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Rep. Schiff Introduces Resolution Concerning Armenian Genocide by Ot

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  • Rep. Schiff Introduces Resolution Concerning Armenian Genocide by Ot

    US Fed News
    March 21, 2009 Saturday 6:38 PM EST



    Rep. Schiff Introduces Resolution Concerning Armenian Genocide by
    Ottoman Empire

    WASHINGTON


    WASHINGTON, March 21 -- Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, has introduced
    a resolution (H.Res. 252) "calling upon the President to ensure that
    the foreign policy of the U.S. reflects appropriate understanding and
    sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic
    cleansing, and genocide documented in the U.S. record relating to the
    Armenian Genocide."

    The resolution, introduced on March 17, has 76 co-sponsors. It was
    referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A copy of the
    full-text of the legislation follows: H.Res. 252 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, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in
    the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for
    other purposes.

    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 House of Representatives 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 which
    succeeded in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of
    Armenians in their historic homeland.

    (2) On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers, 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 `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, however, 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 United States
    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 United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the
    `Department approves your procedure . . . to stop Armenian
    persecution'.

    (11) Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 of 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
    an Act of Congress, 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, dated May 11, 1920, stated in part, `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 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
    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 Genocide itself 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) House Joint Resolution 148, adopted on April 8, 1975, resolved:
    `[t]hat 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 . . .'.

    (21) President Ronald Reagan in proclamation number 4838, dated April
    22, 1981, stated in part `like 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'.

    (22) House Joint Resolution 247, adopted on September 10, 1984,
    resolved: `[t]hat 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 . . .'.

    (23) In August 1985, after extensive study and deliberation, the
    United Nations SubCommission 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'.

    (24) 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.'.

    (25) The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, an independent
    Federal agency, 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.

    (26) Reviewing an aberrant 1982 expression (later retracted) by the
    United States 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'.

    (27) On June 5, 1996, the House of Representatives adopted an
    amendment to House Bill 3540 (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 Turkish Government acknowledged
    the Armenian Genocide and took steps to honor the memory of its
    victims.

    (28) 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.'.

    (29) 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.'.

    (30) 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.

    DECLARATION OF POLICY Sec. 3. The House of Representatives--

    (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, 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.

    For more information about US Fed News contract awards please contact:
    Sarabjit Jagirdar, US Fed News, Email:-
    [email protected]
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