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12/07/2005:

"Hurricane victims tell US Congress of racial slurs"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Survivors from New Orleans told a congressional panel on Tuesday they felt abandoned by government at all levels after Hurricane Katrina hit the city and had been subjected to racial slurs and menaced by guns when they sought food and water.

"We were abandoned. City officials did nothing to protect us," Patricia Thompson, a New Orleans evacuee now living in Texas, told a House of Representatives panel investigating the response to the storm.

"We saw buses, helicopters and FEMA trucks but no one stopped to help us. We never felt so cut off in all our lives," Thompson said.

She described "demoralizing and inhumane" treatment by police telling the panel: "We were cursed when we asked for help for our elderly. We had guns aimed at us by the police who were suppose to be there to protect us."

Thompson said her 5-year-old granddaughter cried in terror when a policeman pointed a gun at her and she worried about whether she had put up her hands correctly.

"I know the police were scared, but they had no right to treat everyone like criminals," she said.

The witnesses blamed local, state and federal officials for inadequately responding to victims in New Orleans and told the committee they thought racism was the root cause of their harsh treatment after the storm caused massive flooding in the city more than three months ago.

Of the five African Americans who testified, only Terrol Williams, a former federal worker, said he did not think the botched response was rooted in racial attitudes. He said authorities were unprepared and a mandatory evacuation should have been ordered sooner.

Leah Hodges, a community activist, recalled trying to help a group of stranded senior citizens. The military took them to an evacuation point on a highway where they spent the night, awakening to a "bunch of hard red necks scowling and growling at us in military uniforms ... pointing guns at us and treating us worse than prisoners of war," she said.

Hodges described waiting in the burning sun in conditions she likened to a concentration camp. Rep. Jeff Miller, a Florida Republican, asked her to stop making that comparison.

"I'm going to call it what it is. If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig," she responded heatedly.
reuters.com

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