The following letter was submitted to the New York Times.

Dear Editor:
Referring to the article, "House vote averted on Turks' genocide," in the New York Times, I have only one thing to say to J. Hastert, Speaker of the House: "A pox on both your houses." (*) To President Clinton who sent a letter to Hastert the last minute to withdraw the resolution because it could "inflame our relations with Turkey," I ask, "Which country needs the other more, America or Turkey?"

The Armenian people have been working for decades to bring this resolution to a vote in the House. Turkey refuses to acknowledge that the Genocide took place even though we have mass graves, film reels, and eyewitness survivors to prove that 1.5 million Armenians did not just disappear. Ask any Armenian and he has a story to tell about one of his relatives who were killed at that time.

First, the men were rounded up and murdered. My grandfather was one of these men. Then the women and children were forced to march into the desert for over a hundred miles with only the clothes on their backs. My stepmother was a young girl of 13 and she and her brother were the only survivors in her family. Mothers with babies left them under a tree, hoping a kind Turkish woman would feel pity and take them home. Very few survived.

Armenians are an intelligent, hard-working, law-abiding people and have fared well in America. We have notable Armenians in the fields of business, the arts, sports, and sciences. Can we as Americans feel comfortable with ourselves that we send our boys to distant lands for years on peacekeeping missions and yet we will not acknowledge the Armenian Genocide that took place even though it was duly reported in detail by our own Ambassador Henry Morgenthau?

Anne Nersesian
Williamsburg, VA

*Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare