Armenian Genocide Bill 2007

[Error 404]

Yeap, it passed!

 

Congratulations guys! First step is done and it was successful. More coming. But hard ones. Stay tuned!

[ExtraHye]

now the resolution goes to house

then if it passes to senate

if both passes we have the resolution

But the president could veto it.

[Error 404]

It is non binding resolution. I don't think he can do that.

[Yervant1]

I say it will pass with a very small margin.

Didn't I tell you guys

[Armat]

Ruben jan i join you w/ a prayer

 

Hayr mer, vor yerkins es,

Surb yeghici anun qo.

Yekesceh arqayutiun qo

Yeghicin kamq qo

Vorpes yerkins yev yerkri.

Zhac mer hanapazord tur mez aysor.

Togh mez zpartis mer,

Vorpes yev meq toghumq meroc partapanac.

Yev mi tanir zmez i pordzutiun,

Ayl prkea i chare.

Zi qo e arqayutiun

yev zorotiun yev parq, haviteans.

Amen

Mos Jan enjoy your day.Today is truly historic. Bolor Hayerin Congrats for your support and emails.I sent several Emails to Mass Officials

[Arpa]

Accirding to the latest on CNN, the house Commitee has approved the meausre, and sent it to the floor of HR.

Which according to some commentators is a "big slap" on the face of Turkey.

I have never seen the A word and G word used on American media before.

Keep it coming.

Edited October 10, 2007 by Arpa

[Maral]

That made me cry...on to bigger and better

[Takoush]

Հայր Մեր որ յերկինս ես Սուրբ Եղիցի

անհուն քո եկեսցէ արքայութիւն քո

եղիցին կամք քո, որպէս յերկինս եւ յերկրի

ըզհած մեր յանապազօր, տուր մեզ այսոր

եւ թող մեզ ըզպարտիս մեր

որպէս եւ մենք, թողումք մերոց

պարտապանաց, եւ մի տանիր ըզմեզի բորձութիւն

այլ բրկեայ ի չարէն

զի քո է արքայուն եւ զորութիւն

եւ բարք յաւիտեանս յաւիտենից, Ամէն!

 

Եւ նաեւ Հայերէնով:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 2007 by Anahid Takouhi

[Vayri7X]

I counted 27 ayes, 21 nayes: WE GOT IT FOR MARKUP ! no onto next phase of the work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

The job well done! But it's not over yet. Contact your representatives and ask them work harder to bring the bill to the house floor for vote. The influence of the Armenian Americans is greater when they work together.

 

We finally made all major TV stations to talk about the Armenian-genocide.

 

 

 

 

 

[Error 404]

LOL look at the bbcnews.com "Breaking News": US bill on Armenia moves forward!

 

Wow what a sensation... Now brits are affraid that turks may get mad on them...

 

BBC has always been "anal" when reporting news or anything about Armenian Genocide.

 

P.S. Armenian Genocide makes now headlines almost everywhere.

[Takoush]

LOL look at the bbcnews.com "Breaking News": US bill on Armenia moves forward!

 

Wow what a sensation...

 

P.S. Armenian Genocide makes now headlines almost everywhere.

It's about time!!!!

 

 

 

 

Edited October 10, 2007 by Anahid Takouhi

[MosJan]

LOL look at the bbcnews.com "Breaking News": US bill on Armenia moves forward!

 

Wow what a sensation... Now brits are affraid that turks may get mad on them...

 

BBC has always been "anal" when reporting news or anything about Armenian Genocide.

 

P.S. Armenian Genocide makes now headlines almost everywhere.

 

US bill on Armenia moves forward

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42603000/jpg/_42603199_mother_ani_203300.jpg

A German soldier took photos of Armenian deportees at the time

 

A bill recognising the killing of Armenians in Ottoman times as genocide has cleared its first hurdle in the US Congress despite Turkish warnings. It passed through the House Foreign Affairs Committee by 27 votes to 21 - the first step towards holding a vote in the House of Representatives.

 

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned the bill's success would "significantly weaken" relations.

 

President George W Bush had urged US legislators not to pass it.

 

A spokesperson for the National Security Council told the BBC that the White House was "very disappointed" by the outcome of the vote.

 

Turkey is a regional operational hub for the US military, which uses its airspace to supply US forces in Iraq.

 

'Sobering'

 

The result means that only a change of heart by the opposition Democrats, who control Congress, can now stop a full vote.

 

Divisions within the Foreign Affairs Committee crossed party lines with eight Democrats voting against the measure and eight Republicans voting for it.

 

Tom Lantos, the committee's chairman, had opened the debate by admitting the resolution posed a "sobering" choice.

