PanARMENIAN.Net – Representative Dina Titus (D-NV) is collecting the signatures of her U.S. House colleagues on a letter asking the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla D. Hayden, to correct the outdated and inaccurate Armenian Massacres subject heading to Armenian Genocide in the wake of last year’s near-unanimous passage of the Congressional Armenian Genocide resolution, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).
In the letter, legislators share with Dr. Hayden that they are writing “to ask that the Library of Congress, an agency of the legislative branch and the research arm of the U.S. Congress, use the historically accurate term “Armenian Genocide” in its subject heading for books and other materials regarding the Ottoman Empire’s intentional, systematic, and deliberate mass murder, deportation, and exile of more than one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.”
In June, the Library of Congress put in writing its refusal to correct its outdated “Armenian Massacres” subject heading to “Armenian Genocide” in the wake of last year’s Congressional passage of Armenian Genocide legislation (H.Res.296 and S.Res.150). The library justified its refusal to make this correction because it “defers to the President and the State Department on the terminology and refrains from using the word genocide in the official subject heading.”
The Titus letter, notes that “while we understand the Library of Congress has said it defers to the president and State Department on terminology, we do not believe that determinations of fact by an agency of the legislative branch should be made for political reasons or under pressure from foreign governments.”
The letter makes the case that: “the current subject heading, “Armenian Massacres,” is outdated, having been created before Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide and prior to the 1948 adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” It goes on to argue that “the existing heading is also inconsistent with the broad, near-universal academic consensus recognizing the Armenian Genocide as a clear case of genocide as reflected in numerous resolutions, letters, and statements by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.”
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