Cambodia on May 20 - National Day of Remembrance

Killing Fields in Cambodia

https://www.aptuitiv.com/portfolio/item/maine-bicentennial

Khmer Rouge - "...an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people were killed including ethnic minorities, Buddhists and Cham Muslims died under his regime."

How Cambodia’s Day of Remembrance for Genocide Victims Has Always Been Complicated by Politics


BY ANDY KOPSA  May 20, 2019 in TIME
Reenactments of the Khmer Rouge genocide are annual events in Cambodia. On the grounds of the famous killing fields of Choeung Ek, outside the capital of Phnom Penh, a troupe of young performers will take their positions on an open field. The loudspeakers will blare haunting music and words of hate. Actors carrying wooden machine guns will simulate the mass murder of civilians. Children aren’t spared and neither are the elderly. It is May 20, the National Day of Remembrance.

The annual observance marks the day in 1975 when the communist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began the mass killings of the Cambodian genocide. 

Such national days of remembrance are often a key part of confronting and acknowledging a troubling past; Germany’s decision to create a day to remember the Holocaust, for example, has been seen as an important step forward. 

But Cambodia’s version is complicated by the purpose the day has served for the governments that followed the Khmer Rouge — and the questions it raises are profound: What does it mean when a government decrees that the past must be remembered in a certain way? And how do you memorialize something you can’t forget?

Pol Pot — the nom de guerre of a man named Saloth Sar — had rapidly climbed the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s “red communists,” in the 1960s, and became the leader of the guerrilla fighters who orchestrated the systematic take-over of the country in the 1970s. Starting in the northern provinces, the regime worked its way to Phnom Penh. In April of 1975, they seized the city and forced residents to evacuate. By late afternoon the wide boulevards of the city were emptied of cars and filled with a procession of soldiers and trucks loaded with concertina wire and weapons. Families fanned out from the city on foot, not knowing where they were meant to go. Many, falsely told they could return in a few days, left with only the clothing they wore.

Genocide- Killing Fields of Cambodia

By that point, Cambodia had already been devastated by wars from within and without: the First Indochina War, the Vietnam War and their own civil war. A flood of refugees spilled into Thailand while others from the countryside came to Phnom Penh. 

Rice fields were decimated, livelihoods were lost and people went hungry. The Khmer Rouge stepped into the breach, espousing a vision of a communist utopia. The struggling rural farmer would get the same food, shelter and life as the city-dwelling doctor. It was an easy sell with horrific consequences.

Mass killings of Cambodians began about a month after Phnom Penh fell. Pol Pot convinced a destroyed nation to join an agrarian revolution turned genocide; an estimated 1.7 to 2 million people were killed including ethnic minorities, Buddhists and Cham Muslims died under his regime.

The official remembrance of those events began to take shape almost immediately after Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1979, as the new government looked for ways to legitimize itself. The newly formed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) began distancing itself from the regime — at least outwardly, as many of its own leaders had been officers in the Khmer Rouge too. The Day of Remembrance, first staged in 1984, was originally known as The National Day of Hatred Against the Genocidal Pol Pot-Ieng Sary-Khieu Samphan clique and the Sihanouk-Son Sann Reactionary Groups.

Anthropologist Alex Hinton has written that the Day of Hate was a way for the PRK to keep anger toward the Khmer Rouge active so that they could put it to use for their own political purposes if needed. In his book Voices from S-21, historian David Chandler writes the PRK “worked hard to focus people’s anger onto the ‘genocidal clique’ that had governed Cambodia,” as the “new government based its legitimacy on the fact that it had come to power by toppling the Khmer Rouge [though] it was in no position to condemn the entire movement, since so many prominent PRK figures had been Khmer Rouge themselves.”

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the Day of Hate was staged on a massive scale. Paper effigies of Pol Pot were burned and survivors told the true horror stories of their lives under the Khmer Rouge. These events were critical to the PRK leadership reinventing itself, eventually becoming the Cambodia People’s Party of today, the party of Prime Minster Hun Sen. 

While attendance wasn’t compulsory at the original days of anger, it was strongly encouraged and with the help of local authorities’ mass turnout was assured. After years of war and the Khmer Rouge, the people were left starving in a land littered with landmines and mass graves. The day of hate fell into place easily on this backdrop.