 

"We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people... against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying," he said.

 

Mr Lantos, himself a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, said he would introduce a resolution praising US-Turkish friendship next week, according to AFP news agency.

 

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to take up their version of the resolution in the future.

[MosJan]

Q&A: Armenian 'genocide'

Picture from Armenia in 1915

Arguments have raged for decades about the Armenian deaths

French MPs have passed a bill making it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turkish empire committed genocide against Armenians in 1915.

 

The decision has delighted Armenians and infuriated Turks.

 

Why put "genocide" in inverted commas?

 

Whether or not the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I amounted to genocide is a matter for heated debate. Many Western historians believe it falls into the category of genocide. Some countries have declared that a genocide took place, but others have resisted calls to do so.

 

What happened?

 

During World War I, as the Ottoman Turkish empire fought Russian forces, some of the Armenian minority in eastern Anatolia sided with the Russians.

 

Turkey took reprisals. But historians argue over the extent to which Turkish policy towards Armenians in 1915 was motivated by wartime conditions. On 24 April 1915 Turkey rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian community leaders.

 

In May 1915, the Armenian minority, two or three million strong, was forcefully deported and marched from the Anatolian borders towards Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Many died en route and numerous eyewitnesses reported massacres by Turkish forces.

 

What do Armenians say?

 

Armenians say 1.5 million of their people were killed in this period, either through systematic massacres or through starvation.

 

They allege that a deliberate genocide was carried out by the Ottoman Turkish empire.

 

What does Turkey say?

 

It says there was no genocide.

 

It acknowledges that many Armenians died, but says Turks died too, and that massacres were committed on both sides as a result of inter-ethnic violence and the wider world war.

 

What is genocide?

 

Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948 describes genocide as carrying out acts intended "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

 

What do others say?

 

France, Russia, Canada and Uruguay are among those countries which have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians.

 

The UK, US and Israel are among those that use different terminology.

 

Why does the row continue?

 

Armenians are one of the world's most dispersed peoples. While in Armenia, Genocide Memorial Day is commemorated across the country, it is the diaspora that has lobbied for recognition from the outside world. The killings are regarded as the seminal event of modern Armenian history, and one that binds the diaspora together.

 

In Turkey, the penal code makes calling "for the recognition of the Armenian genocide" illegal. Writers and translators have been prosecuted for attempting to stimulate debate on the subject.

 

Turkey has condemned countries that recognise the Armenian genocide, and was furious when the French parliament passed a bill outlawing denial of it.

 

The European Union has said that accepting the Armenian genocide is not a condition for Turkey's entry into the bloc. But some, including French President Jacques Chirac, have said it should be.

[MosJan]

Turkey's Armenian dilemma

Turkey did not always deny the mass killing of Armenians. As the US House of Representatives prepares to vote on recognising the 1915 massacres as genocide, journalist and historian Bruce Clark looks at how and why Turkish attitudes have changed over the past 90 years.

 

Armenian refugee mother and child (picture taken 1915-16 by German photographer Armin Wegner; reproduced here by permission of the Armenian National Institute)

German soldier Armin Wegner took photos of Armenian deportees

 

"The more foreign parliaments insist that our forebears committed crimes against humanity, the less likely anybody in Turkey is to face up to the hardest moments in history."

 

That, roughly speaking, is the message being delivered by Turkey's hard-pressed intelligentsia as the legislators in one country after another vote for resolutions which insist that the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 amounted to genocide.

 

"Will the adoption [of a resolution] help to inform the Turkish public... on the great tragedy which befell the Ottoman Armenians?

 

"No, it can hardly be expected to... broaden the debate on the history of the Ottoman Empire's final period."

 

So writes Sahin Alpay, a liberal-minded Turkish academic, in a recent column in Zaman newspaper.

 

What such appeals reflect, of course, is an elementary fact of human psychology: the phenomenon of individual and collective defensiveness.

 

When people feel completely secure, and among friends, they can be very frank about misdeeds which they, or people close to them, have committed.

 

But hackles will go up again as soon as they become insecure, because they feel their accusers are acting in bad faith, or that accepting their accusations will have bad consequences.

 

On the defensive

 

In recent years, liberal Turkish scholars have expressed the hope that membership, or even prospective membership of the European Union, will give the country enough confidence to discuss the Armenian tragedy without threatening those who use the "g-word" with prosecution.

 

Armenian refugees attend a burial in a deportation camp 1915 (picture taken by German photographer Armin Wegner; reproduced here by permission of the Armenian National Institute)

Wegner recorded scenes of refugee life such as a funeral rite in a camp

 

Sceptics may retort that in recent years, things have been moving in the opposite direction: the revised Turkish penal code and its preamble, adopted in 2005, make even more explicit the principle that people may be prosecuted if they "insult Turkishness" - a crime which, as the preamble makes clear, includes the assertion that the Ottoman Armenians suffered genocide.

 

It is certainly true that Turkish defensiveness - the sort of defensiveness which can treat open discussion as verging on treachery - has been running high since the 1960s when the Armenians round the world began lobbying for an explicit acceptance, by governments and parliaments, that their people suffered genocide in 1915.

 

A campaign of violence launched by Armenian militants in the 1970s, who mainly attacked Turkish diplomatic targets and claimed over 50 lives, raised hackles even higher.

 

All that raises a question: has there ever been a moment, since the events of 1915, when the Turkish authorities might, conceivably, have acknowledged or even freely discussed the view that almost every Armenians regards as self-evident: the view that in addition to relocating the entire ethnic Armenian population of eastern Anatolia, the "Committee of Union and Progress" (CUP) which wielded effective power in the Ottoman empire also gave secret orders to make sure that as few as possible of the deportees survived the experience?

 

In fact, there was such a moment: the immediate aftermath of World War I.

 

Tried and executed

 

At that time the Ottoman government was intact but dependent for its survival on the good graces of the victorious British Empire.

 

The sultan's regime was desperately trying to distance itself from the actions of the CUP, the "state within a state" which in 1915 had masterminded the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians - and is alleged to have given secret "extermination" orders at the same time.

 

During the early months of 1919, few people in Anatolia publicly doubted that Armenians had suffered atrocities that were egregious even by the standards of a terrible war.

 

The sultan and his foreign minister were at pains to reassure the British of their determination to punish the perpetrators of these atrocities, and they held four big and revealing trials whose proceedings were published in the government gazette.

 

In April 1919 a local governor, Mehmed Kemal, was found guilty and hanged for the mass killing of Armenians in the Ankara district.

 

But the climate shifted rapidly after May 1919, when Greek troops were authorised by the victorious Entente powers to occupy the Aegean port of Izmir and, in another part of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal - later known as Ataturk - began his campaign to make the Turks masters in their own land.

 

Nationalist feeling

 

Turkish rage over the Greek landing lent fuel to the Kemalist cause, and discredited the Ottoman government.

 

With every passing month, the British government's leverage over the Ottoman authorities waned, and so did British enthusiasm for the conduct of war crimes trials.

 

In 1921, the British government made a pragmatic deal to release a group of Turkish prisoners it had been holding in Malta on suspicion (among other things) of crimes against the Armenians.

 

They were freed in exchange for Britons being held by the Turks.

 

In Turkish lore, this release is held up as proof that no serious evidence against the captives existed.

 

What it certainly proves is that British zeal for investigating the past was waning, even as the Kemalist cause gained strength and the British-influenced Ottoman regime faded into oblivion.

 

In any case, the officially cherished version of the Turkish state's beginnings now insists since the empire's British adversaries and occupiers were the main promoters of war crimes trials, those trials themselves must have been worthless or malicious.

 

A new state

 

But in the midst of all this nationalist discourse, something rather important is often obscured, and there are just a few Turkish historians who dare to point this out.

 

The atrocities against the Armenians were committed by an Ottoman government, albeit a shadowy sub-section of that government.

 

There is no logical reason why a new republican administration, established in October 1923 in an act of revolutionary defiance of Ottoman power, should consider itself responsible for things done under the previous regime.

 

In fact, when the nationalist movement was founded in 1919, the climate of revulsion over the sufferings of the Armenians was so general that even the neo-nationalists were keen to distinguish themselves from the CUP.

 

Some see significance in the fact that the nationalist movement chose to rally round an army officer, Mustafa Kemal, who had never been anywhere near the places where the Armenians met their fate.

 

The very fact that the Turkish republic bears no formal responsibility for eliminating the Armenian presence in eastern Anatolia (for the simple reason that the republic did not exist when the atrocities occurred) has given some Turkish historians a flicker of hope: one day, the leaders of the republic will be able to face up to history's toughest questions about the Armenians, without feeling that to do so would undermine the very existence of their state.

 

Fatma Muge Gocek, a Turkish-born sociologist who now works as professor in America, has said there are - or will be - three phases in her country's attitude to the fate of the Armenians: a spirit of "investigation" in the final Ottoman years, a spirit of defensiveness under the Turkish republic, and a new, post-nationalist attitude to history that will prevail if and when Turkey secures a places in Europe.

