John Glenn: “I rise today to join my colleagues in commemorating the 79th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Annual remembrance of…”

“I rise today to join my colleagues in commemorating the 79th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Annual remembrance of the tragedy of 1915-23 does not dim the horror. On April 24, 1915, some 200 Armenian religious, political and intellectual leaders were arrested in Constantinople, exiled or taken to the interior and executed. Similar atrocities followed in Armenian centers across the Ottoman Empire. In a July 16 cable to the Secretary of State, Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, reported-- Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in process under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion. When the horror ended in 1923, 1.5 million Armenians have been killed and another 0.5 million had been forced to flee their homeland. Sadly, this was the first but by no means the last genocide of this century. The Armenian tragedy was followed by the horrors of the Holocaust, when Adolph Hitler is said to have asked, when contemplating the ``final solution'', ``Who remembers the Armenians?'' The later part of this century saw the massacre of Cambodians during the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, Saddam Hussein's extermination campaigns against Iraqi Kurdish and Shia populations, and even today the scourge of ethnic cleaning in former Yugoslavia.”