Armenian Genocide resolution adopted by US
house: Full text
11:21, 30.10.2019
Region:World
News, Armenia, Turkey
Theme: Politics
Theme: Politics
The US House of Representatives voted 405 to 11 Tuesday to adopt Armenian
Genocide resolution.
The full text of the resolution is presented below:
RESOLUTION
Affirming the United States record on the Armenian Genocide.
Whereas the United States has a proud history of recognizing and condemning
the Armenian Genocide, the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman
Empire from 1915 to 1923, and providing relief to the survivors of the campaign
of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans,
Maronites, and other Christians;
Whereas the Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United States Ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, organized and led protests by officials of
many countries against what he described as the empire’s “campaign of race
extermination”, and was instructed on July 16, 1915, by United States Secretary
of State Robert Lansing that the “Department approves your procedure … to stop
Armenian persecution”;
Whereas President Woodrow Wilson encouraged the formation of the Near East
Relief, chartered by an Act of Congress, which raised $116,000,000 (over
$2,500,000,000 in 2019 dollars) between 1915 and 1930, and the Senate adopted
resolutions condemning these massacres;
Whereas 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 Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of
genocide in the 20th century;
Whereas, 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?”, setting the stage for the
Holocaust;
Whereas the United States has officially recognized the Armenian Genocide,
through the United States Government’s May 28, 1951, written statement to the
International Court of Justice regarding the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, through President Ronald Reagan’s
Proclamation No. 4838 on April 22, 1981, and by House Joint Resolution 148,
adopted on April 8, 1975, and House Joint Resolution 247, adopted on September
10, 1984; and
Whereas the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018
(Public Law 115–441) establishes that atrocities prevention represents a United
States national interest, and affirms that it is the policy of the United
States to pursue a United States Government-wide strategy to identify, prevent,
and respond to the risk of atrocities by “strengthening diplomatic response and
the effective use of foreign assistance to support appropriate transitional
justice measures, including criminal accountability, for past atrocities”: Now,
therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that it
is the policy of the United States to—
(1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and
remembrance;
(2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United
States Government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide;
and
(3) encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the
Armenian Genocide, including the United States role in the humanitarian relief
effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against
humanity.
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