THE CONGRESSIONAL GENOCIDE RESOLUTIONS ARE A CRUEL HOAX
By William M. Paparian
USA Armenian Life
January 21, 2009
Pasadena, California
Adam Schiff, Howard Berman, and Nancy Pelosi are perpetrating a cruel
hoax upon the Armenian-American community. And we have allowed them
to get away with it. With a wink and a nod they solemnly profess their
public support of an Armenian Genocide Resolution. Nevertheless, they
have absolutely no intention of ever bringing the Armenian Genocide
Resolution to the floor of the United States Congress for a vote,
let alone bringing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs
where it was referred on March 17, 2009. It’s a fraud, plain and
simple. And like a parlor magician who uses the device of misdirection,
they seek to divert our attention away from their clever tricks as
they tout their complicit colleagues announcements of support or
when they denounce opposition to the resolution. One example can be
found most recently with Mr. Schiff when, on December 17, 2009, he
attacked Turkish lobby opposition to a resolution which he knows will
simply never be voted on. We have been deceived long enough by these
shysters. Am I being too harsh? Then let Mr. Schiff, and Mr. Berman,
and Ms. Pelosi prove me wrong. Stop the limp-wristed shenanigans and
put the resolution on the agenda of the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs and then bring it to the floor of the House of Representatives
for a vote. Otherwise it’s time to put an end to this charade and
move on. It’s time for us to stop wallowing in this bottomless pit
of false promises and broken dreams.
It’s an integral part of the DNA of Armenian-Americans to be
respectful to our elected representatives, to be loyal and faithful
citizens and hope that our government will be nice to us. One way
in which this unfortunate pathology has manifested itself is in
our perpetual hope that the United States government will become
a champion of the Armenian cause with regard to relations with the
Turkish government. And so we lobby candidates and office-holders in
what has been, up to now, a perpetual merry-go-round. We give them
our money. We give them our votes. They show up at community events
with meaningless proclamations and issue empty statements of support.
And ultimately we are betrayed. The cycle continues unabated and the
agenda for justice for the Armenian nation never advances forward.
What have we been waiting for? Why not simply proclaim "Mission
Accomplished" and move on? We have to convince ourselves that we
cannot rely on anyone else to help us in our fight for justice. We
have to be self-reliant. No one can do for us what we must do for
ourselves! We must be uncompromising in dealings with our government.
We can no longer remain quietly on the sidelines while cold-blooded
bureaucrats sell off our children’s future. Speaking with a single
voice, Armenian-Americans must reject any further attempt to water
down our nation’s just demands on Turkey.
It’s time to declare that the record is abundantly clear: he Armenian
Genocide has long been recognized by the government of the United
States, from contemporaneous communications from the American
Ambassador to Turkey to the Secretary of State in Washington, DC,
up to President Ronald Reagan’s proclamation in 1981.
On July 16, 1915, at 1 PM, the American Ambassador in Constantinople
sent the following message to the Secretary of State:
"Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing
and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign
of race extermination is in progress under the pretext of reprisal
against rebellion."
On April 22, 1981, in Proclamation 4838, President Ronald Reagan said:
"Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide
of the Cambodians which followed it – and like too many other such
persecutions of too many other peoples – the lessons of the Holocaust
must never be forgotten."
There is the official record of the United States Department of State
and the proclamation from the President of the United States what
happened to our nation was a Genocide. Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury
we rest our case. Mission Accomplished. Now let us finally move on!
As a young Armenian-American activist one of my earliest lessons
was to learn the three R’s of the Armenian Genocide: recognition;
reparation; and return. It’s time to declare victory on the first "R",
recognition, and advance our struggle to the second and third "R’s,
" reparation and return. Here’s one example. Passed down to me from
my late maternal grandfather, Mihrtad Dickranian, is the deed to my
family’s residence in Izmit, Turkey. On December 16, 2008, I wrote to
the Turkish Consul General in Los Angeles a letter and enclosed a copy
of the deed to my family’s house. I explained that during World War I,
my family was deported from Izmit, that it was my understanding that
there was a government accounting prepared of the property owned by the
deportees, and that I wanted to know what happened with this asset of
my family. The tone of my letter was tactful and straightforward. I
made no accusations of criminal misconduct. Yet, more than a year
later, the Consul General has not responded. Why not? I’m sure the
Consul General forwarded the letter to Ankara. And I’m equally sure
that the Turkish Foreign Ministry made a most sober assessment of the
implications presented by my simple inquiry. How many other property
deeds like the late Mihrtad Dickranian’s are in the hands of the
descendants of Genocide survivors? And what is the present day value
of these property holdings that were stolen from citizens of Turkey
like my grandfather by their own government? They are loosing sleep in
Ankara over the calculations of the value of our collective claims! I
will relentlessly pursue an accounting to what happened to my family’s
home. Make no mistake, this is no Quixotic endeavor. But this is the
individual pursuit of one determined person. I know that there must
be countless other property deeds in the possession of others in the
Armenian-American community. There must be other documentation of the
losses suffered by our fallen nation. Why not make reparations and
return part of the agenda when Armenian-American community leaders
meet with Secretray of State Hillary Clinton? Why not declare the
opening of a new front in our campaign for justice?
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
