July 11



ISRAEL/POLAND:

Israel refuses to extradite war crime suspect


Israel has turned down a Polish request to extradite a Polish-born Jew
accused of war crimes against Germans in World War II.

Solomon Morel, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, is said to have been
responsible for the deaths of about 1,538 detainees when he was the head
of a Russian-run camp holding ethnic Germans in Poland's southern Silesian
region after the Soviets seized Poland in 1945, Poland's Rzeczpospolita
daily reported.

Eye-witness evidence suggested that Morel used both psychological and
physical abuse against the nearly 6,000 detainees at the camp, including
beatings and starvation. He is also accused of allowing the spread of
deadly infectious diseases in the camp.

Morel traveled to Israel in 1994 after Police justice authorities started
a criminal investigation against him.

Poland made its second extradition request to Israel for Morel in April
2004. the first request was rejected in 1998.

Israel's Justice Ministry said that the extradition call had been refused,
but didnt provide further details.

Polish prosecutors confirmed that Israel refused the request, claiming
that there was "no basis whatsoever" to extradite Morel.

Israel has no extradition agreement with Poland.

"One measure"

A prosecutor at Poland's Institute for National Remembrance, which probes
war-era crimes, slammed the Israeli decision, referring to the Jewish
state's support of the prosecution of elderly people accused of genocide
against Jews during the war.

"There should be one measure for judging war criminals, irrespective
whether they are German, Israeli or any other nationality," Ewa Koj said.

Morel had survived incarceration in Auschwitz concentration camp earlier
in the war, and lost many members of his family in the Holocaust.

His case was brought to light in the 1990s when an American Jewish
journalist, John Sack, published a book on the "revenge killings" by Jews
responsible for prison camps at the end of the war.

(source: Al-jazeera)






USA/CALIFORNIA:

Activists keep focus on Japan's atrocities -- Chinese Americans lead
effort to put pressure on Tokyo



With centuries-old tension between China and Japan surging again, the Bay
Area's Chinese American community is marshaling its outrage over World War
II atrocities.

Activists here, leading efforts across the country, have lobbied for state
and federal legislation, put on youth conferences, developed public school
curricula and assembled traveling exhibits to publicize Japanese
atrocities in the 1930s and Japan's invasion and occupation of China
during World War II. Millions of civilians died starting in the 1930s,
caught in the cross fire as they tried to flee or were felled by disease
and starvation.

When tens of thousands of demonstrators in China protested Japan's bid for
a seat on the U.N. Security Council and the publication of a Japanese
government-approved history textbook in April, hundreds in the Bay Area
rallied outside the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco.

"Japan must apologize," read their signs, and "Face the truth" -- a
reference to a textbook that they felt whitewashed Tokyo's wartime
conduct.

And a Bay Area group sent the United Nations an online petition in May
that members say held 42 million signatures hoping to block the Security
Council bid.

The Bay Area's Chinese Holocaust Museum, Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition
and Global Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War want
Japan to make amends for its actions before and during World War II.

Silicon Valley activists have drawn on their technical and entrepreneurial
experience to build the movement. The Global Alliance, founded in the
South Bay in 1992, draws on the work of 52 groups, most of them in the
United States.

"We use our business knowledge to network, expand and recruit," said
Ignatius Ding, senior vice president of the Global Alliance and a retired
computer engineer, who helped organize the online petition. "We're like an
R&D center. We develop a strategy then farm it out to different
organizations."

In 2000, the alliance advocated for a state resolution -- sponsored by
then-Assemblyman Mike Honda, a Japanese American -- that demanded the
Japanese government offer an apology and compensation. It also lobbied
that year for the federal Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act,
which declassifies certain documents about atrocities committed during the
war.

Ding was moved by the wartime stories senior citizens told at a 1991
Nanking massacre memorial event in Sunnyvale at which he volunteered.
"They told me they're dying and want closure."

Japan's military atrocities gained new visibility in the Bay Area and
across the country after the 1997 publication of "The Rape of Nanking" by
South Bay author Iris Chang. In 1998, San Francisco Superior Court Judge
Julie Tang helped co-found the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition, which is
a multiethnic organization based in San Francisco.

"We cannot see this as just a Chinese American battle," said Tang, noting
that Japanese American activist Cliff Uyeda, who died last year,
co-founded the group. "This is a human rights issue more than any thing
else."

Tang's two older sisters died of meningitis during the war while the
family was fleeing Japanese soldiers.

"For our dignity as Chinese, we need to do something about it," said
Philip Ng, the Chinese Holocaust Museum's executive director and an
ex-aide of former-Supervisor Leland Yee. "In the United States, we have
freedom of speech. "

Ng, who heard stories about the wartime horrors while he was growing up in
Hong Kong, said Chinese in the United States have the power to do more
than their countrymen back home.

Poland Hung, a high school history teacher and president of the Chinese
Holocaust Museum in San Francisco, organized this spring's protest.
Reflecting the depth of her grievance, she boycotts Japanese companies
that she says propped up the government's war effort. "That is not
acceptable," said Hung, who is trying to raise $5 million to build a new
home for the museum, which has been housed for two years in a tiny Sunset
District storefront. Hung wept as she knelt to mime a memorial she saw in
China. The skeletons of four victims were left where they had died: A
mother crouching to protect her two kids, covered by her husband, they
were shot, soaked with gasoline and burned to death.

The walls of the museum's single display room are crowded with enlarged
photos of newspaper clippings, skeletons and weapons used in the war.

"I want the world to know about it. We must let the younger generation
learn from the past," Hung said. "If we ignore and deny history, how can
we promote peace?

The Chinese Holocaust Museum, at 1914 Lawton St., San Francisco, is open 1
to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment. For details, call (415)
661-6619.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)