[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 17] [House] [Pages 25507-25510] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]REGARDING THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 19, 1999, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Palone) is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes. Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, I rise today to express my deep disappointment regarding the withdrawal of H. Res. 596, the Armenian genocide resolution from the House floor. As it has been said on many occasions, H. Res. 596 is not about the Republic of Turkey. In fact, an amendment was adopted in the Committee on International Relations which made it perfectly clear that this resolution was not about modern day Turkey. Unfortunately, the Republic of Turkey decided to make a sense of the House resolution about the extensive U.S. record on the Armenian genocide a litmus test of its relationship with the United States. I deeply regret that Turkish officials have opted to use coercion and threats too make their case. A recent report by the Anatolia news agency that a Turkish human rights activist, Akin Birdal, faces charges for acknowledging what happened to the Armenian people as genocide, demonstrates the lengths Turkey will take to deny the truth. Birdal reportedly made the comment during a recent conference in Germany, and now faces the possibility of a 3 year sentence in Turkey. In addition to prosecuting this human rights activist, Turkey also coerced a statement from the head of the Armenian Church in Turkey, distancing his church and the remnant 35,000 Armenians who still live in Turkey from H. Res. 596 and its meaning. Setting aside for the moment how a population of some 2 million Armenians has been reduced so catastrophically, is there any doubt in the minds of any Member that virtually every living Armenian in Turkey is anxiously waiting for the world to acknowledge the truth about their near total destruction or the near total destruction of their community? Madam Speaker, is there any doubt that the statements made by the Armenian Patriarch were made under duress? There is only one place in the world where an Armenian Church leader cannot tell the truth. There is only one place in the world where nobody answers Hitler's chilling question, ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' And that place is modern, secular and democratic Turkey. Madam Speaker, I ask what kind of message we are sending to the Patriarch of the Armenian Church in Turkey and all others in that country who are prevented from speaking their conscience. I call upon our Ambassador to Turkey, who has so forcefully advocated against H.R. 596, to immediately visit the Armenian Patriarch as a show of solidarity with His Eminence and with his dwindling Armenian flock. Madam Speaker, we must remain vigilant in the face of threats and those who continue to deny the Armenian genocide. As Van Krikorian, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Armenian Assembly noted in remarks given over 10 years ago to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai B'rith, ``Make no mistake, those who are denying the Armenian genocide today are paving the way for those who deny other genocides and for those who will undoubtedly plan future episodes of race extermination.'' I will introduce the remarks of Mr. Krikorian for the record. Madam Speaker, I just want to say that these remarks are as valid today as they were 10 years ago. I urge all of my colleagues to reject the ongoing campaign of denial regarding the Armenian genocide. [Remarks to the Capitol Legal Council of B'nai B'rith--Dec. 21, 1989] Fighting Denial of the Armenian Genocide (By Van Z. Krikorian, Director, Government and Legal Affairs, the Armenian Assembly of America) In the spring, you heard a speech from a Turkish Embassy official contending that the Armenians did not suffer a genocide between 1915 and 1923. That contention is patently false. But, Turkey's and its agents' insistence on vigorously pursuing it poses a frightening threat to all people who believe in democracy and human rights. Make no mistake, those who are denying the Armenian genocide today are paving the way for those who deny other genocides and for those who will undoubtedly plan future episodes of race extermination. I am sure you are aware that Hitler publicly laid the foundation for the Holocaust by referring to ``the extermination of the Armenians'' starting, at least, in 1931 and most forcefully in 1939 when he commanded his military to show no mercy by asking: ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' Those who deny the Armenian genocide are removing the underpinnings of all human progress by pretending that nothing exists which, for whatever reason, they do not want to exist. This approach is often viewed as politically expedient. But, in the end, it only aborts the cause of civilization. This is why I am especially glad to address you this afternoon and to publicly challenge the arguments of the deniers. I am also glad to know that the Holocaust Memorial Council has publicly and unequivocally committed to include the Armenian genocide in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a decision which rebukes the deniers and promotes historical integrity. Today, I plan to discuss some of the reasons why the Armenian genocide is properly classified as a genocide and then refute some of the more popular arguments offered by the Turkish government and other deniers. First of all, what does the term genocide mean? Literally, it means the killing of a race. An attorney and Holocaust survivor, Rafael Lemkin, coined the term in 1944 and then dedicated himself to creating and promoting the United Nations Genocide Convention. Before, during, and after coining the [[Page 25508]] term, Lemkin used the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide. In Lemkin's view, it would be impossible to question whether the Armenians suffered a genocide, because the term was created to be a synonym with the Armenian experience. Similarly, the United Nations legislative history of the Genocide Convention is clear that the Armenian case is an example of genocide, a position from which the United Nations has not moved. In the United States, the legislative history of ratifying the Genocide Convention and the implementing legislation is equally clear that the Armenian case is synonymous with the term genocide. These legislative histories, of course, merely reflect the overwhelming evidence of the Armenian genocide. Yet, the deniers argue that the Armenian case somehow does not fit the definition of genocide. The Genocide Convention provides: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. No one realistically questions whether Ottoman Turkey engaged in the specific acts enumerated in this definition. That would be absurd because the Armenian population of over two million was unquestionably reduced to under 100,000, and those people did not simply disappear--they were killed, forcibly converted to Islam, and, in small numbers, escaped. What the deniers question is whether the government committed the acts with the intent to destroy the Armenian presence in their homeland of three thousand years. This contention is shamefully absurd. I cannot go over all the admissions and evidence establishing beyond any doubt that the government planned and implemented a campaign of race extermination, but the archives of the United States and almost every European country (including the Central Powers, Turkey's allies) are overflowing with this evidence. Today, I would like to call your attention to the following pieces of evidence: (1) a December 1914 authenticated blueprint for genocide issued by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress Party which can be found in the British archives; (2) the post World War I, Turkish trials and convictions (based on substantial, irrefutable testimonial and documentary evidence) of the government officials responsible for ordering and implementing the extermination of the Armenians; (3) a November 8, 1920 order for the military to exterminate the Armenians living in Russia; (4) and the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. The December 1914 order reads as follows: (1) Profiting by Articles 3 and 4 of Committee Union and Progress, close all Armenian Societies, and arrest all who worked against Government at any time among them and send them into the provinces such as Bagdad or Mosul, and wipe them out either on the road or there. (2) Collect arms. (3) Excite Moslem opinion by suitable and special means, in places as Van, Erzeroum, Adana, where as a point of fact the Armenians have already won the hatred of the Moslems, provoke organized massacres as the Russians did at Baku. (4) Leave all executive to the people in provinces such as Erzeroum, Van, Mamuret ul Aziz, and Bitlis, and use Military disciplinary forces (i.e. Gendarmeris) ostensibly to stop massacres, while on the contrary in places as Adana, Sivas, Broussa, Ismidt and Smyrna actively help the Moslems with military force. (5) Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized. (6) Carry away the families of all who succeed in escaping and apply measures to cut them off from all connection with their native place. (7) On the ground that Armenian officials may be spies, expel and drive them out absolutely from every Government department or post. (8) Kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the Army--this to be left to the military to do. (9) All action to begin everywhere simultaneously and thus leave no time for preparation of defensive measures. (10) Pay attention to the strictly confidential nature of these instructions, which may not go beyond two or three persons. In fact, these orders basically describe the actual pattern of the genocide. Of course, during implementation, the ruling party issued additional orders on massacring Armenians (I will share another with you shortly) as well as orders to punish those Turks who showed mercy to the Armenians. The post-war trials are also dispositive not only for their indictments and verdicts, but also for the overwhelming evidence used to secure the verdicts. Specifically, both central and provincial government officials were tried and convicted for the ``massacre and destruction of the Armenians.'' Besides a major trial in Istanbul, moreover, local trials for the same crimes, which have yet not been widely publicized, also took place. (Parenthetically, I would add here that these trials were cited as precedent for the Nuremberg trials following World War