Affirming the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H. Res. 296, which I introduced along with Representative Bilirakis to recognize and commemorate the Armenian genocide.

This is a vote that I have fought for 19 years to cast. My wonderful colleagues, Anna Eshoo and Jackie Speier, have fought far longer than I have. It is one that tens of thousands of my constituents, my Armenian American constituents, have waited decades to see. It is a moment that so many have worked and struggled and prayed for, a moment when the House of Representatives refused to be enlisted in the cause of genocide denial.

This April would have marked the 104th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians, and the displacement of millions more by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. Many other religious and ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire met similar fates, among them the Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and others.

More than a century later, it is our solemn responsibility to remember those who were lost, to seek justice and restitution, and to educate Americans and those around the world about the crime of genocide.

The facts of the genocide are horrific and undisputed by historians. They were recorded by American diplomats serving in the Ottoman Empire at the time who bore witness in official cables to the annihilation of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, a crime that at the time had no name.

Though it lacked a name, there was no doubt in the observers of the time that they were witnessing a crime on a massive and industrial scale. The U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, would recall later: ``I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.''

It was only decades later that Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, coined the term ``genocide'' to describe the atrocities that have been visited upon the Jews as well as the Armenians.

I have sat with survivors of the genocide, men and women, their numbers dwindling year after year, and heard them recall the destruction of their lives and the loss of all they had known. As children, they were forced from their homes and saw their families beaten, raped, and murdered. They fled across continents and oceans to build lives in this Nation, in Armenia, and around the world.

For them and for their descendants, the word ``genocide'' is sacred because it means that the world has not and will not forget. To deny genocide, on the other hand, is profane. It is, in the words of Elie Wiesel, ``a double killing.''

Mr. Speaker, it is always the right time to recognize genocide, but it is particularly so today. For when we see the images of terrified Kurdish families in northern Syria, loading their possessions into cars or carts and fleeing their homes headed to nowhere except from Turkish bombs and marauding militias, how can we truly say the crimes of a century ago are in the past?

We cannot. We cannot pick and choose which crimes against humanity are convenient to speak about. We cannot cloak our support of human rights in euphemisms. We cannot be cowed into silence by a foreign power.

What we can do, what we must do, Mr. Speaker, is state the facts. We can say that the Ottoman Empire committed this grotesque crime against the Armenians, but their campaign of extermination failed, and that, above all, we will never forget and will never again be silenced.

I am grateful for the leadership of Mr. Engel, Mr. McCaul, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), and so many Members on both sides of the aisle who have fought for recognition for decades. I urge every Member of the House to join today in supporting H. Res. 296.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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