AMBASSADOR SAM BROWNBACK: Thank you, sir.
What a pleasure to be here.
What a great place to open this first ever
ministerial on religious freedom.
This has never been done before--
religious freedom ministerial-- and I
can think of no better place to open it than here to remember
that never again means never again, but it also means,
you got to work against that.
And you've got to work against it each and every day.
This is going to be an amazing week as we
talk about religious freedom.
I want to recognize a few people at the outset.
Knox Thames, special envoy religious freedom
in our office.
He's done a great bit about putting this together
and he's been really the philosophical anchor
to put this whole event together.
And of course, I wanna recognize my wife
Mary, who I'm so honored to be here as well.
Shortly, you'll get to see some of the people we have here
to speak this week.
The lead speakers this week are people
who have been persecuted for their faith.
We have Yazidis and Rohingya, we have Christians,
we have people that have been put in jail,
we've got Buddhists.
We have all people--
Beha'i faith-- all over, all different faiths
that are here because they have been persecuted.
And we've asked them to come to tell the world their story.
And to say, this is what happened to me.
This is what happened recently.
This is what is happening in our world today
and it shouldn't happen.
Each and every person in this world
has an inalienable right to religious freedom.
It is their right of their own soul to do with their soul
what they choose, whatever that is.
They have that right.
Yet sadly, most of the people in the world
live in an environment where religious restrictions are
significant and often deadly.
Walking through this museum, it's such a powerful place
anyway, but even more powerful when
the person you're walking by says,
I see that prison uniform.
That's the kind of prison uniform I was in in Vietnam.
This happened to me in Northern Iraq.
And they show a scene that's similar to what they saw.
And one person even said to me going through this,
how unimaginative evil is--
it just keeps repeating itself.
And unfortunately, we see it still here today.
What we're about with this ministerial
is to see that that stops.
That concrete steps are taken by governments around the world
to open up for religious freedom,
to not persecute religious minorities,
to see that people can practice their faith freely
as they choose without fear or without consequence.
This is something that's in the DNA of the United States.
We believe this in our very soul.
We believe this is a God-given right.
This country was founded by people of faith,
generally, that came here to be free
and we want to see it for everybody around the world.
And most people have signed onto the UN 1948 charter
of human rights that declared religious freedom their right,
yet most people don't get to experience that.
And I have already, in this job, been in way too many places
where there's been persecution and death of people
who are religious minorities.
So this administration is going to push hard against that.
We're going to work to build an alliance around the world
of civil society groups, religious organizations, NGOs,
governments, to form an alliance to push back the Iron
Curtain of religious persecution to see that it gets destroyed
so that people can live free.
And this is not just a fundamental issue
of human rights, although that in and of itself
should be enough.
This is also an issue of prosperity and opportunity
for people around the world.
Societies that are open are more prosperous.
Societies that are open are more secure.
They have less terrorism.
This is a trajectory the world needs to pursue and pursue
aggressively.
And we will do that.
So we open here and we will close here, Thursday night.
Ambassador Nikki Haley will address the reception
here at the Holocaust Museum at the end
of our week-long activities that we'll have.
In between, you will see the faces of these individuals here
speaking, telling their story, telling the world,
this is what I experienced.
This is what happened in my country.
This is what happened to me.
This is what happened to my family.
The stories are sad.
Stories are difficult. Stories are hard.
But they're to remind and tell the rest of us,
they're a witness to the rest of us,
this still goes on in the world today and it should not.
And we're going to fight against it.
And we're going to organize against it.
And we will defeat this evil.
We together will defeat this evil.
And we're going to get it done.
So I'm honored to be in this position.
I'm delighted that this administration has
made this a top foreign policy priority
and that we're going to push it and push it aggressively.
This conference is a launch, it isn't a finale.
We will use this to continue to push religious freedom
issues around the world in various countries
and continents all over the world.
We will seek to find allies to push this topic on forward.
With that, I'm delighted to see this take place
and we will call up--
actually, if you don't mind, just ahead of your speech,
I'm going to call the people that
are going to be speaking up and they'll stand behind you
as you speak, Irene.
So if you're a person here that's
going to be speaking this week please come up.
And as I mentioned, we have Yazidis
that are here, Rohingya, Ahmadis, Buddhists, Christians,
Jews Baha'is, people of all faiths or no faith at all.
Please come up here and stand, if you would,
a number of you that are survivors and that
are going to be speaking.
We'll be inviting, if the press wants to afterwards,
interview individuals that are here.
What we will do is ahead of each session,
we will have one or two of the survivors will speak
and then we'll go into a session to discuss the topic.
But the idea is to remind each of the participants
at each of the sessions this is why we're doing this.
It's so that this does not happen again.
So that this doesn't happen in this country.
And that we're going to bind together.
Now these are people of all different faiths or no faith
at all.
They are the spectrum around the world.
And yet, they're all united around this notion
of religious freedom.
That a person should be free to pursue their faith as they see
fit without fear of consequence.
They're all united on this.
Weekly, I do a roundtable on religious freedom,
and people from all spectrums come in
and we are united on this topic.
And we will be.
And with that, we'll be highly successful.
Irene is here that is a Holocaust survivor
and she was one that was in a picture
here that we got to see as we were going through.
She was 13 years old when she was taken from her family
and put in a Nazi concentration camp.
I've heard the stories of several survivors
of the Nazi concentration camps.
They never cease to just motivate and stir
my heart about how horrible that is.
How awful evil is and how we just
got to constantly fight and push back against it.
Irene, would you please tell your story
so we can start that off.
This will be the first testimony of a survivor
you will hear this week.
You will hear many of the rest of them throughout the week.
Irene Weiss.
IRENE WEISS: Thank you very much.