Bill Text: CA SR28 | 2023-2024 | Regular Session | Introduced

California Senate Resolution 28

NOTE: There are more recent revisions of this legislation. Read Latest Draft

Bill Title: Relative to the Commemoration of the Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923.

Spectrum: Moderate Partisan Bill (Democrat 8-2)

Status: (Passed) 2023-04-24 - Read. Adopted. (Ayes 39. Noes 0. Page 836.) [SR28 Detail]

Download: California-2023-SR28-Introduced.html

CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE— 2023–2024 REGULAR SESSION

Senate Resolution

No. 28

Introduced by Senator Portantino
(Principal coauthors: Senators Archuleta, Atkins, Durazo, Jones, Menjivar, Rubio, Stern, Wiener, and Wilk)

April 12, 2023

Relative to the Commemoration of the Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923.

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

SR 28, as introduced, Portantino.

WHEREAS, Armenians have resided in Asia Minor and the Caucasus for approximately four millennia and have a long and rich history in the region, including the establishment of many kingdoms. Despite Armenians’ historic presence, stewardship, and autonomy in the region, Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey subjected Armenians to severe and unjust persecution and brutality; and

WHEREAS, Ottoman Turkish political leaders, succeeded by the leaders of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, promoted a pan-Turkic agenda to unite the Turkic populations of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire by annihilating the non-Turkic Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian minorities in the region, an agenda that continues to this day; and

WHEREAS, The Armenian population was a victim of a series of massacres, namely the Hamidian massacres between 1894 and 1896 and the Adana massacre of 1909, at the hands of Ottoman Turkey; and

WHEREAS, The Armenian nation was subjected to a systematic and premeditated genocide at the hands of the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1919. The genocide officially began on April 24, 1915, and continued at the hands of the Kemalist Movement of Turkey from 1920 to 1923; and

WHEREAS, Over 1,500,000 Armenian men, women, and children were slaughtered or marched to their deaths in an effort to annihilate the Armenian nation in the first genocide of modern times, thousands of surviving Armenian women and children were forcibly converted and Islamized, and hundreds of thousands more were subjected to ethnic cleansing during the period of the modern Republic of Turkey from 1924 to 1937; and

WHEREAS, During the genocides of the Christians living in the Ottoman Empire and surrounding regions, in addition to the 1,500,000 men, women, and children of Armenian descent, hundreds of thousands of Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christians lost their lives at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Republic of Turkey, thereby constituting one of the most atrocious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity in the history of the world; and

WHEREAS, The Republic of Azerbaijan also carried out massacres in Shushi, Baku, Ghaibalishen, Jamilli, Karkijahan, and Pahlul between 1918 and 1920; and

WHEREAS, These crimes against humanity also had the consequence of permanently removing all traces of the Armenians and other targeted people from their historic homelands of more than four millennia and enriching the perpetrators with the lands and other property of the victims of these crimes, including through the usurpation of several thousand churches and cultural institutions; and

WHEREAS, In response to the genocide and at the behest of President Woodrow Wilson and the United States State Department, the Near East Relief organization was founded and became the first congressionally sanctioned American philanthropic effort created exclusively to provide humanitarian assistance to, and to rescue from annihilation, the Armenian nation and other Christian minorities. Those who were rescued went on to survive and thrive outside of their ancestral homeland all over the world and specifically in this state; and

WHEREAS, Near East Relief succeeded, with the active participation of the citizens from this state, in delivering $117,000,000 in assistance and in saving more than 1,000,000 refugees, including 132,000 orphans, between 1915 and 1930, by delivering food, clothing, and materials for shelter and by setting up refugee camps, clinics, hospitals, and orphanages; and

WHEREAS, The Armenian nation survived the genocide despite the attempt by the Ottoman Empire to exterminate it; and

WHEREAS, In 1923, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, utilizing a strategy to divide and conquer ethnic minorities in the former Russian Empire, proclaimed the ancient Armenian region of Artsakh, populated almost entirely by ethnic Armenians, as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic; and

WHEREAS, In 1924, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, in furtherance of the same strategy, created an Azerbaijani exclave on the ancient Armenian lands of Nakhichevan, which was subsequently ethnically cleansed of all Armenians and rendered devoid of Armenian cultural presence through the deliberate destruction of thousands of Armenian antiquities, cross-stones, and artifacts; and

WHEREAS, Adolf Hitler, in persuading his army commanders that the merciless persecution and killing of Jews, Poles, and other people would bring no retribution, declared, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”; and

WHEREAS, On November 4, 1918, immediately after the collapse of the Young Turk regime and before the founding of the Republic of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, the Ottoman Parliament considered a motion on the crimes committed by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) stating: “A population of one million people guilty of nothing except belonging to the Armenian nation were massacred and exterminated, including even women and children.” The Minister of Interior at the time, Fethi Bey, responded by telling the Parliament: “It is the intention of the government to cure every single injustice done up until now, as far as the means allow, to make possible the return to their homes of those sent into exile, and to compensate for their material loss as far as possible”; and

