[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 45 (Monday, March 19, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1792-S1793]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         SUBMITTED RESOLUTIONS

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 SENATE RESOLUTION 399--CALLING UPON THE PRESIDENT TO ENSURE THAT THE 
FOREIGN POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES REFLECTS APPROPRIATE UNDERSTANDING 
   AND SENSITIVITY CONCERNING ISSUES RELATED TO HUMAN RIGHTS, CRIMES 
  AGAINST HUMANITY, ETHNIC CLEANSING, AND GENOCIDE DOCUMENTED IN THE 
 UNITED STATES RECORD RELATING TO THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, AND FOR OTHER 
                                PURPOSES

  Mr. MENENDEZ (for himself, Mr. Kirk, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Lieberman, Mr. 
Bennet, Mr. Whitehouse, Mrs. Feinstein, Mr. Levin, and Mr. Reed of 
Rhode Island) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to 
the Committee on Foreign Relations:

                              S. Res. 399

       Resolved,


                              short title

       Sec. 1. This resolution may be cited as the ``Affirmation 
     of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide 
     Resolution''.


                                findings

       Sec. 2. The Senate finds the following:
       (1) 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 the elimination of the over 
     2,500-year presence of Armenians in their historic homeland.
       (2) On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers of England, France, 
     and Russia, jointly issued a statement explicitly charging 
     for the first time ever another government of committing ``a 
     crime against humanity''.
       (3) This joint statement stated that ``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''.
       (4) 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''.
       (5) In a series of courts-martial, officials of the Young 
     Turk Regime were tried and convicted, as charged, for 
     organizing and executing massacres against the Armenian 
     people.
       (6) The chief organizers of the Armenian Genocide, Minister 
     of War Enver, Minister of the Interior Talaat, and Minister 
     of the Navy Jemal were all condemned to death for their 
     crimes, but, the verdicts of the courts were not enforced.
       (7) The Armenian Genocide and these domestic judicial 
     failures are documented with overwhelming evidence in the 
     national archives of Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, 
     Russia, 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.
       (8) The United States National Archives and Record 
     Administration holds extensive and thorough documentation on 
     the Armenian Genocide, especially in its holdings under 
     Record Group 59 of the United States Department of State, 
     files 867.00 and 867.40, which are open and widely available 
     to the public and interested institutions.
       (9) 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.
       (10) 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''.
       (11) Senate Concurrent Resolution 12, 64th Congress, agreed 
     to February 9, 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 the time were enduring 
     ``starvation, disease, and untold suffering''.
       (12) President Woodrow Wilson concurred and also encouraged 
     the formation of the organization known as Near East Relief, 
     chartered by the Act of August 6, 1919, 66th Congress (41 
     Stat. 273, chapter 32), which contributed some $116,000,000 
     from 1915 to 1930 to aid Armenian Genocide survivors, 
     including 132,000 orphans who became foster children of the 
     American people.
       (13) Senate Resolution 359, 66th Congress, agreed to May 
     11, 1920, stated in part that ``the testimony adduced at the 
     hearings conducted by the sub-committee 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''.
       (14) The resolution followed the April 13, 1920, report to 
     the Senate of the American Military Mission to Armenia led by 
     General James Harbord, 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''.
       (15) 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.
       (16) Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ``genocide'' in 
     1944, and who was the earliest proponent of the United 
     Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the 
     Crime of Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a definitive 
     example of genocide in the 20th century.
       (17) The first resolution on genocide adopted by the United 
     Nations at Mr. Lemkin's urging, the December 11, 1946, United 
     Nations General Assembly Resolution 96(1), and the United 
     Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the 
     Crime of Genocide recognized the Armenian Genocide as the 
     type of crime the United Nations intended to prevent and 
     punish by codifying existing standards.
       (18) In 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission 
     invoked the Armenian Genocide, ``precisely . . . one of the 
     types of acts which the modern term `crimes against humanity' 
     is intended to cover,'' as a precedent for the Nuremberg 
     tribunals.
       (19) The 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''.
       (20) On May 28, 1951, in a written statement submitted to 
     the International Court of Justice concerning the Convention 
     on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 
     the United States Government stated, ``The Genocide 
     Convention resulted from the inhuman and barbarous practices 
     which prevailed in certain countries prior to and during 
     World War II, when entire religious, racial and national 
     minority groups were threatened with and subjected to 
     deliberate extermination. The practice of genocide has 
     occurred throughout human history. The Roman persecution of 
     the Christians, the Turkish massacres of Armenians, the 
     extermination of millions of Jews and Poles by the Nazis are 
     outstanding examples of the crime of genocide. This was the 
     background when the General Assembly of the United Nations 
     considered the problem of genocide. Not once, but twice, that 
     body declared unanimously that the practice of genocide is 
     criminal under international law and that States ought to 
     take steps to prevent and punish genocide.''.
       (21) House Joint Resolution 148, 94th Congress, adopted 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 . . .''.
       (22) President Ronald Reagan, in proclamation number 4838, 
     dated April 22, 1981 (95 Stat. 1813), stated that, in part 
     ``[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''.
       (23) House Joint Resolution 247, 98th Congress, adopted 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 . . 
     .''.
       (24) 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 that ``[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''.
       (25) This 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. 
     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''.
       (26) The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, an 
     independent Federal agency,

[[Page S1793]]

     unanimously resolved on April 30, 1981, that the United 
     States Holocaust Memorial Museum would include the Armenian 
     Genocide in the Museum and has since done so.
       (27) Reviewing an aberrant 1982 expression (later 
     retracted) by the Department of State asserting 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''.
       (28) On June 5, 1996, the House of Representatives adopted 
     an amendment to House Bill 3540, 104th Congress (the Foreign 
     Operations, 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 Government of Turkey 
     acknowledged the Armenian Genocide and took steps to honor 
     the memory of its victims.
       (29) President William Jefferson Clinton, on April 24, 
     1998, stated: ``This 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.''.
       (30) President George W. Bush, on April 24, 2004, stated: 
     ``On 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.''.
       (31) President Barack Obama, on April 24, 2010, explicitly 
     employed the expression Meds Yeghern, a term used by 
     Armenians to reference the Armenian Genocide. The statement 
     reads in part: ``On this solemn day of remembrance, we pause 
     to recall that 95 years ago one of the worst atrocities of 
     the 20th century began. In that dark moment of history, 
     1,500,000 Armenians were massacred or marched to their death 
     in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. . . . The Meds 
     Yeghern is a devastating chapter in the history of the 
     Armenian people, and we must keep its memory alive in honor 
     of those who were murdered and so that we do not repeat the 
     grave mistakes of the past.''.
       (32) 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 just 
     resolution of this issue will help prevent future genocides.


                         declaration of policy

       Sec. 3. The Senate--
       (1) calls upon the President to ensure that the foreign 
     policy of the United States reflects appropriate 
     understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to 
     human rights, crimes against humanity, 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 upon 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.

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