Letter to the new Prime Minister, The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP
The Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury
10 Downing Street
LONDON
SW1A 2AA

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing to share the good news - the good news for all those who believe that peace and reconciliation require acknowledgment of difficult and often bloody periods of world history.

The Armenian Genocide resolution (H. Res. 106) in the U.S. Congress reached an important milestone yesterday with the number of co-sponsors for the human rights measure growing to 218 – a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is another inevitable step towards recognition of the Armenian Genocide by the United States.

In this country, Parliamentary support for the recognition is steadily increasing and has reached unprecedented 144 signatures - 144 Members of Parliament who believe that "the killing of over a million Armenians in 1915 was an act of genocide; call upon the UK Government to recognise it as such; and believe that it would be in Turkey's long-term interests to do the same."

Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he defined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide; 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the "incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide" and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

Prime Minister, do not let the United Kingdom become one of the last members of the European Union to recognise the Armenian Genocide.

Yours sincerely,

E. Danielyan
For and on behalf of the Armenian Genocide Trust of Great Britain