WHEREAS, The Parliamentary Investigative Committee proceeded to collect relevant documents describing the actions of those responsible for the Armenian mass killings and turned them over to the Turkish Military Tribunal. CUP’s leading figures were found guilty of massacring Armenians and hanged or given lengthy prison sentences. The Turkish Military Tribunal requested that Germany extradite to Turkey the masterminds of the massacres who had fled the country. After German refusal, they were tried in absentia and sentenced to death; and

WHEREAS, On August 1, 1926, in an interview published in the Los Angeles Examiner, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk admitted: “These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who 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, have been restive under the Republican rule. They have hitherto lived on plunder, robbery and bribery and become inimical to any idea or suggestion to enlist in useful labor and earn their living by the honest sweat of their brow”; and

WHEREAS, From 1988 to 1990, the Armenian population in Soviet Azerbaijan was also the target of racially motivated pogroms in the Cities of Sumgait (February 27 to 29, 1998), Kirovabad (November 21 to 27, 1988) and Baku (January 13 to 19, 1990); and

WHEREAS, Eighty-nine medieval churches, 5,840 ornate cross-stones (khachkars), and 22,000 tombstones in the formerly Armenian region of Nakhichevan were systematically and covertly eradicated by the Azerbaijani government from 1997 to 2006 in order to erase the region’s indigenous Armenian trace; and

WHEREAS, Having suffered racial and economic discrimination under the Soviet Azerbaijani occupation, the citizens of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region declared their independence from the USSR in 1991 and established the free, independent, and democratic Republic of Artsakh through a referendum held in accordance with the constitution and laws of the Soviet Union, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and

WHEREAS, Unlike other people and governments that have admitted and denounced the abuses and crimes of predecessor regimes, and despite the Turkish government’s earlier admissions and the overwhelming proof of genocidal intent, the Republic of Turkey inexplicably and adamantly has denied the occurrence of the crimes against humanity committed by the Ottoman and Young Turk rulers for many years, and continues to do so more than a century since the first crimes constituting genocide occurred; and

WHEREAS, The Republic of Turkey continues its genocidal policy by showing no remorse for the crime and engages in the final stage of genocide by denying the veracity of the crimes perpetrated against the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian nations; and

WHEREAS, Those denials compound the grief of the few remaining survivors and deprive the surviving Armenian nation of its individual and collective ancestral lands, property, cultural heritage, financial assets, and population growth; and

WHEREAS, The Republic of Turkey has escalated its international campaign of Armenian Genocide denial, maintained its blockade of Armenia, and increased its pressure on the small but growing movement in Turkey acknowledging the Armenian Genocide and seeking justice for this systematic campaign of destruction of millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other Christians upon their homelands; and

WHEREAS, Those citizens of Turkey, both Armenian and non-Armenian, who continue to speak the truth about the Armenian Genocide, such as human rights activist and journalist Hrant Dink, continue to be silenced by violent means or imprisonment, in part due to a Turkish law that criminalizes any expression that is considered to be insulting to the Turkish identity; and

WHEREAS, There is continued concern about the welfare of Christians in the Republic of Turkey, their right to worship and practice freely, and the legal status and condition of thousands of ancient Armenian churches, monasteries, cemeteries, and other historical and cultural structures, sites, and antiquities in the Republic of Turkey; and

WHEREAS, The United States is on record as having officially recognized the Armenian Genocide in the United States government’s May 28, 1951, written statement to the International Court of Justice regarding the Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, through President Ronald Reagan’s April 22, 1981, Proclamation No. 4838, and by congressional legislation, including House Joint Resolution 148 adopted on April 9, 1975, and House Joint Resolution 247 adopted on September 12, 1984; and

WHEREAS, Prior to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the United States had a record of seeking just and constructive means to address the consequences of the Ottoman Empire’s intentional destruction of the Armenian people, including through United States Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 adopted on February 9, 1916, United States Senate Resolution 359 adopted on May 11, 1920, and President Woodrow Wilson’s November 22, 1920, decision titled, “The Frontier between Armenia and Turkey,” which was issued as a legally binding arbitral award, but has not been enforced to this date; and

WHEREAS, The Republics of Armenia and Artsakh are bastions of freedom, liberty, and democracy in the region; and

WHEREAS, Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, has never been a part of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan in that it proclaimed its independence before the fall of the Soviet Union and before Azerbaijan did the same; and

WHEREAS, The Republics of Turkey and Azerbaijan proclaim each other as “one nation, two states”; and

WHEREAS, The Republic of Turkey has long served as a destabilizing force in the region by illegally blockading the Republic of Armenia, targeting minority groups in Turkey, and invading and occupying the sovereign territories of the Syrian Arab Republic, among other gross violations of international law; and

WHEREAS, The Republic of Turkey directly supported Azerbaijan during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War through the recruitment and deployment of mercenary terrorists and the supply of military equipment and senior military personnel used by Azerbaijan to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Armenians of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, including ISIS-style beheadings of Armenian senior citizens; and

WHEREAS, These international crimes against humanity still need to be prosecuted under the jurisdiction of international legal institutions; and

