IV 
109TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. RES. 316
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 
JUNE 14, 2005
Mr. RADANOVICH
(for himself, Mr. KNOLLENBERG, Mr. SCHIFF, Mr. 
PALLONE, Mr. DREIER, Mr. WEINER, Mr. SAXTON, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. 
SOUDER, Ms. WATSON, Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey, Mr. MCNULTY, 
Mrs. MILLER of Michigan, Mr. SCHWARZ of Michigan, Mr. CARDOZA, Mr. 
COSTELLO, Mr. CROWLEY, Mr. MCCOTTER, Mr. ISRAEL, Mrs. 
NAPOLITANO, Mrs. MALONEY, Mr. KIRK, Mr. FILNER, Mr. SHERMAN, 
Ms. ESHOO, Mr. ROGERS of Michigan, Mr. MCKEON, Mr. MCGOVERN, 
Mr. MEEHAN, Mr. VISCLOSKY, Mr. BRADLEY of New Hampshire, Mr. 
BASS, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. NUNES, Mr. ANDREWS, Mr. SHAW, Mr. 
GRIJALVA, Mr. SHIMKUS, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. HINCHEY, Mr. SWEENEY, 
Mr. COSTA, Mr. MCDERMOTT, Mr. MENENDEZ, Ms. ROYBAL-ALLARD, 
Mr. ISSA, Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts, Mr. LANGEVIN, Mr. BILIRAKIS, 
Mr. FOLEY, Mr. KENNEDY of Rhode Island, Mr. ROTHMAN, Mr. SMITH 
of New Jersey, and Mr. ROYCE) 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
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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’’. 
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 ‘‘the Allied Gov-
ernments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte 
that they will hold personally responsible for these 
crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as
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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
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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 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. 
(10) Ambassador Morgenthau explicitly de-
scribed to the United States Department of State 
the policy of the Government of the Ottoman Em-
pire as ‘‘a campaign of race extermination,’’ and was 
instructed on July 16, 1915, by United States Sec-
retary of State Robert Lansing that the ‘‘Depart-
ment approves your procedure . . . to stop Armenian 
persecution’’. 
(11) 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’’.
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(12) President Woodrow Wilson concurred and 
also encouraged 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 Armenian Genocide sur-
vivors, including 132,000 orphans who became foster 
children of the American people. 
(13) 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’’. 
(14) 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’’. 
(15) As displayed in the United States Holo-
caust Memorial Museum, Adolf Hitler, on ordering 
his military commanders to attack Poland without
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provocation in 1939, dismissed objections by saying 
‘‘[w]ho, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of 
the Armenians?’’ and thus set the stage for the Hol-
ocaust. 
(16) Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term 
‘‘genocide’’ in 1944, and who was the earliest pro-
ponent 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. 
(17) 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 Convention 
on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide itself 
recognized the Armenian Genocide as the type of 
crime the United Nations intended to prevent and 
punish by codifying existing standards. 
(18) 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. 
(19) The Commission stated that ‘‘[t]he provi-
sions of Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Sevres
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were obviously intended to cover, in conformity with 
the Allied note of 1915 . . ., offenses which had 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’’. 
(20) House Joint Resolution 148, adopted on 
April 8, 1975, resolved: ‘‘[t]hat April 24, 1975, is 
hereby designated as ‘National Day of Remembrance 
of Man’s Inhumanity to Man’, and the President of 
the United States is authorized and requested to 
issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the 
United States to observe such day as a day of re-
membrance for all the victims of genocide, especially 
those of Armenian ancestry . . .’’. 
(21) President Ronald 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’’.
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(22) House Joint Resolution 247, adopted on 
September 10, 1984, resolved: ‘‘[t]hat April 24, 
1985, is hereby designated as ‘National Day of Re-
membrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man’, and the 
President of the United States is authorized and re-
quested to issue a proclamation calling upon the 
people of the United States to observe such day as 
a day of remembrance for all the victims of geno-
cide, especially the one and one-half million people of 
Armenian ancestry . . . ’’. 
(23) In August 1985, after extensive study and 
deliberation, the United Nations SubCommission on 
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Mi-
norities voted 14 to 1 to accept 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 20th century. 
Among other examples which can be cited as quali-
fying are . . . the Ottoman massacre of Armenians 
in 1915–1916’’. 
(24) This report also explained that ‘‘[a]t least 
1,000,000, and possibly well over half of the Arme-
nian population, are reliably estimated to have been 
killed or death marched by independent authorities
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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.’’. 
(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) 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 
Armenian 
Genocide 
‘‘contradicted 
longstanding 
United States policy and was eventually retracted’’. 
(27) On June 5, 1996, the House of Represent-
atives adopted an amendment to House Bill 3540 
(the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Re-
lated Programs Appropriations Act, 1997) to reduce 
aid to Turkey by $3,000,000 (an estimate of its pay-
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ment of lobbying fees in the United States) until the 
Turkish Government acknowledged the Armenian 
Genocide and took steps to honor the memory of its 
victims. 
(28) President William Jefferson Clinton, on 
April 24, 1998, stated: ‘‘This year, as in the past, 
we join with Armenian-Americans throughout the 
nation in commemorating one of the saddest chap-
ters in the history of this century, the deportations 
and massacres of a million and a half Armenians in 
the Ottoman Empire in the years 1915–1923.’’. 
(29) President George W. Bush, on April 24, 
2004, stated: ‘‘On this day, we pause in remem-
brance of one of the most horrible tragedies of the 
20th century, the annihilation of as many as 
1,500,000 Armenians through forced exile and mur-
der at the end of the Ottoman Empire.’’. 
(30) 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 just resolution will 
help prevent future genocides.
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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 realize a just resolution; 
and 
(2) calls upon the President in the President’s 
annual message commemorating the Armenian 
Genocide issued on or about April 24, to accurately 
characterize the systematic and deliberate annihila-
tion of 1,500,000 Armenians as genocide and to re-
call the proud history of United States intervention 
in opposition to the Armenian Genocide.
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