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Verenigde Staten, resolutie van het Huis van Afgevaardigden
[29 oktober 2019]
House Resolution 296
Affirming the United States record on the Armenian Genocide.
Whereas the United States has a proud history of recognizing
and condemning the Armenian Genocide, the killing of
1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from
1915 to 1923, and providing relief to the survivors of the
campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians,
Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other
Christians;
Whereas the Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United States
Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916,
organized and led protests by officials of many countries
against what he described as the empire’s “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”;
Whereas President Woodrow Wilson encouraged the formation
of the Near East Relief, chartered by an Act of Congress,
which raised $116,000,000 (over $2,500,000,000
in 2019 dollars) between 1915 and 1930, and the Senate
adopted resolutions condemning these massacres;
Whereas Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in
1944, and who was the earliest proponent 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;
Whereas, as displayed in the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, Adolf Hitler, on ordering his military
commanders to attack Poland without provocation in 1939,
dismissed objections by saying “Who, after all, speaks
today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”, setting the
stage for the Holocaust;
Whereas the United States has officially recognized the
Armenian Genocide, through the United States Government’s
May 28, 1951, written statement to the International
Court of Justice regarding the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
through President Ronald Reagan’s Proclamation
No. 4838 on April 22, 1981, and by House Joint
Resolution 148, adopted on April 8, 1975, and House Joint
Resolution 247, adopted on September 10, 1984; and
Whereas the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention
Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–441) establishes that
atrocities prevention represents a United States national
interest, and affirms that it is the policy of the United
States to pursue a United States Government-wide strategy
to identify, prevent, and respond to the risk of atrocities
by “strengthening diplomatic response and the effective use
of foreign assistance to support appropriate transitional
justice measures, including criminal accountability,
for past atrocities”: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives
that it is the policy of the United States to—
(1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide
through official recognition and remembrance;
(2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise
associate the United States Government with denial
of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and
(3) encourage education and public understanding
of the facts of the Armenian Genocide,
including the United States role in the humanitarian
relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian
Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity.
