[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S6003]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


             THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, once again I join my colleagues in pausing 
to reflect upon, and remember the victims of, this century's first 
example of the horrendous crime of genocide, the Armenian population of 
the Ottoman Empire. April 24, 1995, marked the 80th anniversary of the 
beginning of this tragedy. On that day in 1915, some 200 Armenian 
religious, political, and intellectual leaders were arrested in 
Constantinople and exiled or taken to the interior and executed. For 
the next several years, Armenians were systematically expelled and 
deported. Some were killed and others left to die of deprivation. When 
the horror ended in 1923, 1.5 million Armenians had perished and 
another 500,000 had fled their homeland.
  Evidence of the Armenian genocide is available from a number of 
sources, among the most compelling of which is the reporting of our own 
United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau. In a 
cable to the Secretary of State, Ambassador Morgenthau wrote:

       Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is 
     increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it 
     appears that a campaign of race extermination is in process 
     under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.

  Some may ask why it is important to take time each year to 
commemorate an event which occurred over half a century ago. In reply I 
would recall the reported observation of Adolph Hitler as he 
contemplated the ``final solution''--``Who remembers the Armenians?''
  Sadly, as we all well know, the Armenian peoples' tragedy was not the 
last genocide of this century; there followed the horrors of the 
Holocaust and the extermination of the Cambodians during the brutal 
Khmer Rouge regime. Surveying the world today we unfortunately see many 
too many examples of brutal ethnic, religious, or tribal-based 
conflict, from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to massacres in Rwanda.
  Today we remember the 1\1/2\ million victims of the Armenian 
genocide. It is not comfortable to remind ourselves of this tragedy, or 
to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum, or to see ongoing atrocities in 
real time on our television screens. Let us hope and pray today that we 
never allow ourselves to become complacent about man's inhumanity to 
man. For in the words of Edmund Burke, ``the only thing necessary of 
the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.''


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