[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 47 (Wednesday, April 24, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H1594-H1595]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 COMMEMORATION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to join my colleagues in speaking 
about the genocide, a genocide, unfortunately, that has not been 
acknowledged by some and, unfortunately, heightens the risk of its 
repetition. The massacre of Armenians in Turkey during and after World 
War I is recorded as the first State-ordered genocide against a 
minority group in the 20th century. Tragically, Mr. Speaker, it was 
not, as we all know, the last.
  In the 87 years since this unspeakable tragedy, the world has 
witnessed decades of genocide and ethnic cleansing and wholesale 
persecution of people simply because of who they are: European Jews, 
Bosnian Muslims, the Tutsis of Rwanda, Kosovar Albanians, and others.
  Mr. Speaker, we undertake this year's commemoration of the Armenian 
genocide in a world that is forever changed as we reflect on the 
terrible events of September 11. We understand that confronting 
irrational hatred and the evil which kindles it remains a constant 
challenge for us all.
  Mr. Speaker, there are those who deny that there was an Armenian 
genocide, yet there is, of course, no lack of documentation of what 
occurred during that terrible time. In her powerful new book, A Problem 
From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, author Samantha Powers 
points out that The New York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady 
coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915 alone. According to Powers, 
beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish ``massacres,'' 
``slaughter,'' and ``atrocities'' against the Armenians, relaying 
accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious 
authorities, and survivors of mass executions.
  The U.S. Ambassador to Turkey at that time, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., 
cabled Washington on July 10, 1950 stating, ``Persecution of Armenians 
assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered 
districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian 
populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale 
expulsions, and deportations from one end of the empire to the other, 
accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning 
into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.'' The 
tragedy, Mr. Speaker, is that similar language could have been applied 
during the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
  Mr. Speaker, those reports came to us, and the West did little. The 
West did little until the middle of the 1990s and, when we acted, the 
killing and carnage stopped. Sadly, Mr. Speaker, at that time in 1915, 
no action, no action was taken to try to save the Armenians because 
their plight was deemed to be an ``internal affair'' of their 
government.
  Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege of having chaired for 10 years the 
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, otherwise known as 
the Helsinki Commission. It oversees the implementation of the Helsinki 
Final Act, signed August 1, 1975 in Helsinki, Finland. That act, post-
genocide of the 1930s and 1940s, adopted the premise that a nation's 
mistreatment of its own citizens would never be again an internal 
affair. To that extent, Mr. Speaker, the international community has, 
in fact, adopted the premise that we are our brothers' and our sisters' 
keepers.

[[Page H1595]]

  Decades later, 6 million Jews would perish in the Holocaust before 
the community of nations would adopt the universal declaration of human 
rights. Then, as I have said, the Helsinki Final Act, some years later.
  The declaration on human rights captured the world's revulsion of 
that traditional view of international relations and made clear a new 
norm: how a State treats its own people is of direct and legitimate 
concern to all States and is not simply an internal affair of the State 
concerned.

                              {time}  1545

  Mr. Speaker, I trust that all of us will urge our Turkish friends who 
were not involved in this genocide, but who now head their governments, 
to acknowledge and express their own horror at those acts taken in 
1915.

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