[Congressional Bills 111th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 252 Introduced in House (IH)]

111th CONGRESS
  1st Session
H. RES. 252

  Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the 
   United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity 
   concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and 
    genocide documented in the United States record relating to the 
               Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                             March 17, 2009

  Mr. Schiff (for himself, Mr. Radanovich, Mr. Pallone, Mr. Kirk, Mr. 
Berman, Mr. Cantor, Mr. McCotter, Mr. Ackerman, Mr. Royce, Mr. Waxman, 
 Mr. Smith of New Jersey, Ms. Watson, Mr. Bilirakis, Mr. Crowley, Mr. 
Sensenbrenner, Mr. Payne, Mr. Sherman, Mr. Wu, Mr. Sires, Mr. Daniel E. 
 Lungren of California, Mr. Barrett of South Carolina, Ms. Eshoo, Mr. 
 Capuano, Mr. Weiner, Mr. Honda, Mrs. Maloney, Mr. Langevin, Mr. Walz, 
     Mr. Peters, Ms. Sutton, Mr. Costa, Mr. LoBiondo, Mr. Frank of 
  Massachusetts, Mr. Souder, Mr. Garrett of New Jersey, Mr. Wolf, Mr. 
 Markey of Massachusetts, Mr. Neal of Massachusetts, Mr. Cardoza, Mr. 
 Lipinski, Mr. Abercrombie, Mrs. Capps, Ms. Schakowsky, Mr. Levin, Mr. 
 Himes, Mr. Baca, Ms. Hirono, Mr. Rothman of New Jersey, Mr. McGovern, 
Ms. McCollum, Mr. Fattah, Mrs. Napolitano, Mr. Space, Ms. DeLauro, Mr. 
 Ryan of Wisconsin, Mr. Calvert, Mr. Polis of Colorado, Mr. Lance, Ms. 
 Loretta Sanchez of California, Mr. Olver, Mr. Grijalva, Mr. Davis of 
Illinois, Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Conyers, Mr. Sarbanes, Mr. Van Hollen, Ms. 
 Titus, Mr. Stark, Mr. Jackson of Illinois, Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Tsongas, 
 Mrs. Tauscher, Ms. Woolsey, Mr. Dreier, Mr. Nunes, Mr. Tonko, and Mr. 
Tierney) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the 
                      Committee on Foreign Affairs

_______________________________________________________________________

                               RESOLUTION


 
  Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the 
   United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity 
   concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and 
    genocide documented in the United States record relating to the 
               Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes.

    Resolved,

                              short title

    Sec. 1. 
    This resolution may be cited as the ``Affirmation of the United 
States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution''.

