Speech #1090043838

Eastern Europe or Central America. Minnesota is now their home and we call them our neighbors. our coworkers and our friends. The resettlement of refugees in Minnesota is a success story. We should all celebrate the economic. social and cultural contributions made over the past generation who found peace. hope and opportunity in Minnesota. For the refugees and the communities that welcomed them it has not always been easy. but it has worked and worked to the benefit of our state. Let me acknowledge the state. county and local government officials as well as the staff and educators from our school districts who work so hard to get families settled and transitioned to life in Minnesota. Let me also thank the resettlement agencies. community based nonprofits. the faith community and the many families and volunteers. This collective effort has kept the refugee resettlement experience positive for both new Minnesotans as well as longtime residents. While today is a celebration of sorts. I do not want anyone here to forget that suffering also continues for the more than 19 million people around the world fleeing persecution. The fact that more than nine million people are refugees and almost eight million more are internally displaced inside their own country due to violencewhile millions more are stateless or seeking asylum. Earlier this year I traveled to Eastern Chad to visit refugees in camps along the border of Sudans Darfur region. The men. women and children I met had escaped the horrors of mass murder. mass rape. the burning of their villages. the killing of their animals and the poisoning of their wells. These exhausted souls were the survivors a genocide that continues to go on todayat this very moment. Just as Minnesota has been a refugea place of safe. I want to publicly commend the people of Chad. a very. very poor nation with difficult geography. little water and few resources. for providing nearly a million Sudanese survivors of genocide a safe place. In normal times the people of Chad have very little. now they are sharing what they have with the Darfur refugees. In Darfur. at least 180.000 people have been killed. starved to death or died of disease because of the intentional campaign of cleansing by the militias sponsored by the government of Sudan. Tens of thousand of women and giris have been raped and tortured in this campaign of terror. Inside Sudan almost 2 million people are displaced--driven from their homes. Let me praise the work that Hugh Parmer and his staff at the American Refugee Committee are doing to keep people alive in Sudanthey are true heroes. EXTENSIONS OF REMARKS. Vol. 151.