[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 57 (Wednesday, April 9, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H3025-H3026]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   RECOGNIZING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, 88 years ago, Armenian teachers, clergy, 
businessmen, writers and doctors were rounded up and killed. The events 
of April 24, 1915, set the stage for the first genocide of the 20th 
century, the extermination of more than 1.5 million Armenian men, women 
and children at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
  With one of the largest Armenian expatriate communities in the world, 
April 24 has become an integral part of America's history--but debate 
over the genocide is still an annual and bitter conflict.
  Even though modern-day Turkey was established in 1923 out of the 
ashes of the Ottoman Empire and was not the actual perpetrator of 
genocide, it spends millions of dollars each year to fight recognition 
of the Genocide. Despite this well-funded effort, there is no serious 
academic dispute about the Armenian Genocide. Our own National Archives 
houses diplomatic dispatches that vividly describe the systematic 
destruction of an entire people.
  News accounts from the American press also provide a trove of primary 
source evidence. Headlines, such as the following from the New York 
Times, describe the horrors: ``Armenian Officials Murdered by Turks,'' 
``Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres,'' ``Tales of Armenian Horrors 
Confirmed,'' ``Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks,'' ``Armenians 
Are Sent To Perish in Desert,'' ``Turks Depopulate Towns of Armenia,'' 
``Million Armenians Killed or In Exile,'' and ``The death of Armenia.''
  When the Armenian Genocide occurred, the heinous crime had no name. 
In denouncing what he was witness to, our own U.S. Ambassador Henry 
Morgenthau chose the words ``race murder'' to describe the atrocities. 
Raphael Lemkin, an International law scholar, ultimately coined the 
term genocide in 1944.
  As a Polish attorney, Lemkin was appalled by the Turkish atrocities 
against the Armenians and tried to get European statesmen to 
criminalize the destruction of ethnic and religious groups. He was 
dismissed as an alarmist. Years later, when Hitler invaded Poland, 
Lemkin lost 49 family members in the Holocaust.
  Landing as a refugee on American shores, Lemkin resolved to devise a 
word to convey the evil under way. In 1944, while working for the 
U.S. war department, he invented the term ``genocide''--citing the 
Armenian case as an example.

  In 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the international community 
responded to Nazi Germany's methodically orchestrated acts of genocide 
by approving the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the 
Crime of Genocide. The Convention confirms that genocide is a crime 
under international law and defines genocide as actions committed with 
the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
  The United States, under President Harry Truman, was the first nation 
to sign the Convention. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan

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signed an Act that implemented the Convention and criminalized genocide 
under U.S. law--putting the United States on record as being strongly 
opposed to the heinous crime of genocide. This year marks the 15th 
anniversary of the signing of that convention.
  I will soon introduce a resolution, along with my colleague Mr. 
Radanovich and several other Members of Congress, that recognizes this 
important step taken by the United States 15 years ago, to ensure that 
the lessons of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and the genocides 
in Cambodia and Rwanda, among others, will not be forgotten.
  Euphemisms, vague terminology or calls for more discussions are just 
some of the dodges used to avoid Turkish discomfort with its Ottoman 
past. There is nothing to discuss, there is nothing to discover, there 
is nothing to be gained by denial--but there is much to be lost.
  Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million Armenians. 
Let us not equivocate. Let us not temporize. Let us instead pay homage 
to the memory of those innocent victims and honor the courage of the 
survivors. Let us call genocide, genocide.

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