Ladies and Gentlemen,

Lately, in my capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, I have found myself addressing a wide variety of audiences across several continents. But today, the opportunity to speak to you is unique. I am quite aware that the time and the place of this brief statement carry meanings that are particularly significant to me, and to my country. The convergence of several factors is too obvious, too critical to be dismissed simply as coincidences.

It is here, in Massachusetts, at the Fletcher School where I learned about diplomacy and the conduct of international relations, without realizing - who could, at the time- that one day, I would be called upon to manage the foreign affairs of a new, emancipated, independent, Armenian Republic.

It was also the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that first welcomed the bedraggled Armenian victims of the Ottoman massacres of the 1890s, exactly one hundred or so years ago.

The Armenian Diaspora in the United States was born here too, in this State, where the despair of the persecuted was alleviated by the generosity of this land and where the successive waves of survivors came to implant themselves as citizens of Worcester, Springfield and Watertown, blending their hopes and dreams with those others who have come to escape famines, discrimination, and religious intolerance from the four corners of a Europe struggling with its own demons.

It is also not a coincidence that today, tomorrow to be exact, is the symbolic anniversary of the defining event of modern Armenian history, the Genocide of 1915. When the massacres of the 1890s were being perpetrated, the term Genocide was not even invented yet. It took the exterminating evil of 1915 to bring the word to its current use.

Allow me to suggest for a moment, that this is a distinction my generation and the generation of our fathers would have gladly done without.

Unfortunately, at the very end of this century, neither the word nor the practice of Genocide has vanished by disuse. True, there have been many attempts to trivialize the notion of genocide, to relativize it, as well as to contest it by misuse or unscrupulous abuse.

Today, at this very moment, crimes against entire peoples are still being committed for no other reason than the urge to solve political problems by the destruction of innocent populations asserting their claims to their ancestral lands.

This has not been a good century. Its record of man's inhumanity to men has persisted in challenging our claims to enlightenment, modernity, technological progress, economic development and the growing legitimation of democratic institutions and the respect for human rights. The list of gruesome excesses to eradicate or destroy people is long and painful.

And yet after all the evidence, all the undeniable horrors, the denial of the acts continues to persist: Denial of the acts and refusal to accept responsibility; Denial to identify the perpetrators and set the historical record straight; Refusal to bring the guilty to justice; Denial to restore the memory and banish the ghosts that haunt the victims and their descendants.

We Armenians, at the end of this century, a century that began with our virtual and deliberate annihilation, we continue to ask, at the very least, that our experiences be authenticated. After all, there are instances where nations have founded their spiritual and moral resurrection on exorcizing their guilt, on the search for validation through truth, on facing their own past squarely. Redemption and reconciliation without truth will remain forever elusive.

It is often said that a slavish attachment to history and an unreconstructed replay of historical memory are incapacitating traits afflicting certain peoples. It is said that these traits must be overcome if peaceful progress is to be achieved between former enemies or currently hostile and feuding neighbors. There is a certain inequity in the way certain mature democracies in Europe and elsewhere refer to these peoples as trapped by their history, as if, a long memory were a form of congenital incapacitation.

No nation can escape its history entirely, it can only transcend it. But to transcend it, two conditions must prevail. One, a country must confront its history, both internally and in relation to others. Second, those others, outside its borders, who as participants and actors have shaped that history, they must also jointly confront theirs. There is no national history in a vacuum. For France and Germany, England and France, the U.S. and Japan, in order to transcend their histories of conflict, war and hatred, they had to transcend the past together. This process is not yet completed in many parts of Europe. In still other parts, the process hasn't even begun.

I would like to take this opportunity today, at a time when this century begun with massive crimes of continuing implications, comes to a close, to call upon Turkey to agree to a dialogue, with Armenia on what is perhaps the greatest historic and psychological stumbling bloc to normal relations between our two nations. But given Turkey's record of denial, it bears the responsibility to demonstrate a willingness to honestly confront the past in order to confidently chart the future.

A recent press report made me reflect once more on our struggle to see justice prevail, and to have the world recognize our calamity for what it was: a planned Genocide. In this report "An Australian historian, who is the director of the Adelaide Institute in Australia was arrested in Mannheim, Germany, and charged with incitement for expressing doubts about the Holocaust. His statements appeared in the Institute's web site and in its newsletters. Friedrich Toben will face up to five years in prison if he is convicted."

