[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 140 (Monday, October 30, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H11528-H11532]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    REGARDING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Palone) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I rise today to express my deep 
disappointment regarding the withdrawal of H. Res. 596, the Armenian 
genocide resolution from the House floor.

[[Page H11529]]

  As it has been said on many occasions, H. Res. 596 is not about the 
Republic of Turkey. In fact, an amendment was adopted in the Committee 
on International Relations which made it perfectly clear that this 
resolution was not about modern day Turkey.
  Unfortunately, the Republic of Turkey decided to make a sense of the 
House resolution about the extensive U.S. record on the Armenian 
genocide a litmus test of its relationship with the United States. I 
deeply regret that Turkish officials have opted to use coercion and 
threats too make their case.
  A recent report by the Anatolia news agency that a Turkish human 
rights activist, Akin Birdal, faces charges for acknowledging what 
happened to the Armenian people as genocide, demonstrates the lengths 
Turkey will take to deny the truth. Birdal reportedly made the comment 
during a recent conference in Germany, and now faces the possibility of 
a 3 year sentence in Turkey.
  In addition to prosecuting this human rights activist, Turkey also 
coerced a statement from the head of the Armenian Church in Turkey, 
distancing his church and the remnant 35,000 Armenians who still live 
in Turkey from H. Res. 596 and its meaning.
  Setting aside for the moment how a population of some 2 million 
Armenians has been reduced so catastrophically, is there any doubt in 
the minds of any Member that virtually every living Armenian in Turkey 
is anxiously waiting for the world to acknowledge the truth about their 
near total destruction or the near total destruction of their 
community?
  Madam Speaker, is there any doubt that the statements made by the 
Armenian Patriarch were made under duress? There is only one place in 
the world where an Armenian Church leader cannot tell the truth. There 
is only one place in the world where nobody answers Hitler's chilling 
question, ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the 
Armenians?'' And that place is modern, secular and democratic Turkey.
  Madam Speaker, I ask what kind of message we are sending to the 
Patriarch of the Armenian Church in Turkey and all others in that 
country who are prevented from speaking their conscience.
  I call upon our Ambassador to Turkey, who has so forcefully advocated 
against H.R. 596, to immediately visit the Armenian Patriarch as a show 
of solidarity with His Eminence and with his dwindling Armenian flock.
  Madam Speaker, we must remain vigilant in the face of threats and 
those who continue to deny the Armenian genocide. As Van Krikorian, the 
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Armenian Assembly noted in 
remarks given over 10 years ago to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai 
B'rith, ``Make no mistake, those who are denying the Armenian genocide 
today are paving the way for those who deny other genocides and for 
those who will undoubtedly plan future episodes of race 
extermination.'' I will introduce the remarks of Mr. Krikorian for the 
record.
  Madam Speaker, I just want to say that these remarks are as valid 
today as they were 10 years ago. I urge all of my colleagues to reject 
the ongoing campaign of denial regarding the Armenian genocide.

 [Remarks to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai B'rith--Dec. 21, 1989]

                Fighting Denial of the Armenian Genocide

   (By Van Z. Krikorian, Director, Government and Legal Affairs, the 
                     Armenian Assembly of America)

