Joe Biden: “I rise today to speak of a triple commemoration of horror. April 1995 marked the anniversary of both the first and the…”

“I rise today to speak of a triple commemoration of horror. April 1995 marked the anniversary of both the first and the most recent genocide of the 20th century. The first, of course, was the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. The most recent was last year's slaughter of the Tutsis of Rwanda. Chronologically between these two grisly events stand the decimation of the Ukrainian people by Stalin's collectivization, the Jewish Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, and most recently the unspeakable ethnic cleansing of Bosnia's Moslems. The precedent for this inhuman chain was the Armenian genocide, the world's failure to prevent it, and the inability to ensure that it not be denied by future generations. From 1915 to 1923, 30 percent of the Armenian people were massacred by the brutal hand of the Ottoman Turks, beginning with the Armenian intellectual and religious elite on April 24, 1915. Armenian men who had already been conscripted into the Ottoman Army were put into work battalions and then murdered. Other Armenians--mostly helpless, elderly, women, and children--were driven on forced marches into the desert. Many of those who withstood unimaginable suffering finally succumbed to starvation or illness. Sadly, the Armenian massacres have been labeled the ``forgotten genocide'' as a result of a concerted effort to rewrite history.”