HyeOctane

More than 100 years later the U.S. Congress is at a similar crossroads on the very same issue. House and Senate Resolutions 106 call for American foreign policy to recognize the killings of Armenians by the former Ottoman Empire as “genocide.” The Republic of Turkey is the official successor state to the Ottoman Empire because of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Being the official successor state is part of the reason for the Turkish government wanting to deny that the Armenian killings were a genocide, said Brian Kabateck, a senior partner in Kabateck, Brown & Keller, a law firm that has represented about a half-dozen Armenian-Americans in cases against U.S. insurance companies and banks that have denied claims and accounts to relatives of deceased Armenians who took out insurance and had accounts before they died in the Armenian Genocide. Kabateck said that the Ottoman state seized property and businesses and that Turkey would be responsible for reparations to Armenians and the nation of Armenia if they admitted that what the Ottoman state did was genocide. [Read More]