The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 27-21 a resolution Wednesday that recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians as "a genocide," media reported Thursday.
At the issue in the resolution is the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians "by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I."
Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, says the toll has been inflated and insists that those killed "were victims of civil war and unrest."
U.S. president George W. Bush and other senior officials had made a last-minute push to persuade lawmakers on the committee to reject the measure.
"Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror," Bush said hours before the vote.
The Foreign Affairs Committee's Chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., warned of the potential fallout of the measure if passed. Lantos, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, supported a similar resolution two years ago.
Source: Xinhua/agencies
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