       In the spring, you heard a speech from a Turkish Embassy 
     official contending that the Armenians did not suffer a 
     genocide between 1915 and 1923. That contention is patently 
     false. But, Turkey's and its agents' insistence on vigorously 
     pursuing it poses a frightening threat to all people who 
     believe in democracy and human rights. Make no mistake, those 
     who are denying the Armenian genocide today are paving the 
     way for those who deny other genocides and for those who will 
     undoubtedly plan future episodes of race extermination. I am 
     sure you are aware that Hitler publicly laid the foundation 
     for the Holocaust by referring to ``the extermination of the 
     Armenians'' starting, at least, in 1931 and most forcefully 
     in 1939 when he commanded his military to show no mercy by 
     asking: ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of 
     the Armenians?''
       Those who deny the Armenian genocide are removing the 
     underpinnings of all human progress by pretending that 
     nothing exists which, for whatever reason, they do not want 
     to exist. This approach is often viewed as politically 
     expedient. But, in the end, it only aborts the cause of 
     civilization.
       This is why I am especially glad to address you this 
     afternoon and to publicly challenge the arguments of the 
     deniers. I am also glad to know that the Holocaust Memorial 
     Council has publicly and unequivocally committed to include 
     the Armenian genocide in the United States Holocaust Memorial 
     Museum, a decision which rebukes the deniers and promotes 
     historical integrity.
       Today, I plan to discuss some of the reasons why the 
     Armenian genocide is properly classified as a genocide and 
     then refute some of the more popular arguments offered by the 
     Turkish government and other deniers.
       First of all, what does the term genocide mean? Literally, 
     it means the killing of a race. An attorney and Holocaust 
     survivor, Rafael Lemkin, coined the term in 1944 and then 
     dedicated himself to creating and promoting the United 
     Nations Genocide Convention. Before, during, and after 
     coining the term, Lemkin used the Armenian case as a 
     definitive example of genocide. In Lemkin's view, it would be 
     impossible to question whether the Armenians suffered a 
     genocide, because the term was created to be a synonym with 
     the Armenian experience.
       Similarly, the United Nations legislative history of the 
     Genocide Convention is clear that the Armenian case is an 
     example of genocide, a position from which the United Nations 
     has not moved. In the United States, the legislative history 
     of ratifying the Genocide Convention and the implementing 
     legislation is equally clear that the Armenian case is 
     synonymous with the term genocide. These legislative 
     histories, of course, merely reflect the overwhelming 
     evidence of the Armenian genocide. Yet, the deniers argue 
     that the Armenian case somehow does not fit the definition of 
     genocide.
       The Genocide Convention provides:
       Genocide means any of the following acts committed with 
     intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 
     racial or religious group, as such:
       (a) Killing members of the group;
       (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the 
     group;
       (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life 
     calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole 
     or in part;
       (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the 
     group;
       (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another 
     group.
       No one realistically questions whether Ottoman Turkey 
     engaged in the specific acts enumerated in this definition. 
     That would be absurd because the Armenian population of over 
     two million was unquestionably reduced to under 100,000, and 
     those people did not simply disappear--they were killed, 
     forcibly converted to Islam, and, in small numbers, escaped.
       What the deniers question is whether the government 
     committed the acts with the intent to destroy the Armenian 
     presence in their homeland of three thousand years. This 
     contention is shamefully absurd.
       I cannot go over all the admissions and evidence 
     establishing beyond any doubt that the government planned and 
     implemented a campaign of race extermination, but the 
     archives of the United States and almost every European 
     country (including the Central Powers, Turkey's allies) are 
     overflowing with this evidence. Today, I would like to call 
     your attention to the following pieces of evidence: (1) a 
     December 1914 authenticated blueprint for genocide issued by 
     the ruling Committee of Union and Progress Party which can be 
     found in the British archives; (2) the post World War I, 
     Turkish trials and convictions (based on substantial, 
     irrefutable testimonial and documentary evidence) of the 
     government officials responsible for ordering and 
     implementing the extermination of the Armenians; (3) a 
     November 8, 1920 order for the military to exterminate the 
     Armenians living in Russia; (4) and the acknowledgment of the 
     Armenian genocide by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal 
     Ataturk.
       The December 1914 order reads as follows:
       (1) Profiting by Articles 3 and 4 of Committee Union and 
     Progress, close all Armenian Societies, and arrest all who 
     worked against Government at any time among them and send 
     them into the provinces such as Bagdad or Mosul, and wipe 
     them out either on the road or there.
       (2) Collect arms.
       (3) Excite Moslem opinion by suitable and special means, in 
     places as Van, Erzeroum, Adana, where as a point of fact the 
     Armenians have already won the hatred of the Moslems, provoke 
     organized massacres as the Russians did at Baku.
       (4) Leave all executive to the people in provinces such as 
     Erzeroum, Van, Mamuret ul Aziz, and Bitlis, and use Military 
     disciplinary forces (i.e. Gendarmeris) ostensibly to stop 
     massacres, while on the contrary in places as Adana, Sivas, 
     Broussa, Ismidt and Smyrna actively help the Moslems with 
     military force.
       (5) Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, 
     priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be 
     Islamized.
       (6) Carry away the families of all who succeed in escaping 
     and apply measures to cut them off from all connection with 
     their native place.
       (7) On the ground that Armenian officials may be spies, 
     expel and drive them out absolutely from every Government 
     department or post.
       (8) Kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the 
     Army--this to be left to the military to do.

