1873) Armenian Genocide Quotes (Armenian National Committee Of Australia)

Armenian Genocide Quotes (Armenian National Committee Of Australia)

H. Adam
Extract from “Armenia in the World War”
"Of the 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey in 1914, one million have been slaughtered, and the survivors only 130,000 remain in Turkey and the rest are refugees and exiles. Armenian property losses are valued at over 5,000,000,000 dollars are more than three fourths of the estimated wealth of the Armenian race."

Dr Herbert Adams Gibbons
Extracts from “The Blackest Pages of Modern History”
"In April, 1915, the Ottoman Government began to put into execution throughout Turkey a systematic and carefully-prepared plan to exterminate the Armenian race. In six months nearly a million Armenians have been killed. The number of victims and the manner of their destruction are without parallel in Modern History."

"From May until October, the Ottoman Government pursued methodically a plan of extermination far more hellish than the worst possible massacre. Orders for deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia were dispatched to every province of Asia Minor. These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination. There were no exceptions for the aged, the ill, the women in pregnancy."

Mustafa Arif
Minister of Interior, 13/12/1918
"Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones. Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did exterminate them."

Yossi Beilin
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, on the floor of the Knesset in response to a TV interview of the Turkish Ambassador, 27/4/1994
"It was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember... We will always reject any attempt to erase its record, even for some political advantage."

Admiral Mark L. Bristol
U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey
"The Armenians are a race like the Jews-they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character."

Valerii Brusov
Russian Poet, 1916
"Turks continued their previous policy. They would not stop committing massive and most awful massacres that even Leng Timur (Tamerlane) would not dare to do."

British Viscount James Bryce
6/10/1915
"The massacres are the result of a policy which, as far as can be ascertained, has been entertained for some considerable time by the gang of unscrupulous adventurers who are now in possession of the Government of the Turkish Empire. They hesitated to put it in practice until they thought the favorable moment had come, and that moment seems to have arrived about the month of April."

George Bush Sr.
Speech in Orlando, Florida, 20/4/1990
"[We join] Armenians around the world [as we remember] the terrible massacres suffered in 1915–1923 at the hands of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The United States responded to this crime against humanity by leading diplomatic and private relief efforts."

Jimmy Carter
White House ceremony, 16/5/1978
"It is generally not known in the world that, in the years preceding 1916, there was a concerted effort made to eliminate all the Armenian people, probably one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell any group. And there weren't any Nuremberg trials."

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill
British Prime Minister and historian
"The Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be."

Stanley Cohen
Professor of Criminology, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 12/1/1995
"The nearest successful example [of collective denial] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and cover-ups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars."

Baroness Caroline Cox
House of Lords, 4/1/1999
"If nations are allowed to commit genocide with impunity, to hide their guilt in a camouflage of lies and denials, there is a real danger that other brutal regimes will be encouraged to attempt genocides. Unless we speak today of the Armenian genocide and unless the Government recognizes this historical fact, we shall leave this century of unprecedented genocides with this blot on our consciences."

Jacques de Morgan
French scientist, 1917
"The deportations of Western Armenians are nothing but concealed race extermination. There is no language rich enough to describe the horrors of it."

Fayez El Husein
Arab publicist, 1917
"Who can describe the feelings that an eyewitness experiences when he thinks of this heroic and unfortunate nation. Its courage and spirit surprise the world. A nation that yesterday was one of the most energetic and progressive nations of the Ottoman Empire is becoming a memory."

Gerald Ford
Addressing the US House of Representatives
"Mr. Speaker, with mixed emotions we mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people. In taking notice of the shocking events in 1915, we observe this anniversary with sorrow in recalling the massacres of Armenians and with pride in saluting those brave patriots who survived to fight on the side of freedom during World War I. - Congressional Record, pg. 8890"

Anatole France
French author, 1916
"Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die."

Comm. G. Gorrini
Italian Consul General at Trebizond
"As for the Armenians, they were treated differently in the different vilayets. They were suspect and spied upon everywhere, but they suffered real extermination, worse than massacre, in the so-called "Armenian Vilayets". There are seven of these, and five of them (including the most important and thickly populated) unhappily for me formed part of my own Consular Jurisdiction. These were the vilayets of Trebizond, Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis and Sivas.

"In my district from the 24th June onwards, the Armenians were all "interned" - that is, ejected by force from their various residences and dispatched under the guard of the gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will mean the interior Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties."

Sir George Greenwood
"Then, coming to the broad question of Armenia, we remember those terrible massacres in 1895 and 1896, but they pale into insignificance before what has been done during this War. The Germans have been guilty of the most ghastly and unspeakable crimes, but there is no crime so ghastly and unspeakable as the wholesale massacres, under circumstances of the greatest possible barbarity and atrocity, of the Armenians themselves."

Adolf Hitler
While persuading his associates that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the west stated…
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Herbert Hoover
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1/1/1952
"The association of Mount Ararat and Noah, the staunch Christians who were massacred periodically by the Mohammedan Turks, and the Sunday School collections over fifty years for alleviating their miseries—all cumulate to impress the name Armenia on the front of the American mind."