But in 2018, Prime Minister Hun Sen decreed that May 20 was no longer the day of hate. Instead, it would be the National Day of Remembrance. Hun Sen not only changed the official name of the holiday, he told reporters it was now set aside to “respect and pray for the victims who passed away from Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime.”

His decree, timed during an election year, also created a time to praise the Cambodian People’s Party for all its “achievements” since the DK was overthrown — and to cast Hun Sen as protecting citizens from the not-so-distant terror. Hun Sen “has a particular knack for playing on fears of a return to the dark days of massacres and civil war,” writes Sebastian Strangio, an independent journalist and author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia.

However, a 2016 Open Society Justice Initiative Report on Cambodia’s war-crimes tribunal found that at least two court cases stemming from the genocide fell apart because they could “embarrass” the CPP and Hun Sen by revealing ties to former Khmer Rouge members.

But, with or without an official day to remember the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, memories of the atrocities are woven through the daily lives of those who survived the regime and their descendants.

Nowhere is that fact clearer than at the secret prison known as Tuol Sleng, or S-21, where Pol Pot sent officers and officials to be tortured. Today, it’s the site of a genocide museum. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, they found piles of bodies at S-21; some estimates say 18,000 people were killed there alone. The museum is designed to be tourist-friendly. Visitors are given headphones and guided through the complex via audio tour. Photos of S-21 victims paper the walls but the brutality of the Khmer Rouge is hard to see behind Plexiglas.

Chheng Samin, one of the employees there, was born in a pagoda three months after the evacuation of Phnom Penh; she says soldiers forced her mother to return to work the morning after Samin was born. She now has two children of her own, and says she is grateful her children have happy childhood memories far different than her own.

“My grandmother died during the Khmer Rouge and I remember thinking ‘don’t put my grandma in that boat and take her away,’” Samin told me, laughing at her 3-year-old self, a girl who thought a casket was a ship.

Not far from Tuol Sleng is a one of the twenty thousand or so killing fields of the genocide. Choeung Ek on the outskirts of Phnom Penh is perhaps the most well know. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge it was a collection of abandoned buildings and a field of bodies.

Now it is a tourist destination too. An ornate stupa surrounds a stories high scaffold, each level lined with human skulls. Walking the grounds visitors are guided through buildings and alongside unexcavated fields; a shirt or dress held by the gnarled roots of a banyan tree like an insect preserved in amber.

There, on May 20, tourists will again join scores of saffron-robed monks and local residents to watch the performers act out Khmer Rouge atrocities with appropriate horror.

But for people like Samin, memories of the Khmer Rouge are more personal, and perpetually close to the surface. I asked her if working at the museum as a survivor of the genocide was difficult. For the most part, it isn’t, she tells me — but one thing does get to her. In the main hall, an iconic photo is displayed, of a mother holding her baby, cataloging their arrival at S-21. That’s hard for her to see some days. “That,” she said, “could have been my mom and me.”

Andy Kopsa is a reporter based in New York City.

Update on The Killing Fields 20 years post mortem

Cambodia ~ Bearing Witness to the Killing Fields Horror now 20 years after the death of the genocide's leader Po Pot. 

How do survivors find healing? Chum Mey, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, walks past a portrait of Nuon Chea, a former Khmer Rouge leader. AP Photo/Heng Sinith

Bearing witness to Cambodia’s horror, 20 years after Pol Pot’s death April 15, 2018 

Twenty years ago, on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s genocidal government during the late 1970s, died in his sleep at the age of 73. 

Mountains of skulls the result of the genocide during the reign of terror by the Khmer Route in Cambodia

Born Saloth Sar, Pol Pot was never held accountable for the crimes committed during the three years, eight months and 20 days his Khmer Rouge government subjected the Cambodian population to a reign of terror. Almost 2 million people, one-fourth of the country’s population, perished during this time from starvation, disease and execution.

In the search for truth and justice, many Cambodian survivors have looked to the U.N.-assisted tribunal currently in progress in the capital city Phnom Penh. 

Convened in 2006, the tribunal has sentenced the head of the main Khmer Rouge torture center to life in prison.

The tribunal’s second trial is nearing completion and is expected to result in life sentences for two additional high ranking Khmer Rouge leaders as well. At that point, the tribunal will mostly likely close its doors, and the U.N.-appointed judges and lawyers will go home. 

