Ethnic Cleansing

Complicated question.

Is it right to ethnically cleanse people whose "ethnic" leadership are ethnically cleansing other people elsewhere?

Confused?

OK, back to the Balkans War in the 1990s. The Serbian leadership were regarded in the Balkans War as the "bad guys" and indulged in ethnic cleansing - their acolytes in Bosnia were responsible for atrocities such as that at Srebrenica etc. Was it also right for Croatia (under Franjo Tuđman, who was almost as extreme a nationalist as Slobodan Milošević in my estimation) to drive out the Serb population of Krajina, despite the fact that their families may have been there for generations?

Dreadful things happen in wars, the innocent often suffer with the guilty, do we simply shrug our shoulders and move on?

I will offer no answer.

The original name of this piece was going to be "Whatever happened to the Sudeten Germans?". As my last piece was dedicated to the Danzig Corridor (since informed it is also known as the Polish Corridor, but I will stick with the title that I learned as a child), it also serves us to ask about the previous step in Hitler's war planning and the equally nauseous propaganda based on lies issued by Goebbels & Co.

You may guess from the title to this piece that they were ethnically cleansed. Not a phrase actually used at the time, and apparently not 100% the case, although it is a subject that is still bathed more in mud than in clarity.

Research into the subject suggests that at the end of the war many Sudeten Germans were rounded up and executed, some women were raped, and a large number of them were driven out ("ethnically cleansed") by the Czechs. Most of them ended up in Bavaria. Dig round the Internet, you will find groups still representing them or their descendants, many claiming that their treatment was brutal and unacceptable, and still expecting compensation. The right to return as well? That does not seem practical.

Some points from the Czech side.

Firstly when the Sudeten Germans start talking about these matters, the Czechs bring up the butchery of the people of Lidice by the Gestapo. Innocent people suffered on both sides and the Sudeten Germans were more prone to support the Nazis than most.

This has a bit of the sound of the innocent suffering with the guilty, but atrocities like that at Lidice cannot simply be ignored.

Secondly, the Czechs did attempt to weed out the Nazi supporters from the rest. In the chaotic conditions prevailing at the time, it did not prove easy to do. Those would commit themselves to supporting the Czech state could stay. This is indicated by the fact there are pockets of primarily German speakers even now - apparently the small town of Kravaře in the Hlučín region of Silesia has an "ethnic" German (and German speaking) mayor.

In other words, the Czechs will claim, there was not full "ethnic cleansing", merely the driving out of the extreme German nationalist element who would not commit themselves to the Czech state. Of course the process was not perfect, of course some innocent people did suffer.

That this is still an issue at all would surprise many (74 years since the Munich Agreement, 67 years after the end of the war). People move on and adapt, don't they?

And German leaders from both major parties have over the years apologised as best they can for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Gerhard Schröder notably went out of his way to attempt reconciliation on all the issues involved.

History though is not easily forgotten, even if its lessons are. The murder committed at Srebenica by the Serbs under Radko Mladić was an eerie reminder of what happened at Lidice (and at Oradour in France for that matter).

In wars there are often no truly just solutions, the innocent must suffer with the guilty. The best hope that we can have is something that most continental Europeans have been very good at doing over the past 65 years - preventing the start of another major war.