Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution

Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution - Calls upon the President to: (1) ensure that U.S. foreign policy reflects understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the U.S. record relating to the Armenian Genocide; and (2) accurately characterize in the President's annual message commemorating the Armenian Genocide the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide and to recall the proud history of U.S. intervention in opposition to the Armenian Genocide.

[Congressional Bills 112th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[S. Res. 399 Introduced in Senate (IS)]

112th CONGRESS
  2d Session
S. RES. 399

  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, crimes against humanity, 
 ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record 
       relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes.


_______________________________________________________________________


                   IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

                             March 19, 2012

  Mr. Menendez (for himself, Mr. Kirk, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Lieberman, Mr. 
   Bennet, Mr. Whitehouse, Mrs. Feinstein, Mr. Levin, and Mr. Reed) 
submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee 
                          on Foreign Relations

_______________________________________________________________________

                               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, crimes against humanity, 
 ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record 
       relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes.

    Resolved,

                              short title

    Section 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 the Crime 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 the Crime 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) On May 28, 1951, in a written statement submitted to the 
International Court of Justice concerning the Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the United States 
Government stated, ``The Genocide Convention resulted from the inhuman 
and barbarous practices which prevailed in certain countries prior to 
and during World War II, when entire religious, racial and national 
minority groups were threatened with and subjected to deliberate 
extermination. The practice of genocide has occurred throughout human 
history. The Roman persecution of the Christians, the Turkish massacres 
of Armenians, the extermination of millions of Jews and Poles by the 
Nazis are outstanding examples of the crime of genocide. This was the 
background when the General Assembly of the United Nations considered 
the problem of genocide. Not once, but twice, that body declared 
unanimously that the practice of genocide is criminal under 
international law and that States ought to take steps to prevent and 
punish genocide.''.
    (21) 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 . . .''.
    (22) 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''.
    (23) 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 . . .''.
    (24) 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''.
    (25) 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''.
    (26) 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.
    (27) 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''.
    (28) 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.
    (29) 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.''.
    (30) 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.''.
    (31) President Barack Obama, on April 24, 2010, explicitly employed 
the expression Meds Yeghern, a term used by Armenians to reference the 
Armenian Genocide. The statement reads in part: ``On this solemn day of 
remembrance, we pause to recall that 95 years ago one of the worst 
atrocities of the 20th century began. In that dark moment of history, 
1,500,000 Armenians were massacred or marched to their death in the 
final days of the Ottoman Empire. . . . The Meds Yeghern is a 
devastating chapter in the history of the Armenian people, and we must 
keep its memory alive in honor of those who were murdered and so that 
we do not repeat the grave mistakes of the past.''.
    (32) 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, crimes against humanity, 
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.
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