Tragically, the tribunal is a classic example of “justice delayed is justice denied.”

For the past 30 years, I have studied the legal, political and literary responses to the Cambodian genocide. It is the literary responses – accounts written by survivors themselves – that show how in breaking their silence and in speaking on behalf of those who died, they were able to seek justice and healing.

The Killing Fields

Two important texts, Haing Ngor’s “A Cambodian Odyssey,” published in 1987, and Vann Nath’s “A Cambodian Prison Portrait,” published 11 years later, reveal the extraordinary events that led to their writing and publication, as well as the authors’ reasons for recording their literary testimony.

Vann Nath explains a painting depicting torture at his exhibition in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. AP Photo/Heng Sinith

Before the Khmer Rouge took power on April 17, 1975, Haing Ngor was a successful gynecologist at a medical clinic in Phnom Penh. During the genocide, Ngor was arrested and severely tortured by the Khmer Rouge on three separate occasions. Each time, Ngor’s wife Huoy nursed him back to health from the brink of death. Ironically, near the end of the genocide, Huoy died in childbirth, because Ngor lacked the simple medical equipment to save her and their first child.

Ngor was able to survive the genocide. He was given refugee status by the American government and resettled in Long Beach, California, which has the largest population of Cambodians in the United States. However, he continued to be racked by guilt over not being able to save Huoy’s life.

In the early 1980s, the first film about the Cambodian genocide, “The Killing Fields,” was made based on the book by New York Times war correspondent Sydney Schanberg, who reported on the Vietnam War from Phnom Penh. In casting the role of Dith Pran, Schanberg’s Cambodian translator, Ngor was selected out of a crowd at a Cambodian wedding in Los Angeles.

Despite no previous acting experience, Ngor won the 1985 Academy Award for best supporting actor. 

Ngor’s instant fame from wining the Oscar transformed him from an anonymous survivor into the world’s most prominent witness of the Cambodian genocide.

Two years later, Warner Books published his 500-page literary testimony, “A Cambodian Odyssey,” which describes the conditions of extremity under the Khmer Rouge and specifically chronicles his relationship with Huoy, from the time they met prior to 1975, until her tragic death during the genocide.

Bearing witness to Huoy’s senseless death was essential to Ngor’s process of healing. His newly acquired status as an Oscar-winning actor provided him with the platform to affirm the truth of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes. By identifying the victims and perpetrators of the genocide, he attempted to fulfill his responsibility to Huoy and his family members who died. In the book’s introduction, Ngor states:

“I have been many things in life: a medical doctor … a Hollywood actor. But nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That’s who I am.”

Prison Portrait

The second book to highlight is “A Cambodian Prison Portrait,” written by Vann Nath, a painter by trade before the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975. During the genocide, Nath was arrested and sent to Tuol Sleng prison, where approximately 15,000 people were forced to confess to bogus crimes under torture and subsequently executed. Nath was spared execution at the last moment in order to paint portraits of Pol Pot.

Within a year, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power by Vietnamese forces, and Tuol Sleng was transformed into a museum to show the world the atrocities that took place there during the genocide. As one of only seven prisoners known to have survived Tuol Sleng, Nath was asked to paint the scenes of torture and execution he had witnessed to be displayed at the museum.

Deeply traumatized by his year in captivity at Tuol Sleng, Nath later tried to rebuild his shattered life and opened a small coffee shop in downtown Phnom Penh. Two humanitarian workers who frequented the coffee shop befriended Nath and convinced him to tell his story, resulting in the writing and publication of “Prison Portrait,” in 1998.

In 2009, Nath also served as a primary witness at the U.N.-assisted tribunal during the trial of Duch, the Tuol Sleng prison chief, who was eventually sentenced to life in prison. Similar to Ngor, informing the world of the conditions at Tuol Sleng fulfilled a deep responsibility to speak on behalf of those who suffered and died under the Khmer Rouge.

By publishing their personal accounts, as I found in my research, survivors attempt to fulfill a deep responsibility to speak on behalf of those who died. In doing so, they begin to assert some control over the traumatic memories that haunt their lives. These writers act against forgetting in the hope that the world will never allow another Pol Pot to try to silence the voice of the people.