[[Page H11530]]

       (9) All action to begin everywhere simultaneously and thus 
     leave no time for preparation of defensive measures.
       (10) Pay attention to the strictly confidential nature of 
     these instructions, which may not go beyond two or three 
     persons.
       In fact, these orders basically describe the actual pattern 
     of the genocide. Of course, during implementation, the ruling 
     party issued additional orders on massacring Armenians (I 
     will share another with you shortly) as well as orders to 
     punish those Turks who showed mercy to the Armenians.
       The post-war trials are also dispositive not only for their 
     indictments and verdicts, but also for the overwhelming 
     evidence used to secure the verdicts. Specifically, both 
     central and provincial government officials were tried and 
     convicted for the ``massacre and destruction of the 
     Armenians.'' Besides a major trial in Istanbul, moreover, 
     local trials for the same crimes, which have yet not been 
     widely publicized, also took place. (Parenthetically, I would 
     add here that these trials were cited as precedent for the 
     Nuremberg trials following World War II.)
       Next, I would like to share a November 8, 1920 central 
     government order, quoted from a Turkish source. This order 
     commanded General Kazim Karabekir to essentially continue the 
     job of exterminating the Armenians after World War I by 
     wiping out the Russian-Armenian population:
       By virtue of the provisions of the Sevres Treaty Armenia 
     will be enabled to cut off Turkey from the East. Together 
     with Greece she will impede Turkey's general growth. Further, 
     being situated in the midst of a great Islamic periphery, she 
     will never voluntarily relinquish her assigned role of a 
     despotic gendarme, and will never try to integrate her 
     destiny with the general conditions of Turkey and Islam.
       Consequently, it is indispensable that Armenia be 
     eliminated politically and physically [siyaseten ve maddenten 
     ortadan kaldirmak].
       Since the attainment of this objective is subject to [the 
     limitations of] our power and the general political 
     situation, it is necessary to be adaptive in the 
     implementation of the decision mentioned above [tevfiki 
     icraat]. Our withdrawal from Armenia as part of a peace 
     settlement is out of the question. Rather, you will resort to 
     a modus operandi intended to deceive the Armenians 
     [Ermenileri igfal] and fool the Europeans by an appearance 
     of peacelovingness. In reality, however, [fakat hakikatde] 
     the purpose of all this is to achieve by stages the 
     objective [stated above]. . . . [I]t is required that 
     vague and gentle-sounding words [mubhem ve mulayim] be 
     employed both in the framing and in the application of the 
     peace settlement, while constantly maintaining an 
     appearance of peacelovingness towards the Armenians.
       [t]hese instructions reflect the real intent [makasidi 
     hakikiyesi] of the Cabinet. They are to be treated as secret, 
     and are meant only for your eyes.
       Again, documents like these as well as direct admissions of 
     guilt by the government officials are literally everywhere.
       Recognizing that indisputable fact, Kemal Ataturk, the 
     founder of modern Turkey, did not hesitate to condemn the 
     responsible Ottoman government for its actions. In an 
     interview published August 1, 1926 in the Los Angeles 
     Examiner, he said that all those responsible ``should have 
     been made to account for the lives of millions of our 
     Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from 
     their homes and massacred.'' Today, the Turkish government 
     has called the authenticity of this quote into question. Yet 
     this 1926 statement was not an isolated event. In 1918, 
     Ataturk called for the execution of the genocide's 
     perpetrators. In 1919, as recorded by a presumably 
     unimpeachable source, future Turkish prime minister Rauf 
     Orbay, Ataturk acknowledged the government's massacres ``of 
     800,000 Armenians'' and ``decried the extermination of the 
     Armenians.'' In a 1920 speech, Ataturk explicitly condemned 
     the massacres as ``scandalous.'' Again, this type of 
     documentation is indisputable and overwhelming, but we still 
     face those who act as if it does not exist. When such denials 
     are funded from a country as important as Turkey, we face the 
     prospects of the Nazi operating principle: ``a lie told 1,000 
     times becomes the truth.''
       Accordingly, I would next like to refute the predominant 
     arguments used by the deniers today. Let me start with one 
     that the embassy official who spoke here in the spring touted 
     as dispositive--``It was not a systematic effort to kill all 
     Armenians [because] no harm was done to the Armenian 
     communities living outside the war zone--in Istanbul, the 
     Ottoman capital, for example.'' Initially, I would note that 
     this argument is as fallacious as saying that Jews did not 
     suffer a genocide because they were relatively safe in Rome 
     and Bulgaria. But, more importantly, the factual assertion is 
     not true.
       Armenians certainly were exterminated in Istanbul and every 
     other part of Turkey, and it was clearly systematic. For 
     example, on December 7, 1915 German Ambassador Metternich 
     informed Berlin that the Government wiped 30,000 Armenians 
     out of Istanbul and that ``gradually a clean sweep will be 
     made of the remaining 80,000 Armenian inhabitants of the 
     Ottoman capital.'' Indeed, the government massacred or tried 
     to massacre all Armenians from European Turkey by first 
     shipping them over the Bosporus and then killing them. One 
     example is the eradication of the Armenians from the European 
     town of Rodosto. In fact, Armenians and their friends 
     commemorate the genocide on the anniversary of April 24, 1915 
     because on that date the government gave the clearest signal 
     of systematic race extermination. It arrested and killed 
     hundreds of unquestionably innocent Armenian community 
     leaders (including legislators, clergy, educators, and 
     attorneys) in Istanbul.
       Another argument which the deniers forward is that 
     Armenians died of natural causes (famine, cholera, diseases), 
     not government ordered massacres. Putting aside all the 
     direct evidence of the genocide, this argument is ridiculous. 
     It would be the first time, that I know of, in which famine 
     and diseases moved form town to town across an entire country 
     removing all but less than 100,000 Armenians from over 
     2,000,000, and leaving the Turkish Moslem population as the 
     sole survivors. Frankly, such a ``selective disease'' 
     argument has no historical or scientific credibility, and 
     those who make the argument must not expect their audience to 
     reflect on its merits very deeply.
       But, then the deniers argue that there was also a great 
     civil war in which Armenians took up arms against Turks. In 
     that supposed war, great, mutual killings occurred. Never 
     mind that the government had disarmed all the Armenians, the 
     government drafted all the able-bodied Armenian men into 
     labor battalions of the army where they were massacred, 
     and contemporaneous reports do not reference any civil 
     war. In fact, in a newly published book, ``The 
     Slaughterhouse Province,'' we can read American consul 
     Davis's official, eyewitness report from the interior of 
     Turkey of the disarming of the Armenians and the lack of 
     any real resistance. He reports that after the massacres 
     of Armenians in the Province of Harput (ultimately over 
     100,000), the government could ``find only four or five 
     instances where any Turks had been killed or even injured 