 

That makes perfect psychological sense, even if the immediate prospects for a move from phase two to phase three do not look very bright.

 

Bruce Clark is international news editor of the Economist newspaper.

 

bbc

[MosJan]

‘Denial is a slap in the face’

 

House panel approves Armenia resolution

Bush warns ‘genocide’ measure could harm relations with Turkey

 

WASHINGTON - A U.S. congressional panel defied President Bush on Wednesday and approved a measure that he said would damage U.S. goals in the Middle East.

 

The measure that would recognize the World War I-era killings of Armenians as a genocide had been strongly opposed by Turkey, a key NATO ally that has supported U.S. efforts in Iraq.

 

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s 27-21 vote now sends the measure to the House floor — unless the Democratic leadership reverses course and heeds Bush’s warnings.

 

At issue is the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, says the toll has been inflated and insists that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

 

Bush and other senior officials had made a last-minute push to persuade lawmakers on the Foreign Affairs Committee to reject the measure.

 

Bush warns of strained relations with key ally

“Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror,” Bush said hours before the vote.

 

The Foreign Affairs Committee’s Chairman, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., warned of the potential fallout if the proposal passed. Lantos, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, supported a similar resolution two years ago.

 

“We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people ... against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying,” Lantos said.

 

Turkey raised the possibility of impeding logistical and other U.S. military traffic now using Turkish airspace.

 

Earlier, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates conveyed their concerns.

 

Passing the measure “at this time would be very problematic for everything we are trying to do in th

 

The vote comes at a tense time in the region. Turkey’s government is seeking parliamentary approval for a military operation to chase separatist Kurdish rebels who operate from bases in northern Iraq. The move, opposed by the U.S., could open a new front in the most stable part of Iraq.

 

“I have been trying to warn the (U.S.) lawmakers not to make a historic mistake,” said Egemen Bagis, a close foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

 

Patriarch of Armenians makes appearance

Yet with the House’s first order of business Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear that Turkey’s position was a hard sell. She introduced the Supreme Patriarch of all Armenians, Karekin II, to deliver the morning prayer — a daily ritual intended to be apolitical.

 

“With the solemn burden of history, we remember the victims of the genocide of the Armenians,” Karekin said in the House. “Give peace and justice on their descendants.”

 

Gates said 70 percent of U.S. air cargo headed for Iraq goes through Turkey, as does about one-third of the fuel used by the U.S. military in Iraq.

 

“Access to airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would very much be put at risk if this resolution passes and Turkey reacts as strongly as we believe they will,” Gates said. He also said that 95 percent of new vehicles designed to better protect against mine attacks are being flown through Turkey to get to Iraq.

 

CONTINUED: ‘Denial is a slap in the face’

 

‘Denial is a slap in the face’

Lawmakers from both parties who supported the proposal said the moral implications outweighed security concerns and friendship with Turkey.

 

“The sad truth is that the modern government of Turkey refuses to come to terms with this genocide,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R.-N.J. “For Armenians everywhere, the Turkish government’s denial is a slap in the face.”

 

Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said the timing of Karekin’s visit was a coincidence. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, a Republican, had requested the leader deliver a morning prayer earlier this year. The House chaplain arranged the visit based on Karekin’s schedule and was not aware of the committee’s plans, Elshami said.

 

The U.S. Embassy in Ankara warned U.S. citizens in Turkey about “demonstrations and other manifestations of anti-Americanism” if the bill moved ahead. Protests were reported Wednesday outside the embassy and the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul.

 

Pelosi and the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, met Wednesday with Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy but emerged from the meeting unswayed. Hoyer told reporters he expects a floor vote on the measure before the House adjourns for the year.

 

Hoyer said he hoped that Turkey would realize it is not a condemnation of its current government but rather of “another government, at another time.”

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21221278/page/2/

 

[Error 404]

So when is the next step I mean the House vote?

[Armat]

WOW!!!

And

DOUBLE WOW!!

Did any one else see HH Garegin II open the US HR with a prayer, where Ms. Pelosi responded with Amen and the sign of the Cross?

What floored me, an answer to my question of a long time was His impeccable English!

That tape may not yet be on the air but look here;

http://www.pontificalvisit.org/Videos/videos.htm

And all this, Christian Prayer, cross and supplication, it will only take a savage turkey to still rattle that tool of muder the "sword".

Americans. Wake up and see who your "allies" are! Blackmailers may not apply!

The only pictures missing in the above video/pictures is that clown Aram whatever his name from Antelias who calls himslf Katholi-kus, Cathy's Kus, or whatever!

Some may think this is funny. Do you see me laughing?

