• Congrés Mondial Acadien Calendar
• Congrès '99 to open with a flourish
• Priest prepares for French Mass at Southdown
• Bienvenue, y'all: CMA under way
• Acadians honor enduring culture
• Acadian descendents converge on La.
• Bourgeois clan to recognize its historical land 
• Canadian Acadians trek to La.
• Acadian history rescued
• Petition by Warren Perrin
• Genealogy program set at Nicholls
• Congres Mondial is summer gathering for Acadians 

LAFAYETTE -- Warren Perrin, president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, Friday pledged that he will prevail in his 10-year effort to an official British apology for the deportations of thousands of Acadians in the 18th century. Those expulsions beginning in 1755 eventually led to the establishment of the Cajun culture in Louisiana.

Perrin is an attorney with offices in Lafayette and Erath, where he has established a museum brimming with memorabilia of the struggle of his people to survive with their French culture and language intact. His remarks came in an impassioned speech on the first day of the family reunion of La Famille Beausoleil, actually the Broussard clan.  The organization is named for the famous (to much of the English-speaking population of the Canadian Maritime Provinces more like infamous) freedom-fighter Joseph ''Beausoleil'' Broussard.

It was the first event of the Congres Mondial Acadien Louisiane -- 1999 (Louisiana World Congress of Acadians -- 1999) which does not officially begin until opening ceremonies in Houma on Sunday.  It will be celebrated with festivals, 37 reunions of about 80 families, symposiums and conferences. And there will be plenty of food and music practically everywhere in southern Louisiana.

Privately, CMA officials predict as many as 500,000 Acadian descendants will attend from countries as far away as Australia.

Perrin likened the 18th century deportations to 20th century atrocities such as the Nazi-imposed Holocaust attempt to exterminate Jews in Europe and to the culturally motivated mass murders in Kosovo and Rwanda.

''Our ancestors are the first example of ethnic cleansing,'' he said.  He said ''Le Grand Derangement'' was part of an ''attempt to rid all of North America of French and Catholics.''

Explaining with a lawyer's courtroom precision, he said the actions of then Lt. Gov. Col. Charles Lawrence was illegal by British law and technically or ''de facto'' still stands, one of his chief motivations for hounding the British Crown for an apology.

He said Lawrence had to get an ''order signed by a judge.''  ''He had to declare that our ancestors were criminals. I intend that we have our good names returned to us,'' he said, emphasizing that he was seeking no reparations.

Technically in a legal sense, he said, persons of Acadian descent still cannot return to their ancestral homeland, although of course they have been doing that for the last 245 years.

This self-repatriation picked up speed after the 1763 Treaty of Utrecht officially ended the hostilities but not the unofficial mistreatment of Acadians by the British.

''It infuriates me that we still have this hanging over our heads,'' he said.  ''It was a subterfuge of British law (at the time) and that's why we are going to succeed. It was an embarrassment (to the British Crown) then and it's an embarrassment now,'' he said.  He said there have been at least six instances of apologies from the British government and royal family in this century, the latest when Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 apologized for the 1972 massacre of Irish Catholic by British soldiers.

Government spokesmen in England have told him, ''We believe this is a Canadian problem,'' he said.  ''But the Crown of England existed then and it exists today,'' he said.  ''And part of the reason it exists is because they (the royal family) represent the past.''