     by Armenians and less than a dozen instances of any 
     resistance by Armenians.'' In other isolated areas, of 
     course, Armenians fought back against Turks. But, these 
     were either minor incidents; self-defense; or because 
     Armenians were Russian citizens, drafted into the Russian 
     army, and were a part of the Allied war effort fighting 
     Ottoman Turkey. As Ambassador Morgenthau reported as early 
     as July 1915, moreover, allegations of rebellion were only 
     ``a pretext'' for ``a campaign of race extermination.''
       Nevertheless, some people still claim that the massive 
     Armenian deaths resulted from the legitimate quashing of a 
     rebellion. This ``pretext'' or ``legitimate basis'' denial 
     argument is probably the most dangerous. If it is accepted 
     (regardless of its inaccuracy), it sanctions the murder of an 
     entire nation based on the prodemocracy cries of only a few 
     groups. Civilization will not progress if a justification 
     claim can be made in defense of genocide. Otherwise, the 
     Nazis and every subsequent perpetrator would build the 
     defense in as the crime was committed. During the Armenian 
     genocide, the government attempted exactly such a defense, 
     and it was rejected as both inaccurate and immoral by the 
     international community as well as the succeeding Turkish 
     government. There is no reason why it should be accepted now.
       A more slippery denial argument on the ``mutual killings'' 
     theme involves the amount of Turks and Moslems who also died 
     in the war. I call this argument slippery because its 
     proponents slide between ``Turkish'' and ``Moslem'' deaths. 
     For example, some point to ``two million Turkish deaths 
     during the war'' as a reason not to sympathize with 
     Armenians. Yet this two million figure includes the 1.5 
     million Turkish-Armenians killed, the over 300,000 Turkish 
     army casualties, and the tens of thousands of Turkish-Greeks 
     and Arabs put to death at the same time.
       Another strand of this argument points to ``hundreds of 
     thousands of Moslem deaths''--again implying that the 
     genocide was really an Armenian-Turkish war. Yet in 
     calculating the ``Moslem'' figures, these people not only 
     include the Turkish war casualties and the massacres of tens 
     of thousands of Arabs in Turkey, but also the Moslems who 
     died fighting with the Allies against the Turks in the Middle 
     East--that is Moslems which the Turks themselves killed.
       A third strand of this ``numbers game'' argument applies 
     artificial formulas to the nineteenth century populations, 
     plugs in some theoretical conditions, and concludes with 
     ridiculous population and mortality figures which bear no 
     relation to reality. This argument falls on its face because 
     it completely ignores the direct, factual evidence of the 
     genocide. Its proponents are as off base as those who 
     recently claimed in the newspaper ``Sieg'' that only 150,000-
     200,000 Jews died under Nazi rule and those deaths came 
     during the ``German-Jewish war.''
       Another denial theme is that commemorating or recognizing 
     the Armenian genocide promotes terrorism. Initially, let me 
     say that we unequivocally condemn all terrorism, including 
     Armenian terrorist attacks on innocent Turks. But, the threat 
     of terrorism does not justify rewriting history to deny 
     Ottoman Turkey's crimes against humanity. More importantly, 
     and again the deniers conveniently fail to mention this fact, 
     Armenian terrorism is a moot point. In a March 1989 report, 
     even the State Department had to acknowledge that there has 
     not been an Armenian terrorist attack in three or four years 
     and Armenian terrorist groups have withered away. This 
     cessation of terrorism is attributed to lack of mainstream 
     Armenian community support and to the growing 
     international rejection of Turkey's

