SYSTEM OF A DOWN TALKS D.C. ARMENIAN TRIP

(VIDEO) System Of A Down made their way down to Washington D.C. to demonstrate and get the ears of Congress for Armenian Genocide recognition. Were they successful?

***note: sound quality of bites is questionable. Use at your own discretionrnrnSystem Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian and drummer John Dolmayan made their way down to Washington D.C. to try to push the next step through in their effort to recognize the Armenian Genocide. The duo embarked on a three day trip in hopes of swaying Speaker Of The House Dennis Hastert to allow a vote on the U.S. officially recognizing the atrocities committed against Tankian’s ancestors as genocide.

System was represented and joined a demonstration outside of the Turkish Embassy, hosted a screening of Screamers, a documentary film detailing their Armenian Genocide recognition efforts, and met with members of Congress to plead their case. Tankian was asked about visiting DC and joining with the Armenian National Committee of America and Armenian Youth Federation for the annual demonstration.

“Um, well the rally goes on every year, and it’s not… We can’t really set up the rally community. There’s a rally every year and we just decided to join. We figured that instead of having the Souls show in L.A., which we do every year to raise funds and get recognition for the genocide instead of doing it locally in L.A., which we’ve done and been doing for many years. We thought it would be rendundant to continue doing the same thing. So we decided to come to D.C. and partake in the activities in recognition here and try to appeal to Dennis Hastert to try to bring up resolutions for a house vote.”

Tankian and Dolmayan started their campaign on April 24, which is the day officially recognized as the day marking the World War 1 genocide. He talked about the reason the band cancelled the Souls show for this year.

“We’ve been doing that for a number of years and the press that we had been getting from it has mostly been mostly music press and local press. People in Los Angeles pretty much know about the Armenian Genocide because there’s a huge Armenian population there and many rallies and efforts have been going on for years. People in California are pretty aware of the situation, and we thought we should just bring it to D.C.”

All the members of System Of A Down are of Armenian decent, and their goal is official U.S. recognition of Turkey’s destruction of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.