The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

My first year there was consumed by one issue, the Armenian genocide resolution that Sen. Robert Dole, R- Kan., introduced in April 1990. The Turkish government and people went berserk in opposition to it. I ended up coming back to Washington and per- sonally calling on some 60 senators to persuade them not to approve the res- olution, citing the damage it would do to our alliance with Ankara. I believed a war with Iraq was in the cards and we needed Turkish support; I also felt that the Senate should not pass resolu- tions of this type on historical events in a now-allied country nearly a hundred years ago. It was, I confess, a bad moral dilemma for me because of the massive killings of Armenians at that time. The resolution was defeated, not because of the administration, which for domestic political reasons lay low, but largely because of Sen. Byrd, D-W.Va. The resolution still comes up every year. For the rest of my time in Ankara, Iraq was our preoccupation. The embassy focused on cementing Turkish support for the war against Saddam Hussein. President Bush’s telephone diplomacy with President Ozul and Sec. Baker’s four trips in six months to Turkey helped enormously. In the aftermath of the war, I had to deal with another huge humanitarian crisis. The U.S. had called on the Kurds in Iraq to rise up against Saddam during the war, and they did — but we failed to support them. Half a million Kurds fled to the mountain borders of Turkey (and a million to Iran), and they needed to be taken care of. The Turkish government wouldn’t let them into the country, but allowed the U.S. and other concerned countries to feed and shelter them along the border. In the end, the logistical problem was so huge that it was necessary to get the involvement of the U.S. and other militaries. We urged Sec. Baker to make a brief stopover in a Kurdish refugee camp in northern Iraq. He was only there for 12 minutes, but it made all the difference. He got the U.S. military involved. The next effort was to get the Kurds home, and this was done by creating a safe haven for them in northern Iraq, protected by the strength and commitment of the U.S. and its allies. In two months, about 1.5 million people were return- ed to their homes. The justifiably leg- endary Fred Cuny, who was later murdered in Chechnya, played an important role in that effort. That area in northern Iraq was the begin- ning, it turned out, of a de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq, anoth- er example of the law of unintended consequences. I remember meeting Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., at the airport sometime during this period and having him tell me, “Anywhere you are, Mort, I know there’s a war going on!” FSJ: Are you optimistic about Turkey’s prospects for joining the European Union? MIA: Cautiously optimistic. The European publics are right now against it, and so the European Union governments’ support has weakened. The E.U. also seems to have lost its way recently. But I believe Turkey will eventually be admitted. It has become a dynamic state and should continue to be one, if it maintains political sta- bility and carries on its massive reform efforts. FSJ: You also served as the first assistant secretary of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1985 to 1989. In the runup to the Iraq War, INR was one of the few voices in the intelligence community to express skepticism about claims that Saddam 34 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 “I’ve always been very proud of INR. Its people deserve a lot of credit for the work they do and the independent voice they maintain.” Amb. Abramowitz with his wife, Sheppie, and the French ambassador, await- ing the arrival of the King of Thailand in Bangkok in 1980.