Genocide Archives

Alan Meale of PACE Monitoring: Everyone must condemn the atrocities committed by Turks against Armenians

November 24, 2016 By administrator

alan-meale Everyone must condemn the atrocities and the Genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenians. The Governments must recognize what has actually happened. PACE Monitoring Committee Co-Rapporteur for Armenia Alan Meale has made such a statement. “People must be informed, schools must teach about the Genocide and everything must be done to prevent such kind of tragedies,” he has noted.

Alan Meale, together with other Co-Rapporteur for Armenia Giuseppe Galati, have paid a visit to Tsitsernakaberd Memorial accompanied by Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Head of the Armenian delegation to PACE Hermine Naghdalyan. The European high ranking officials have laid flowers at the Eternal Flame paying tribute to the memory of the Armenian Genocide victims with a moment of silence. As the NA Public Relations Department reports, PACE Monitoring Committee Co-Rapporteurs for Armenia also visited the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute and got acquainted with the documents on the Genocide.

Source: http://en.aravot.am/2016/11/23/184251/

Harut Sassounian: Dr. Akcam confirms Turks’ Genocidal intent by Proving validity of Talat’s telegrams

November 23, 2016 By administrator

harut-sassounian-wally-740 Prof. Taner Akcam struck a major blow to Turkish denials of the Armenian Genocide in a highly informative lecture at Ararat-Eskijian Museum-Sheen Chapel in Mission Hills, California, on November 20. Dr. Akcam, a Turkish scholar, is holder of the Robert Aram & Marianne Kalousdian, and Stephen & Marion Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

In his recently published book, “The Memoirs of Naim Bey and Talat Pasha’s Telegrams,” Prof. Akcam laid to rest persistent Turkish denials of Naim Bey’s existence and authenticity of the telegrams he sold to Aram Andonian, who published them in his book, “Meds Vojire” (The Great Crime), in the early 1920’s in English, French, and Armenian. Andonian, a genocide survivor, first met Naim Bey, an Ottoman official, in the concentration camp of Meskene, Turkey, in 1916, and later in Aleppo, Syria, in 1918.

In a crucial telegram dated Sept. 22, 1915, Interior Minister Talat gave “the order that all of the Armenians’ rights on Turkish soil, such as the right to live and work, have been eliminated, and not one is to be left [alive] — not even the infant in the cradle; the government accepts all responsibility for this.” In another cable sent to the Provincial Governor of Aleppo on Sept. 29, 1915, Talat wrote: It “was previously reported that the decision to eliminate and annihilate all Armenians present in Turkey had been taken by the government, on orders of the Committee [of Union and Progress]… regardless of how horrible the annihilation measures, and without giving in to the pangs of conscience, an end will be put to their existence, be they women, children, or invalids.”

In 1983, the Turkish Historical Society published a book by Sinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca, claiming that Talat’s telegrams published by Andonian were forgeries and that Naim Bey never existed. Orel and Yuca raised 12 arguments as to why they believed that these documents were fake. Although Dr. Vahakn Dadrian had published a detailed rebuttal to Orel and Yuca in 1986, some scholars remained doubtful of the materials included in Andonian’s book.

After a lengthy and painstaking research based on Ottoman archives made available in recent years, Prof. Akcam was able to prove conclusively that Orel and Yuca’s accusations were wrong and baseless. In his newly-published Turkish-language book and Nov. 20 lecture, Prof. Akcam asserted:

1) There was in fact a Turkish civil servant by the name of Naim Bey. Original Ottoman records confirm his existence. In fact, Volume 7 of the Turkish Military Archive published in 2007, contains a document that describes him as: “Naim Effendi, son of Huseyin Nuri Effendi, age 26, from Silifke, married, former dispatch officer at Meskene, currently employed as grain storehouse officer of the municipality (Nov. 14-15, 1916).” Akcam confirmed that there are three other Ottoman records with Naim’s name; two of them are in the Boghos Noubar Library in Paris.

2) Prof. Akcam announced that he had in his possession a copy of the original memoirs of Naim Bey, handwritten in Ottoman Turkish. He found the memoirs in the archives of noted researcher Father Krikor Guerguerian who had photographed Naim Bey’s 35-page manuscript while visiting the Boghos Noubar Pasha Library in 1950. The original has since disappeared from the library.