[[Page H11531]]

     denial campaign. For example, in 1985 the United Nations 
     Subcommittee on Human Rights, after years of study, 
     overwhelmingly recognized the Armenian genocide as an 
     indisputable historical fact, and in 1987 the European 
     Parliament conditioned Turkey's acceptance to the European 
     Community on recognizing the Armenian genocide.
       The following denial argument is particular to deniers in 
     the United States. They point out that in 1985 sixty-nine 
     scholars signed an advertisement questioning the accuracy of 
     a Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian 
     genocide and therefore ``there was no Armenian genocide'' or 
     ``the issue should be left to historians''--an argument from 
     authorities so to speak. Following the advertisement, we 
     contacted these sixty-nine people. We found that some did not 
     authorize use of their names on the advertisement and some 
     said they were misled about the text and apologized. Many 
     explicitly recognize the Armenian genocide as a fact. But, 
     most importantly, we found that only four of the sixty-nine 
     actually focus their work on the time span of 1915-1923. All 
     of these individuals are subsidized by the Republic of 
     Turkey, and none has credibility on the Armenian genocide 
     issue. Thus, when deniers make claims like a majority of 
     United States experts question the Armenian genocide, they 
     are simply not telling the truth. Among those sociologists, 
     attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, 
     attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, 
     political scientists, and others who seriously study 
     genocide, there is no question that the Armenians suffered a 
     genocide, by any definition. There is also no question among 
     the credible genocide scholars that failure to memorialize 
     and condemn past genocides facilitates future genocides.
       Before leaving this ``scholars'' issue, however, I would 
     like to make clear that some of those people who signed the 
     1985 advertisement and continue to question the Armenian 
     genocide really have little choice. These people are Turkish 
     or Ottoman historians. If they do not assume the current 
     government's line, they will be cut off from resources 
     necessary for their life's work. Even Turkish sources confirm 
     that cooperation with the government pays dividends while 
     criticism exacts a high price.
       The next denial argument is one of the more interesting. 
     This argument contends that a judgment on the Armenian 
     genocide must be reserved until the Republic of Turkey opens 
     its archives of the period. The argument is interesting 
     because Armenians sought free access to the Ottoman archives 
     for years. Then the irrelevance of these archives became 
     obvious. For instance, Turkey does not even own all the 
     relevant archives from the period. After the War, the 
     government sold hundreds of thousands of its records to the 
     Bulgarians as scrap paper. Other parts of the archives exist 
     in Jerusalem, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Europe. 
     In addition, after World War I, Turkish officials readily 
     acknowledged that the files on Armenian massacres were 
     removed and destroyed. In fact, the documentation in archives 
     around the world contains more direct evidence of the 
     genocide than we can possibly digest. (The United States 
     archives contain approximately 25,000 pages for the period 
     1915-1918 alone, including captured German records, which 
     fully document the genocide.) So, while the Turkish held 
     archives may be interesting, they are only a very minor 
     contribution to the history of the genocide.
       Moreover, Turks themselves acknowledge that military and 
     foreign service officials have been reviewing the records for 
     years to remove whatever incriminating evidence may still 
     exist and that the government is using the archives strictly 
     for public relations purposes. This year, the government, in 
     various ways, has announced that the archives on Armenian 
     issues are open. Yet, they fail to publicize that the wrong 
     archives are open or the restrictions which prevent any 
     incriminating documents from coming to light. For example, in 
     January, they announced that the archives are open, but they 
     did not open the relevant World War I years. Recently, they 
     announced that the Council of Ministers files were open for 
     the war years, but they did not open the records of the party 
     apparatus or other agencies which actually controlled the 
     genocidal operations. (Scholars have found that the genocide 
     was implemented through a two track system of orders--one set 
     ordering ``deportations'' and another set ordering the 
     translation of ``deport the Armenians'' to ``massacre the 
     Armenians.'') Read these continual announcements on the 
     opening of the archives carefully; you will find that there 
     is always a caveat such as ``all previously catalogued 
     archives are open'' or that a researcher may see only fifteen 
     pages at a time and a government official has the right to 
     screen the documents first. The Turkish government continues 
     to use the archives as a delaying tactic. As Cumhuriyet a 
     Turkish newspaper reported in January 1989: ``Endless and 
     empty statements have been made over the years concerning the 
     opening of the Ottoman archives, and it is creating a 
     disturbance among those who follow this topic closely. For 
     the last 8 years, every 6 months a statement is made 
     regarding the opening of the Ottoman archives. That these 
     don't come true indicates that Turkey is pursuing a policy of 
     distraction.''
       At this point, the Ottoman archives held by Turkey are 
     worthless. This explains why only Turcophiles and the 
     uninitiated place any weight on them. It also explains why 
     the archives' administrators publicly complain that serious 
     scholars have not come to review what has been released.
       The last denial argument I would like to touch on is a 
     ``character'' argument--that is, ``Turks are hospitable, good 
