Armenian Genocide Day Of Remembrance

Senate - February 27, 1990

Mr. KERRY. I ask for 3 additional minutes.

Mr. DOLE. I only have 11 left.

Mr. KERRY. If I can have 2.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 2 more minutes.

Mr. KERRY. I will not go through the rest of this evidence except to say the evidence is bone chilling; it is heart rending; extraordinary in the level of cruelty and the clear design for the extermination of a race. And it is clear that the U.S. Senate now has an opportunity to not fall prey to the politics of this moment, which would require us to accept concepts of which George Orwell warned us by which you rewrite whole notions of history.

How can the U.S. Senate take a vote that ignores the reality of what happened when Presidents of the United States have acknowledged it, international bodies have acknowledged it, when our own State Department witnessed and acknowledged it, when history has recorded it? For the U.S. Senate, for some political consideration of today, to support that the history and the past can be rewritten or ignored is to do a kind of injustice which fails prey to an expediency that permits these kinds of massacres to take place.

What then of the people in China and Tibet? What then of the Cambodians or East Timor? What do we say to those who have been subject to the other tragedies of history, which even now as we stand here, some people try to rewrite?

There are those in this world who are willing to support that the holocaust never took place. If the U.S. Senate cannot stand up in favor of the Armenian people and make clear what we all know is reality and still acknowledge our friendship to the Turkish people, who will still get our aid, who will still be our friends because this Government had nothing to do with that, we will make an enormous mistake.

I urge my colleagues to vote for the motion to proceed.