Ronald Dellums: “April 24, 1994 marks the passage of 79 years since the planned campaign of murder by the Ottoman Turkish government…”

“April 24, 1994 marks the passage of 79 years since the planned campaign of murder by the Ottoman Turkish government against the Armenian leadership and Armenian people. The campaign, which lasted 8 years, killed 1.5 million Armenians and forced the exile of millions more from their historic homelands. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire began the systematic elimination of the Armenia leadership with executions, the disarming or execution of other Armenian males, and the forced exile of the surviving women, the elderly and the children through deadly deserts. Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey then, stated that: The Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempts to conceal the fact. The systematic approach to the killing of whole populations, ethnic groups, nationalities, and other subgroups has occurred throughout the written history of our species up to the present time. I believe that we will, through education, through our knowledge of the past, learn to condemn any killing as a crime against our common humanity, and that killing of a group of people should be condemned as the highest, and intolerable crime.”