Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution (Introduced in House)
HRES 106 IH
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 allyGermany.’.
(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.
RESOLUTION 106 WAS APPROVED BY THE HOUSE
FOREIGN COMMITTEE
on October 10, 2007, by a 27 votes in favor
and 21 votes against. Most of those who
voted against it admitted that it was a
Genocide, but opposed it for political considerations.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.res.00106:
H.RES.106
Title: 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.
Sponsor: Rep
Schiff, Adam B. [CA-29] (introduced 1/30/2007)
Cosponsors
(211)
Related Bills: S.RES.106
Latest Major Action: 10/10/2007 House committee/subcommittee actions.
Status: Ordered to be Reported by the Yeas and Nays: 27 – 21.
Source: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.RES.106:
