Second Amendment Rights Protection Act of 2003

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the one and a half million Armenians who perished in the Armenian genocide that began 89 years ago on April 24, 1915. I consider this a sacred obligation, to ensure that future generations of Americans remember the first genocide of the 20th century and to ensure that the men, women and children who perished at the hands of the Ottoman Empire are not lost to history.

We have always recognized the transience of memory. It is why we set aside holidays and build monuments to honor our heroes and the events that have shaped our societies. The stone and concrete of a memorial serve to freeze history and to preserve it for those who will follow. The written word cannot be burned when it is etched into rock.

Time is the ally of those who would deny or change history. Such has it been with the government of Turkey and the Armenian genocide. Although the genocide was perpetrated by modern Turkey's predecessor, generations of Turkish leaders have steadfastly denied that the genocide ever took place, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Time is on their side. The generation of Armenians with direct memory of the genocide is gone. Their children are aging. Much of the rest of the world has moved on, reluctant to dredge up unpleasant memories and risk the ire of modern Turkey. For those of us who care deeply about the issue, we must redouble our efforts to ensure that our Nation, which has championed liberty and human rights throughout its history, is not complicit in Ankara's effort to obfuscate what happened between 1915 and 1923. Worse still, by tacitly siding with those who would deny the Armenian genocide, we have rendered hollow our commitment to never again let genocide occur.

Among historians there is no dispute that what happened to the Armenian people was genocide. Thousands of pages of documents sit in our National Archives. Newspapers of the day were replete with stories about the murder of Armenians. Appeal to Turkey to stop massacres headlined the New York Times on April 28, 1915, just as the killing began. On October 7 of that year, the Times reported that 800,000 Armenians had been slain in cold blood in Asia Minor. In mid-December of 1915, the Times spoke of a million Armenians killed or in exile.

Prominent citizens of the day, including America's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, and Britain's Lord Bryce reported on the massacres in great detail. Morgenthau was appalled at what he would later call the sadistic orgies of rape, torture, and murder. Lord Bryce, a former British ambassador to the United States, worked to raise awareness of and money for the victims of what he called the most colossal crime in the history of the world. In October 1915, the Rockefeller Foundation contributed $30,000, a sum worth more than half a million dollars today, to a relief fund for Armenia.

Others, too, reacted in horror to what Ambassador Morgenthau called, for lack of a specific term, race murder. In the early 1930s, 10 years after the genocide, a young Polish attorney named Raphael Lemkin, who had read of the genocide as a child, tried to get European statesmen to criminalize the destruction of ethnic and religious groups. He was dismissed as an alarmist. A few years later, when Hitler invaded Poland, Lemkin lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.

Lemkin escaped, first to Sweden, where he documented the horrors going on in Nazi-occupied Europe and then to the United States, where he worked for the Allied war effort. He resolved to create a word to convey the mass atrocities being committed by the Germans. In 1944, while working for the U.S. War Department, he coined the term ``genocide,'' citing the slaughter of Armenians three decades earlier.

In 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the international community responded to Nazi Germany's methodically orchestrated acts of genocide by approving the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It confirms that genocide

is a crime under international law and defines genocide as actions committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

The United States, under President Truman, was the first Nation to sign the convention. Last year marked the 15th anniversary of President Reagan's signing of the Genocide Convention Implementation Act.

Just over a year ago, I introduced H.R. 193 with my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Radanovich), with the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone), with the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), and other Members of this House. This resolution reaffirms the support of the Congress for the genocide convention and commemorates the anniversary of our becoming a party to this landmark legislation.

On May 21 of last year, we achieved a huge victory when we passed the genocide resolution by a very strong bipartisan vote.

This should be an easy resolution for all of us now to support on the House floor. Genocide is the most abhorrent crime known to humankind; and unfortunately, it still exists. Exactly 10 years ago, before the cameras of the world, Rwanda's majority Hutus exterminated over 500,000 Tutsi in just over 3 months' time, mostly with machetes and homemade axes.

The reason that we have not yet succeeded in passing this resolution on the House floor is simple. The government of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide and the strongest Nation on Earth fears their reaction if we do.

