President. I rise today to mark the 81st anniversary of the Armenian genocide that took place during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. From 1915 to 1923. some 1.500.000 persons of Armenian ancestry are reported to have died at the hands of their Ottoman rulers. through a deliberate policy of deportation. confiscation of property. slave labor. and murder. Although we now recognize this policy as genocide. no such word existed at the time of its commission. The American Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. New Yorker Henry Morgenthau. described the Ottoman atrocities as a "campaign of race extermination." A chilling prologue. if you will. to the twentieth century. The word "genocide" comes from the Greek genos (clan or breed) and the Latin caedere (to kill). It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. a Polish Jew who emigrated to the United States in In the early 1930s. after studying the slaughter of the Armenians. Lemkin began a campaign to outlaw the crime now known as genocide. He took his case before the Legal Council of the League of Nations in 1933 but the learned jurists would not heed him.
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emigrated deportation