Maurice Hinchey: “I join my colleagues in honoring the memory of 1\1/2\ million Armenians who perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish…”

“I join my colleagues in honoring the memory of 1\1/2\ million Armenians who perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish Government between the years of 1915 and 1923. As a result of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was effectively eliminated through a carefully executed government plan. Although the facts of the Armenian Genocide are well documented, there are still those who seek to rewrite the history of the first genocide of the 20th century. For this reason I want to enter into the Congressional Record a statement by former U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau who served during the period of the Armenian Genocide. When the Turkish authorities gave the order for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal this fact. At the beginning of World War I, there were more than 2,500,000 Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Today fewer than 80,000 Armenians remain in Turkey, predominantly in Istanbul and Western Turkey. The Armenian heartland--the Eastern provinces--are virtually without Armenians. That part of the world has changed greatly in the past 80 years and there is nothing to be gained in blaming today's Turks for what happened then. But we should not allow ourselves to forget what happened then.”