3) The names of individuals and events Naim Bey had described in his memoirs are corroborated by materials Akcam recently obtained from the Ottoman archives.

4) Akcam was able to confirm that Orel and Yuca’s main arguments about various aspects of Talat’s telegrams, including the type of paper used and coding techniques, were incorrect.

In his scholarly quest to prove that Talat’s telegrams included in Andonian’s book are authentic, and debunk Turkish claims that they are forged, Prof. Akcam has made a much more significant revelation. Talat’s Sept. 22, 1915 telegram confirms that Turkish leaders had ordered the wholesale massacre of all Armenian men, women, and children, and not simply their deportation as Turkish denialists have falsely claimed for over a century. By authenticating these telegrams, Dr. Akcam has shown that Talat had a murderous INTENT — a crucial element in qualifying the Armenian mass killings as genocide, according to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

VIDEO: U.S. Amb. Evans Sacrificing diplomatic Career by telling the truth, Armenian Genocide

November 22, 2016 By administrator

Ambassador John Evans’s Truth Held Hostage

Truth Held Hostage: America and the Armenian Genocide – What Then? What Now? To order please contact books@gomidas.org

By Dr. Dickran Kouymjian,

Ambassador John Evans’s Truth Held Hostage is the most important work about the Armenian genocide by a US diplomat since Henry Morgenthau’s groundbreaking Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story in 1918. Evans writes with an elegant clarity that allows us to experience his journey into a major personal and political ethical dilemma concerning the truth of history and the untruth of US government protocol in the name of foreign policy politics.
…This is a must read with implications for all histories of mass violence and trauma.”
—PETER BALAKIAN, author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response”Evans is a remarkable man who was an unusual American diplomat. A principled man steeped in history, he wrestled with the moral issue of whether to defy his own government’s increasingly awkward position on the Armenian Genocide. Evans’ tale of how he came to be involved in Armenia, his term as ambassador in Yerevan and his decision to break the US government’s genocide taboo is a compelling, page-turning read. It is fascinating not just for anyone interested in Armenian issues but as an inside story of international diplomacy and politics of recent times.”
—THOMAS DE WAAL, Senior Associate at Carnegie Europe and author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War”This is a book from which one learns a great deal about the Armenian Genocide. It is also a poignant and uplifting book by and about an American ambassador, John Evans, who bravely placed ethical principles over the requirements of a diplomatic post.”
—ISRAEL W. CHARNY, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, a co-founder and past-president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars

“An informative, even-handed account of a matter of international importance.”
—PAUL IGNATIUS, former Secretary of the Navy

John Evans, formerly U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, gained notoriety in 2005 by publicly dissenting from the stated policy of the Bush and previous Administrations on the 90-year-old issue of the Armenian Genocide. A veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, Ambassador Evans had no Armenian ancestors or family connections, but over the course of his historical studies and diplomatic career, became convinced that a gross injustice was being perpetrated against the Armenians through the denialist policies of the Turkish Government and the U.S. Government’s tacit acceptance of them. He decided to take a measured public stand, but then paid for his “heresy” by being dismissed from his post and forced into early retirement, although not without a fight over the issue in the U.S. Congress.
Over the course of his thirty-five-year career, Ambassador Evans served with distinction in diplomatic posts in Tehran, Prague, Moscow, Brussels (NATO), St. Petersburg and Washington, reaching the rank of Minister-Counselor. A native of Williamsburg, Virginia, educated at Yale and Columbia, he is an avid student of Russian history who devoted a sabbatical year to investigating the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the setting in which the tragic events of 1915 occurred.
Now retired from the Foreign Service, Mr. Evans makes his home in Washington with his wife, the former Donna Chamberlain.

Order Book:

London: Gomidas Institute, 2016,
xxx + 170 pages, maps, photos, index,
ISBN 978-1-909382-26-8, hardback,
Price: UK£22.00 / US$32.00
To order please contact books@gomidas.org

Iraqi Kurdistan: Galawezh literary festival in Sulaimani spotlights Armenian genocide

November 22, 2016 By administrator

galawezh-festival SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Galawezh, a literary festival in the city of Sulaimani that has endured for two decades, is focusing this year’s edition on literature from the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire.