     people'' and good people would not do what the Armenians 
     allege happened under Ottoman reign. Let me say that the 
     character of the Turkish people is not at issue here. Turkish 
     hospitality is well known, and many Turks proved their sense 
     of humanity during the genocide by protecting individual 
     Armenians. That does not change what the government did to 
     the Armenians from 1915 to 1923, the fact that the racist 
     ideology of Pan-Turkism (Turkey only for Turks) was and still 
     is prevalent, or that the government continues to have a poor 
     human rights record and severely discriminates against 
     Armenians in Turkey today.
       You should also know that the 1915-1923 Armenian genocide 
     was not an isolated event. From 1894 to 1896, Sultan Abdul 
     Hamid openly and proudly ordered the massacre of hundreds of 
     thousands of Armenians, ostensibly to send the Armenians a 
     message about their place in Turkish society. Lord Kinross 
     gave the following example of the atrocities in this period:
       ``[The Massacre's] objective, based on the convenient 
     consideration that Armenians were now tentatively starting to 
     question their inferior status, was the ruthless reduction, 
     with a view to elimination of the Armenian Christians, and 
     the expropriation of their land for the Moslem Turks. Each 
     operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar 
     pattern. First the Turkish troops came into a town for the 
     purpose of massacre; then came the Kurdish irregulars and 
     tribesmen for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the 
     holocaust, by fire and destruction, which spread, with the 
     pursuit of the fugitives and mopping-up operations, 
     throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding 
     province. This murderous winter of 1895 thus saw the 
     decimation of much of the Armenian population and the 
     devastation of their property in some twenty districts of 
     eastern Turkey. Often the massacres were timed for a Friday, 
     when the Moslems were in their mosques . . . Cruelest and 
     most ruinous of all were the massacres at Urfa, where the 
     Armenian Christians numbered a third of the population . . . 
     When the bugle blast ended the day's operations, some three 
     thousand refugees poured into the cathedral, hoping for 
     sanctuary. But the next morning--a Sunday--a fanatic mob 
     swarmed into the church in an orgy of slaughter, rifling its 
     shrines with cries of `Call upon Christ to prove Himself a 
     greater prophet than Mohammed.' Then they amassed a large 
     pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of 
     corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum. The 
     woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children 
     crouched, wailing with terror, caught fire, and all perished 
     in the flames. Punctiliously at three-thirty in the afternoon 
     the bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded 
     around the Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres 
     were over . . . the total casualties in the town, including 
     those slaughtered in the cathedral, amounted to eight 
     thousand dead.''
       Similar accounts of massive Armenian massacres during this 
     1894-1896 period abound. In 1909, for similar reasons, the 
     government set another prelude to the 1915-1923 genocide. 
     Then, it ordered and carried out massacres in Adana which 
     killed 30,000 Armenians.
       Today, as I have noted, the Turkish government is engaged 
     in an all out effort to deny the Armenian genocide. In 
     addition to its efforts in the United States, it is 
     eradicating the physical evidence of any Armenian existence 
     in Turkey. At the beginning of this century Armenians had two 
     thousand churches in Turkey. Now, under two hundred are 
     standing. As for the rest, the government has: destroyed 
     them; converted them to mosques, warehouses, cinemas, and 
     other uses; or allowed them to be plundered and destroyed. In 
     Armenian schools, Armenians are forbidden to teach history 
     and geography, those subjects can only be taught by Turkish 
     officials. As a final example, Turkey strictly forbids open 
     discussion of Armenian history or any other matters which do 
     not comply with government policy. In March of this year, the 
     Independent Magazine reported that:
       ``In early December 1986 Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested 
     by the Turkish Security Police and charged with `making 
     propaganda with intent to destroy or weaken national 
     feelings.' The prosecutor of the Istanbul State Security 
     deemed her offense as meriting severe punishment and asked 
     for between a seven-and-a-half and a 15-year jail sentence.
       Potuoglu's crime was to edit the Turkish edition of the 
     Encyclopedia Britannica. In this was included a footnote 
     which read as follows: `During the Crusades the mountainous 
     regions of Cilicia were under the hegemony of the Armenian 
     Cilician king-
     dom' . . .
       The Encyclopedia Britannica was not the first publication 
     to offend. In 1981 the authorities seized Ankara 50, a 
     guidebook to Ankara produced by the British Institute of 
     Archaeology. The book, when published in 1973, had been 
     passed by the military censor. By 1981, however, times had 
     changed. It was noticed that the book featured a map naming 
     the Roman provinces of Asia Minor including--with perfect 
     historical accuracy--the province of Armenia. The guidebook

[[Page H11532]]

     quickly joined the index of forbidden books along with other 
     such politically dubious publications The Times Atlas of 
     World History and the National Geographic Atlas of the 
     World.''
       This is the type of action that the Turkish government and 
     those in the United States who deny the Armenian genocide are 
     promoting--the sacrifice of truth and integrity on the altar 
     of perceived political expedience. This is why I am 
     especially glad to have had this time with you today, to 
     publicly expose exactly what we are all up against in 
     fighting denial of the Armenian genocide. Thank you.

                          ____________________