[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 24, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Page S4090]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             THE 81ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

 Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, once again I rise to join my 
colleagues, and Armenian Americans in Ohio and across the Nation, to 
remember the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. Over this period the 
Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was systematically destroyed. 
Some were killed, others left to die of deprivation, still others 
uprooted and expelled from their homeland. In the end, some 1.5 million 
Armenians perished and another 0.5 million were displaced.
  Evidence of the Armenian genocide is available from a number of 
sources, among the most compelling 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?''
  Today we remember the 1\1/2\-million victims of the Armenian 
genocide. Undeniably it is not comfortable to repeatedly revisit this 
tragedy, or to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum, or to have 
contemporary atrocities played out nightly on our television screens, 
as in Bosnia or Rwanda. But we remember today, we did last year and the 
year before, so that we will not become complacent about or indifferent 
to any example of man's inhumanity to man, wherever and whenever it may 
occur. For in the words of Edmund Burke, ``the only thing necessary for 
the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.''

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