110th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. RES. 106

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.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

January 30, 2007

Mr. SCHIFF (for himself, Mr. RADANOVICH, Mr. PALLONE,
Mr. KNOLLENBERG, Mr. SHERMAN, and Mr. MCCOTTER)
submitted the following resolution; which was referred
to the Committee on Foreign Affairs

RESOLUTION

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,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

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

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

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.

SEC. 3. DECLARATION OF POLICY.

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.

END

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress