YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 25, ARMENPRESS. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham has announced that the resolution N150 on Armenian Genocide has been blocked by the request of the White House.

“They asked me and I said of course”, Graham told Axios. His decision was conditioned by the fact that at that moment Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was in Washington and the discussion of the issue at the Senate could seriously damage the relations. “I tried to save the relations”, ARMENPRESS reports, he said.

Graham added that he’d felt uncomfortable about blocking the resolution “because I like Bob [Menendez],” the New Jersey Democrat who introduced the measure.

“He’s been working on this for years, but I did think with the president of Turkey in town that was probably more than the market would bear,” Graham said, stressing that he would “not … object next time” to the measure.

Republican Senator Graham blocked the resolution on November 13 following the meeting between him and a number of other senators with the Presidents of the USA and Turkey. He used his power of “veto” that any senator has. “I hope Turkey and Armenia can solve this issue on their own”, Graham had announced during the session of the Senate.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan