[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 66 (Monday, April 24, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5566-S5567]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


             THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues in 
commemorating one of this century's most tragic events. Today marks the 
80th anniversary of the Armenian genocide of 1915-23, recognized by 
some as the first genocide of this century when 1\1/2\ million Armenian 
men, women, and children lost their lives as a result of the brutal 
massacres and wholesale deportations conducted by the Turkish Ottoman 
rulers.
  Mr. President, on this day 80 years ago began one of the great 
martyrdoms of modern history, a systematic and methodical campaign to 
exterminate an innocent people. An entire nation was uprooted from its 
homeland scattering thousands of survivors around the world. Thus this 
human tragedy, having left few families unaffected, and its anniversary 
have special meaning to Armenians everywhere.
  The 1915 genocide represented the culmination of decades, and the 
development of an insidious pattern, of persecution against the 
Armenian community living in the Ottoman Empire. During the period 
1894-96 and again in 1909, thousands of Armenians lost their lives at 
the hands of their ruthless persecutors. On April 24, 1915, Armenian 
intellectual, religious, and political leaders, were rounded up by 
Ottoman authorities, taken to remote parts of Anatolia and murdered.
  At least 250,000 Armenians serving in the Ottoman Army were expelled 
and forced into labor battalions where executions and starvation were 
common. Men, women, and children were deported from their villages and 
obliged to march for weeks in the Syrian Desert where a majority of 
them perished.
  There was no shortage of contemporaneous newspaper accounts in the 
United States of the Ottoman Turkish atrocities--a simple review of 
headlines appearing in the New York Times in mid-1915 yields the 
following: ``Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks,'' ``Tales of 
Armenian Horrors Confirmed,'' ``800,000 Armenians Counted Destroyed,'' 
``Thousands Protest Armenian Murders.'' In fact, through a 
congressionally chartered organization called Near East Relief, 
Americans contributed $113 million in humanitarian assistance from 1915 
to 1930 to help the surivors. In addition, 132,000 Armenian orphans 
were adopted in this country.
  Perhaps America's most notable observer of the Armenian genocide was 
its distinguished ambassador to Turkey at the time, Henry Morgenthau, 
who published an article in the Red Cross magazine in 1918 describing 
the wide-scale and deliberate orchestration of Ottoman atrocities 
against the Armenian people as ``the Greatest Horror in History.'' 
Morgenthau has also written the following about the Armenian genocide 
in this now famous passage:

       Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human 
     mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecutions and 
     injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became 
     the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident 
     that the whole history of the human race contains no such 
     horrible episode as this. The great massacres and 
     persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when 
     compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915. The 
     killing of the Armenian people was accompanied by the 
     systematic destruction of churches, schools, libraries, 
     treasures of art and of history, in an attempt to eliminate 
     all traces of a noble civilization some three thousand years 
     old.

  Indeed, Morgenthau and other diplomats who witnessed and reported in 
great detail the enormous devastation of the Armenian community by the 
Ottomans would be astonished to learn today that the abundant evidence 
they collected, much of which is held in our own National Archives, and 
the testimony of survivors who are still with us, continue to be 
challenged without a trace of contrition. Despite the irrefutability of 
the documentation and testimony, including extensive accounts from 
survivors, witnesses, and historians, there are those who refuse to 
come to grips with the past, blame the victims, and deride 
reconciliation.
  Remembrance and understanding, however, are universal imperatives 
essential to all decent people an decent 
[[Page S5567]] societies. To be sure, Armenians themselves are 
committed to the proposition that their experience has meaning for all 
of us--it must not remain the special province of the survivors. In 
other words, to ignore or forget the past is to remain its captive, and 
coming to terms with the past is an indispensable part of building for 
the future.
  Elie Wiesel, speaking at a Holocaust memorial service here in the 
Congress during the early 1980's, expressed eloquently the importance 
of recognizing the Armenian genocide when he said:

       Before the planning of the final solution, Hitler asked, 
     ``Who remembers the Armenians?'' He was right. No one 
     remembered them, as no one remembered the Jews. Rejected by 
     everyone, they felt expelled from history.

  From the darkness of this experience, Armenians have risen to 
demonstrate great courage and strength in their pursuit of human 
dignity and freedom. After enduring years of struggle under Soviet rule 
the Armenians gained independence at last. They now face the effects of 
a devastating earthquake in 1988, an inhumane economic blockade which 
continues to hamper the delivery of needed humanitarian assistance, and 
the hostile forces arrayed against them in their volatile area of the 
world.
  Perhaps the Armenian-American community is one of the best examples 
of this indomitable human spirit of the Armenian people. The 
contribution of the Armenian community to the cultural, social, 
economic, and political life of America is a source of great strength 
and vitality in our Nation. Americans of Armenian origin have kept 
alive, and not let tragedy shatter, the rich faith and traditions of 
Armenian civilization.
  Mr. President, in keeping with our country's highest principles and 
ideals, we pause and pay tribute today to the survivors and the victims 
who perished in the midst of a deliberate attempt to rid the world of 
the entire nation. As we recall the events that began on the night of 
April 24, 1915, we are reminded yet again of the fundamental importance 
of freedom and respect for human rights, and of the terrible 
consequences of their abuse.
  I ask unanimous consent that a recent column appearing in the New 
York Times entitled ``For Old Armenians, April is the Cruelest Memory'' 
be printed in the Record at this point.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 19, 1995]

