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in its holdings under Record Group 59 of the United
States Department of State, files 867.00 and 867.40,
which are open and widely available to the public
and interested institutions.
(9) The national archives of Turkey should also
include all of the records pertaining to the indict-
ment, trial, and conviction of the Ottoman authorities
responsible for the Armenian Genocide.
(10) The Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United
States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913
to 1916, organized and led protests by officials of
many countries, among them the allies of the Otto-
man Empire, against the Armenian Genocide.
(11) Ambassador Morgenthau explicitly described
to the United States Department of State the policy
of the Government of the Ottoman Empire as ‘‘a cam-
paign 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’’.
(12) Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 of Feb-
ruary 9, 1916, resolved that ‘‘the President of the
United States be respectfully asked to designate a day
on which the citizens of this country may give expres-
sion to their sympathy by contributing funds now
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being raised for the relief of the Armenians’’, who at
the time were enduring ‘‘starvation, disease, and un-
told suffering’’.
(13) President Wilson concurred and also en-
couraged the formation of the organization known as
Near East Relief, chartered by an Act of Congress,
which contributed some $116,000,000 from 1915 to
1930 to aid the Armenian Genocide survivors, includ-
ing 132,000 orphans who became foster children of the
American people.
(14) Senate Resolution 359, dated May 11, 1920,
stated in part, ‘‘the testimony adduced at the hear-
ings conducted by the sub-committee of the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations have clearly estab-
lished the truth of the reported massacres and other
atrocities from which the Armenian people have suf-
fered’’.
(15) The resolution followed the April 13, 1920,
report to the Senate of the American Military Mission
to Armenia led by General James Harbord, that stat-
ed ‘‘[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death have
left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful
Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is
seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal
crime of all the ages’’.
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(16) Setting the stage for the Holocaust, Adolf
Hitler, on ordering his military commanders to at-
tack Poland without provocation in 1939, dismissed
objections by saying ‘‘[w]ho, after all, speaks today of
the annihilation of the Armenians?’’.
(17) Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term
‘‘genocide’’ in 1944, and who was the earliest pro-
ponent of the Genocide Convention, invoked the Arme-
nian case as a definitive example of genocide in the
20th century.
(18) Raphael Lemkin described the crime as ‘‘the
systematic destruction of whole national, racial or re-
ligious groups. The sort of thing Hitler did to the
Jews and the Turks did to the Armenians’’.
(19) The first resolution on genocide adopted by
the United Nations at Lemkin’s urging, the December
11, 1946, United Nations General Assembly Resolu-
tion 96(1) and the United Nations Genocide Conven-
tion itself recognized the Armenian Genocide as the
type of crime the United Nations intended to prevent
by codifying existing standards.
(20) In 1948 the United Nations War Crimes
Commission invoked the Armenian Genocide ‘‘pre-
cisely . . . one of the types of acts which the modern
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term ‘crimes against humanity’ is intended to cover’’
as a precedent for the Nuremberg tribunals.
(21) The Commission stated that ‘‘[t]he provi-
sions of Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Se´vres were
obviously intended to cover, in conformity with the
Allied note of 1915 . . ., offenses which had been com-
mitted on Turkish territory against persons of Turk-
ish citizenship, though of Armenian or Greek race.
This article constitutes therefore a precedent for Arti-
cle 6c and 5c of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Charters,
and offers an example of one of the categories of
‘crimes against humanity’ as understood by these en-
actments’’.
(22) The United Nations Commission on Human
Rights adopted in 1985 a report entitled ‘‘Study of
the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide’’, which stated ‘‘[t]he Nazi aberra-
tion has unfortunately not been the only case of geno-
cide in the twentieth century. Among other examples
which can be cited as qualifying are . . . the Ottoman
massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916’’.
(23) This report also explained that ‘‘[a]t least
1 million, and possibly well over half of the Armenian
population, are reliably estimated to have been killed
or death marched by independent authorities and eye-
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witnesses. This is corroborated by reports in United
States, German and British archives and of contem-
porary diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, including
those of its ally Germany’’.
(24) The tragedy of the Armenian Genocide has
been acknowledged by countries and international
bodies such as Argentina, Belgium, Canada, the
Council of Europe, Cyprus, the European Par-
liament, France, Great Britain, Greece, Lebanon,
Russia, the United Nations, the United States, and
Uruguay.
(25) The United States Holocaust Memorial
Council, an independent Federal agency, unani-
mously resolved on April 30, 1981, that the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum would include
the Armenian Genocide in the Museum and has since
done so.
(26) President Reagan in proclamation number
4838, dated April 22, 1981, stated in part ‘‘like the
genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide
of the Cambodians, which followed it—and like too
many other persecutions of too many other people—
the lessons of the holocaust must never be forgotten’’.
(27) President Bush, in 1988, speaking of the
Armenian Genocide, stated ‘‘we must consciously and