MARYLAND CITY’S FLAG FLAP

After a spike in hate crimes over the winter, Rockville, Md., officials came up with what they thought would be the ideal way to affirm the city’s commitment to diversity and inclusion: fly the flags of all 193 member countries of the United Nations from downtown light poles. But within weeks, officials discovered that celebrating diversity is not a simple business and that good intentions can be derailed by unintended consequences.

IRAQ

Some U. S. military veterans protested the presence of the Iraqi flag at Hometown Holidays, the city’s annual threeday street festival celebrating Memorial Day, where Gold Star mothers and the wounded would be in attendance. “If it was 10 years after World War II, would we fly the Japanese flag or the German flag in downtown Rockville?” asked Darrin Jones, an Army veteran of the 1991 Gulf War.

SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM

The loudest protest came from Montgomery’s large Vietnamese community. Trinh Nguyen was furious when he learned that the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — the communist regime that defeated his homeland of South Vietnam in 1975 — was flying outside Rockville Memorial Library. “That red flag is painted by the blood of three million Vietnamese plus more than 58 thousand American GIs,” the 75- year- old former captain in the South Vietnamese army wrote in a June 8 email to Montgomery County executive Isiah Leggett.

UP, DOWN, UP AGAIN

Mayor Bridget Newton said the city initially took down the Vietnam communist regime’s flag — a yellow star against a field of red — but only to verify that it was actually recognized by the United Nations. Once that was confirmed, it went up again.

ETHIOPIA

An Ethiopian resident complained that his country’s flag was upside down. It turned out he was looking at the Bolivian flag, which has the same stripes of red, yellow and green but ordered in reverse.

CRASH COURSE

Tim Chesnutt, director of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which oversaw the flag placement, said the whole episode has been a crash course in a subject he never realized was so complex.

“We’ve l earned more about flags in the last month than we ever knew,” he said.

SARAH L. VOISIN / THE WASHINGTON POST Officials in Rockville tried to soothe tensions and promote diversity by flying the flags of all 193 member nations of the United Nations, but that good intention backfired.