            For Old Armenians, April Is the Cruelest Memory

                        (By Michael T. Kaufman)

       The forsythia at the Armenian Home in Flushing are blooming 
     cheerily and the dandelions wink from the lawn, but for the 
     old people who live there, April remains a time of heavy 
     sorrows. They sit silently in sunny rooms, keeping to 
     themselves what they saw and heard and smelled 80 years ago 
     when their people were scattered and killed in the first of 
     the century's many genocides.
       ``We don't talk to each other about it because everybody 
     has their own terrible stories,'' said Alice Dosdourian, who 
     is 89 years old. They also no longer go to the commemorative 
     gatherings, such as the one to be held this Sunday in Times 
     Square, where younger people mark the years of Armenian agony 
     that began when the Turks killed 235 intellectuals on April 
     24, 1915. The home's administrators say the memorials were 
     too upsetting for the residents.
       ``But I never forget,'' Mrs. Dosdourian said. ``I think 
     about what happened all the time. Sometimes I dream about it 
     and I wake up and I hold myself and tell myself, `No, you do 
     not have to worry, now you are in America.''' Mrs. Dosdourian 
     has been in America since 1924.
       But if the old Armenians discreetly avoided making each 
     other cry, they eagerly took advantage of a stranger's visit 
     to tell what they had seen and endured as children. They are, 
     after all, among the last ones alive who had seen the horrors 
     with their own eyes. They need to reveal their recollections 
     to those who were not there, not to seek redress or make 
     politics, but simply to have the facts acknowledged. And so, 
     one after another, the Armenians clasped a stranger's arm and 
     testified.
       Mrs. Dosdourian had been born in Mazhdvan, a village in 
     that part of Turkey where the Armenians had lived for many 
     centuries. She was 6 years old in 1915 when soldiers came and 
     took away her father, a shoemaker. She never saw him again. 
     ``My mother took me and my brother, who was 12, and we 
     walked. We went from village to village. We went to the 
     mountains. I do not know how many months we walked. Once we 
     were in a village where all the men were Armenian heroes, big 
     men who fought until they died. But then the soldiers came 
     and made us walk again.''
       There were more than a million who walked, mostly women, 
     children and old men forced across Mesopotamian deserts into 
     Syria. Many drowned and died of hunger. Some, like Mrs. 
     Dosdourian's brother, were shot to death during the exodus. 
     In all, the estimates of the dead ranged between 600,000 and 
     1.5 million. Until World War II and the destruction of the 
     Jews, it was the sufferings of the Armenians, well documented 
     by journalists and writers, that set standards of horror and 
     contemporary barbarism.
       ``Every night,'' Mrs. Dosdourian said, ``I heard people 
     shouting that they were robbed by the gendarmes. We were 
     always hungry. People were dying and we had no shovels to 
     bury them. People stayed up at night to protect bodies from 
     dogs and wild animals. People sang out to God, `How could you 
     let this happen to us?''' The woman spoke unhesitatingly, 
     sitting erect and keeping her clear blue eyes on her 
     listener.
       ``One day we came to a river. There were many dead around 
     but in the water there was the body of a young woman 
     floating. I could see her long black hair spread out like a 
     beautiful fan.'' She shuddered and her clear blue eyes filled 
     with tears.
       Annahid Verdanian also remembers. She was 4 years old when 
     she was forced from her home with her mother and her father. 
     She and her nurse became separated from the others. At one 
     river she watched as a ferry full of people was turned over. 
     She thinks her family may have been on the boat and drowned. 
     She was adopted by people, some good, some exploitative. She 
     worked as a maid, as a seamstress. She went to Greece and 
     then to Marseille, and then in 1934 she came to 
     Massachusetts, where she worked in textile mills.
       Hagop Cividian, who is 86, did not come here until 1990. In 
     French and German he explains his story. With difficulty he 
     talks about a woman named Diana, saying it is important to 
     remember her because she was a real hero. He has written her 
     story but only in Armenian. ``Americans should know,'' he 
     said with passion. ``She was an American.'' She was married 
     to his cousin and they had a 7-year-old boy who was a prodigy 
     on the piano. ``The authorities told her that because she was 
     American she could go but she would have to leave the boy,'' 
     Mr. Cividian said. ``She stayed and died with her husband and 
     son.''
       Mr. Cividian managed to live. ``For four years I was 
     hungry, and beaten,'' said the stocky and still muscular man. 
     Later he made his way to Romania, where he became a chemical 
     engineer. ``As a child I saw the Turks kill the Armenians, 
     later I saw Hitler and then Ceaucescu,'' Mr. Cividian said. 
     ``The only time I knew freedom was when I came to America 
     five years ago. Only here I can do what I want. I can think, 
     speak and remember.''
     

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