[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 154 (Friday, November 18, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13394-S13395]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SUBMITTED RESOLUTIONS
______
SENATE RESOLUTION 320--CALLING ON THE PRESIDENT TO ENSURE THAT THE
FOREIGN POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES REFLECTS APPROPRIATE UNDERSTANDING
AND SENSITIVITY CONCERNING ISSUES RELATED TO HUMAN RIGHTS, ETHNIC
CLEANSING, AND GENOCIDE DOCUMENTED IN THE UNITED STATES RECORD RELATING
TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Mr. ENSIGN (for himself and Mr. Durbin) submitted the following
resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations:
S. Res 320
Whereas the Armenian Genocide was conceived and carried out
by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulting in the
deportation of nearly 2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000
men, women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors were
expelled from their homes, and which succeeded in the
elimination of more than 2,500-year presence of Armenians in
their historic homeland;
Whereas, on May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers issued the
joint statement of England, France, and Russia that
explicitly charged, for the first time ever, another
government of committing ``a crime against humanity'';
Whereas that joint statement stated ``the Allied
Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they
will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members
of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents
who are implicated in such massacres'';
Whereas the post-World War I Turkish Government indicted
the top leaders involved in the ``organization and
execution'' of the Armenian Genocide and in the ``massacre
and destruction of the Armenians'';
Whereas in a series of courts-martial, officials of the
Young Turk Regime were tried and convicted on charges of
organizing and executing massacres against the Armenian
people;
Whereas the officials who were the chief organizers of the
Armenian Genocide, Minister of War Enver, Minister of the
Interior Talaat, and Minister of the Navy Jemal, were tried
by military tribunals, found guilty, and condemned to death
for their crimes, however, the punishments imposed by the
tribunals were not enforced;
Whereas the Armenian Genocide and the failure to carry out
the death sentence against Enver, Talaat, and Jemal are
documented with overwhelming evidence in the national
archives of Austria, France, Germany, Russia, the United
Kingdom, the United States, the Vatican, and many other
countries, and this vast body of evidence attests to the same
facts, the same events, and the same consequences;
Whereas the National Archives and Records Administration of
the United States holds extensive and thorough documentation
on the Armenian Genocide, especially in its holdings for the
Department of State under Record Group 59, files 867.00 and
867.40, which are open and widely available to the public and
interested institutions;
Whereas the Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United States
Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, organized
and led protests by officials of many countries, among them
the allies of the Ottoman Empire, against the Armenian
Genocide;
Whereas Ambassador Morgenthau explicitly described to the
Department of State the policy of the Government of the
Ottoman Empire as ``a campaign of race extermination'', and
was instructed on July 16, 1915, by Secretary of State Robert
Lansing that the ``Department approves your procedure . . .
to stop Armenian persecution'';
Whereas Senate Concurrent Resolution 12, 64th Congress,
agreed to July 18, 1916, resolved that ``the President of the
United States be respectfully asked to designate a day on
which the citizens of this country may give expression to
their sympathy by contributing funds now being raised for the
relief of the Armenians'', who, at that time, were enduring
``starvation, disease, and untold suffering'';
Whereas President Woodrow Wilson agreed with such
Concurrent Resolution and encouraged the formation of the
organization known as Near East Relief, which was
incorporated by the Act of August 6, 1919, 66th Congress (41
Stat. 273, chapter 32);
Whereas, from 1915 through 1930, Near East Relief
contributed approximately $116,000,000 to aid survivors of
the Armenian Genocide, including aid to approximately 132,000
Armenian orphans;
Whereas Senate Resolution 359, 66th Congress, agreed to May
11, 1920, stated in part, ``the testimony adduced at the
hearings conducted by the subcommittee of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations have clearly established the
truth of the reported massacres and other atrocities from
which the Armenian people have suffered'';
Whereas such Senate Resolution followed the report to the
Senate of the American Military Mission to Armenia, which was
led by General James Harbord, dated April 13, 1920, that
stated ``[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death have
left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian
valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from
the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages'';
Whereas, as displayed in the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Adolf Hitler, on ordering his military
