When answering this question during his recent interview with the Foreign Service Journal, Morton Abramowitz, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1989-1991, said that his first year as Ambassador to Turkey was consumed by one issue, the Armenian genocide resolution that Sen. Robert Dole introduced in April 1990. M. Abramowitz noted that the Turkish government and people went berserk in opposition to it. “I ended up coming back to Washington and personally calling on some 60 senators to persuade them not to approve the resolution, citing the damage it would do to our alliance with Ankara” confessed the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. Moreover, according to his remarks, he had done that knowing that the U.S. may need Turkey’s support in the war with Iraq, which was to take place in the near future. The former Ambassador also said, “It was, I confess, a bad moral dilemma for me because of the massive killings of Armenians at that time.” No matter how much Morton Abramowitz tries to lessen his and President Bush Sr.’s administration’s role in the defeat of the resolution, nevertheless, today it is a fact that the resolution did fail.
Years after the defeat of the resolution, on June 22, 2006, Morton Abramowitz was awarded the American Foreign Service Association’s Award for Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy. We would like to remind our readers that in 2005, John Evans, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, was forced to return another award by the same organization, the “Christian Herter” Award for “Constructive Dissident ”, which was awarded to him for his statement in February of 2005, when speaking about Armenian genocide in US, in contrast to the US leadership, he qualified what had taken place in 1915 against the Armenians as genocide. However, the U.S. State Department, as a punishment for Ambassador’s said action, forced that organization to take back the award.
Not long after these incidents, in 2006, the same Award was presented to Michael Guest, the U.S. Ambassador to Romania from 2001-2004, where he served with his partner by his side. This is what the Foreign Service Journal wrote about him. But the most interesting part of this story is the reason why Ambassador Guest earned this award. It turns out that Ambassador Michael Guest found that the existing State Department regulations were particularly unfair to homosexual employees, who based on U.S. law are not allowed to get married, and therefore their partners cannot benefit from the same benefits which are accorded to legal spouses. The Foreign Service Journal also writes that Ambassador Guest recognizing that the “best and brightest” of the U.S. Foreign Service “are sometimes homosexual”, fought to eliminate such discrimination. According to the Foreign Service Journal, Ambassador Guest’s efforts were directed not towards establishing special “gay rights”, rather, to establish fair and equal rights for all State Department employees. And for this, Michael Guest was awarded the “Christian Herter” Award.
Finally, it is necessary to note that the already twice postponed hearings of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations’ Committee on confirming the new U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, Richard Hoagland, will take place on September 7th. According to the information at our disposal, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, will go home on September 10th.