Mustafa "Ataturk" Kemal
Founder of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 and revered throughout Turkey, in an interview published on August 1, 1926 in The Los Angeles Examiner, talking about former Young Turks in his country…
"These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule."

Prince Abdul Mecid
Heir-Apparent to the Ottoman Throne, during an interview…
"I refer to those awful massacres. They are the greatest stain that has ever disgraced our nation and race. They were entirely the work of Talat and Enver. I heard some days before they began that they were intended. I went to Istanbul and insisted on seeing Enver. I asked him if it was true that they intended to recommence the massacres which had been our shame and disgrace under Abdul Hamid. The only reply I could get from him was: 'It is decided. It is the program.'"

Alexander Millerand
President of the French Republic, 16/7/1920
"The Allies see clearly that the time has come to put an end to Turkish domination over other races. During the past twenty years Armenians have been massacred with unexampled brutality. During the war, the exploit of the Turkish Government, in massacres, deportations and bad treatment of prisoners of war, exceeded in ferocity its former misdeeds. Not only has the Government failed to protect its subjects against murder and pillage, but it itself has organised and perpetrated these outrages. The Allies are determined to liberate from Turkish rule the regions inhabited by non-Turks."

Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 1/1/1919
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact. . . . I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

Fridtjof Nansen
Norwegian Statesman and humanitarian, winner of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations
"The whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the motive of greed".

Cemal Pasha
Minister of the Interior of Turkey, publicly declared that on the basis of computations undertaken by Ministry Experts…
"800,000 Armenian deportees were actually killed...by holding the guilty accountable the government is intent on cleansing the bloody past."

Cemal Pasha
To a German officer upon seeing the deportations in Mamure said…
"I am ashamed of my nation (Ich schame mich fur meine Nation)"

Enver Pasha
One of the triumvirate rulers publicly declared on 19/5/1916
"The Ottoman Empire should be cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation."

Rashid Pasha
Minister of Foreign Affairs, 21/12/1918
"A pallid light extends over the atrocities committed against the Armenians, atrocities which have raised the indignation of humanity. They gave us our country transformed into a gigantic slaughter house."

Talat Pasha
Minister of the Interior, in a conversation with Dr. Mordtmann of the German Embassy, 6/1/1915
"Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate (grundlich aufzaumen) its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention. What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians."

Talat Pasha
To the Government of Aleppo, 9/6/1916
"It was at first communicated to you that the Government, by order of the Jemiet had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey...An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples."

Grand Vezir Damad Ferid Pasha
"A crime that drew the revulsion of the entire humankind."

Thomas Power O’Conner
Irish journalist and nationalist leader
"Let us not forget that the Armenian Nation has had a long and glorious history; that it was one of the earliest to create a civilisation and cultured society; that is was the first nation to adopt Christianity for all these centuries, through every horror. But even this is not enough to say of the essential greatness of Armenian History and the Armenian character. It is necessary to remember that it was at one period of its history, the greatest power among nations of Asia, that it governed itself with success and Christianity between Asia and Europe and finally these traditions of faith and of patriotism have been carried on through many centuries and numberless generations while religion and national spirit have not suffered the slightest diminution in either valor or tenacity."

Ronald Reagan
22/4/1981
"Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it . . . the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten."

Theodore Roosevelt
Letter to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge, 11/5/1918
". . . the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it . . . the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense."

Prof. Colin Tatz
Director, Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, 1/1/1996
"The Turkish denial [of the Armenian Genocide] is probably the foremost example of historical perversion. With a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic thuggery -- of which we at Macquarie University have been targets -- the Turks have put both memory and history into reverse gear."

Monsignor Touchet
Bishop of Orleans, France
"I would like to see Europe, that wept of Uncle Tom's Cabin, think over the outrages perpetrated by the Turks in Armenia. Eight centuries ago a lesser injustice than these crimes would have caused an avenging Crusade. It is the duty of the Allied Powers, fighting now against the Central Empires, to grant freedom to Armenia. Otherwise the remnant of this unfortunate nation will become anarchists, and if they were to destroy Constantinople by dynamite, I a bishop, standing before the altar of Christ, would without any compunction pronounce their action not only justified, but even sanctified."

Arnold J. Toynbee
British historian, extract from “The Murder of a Nation”
"The scheme was nothing less than the extermination of the whole Christian population within the Ottoman frontiers...Nothing remained but the opportunity to strike a stroke that would never need repetition. “After this", said Talat Bey, when he gave the final signal, "there will be no Armenian Question for fifty years".

Count Wolff-Metternich
German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, cable to the German Chancellor, 10/7/1916
"In its attempt to carry out its purpose to resolve the Armenian question by the destruction of the Armenian race, the Turkish government has refused to be deterred neither by our representations, nor by those of the American Embassy, nor by the delegate of the Pope, nor by the threats of the Allied Powers, nor in deference to the public opinion of the West representing one-half of the world."

President Woodrow Wilson
President of the USA, 24/2/1919
"Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall never suffer again."

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