Tuesday, 26 November 2013
Volume # 8, Issue # 222
deaths of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide and objects to the display of Armenian artifacts -- and the implicit acknowledgement of Turkey's responsibility in the 20th century's first large-scale ethnic cleansing. But the rug has powerful supporters, who are now pushing a White House loathe to antagonise Turkey to put the rug on display. As strange as it sounds, the memory of a nearly century-old genocide is now being litigated over the future fate of a rug. For a time, it looked like the rug would be shown next month at a book launch event for a book about the rug's history, but the White House declined to exhibit it. "We regret that it was not possible to loan it out for this event," Laura Lucas Magnuson, assistant press secretary for the National Security Council, told Foreign Policy. "Displaying the rug for only half a day in connection with a private book launch event, as proposed, would have been an inappropriate use of U.S. government property, would have required the White House to undertake the risk of transporting the rug for limited public exposure, and was not viewed as commensurate with the rug's historical significance." But some suspect the decision was motivated by political expediency as much as concerns about finding the right setting for the rug. The rug is a symbol of the expulsion of the collapsing Ottoman Empire's Armenian population in 1915, which left 1.5 million dead and hundreds of thousands displaced -- an event that most historians consider the first genocide of the modern era. The devastating effects of the deaths and displacement prompted the first concerted effort at U.S. international humanitarianism with the establishment of Near East Relief, an early precursor to USAID. But Turkey adamantly denies that the
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