State to honor genocide victims After Jan. 1,

California will begin plans to construct memorial in Sacramento.

By Peter Hecht
The Sacramento Bee
12/26/06

SACRAMENTO – Assembly Member Lloyd Levine says he came to understand his
Jewish cultural roots and comprehend a horrific epoch in history on a trip
to Israel in 2004.

He was at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, transfixed by cubes
stacked like children’s play blocks. Each depicted children who died of Nazi
genocide. A somber voice intoned their names as 1.6 million beams of light
reflected the toll of young lives taken.

"For the next several hours, I had the abiding urge to throw up," said
Levine, D-Van Nuys. "It makes you sick knowing what happened."

Levine returned to California determined to make his own contribution to the
victims by seeking a "dignified and quiet" memorial outside the Capitol to
honor those who "perished and suffered" in the Holocaust.

But as the bill he sponsored was debated and amended in the Legislature and
then signed into law by Gov. Schwarzenegger on Sept. 30, Levine’s vision
grew markedly.

Under Assembly Bill 1210, which goes into effect Jan. 1, California will
begin a quest to construct a memorial in Sacramento not only for victims and
survivors of the Holocaust – but for all people who faced genocide and
ethnic cleansing across the world and many generations.

On its face, the effort raises a poignant challenge by seeking to bring
together diverse peoples and histories to acknowledge acts of inhumanity
from the Holocaust of Nazi Germany to the killing fields of Cambodia to the
ethnic slaughter in Darfur.

Though still an ill-defined concept, the idea of such a memorial is stirring
emotional discussions among vast, varied communities affected by genocide.

In Glendale, Haig Hovespian hopes the memorial will acknowledge the mass
murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey in 1915.

"A vast majority of Armenians who came to California were either survivors
or descendants of the victims of Armenian genocide," said Hovespian,
community relations director for Armenian National Committee of America. "If
you want to boil it down, it is the reason that they are Californians
today."

In Sacramento, Zang Fang, 36, believes such a monument should acknowledge
Hmong refugees who fled wanton killings in Laos during 30 years of
retaliations for the Hmong’s support of the United States’ secret war
against communist Pathet Lao in the 1970s.

Under AB 1210, a nine-member International Genocide Commission, including at
least six survivors or descendants of genocide, will be appointed to select
a design and initiate private fundraising to build the memorial.

The bill declares that "California recognizes the atrocities of all ethnic
cleansing campaigns," including "the Holocaust, Kosovo, Armenian genocide,
Rwanda, African American slaves, Native Americans and the plight of the
Hmong in Southeast Asia."

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