WHEREAS, Azerbaijan has continuously invaded and occupied the sovereign territories of the Republic of Armenia since May 2021, harmed or killed civilians, and destroyed critical infrastructure; and

WHEREAS, Azerbaijan began, on December 12, 2022, an illegal blockade of the Lachin corridor, the road of life connecting Artsakh to the world through Armenia, that has deprived 120,000 Armenians of food, medicine, gas, electricity, and internet connectivity; and

WHEREAS, California is home to the largest Armenian American population in the United States, and Armenians living in California have enriched our state through their leadership and contribution in business, agriculture, academia, government, and the arts. Many of them have family members who experienced firsthand the horror and evil of the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial; and

WHEREAS, Every person should be made aware and educated about the Armenian Genocide and other crimes against humanity; and

WHEREAS, The State of California has been at the forefront of encouraging and promoting a curriculum relating to human rights and genocide in order to empower future generations to prevent the recurrence of genocide; and

WHEREAS, April 24, 1915, is globally observed and recognized as the commencement of the Armenian Genocide; and

WHEREAS, The Armenian Genocide has been officially recognized by the United States Congress in 2019 with the adoption of House Resolution 296 and Senate Resolution 150, officially reaffirming the United States’ record on the Armenian Genocide; and

WHEREAS, Both resolutions set, as a matter of United States policy, to (1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide through official recognition and remembrance; (2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise associate the United States government with denial of the Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and (3) encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the United States’ role in the humanitarian relief effort and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity; and

WHEREAS, President Joseph Biden affirmed the United States’ record on the recognition of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2021, and in doing so noted that recognition is a step “to ensure that what happened is never repeated”; and

WHEREAS, The Senate encourages the United States government to halt all military assistance to Azerbaijan while it continues Turkey’s annihilation of ethnic Armenians in both Nagorno-Karabakh, which is also known as Artsakh, and Armenia; and

WHEREAS, We must encourage education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the United States’ role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity; and

WHEREAS, Armenians in California and throughout the world have not been provided with justice for the crimes perpetrated against the Armenian nation despite the fact that over a century has passed since the crimes were first committed; and

WHEREAS, The Armenian people in California and throughout the world remain resolved and their spirit continues to thrive more than a century after their near annihilation; and

WHEREAS, By recognizing and consistently remembering the Armenian Genocide and other genocides, we help protect cultural and historic memory and ensure that similar atrocities do not occur again; now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate of the State of California, That the Senate hereby designates the year of 2023 as “State of California Year of Commemoration of the Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923” and in doing so, intends, through the enactment of legislation, that the Armenian Genocide is properly commemorated and taught to its citizens and visitors through statewide educational and cultural events; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate hereby designates the month of April 2023 as “State of California Month of Commemoration of the 108th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923”; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate commends its conscientious educators who teach about human rights and genocide, and intends for them, through the enactment of legislation, to continue to enhance their efforts to educate students at all levels about the experience of the Armenians and other crimes against humanity; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate hereby commends the extraordinary service that was delivered by Near East Relief to the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and the Assyrian Genocide, including thousands of direct beneficiaries of American philanthropy who are the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of many Californian Armenians and Assyrians, and pledges its intent, through the enactment of legislation, to working with community groups, nonprofit organizations, citizens, state personnel, and the community at large to host statewide educational and cultural events; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate deplores the persistent, ongoing efforts by any person, in this country or abroad, to deny the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate respectfully calls upon the President and the Congress of the United States to formally and consistently reaffirm the historical truth that the atrocities committed against the Armenian people constituted genocide; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate calls on the President of the United States to work toward equitable, constructive, stable, and durable Armenian-Turkish relations; and be it further

Resolved, That the Senate calls on the President and the Congress of the United States, in all official contacts with Turkish and other world leaders and officials, to emphasize that Turkey should:

(1) End all forms of religious discrimination and persecution;

(2) Allow the rightful historical church and lay owners of Christian and other church properties, without hindrance or restriction, to organize and administer prayer services, religious education, clerical training, appointments, and succession, religious community gatherings, social services, including ministry to the needs of the poor and infirm, and other religious activities;

(3) Return to their rightful owners all historical Christian and other churches and other places of worship, monasteries, schools, hospitals, monuments, relics, holy sites, and other religious properties, including movable properties, such as artwork, manuscripts, vestments, vessels, and other artifacts;

(4) Allow the rightful Christian and other church and lay owners of church properties, without hindrance or restriction, to preserve, reconstruct, and repair, as they see fit, all churches and other places of worship, monasteries, schools, hospitals, monuments, relics, holy sites, and other religious properties within Turkey; and be it further

Resolved, That in light of the impending ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Armenians in Artsakh, the Senate calls upon the President of the United States to ensure the rights of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to extraterritorial self-determination (independence) in accordance with the principle of remedial succession and the global commitment to Responsibility to Protect (R2P); and be it further

Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate transmit copies of this resolution to the President and Vice President of the United States, to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to the Majority Leader of the Senate, to each Senator and Representative from California in the Congress of the United States, to the Governor of California, to every Member of the California State Legislature, and to the Superintendent of Public Instruction.