[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 67 (Wednesday, April 25, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H3571-H3573]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GENOCIDE AWARENESS AND PREVENTION MONTH
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Missouri
(Mrs. Wagner) for 30 minutes.
General Leave
Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members
may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks
and to include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentlewoman from Missouri?
There was no objection.
Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in honor of Genocide Awareness and
Prevention Month. Today we remember the millions of victims of genocide
throughout history, and we recommit to working toward the day when
genocide and mass-atrocity crimes are not only inconceivable, Mr.
Speaker, but they are nonexistent.
April marks the commemorations of some of the worst genocides in
history, including the Holocaust and Rwandan, Cambodian, and Armenian
genocides. Time and again, senseless bloodshed has ended innocent lives
and fractured families and livelihoods.
My hometown, St. Louis, is home to the largest Bosnian community
outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This community has shaped what the
city looks and feels like. It has added great cultural diversity to the
city, immense intellectual capital, thriving small businesses, and a
strong religious presence.
Two decades ago, members of our Bosnian community were refugees. In
1995, Orthodox Serbs, under the command of General Ratko Mladic,
initiated a horrific ethnic cleansing campaign against majority Muslim
Bosniaks. The escalating bloodshed forced 130,000 Bosnian refugees to
seek new lives in the United States. Thousands were murdered in
Srebrenica. Today I wish to honor these brave men and women.
The resilience of our Bosnian neighbors has enriched our city, and
their courage inspires me. It has inspired me to seek change. Tomorrow
I am offering an amendment to the State Department Authorization Act of
2018 asking the administration to study countries at risk of genocide
and mass-atrocity crimes and craft training regimens for U.S. Foreign
Service officers.
Should this bill become law, America's diplomats will have the know-
how to respond to those conflicts on the ground and act before violence
spirals out of control. Most importantly, this amendment establishes
that the official policy of the United States of America is to regard
the prevention of genocide and atrocity crimes as a core national
security interest.
However, this is just one step in the right direction. The U.S.
Government must improve how it responds to conflicts. Last April, I
introduced the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act to
improve U.S. efforts to prevent mass-atrocity crimes, named after the
courageous Auschwitz survivor. The legislation honors the legacy of
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and his life work to fight evil around the
world.
Mr. Wiesel was just 15 years old when the Nazis deported him and his
family to Auschwitz. He was the only member of his family to survive.
Having witnessed the near total destruction of his people, he spent his
life defending the persecuted. In his honor, we fight to rectify
injustice and protect the most vulnerable in our society and across the
globe.
As Mr. Wiesel understood so well, the true horror of genocide is that
it is preventable, and the U.S. Government has the tools to effect real
change. The Elie Wiesel Act would affirm the mission of the United
States Atrocities Prevention Board and its work to coordinate
prevention and response efforts. It would also authorize the Complex
Crisis Fund to support agile, efficient responses to unforeseen crises
overseas.
This time, when America says ``never again,'' our actions will
reinforce our platitudes and our words. I thank the Chair, Mr. Speaker,
and I thank all of my colleagues who share in this fight.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr.
McGovern).
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the
gentlewoman from Missouri, for her leadership. I am honored to join her
and other distinguished colleagues this evening in recognition of
Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month.
Preventing genocide and mass atrocities is a moral imperative that
deserves to be at the very top of our priority list. Mass atrocities
are large-scale, deliberate attacks against civilian populations. They
include genocide but also crimes against humanity, war crimes, and
ethnic cleansing.
After the Holocaust--the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored
persecution and murder of 6 million Jews and members of other
persecuted groups by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1941
and 1945--people all around the world vowed to never again stand by in
the face of genocide; but since then, mass atrocities, including
genocide, have been committed in Indonesia, Cambodia, Guatemala, East
Timor, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, and South Sudan, among
other places. Hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered,
tortured, disappeared, or suffered sexual violence; and millions more
have been forced to flee with profound humanitarian, political, and
national security consequences.
I don't believe the world's failure to prevent atrocities is because
no one cares. In this era of instant communication powered by social
media, most people I meet have seen and passionately condemn the
ongoing atrocities in Syria and elsewhere. Nor is it because no one
knows what is happening. Many, many people warned us for years about
the potential for genocide against the Rohingya in Burma.