II.) Next, I would like to share a November 8, 1920 central government order, quoted from a Turkish source. This order commanded General Kazim Karabekir to essentially continue the job of exterminating the Armenians after World War I by wiping out the Russian-Armenian population: By virtue of the provisions of the Sevres Treaty Armenia will be enabled to cut off Turkey from the East. Together with Greece she will impede Turkey's general growth. Further, being situated in the midst of a great Islamic periphery, she will never voluntarily relinquish her assigned role of a despotic gendarme, and will never try to integrate her destiny with the general conditions of Turkey and Islam. Consequently, it is indispensable that Armenia be eliminated politically and physically [siyaseten ve maddenten ortadan kaldirmak]. Since the attainment of this objective is subject to [the limitations of] our power and the general political situation, it is necessary to be adaptive in the implementation of the decision mentioned above [tevfiki icraat]. Our withdrawal from Armenia as part of a peace settlement is out of the question. Rather, you will resort to a modus operandi intended to deceive the Armenians [Ermenileri igfal] and fool the Europeans by an appearance of peacelovingness. In reality, however, [fakat hakikatde] the purpose of all this is to achieve by stages the objective [stated above]. . . . [I]t is required that vague and gentle- sounding words [mubhem ve mulayim] be employed both in the framing and in the application of the peace settlement, while constantly maintaining an appearance of peacelovingness towards the Armenians. [t]hese instructions reflect the real intent [makasidi hakikiyesi] of the Cabinet. They are to be treated as secret, and are meant only for your eyes. Again, documents like these as well as direct admissions of guilt by the government officials are literally everywhere. Recognizing that indisputable fact, Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, did not hesitate to condemn the responsible Ottoman government for its actions. In an interview published August 1, 1926 in the Los Angeles Examiner, he said that all those responsible ``should have been made to account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.'' Today, the Turkish government has called the authenticity of this quote into question. Yet this 1926 statement was not an isolated event. In 1918, Ataturk called for the execution of the genocide's perpetrators. In 1919, as recorded by a presumably unimpeachable source, future Turkish prime minister Rauf Orbay, Ataturk acknowledged the government's massacres ``of 800,000 Armenians'' and ``decried the extermination of the Armenians.'' In a 1920 speech, Ataturk explicitly condemned the massacres as ``scandalous.'' Again, this type of documentation is indisputable and overwhelming, but we still face those who act as if it does not exist. When such denials are funded from a country as important as Turkey, we face the prospects of the Nazi operating principle: ``a lie told 1,000 times becomes the truth.'' Accordingly, I would next like to refute the predominant arguments used by the deniers today. Let me start with one that the embassy official who spoke here in the spring touted as dispositive--``It was not a systematic effort to kill all Armenians [because] no harm was done to the Armenian communities living outside the war zone--in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, for example.'' Initially, I would note that this argument is as fallacious as saying that Jews did not suffer a genocide because they were relatively safe in Rome and Bulgaria. But, more importantly, the factual assertion is not true. Armenians certainly were exterminated in Istanbul and every other part of Turkey, and it was clearly systematic. For example, on December 7, 1915 German Ambassador Metternich informed Berlin that the Government wiped 30,000 Armenians out of Istanbul and that ``gradually a clean sweep will be made of the remaining 80,000 Armenian inhabitants of the Ottoman capital.'' Indeed, the government massacred or tried to massacre all Armenians from European Turkey by first shipping them over the Bosporus and then killing them. One example is the eradication of the Armenians from the European town of Rodosto. In fact, Armenians and their friends commemorate the genocide on the anniversary of April 24, 1915 because on that date the government gave the clearest signal of systematic race extermination. It arrested and killed hundreds of unquestionably innocent Armenian community leaders (including legislators, clergy, educators, and attorneys) in Istanbul. Another argument which the deniers forward is that Armenians died of natural [[Page 25509]] causes (famine, cholera, diseases), not government ordered massacres. Putting aside all the direct evidence of the genocide, this argument is ridiculous. It would be the first time, that I know of, in which famine and diseases moved form town to town across an entire country removing all but less than 100,000 Armenians from over 2,000,000, and leaving the Turkish Moslem population as the sole survivors. Frankly, such a ``selective disease'' argument has no historical or scientific credibility, and those who make the argument must not expect their audience to reflect on its merits very