When families flee their homes, this is the bottom, the last loss. It is not just job loss, or the destruction of seed corn. It is not just chaos and loss of family members. It is everything. Maybe the last bit of life, hanging on.
In the history of migration, often it is native inhabitants fleeing their villages in the face of an onslaught of immigrants.
In modern times, often technologically superior groups flee from "laws", the extortion exerted by force upon legitimacy. The Karelians were not displaced by a sudden influx of Soviets, but 300,000 of them fled the USSR seizure of their jurisdiction. Millions of Jewish people were forced from their homes by public policies and laws of various European States -- although organized pogroms, and Crystalnacht, followed the legalization of the ethnic persecution. The point is that Law led the coersion.
Curiously, the Hutu-controlled government took the trouble to project a "public policy" which at least pretended a justification for slaughtering unarmed Tutsi in their homes and churches. In 1994, ethnic fighting in Rwanda led to the massacre of at least half a million Tutsis and sent more than a million Hutus fleeing to Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi.
The Darfurians are subjected to the most primitive form of persecution. The tribal Arabs are simply attacking them -- killing and burning. The government of Sudan does not even bother to project a public policy or "legal" authority for the persecution. Arab racist sophistication is devoted to blaming Israel, denying reality, and preventing investigation, or resolution. Three of the minority ethnic groups in Darfur--the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa--are being attacked by armed forces, the Janjaweed militias, and the entire government apparatus. Over 2.7 million have fled their homes.
In Kenya, after the December 2007 "election" was compromised by violence (President Mwai Kibaki claimed to have defeated Raila Odinga by 230,000 votes out of 10 million cast), thousands of people were killed in the streets, and more than 300,000 fled their homes.
The Palestinian Arabs also fled their homes during the first war between Israel and the combined nations on its border. However, no government had declared a public policy of extermination against Arabs, and no organized pogroms had destroyed their communities before they fled. It is true that many of them fled out of fear, but it is fair to say that it was the fear of war, not targeted persecution. It is also true that many Arab "villages", not all of which were entirely abandoned, were destroyed by the Israeli Army. (The number of destroyed "villages" is controversial as it is difficult to define the abandoned dwellings and propagandists have made it impossible. There is no such discrepant calculation in counting the villages in Darfur.)
In modern Kurdistan, the Kurds who once conquered the Middle East, are now persecuted by Arabs and Turks. Over one million Kurds fled and lost their homes at the hand of Saddam Hussein in the last decade of his rule.
Why is there any controversy at all? ANY essentially involuntary movement of people from their homes on any scale, reflects upon the leadership and comfort of all.
The Chechnya sought to break away from Russia, but their movement failed and a state of suspicion remains.
ReplyDeleteGeorgia tried to suppress an independence movement in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and now Russia has invaded Georgia. The roads are filled with people fleeing their homes. The Georgians are actually the majority in adjacent Abkhazia.
Nearby in the same Caucasus region, the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians, living technically in Azerbajian, continue to be in jeopardy.
In Transnistria, the people may have to seek to break away from Moldovia.
Compare, on the island of Cypress, the Greeks and Turks are no closer to unification than 100 years ago.
The Balkans themselves are filled with millions of refugees. Serbia developed "ethnic cleansing" operations after the fall of Tito. Croatia may have "solved" its problem with Serbs, by causing the Serbs of Krajina to flee - a number close to 200,000.
Kosovo, is now nominally independent from Serbia, which had reconquered it as an historical homeland in 1912. But 90% of Kosovars are Albanian.
It was a brave Serbian journalist, Bosko Jacksic, who said "It is high time we finally understood that the mighty do as they please and the small do as they must".