                                findings

    Sec. 2. 
    The House of Representatives finds the following:
    (1) The Armenian Genocide was conceived and carried out by the 
Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulting in the deportation of 
nearly 2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000 men, women, and children 
were killed, 500,000 survivors were expelled from their homes, and 
which succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of 
Armenians in their historic homeland.
    (2) On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers, England, France, and 
Russia, jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first 
time ever another government of committing ``a crime against 
humanity''.
    (3) This joint statement stated ``the Allied Governments announce 
publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally 
responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as 
well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres''.
    (4) The post-World War I Turkish Government indicted the top 
leaders involved in the ``organization and execution'' of the Armenian 
Genocide and in the ``massacre and destruction of the Armenians''.
    (5) In a series of courts-martial, officials of the Young Turk 
Regime were tried and convicted, as charged, for organizing and 
executing massacres against the Armenian people.
    (6) The chief organizers of the Armenian Genocide, Minister of War 
Enver, Minister of the Interior Talaat, and Minister of the Navy Jemal 
were all condemned to death for their crimes, however, the verdicts of 
the courts were not enforced.
    (7) The Armenian Genocide and these domestic judicial failures are 
documented with overwhelming evidence in the national archives of 
Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, the United States, the 
Vatican and many other countries, and this vast body of evidence 
attests to the same facts, the same events, and the same consequences.
    (8) The United States National Archives and Record Administration 
holds extensive and thorough documentation on the Armenian Genocide, 
especially in its holdings under Record Group 59 of the United States 
Department of State, files 867.00 and 867.40, which are open and widely 
available to the public and interested institutions.
    (9) The Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United States Ambassador to the 
Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, organized and led protests by 
officials of many countries, among them the allies of the Ottoman 
Empire, against the Armenian Genocide.
    (10) Ambassador Morgenthau explicitly described to the United 
States Department of State the policy of the Government of the Ottoman 
Empire as ``a campaign of race extermination,'' and was instructed on 
July 16, 1915, by United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing that 
the ``Department approves your procedure . . . to stop Armenian 
persecution''.
    (11) Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 of February 9, 1916, resolved 
that ``the President of the United States be respectfully asked to 
designate a day on which the citizens of this country may give 
expression to their sympathy by contributing funds now being raised for 
the relief of the Armenians'', who at the time were enduring 
``starvation, disease, and untold suffering''.
    (12) President Woodrow Wilson concurred and also encouraged the 
formation of the organization known as Near East Relief, chartered by 
an Act of Congress, which contributed some $116,000,000 from 1915 to 
1930 to aid Armenian Genocide survivors, including 132,000 orphans who 
became foster children of the American people.
    (13) Senate Resolution 359, dated May 11, 1920, stated in part, 
``the testimony adduced at the hearings conducted by the sub-committee 
of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations have clearly established 
the truth of the reported massacres and other atrocities from which the 
Armenian people have suffered''.
    (14) The resolution followed the April 13, 1920, report to the 
Senate of the American Military Mission to Armenia led by General James 
Harbord, that stated ``[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death have 
left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, 
and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of 
this most colossal crime of all the ages''.
    (15) As displayed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 
Adolf Hitler, on ordering his military commanders to attack Poland 
without provocation in 1939, dismissed objections by saying ``[w]ho, 
after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' and 
thus set the stage for the Holocaust.
    (16) Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ``genocide'' in 1944, and 
who was the earliest proponent of the United Nations Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a 
definitive example of genocide in the 20th century.
    (17) The first resolution on genocide adopted by the United Nations 
at Lemkin's urging, the December 11, 1946, United Nations General 
Assembly Resolution 96(1) and the United Nations Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide itself recognized the Armenian 
Genocide as the type of crime the United Nations intended to prevent 
and punish by codifying existing standards.
    (18) In 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission invoked the 
Armenian Genocide ``precisely . . . one of the types of acts which the 
modern term `crimes against humanity' is intended to cover'' as a 
precedent for the Nuremberg tribunals.
    (19) The Commission stated that ``[t]he provisions of Article 230 
of the Peace Treaty of Sevres were obviously intended to cover, in 
conformity with the Allied note of 1915 . . ., offenses which had been 
committed on Turkish territory against persons of Turkish citizenship, 
though of Armenian or Greek race. This article constitutes therefore a 
precedent for Article 6c and 5c of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Charters, 
and offers an example of one of the categories of `crimes against 
humanity' as understood by these enactments''.
    (20) House Joint Resolution 148, adopted on April 8, 1975, 
resolved: ``[t]hat April 24, 1975, is hereby designated as `National 
Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man', and the President of 
the United States is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation 
calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day as a 
day of remembrance for all the victims of genocide, especially those of 
Armenian ancestry . . .''.
    (21) President Ronald Reagan in proclamation number 4838, dated 
April 22, 1981, stated in part ``like the genocide of the Armenians 
before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians, which followed it--and 
like too many other persecutions of too many other people--the lessons 
of the Holocaust must never be forgotten''.
    (22) House Joint Resolution 247, adopted on September 10, 1984, 
resolved: ``[t]hat April 24, 1985, is hereby designated as `National 
Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man', and the President of 
the United States is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation 
calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day as a 
day of remembrance for all the victims of genocide, especially the one 
and one-half million people of Armenian ancestry . . .''.
    (23) In August 1985, after extensive study and deliberation, the 
United Nations SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and 
Protection of Minorities voted 14 to 1 to accept a report entitled 
``Study of the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime 
of Genocide,'' which stated ``[t]he Nazi aberration has unfortunately 
not been the only case of genocide in the 20th century. Among other 
examples which can be cited as qualifying are . . . the Ottoman 
massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916''.
    (24) This report also explained that ``[a]t least 1,000,000, and 
possibly well over half of the Armenian population, are reliably 
estimated to have been killed or death marched by independent 
authorities and eye-witnesses. This is corroborated by reports in 
United States, German and British archives and of contemporary 
diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, including those of its ally 
Germany.''.
    (25) The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, an independent 
Federal agency, unanimously resolved on April 30, 1981, that the United 
States Holocaust Memorial Museum would include the Armenian Genocide in 
the Museum and has since done so.
    (26) Reviewing an aberrant 1982 expression (later retracted) by the 
United States Department of State asserting that the facts of the 
Armenian Genocide may be ambiguous, the United States Court of Appeals 
for the District of Columbia in 1993, after a review of documents 
pertaining to the policy record of the United States, noted that the 
assertion on ambiguity in the United States record about the Armenian 
Genocide ``contradicted longstanding United States policy and was 
eventually retracted''.
    (27) On June 5, 1996, the House of Representatives adopted an 
amendment to House Bill 3540 (the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, 
and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 1997) to reduce aid to Turkey 
by $3,000,000 (an estimate of its payment of lobbying fees in the 
United States) until the Turkish Government acknowledged the Armenian 
Genocide and took steps to honor the memory of its victims.
    (28) President William Jefferson Clinton, on April 24, 1998, 
stated: ``This year, as in the past, we join with Armenian-Americans 
throughout the nation in commemorating one of the saddest chapters in 
the history of this century, the deportations and massacres of a 
million and a half Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the years 1915-
1923.''.
    (29) President George W. Bush, on April 24, 2004, stated: ``On this 
day, we pause in remembrance of one of the most horrible tragedies of 
the 20th century, the annihilation of as many as 1,500,000 Armenians 
through forced exile and murder at the end of the Ottoman Empire.''.
    (30) Despite the international recognition and affirmation of the 
Armenian Genocide, the failure of the domestic and international 
authorities to punish those responsible for the Armenian Genocide is a 
reason why similar genocides have recurred and may recur in the future, 
and that a just resolution will help prevent future genocides.

                         declaration of policy

    Sec. 3. 
    The House of Representatives--
    (1) calls upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of 
the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity 
concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and 
genocide documented in the United States record relating to the 
Armenian Genocide and the consequences of the failure to realize a just 
resolution; and
    (2) calls upon the President in the President's annual message 
commemorating the Armenian Genocide issued on or about April 24, to 
accurately characterize the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 
1,500,000 Armenians as genocide and to recall the proud history of 
United States intervention in opposition to the Armenian Genocide.
                                 <all>