SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The House of Representatives finds the following:
(1) The Armenian Genocide was conceived and
carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to
1923, resulting in the deportation of nearly
2,000,000 Armenians, of whom 1,500,000 men,
women, and children were killed, 500,000 survivors
were expelled from their homes, and which succeeded
in the elimination of the over 2,500-year presence of
Armenians in their historic homeland.
(2) On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers, Eng-
land, France, and Russia, jointly issued a statement
explicitly charging for the first time ever another
government of committing ‘‘a crime against human-
ity’’.
(3) This joint statement stated ‘‘[i]n view of
these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and
civilization, the Allied Governments announce pub-
licly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold person-
ally responsible for these crimes all members of the
Ottoman Government, as well as those of their
agents who are implicated in such massacres’’.
(4) The post-World War I Turkish Government
indicted the top leaders involved in the ‘‘organization
and execution’’ of the Armenian Genocide and in the
‘‘massacre and destruction of the Armenians’’.
(5) In a series of courts-martial, officials of the
Young Turk Regime were tried and convicted, as
charged, for organizing and executing massacres
against the Armenian people.
(6) The chief organizers of the Armenian Geno-
cide, Minister of War Enver, Minister of the Interior
Talaat, and Minister of the Navy Jemal were all
condemned to death for their crimes, however, the
verdicts of the courts were not enforced.
(7) The Armenian Genocide and these domestic
judicial failures are documented with overwhelming
evidence in the national archives of Austria, France,
Germany, Great Britain, Russia, the United States,
the Vatican and many other countries, and this vast
body of evidence attests to the same facts, the same
events, and the same consequences.
(8) The United States National Archives and
Record Administration holds extensive and thorough
documentation on the Armenian Genocide, especially
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 authori-
ties 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
Ottoman Empire, against the Armenian Genocide.
(11) Ambassador Morgenthau explicitly de-
scribed to the United States Department of State
the policy of the Young Turk government 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
expression to their sympathy by contributing funds
now being raised for the relief of the Armenians’’,
who at the time were enduring ‘‘starvation, disease,
and untold 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, in-
cluding 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
hearings conducted by the sub-committee of the Sen-
ate Committee on Foreign Relations have clearly es-
tablished the truth of the reported massacres and
other atrocities from which the Armenian people
have suffered’’.
(15) The resolution followed the April 13, 1920,
report to the Senate of the American Military Mis-
sion to Armenia led by General James Harbord, that
stated ‘‘[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’’.
(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 Ar-
menian 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 religious 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 De-
cember 11, 1946, United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 96(1) and the United Nations Genocide
Convention 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
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