The four-day festival, which ends Wednesday, has followed an annual tradition of focusing on the literature of a particular country, often with links to Kurdistan.

This year’s pick, Armenia, is a nation divided by language and culture but united in a common past of genocidal campaigns, mirroring the Kurds’ own recent history.

The Armenian Genocide of the 20th century led to the death of about 1.5 million people at the hands of the then Turkish Ottoman Empire.

The Kurdish Genocide, on the other hand, was committed at the hands of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, under his so-called Anfal campaign. At least 182,000 Kurds, notably in rural areas, were killed under the systematic military campaign to wipe out a whole nation.

Source: rudaw.com

Istanbul: Hamidian massacres and Van, Mehmet Polatel, PhD candidate

November 22, 2016 By administrator

Mehmet Polatel. Photo credit: Berge Arabian

Mehmet Polatel, PhD candidate in Boğaziçi University, gave a presentation titled as “Demographic and Socioeconomic Outcomes of Hamidian Massacres in Van” in “The Social, Cultural and Economic History of Van and the Region” conference organized by Hrant Dink Foundation. We talked to Polatel focusing on his presentation.

Historical sources define Van and the region as an area where Armenian people was shaped. Given the current population of Van, what do you think about the economic and cultural outcomes of this change?

Given the historical sources, Armenians and Kurds constituted the majority of the population in and around Van. A centralization movement started in Ottoman Empire especially with the Edict of Gülhane and this development brought about major changes in eastern provinces including Van. In 1840s, emirates had been the dominant system of government in the region. The central government dissolved that system but failed to replace it with the central authority, leading to a chaotic atmosphere. In many regions, the ashirats started to fight for regional dominance and sheiks became more powerful. With this process, a similar chaotic atmosphere also emerged in Van. Starting from the second half of 19th century, villagers had been suffering from these developments. Fron 1860s onward, Armenian villagers had been filing complaints to the patriarch about the oppression and plunders by aghas and begs. The patriarchate tried to solve these problems, but failed. With the reform decision made in Berlin Congress in 1878, the nature of the problem started to change; population and demographic distribution became an important concern for the central government. In this process, the central government started to develop policies in order to increase the Muslim population in 6 provinces including Van, which were densely populated by Armenians. An order about these polices was sent in 1889. That order wasn’t followed, so they sent another one with the intention of placing Caucasian Muslim immigrants into Erzurum, Van and Hakkari. The formation of Hamidian regiments and the massacres in 1894-1897 caused changes in population and demographic structure. In Van, almost 10,000 Armenian were forced to immigrate and around 10,000 Armenians were killed. Later, there had been genocide, resistance and occupation and a demographic and socioeconomic reshaping process took place. However, we cannot understand the current situation of Van only with these processes, though they played an important part in the transformation of Van.

Some Kurdish political movements include Lake Van and the region in the Kurdistan maps. Is it correct to draw such maps only considering the current demographic structure?

Maps have an important function in terms of imagination of the identities. We see that maps and names of the places have an important role in the struggles for the territories, which different groups have been claiming since 19th century. Thus, we can say that each political movement expresses its own geographical imagination in the maps they draw. This can be seen in the maps that have been drawn by Armenian and Kurdish political movements. This is nothing new; it has been discussed since the late 19th century on an intellectual and political level. So, this is the reason why we see Lake Van and the region are included in different maps with different names.

How did the ethnic cleansing carried out by Hamidian regiments affect the demographic structure of Van?

The massive violence carried out by the regiments in the region and the feeling of insecurity that lingered in Van for a long time had a deep impact on the life in Van. There are 3 factors that affected the demographic structure in this process: murders, migration and population settlement. During this period, Armenians migrated to Iran, Russia and different regions of Ottoman Empire. We know that there were plans for placing Muslim immigrants into those places and local authorities provided information as to where those Muslims could be settled. During Hamidian period, especially after 1894-97 massacres, important developments took place that affected the demographic structure of Van. However, the historians are yet to determine the exact numbers. The more archive documents we have, the more we will find out.

Today, trading activities with Iran is an important factor that determines the economic life in Van. How was trade in Van in the past? What was the most important factor determining the economy?

Since Van is a border province, the trade with Iran has always been important for economy. The ashirats reaching to both countries had important parts in the trade. When we look at the products that were produced in Van and sold outside Van, we can say that tobacco was an important product. We should note that small cattle trade was also important in terms of the socioeconomic life in Van. We see that the stocks raised in Van were sold to different regions of the empire, especially to Aleppo. Also, the animals that were brought to Van from Iran had been sold in other regions. Thus, it can be said that Van was an important transit point in animal trade. Agricultural production was also important. In addition to grains, flax seed was also raised in small amounts. Also, in Şatak district, there was shawl manufacturing. These products were sold in Van and exported in small quantities.

Source: Agos.com.tr

Egypt Prepares to Include #ArmenianGenocide Resolution in Agenda

November 19, 2016 By administrator

Egyptian Parliament (Photo: AFP)

CAIRO, Egypt (Armenpress)—The Parliament of Egypt is preparing to include the resolution on condemning the Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey in its agenda.

Head of the Armenian National Committee of Egypt Armen Mazlumyan said that Egyptian MP Mustafa Pakri mentioned the inclusion of the resolution during a meeting with a European delegation.

“Mustafa Pakri briefed the members of the delegation on the stance of the Egyptian Parliament regarding the Armenian Genocide, affirming that they are preparing to present the resolution on condemning the massacres by Turkey to voting. He confirmed that it is a “shame stigma” for Turkey and all other governments must also condemn that inhumane massacre” said Mazlumyan.

Pakri said they initiated a petition and 337 lawmakers approved the initiative on recognizing and condemning the Armenian Genocide – expressing confidence that the voting will be done in favor of the resolution. The Egyptian lawmaker also condemned the stance of Arab states regarding the Armenian Genocide, mentioning that until now only Lebanon has recognized it.

Forbes: Armenian Genocide Denial Goes Viral: ‘The Promise’ And The IMDB

November 14, 2016 By administrator

(L-R) Actors Oscar Isaac, Charlotte Le Bon and Christian Bale attend the ‘The Promise’ premiere during the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2016 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

By Stefan Ihrig,

Dr. Ihrig is an author and professor in history at the University of Haifa.

Writing this is dangerous: Speaking out on the Armenian Genocide means taking a huge risk. At the very least, it will be an exhausting experience, getting harassed online, trolled, threatened, down-rated on Amazon and publicly vilified. Until now, this was true mainly for individuals—academics, artists and activists. Now, it seems to apply to Hollywood movies, too. The Armenian Genocide remains one of the most controversial topics of 20th-century history and, even after its centennial, there is little reason to believe that controversy will come to an end and that some sort of consensus will come into being any time soon. Quite the opposite. Just in the last weeks, Turkey left the European Union’s cultural program in protest over a piece honoring the victims of the genocide by the Dresden Symphonic Orchestra which was sponsored by the program. Most recently, Turkey prevented a concert—again the very same piece—at the German Consulate in Istanbul. And now, we are in the middle of the next anti-Armenian campaign. This time its object is a Hollywood movie, The Promise, an epic focusing on the Armenian Genocide, starring amongst others Christian Bale. Yet, this time it might actually backfire and go another way.

All this has a long tradition. Eighty years ago the Turkish government forced Hollywood to drop a movie project based on The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, then a best-selling novel on the Armenian Genocide by German-language author, Jew and outspoken Hitler opponent Franz Werfel. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, originally written as a warning against Hitler through the prism of the Armenian Genocide, never saw the silver screen. Such a movie could have also raised awareness of the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time and later of the ongoing Holocaust. It could have shaped the “narrative” of the struggle against Hitler. Many have since been interested to finally turn the novel into a major production, most recently, for example, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone, but Turkish opposition and obstruction seemed insurmountable.

Much seemed to have changed in the last years, especially in the centennial last year. A whole barrage of new publications, academic and non-academic, add to recent milestone publications by the great historians of the Armenian Genocide, such as Raymond Kevorkian, Taner Akcam and Ronald Grigor Suny. Academic conferences were held all over the world. It was not without reason that, at all the conferences on the Armenian Genocide in Israel last year—at the Open University, at the Hebrew University, or at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute—participants and organizers made a point to talk about past efforts to put on a conference about the Armenian Genocide and how these had been thwarted by intervention of the Turkish government. Israel was a prized battleground in the conflict over acceptance and denial. Hollywood was and is another.