Editor’s note: in a previous version of this article there was an inadvertent typo in the year of Vann Nath serving as a primary witness. It has been corrected to 2009.

When leaders murder their own people

http://oneturkeyrun.blogspot.com/2016/12/aleppo-and-cambodia.html

I posted the above link on my Maine Writer Blog. It's titled "Aleppo and Cambodia".
Po Pot was a Cambodian who murdered his own people.
Assad is a Syrian who is destroying his own nation.
Both of them being the perpetrators of evil ambition.

YouTube interview with Martha Gellhorne - reference Khmer Rouge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj9D3GIczW4

In this YouTube interview (link above) dated 1983, Gellhorn speaks candidly about her experience entering Dachau Concentration Camp, a chilling first person history.

Moreover, she described the "stupidity" (in her words) of the 1970s, political situation in Vietnam, whereby it became the Vietnamese, who defeated the US in their nation, that were then the liberators of the Cambodian people, who were suffering from the terrorism inflicted on them by the Khmer Rouge.

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist, who is now considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She was one of writer Ernest Hemingway's wives.

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

Wikipedia

Born: November 8, 1908, St. Louis, MO
Died: February 15, 1998, London, United Kingdom
Spouse: T.S. Mathews (m. 1954–1963), Ernest Hemingway (m. 1940–1945), Bertrand de Jouvenel (m. 1933)
Parents: Edna Gellhorn, George Gellhorn

Martha Gellhorn was a distinguished war correspondent who covered every war that occurred across the globe over a period extending nearly 60 years.

Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri, Martha Gellhorn began her writing career as a crime writer in the late 1920s. 

Her storied life as a war reporter began when she met Ernest Hemingway in late 1936, and she traveled with him to Madrid the following year to cover the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn went on to cover every war that broke out during her lifetime, until the mid-1990s when her health began to give out. Stricken with cancer, she committed suicide in 1998.

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

Martha Gellhorn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 8, 1908. She attended Bryn Mawr College, in Philadelphia, but dropped out in 1927 to pursue journalism, writing early on for New Republic. She soon moved to Paris, working for various publications and joining the United Press Bureau, where she sought to become a foreign correspondent. While there, she aligned herself with the pacifist movement and wrote a book about her experiences in a novel, What Mad Pursuit (1934).

When Gellhorn returned to the United States, she was hired as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, who sent her around the country to document the impact of the Great Depression. Her reports caught the eye of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the two women became friends for life. 

Gellhorn turned what she had witnessed into another work of fiction, The Trouble I've Seen (1936). The same year her book was published, she met Ernest Hemingway in a bar in Key West, Florida, and within months she was traveling with Hemingway to Spain to cover the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War for Collier’s Weekly. In 1940, Hemingway and Gellhorn were married, and he dedicated his Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bells Toll (1940), to her.

Covering WWII and Vietnam

Gellhorn soon went to Western Europe to cover World War II, and in 1944 she allegedly stowed away on a hospital ship to report on the D-Day landings. The next year, she entered Dachau with American troops for the liberation of the infamous concentration camp (that same year, she and Hemingway split up), and her harrowing account was a landmark piece of journalism.

In 1966, she covered the war in Vietnam, which she found supremely disturbing and horrific, full of victims on both sides of the battles lines. In the 1980s she continued to travel extensively, writing about the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the U.S. invasion of Panama, and in the mid-1990s she went to Brazil to write about street children there. 

That would be her last significant article before her death, as, dying of cancer, she took her own life in 1998.

Sydney Schanberg obituary 1934-1016

Sadly, I'm just learning about the work of Sydney Schanberg through his obituary.  I regret never having the opportunity to meet him, because I certainly would have appreciated a conversation about Cambodia.

As the evil dictator Pol Pot's Maoist guerrillas closed in on Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, Sydney Schanberg's editors at The New York Times instructed him to leave the Cambodian capital. The veteran war journalist ignored the order and together with his Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran, he continued reporting.  

Within days of the Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seizing the capital city, Dith would be expelled to the contryside, along with millions of other educated and urban Cambodians- the start of Pol Pot's genocidal attempt to creat an agrarian utopia. 

Schanberg won a Pulitzer for his reports on the Khmer Rouge and Dith's remarkable survival story, which inspired the 1984 film, "The Killing Fields".  Dith's mission, "was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through," he wrote. "It became my mission too."

