Texas Joint Committee for the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide
PRESS RELEASE
Texas Armenian Committee
March 25, 2005
Contact: [email protected]
90TH ANNIVERSARY OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE TO BE COMMEMORATED ON APRIL 23,
2005, 1 P.M. ON THE STEPS OF STATE CAPITOL, AUSTIN, TEXAS
Armenian-Americans of Texas from Dallas, Houston, College Station, San
Antonio, El Paso and Austin will gather on this day of remembrance to
bring their story to light in speeches, prayers, music and poetry, pay
homage to their dead, and declare their fellowship with genocide
survivors of all ethnicities and races. An exhibition will be on
display at South Gallery of Texas State Capitol (April 23 – 26). The
event will be part of a unified international effort on this weekend
led by the descendants of Armenians who were scattered across the
world (see ).
The Armenians are among the world’s oldest civilizations with at least
a 3000 year history. In 301 A.D., they became the first nation to
adopt Christianity as their state religion. With the Turkish invasion
in 1375, Armenians became an occupied people for almost six centuries.
The Turkish Ottoman Empire was based on twin myths – racial purity and
military superiority. In the late 19th century, as Armenians were
striving for reform and freedom from religious persecution, they were
targeted by the Ottoman government for extermination of their entire
race (A&E, Time Machine, The Hidden Holocaust, 5/28/93). Michael
Arlen in his Passage to Ararat referred to the Genocide as “the
beginning of a bloody river linking the great murderous events of our
century.” On April 24, 1915, in Constantinople (modern Istanbul,
Turkey), 250 Armenian cultural leaders were rounded up, late in the
night after their Easter celebration, sent to prison and summarily
executed.
Thus began the Armenian Genocide, a government-sponsored, premeditated
and orchestrated race murder that would annihilate over 1.5 million
Armenians by 1923. There were an estimated two million Armenians
living in the Ottoman Empire at that time. Hundreds of thousands were
butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and
epidemics on death marches and in concentration camps. Also during
this time and in the years following, innumerable monuments and
cultural treasures were methodically destroyed and place names were
changed, so that no one might imagine Armenians had ever lived in
Eastern Anatolia, which had been the heartland of the Armenian nation
even before the Biblical times.
To this day, the Turkish government denies this Genocide ever took
place. Furthermore, it has been conducting a cover-up since 1915 with
an image-cleansing campaign to erase and obfuscate the facts. The
evidence, however, remains irrefutable. It includes official Ottoman
records, reports of foreign ambassadors at the time in Turkey, The Red
Cross, thousands of eyewitness accounts including American and German
missionaries, medical doctors, photographs of the concentration camps
and film footage of the death marches into the Syrian desert where
thousands of human skeletons still exist. On March 7, 2000, a petition
was signed by 126 of the world’s preeminent genocide scholars,
including Nobel Laureate for Peace Elie Wiesel, calling on the Turkish
government to recognize the incontestable fact of the Armenian
Genocide. Many countries around the world, including France, Canada,
Russia, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Greece, Slovakia,
Lebanon, Belgium, and thirty-seven of the United States have
recognized these events as a Genocide by legislation or
proclamation. Texas recognition is still pending.
`Far more people were murdered by governments in the 20th century than
died in all the century’s wars combined’ (`Murder By The State’, The
Atlantic Monthly, November 2003). On April 23rd, the public is invited
to unite with the Armenian-Americans of Texas against all governments
that have perpetrated genocide upon their own citizens including
Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and all
others.
For more information see: