Hilal Nakiboglu: Sixty years later, a modern Manzanar

I remember reading Farewell to Manzanar for my eighth grade English class. It was a slim book about little Jeanne Wakatsuki and her experience in a Japanese internment camp. Notable for the bleak portraits of imprisonment it managed to paint, the book made its mark on me, as it told a seemingly impossible tale. I read about Manzanar and of references to other "war relocation centers" like it, read about the barbed wire, the absolute indignity of being shackled with a red number tag tied around your neck and bused off to a camp of forced manual labor. I read, convinced that it was just a horror story with roots in the fantastic. Sadly enough, it wasn't until years later that I came to understand the truths behind Jeanne's narrative. In the eighth grade, I hadn't realized that the Second World War saw roughly 110,000 Japanese Americans uprooted from their homes and subjected to forced detention in one of 10 such camps across this country. I hadn't yet heard of President Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, calling for the evacuation and internment of Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens alike. And I certainly didn't know that about half those detained were children much like Jeanne. Today, Manzanar is maintained as a historic site just outside of -- as irony would have it -- Independence, Calif. The National Park Service offers free admission to Manzanar and, for the interested, a birdwatching tour of the grounds. Sounds like quite the tourist destination. Who knows? Manzanar might even have a quaint gift shop where one can pick up a nice "internment camp" fridge magnet or commemorative T-shirt. Since I am planning a short trip to California this month, maybe I ought to consider making the drive up from Los Angeles to the park. Or maybe I needn't bother. After all, if I am interested in learning about innocents being shackled and detained by the government simply because of their ethnicity, I can certainly get my fill of this in Los Angeles itself. No need for a road trip down memory lane. Right before Christmas last month, some 700 Muslims in the southern California area were rounded up and forcefully detained. These arrests constitute a cornerstone of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's recent commitment to keeping close tabs on the Muslim immigrants who live in this country. Post Sept. 11, men from a list of 25 countries have been asked to register with American federal authorities. Some that dutifully went to immigration offices in southern California must have been surprised then to be fingerprinted, cuffed and placed behind bars. Oddly, it seems those complying with the INS requests were being punished. Although some have since been released, the fact remains that this National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, as it is called, it just a plain bad idea. While arresting blameless, cooperative California taxpayers may seem like a foolproof way to combat global terrorism, for me at least, all this smacks of shocking injustice. It begs the question: what on Earth next? With the bunkers at Manzanar having undergone recent renovations, perhaps the facilities can be put to renewed use. Young men, maybe eventually children like Jeanne, could be placed in these internment camps. Yes, it would be free labor and detainment without trial. And it would all be in the name of national security. Whether 1942 or 2002, our knee-jerk response to foreign attacks seems to be very misguided and unfortunate. Do we really want our children to read about the ethnicity-based atrocities of which we are on the brink? Have we learned nothing from our unjustified, deplorable treatment of Japanese Americans during and after World War II? Must we travel this ignoble road yet again? As Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes in his famed book The Gulag Archipelago, "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties -- but right through every human heart." Looking to a new year, let us heed the words of Solzhenitsyn and the lessons of years past. Taking out our collective national anger on the innocent based simply on their ethnic-identity is not a solution. It never has been. Penn's admissions Web site boasts of this campus having "the largest percentage of international undergraduates in the Ivy League." That translates to just under 900 undergraduate students. Consider how different a place Penn would be without an important chunk of its international community. Consider how tragic it would be should members of this community be locked away without reasonable explanation. Consider the nation's approach to security. Consider your conscience. Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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