Killing Fields journalist Sydney Schanberg dies at 82- BBCNews

US journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose reporting inspired the Oscar-winning Hollywood film, The Killing Fields,  died at the age of 82, the New York Times reports.

Schanberg worked for the Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

His colleague, Dith Pran, was unable to leave and his four-year ordeal inspired Schanberg's work.

Sydney Schanberg 1934-2916 died in Poughkeepsie NY

Schanberg died in Poughkeepsie after a heart attack earlier in the week.

His death was confirmed by Charles Kaiser, a friend and former Times reporter, the paper said.

In 1980, Schanberg described his Cambodian colleague's ordeal of torture and starvation at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in a magazine article, and later a book called The Death and Life of Dith Pran.

Oscar awards

Pictures of some of the victims of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror

In 1975, Schanberg and Dith Pran ignored directives from Times editors to evacuate and stayed in Cambodia as almost all Western diplomats and journalists fled.

Born in Clinton, Massachusettes, Schanberg joined the Times as a copy boy in 1959, and "rose quickly  through the organization," said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.) He reported on the civil war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, and met Dith a year later while covering the US bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Camobida.  Four years after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, "there was no news of Dith," said The New York Times.  Racked with guild, Schangergtook time off to write about his experiences and to help Dith's wife and children to settle in the US. 

Then, in 1979, word arrived that Dith had escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand. He had endured unimaginable hardship, surviving beatings, back breaking labor, and a diet of insects, rodants and as litle as a tablespoon of rice a day.  

Schanberg immediately flew to Thailand and arranged for his friend to move to the US. Dith died in 2008.

The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, during which time, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. The genocide claimed the lives of more than a million people - some estimates say up to 2.5 million.

Under the Maoist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But the attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

Schanberg began writing a column about New York City for the Times, in 1981, said The Washington Post. But, the "abrasive, headstrong manner" that had served him well overseas led to clashes with his bosses, and his column was canceled in 1985. Schanberg went on to write for other outlets and became a mentor to young journalists, but he never turly got over the horrors of Cambodia. "You tell yourself things in order to function, but you're going to break down," he said.  

"Eventually, you need to find room where you can sit alone and cry."

Open Letter to Maine Governor Paul LePage

"Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’” 2 Corinthians 3:17  (In other words: Second Corinthians)

Donald Trump made a Biblical fool of himself when he couldn't state "2 Corinthians" correctly. Worse than being unable to state scriptural text, was the inability to understand the meaning of the passage.  

Unfortunately, America's right wing Republican party might be adept at reciting scriptural text and references, but they ignore the meaning of the words they often memorize. This is particularly true when faced with the immigration issue.

Recently, Maine's Governor Paul LePage made immigrants and asylum seekers the victims of his horrible racist rhetoric. There's absolutely no reason, whatsoever, for Governor LePage to stigmatize immigrants and asylum seekers. LePage stereotyped them with terrible lables, called them names and accused them, without cause, of carrying "germs" into Maine. What's worse, Governor LePage ignores the reality of his own family. In fact, he grew up in Lewiston, Maine, in a family directly related to French-Canadian immigrants! When Governor LePage ran for office, he was complimented for being a Franco-American.  Now, unfortunately, he has become an embarrassment to his heritage.  

Now, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center on the campus of the University of Maine Augusta (UMA), has published an open letter to challenge the unjust ethnic criticisms of Maine's immigrants and asylum seekers. Shame on Governor Paul LePage!

Here is the text of the HHRC letter:

In the wake of the world's response to the (terrorist) tragedies in Paris and turmoil in Beirut this week (recently) our (Maine Governor LePage) Governor has announced that he would oppose any efforts to bring Syrian refugees to Maine. While our history is crowded with efforts to limit groups of people from coming to the US, there is little question that immigration has been one of the most important factors in making the US a world power, and is, arguably, the key to Maine's success as a state.

U.S. law is very clear on immigration. The issue is under Federal control, based on article six of the US Constitution, and has been reviewed several times by the Supreme Court,most notably in Hines vs Davidowitz in 1941. (Under the preemption doctrine, enforcement of a state alien registration law was barred by the federal Alien Registration Act.)

