U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on the 88th Anniversary of Armenian Genocide

Mr. President, today people around the world are pausing to remember and honor the victims of the Armenian genocide, which began 88 years ago in what is now Turkey. Between 1915 and 1923, one-and-a-half million Armenians--roughly 60 percent of the total Armenian population--were systematically murdered at the hands of agents of the Ottoman Empire, and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes. At that time, the word ``genocide'' had not yet entered our vocabulary. Now, 88 years later, this brutal episode of violence against the Armenian people is considered to have been the first, but unfortunately not the last, genocide of the 20th century.

Two decades later, in 1939, as Adolph Hitler, confident that history would exonerate him, prepared to send his armies into Poland with instructions to slaughter people indiscriminately and without mercy, he rhetorically asked his advisers: ``Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'' That is precisely why I speak today, and every year on this date, to honor the Armenian people who lost their lives nearly a century ago and to remind the American people that the capacity for violence and hate is still prevalent in our world today.

Just in the last decade, we have seen systematic efforts to extinguish people because of their ethnicity in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Last year the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted a ``sharp escalation'' of anti-Semitic violence in Europe. Apparently, even lessons as searing and tragic as those of the Holocaust can be forgotten if we do not remain vigilant in our efforts to remember them.

Last year, as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa, I had the opportunity to visit the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is setting groundbreaking legal precedents with regard to the treatment of genocide. Through such tribunals, the international community should send a powerful message to would-be mass-murderers that such horrific acts will not go unpunished. Since I became a member of the U.S. Senate, I have striven to make protection of basic human rights, and accountability for such atrocities, cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy, and I will continue to do so as long as I am here.

Today, we remember the men, women and children who perished in the Armenian genocide, because to forget them, or any of the countless millions who have been murdered because of their ethnicity over the past century, would be to invite such tragic episodes to be repeated.