deeply. But, then the deniers argue that there was also a great civil war in which Armenians took up arms against Turks. In that supposed war, great, mutual killings occurred. Never mind that the government had disarmed all the Armenians, the government drafted all the able-bodied Armenian men into labor battalions of the army where they were massacred, and contemporaneous reports do not reference any civil war. In fact, in a newly published book, ``The Slaughterhouse Province,'' we can read American consul Davis's official, eyewitness report from the interior of Turkey of the disarming of the Armenians and the lack of any real resistance. He reports that after the massacres of Armenians in the Province of Harput (ultimately over 100,000), the government could ``find only four or five instances where any Turks had been killed or even injured by Armenians and less than a dozen instances of any resistance by Armenians.'' In other isolated areas, of course, Armenians fought back against Turks. But, these were either minor incidents; self- defense; or because Armenians were Russian citizens, drafted into the Russian army, and were a part of the Allied war effort fighting Ottoman Turkey. As Ambassador Morgenthau reported as early as July 1915, moreover, allegations of rebellion were only ``a pretext'' for ``a campaign of race extermination.'' Nevertheless, some people still claim that the massive Armenian deaths resulted from the legitimate quashing of a rebellion. This ``pretext'' or ``legitimate basis'' denial argument is probably the most dangerous. If it is accepted (regardless of its inaccuracy), it sanctions the murder of an entire nation based on the prodemocracy cries of only a few groups. Civilization will not progress if a justification claim can be made in defense of genocide. Otherwise, the Nazis and every subsequent perpetrator would build the defense in as the crime was committed. During the Armenian genocide, the government attempted exactly such a defense, and it was rejected as both inaccurate and immoral by the international community as well as the succeeding Turkish government. There is no reason why it should be accepted now. A more slippery denial argument on the ``mutual killings'' theme involves the amount of Turks and Moslems who also died in the war. I call this argument slippery because its proponents slide between ``Turkish'' and ``Moslem'' deaths. For example, some point to ``two million Turkish deaths during the war'' as a reason not to sympathize with Armenians. Yet this two million figure includes the 1.5 million Turkish-Armenians killed, the over 300,000 Turkish army casualties, and the tens of thousands of Turkish-Greeks and Arabs put to death at the same time. Another strand of this argument points to ``hundreds of thousands of Moslem deaths''--again implying that the genocide was really an Armenian-Turkish war. Yet in calculating the ``Moslem'' figures, these people not only include the Turkish war casualties and the massacres of tens of thousands of Arabs in Turkey, but also the Moslems who died fighting with the Allies against the Turks in the Middle East--that is Moslems which the Turks themselves killed. A third strand of this ``numbers game'' argument applies artificial formulas to the nineteenth century populations, plugs in some theoretical conditions, and concludes with ridiculous population and mortality figures which bear no relation to reality. This argument falls on its face because it completely ignores the direct, factual evidence of the genocide. Its proponents are as off base as those who recently claimed in the newspaper ``Sieg'' that only 150,000- 200,000 Jews died under Nazi rule and those deaths came during the ``German-Jewish war.'' Another denial theme is that commemorating or recognizing the Armenian genocide promotes terrorism. Initially, let me say that we unequivocally condemn all terrorism, including Armenian terrorist attacks on innocent Turks. But, the threat of terrorism does not justify rewriting history to deny Ottoman Turkey's crimes against humanity. More importantly, and again the deniers conveniently fail to mention this fact, Armenian terrorism is a moot point. In a March 1989 report, even the State Department had to acknowledge that there has not been an Armenian terrorist attack in three or four years and Armenian terrorist groups have withered away. This cessation of terrorism is attributed to lack of mainstream Armenian community support and to the growing international rejection of Turkey's denial campaign. For example, in 1985 the United Nations Subcommittee on Human Rights, after years of study, overwhelmingly recognized the Armenian genocide as an indisputable historical fact, and in 1987 the European Parliament conditioned Turkey's acceptance to the European Community on recognizing the Armenian genocide. The following denial argument is particular to deniers in the United States. They point out that in 1985 sixty-nine scholars signed an advertisement questioning the accuracy of a Congressional resolution commemorating the Armenian genocide and therefore ``there was no Armenian genocide'' or ``the issue should be left to historians''--an argument from authorities so to speak. Following the advertisement, we contacted these sixty-nine people. We found that some did not authorize use of their names