On Saturday, 24th April the U.S. president Jo Biden recognized the Armenian genocide. It happened exactly on the 106th anniversary of Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turkey.
He is the first U.S. president in 40 years, after Ronald Reagan to publicly state that the mass killings during the final years of the Ottoman Empire were a genocide.
Ronald Reagan on April 22, 1981 said these famous words: ”Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it — and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.”
Read below both statements
Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day
Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring. Beginning on April 24, 1915, with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople by Ottoman authorities, one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. We honor the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.
Of those who survived, most were forced to find new homes and new lives around the world, including in the United States. With strength and resilience, the Armenian people survived and rebuilt their community. Over the decades Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores. We honor their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.
Today, as we mourn what was lost, let us also turn our eyes to the future—toward the world that we wish to build for our children. A world unstained by the daily evils of bigotry and intolerance, where human rights are respected, and where all people are able to pursue their lives in dignity and security. Let us renew our shared resolve to prevent future atrocities from occurring anywhere in the world. And let us pursue healing and reconciliation for all the people of the world.
The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today.
April 22, 1981
“Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it — and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.”
Proclamation 4838 of April 22, 1981
Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust
by the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
The Congress of the United States established the United States Holocaust Memorial Council to create a living memorial to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Its purpose: So mankind will never lose memory of that terrible moment in time when the awful specter of death camps stained the history of our world.
When America and its allies liberated those haunting places of terror and sick destructiveness, the world came to a vivid and tragic understanding of the evil it faced in those years of the Second World War. Each of those names — Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka and so many others — became synonymous with horror.
The millions of death, the gas chambers, the inhuman crematoria, and the thousands of people who somehow survived with lifetime scars are all now part of the conscience of history. Forever must we remember just how precious is civilization, how important is liberty, and how heroic is the human spirit.
Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it — and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples — the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.
As part of its mandate, the Holocaust Memorial Council has been directed to designate annual Day of Remembrance as a national, civic commemoration of the Holocaust, and to encourage and sponsor appropriate observances throughout the United States. This year, the national Days of Remembrance will be observed on April 26 through May 3.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, RONALD REAGAN, President of the United States of America, do hereby ask the people of the United States to observe this solemn anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, with appropriate study, prayers and commemoration, as a tribute to the spirit of freedom and justice which Americans fought so hard and well to preserve.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this 22nd day of April, in the year of our Lord Nineteen hundred and eight-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fifth.
Ronald Reagan
Sources
https://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.63/current_category.4/affirmation_detail.html
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