[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 45 (Wednesday, April 22, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H2214-H2215]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    DO NOT FORGET ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, like many of my colleagues, I rise today to 
remember the Armenian genocide of 83 years ago. We are asked why it is 
so important that we come to this floor and remember. We must remember 
to make sure that it never happens again, and we must remember because 
there is an organized effort to force us and convince us to forget.
  Let us look back at the historical record. The American Ambassador to 
the Ottoman Empire was an eyewitness in 1919, and he recounts his 
discussion with Turkish authorities. He says in his memoirs, ``When the 
Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations they were 
merely giving the death warrant to an entire race. They understood this 
well and in their conversations with me made no particular attempt to 
conceal this fact.''
  He went on to describe what he saw at the Euphrates River, and he 
said, as our eyes and ears in the Ottoman Empire in the year 1919 as a 
representative of the American government, ``I have by no means told 
the most terrible details, for a complete narration of the sadistic 
orgies of which they, Armenian men and women, are victims can never be 
printed in an American publication. Whatever crimes the most perverted 
instincts of the human mind can devise, whatever refinements of 
persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, 
became the daily misfortune of the Armenian people.''
  As other speakers have pointed out, the first genocide of this 
century laid the foundation for the second genocide, and as a Jewish 
American I can never forget that 8 days before he invaded Poland Adolf 
Hitler turned to his inner circle and said, ``Who today remembers the 
extermination of the Armenians?'' The impunity with which the Turkish 
Government acted in annihilating the Armenian people emboldened Adolf 
Hitler to carry out the holocaust of the Jewish people.
  And yet today there is an organized effort to expunge from our memory 
this genocide, and the focus is on the elites and academia.
  I am a proud graduate of UCLA, and I would like to tell you a short 
story about my alma mater, for earlier this year and late last year 
UCLA considered the offer of over $1 million from the Turkish 
government, $1 million to be used to study Ottoman history, and

[[Page H2215]]

it is important indeed that we study the history and culture and 
language of Turkey. But this $1 million gift came with strings 
attached, strings designed to make sure that the person who sat in that 
chair at UCLA would be a person selected by the Turkish Government to 
begin the process of covering up and concealing the Armenian genocide.
  Now I am proud of many things at UCLA. I was there when Bill Walton 
led us to an NCAA championship. But I was never prouder of my alma 
mater than when UCLA said ``no'' to the $1 million. And now that same 
$1 million is being floated in front of the University of California at 
Berkeley and other institutions. I hope that academic institutions from 
one coast to the other will join in unison in saying America's academic 
integrity is not for sale; $1 million, $10 million will not buy the 
prestige of American universities and enlist them in the goal of 
denying the Armenian genocide.
  Likewise, it is time for the State Department to go beyond shallow, 
hollow reminders and remembrances of this day and to use the word 
``genocide'' in describing the genocide of the Armenian people at the 
hands of the Ottoman Turks.
  You know the United States plays a unique role in the world today. 
Never before in history has a single Nation not only been the sole 
superpower but then accepted by all the other nations in the world as 
the sole superpower. We hold that position uncontested because other 
nations have allowed us. They have not joined in some sort of anti-
American alliance but rather are happy to see America as the world's 
superpower. Why? Because our foreign policy is guided by morality.
  Mr. Speaker, never again, never forget.

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