on the advertisement and some said they were misled about the text and apologized. Many explicitly recognize the Armenian genocide as a fact. But, most importantly, we found that only four of the sixty-nine actually focus their work on the time span of 1915-1923. All of these individuals are subsidized by the Republic of Turkey, and none has credibility on the Armenian genocide issue. Thus, when deniers make claims like a majority of United States experts question the Armenian genocide, they are simply not telling the truth. Among those sociologists, attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, attorneys, historians, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and others who seriously study genocide, there is no question that the Armenians suffered a genocide, by any definition. There is also no question among the credible genocide scholars that failure to memorialize and condemn past genocides facilitates future genocides. Before leaving this ``scholars'' issue, however, I would like to make clear that some of those people who signed the 1985 advertisement and continue to question the Armenian genocide really have little choice. These people are Turkish or Ottoman historians. If they do not assume the current government's line, they will be cut off from resources necessary for their life's work. Even Turkish sources confirm that cooperation with the government pays dividends while criticism exacts a high price. The next denial argument is one of the more interesting. This argument contends that a judgment on the Armenian genocide must be reserved until the Republic of Turkey opens its archives of the period. The argument is interesting because Armenians sought free access to the Ottoman archives for years. Then the irrelevance of these archives became obvious. For instance, Turkey does not even own all the relevant archives from the period. After the War, the government sold hundreds of thousands of its records to the Bulgarians as scrap paper. Other parts of the archives exist in Jerusalem, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Europe. In addition, after World War I, Turkish officials readily acknowledged that the files on Armenian massacres were removed and destroyed. In fact, the documentation in archives around the world contains more direct evidence of the genocide than we can possibly digest. (The United States archives contain approximately 25,000 pages for the period 1915-1918 alone, including captured German records, which fully document the genocide.) So, while the Turkish held archives may be interesting, they are only a very minor contribution to the history of the genocide. Moreover, Turks themselves acknowledge that military and foreign service officials have been reviewing the records for years to remove whatever incriminating evidence may still exist and that the government is using the archives strictly for public relations purposes. This year, the government, in various ways, has announced that the archives on Armenian issues are open. Yet, they fail to publicize that the wrong archives are open or the restrictions which prevent any incriminating documents from coming to light. For example, in January, they announced that the archives are open, but they did not open the relevant World War I years. Recently, they announced that the Council of Ministers files were open for the war years, but they did not open the records of the party apparatus or other agencies which actually controlled the genocidal operations. (Scholars have found that the genocide was implemented through a two track system of orders--one set ordering ``deportations'' and another set ordering the translation of ``deport the Armenians'' to ``massacre the Armenians.'') Read these continual announcements on the opening of the archives carefully; you will find that there is always a caveat such as ``all previously catalogued archives are open'' or that a researcher may see only fifteen pages at a time and a government official has the right to screen the documents first. The Turkish government continues to use the archives as a delaying tactic. As Cumhuriyet a Turkish newspaper reported in January 1989: ``Endless and empty statements have been made over the years concerning the opening of the Ottoman archives, and it is creating a disturbance among those who follow this topic closely. For the last 8 years, every 6 months a statement is made regarding the opening of the Ottoman archives. That these don't come true indicates that Turkey is pursuing a policy of distraction.'' At this point, the Ottoman archives held by Turkey are worthless. This explains why [[Page 25510]] only Turcophiles and the uninitiated place any weight on them. It also explains why the archives' administrators publicly complain that serious scholars have not come to review what has been released. The last denial argument I would like to touch on is a ``character'' argument--that is, ``Turks are hospitable, good people'' and good people would not do what the Armenians allege happened under Ottoman reign. Let me say that the character of the Turkish people is not at issue here. Turkish hospitality is well known, and many Turks proved their sense of humanity during the genocide by protecting individual Armenians. That does not change what the government did to the Armenians from 