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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 71 (Tuesday, May 2, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S6004]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

             THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to speak of a triple 
commemoration of horror. April 1995 marked the anniversary of both the 
first and the most recent genocide of the 20th century. The first, of 
course, was the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. The most 
recent was last year's slaughter of the Tutsis of Rwanda.
  Chronologically between these two grisly events stand the decimation 
of the Ukrainian people by Stalin's collectivization, the Jewish 
Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, and most recently the 
unspeakable ethnic cleansing of Bosnia's Moslems.
  The precedent for this inhuman chain was the Armenian genocide, the 
world's failure to prevent it, and the inability to ensure that it not 
be denied by future generations.
  From 1915 to 1923, 30 percent of the Armenian people were massacred 
by the brutal hand of the Ottoman Turks, beginning with the Armenian 
intellectual and religious elite on April 24, 1915. Armenian men who 
had already been conscripted into the Ottoman Army were put into work 
battalions and then murdered.
  Other Armenians--mostly helpless, elderly, women, and children--were 
driven on forced marches into the desert. Many of those who withstood 
unimaginable suffering finally succumbed to starvation or illness.
  Sadly, the Armenian massacres have been labeled the ``forgotten 
genocide'' as a result of a concerted effort to rewrite history. Some 
who should know better assert that the horrid events were merely a 
regrettable sidelight of war, not genocide.
  Mr. Chairman, we must not let unseemly quarrels over semantics cloud 
our moral vision or distract us from the fundamental point: The world 
must not allow human beings to be killed because of their race, 
religion, or ethnic group.
  It matters little whether or not in every case of genocide in this 
century the perpetrators had a master plan for annihilation. The 
crucial, horrifying truth is that Armenians were killed because they 
were Armenians; Jews were killed because they were Jews; Gypsies were 
killed because they were Gypsies; Tutsis were killed because they were 
Tutsis; and Bosnian Moslems were killed because they were Moslems.
  In the 1930's the international community should have been alerted by 
Hitler's cynical comment, ``Who today remembers the extermination of 
the Armenians?'' Just as Hitler saw lack of historical memory of the 
Armenian genocide as a signal that he could carry out with impunity his 
demented genocide of Jews and Gypsies, so too must the Hutus in Rwanda 
have been emboldened by the world's failure to stop the vile ethnic 
cleansing in Bosnia.
  On this 80th anniversary of the Armenian genocide; the 50th 
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other Nazi 
death camps; and the first anniversary of the Tutsi genocide, I stand 
here to tell you that this chain must be broken once and for all.
  We must not only remember and honor the martyrs, but must also 
solemnly swear: ``This will never happen again.''

                          ____________________
```