"I hold the view that, political issues aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest postwar refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of the host countries. There is room for them, and land for them, in Syria and in Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower that they represent. More unusually still, there is the money to make this integration possible. The United Nations General Assembly, five years ago, voted a sum of 200 million dollars to provide 'homes and jobs' for the Arab refugees. That money remains unspent, not because these tragic people are strangers in a strange land, because they are not; not because there is no room for them to be established, because there is; but simply for political reasons."

-- Elfan Rees, Adviser on Refugees to the World
       Council of Churches, in "The Refugee
       Problem Today and Tomorrow," 1957.

To most of the educated world, the names of several leaders of modern Czechoslovakia evoke affection and respect, notably Tomas Masaryk, whose father was the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. The son had to endure the pusillanimity of Great Britain and France at Munich; he survived the war and the Nazis, but was killed in 1948, pushed out of a window by Soviet agents, in the Second Defenestration of Prague. Alexander Dubcek, whose Prague Spring and "socialism with a human face" in 1968 brought a Soviet military response, evokes a similar though perhaps lesser affection. Vaclav Havel, the current president of the non-Communist Czech Republic, who began as an anti-Communist dissident and wrote his Letters to Olga from prison, is another in that list.

In nearby Poland, the shipyard workers in Gdansk, who helped to found the Solidarity movement, and whose refusal to obey the authorities hastened the disintegration of Communist rule in Poland, and Soviet power everywhere, remain in Western memories as objects of admiration.

Yet the admirable Masaryk (and his foreign minister Benes) undertook the wholesale expulsion of ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, that region where the Germans had been living for some 600 years, and the admirable Havel defends that action and refuses to apologize to Germans recently demanding an expression of remorse. All Czechs supported this policy in 1945, nor did anyone in the civilized world drop a tear of regret, or utter a syllable of recrimination. Under the circumstances, and given the history of German aggression in Central Europe, the Czechs felt in 1948, and feel now, that they had every right to limit a potential internal threat against their national security -- even though, in 1945, any threat posed by a destroyed Germany seemed vague and theoretical.

In Poland, those Solidarity workers conducted their strikes in Gdansk, a city formerly full of Germans, known before the war as Danzig (a war-cry of the appeasers was "Don't die for Danzig"). Gdansk is now entirely Polish (as Kaliningrad, ne Koenigsberg, is entirely Russian), for its German population left in 1945, harried out along with 12 million Germans all over Central and Eastern Europe, in Hungary, in Rumania, and elsewhere. Individual injustices occurred, as happens in politics and geopolitics (not everyone killed by the Allies was guilty), where large masses of people have to be dealt with. Most think that the post-World War II expulsion of Germans was justified by larger considerations.

In the Middle East, expulsion of a population deemed dangerous, or otherwise unwelcome, has been common.

Elsewhere in the world, expulsions of hostile populations -- sometimes in the context of war, or independence, sometimes in their aftermath -- have been the rule, not the exception. Post-Ottoman Turkey, in the 1920s, expelled several million Pontic Greeks from Turkish land; hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks were expelled by Greece and repatriated to Turkey. Tens of millions of Muslims fled India in 1947 for the Muslim state of Pakistan, and tens of millions of Hindus fled what was to become Pakistan for predominantly Hindu India. In the recent past, Greeks and Turks on Cyprus have separated themselves into discrete populations on either side of a dividing line.

In the Middle East, expulsion of a population deemed dangerous, or otherwise unwelcome, has been common. Indeed, the Ur-Expulsion in the Middle East was that conducted by the very early Muslim ruler, successor to the Abu Bakr who succeeded Muhammad, the celebrated 'Umar ('Umar bin al-Khattab). In his study The Succession to Muhammad, Wilfred Madelung notes that "the relatively large Christian and Jewish communities in Najran and Khaybar were summarily expelled by 'Umar to the conquered territories." (p. 74). Such forced movements of population have been common since in the Mid-

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