And while a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. One sure indicator is the lack of reviews these many new, well-written and well-researched books that appeared last year have received in the mainstream media outlets in the Western world. Furthermore, even a rudimentary survey of last year’s press coverage of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide shows that it were mainly authors of Armenian descent who spoke out for the Armenians and their story. Despite a series of resolutions by various European national parliament recognizing the Armenian Genocide, most of the public opinion-makers remain silent. This applies not only to journalists but also, for example, historians writing the big histories of the 20th century or World War I. It is thus not surprising that the press coverage of The Promise betrays the fact that the Armenian Genocide is still perceived as a “new” and relatively unknown topic to the public at large.

The Turkish government has constructed a very solid and relatively successful wall of enforced silence, blocking attempts not only to acknowledge, but even to discuss the topic through various forms of intimidation. Armenian Genocide denial must be counted as one of the most successful lobbying campaigns of the last 100 years when it comes to influencing our understanding of the past. Even if methods of intervention have changed, Turkish denialism is not a thing of the past. It is less often direct intervention by the government or the embassy, but rather a general atmosphere of intimidation, fear and enforced silence. One can only imagine what the threatened repercussions for media companies are—papers, networks and movie distributors—but we know that they exist and are very real. What is also real and tangible is the instant slandering, the bullying reflex of an amorphous body of Turkish nationalists and denialists who will use social media to attack people who speak out.

The Promise made it further than the past grand projects—mainly because it was independently financed. It is one of the most expensive independent movies ever. It has been actually made and seems to have made it. Well, almost: It still has to take a crucial hurdle. It still lacks distributors. And it is here that Turkish intimidation, threat of boycott and retaliation strikes. The movie was screened in September at the Toronto International Film Festival to rather small-sized audiences. Like any movie of note, it has its IMDB entry ready where you can find all the information on the movie and where people can rate the film from one star to ten. And here this movie, for all intents and purposes is not yet available to the public, has become something of an online sensation, or rather an online battlefield. Over the last weeks it has attracted over 91,000 votes, largely split between ten- and one-star votes. The majority, over 57,000, are one-star votes. This is an obvious campaign to downrate the movie which then triggered pro-Armenian voting. We are witnessing yet another anti-Armenian denialist campaign playing out abroad, far away from Turkey, in open, democratic societies. While it is not clear who is orchestrating the campaign, it has to be assumed that, as with other campaigns, connections go back to the Turkish government and/or nationalist groups.

This seems to be something new. Armenian Genocide denialism has gone through various phases of development in the last decades. It has now fully endorsed, it appears, post-modern lingo, and often one finds pieces talking simply about “stories” and “discourses” where in the past facts and archival documents reigned supreme. If this was the post-modern turn of Armenian Genocide denial, we are witnessing now the social media turn of the phenomenon. Denialism has entered the age of Twitter and online mob-rule. And, unfortunately, quite successfully so.

But what do over 91,000 votes on IMDB really tell us? Who votes when, how many actual people are behind it, and thus how representative is it? And for what exactly? Just as Trump’s presidential campaign can tell us a lot about the future of politics—say, for example, about the role of online bullying, social media message policy, and mobilizing hardcore supporters—so the IMDB hype surrounding the The Promise can tell us something about highly fragmented and mobilizable societies as well as, in many ways, radical groups mainly existing as such groups only in the universe of social media (for now). Until we understand this better and are more careful in falling into the traps of social media polls, likes and reviews, more than 91,000 votes make for fine advertisement and should help the movie secure good distribution so that we, and all those over 32,000 who voted for it, can actually see the movie. Few movies have ever experienced such a pre-release buzz on IMDB. That much is clear. Thank you, denialists.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/11/14/genocide-denial-goes-viral-the-promise-and-the-imdb/#546557133ca7

The life of Rakel Dink, FROM A VILLAGE WITH NO CHAIRS TO LEADING A FOUNDATION

November 12, 2016 By administrator

Board director of the Hrant Dink Foundation: “Nothing can force us to forget”

The life of Rakel Dink, widow of the late Turkish journalist and founder of the Agos newspaper Hrant Dink, has been continuously shaped by the past 100 years of Armenians’ history in the Ottoman Empire and present-day Turkey.

