Submitted Resolutions

SUBMITTED RESOLUTIONS

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise today to recall and to honor the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1923. Genocides claimed the lives of some 60 million people in the century just past, 16 million after the end of the Second World War, when we told ourselves, ``Never again.'' The Armenian Genocide was the 20th century's first genocide, a vicious, organized crime against humanity that included murder, deportation, torture, and slave labor.

Some would ignore the Armenian victims and forget how they died. We need to fight against such forgetfulness.

An Armenian named Vahram Dadrian was a survivor of the genocide and wrote about his experiences in a moving memoir. But by the 1940s, he had begun to lose hope. ``Everything has been forgotten,'' he wrote, ``our ..... dead could never have imagined, even for a fraction of a moment, that they would have been forgotten so soon.''

We must restore that lost hope. We must not forget. To do so would dishonor the memories of the dead and send a message to the world that we might tolerate genocide.

We will not tolerate the intolerable. We will remember, and in doing so, cultivate the knowledge--and the wisdom--necessary to act to prevent a repetition of these terrible crimes. Because the problem isn't simply a matter of knowing, but about knowing when and how to act.

Senator Ensign and I have submitted a resolution that acknowledges the suffering of those destroyed by the Armenian genocide.

It calls on the President to remember the hard lessons of the Armenian genocide in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and to assure that our knowledge of this terrible crime informs our human rights policies.

As I said, the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century. It was also the first time that the American public found itself confronting such a cruel, man-made catastrophe.

America closely followed the crisis. In 1915, the New York Times alone published 145 articles on the Armenian massacres, roughly one every 2 1/2 days.

Dedicated and courageous American diplomats tried to end the carnage. Our ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, played an important role in bringing the massacres to the attention of the outside world.

Americans, such as Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Clara Barton, spoke out against the massacres and a broad-based American humanitarian movement sought to provide relief to the desperate Armenians and pushed the U.S. Government to protect the victims from further violence. It was the birth of the American international human rights movement.

The Near East Relief Organization, founded in 1919 to assist Armenian refugees, provided more than $116 million for the cause during its 10-year lifetime--the equivalent of more than $1 billion in today's money.

We need to recapture that energy and determination because the best way to honor those who died is to recognize their suffering and dedicate ourselves to preventing such a destruction of entire communities in the future.

Recognizing the Armenian genocide takes on added importance in the face of the genocide occurring right now in the Darfur region of Sudan. As we pause to reflect upon this grievous example of man's inhumanity to man, let us honor the victims of the Armenian genocide and all crimes against humanity not only by acknowledging their suffering, but also by acting to halt similar atrocities that are occurring now before our very eyes.

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