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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (13023)	6/28/1999 12:04:00 PM
From: JBL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Military victories are not always moral Paul Oestreicher Sunday June 27, 1999 The Observer It will be said by many, as the Kosovan war recedes into history, that it was the first to be ostensibly fought in pursuit of human rights. The Second World War was certainly not fought to save the Jews. Indeed, their plight was played down by the Allies. Neither during nor after that war were human rights high on any political agenda. Yet we have in recent weeks been led to believe that ever since the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Europe had become intolerable. Not so. Few remember that the defeated Germans were given a bitter taste of their own medicine. The years 1945-47 saw on a grand scale what we have seen in Kosovo, though the term ethnic cleansing had not been invented. There was no law to impede it. Human Rights Conventions are of more recent date. At the Potsdam Conference, with Stalin, Truman and Attlee around a table, the map of central Europe was redrawn. The United States and the United Kingdom bowed to Stalin's demand to annex almost one third of Poland. In turn, Poland got the eastern provinces of Germany, Silesia, Eastern Pomerania and two thirds of East Prussia. The remaining third with the historic German city of Konigsberg - today's Kaliningrad - became part of the Soviet Union. In one of the century's most bitter winters, most of the German population of these provinces as well as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, somewhere between 10 and 12 million people were driven out of their towns and villages. Of these, at least two million died on the freezing trek to Germany's four allied occupation zones. In the British occupied Ruhr, its industries laid waste, children were starving, and thousands of homes had been destroyed. In these pitiable conditions Germany had to absorb some eight million displaced fellow Germans. All this made no headlines. TV (as we know it now) did not exist. With Nazi atrocities fresh in everyone's mind, there was little pity for these German victims. Was not the only good German a dead German? An exception to this serves-them-right attitude was the Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz, who did all he could to make Britain aware of the misery of defeated Germany. Very few were prepared to champion the universality of human rights. For more than a generation, the German expellees' organisations campaigned for the right to return to their homes. They and their children formed a significant part of the German electorate. Instead of giving way to this pressure, Chancellor Willy Brandt went to Warsaw, knelt in penitence at the monument to the victims of Nazi terror, and negotiated a treaty which guaranteed Poland's western frontier. The German churches, in a historic document, had prepared the ground for this act of renunciation. With a dignified sense of reality, any claim on this historic German soil was publicly abandoned. Since German unification a decade ago, that has been solemnly reaffirmed. While no Polish leader has yet found it possible to express any degree of remorse, President V‡clav Havel's recent brave apology for the cruel way in which the Sudeten Germans had been driven out, has made an important contribution to German-Czech reconciliation. Ethnic cleansing is now rightly recognised as a crime justifying foreign intervention. How to intervene without making matters worse is still far from clear. America and Britain, prepared to go to war to punish a delinquent Serbia, might pause to remember that within living memory they signed up to a post-war settlement that led to ethnic cleansing on a huge scale, and lived at ease with the consequences. Germans, still burdened by the incomparable guilt of their Nazi past, were in no position to seek any kind of redress. But, in the words of Coventry Cathedral's litany of reconciliation, a Cathedral destroyed by German bombs, 'all have sinned and fallen short ...' It was always so, and is today. To admit it publicly, would help to affirm our ever threatened moral values. Those values are undermined by the United Kingdom's extreme reluctance to accept significant numbers of refugees and by our habitually unjust treatment of many asylum-seekers. In contrast, Germany, over the last quarter century, has taken in more refugees than the rest of Europe put together and absorbed them without major social upheaval. Firstly, I suggest, to assuage the guilt of the Nazi past and secondly because a large number of Germans know from personal experience what it means to be driven out of their homes. They know too what living in a police state is like. There was no one to admonish the Allies in 1945. To win a war militarily is sometimes easier than to win it morally. It might be wise on several counts, as more Balkan atrocities come to light, not to judge the Serbs too self-righteously. • Rev Dr Paul Oestreicher, a former chairman of Amnesty International UK. He is international consultant to Coventry Cathedral. His father's family were victims of the Holocaust.