Prospective US Ambassador to Armenia swears off use of word "genocide"

In confirmation hearings, President Barack Obama's nominee for US ambassador to Armenia told Senators Wednesday he would not use the word "genocide" to describe the killing of more than one million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. "As the president has said, the massacres and the forced deportations leading to the death of 1.5 millions of Armenians is acknowledged and recognized and deplored by President Obama, and yes sir, I believe it as well," nominee John Heffern told the Senate Foreign Affairs committee. "The characterization of those events is a policy decision that is made by the president of the US, and that policy is enunciated in his April 24th Remembrance Day statement." The issue is extremely sensitive in Turkey, a key US military and economic ally, which rejects any suggestion that the massacres constituted a genocide.