"NEVER AGAIN" - 60th ANNIVERSAY OF JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

Los Angeles:

HUNDREDS MARK 60th ANNIVERSAY OF JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT
In Solidarity with Arab-Americans, Activists Vow "Never Again"

by Jon Hillson

LOS ANGELES, Feb 22 (NY Transfer)--There was standing room only at
the George and Sakaye Aratani Central Hall of the prestigious
Japanese American National Museum here, where more than 300 people
gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, issued
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The order resulted in the
incarceration of 120,000 U.S. residents and citizens of Japanese
origin in U.S. concentration camps for the bulk of World War II.

The infamous declaration took effect on February 19, 1942. It was
opposed by Japanese-American organizations and a tiny handful of
political groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the
American Friends Service Committee and the Socialist Workers Party,
whose central leaders months earlier had been the first convicted
under provisions of the "anti-subversive" Smith Act.

The co-optation by the Roosevelt administration of liberal and
"progressive" leadership, trade-union officialdom and the remainder
of the left into the war drive sealed the isolation of Japanese
Americans as they were boarded with substanial protest on trains to
harsh internment facilities in Arkansas, California, Texas and
Wyoming.

The annual Day of Remembrance, observed in Japanese American
communities across the United States, was entitled in Los Angeles,
"Without Due Process: From Japanese American Internment to Arab
American and Muslim Detention." The program was infused with focused
indignation over Washington's continued refusal to redress the
outstanding grievances of surviving camp internees, and quiet
outrage over federal and local police attacks targeting Arab
immigrants and citizens of Middle Eastern ancestry. This combination
created an atmosphere of unmistakable moral power, informing the
traditional event with particular relevance.

An initiative by the September 11 Committee of Nikkei for Civil
Rights & Redress (NCRR), to deepen solidarity with Arab American and
Muslim communities in the face of Washington's assaults on the Bill
of Rights, helped bear the fruit of the dignified protest February 16
in the heart of Little Tokyo. Attendance at the commemoration bridged
generations and nationalities in the common cause of recollection of
the past and vigilance in the present.

The NCRR, the Japanese American Citizens League Pacific Southwest
Regional District and the Museum sponsored the event. Co-hosts Tritia
Toyota and Chistina Shigemura described continuing community efforts
to win redress for hundreds of wartime internees denied benefits by
the U.S. government because they were born after the cut-off date for
payments -- January 20, 1945. These victims of the camps were born
shortly after internment ended on December 17, 1944.

Many of these children were traumatized by the stigma attached to
their just-freed parents, who lost jobs, property and rights during
the war and who suffered as targets of racist victimization for years
after their release.

A second focus of the ongoing campaign aims to secure recognition of
the status of survivors of the internment among more than 2,200
Japanese Latin Americans, who were seized on U.S. orders by the
governments of 12 Latin American countries where they lived, and
transferred to camps in the United States. More than 1,200 men, women
and children were taken from Peru. Most ended up in the Crystal City,
Texas concentration camp.

Washington cruelly used hundreds of these wartime "desaparacidos" as
hostages, forcing them to go to Japan in exchange for U.S. prisoners
of war. With the shuttering of the camps, Japanese Latin Americans
were designated as "illegal aliens" and deported or re-incarcerated.
Some waged long battles for legal residency and citizenship in a
fight that continues today.

Only Cuba maintained a local concentration camp. More than 400
male citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned on the Island of
Pines -- now the Isle of Youth -- for the duration of the war. This
brutalizing experience, which devastated communities and divided
families, was finally and fully overcome in 1959 with the defeat of
the Batista regime. Japanese-Cubans overwhelmingly supported the
insurrectionary war and the revolutionary government it brought to
power. Over the past two years, the Los Angeles NCRR has developed
warm relations with the Japanese-Cuban community.

The goals of the unfinished fight for redress are embedded in
legislation introduced by Senator Daniel Inoye (D-Hawaii), a camp
internee, and Representative Xavier Beccera (D-CA), along with
wording to release $45 million earmarked for public education on the
internment, authorized in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

In it, a token one-time benefit of $20,000 was issued to 80,000 camp
survivors, along with a formal apology, but the funds for public
education have never been disbursed.

This political undertaking is not simply about securing a measure of
justice, but also about retaining the "history of our community,"
Christina Shegimura noted.

 
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nytrc-02.23.02-07:50:45-25921