commanders to attack Poland without provocation in 1939,
dismissed objections by saying ``[w]ho, after all, speaks
today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' and thus set
the stage for the Holocaust;
Whereas Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ``genocide'' in
1944, and who was the earliest proponent of the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, invoked the
Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide in the 20th
century;
Whereas the first resolution on genocide adopted by the
United Nations, United Nations General Assembly Resolution
96(1), dated December 11, 1946, (which was adopted at the
urging of Raphael Lemkin), and the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, done at Paris December
9, 1948, recognized the Armenian Genocide as the type of
crime the United Nations intended to prevent and punish by
codifying existing standards;
Whereas, in 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission
invoked the Armenian Genocide as ``precisely . . . one of the
types of acts which the modern term `crimes against humanity'
is intended to cover'' and as a precedent for the Nuremberg
tribunals;
Whereas such Commission stated that ``[t]he provisions of
Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Sevres were obviously
intended to cover, in conformity with the Allied note of 1915
. . . offenses which had been committed on Turkish territory
against persons of Turkish citizenship, though of Armenian or
Greek race. This article constitutes therefore a precedent
for Article 6c and 5c of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Charters,
and offers an example of one of the categories of `crimes
against humanity' as understood by these enactments'';
Whereas House Joint Resolution 148, 94th Congress, adopted
by the House of Representatives on April 8, 1975, resolved
that ``April 24, 1975, is hereby designated as `National Day
of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man', and the President
of the United States is authorized and requested to issue a
proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to
observe such day as a day of remembrance for all the victims
of genocide, especially those of Armenian ancestry'';
Whereas Proclamation 4838 of April 22, 1981 (95 Stat. 1813)
issued by President Ronald Reagan, stated, in part, that
``[l]ike the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the
genocide of the Cambodians which followed it--and like too
many other persecutions of too many other people--the lessons
of the Holocaust must never be forgotten'';
Whereas House Joint Resolution 247, 98th Congress, adopted
by the House of Representatives on September 10, 1984,
resolved that ``April 24, 1985, is hereby designated as
`National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man', and
the President of the United States is authorized and
requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of
the United States to observe such day as a day of remembrance
for all the victims of genocide, especially the one and one-
half million people of Armenian ancestry'';
Whereas, in August 1985, after extensive study and
deliberation, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention
of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities voted 14 to 1
to accept a report entitled ``Study of the Question of the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide'', which
stated ``[t]he Nazi aberration has unfortunately not been the
only case of genocide in the 20th century. Among other
examples which can be cited as qualifying are . . . the
Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916'';
Whereas such report also explained that ``[a]t least
1,000,000, and possibly well over half of the Armenian
population, are reliably estimated to have been killed or
death marched by independent authorities and eye-witnesses
and this is corroborated by reports in United States, German,
and British archives and of contemporary diplomats in the
Ottoman Empire, including those of its ally Germany'';
Whereas the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, an
independent Federal agency that serves as the board of
trustees of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
pursuant to section 2302 of title 36, United States Code,
unanimously resolved on April 30, 1981, that the Museum would
exhibit information regarding the Armenian Genocide and the
Museum has since done so;
Whereas, reviewing an aberrant 1982 expression by the
Department of State (which was later retracted) that asserted
that the facts of the Armenian Genocide may be ambiguous, the
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
in 1993, after a review of documents pertaining to the policy
record of the United States, noted that the assertion on
ambiguity in the United States record about the Armenian
Genocide ``contradicted longstanding United States policy and
was eventually retracted'';
Whereas, on June 5, 1996, the House of Representatives
adopted an amendment to H.R. 3540, 104th Congress (the
Foreign Operations,
[[Page S13395]]
Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act,
1997), to reduce aid to Turkey by $3,000,000 (an estimate of
its payment of lobbying fees in the United States) until the
