Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month

Floor Speech

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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.

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