89th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

89TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE -- (House of Representatives - April 27, 2004)
The SPEAKER pro tempore.

Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner) is
recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. WEINER. Mr. Speaker, this month many of us pause to remember the Holocaust in Yom Hashoah commemorations. But on April 24, 1915, the first genocide of the 20th century began. The Ottoman Empire began rounding up a group of more than 250 Armenian intellectuals and civic leaders. Then soldiers of Armenian descent who were serving in the Turkish military were moved to labor camps and eventually murdered.

Across Anatolia, Armenian leaders were arrested and killed. So, too, were the most powerless, children, women, and
the elderly, all driven from their homes into the Syrian desert. These mass deportations were in fact slaughters. They were death marches. Soldiers themselves not only permitted the attacks on the deportees but participated in the killing and rapes. The inevitable end was thousands upon thousands dying of starvation or simply being worked to death, but sometimes these victims were the lucky ones.

When the Turks deemed deportations impractical, the genocide took other vicious forms. In communities near the Black Sea, Armenians were forced onto boats, driven out into the middle of the ocean, and drowned.

In the end, 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide as the world stood by. Henry Morganthau, the U.S.
Ambassador to Turkey, who pleaded with world leaders to intervene, described the Ottoman effort to eliminate the Armenian population this way: "The whole history of the human race contains no such horrible an episode as this." An American diplomat stationed in eastern Anatolia cabled back to Washington that "it has been no secret that the plan was to destroy the Armenian race as a race, but the methods used could not have been more cold-blooded and barbarous, if not more effective, than I had first supposed."

Like communities that survived the Nazis efforts at extermination, the Armenian community today is often faced by those who deny the Turkish effort to commit genocide ever occurred. Despite records and accounts preserved in our own National Archives, there have been those bent on erasing this horrible memory from the annals of history.
We will not let that happen. That is why today's commemoration here in the United States Congress and those going on this week is so crucial. If the world fails to remember the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century, we do more than a grave injustice to those who perished. We do a disservice to the generations who have come after us who would be left without the collective memory that binds those who understand the depth of evil that one community is capable of unleashing upon another.

Yet even as we remember and grieve, we thank those in the Armenian community for the contributions they have made around the globe since emerging from terror 89 years ago. One need not look too far to find Armenian-Americans who have become pillars of American society. Armenian-Americans are influential businessmen, like Kirk Kerkorian; famous writers, like William Saroyan; and international sports stars, like Andre Agassi.

In New York, internationally renowned scholar and Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian spent 8 years as president of the New York Public Library. Arshile Gorky was a leader of the abstract expressionist school that flourished in New York during the 1940s. And I am particularly proud that Raymond Damadian, who invented the MRI, was not only a resident of New York but was a neighbor of mine in Forest Hills. His parents were survivors of the genocide.

As we gather, we also pay tribute to those who have become famous public servants, football coaches, astronauts and others. As we gather to commemorate the Armenian genocide, we do so as a lesson to one another that we must not forget the lessons that were learned. We also gather to pay a message to those who would deny that the Holocaust ever happened. But perhaps most importantly, we gather to send a signal across the world that those who seek to deny the Armenian genocide do a disservice to all of us.

We here in the United States House of Representatives should delay no further in making our voices heard in this debate. It is worth noting that the very same people who would deny this Holocaust actively push that we do not consider the resolution that the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) has proposed.

We gather here today to pay tribute, but we also gather to put pressure on this United States Congress to finally designate what we all know to be the case as genocide. The first genocide of the 20th century was not the last, tragically; but it is time that we correct the history in the minds of many and finally declare the Armenian genocide the holocaust that it was.