IV 
111TH CONGRESS 
1ST SESSION 
H. RES. 252 
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 
MARCH 17, 2009 
Mr. SCHIFF (for himself, Mr. RADANOVICH, Mr. PALLONE, Mr. KIRK, Mr. 
BERMAN, Mr. CANTOR, Mr. MCCOTTER, Mr. ACKERMAN, Mr. ROYCE, 
Mr. WAXMAN, Mr. SMITH of New Jersey, Ms. WATSON, Mr. BILIRAKIS, 
Mr. CROWLEY, Mr. SENSENBRENNER, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. SHERMAN, Mr. 
WU, Mr. SIRES, Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California, Mr. BARRETT 
of South Carolina, Ms. ESHOO, Mr. CAPUANO, Mr. WEINER, Mr. HONDA, 
Mrs. MALONEY, Mr. LANGEVIN, Mr. WALZ, Mr. PETERS, Ms. SUTTON, 
Mr. COSTA, Mr. LOBIONDO, Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts, Mr. SOUDER, 
Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey, Mr. WOLF, Mr. MARKEY of Massachusetts, 
Mr. NEAL of Massachusetts, Mr. CARDOZA, Mr. LIPINSKI, Mr. ABER-
CROMBIE, Mrs. CAPPS, Ms. SCHAKOWSKY, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. HIMES, Mr. 
BACA, Ms. HIRONO, Mr. ROTHMAN of New Jersey, Mr. MCGOVERN, Ms. 
MCCOLLUM, Mr. FATTAH, Mrs. NAPOLITANO, Mr. SPACE, Ms. 
DELAURO, Mr. RYAN of Wisconsin, Mr. CALVERT, Mr. POLIS of Colo-
rado, Mr. LANCE, Ms. LORETTA SANCHEZ of California, Mr. OLVER, Mr. 
GRIJALVA, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Mr. GONZALEZ, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. 
SARBANES, Mr. VAN HOLLEN, Ms. TITUS, Mr. STARK, Mr. JACKSON of 
Illinois, Mr. KENNEDY, Ms. TSONGAS, Mrs. TAUSCHER, Ms. WOOLSEY, 
Mr. DREIER, Mr. NUNES, Mr. TONKO, and Mr. TIERNEY) submitted the 
following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Af-
fairs 
RESOLUTION 
Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy 
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•HRES 252 IH 
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, 
SHORT TITLE 
SEC. 1. 
This resolution may be cited as the ‘‘Affirmation of 
the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Reso-
lution’’. 
FINDINGS 
SEC. 2. 
The House of Representatives finds the following: 
(1) The Armenian Genocide was conceived and car-
ried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, re-
sulting 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, England, 
France, and Russia, jointly issued a statement explicitly 
charging for the first time ever another government of 
committing ‘‘a crime against humanity’’. 
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(3) This joint statement stated ‘‘the Allied Govern-
ments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they 
will hold personally responsible for these crimes all mem-
bers 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 in-
dicted the top leaders involved in the ‘‘organization and 
execution’’ of the Armenian Genocide and in the ‘‘mas-
sacre 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 Arme-
nian people. 
(6) The chief organizers of the Armenian Genocide, 
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 judi-
cial 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 at-
tests to the same facts, the same events, and the same 
consequences. 
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(8) The United States National Archives and Record 
Administration holds extensive and thorough documenta-
tion 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 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 described to 
the United States Department of State the policy of the 
Government of the Ottoman Empire as ‘‘a campaign 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’’. 
(11) Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 of February 
9, 1916, resolved that ‘‘the President of the United States 
be respectfully asked to designate a day on which the citi-
zens 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 ‘‘starva-
tion, 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 survivors, 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 Senate Committee 
on Foreign Relations have clearly established the truth of 
the reported massacres and other atrocities from which 
the Armenian people have suffered’’. 
(14) The resolution followed the April 13, 1920, re-
port to the Senate of the American Military Mission 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 val-
leys, 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 Holocaust Me-
morial Museum, Adolf Hitler, on ordering his military 
commanders to attack Poland without 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 Holocaust. 
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(16) Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘‘geno-
cide’’ in 1944, and who was the earliest proponent of the 
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punish-
ment of Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a defini-
tive example of genocide in the 20th century. 
(17) The first resolution on genocide adopted by the 
United Nations at Lemkin’s urging, the December 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 Com-
mission invoked the Armenian Genocide ‘‘precisely . . . 
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 provisions 
of Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Sevres were obvi-
ously 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 Nurem-
berg and Tokyo Charters, and offers an example of one 
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of the categories of ‘crimes against humanity’ as under-
stood by these enactments’’. 
(20) House Joint Resolution 148, adopted on April 
8, 1975, resolved: ‘‘[t]hat April 24, 1975, is hereby des-
ignated as ‘National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhu-
manity 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 remembrance for all the victims of genocide, 
especially those of Armenian ancestry . . .’’. 
(21) President Ronald Reagan in proclamation num-
ber 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’’. 
(22) House Joint Resolution 247, adopted on Sep-
tember 10, 1984, resolved: ‘‘[t]hat April 24, 1985, is here-
by 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 remembrance for all the victims of 
genocide, especially the one and one-half million people of 
Armenian ancestry . . .’’. 
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(23) In August 1985, after extensive study and delib-
eration, the United Nations SubCommission on Preven-
tion of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities voted 
14 to 1 to accept a report entitled ‘‘Study of the Question 
of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Geno-
cide,’’ which stated ‘‘[t]he Nazi aberration has unfortu-
nately not been the only case of genocide in the 20th cen-
tury. 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 Armenian 
population, are reliably estimated to have been killed or 
death marched by independent authorities and eye-wit-
nesses. This is corroborated by reports in United States, 
German and British archives and of contemporary dip-
lomats in the Ottoman Empire, including those of its ally 
Germany.’’. 
(25) The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 
an independent Federal agency, unanimously resolved on 
April 30, 1981, that the United States Holocaust Memo-
rial 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 as-
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serting that the facts of the Armenian Genocide 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 long-
standing United States policy and was eventually re-
tracted’’. 
(27) On June 5, 1996, the House of Representatives 
adopted an amendment to House Bill 3540 (the Foreign 
Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Ap-
propriations Act, 1997) to reduce aid to Turkey by 
$3,000,000 (an estimate of its payment of lobbying fees 
in the United States) until the Turkish Government ac-
knowledged 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 commemo-
rating one of the saddest chapters 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 remembrance of one 
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of the most horrible tragedies of the 20th century, the an-
nihilation of as many as 1,500,000 Armenians through 
forced exile and murder at the end of the Ottoman Em-
pire.’’. 
(30) Despite the international recognition and affir-
mation of the Armenian Genocide, the failure of the do-
mestic and international authorities to punish those re-
sponsible for the Armenian Genocide is a reason why simi-
lar genocides have recurred and may recur in the future, 
and that a just resolution will help prevent future geno-
cides. 
DECLARATION OF POLICY 
SEC. 3. 
The House of Representatives— 
(1) calls upon the President to ensure that the for-
eign policy of the United States reflects appropriate un-
derstanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to 
human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented 
in the United States record relating to the Armenian 
Genocide and the consequences 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 sys-
tematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Arme-
nians as genocide and to recall the proud history of United 
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States intervention in opposition to the Armenian Geno-
cide. 
Æ 
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