All over the globe--from South Africa, to Argentina, to the former Yugoslavia, governments have set up truth commissions and other bodies to investigate atrocities. Nowhere has this process been more extensive than in Germany, which has engaged in decades of soul-searching and good works that have not only restored the nation's standing, but also its moral authority.

I call upon the government of Turkey and our own government to do the same. When the burden of the past is lifted, then the future is brighter. As long as Ankara engages in prevarication, equivocation and evasion, Turkey will exist under a cloud--not because of its past, but because of its refusal to address that past. And as long as we fail to do our duty in this country, in this Congress, we do not live up to our great name and our great heritage.

I also call upon the distinguished Speaker of the House to allow us to vote on the Genocide Resolution. One hundred ten of my colleagues have cosponsored this resolution and I expect that it would pass overwhelmingly if given the chance, but we must do it soon, for with each year the events of 1915-1923 recede a bit more into the dark of history.

Time, Mr. Speaker, is not on our side.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the House floor this evening to mark the fact that we now have 100 cosponsors of House Resolution 193, a bill reaffirming support of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This legislation seeks to educate on the horrors of the crimes against humanity of genocide and, by educating, helping to prevent genocide from happening again. It is common knowledge that history repeats itself, and some of the worst crimes against humanity are no exception to this rule.

Mr. Speaker, as the cochair and founder of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, I have been involved in genocide recognition efforts for the past decade. The caucus is 125 members strong and has been instrumental in the education of my colleagues on the issue of Armenian genocide. We have organized floor speeches every year on April 24, we have circulated a yearly letter asking the President to use the word ``genocide'' in his yearly April 24 address, and, most importantly, we were very close in the year 2000 in passing legislation officially recognizing the Armenian genocide.

That resolution in 2000 did not come to the House floor for a vote due to a decision by the leadership. If it were not for that decision, the legislation would have passed overwhelmingly, in my opinion.

As I mentioned, the Armenian Caucus sends a yearly letter to the President asking him to use the word ``genocide'' in his yearly April 24 commemoration. President Bush, like President Clinton before him, made a campaign promise to give the Armenian genocide its due recognition, but then they both recanted. Both presidents avoided the use of the word ``genocide'' in their statements.

This year, 168 Members of Congress, well over one-third of the total number of Members serving, asked President Bush to use the word ``genocide'' last month. He instead characterized the worst crime ever to befall the Armenian people as a ``great calamity.'' I must say I reject this characterization as simplistic and also demeaning, and I hope my colleagues in the House will do the same. If they do, they have the chance to act by joining the 100 Members who have signed on to H.R. 193 and take a stand to properly recognize the worst crimes against humanity.

I use the plural ``crimes,'' because this legislation is not only about the Armenians. In the bill it states, ``the enactment of the Genocide Convention Implementation Act marked a principal stand by the United States against the crime of genocide and an important step towards ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, among others, will be used to help prevent future genocides.''

Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, we have not come together as a world community to eradicate the horrific crime of systematic destruction of an entire people. Every generation in the last 100 years has seen the brutal realities of genocide, but none have fully learned from it. Passing House Resolution 193, in my opinion, will help to educate and hopefully help to stop the crime of genocide in the future.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to say that we have obtained cosponsors that will bear great credence to this bill. H.R. 193 is currently under consideration in the Committee on the Judiciary, with the gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) and the ranking member, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) on as cosponsors. Also among the 100 cosponsors are the minority leader, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), and the former minority leader and presidential candidate, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt). All of my colleagues on a bipartisan basis will be instrumental in passing this bill, but it is nice to see some early support from a very diverse group of Members on a bipartisan basis.

The title of House Resolution 193 includes the word ``genocide,'' but the heart of the bill is about humanity. It takes humanity to overcome the ignorance that spurs the evil crime of genocide, learning about another culture instead of fearing it. It takes humanity to bridge the gap of hate that exists between a warring people.

We have seen this work in the last century. One of the worst crimes ever to be committed, the Holocaust against the Jews, is the best example of how some good can come from a terrible evil. At the end of World War II, Germany was vanquished as a Nation and its citizens were forced to accept the reality of what Hitler had done. The fact is, Germans as a people accepted that something horrific had taken place, and they accepted it. Last year, the Holocaust Museum in Berlin became a reality. Sixty years after the Holocaust, peace was made where war had begun.