Rakel Dink was born in 1959 in an Armenian family in Silopi (southeastern Turkey), close to the borders with Iraq and Syria. Her grandfather, Vartan, was a native of Van. Fleeing the Armenian Genocide, Vartan resettled his family on the slopes of Mt. Joudi in the Şirnak Province in southeastern Anatolia. To survive, the family was forced to hide in a mountain grotto. “They say such a cave didn’t exist, but that God opened it up for us. That’s the story. They lived there for a long time,” says Rakel, recounting a family legend passed down through generations.

“In 1915, while in hiding, my grandmother’s sister had a child. She couldn’t stop the child from crying during that dangerous time. The mother-in-law took the child’s hand to stop the crying, so that the family wouldn’t be discovered, and…I can’t say the word. The child was lost,” Rakel remembers the horrific decisions the family was forced to make to survive.

Rakel’s father Siyament Yağbasan and mother Delal had six children. Their second, Rakel, was just eight years old when her mother passed away. Rakel’s father remarried and had seven more children. The family spoke only Kurdish and was mainly engaged in farming.

When Rakel was eight and a half years old, a group of clergy visited her village at the behest of Constantinople Patriarch Archbishop Shnork Kaloustian. At the time, Christian clergy from Istanbul traveled throughout Anatolia looking for Armenians and other Christians who survived the Genocide. Hrant Güzelyan and Orhan Younkesh, representatives of the Armenian Evangelical Church, took several groups of Armenian children back to Istanbul in order to give them an education. Rakel Dink and her two brothers were in the second group of kids. “We got to Bolis in order to learn Armenian, to read and write. There was no school near our village. No one knew how to read,” Rakel remembers. The new arrivals were housed at the Tuzla camp for Armenian children (Camp Armen), just outside Istanbul.

Istanbul: Cerrah blamed Hrant Dink: Why didn’t he ask for protection?

November 12, 2016 By administrator

Answering the questions of lawyers, Celalettin Cerrah blamed Hrant Dink: “Why didn’t he ask for protection?”

Dink family’s lawyer Hakan Bakırcıoğlu asked Cerrah whether he knew about the hearings in Şişli Courthouse, which made Dink a target. Bakırcıoğlu stated that the criminal complaint against Dink on charge of insulting Turkish nation was filed by Avni Usta, an official from Istanbul Security Directorate.

Cerrah said that he was very busy as he was the chief and stated that he heard the staff talking about the measures that were taken around the courthouse.

Lawyer Sebu Aslangil said that he was attacked in the courthouse, while Hrant Dink was with him.

Cerrah asked: “Haven’t you warned him? I know. They said that we should provide protection to Dink, but he didn’t accept it. Why?”

Yılmazer: the prime minister directed me

Ali Fuat Yılmazer also spoke in the hearing. He said that he wanted to inform Cerrah, but he didn’t listened to what he had to say. “Since he didn’t give me any direction, the prime minister directed me. Then we discovered the part that gendarmerie forces played in the murder. Now Engin Dinç says that they discovered it, but it was us. We just didn’t start a legal process. Engin Dinç started to talk about these issue after July 15, but we have been knowing it since the beginning.”

US congressman says Trump has no relevant information on Armenian Genocide

November 12, 2016 By administrator

armenian-genocide Jim Costa, a State of California Democratic Party member of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, told the Voice of America Armenian service that he does not believe that President-elect Donald Trump has relevant information on Armenian Genocide, and we need to see whom he will appoint as the new US Secretary of State.

To note, Congressman Costa was re-elected in Tuesday’s elections.

When asked whether Armenian Genocide recognition at the level of the US President is possible during Trump’s term in office, he responded that the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues should raise this matter sooner or later.

As per Jim Costa, it is very important as to what US foreign policy team Trump will select.

The congressman, for his part, pledged to continue the ongoing efforts—together with his colleagues in the US Congress—toward recognition of Armenian Genocide, deepening of US-Armenia relations, and resolving matters with respect to several other important issues for Armenia.