The problem is that we have not been very good at turning knowledge
and moral indignation into action to prevent a bad situation from
worsening. We must do better. We must do more. This year, in the Tom
Lantos Human Rights Commission, which I co-chair along with my
colleague Congressman Randy Hultgren, we are looking at the tools we
have as U.S. policymakers to prevent mass atrocities and asking how we
can strengthen them.
We are asking what it would mean to institutionalize an atrocity
prevention's lens so we don't wait until it is so late and the problem
is so big that all we can do is lament the immorality and the
inhumanity and then provide humanitarian aid to the victims and
survivors. As we undertake this effort, we know that there is a lot of
good work already underway in both Chambers of Congress and on both
sides of the aisle to find new ways forward.
One example is H.R. 3030, the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities
Prevention Act of 2017, led by Representative Ann Wagner and
cosponsored by both myself and Representative Hultgren. We also
recognize that government officials cannot do this work alone. We need
civil society, in all its diversity, to help us. We need community
associations, churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, and businesses to
take a stand against hate speech, to teach and live tolerance, to
document and denounce human rights violations, to open their hearts to
reconciliation based on justice. We need to get to the point where our
societies recognize and honor every person's innate human dignity.
And I want to take this opportunity to salute one of the many
organizations that are doing just this kind of work. STAND is a
student-led movement to end mass atrocities and genocide by organizing
and educating their peers and communities. I first met student leaders
of STAND in 2005 and 2006, when they were part of the national movement
that brought the genocide happening in Darfur, Sudan, to public
awareness. They were my teachers during that time.
Tonight, representatives of STAND are here listening to this debate.
They push us to do better, and I thank them for their commitment and
their vision.
Mr. Speaker, mass atrocities are human rights violations on a grand
scale. We must find new strategies to prevent them from happening and
more effective strategies to interrupt and stop them at the very
earliest stages, should they begin to unfold.
Mr. Speaker, all of us in this Chamber, all of us in this country,
need to do more, because I believe, if the United States of America
stands for anything, we stand for human rights. We need to be better.
We need to be more effective in preventing these mass atrocities and
these genocides.
[[Page H3572]]
So I am very proud to stand with my colleagues in these efforts. I
want to thank the gentlewoman from Missouri for her incredible
leadership, and I am honored to participate in this Special Order with
her.
Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts
(Mr. McGovern) for his outstanding words and his support, his support
and that of Representative Randy Hultgren on sponsoring and
cosponsoring with me my piece of legislation, the Elie Wiesel Genocide
and Atrocities Prevention Act.
This truly is an issue that is not just about human rights and giving
voice to the voiceless and speaking for the most vulnerable in our
society; it is about human dignity across our globe.
{time} 1830
It is about the U.S. responding to these conflicts in the way that
only we can and should do and provide the kind of moral authority and
support to do so through both our Congress and through our foreign
service officers and others who are working across the globe. So I
thank the gentleman for his fine words.
I now yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Tenney).
Ms. TENNEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Ann Wagner for
yielding. She is a wonderful inspiration to me as a new Member.
I also want to thank Congressman McGovern for his comments.
This is really important that she is hosting tonight's Special Order
on genocide awareness and prevention.
During the month of April, we joined together to honor victims and
survivors to educate the public about genocide--it is hard to believe
it is happening in our time--and to advocate for the prevention of
future atrocities.
In the past 150 years, tens of millions of men, women, and children
have lost their lives during brutal genocides and mass atrocities.
Millions have been tortured, raped, and forced from their homes. Some
of the darkest moments in world history have occurred, oddly enough, in
the month of April.
In April 1933, the Nazi Party began its boycott of Jewish-owned
businesses. This marked the beginning of a campaign of hatred that led
to the murder of 6 million Jews.
My district is home to thousands of refugees from the former
Yugoslavia. I have a long history with Yugoslavia. I began my study of
the country of Yugoslavia in 1981 when I first participated as a
student, a college student from Colgate University, in a semester
abroad, and we traveled throughout the entire Yugoslavia and all the
different principalities and republics. It was a spectacular and
beautiful country, and it sparked a lifelong interest for me in this
region.
I completely fell in love with the country and was fascinated by the
people who were there who survived conquests, whether it was from the
Ottoman Empire to being part of so many other parts of human history.
They were also victims during the Nazi invasion, as well, during World
War II.
I had the lucky opportunity to graduate from college and work as a
foreign correspondent in the Press and Cultural Office of the former
Yugoslav Consulate in New York. I also worked, at that time, alongside
with ABC Sports during the Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo in 1984.
The war in Yugoslavia was a tragic saga in the history of human
experience, especially for me, with my long history and love of the
country and the people who inhabited this part of world.
I worked with people from the consulate, from all the republics and
autonomous provinces from the former Yugoslavia. It just seemed
unthinkable to me that this human genocide could occur in a region of
the world which had experienced many occupying forces due to its very
unique, very important geopolitical, strategic location in the world.
Yugoslavia was always known as the gateway between East and West, the
place where you could get from Europe through Yugoslavia to,
eventually, the Middle East along the Mediterranean. This region had
diverse culture, religion, and people from all parts of Europe and the
Middle East, and the world all united together for centuries, actually,
living alongside each other with different values. Certainly, they had
their differences.
But sadly, unfortunately, after all this history of unrest, the war
in Yugoslavia eventually elicited the worst in humankind and was
witness to one of the most horrific genocides in our generation against
Bosnian citizens.
To the Bosnian community, April, again, marks 26 years since the
beginning of the siege in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The horrific period of
violence lasted for over 3\1/2\ years and was the longest siege in
modern warfare. All told, over 10,000 people, including 1,500 children,
were killed in Sarajevo during the siege.
In 1995, the worst massacre within Europe since World War II took
place. The Srebrenica massacre killed more than 8,000 Bosnian boys and
men during the Bosnian War.
In addition to these horrific killings, more than 20,000 civilians
were expelled from the area. Many of these Bosnian refugees immigrated
to my region. We are thrilled to have them.
It is just worth noting that my son was actually a student in the
afterschool program at the Jewish Community Center in my area. The
Jewish Community Center was actually instrumental in helping to find
safe refuge in our community for these Bosnian Muslims who were
suffering from this unconscionable genocide and atrocities against
them.
I think it was the solidarity and the sympathy and the understanding,
the true understanding of genocide that our Jewish citizens recognized
in our region, and we are grateful to them. And we are also grateful to
the Bosnian community for the decision to have so many wonderful
Bosnian families visit our city and now remain as citizens. They
provided the same ingenuity and the entrepreneurship and the vibrancy
and the creativity that I remembered during my days of studying this
very special part of the world.
I am especially grateful to them for enabling me to sustain the bond
that developed between me, my family, who have all traveled to that
part of the world, and this amazing group of people for the past 37
years of my life. It has become almost a vocation for me, just my study
of Serbo-Croatian and my study of this region.
As we mark these tragedies of the past, we must not overlook what is
taking place in the present. I just want to mention a little bit about
my city, Utica, New York.
It has been recognized as one of the friendly cities to refugees. The
Utica City School District now has over 42 languages spoken, and so we
have a number of people coming from war-torn areas where, very
graciously and also very generously, our communities have accepted them
and provided them a home.
I want to just highlight one of the communities that is in our region
as well, and those are the people from Myanmar, where over 700,000
Rohingya people have fled the Rakhine State in the face of expulsions
and violent persecution at the hands of government forces.
In Syria, Bashar al-Assad's military butchers its own citizens and
uses chemical weapons without regard for international law.
Under this dark cloud of atrocities and massive human rights
violations, both present and past, I just want to join with my
colleagues today in remembering these and remembering to ensure that
these lessons are never forgotten, but more important, if we could only
make sure they are never repeated.
I sincerely thank my colleague, Congresswoman Ann Wagner, for her
great leadership on this issue, her tenacity and her courage and her
continued fight to try to help these people who are the most needy, who
have just been victimized in our society and across our country and our
world. I thank her for including me tonight.
It is very special for me to especially recognize the Bosnians. It
has been such a long part of my history, and my heart and my sympathy
go to these wonderful people who suffered unfairly.
I just want to say thank you again to Mrs. Wagner for her great
leadership on this issue.
Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her kind words.
The gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Tenney) is also a leader in this
cause and this effort that is really about, as we said, human dignity
and human rights across this world.
[[Page H3573]]
We want a day when no longer are these refugees suffering, whether it
is in Syria. On the day that President Macron addressed a joint session
here in this very Chamber, the President of the People's Republic of
France, that stood with the United States, along with the United
Kingdom, in the bombings against Syria that were targeted against those
who had been barrel-bombed and victimized and murdered by the Assad
regime in Syria.
We share a common bond with the Bosnian community. We both have very
large Bosnian communities, many of whom started out as refugees some 20
years ago. Now, as I said, the cultural diversity, the business, the
religious presence has been just wonderful to see flourish in a
district like Missouri's Second Congressional District, so I recognize
the common bond that we have there.
I thank Ms. Tenney for participating in this Special Order that goes
to the heart of genocide and mass atrocities across our globe. I know
that the people of Ms. Tenney's district in New York are also
appreciative of all she does there to represent them and those who are
the most vulnerable in our society, so I thank the gentlewoman from New
York.
I now yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot).
Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Missouri for
yielding.
It is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month, and the gentlewoman
from Missouri (Mrs. Wagner) has been a leader in speaking out on this
critical issue for many years now, and we appreciate her leadership on
that.
As a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I have had
the opportunity to advocate for global human rights issues for many
years. Tonight, I want to condemn a genocide that has been happening
before our eyes: the genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine State,
Burma.
Last September, the Burmese military began a so-called clearing
operation, allegedly in response to some insurgent attacks. In reality,
this was just an excuse for a massive and barbaric campaign to forcibly
remove the Rohingya from Burma altogether and erase their memory from
the Rakhine State once and for all, resulting in over 700,000 Rohingya,
many of whom are children, fleeing Burma for Bangladesh. This has
needlessly left Bangladesh and the world with one of the worst
humanitarian crises that the world faces today.
While these numbers are truly shocking, as we learn more about the
crimes committed by the Burmese military, there can be no doubt that
this is, in fact, genocide.
When the Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh, they told story after story
of the crimes that they had witnessed and that they had personally
suffered: widespread killings, mass graves, rapes, and other
unspeakable horrors and injuries. These atrocities have been confirmed
by many people who had no ax to grind here or anything, So this is
something that the world must see and must believe.
In addition, hundreds of villages have been burned and others have
been simply bulldozed in a clear attempt to prevent the Rohingya from
ever returning. Together, these heinous acts are a deliberate attempt
to irreparably harm the Rohingya. This is absolutely genocide.
Together with Mr. Engel and Mr. Crowley, our colleagues here in the
House, I have helped to lead the House's efforts to address this
crisis. With our passage of H. Con. Res 90, the House unequivocally
condemned the Burmese military's atrocious actions, but more serious
action is still needed.
Burma's constitution allows the Burmese military to control much of
the government, and civilian leadership has taken virtually no real
steps to address this violence. That is why I joined again with Mr.
Engel and Mr. Crowley to introduce the BURMA Act, which applies tough,
targeted sanctions on the individuals involved in leading this
genocide. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation and then,
ultimately, of course, to vote for it when the time comes.
As we remember the victims of all genocides this month, we must work
to adequately address one which is unfolding right before our eyes,
right before the world's eyes right now. So, again, I want to thank the
gentlewoman from Missouri for calling this particular action to the
attention of our colleagues and the attention of the world, but also
other genocides and other atrocities that have occurred across the
globe. She is truly a leader, and we are lucky to have her doing that
in Congress on an everyday basis, but also, in particular, this
evening.
Mrs. WAGNER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr.
Chabot) for his kind words. He is a leader and a senior member of our
House Foreign Affairs Committee, and I also have the privilege of
serving on it.
It is an honor to have Congressman Chabot here at this Special Order
during Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month to give voice to those
millions of victims and to say we live for a time when this is
nonexistent in society.
I look forward, Mr. Speaker, tomorrow, to offering my amendment to
the State Department Authorization Act of 2018, asking the
administration to study countries at risk of genocide and mass atrocity
crimes and crafting the kind of training regimens for U.S. foreign
service officers that are so very important.
I look forward to the time when my piece of legislation, the Elie
Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, will, Mr. Speaker, be
signed into law. It will improve the U.S. efforts to prevent mass
atrocity crimes, and I think we all, in this Chamber, on a bipartisan
level, Mr. Speaker, continue to hope and, more importantly, to work
towards a time when America says, ``Never again,'' and our actions
reinforce our words.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for coming out. I thank those
advocates on the Friends Committee on National Legislation's stand.
Together we remember the Carl Wilkens Fellowship and so many others
that stand with the victims of genocide and mass atrocities. It is an
honor to be with my colleagues here tonight and with the advocacy
groups that stand for the millions that say, ``Never again.''
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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