Yes, this dispatch makes us wonder. We wonder about all those academic historians, comfortably settled in some of the great universities of this country, making a career by falsifying history. How differently Germany handles the cynical doubters of its crimes from the way in which Turkey, through fame and fortune, seduces its acolytes to counterfeit history. Endowed chairs from coast to coast lend legitimacy to this orchestrated effort to rewrite our memories, exonerate the guilty, and demonize the victims.

However, we shall not despair and we will continue to trust the judgement and integrity of the people's representatives of the great democracies. We turn to you, custodians of the great tradition of this August House, to defend truth, to assert it, and to see that justice is done.

But I have not come here to talk only about the past and its restitution by rightful recognition. Throughout its history, this House has been a place of deliberation, of vision and ambitious imagination. A place where great and fundamental principles have seen the light of day and become building blocks of an enduring tradition of liberty, representative democracy, and a multi-ethnic commonwealth.

As Armenia confronts today the most pressing issues of its present and its near future, it looks at this State and this House for inspiration and for help. A young republic in transition from a long nightmare of totalitarian single party state, to an emergent democratic, free market, open society, Armenia must simultaneously, consolidate its state structures, move its economy forward and resolve the Karabagh conflict. It must do all three at the same time for they are in fact interdependent.

First and foremost Armenia must ensure that the Armenian population of Karabagh continues to enjoy its security within its own lands. Our recent memories of vulnerability and insecurity make it impossible for any Armenian, anywhere, to accept anything less than the inalienable right of the people of Karabagh, not to be subjugated, not to be dominated, and not to be subordinate. Armenia understands this and is actively engaged in pursuing, in every possible forum, a resolution of the conflict with Azerbaijan, that would achieve peace without endangering the hard won and legitimate rights of our people to live in secure dignity and freedom.

Here in Massachusetts, dignity, security and freedom do not need to be defended as legitimate aspirations. You have been pioneers. Allow us to strive to settle for nothing less.

Our democracy and future prosperity count on a time when through peace, the Caucasus fulfils its promise as a region of neighborly cooperation and economic growth. At this moment, Armenia, a landlocked country, is blockaded and isolated by old enemies, and new. The world community must see, that without equitable and evenhanded mediation, Armenia cannot be forced to choose, between its security and its prosperity, when the regional framework seems to be conceived in terms of the lop-sided geopolitics of petroleum.

Without regional political stability, regional economic prospects for all the countries of the Caucasus will remain rocky. And without satisfying the security and aspirations of the people of the region, there cannot be political stability.

It is ironic how State Houses and Congress seem more attuned to this reality than the executive branch, who continues to pursue realpolitik schemes that ignore the founding principles of this great democracy. Respect for human rights derives its significance from the moral authority that attaches to its universality in application.

The rights of some cannot be made more important than the rights of others. Without legitimacy, political solutions will continuously require heavy investments in control mechanisms that cannot be forever sustained.

The events in Europe in the last few weeks have a lot to teach us all. The war in Kosovo, for that is what it is, is not something anyone can ignore, or avoid reflecting on. We Armenians, have particularly singular reflections, as we witness those events. The plight of suffering civilians in forced exodus from their homes brings back too many memories. We empathize, for we see in those huddled and frightened masses images of our grandparents, brutalized under the burning sun of the endless Syrian deserts instead of the snowy hills in Kosovo. Yes, we empathize, but not without some bitterness. Does the conscience of the world need CNN to be moved?

Why were the eyewitness accounts of diplomats and missionaries not sufficient to make the great powers resist barbarism? Why is it, that even today, we deploy our cameras and reporters so selectively? How can we justify this double and adjustable multiple standards? How can we justify our claim to humanitarian solidarity and disinterested determination to stop oppression, when we remain blind to equal horrors in the past, and those going on in the present, where some perpetrators seem to enjoy a certain immunity from the prying eyes of self-appointed guardians of righteousness.

It is often said that only the naive and innocent look for ethics in affairs of the state. Let me boldly state here, that perhaps the dismissal of the ethical is itself a very shortsighted, self-inflicted blind spot. It is becoming increasingly difficult to hide behind reasons of state in a world in which images of human beings slaughtered, create an instantaneous transparency of method and consequences. Media managers and spindoctors can continue to perfect their tools, but they can never silence forever those, who are courageous enough to speak for and defend human rights. Those inalienable rights founded on self evident truths that continue to reverberate in this House and across this Land.

Thank you.