Maine Governor Samuel Cony (Governor 1864-1867) b. 1811 d. 1870 in Augusta ME "...invite the freest immigration...."

Since the end of the Civil War, when Republican Governor Samuel Cony declared, "From the very foundation of our government, it has been our policy to invite the freest immigration from every portion of the earth," Maine has had a love/hate relationship with its immigrants. But, for Governor LePage to take an anti-immigrant stance seems somewhat disingenuous. The largest group for immigrants to Maine in the 19th century were the French Canadians, including the Governor's ancestors. At the time, there was also a good deal of rhetoric and discrimination against them. Most people know that the Ku Klux Klan movement in Maine in the 1920s, was mostly focused on the French-Catholic immigrants from Canada. Governor LePage has talked about the racism he felt growing up in "Little Canada", in Lewiston. He is, by all accounts, a self-made man, and a proud model of the success an immigrant can have in Maine, as are our Senator Susan Collins (Irish and English), former Senator Snowe (Greek), former Senator Mitchell (Lebanese) and many other prominent Mainers. 
This fall, at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, we have had a chalkboard in the lobby asking visitors, "What Country Are Your Ancestors From?" After two months, the board is filled with answers that reveal that Maine, like the rest of the country, is made up of people from all over the world. Of course, we'd expect to see Canada, France, Ireland, England, Sweden, Germany, Finland and mostly western European countries listed on the board. But, we might be surprised to see Guam, Jamaica, Belarus, Senegal, Lithuania, Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Russia, Poland, China, Humgary, Turkey, Brazil, Iceland, Australia, Rwanda, Lebanon and Sudan were listed; and, of course, a few people wrote that their ancestors are Native Americans.

It's interesting to note that our post Civil War interest in immigrants was fueled mostly by the fact that so many of our Maine boys got out, saw the possibilities in the rest of the country and decided not to come back home. That's what caused Governor Cony to make his bold statement that immigrants would be welcomed in Maine. 
A few years later, Maine's Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain was Governor. He encouraged Maine residents to think differently about the issue of the outward migration of our youth. "We have been too long content with the doubtful compliment that 'Maine is a good State to go from.'  She must be made a good State to come to and to stay in."  We've complained for about 150 years now about our young people leaving, perhaps it's time for us to revisit that argument as well.  Maybe, we should try harder to welcome everyone who wants to come to Maine or stay in Maine. And yes, that includes immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Maine is a rich tapestry made up of individuals from around the world, and while we know that most immigrants and all refugees are vetted, we disagree with the concept that someone should be considered subversive or a danger to the American people simply because of their country of origin, religion, color of their skin, sexual orientation, or any other broad measure of a group of people. That's surely not an American or Maine measure of a person.  As Dr. (Martin Luther) King suggested, many years ago, we should measure people by the content of their character.  Maine's character is clearly composed of people from all over the world.  Rather than opposing those who would seek refuge in a safe land and contribute to our society, we should embrace them and remember, in their quest for a new home, they're very much like our own ancestors.  

Written by David Greenham, Program Director, Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.

Obviously, Republicans have a big problem understanding the Scripture they claim to revere.  2 Corinthians.  Sadly, they do not advocate for the intent of this Biblical passage. For selfish reasons, Republicans do not believe in providing liberty for those who are seeking the spirit of freedom.  

Comparing the Khmer Rouge with the ethnic cleansing of Yazidis

An article by journalist Rose George describes how one humanitarian woman compared the carnage perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (The Killing Fields), with the ongoing and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Yazidis population, in Syria.

Rose George writes "All I can do is tell their stories" in the February 2016 "The Rotarian" magazine.

In the article titled, "All I can do is tell their stories," she reports:

"Evin traveled to Cambodia, where, having read about the Khmer Rouge, she met people who had suffeed under the regime. "I learned so much," she says, and she shared her own knowledge with others...."

The Yazidi are a Kurdish people who follow an old religion related to Zoroastrianism, but which has remnants of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are located primarily in the Nineveh province of northern Iraq. The sacred valley of Lalish is the center point of their culture. (Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. It was founded by the Prophet Zoroaster in ancient Iran, approximately 3500 years ago.) 

An icon representing Zoroastrianism

Link to the Rose George article and blog are here:

http://oneturkeyrun.blogspot.com/2016/01/syrian-refugees-tragically-brave.html