Happy Birthday

Sixty years ago, India and Pakistan gained their independence. Again, Ethnic Cleansing is my topic of this post. I think all of you have seen Sir Richard Attenborough’s movie, Ghandi. If not, stop reading and watch that movie and read the rest later.

I can very well remember the trails of Muslims fleeing India and the Hindi fleeing Pakistan leading parallel away from their homes to an uncertain future. And of the fight between the two groups starting because of nothing. Twelve million refugees, one million murdered because of race, religion and greed.

Ghandi, who was against the separation, was murdered himself half a year later by a radical Hindu. Not even he could stop the killing.

Those events were not too much different between Turkey and Greece. But I want to know, what we can learn from those events for, say, Kosovo.

I don’t know if India and Pakistan are in a state of war or peace. We know about the more or less constant fighting in Kashmir. And we know, that both countries acquired nuclear weapons even though the cost politically as well as economically was very high.

And we have heard all about the regular terror attacks in India by Muslims and the racist and radical Hindus in high political posts.

On the other hand, India has not fallen apart, even thought there are 22 official languages and ballot-lists are in 114 different languages! Tata Steel, an Indian company paid 13 billion dollar for Corus, formerly known as British Steel. Thousands of programmers are working for Western companies but still half of the Children in India are malnourished.

Pakistan on the other hand is not much better. If at all better. Ruled by a General, Democracy has a difficult stand. There is a huge difference between Islamabad where people go to jail because their fight for democracy and the North-West Provinces, where support for the Taliban runs high. There seem to be some hope, that Pakistan will become more democratic. There were demonstrations in support for the Courts, because they tried to keep the Army’s influence out of the judicial system.

But, as in Turkey and probably Palestine, Muslim orientated parties have to prove, if Islam and Democracy can be combined or not. Personally, I still have some doubt.

Israel has a refugee-problem

Yeah, you might say, there are the Jews, who fled/came to Israel and the Palestinians who fled during the different wars.

But now they have a third refugee-problem with people from Sudan. About 200 Sudanese have fled, crossing the Egyptian-Israeli border. About one Million refugees from Sudan live in difficult condition in Egypt.

Some were killed by the Egyptian army, some clubbed to death. In December 2006, at least 27 Sudanese were killed by Egyptian police trying to brake up a demonstration near the U.N.'s refugee agency office in Cairo.

Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, the Jewish state's Holocaust museum and memorial, recently wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert urging Israel to "show solidarity" with the Sudanese refugees and help find a solution.

Most of the 200 Sudanese are held in jails. Israel wants to be an ethnic-clean Jewish state, also a democracy and has no need for further presumably uneducated Sudanese.

And beside the first point, we in Europe have the same problem. The unemployment rate of uneducated is already high enough. Those jobs we had have long ago been transferred to China.

If Israel gives them the right to stay, thousands more would try to cross the border. And if the ties between Egypt and Israel were worse, the Egyptians just could look the other way. Israel needs Egypt as much as we need Libya.

I believe, that we should stop the right for asylum as it is impossible to grant it to all those that come to our doors and we deny it for some reasons. And we should send those back, which manage to come here. If they don't say from where they come, we should send them back to where we think they came from.

On the other hand I would grant the right to stay to following groups:

A) Workers and their families for jobs which we can't find anyone in Switzerland or the EU.

B) People which were persecuted, because either they were for democratic changes or free speech (not because of religion and not if they were part of an antidemocratic, say Islamic, movement).

C) A contingent of people from around the world, as the Green Card Lottery in the US.

D) A contingent of people from war-zones. Families with young children preferred.

Kosovo or Kosova

Serbs call it Kosovo, Albanians call it Kosova. Since the Nato-campaign in 1999 there is a constant discussion, if Kosovo should be A independent, B part of Albania, C part of Serbia, the pre-war status or D segregation.

At least B, part of Albania, seems to be the least possible version right now. But I believe, that if A or D should become reality, B could easily follow. And if we allow the Albanians to reunite, who could stop the Serbs and the Croats to take the' part of Bosnia they already control?

Which would leave the Bosniaks with almost nothing.

A is what the West wants, at least most of it, C has the support of Russia and as far as I know is the thing to do according to international law.

If one changes the rule here, there would be a lot of other ethnic groups all around the world, which would want their independence and if we give that to the Kosova-Albanians, who could deny it to any other group. Even the USA, with their large Indian, Black and Latino groups could be on the receiving end of segregation demands.