Alfred DeZayas' letter to St. Louis' Ethnic German conference of last Saturday: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening Ladies and gentlemen, dear Anne Morrison This is Alfred de Zayas from the Geneva School of Diplomacy On Friday 12 February I wish I could be with you in St. Louis But as you may know, from 22 to 25 February I shall be in Bilbao as rapporteur of a conference aiming at drafting a Declaration on Peace as a Human Right. Indeed, there is a human right to peace And there is a right to one’s homeland, a right to one’s identity and a right to truth. These are fundamental human rights – all too often ignored. I take this opportunity to reaffirm my conviction that high schools, colleges and graduate schools have a responsibility to do more to educate the younger generations About human rights, about peace, about identity – This entails among others, teaching history Not excluding whole chapters of history, nor practicing generalization and demonization of others. The German historian Leopold von Ranke spoke of writing history “wie es eigentlich gewesen” Just as things occurred In the complexity of factors, taking note of causal relationships, and in the right perspective. It is too simplistic to pretend that the world is divided into two camps – the good guys and the bad guys – us and them When I studied history in high school, college and graduate school The expulsion of 14 million Germans at the end of the second world war was not a theme – It was never mentioned, neither in the textbooks and nor in the lectures. I learned about it by chance at Harvard Law School, when in a seminar on international law I heard that forcible population transfers were illegal. Obvious, of course, How could it be legal to expel 14 million human beings from their homelands where their ancestors had lived for seven centuries. This was big – and yet it was totally ignored. In fact, it was much bigger than any other mass expulsion in history, and more murderous than ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and yet no one talks about it. Back in the 70’s I got a Fulbright and went to Germany to study this historical cataclysm. The result was my book “Nemesis at Potsdam” I interviewed George Kennan, Robert Murphy, James Riddleberger, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, Sir Dennis Allen and so many other officials and participants at the key conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. I then helped make a television documentary for the Bayerischer Rundfunk – Flucht und Vertreibung – and made a book out of it A Terrible Revenge, published by St. Martin’s Press, and now in paperback by Palgrave/Macmillan. The subject matter has not left me Bottom line: the expulsion was not only illegal, it was evidence of a moral failure in the democracies And the continued taboo that hangs over it, is unworthy of a democracy. Bottom line: everyone has a right to one’s homeland without fear of being expelled. The German expellees and their descendants have a right to recognition in their status of victims. It is their human right. I wish you a great conference and many more. ........................................... Thank you Anita Pare for sharing it with us! Rosina www.hrastovac.net