Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the one and a half million Armenians who perished in the Armenian genocide that began 89 years ago on April 24, 1915. I consider this a sacred obligation, to ensure that future generations of Americans remember the first genocide of the 20th century and to ensure that the men, women and children who perished at the hands of the Ottoman Empire are not lost to history.
We have always recognized the transience of memory. It is why we set aside holidays and build monuments to honor our heroes and the events that have shaped our societies. The stone and concrete of a memorial serve to freeze history and to preserve it for those who will follow. The written word cannot be burned when it is etched into rock.
Time is the ally of those who would deny or change history. Such has it been with the government of Turkey and the Armenian genocide. Although the genocide was perpetrated by modern Turkey's predecessor, generations of Turkish leaders have steadfastly denied that the genocide ever took place, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Time is on their side. The generation of Armenians with direct memory of the genocide is gone. Their children are aging. Much of the rest of the world has moved on, reluctant to dredge up unpleasant memories and risk the ire of modern Turkey. For those of us who care deeply about the issue, we must redouble our efforts to ensure that our Nation, which has championed liberty and human rights throughout its history, is not complicit in Ankara's effort to obfuscate what happened between 1915 and 1923. Worse still, by tacitly siding with those who would deny the Armenian genocide, we have rendered hollow our commitment to never again let genocide occur.
Among historians there is no dispute that what happened to the Armenian people was genocide. Thousands of pages of documents sit in our National Archives. Newspapers of the day were replete with stories about the murder of Armenians. Appeal to Turkey to stop massacres headlined the New York Times on April 28, 1915, just as the killing began. On October 7 of that year, the Times reported that 800,000 Armenians had been slain in cold blood in Asia Minor. In mid-December of 1915, the Times spoke of a million Armenians killed or in exile.
Prominent citizens of the day, including America's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, and Britain's Lord Bryce reported on the massacres in great detail. Morgenthau was appalled at what he would later call the sadistic orgies of rape, torture, and murder. Lord Bryce, a former British ambassador to the United States, worked to raise awareness of and money for the victims of what he called the most colossal crime in the history of the world. In October 1915, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed $30,000, a sum worth more than half a million dollars today, to a relief fund for Armenia.
Others, too, reacted in horror to what Ambassador Morgenthau called, for lack of a specific term, race murder. In the early 1930s, 10 years after the genocide, a young Polish attorney named Raphael Lemkin, who had read of the genocide as a child, tried to get European statesmen to criminalize the destruction of ethnic and religious groups. He was dismissed as an alarmist. A few years later, when Hitler invaded Poland, Lemkin lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.
Lemkin escaped, first to Sweden, where he documented the horrors going on in Nazi-occupied Europe and then to the United States, where he worked for the Allied war effort. He resolved to create a word to convey the mass atrocities being committed by the Germans. In 1944, while working for the U.S. War Department, he coined the term "genocide,'' citing the slaughter of Armenians three decades earlier.
In 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the international community responded to Nazi Germany's methodically orchestrated acts of genocide by approving the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It confirms that genocide is a crime under international law and defines genocide as actions committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The United States, under President Truman, was the first Nation to sign the convention. Last year marked the 15th anniversary of President Reagan's signing of the Genocide Convention Implementation Act.
Just over a year ago, I introduced H.R. 193 with my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Radanovich), with the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone), with the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), and other Members of this House. This resolution reaffirms the support of the Congress for the genocide convention and commemorates the anniversary of our becoming a party to this landmark legislation.
On May 21 of last year, we achieved a huge victory when we passed the genocide resolution by a very strong bipartisan vote.
This should be an easy resolution for all of us now to support on the House floor. Genocide is the most abhorrent crime known to humankind; and unfortunately, it still exists. Exactly 10 years ago, before the cameras of the world, Rwanda's majority Hutus exterminated over 500,000 Tutsi in just over 3 months' time, mostly with machetes and homemade axes.
The reason that we have not yet succeeded in passing this resolution on the House floor is simple. The government of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide and the strongest Nation on Earth fears their reaction if we do.
All over the globe--from South Africa, to Argentina, to the former Yugoslavia, governments have set up truth commissions and other bodies to investigate atrocities. Nowhere has this process been more extensive than in Germany, which has engaged in decades of soul-searching and good works that have not only restored the nation's standing, but also its moral authority.
I call upon the government of Turkey and our own government to do the same. When the burden of the past is lifted, then the future is brighter. As long as Ankara engages in prevarication, equivocation and evasion, Turkey will exist under a cloud--not because of its past, but because of its refusal to address that past. And as long as we fail to do our duty in this country, in this Congress, we do not live up to our great name and our great heritage.
I also call upon the distinguished Speaker of the House to allow us to vote on the Genocide Resolution. One hundred ten of my colleagues have cosponsored this resolution and I expect that it would pass overwhelmingly if given the chance, but we must do it soon, for with each year the events of 1915-1923 recede a bit more into the dark of history.