WASHINGTON. – US Ambassador to Armenia nominee John Heffern in his testimony during the hearings in U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations refused to reference as genocide the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.

In response to the New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez question: “Do you agree that there were mass killings, ethnic cleansing and forced deportation of over one and a half million Armenians during the period that the Ottoman Empire existed?” Heffern replied positively.

“The massacres and the forced deportations leading to the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians is acknowledged and recognized by President Obama, and, yes, I believe it as well,” said John Heffern.

Menendez also noted that Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that the U.S. has both signed and ratified states that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such, (a) Killing members of the group, (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

“Those are [Articles of] a Convention for which we, the United States, has signed. Would not the facts that you acknowledged in your opening statement during period of 1915 to 1923 meet the definition of Article 2?” asked Senator Robert Menendez.

“You have accurately described Article two, the definition of genocide in the Convention, so, yes to that part of the question and yes to the facts that were in my statement and that you have repeated, but the characterization of those events is a policy decision that is made by the President of the United States and that policy is annunciated in his April 24 Remembrance Day statement,” replied the nominee of the President Obama to the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia.

Heffern noted that the U.S. President Obama has recognized and deplored the “horrific events that took place in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.” He reminded that Obama has publicly called “the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians at this time one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century” and urged Turkey and Armenia to “work through their painful history to achieve a full, frank, and just acknowledgement of the facts.”

“If confirmed, I will do my best to fulfill the president’s vision,” he added.

Senator Robert Menendez stressed that he finds it “very difficult to be sending diplomats of the United States to a country in which they will go to a genocide commemoration, and yet never be able to use the word genocide.”

“This is a difficult, an inartful dance that we do. We have a State Department whose history full of dispatches cites the atrocities committed during this period of time, we have a Convention, which we signed onto as a signatory that clearly defines these acts as genocide, we have a historical knowledge of the facts, which we accept that would amount to genocide, but we are unwilling to reference it as genocide. If we cannot accept the past, we cannot move forward,” said Menendez. “It is much more than a question of a word, it is everything that signifies our commitment to saying never again. And yet we cannot even acknowledge this fact, and we put diplomats in a position that is totally untanable.”