Lincoln Diaz-Balart: “I rise to address the Houston on this very sad day. In Colorado, parents are grieving their murdered sons and daughters.…”

“I rise to address the Houston on this very sad day. In Colorado, parents are grieving their murdered sons and daughters. In the Balkans, Albanian refugees are running for their lives, having been kicked out of their homes by Serbian thugs who rape, torture, and kill their former neighbors. In central Africa, civil wars are rocking the Cargo furthering the horror started there by the genocidal murders of Hutus and Tutsis. In China, North Korea and Cuba, communist dictators continue to deny their citizens basic human rights and imprison anyone who dissents. That is the world today. But I rise, joining my colleagues, to remind the world of a genocide that happened 84 years ago in the part of the world we now call Turkey. On April 24, 1915 more than 200 Armenian religious, political and intellectual leaders from Constantinople--what is Istanbul--were arrested and sent into exile. By silencing the leading representatives of the Armenian people, the government of the Ottoman Empire was able to proceed with its premeditated and methodical extermination of the Armenian people. Between 1915 and 1923, more than 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children were deported, forced into slave labor concentration camps, tortured, and murdered. The goal of this atrocity was to remove all traces of the Armenian people and their rich heritage from Anatolia. At the time, the world had not coined such terms as concentration camps, genocide, ethnic cleansing or holocaust.”