Yeah. Yeah. We need two katholi-kus-s like another two holes in the head!

Arpa

I am little confused about this post and interested to read your comments about it.Is it mainly he speaks good English?Please explain

[MosJan]

on horizon - at 4pm - something on AlJaZira ... i did not get the whole think

[MosJan]

Arpa

I am little confused about this post and interested to read your comments about it.Is it mainly he speaks good English?Please explain

 

did you see the Sliced bred ?? he was blessing ?? could not find a Lavash or at list remove the wrap

[Armat]

did you see the Sliced bred ?? he was blessing ?? could not find a Lavash or at list remove the wrap

no I didn't get the chance to watch from the beginning. Sliced Bread?

 

[Haytorontonian]

Just made it home from work and very happy to hear the good news...

[hytga]

US Congressional Committee Approves Armenian Genocide Resolution

 

The House of Representatives foreign affairs committee has approved a non-binding resolution calling the massacre of Armenians nearly a century ago a genocide. The vote was 27 to 21. VOA's Dan Robinson reports from Capitol Hill, President Bush and senior officials in his administration strongly oppose the measure, saying it will damage relations with Turkey and set back U.S. efforts in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.

 

 

Members of House Foreign Affairs Committee 10 Oct. 2007

 

Members of Congress were subjected to two public relations campaigns, one financed by the Turkish government, the other by Armenian-American and other groups supporting the measure.

 

Turkey has long insisted that Armenians killed during World War I and the years immediately following perished because of clashes stemming from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire rather than from a genocide campaign.

 

In full page statements published in major U.S. newspapers, the Turkish government characterized the resolution, which would be non-binding if Congress were to pass it, as a biased interpretation of tragedies involving Armenians in the early 20th century.

 

Armenian-American groups asserted that the resolution would be an important gesture by the U.S. Congress to recognize what they call the fact of the Armenian genocide.

 

 

President Bush received a letter from Turkey's president Abdullah Gul warning of harm to bilateral relations if the resolution moves forward in Congress, a view shared by a number of former U.S. secretaries of state and others who appealed to Congress.

 

Mr. Bush used a White House statement to say that while Americans deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people, a resolution is not the way to address the issue.

 

"This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO, and the global war on terror," he said.

 

Speaking outside the White House, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed the comments, while Defense Secretary Robert Gates reflected concerns of U.S. military commanders about a potential backlash by Turkey affecting military supply lines.

 

"Passage of this resolution at this time would indeed be very problematic for everything that we are trying to do in the Middle East because we are very dependent on a good Turkish strategic ally to help with our efforts," Rice said.

 

"They believe clearly that access to airfield sand to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes and the Turks react as strongly as we believe they will," said Gates.

 

Foreign affairs panel chairman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, said lawmakers were faced with a difficult choice in what he called a vote of conscience.

 

"We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people and to condemn this historic nightmare through the use of the word genocide against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the U.S. armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are now paying," he said.

 

Republicans Dan Burton and Chris Smith, took opposite views of the issue.

 

"The strongest ally in the area, and has been for over 50 years, is Turkey, and I just don't understand why we are going to cut our nose off and shoot ourselves in the foot at a time when we need this ally," Burton said.

 

The issue behind the resolution today is whether any government that denies a genocide, whether or not Congress has a responsibility to insist that our government at the very least acknowledges it. I believe that we do," said Smith.

 

There were also divisions among Democrats, such as California's Brad Sherman, and Florida's Robert Wexler.

 

"We cannot provide genocide-denial as one of the perks of friendship with the United States," Sherman said.

 

"It is clear that America can ill afford to lose the support of an ally as important as Turkey at this critical juncture," said Wexler.

 

Armenian genocide resolutions have been approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee in the past, but failed to make it to the full House and never passed through Congress as a whole.

 

The current measure has strong support from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer met Wednesday with Turkey's Ambassador to the United States.

 

The Democratic leaders sought to assure him that the United States remains a strong ally of the Turkey and that the government in Ankara should not view the resolution as a reflection of the Turkish government or people. Congressman Lantos, meanwhile, says he will introduce a resolution next week on U.S.-Turkish friendship.

 

Democratic leaders intend to bring the Armenian genocide measure to the House floor next month, while a similar measure is pending in the Senate.

http://voanews.com/english/2007-10-10-voa50.cfm

[HyeFedayis]

They were talking about the resolution on CNN and FOX news

[gamavor]

The importance of the passage of this resolution in the Foreign commission is that hopefuly more Armenians will join by calling and notifying their representatives to support the resolution when it reaches the floor in Congress.