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Verenigde Staten, resolutie van de Senaat
[12 december 2019]
Senate Resolution 150
Expressing the sense of the Senate that it is the policy of the United States
to commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance.
Whereas the United States has a proud history of recognizing
and condemning the Armenian Genocide, the killing of an
estimated 1,500,000 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, Sr., 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 “a campaign of
race extermination”, and, on July 16,
1915, was instructed 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 (more than $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—
(1) through the May 28, 1951, written statement of
the United States Government to the International
Court of Justice regarding the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
and Proclamation
No. 4838 issued by President Ronald Reagan on
April 22, 1981; and
(2) by House Joint
Resolution 148, 94th Congress,
agreed to April 8, 1975, and House Joint
Resolution 247, 98th Congress, agreed to September 10, 1984; and
Whereas the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention
Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–441) establishes that the
prevention of atrocities is a national interest of the
United States and affirms that it is the policy of the
United States to pursue a United States Governmentwide 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 Senate
that it is the policy of the United States—
(1) to commemorate the Armenian Genocide
through official recognition and remembrance;
(2) to reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise
associate the United States Government with denial
of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and
(3) to 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.