Turkish Government acknowledged the Armenian Genocide and
took steps to honor the memory of its victims;
Whereas President William Jefferson Clinton, on April 24,
1998, stated, ``[t]his year, as in the past, we join with
Armenian-Americans throughout the nation in commemorating one
of the saddest chapters in the history of this century, the
deportations and massacres of a million and a half Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire in the years 1915-1923'';
Whereas President George W. Bush, on April 24, 2004,
stated, ``[o]n this day, we pause in remembrance of one of
the most horrible tragedies of the 20th century, the
annihilation of as many as 1,500,000 Armenians through forced
exile and murder at the end of the Ottoman Empire''; and
Whereas, despite the international recognition and
affirmation of the Armenian Genocide, the failure of the
domestic and international authorities to punish those
responsible for the Armenian Genocide is a reason why similar
genocides have recurred and may recur in the future, and that
a just resolution will help prevent future genocides: Now,
therefore, be it
Resolved, That the Senate--
(1) calls on the President to ensure that the foreign
policy of the United States reflects appropriate
understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to
human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in
the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide
and the consequences of the failure to realize a just
resolution; and
(2) calls on the President, in the President's annual
message commemorating the Armenian Genocide issued on or
about April 24 to accurately characterize the systematic and
deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide
and to recall the proud history of United States intervention
in opposition to the Armenian Genocide.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise today to recall and to honor the
1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman government between 1915 and
1923. Genocides claimed the lives of some 60 million people in the
century just past, 16 million after the end of the Second World War,
when we told ourselves, ``Never again.'' The Armenian Genocide was the
20th century's first genocide, a vicious, organized crime against
humanity that included murder, deportation, torture, and slave labor.
Some would ignore the Armenian victims and forget how they died. We
need to fight against such forgetfulness.
An Armenian named Vahram Dadrian was a survivor of the genocide and
wrote about his experiences in a moving memoir. But by the 1940s, he
had begun to lose hope. ``Everything has been forgotten,'' he wrote,
``our . . . dead could never have imagined, even for a fraction of a
moment, that they would have been forgotten so soon.''
We must restore that lost hope. We must not forget. To do so would
dishonor the memories of the dead and send a message to the world that
we might tolerate genocide.
We will not tolerate the intolerable. We will remember, and in doing
so, cultivate the knowledge--and the wisdom--necessary to act to
prevent a repetition of these terrible crimes. Because the problem
isn't simply a matter of knowing, but about knowing when and how to
act.
Senator Ensign and I have submitted a resolution that acknowledges
the suffering of those destroyed by the Armenian genocide.
It calls on the President to remember the hard lessons of the
Armenian genocide in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and to assure
that our knowledge of this terrible crime informs our human rights
policies.
As I said, the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th
century. It was also the first time that the American public found
itself confronting such a cruel, man-made catastrophe.
America closely followed the crisis. In 1915, the New York Times
alone published 145 articles on the Armenian massacres, roughly one
every 2\1/2\ days.
Dedicated and courageous American diplomats tried to end the carnage.
Our ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, played an important
role in bringing the massacres to the attention of the outside world.
Americans, such as Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Clara Barton, spoke
out against the massacres and a broad-based American humanitarian
movement sought to provide relief to the desperate Armenians and pushed
the U.S. Government to protect the victims from further violence. It
was the birth of the American international human rights movement.
The Near East Relief Organization, founded in 1919 to assist Armenian
refugees, provided more than $116 million for the cause during its 10-
year lifetime--the equivalent of more than $1 billion in today's money.
We need to recapture that energy and determination because the best
way to honor those who died is to recognize their suffering and
dedicate ourselves to preventing such a destruction of entire
communities in the future.
Recognizing the Armenian genocide takes on added importance in the
face of the genocide occurring right now in the Darfur region of Sudan.
As we pause to reflect upon this grievous example of man's inhumanity
to man, let us honor the victims of the Armenian genocide and all
crimes against humanity not only by acknowledging their suffering, but
also by acting to halt similar atrocities that are occurring now before
our very eyes.
____________________