1915 to 1923, the fact that the racist ideology of Pan-Turkism (Turkey only for Turks) was and still is prevalent, or that the government continues to have a poor human rights record and severely discriminates against Armenians in Turkey today. You should also know that the 1915-1923 Armenian genocide was not an isolated event. From 1894 to 1896, Sultan Abdul Hamid openly and proudly ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians, ostensibly to send the Armenians a message about their place in Turkish society. Lord Kinross gave the following example of the atrocities in this period: ``[The Massacre's] objective, based on the convenient consideration that Armenians were now tentatively starting to question their inferior status, was the ruthless reduction, with a view to elimination of the Armenian Christians, and the expropriation of their land for the Moslem Turks. Each operation, between the bugle calls, followed a similar pattern. First the Turkish troops came into a town for the purpose of massacre; then came the Kurdish irregulars and tribesmen for the purpose of plunder. Finally came the holocaust, by fire and destruction, which spread, with the pursuit of the fugitives and mopping-up operations, throughout the lands and villages of the surrounding province. This murderous winter of 1895 thus saw the decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey. Often the massacres were timed for a Friday, when the Moslems were in their mosques . . . Cruelest and most ruinous of all were the massacres at Urfa, where the Armenian Christians numbered a third of the population . . . When the bugle blast ended the day's operations, some three thousand refugees poured into the cathedral, hoping for sanctuary. But the next morning--a Sunday--a fanatic mob swarmed into the church in an orgy of slaughter, rifling its shrines with cries of `Call upon Christ to prove Himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.' Then they amassed a large pile of straw matting, which they spread over the litter of corpses and set alight with thirty cans of petroleum. The woodwork of the gallery where a crowd of women and children crouched, wailing with terror, caught fire, and all perished in the flames. Punctiliously at three-thirty in the afternoon the bugle blew once more, and the Moslem officials proceeded around the Armenian quarter to proclaim that the massacres were over . . . the total casualties in the town, including those slaughtered in the cathedral, amounted to eight thousand dead.'' Similar accounts of massive Armenian massacres during this 1894-1896 period abound. In 1909, for similar reasons, the government set another prelude to the 1915-1923 genocide. Then, it ordered and carried out massacres in Adana which killed 30,000 Armenians. Today, as I have noted, the Turkish government is engaged in an all out effort to deny the Armenian genocide. In addition to its efforts in the United States, it is eradicating the physical evidence of any Armenian existence in Turkey. At the beginning of this century Armenians had two thousand churches in Turkey. Now, under two hundred are standing. As for the rest, the government has: destroyed them; converted them to mosques, warehouses, cinemas, and other uses; or allowed them to be plundered and destroyed. In Armenian schools, Armenians are forbidden to teach history and geography, those subjects can only be taught by Turkish officials. As a final example, Turkey strictly forbids open discussion of Armenian history or any other matters which do not comply with government policy. In March of this year, the Independent Magazine reported that: ``In early December 1986 Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested by the Turkish Security Police and charged with `making propaganda with intent to destroy or weaken national feelings.' The prosecutor of the Istanbul State Security deemed her offense as meriting severe punishment and asked for between a seven-and-a-half and a 15-year jail sentence. Potuoglu's crime was to edit the Turkish edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In this was included a footnote which read as follows: `During the Crusades the mountainous regions of Cilicia were under the hegemony of the Armenian Cilician king- dom' . . . The Encyclopedia Britannica was not the first publication to offend. In 1981 the authorities seized Ankara 50, a guidebook to Ankara produced by the British Institute of Archaeology. The book, when published in 1973, had been passed by the military censor. By 1981, however, times had changed. It was noticed that the book featured a map naming the Roman provinces of Asia Minor including--with perfect historical accuracy--the province of Armenia. The guidebook quickly joined the index of forbidden books along with other such politically dubious publications The Times Atlas of World History and the National Geographic Atlas of the World.'' This is the type of action that the Turkish government and those in the United States who deny the Armenian genocide are promoting--the sacrifice of truth and integrity on the altar of perceived political expedience. This is why I am especially glad to have had this time with you today, to publicly expose exactly what we are all up against in fighting denial of the Armenian genocide. Thank you. ____________________