IV
106TH CONGRESS
2D SESSION
H. RES. 596
Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the United
States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning
issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide docu-
mented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide,
and for other purposes.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
SEPTEMBER 27, 2000
Mr. RADANOVICH submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the
Committee on International Relations
RESOLUTION
Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy
of the United States reflects appropriate understanding
and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights,
ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United
States record relating to the Armenian Genocide, and
for other purposes.
Resolved,
SECTION. 1. SHORT TITLE.
This resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Affirmation of
the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Reso-
lution’’.
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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’’.
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(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-
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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,
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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?’’.
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(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 mod-
ern 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
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been committed on Turkish territory against persons
of Turkish citizenship, though of Armenian or Greek
race. This article constitutes therefore a precedent
for Article 6c and 5c of the Nuremberg and Tokyo
Charters, and offers an example of one of the cat-
egories of ‘crimes against humanity’ as understood
by these enactments’’.
(22) The United Nations Commission on
Human Rights adopted in 1985 a report entitled
‘‘Study of the Question of the Prevention and Pun-
ishment of the Crime of Genocide’’, which stated
‘‘[t]he Nazi aberration has unfortunately not been
the only case of genocide in the twentieth century.
Among other examples which can be cited as quali-
fying 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 Arme-
nian population, are reliably estimated to have been
killed or death marched by independent authorities
and eye-witnesses. This is corroborated by reports in
United States, German and British archives and of
contemporary diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, in-
cluding those of its ally Germany’’.
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(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 geno-
cide of the Cambodians, which followed it—and like
too many other persecutions of too many other peo-
ple—the lessons of the holocaust must never be for-
gotten’’.
(27) President Bush, in 1988, speaking of the
Armenian Genocide, stated ‘‘we must consciously
and conscientiously recognize the genocides of the
past—the enormous tragedies that have darkened
this century and that haunt us still. We must not
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only commemorate the courage of the victims and of
their survivors, but we must also remind ourselves
that civilization cannot be taken for granted. . . .
We must all be vigilant against this most heinous
crime against humanity’’.
(28) President Bush, in 1988, stated further
‘‘[t]he United States must acknowledge the at-
tempted genocide of the Armenian people in the last
years of the Ottoman Empire, based on the testi-
mony of survivors, scholars, and indeed our own rep-
resentatives at the time, if we are to insure that
such horrors are not repeated’’.
(29) President Clinton, on August 13, 1992,
stated ‘‘[t]he Genocide of 1915, years of communist
dictatorship, and the devastating earthquake of
1988 have caused great suffering in Armenia during
this century’’.
(30) Reviewing an aberrant 1982 expression
(later retracted) by the United States Department of
State asserting that the facts of the Armenian Geno-
cide may be ambiguous, the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1993, after
a review of documents pertaining to the policy
record of the United States, noted that the assertion
on ambiguity in the United States record about the
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Armenian 
Genocide 
‘‘contradicted 
longstanding
United States policy and was eventually retracted’’.
(31) Despite the international recognition and
affirmation of the Armenian Genocide, the failure of
the domestic and international authorities to punish
those responsible for the Armenian Genocide is a
reason why similar genocides have recurred and may
recur in the future, and that a proper judicial and
firm response, holding the guilty accountable and re-
quiring the prompt enforcement of verdicts would
have spared humanity needless suffering.
(32) In a commendable letter on April 9, 1999,
Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, then Under Secretary
of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural
Affairs, pledged that the administration would raise
with the Republic of Turkey the issue of the recov-
ery of Armenian assets from the genocide period
held by the Imperial Ottoman Bank.
(33) It is important that the President ensure
that the foreign policy of the United States reflects
appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning
issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide documented in the United States record re-
lating to the Armenian Genocide and the con-
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sequences of the failure to enforce the judgments of
the Turkish courts against the responsible officials.
SEC. 3. DECLARATION OF POLICY.
The House of Representatives—
(1) calls upon the President to ensure that the
foreign policy of the United States reflects appro-
priate understanding and sensitivity concerning
issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide documented in the United States record re-
lating to the Armenian Genocide and the con-
sequences of the failure to enforce the judgments of
the Turkish courts against the responsible officials;
and
(2) calls upon the President in the President’s
annual message commemorating the Armenian
Genocide issued on or about April 24 to characterize
the systematic and deliberate annihilation of
1,500,000 Armenians as genocide and to recall the
proud history of United States intervention in oppo-
sition to the Armenian Genocide.
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