SEN. MENENDEZ INTRODUCES RESOLUTION CONCERNING UNITED STATES RECORD AFFIRMATION ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

US Fed News
December 1, 2009 Tuesday 10:11 AM EST

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey, has
introduced a resolution (S. Res. 316) "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."

The resolution introduced on Oct. 21, was co-sponsored by Sen. John
Ensign, R-Nevada. It was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.

A copy of the full-text of the legislation follows:

S. Res. 316

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 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 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 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) 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 . . .’.

(21) 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’.

(22) 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 .

. .’.

(23) 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’.

(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
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, 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.

(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 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, 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.