The lessons of the relationship of the Jewish and German people should be applied to the rest of the victims and perpetrators of the crime of genocide all around the world. This is especially true, Mr. Speaker, in Armenia and Turkey. It has been 88 years since the beginning of the genocide, and after 33 U.S. State legislatures, over a dozen governments around the globe and vast documentation in our national archives, the Turkish government still will not recognize the Armenian genocide. They have instead established a deliberate campaign of revisionist history to try to commit the last act of genocide, the destruction of culture and history.

I ask that the Turkish government give up its futile effort and for my colleagues to join me in recognizing the worst crimes against humanity.

Mr. Speaker, last Sunday, I attended a ceremony to remember the victims of the Armenian genocide in Times Square in New York City, and I have to say it was a very moving moment. There were several, I would not say many, because there are not that many genocide survivors that are still around, but I did have a chance to talk briefly with maybe 10 or so.

It was incredible to hear them tell the stories of the families and atrocities that had occurred 89 years ago now. More and more countries and States and even the media are now in the process of recognizing the genocide, and I just wanted to mention specifically that the Canadian House of Commons last week joined France, Italy, the Vatican and a number of other European countries and the European Parliament in acknowledging this crime against humanity as genocide.

Also last week, The New York Times reversed decades of ambiguity by declaring in favor of using the term ``genocide'' to describe the Armenian cataclysm of 1915. The Boston Globe adopted a similar policy change last year.

Mr. Speaker, the unfortunate thing is, although so many other countries and so many of our own States have recognized the Armenian genocide, we in the Congress continue not to recognize it. I think it is important that we do so.

The gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) was here earlier, and he mentioned the House Genocide Resolution, H. Res. 193, which has now 111 cosponsors. The resolution was adopted unanimously by the House Committee on the Judiciary on May 21, 2003, but it has not been brought to the floor for consideration. I would urge the Speaker and the leaders on the Republican side of the aisle to bring this resolution to the floor. It is important that they do so.

Now, this year, as we do every year, the members of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues put together a letter to the President of the United States asking him to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This year there were 169 signatures, more than we have ever had before in that letter that we sent to the President; and I just wanted to read, if I could, some sections of that letter, because I think it is important.

We say, ``Dear Mr. President: We are writing to urge you to join us in reaffirming the U.S. record on the Armenian genocide in your April 24 commemorative statement.

``By properly recognizing the atrocities committed against the Armenian people as genocide in your statement, you will honor the many Americans who helped launch our first international human rights campaign to end the carnage and protect the survivors. The official U.S. response mirrored the overwhelming reaction by the American public to this crime against humanity and, as such, constitutes a proud, irrefutable and groundbreaking chapter in U.S. diplomatic history.

``Now, more than ever, as your administration seeks to bring an end to global terrorism and to help establish democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the memory of the genocide underscores our responsibility to help convey our cherished tradition of respect for fundamental human rights and opposition to mass slaughters. The victims of the Armenian genocide deserve our remembrance and their rightful place in history. It is in the best interests of our Nation and the entire global community to remember the past and learn from these crimes against humanity to ensure they are never repeated.''

That is really the essence of what we are trying to achieve here today in asking that the President and this Congress basically reaffirm the Armenian genocide, because we simply do not want it repeated again. We know how many times in the 20th century that genocide occurred.

House Resolution H.R. 193, and also its Senate counterpart, Senate Resolution 164, which I would like to add has 37 cosponsors right now, basically state that the purpose of the resolutions are to strengthen America's commitment to the value of the genocide convention that was implemented 15 years ago.

This convention recognizes essentially a number of the genocides that occurred in the 20th century. And as some of my colleagues mentioned earlier, not only the Armenian genocide, but that in Rwanda, Burundi, and, of course most important, the Nazi Holocaust genocide against the Jews.

The fact of the matter is, Mr. Speaker, that when we talk about the Armenian genocide, we are simply acknowledging the fact. And we feel very strongly that if at the time the genocide occurred the world and the nations of the world had taken more notice and had tried to prevent it, I think it would have served as a lesson so that the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and so many other atrocities that took place in the 20th century would not have occurred. If we are going to see a situation in the future, in this 21st century, where we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, we must acknowledge the Armenian genocide.