October 2001
Flying While Arab: Lessons From Japanese Internment in World War II
Posted Tuesday, October 30, 2001 by Peter Dumbuya
Since September 11, 2001, when terrorists launched their deadliest attack ever against the targets inside the U. S. (World Trade Center--WTC), Pentagon--Department of Defense, and crash-landed a jetliner in Pennsylvania), “flying while Arab” (FWA) has taken its place along side such other icons of intolerance and racial profiling as “driving while black” (DWB).
Whereas DWB refers to the practice by the highway police of stopping black motorists upon suspicion of committing or having committed an offense or moving violation, FWA describes instances in which passengers on board commercial flights have been detained, ordered to deplane, or simply harassed because they are assumed to be Muslims and/or they look Middle Eastern like some of the terrorists themselves.
Under domestic and international law, singling out groups for collective punishment because Arab-looking individuals committed acts of terrorism against a state is unlawful. But in times of national catastrophes, legal niceties are often sacrificed upon the altar of nationalism and patriotism. Such was the case of the Japanese in World War II. The internment of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry in the U. S. after Japanese warplanes bombed Pearl Harbor is an object lesson worth learning as the war on international terrorism unfolds.
Strains in relations between the U.S. and Japan appeared soon after the end of World War I in 1918. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the U.S., together with Britain and Australia, rejected a Japanese request for the inclusion of a declaration of racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Relations deteriorated further in 1924 with the passage of the Immigration Act that denied U.S. citizenship to Japanese immigrants. In the early 1930s, Japanese territorial designs in the Far East led to increasing hostility toward Japanese Americans in the U.S.
On 7 December 1941, just over two years after hostilities began in Europe, Japanese warplanes attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,403 men, destroying 17 war ships and 188 warplanes. The Japanese lost 29 warplanes in the attack. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an emotional address to a joint session of Congress, urging a declaration of war against Japan:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy-the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.
Having made a compelling case against Japan, FDR issued Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942. In it he authorized and directed the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, and the military Commanders to prescribe military areas from which any or all persons may be excluded. Under Executive Order 9102, the president entrusted the care of the evacuees to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), located in the White House Office for Emergency Management. The director of the WRA had responsibility for the relocation, maintenance, and supervision of persons removed from the designated military areas.
Although FDR did not mention any specific national groups in Executive Order 9066, Army General John L. DeWitt, in Public Proclamation No. 4 of March 27, 1942, prohibited Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens from leaving Military Area No. 1 pending the issuance of other proclamations and orders. Then in a series of Civilian Exclusion Orders, beginning on April 24, 1942, General DeWitt excluded all persons of Japanese ancestry, citizen and alien alike, from specific states, counties, and cities in Military Area No. 1. These included San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Arizona, to name but a few. Other regulations ordered Japanese aliens and Americans of Japanese ancestry to report to various civilian centers in their respective states.
By June 1942, General DeWitt had issued 108 civilian exclusion orders. By the end of October 1942, the War Department had interned 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens in unpopulated areas of California, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, and Arkansas where they remained until March 20, 1946.Challenges to the Exclusion Orders.
In 1942, Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui unsuccessfully challenged the curfew and civilian exclusion orders in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California respectively. In all three cases, the respective U.S. district courts convicted them, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their convictions. The case of Hirabayashi illustrates the extent to which the courts went to uphold the executive department’s wartime actions.
Born in Seattle in 1918 of Japanese parents, Hirabayashi was a University of Washington senior at the time of his arrest in May 1942 for failing to abide by the curfew and exclusion orders issued by General DeWitt. At his trial in Seattle, Hirabayashi challenged the constitutionality of the powers delegated by Congress to General DeWitt under the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of Due Process, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.
In rejecting Hirabayashi’s argument, the district court submitted that:
It must not for an instant be forgotten that since Pearl Harbor last December we have been engaged in a total war with enemies unbelievably treacherous and wholly ruthless, who intend to totally destroy this nation, its Constitution, our way of life, and trample all liberty and freedom everywhere from this earth. It must be realized that civilization itself is at stake in this global conflict.
A jury returned a guilty verdict on both counts, and the court sentenced Hirabayashi to three months in prison on each count, to run concurrently. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hirabayashi’s conviction on June 21, 1943.
Final Disposition of the Internment Cases
In 1980 Congress appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, with a mandate to review Executive Order 9066 and its impact on persons of Japanese ancestry and other enemy aliens during World War II. Issued in December 1982, the Commission’s report concluded that the internment of 120,000 people without individual review occurred despite the fact that not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage, or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast. Further, the Commission found no instances in which the government ordered the exclusion and detention of persons of German and Italian ancestry.
As the Commission further noted, Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and that “The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The Commission recommended that Congress provide compensation ($20,000) to each surviving internee. Congress complied with the recommendation in August 1988, and President Ronald Reagan signed the bill on August 10.
On 24 September 1987, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals finally reversed Hirabayashi’s curfew conviction and remanded the case to the district court to vacate the convictions on counts one and two. The Court of Appeals held that Hirabayashi’s convictions were based upon simultaneous indictments, were tried together, briefed together, and decided together, and thus “The district court erred in distinguishing between the validity of the curfew and exclusion convictions.”
As circuit judge Denman observed in 1943:
Americans are to face a peace table at which our prestige and power will rest upon the belief of a world questioning Caucasian sincerity, a world which includes a billion Asiatics. There no one will shut his eyes to the Postons, Manzanars and Tanforans. One of the questions will be what sort of judicial consideration do minority groups of American citizens receive from the courts of a claimed democracy.
Terrorism and the UN
Posted Tuesday, October 2, 2001 by Peter Dumbuya
In recent years, U.S. politicians, ranging from Pat Buchanan to Senator Jessie Helms of North Carolina, have derided the United Nations for its bureaucratic inefficiencies and inept peace keeping operations among other things. In the presidential election campaign of 1992, Buchanan went so far as to call the then UN Secretary General ,Boutros-Boutros Ghali, "Boo Boo Ghali." The U.S. Congress refused to pay its dues to the UN.
Only months before, the Bush Administration signaled its intention not to abide by the Kyoto (on global warming) and other international agreements. Days before, the Bush Administration pulled out of the Durban conference on racism, citing concerning over language critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
On September 11, 2001, a day that will live in infamy, to borrow the words of FDR, the administration, and indeed the nation as a whole, lurched from unilateralism, some would say isolationism, to multilateralism and coalition-building. We were rudely reminded on September 11 that nations, great and small, cannot walk away from each other in an age of global interdependence (ironically a breeding ground for loosely-affiliated networks of evil-doers). The diverse nationalities of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks attest to that.
Internationalists advanced the same argument in the period between World War I and World War II. They warned that the absence of great powers on the international scene merely encouraged aggressors to flout international agreements and the norms of civilized behavior. It took World War II for isolationists to realize their folly. The UN came into existence in 1945, replacing the moribund League of Nations, as a bulwark against state-instigated international terrorism. That lesson is now being imbibed by the Bush Administration.
That the UN has now been called upon to lead the charge against international terrorism is indeed refreshing. That the mayor of New York City could address the UN General Assembly on the issue of terrorism shows that the UN can still be depended upon to fulfill its world-wide obligations despite the bad press it has garnered in the U.S.
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UN Moves on Terrorism – The World Unit!
Posted Monday, October 1, 2001 by SJK
The attack on World Trade Center and the Pentagon has given the world body reason for the first time to seriously consider the menaces caused by terrorist acts. For a long time, terrorism has in a sense, been accepted as the code of action for change of government or leadership in the third world. In fact majority of the colonized world gained independence through acts of terrorizing the scanty population of the colonized power in the area. The colonized powers in turn waged a different kind of terrorism on the colonies vying for independence.
When there appeared opposing ideas among leaders of independent movement, it was common for the world powers to join forces or rally behind somebody in the struggle that appears more favorable to their cause. In Africa in particular, people like Patrice Lumumba, Kwameh Nkrumah had no chance against the forces of the UN Security Council. Nelson Mandela perhaps is the lucky one among the lots. The practice of conniving against popular moments in favor of a less popular regime has not been unique to Africa. Asia and the Middle East have had their shares as well.
In both Sierra Leone and Liberia for the last ten years more than a million people have been violently destroyed including homes, bridges and places of business by terrorists clowned as rebel movements. The WTC and the Pentagon are the most single acts of callousness and the shear dramatic nature of the acts by far goes beyond ideological divides. That perhaps is the motivating force behind the UN session this week on terrorism.
One issue or area of this entire UN gathering is whether they members will come out with a definition of "TERRORISM" or "Terrorist Act" that can be uniformly applied across the board that the participants can live with! Me think that only when the UN can act as one to condemn all forms of terrorism, and act as such that our world will be safer.
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