I agree.
I also find the idea wrong in principal. For while I think that attempts should be made to rectify ethnic cleansing in the immediate aftermath of such an event, doing so decades later is simply compounding one wrong with another. There simply has to be a statute of limitations on such things.
Here I´m unsure... So then when do you think those limitations you mention should start to work? What does "immediate" mean? One year after the ethnic cleansing, five years or ten years later? Just asking? And remembering Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.
Doesn´t that mean that if nobody - no important country in the world - is interested in "you", "you" are required to shut up once once your "limitation" is reached? So if a powerful nation "occupies" your territory for - say one generation - and expells "you", "you" should shut up once reaching the "limitation". Right?
So Tibet should be quiet. Same for the West Sahara. And East Timor never should have gained statehood either. You just have to expell more than 50% of the complaining people for - how long? - one generation and the "statute of limitations" is valid, right?
So the Russians did just make one mistake. They just didn´t send more than 50% of the Baltic population to Siberia when they could. With the result of losing the Baltic states in the 1990s. I´m sure future dictators will carefully view your "statutes of limitations". :)
In this my thinking has been perhaps influenced by my automatic association of a right of 'return' to the German expellee movement's notion of a Recht auf Heimat (or Heimatrecht) which is clearly associated with the strange idea that there is some mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory (Kulturlandschaft).
Get real! Only a tiny minority of Germans would actually return to the birthplace of their great-parents. That said the Chech laws after 1945 didn´t distinguish between supporters of Hitler and people resisting him. So the laws might be a touch insensitive...
So you disagree with the Baltic states laws that if you want to be a citizen you have to speak the local language and be a local citizen? I mean their law made some "mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory". Given your definition they don´t even have a right to exist?
The Baltic states only existed between 1920 and 1940? Less than one generation. Before 1918 they were part of Russia. After 1945 they were part of the USSR. So according to your definition they don´t have any right to exist? Your "statute of limitations" would have certainly expired for these states?
How long do you think the rights should last? Do you think the Poles in the postwar period with their talk of 'recovered territories' and the 'repatriation' of the German 'settlers' were correct?
Only a tiny minority of Germans would actually return to the birthplace of their great-parents. That said the Chech laws after 1945 didn´t distinguish between supporters of Hitler and people resisting him. So the laws might be a touch insensitive... The number actively involved (as opposed to passively supporting) was a small minority of the population. In any case depending on how the question was asked a clear majority of the expellees wished to return into the sixties. A right of return was the official policy of the German government until Brandt, and remained the official policy of the expellee movement long after that. And if the expellees had been kept in refugee camps as second class citizens (Jordan, occuppied territories) or non-citizens (everywhere else) I suspect that plenty would still want to 'return.' Conversely, if the Arab governments had had a deliberate policy of scattering the refugees throughout the rest of the population, breaking up old local communities geographically, and providing financial aid and partial compensation for lost property I imagine we wouldn't be all that worried about the Palestinian refugee problem today. (To be exact the Bundesregierung had a dual, contradictory policy for the expellees. On the one hand the practical one described above. On the other a propaganda/cultural one seeking to preserve their local identities so that they would want to return - hence the large scale funding of the Landsmannschaft movement and its associated organizations.)
Re. the Baltics - you do realize that Vilnius had a Lithuanian population of at most 5% in 1939, and no I don't think the Poles (or rather their children and grandchildren) expelled from Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine have any rights with respect to those countries.
And as a final note, a poem by the Polish poet Anna Frajlich, about her home town of Szczecin, formerly Stettin. (translation mine) City
A sharp western light strikes my eyes a different view greeted me from my childhood windows from one side gardens stretching out in the distance from the other end of a street planted so thickly with lindens that their crowns formed a tent the light as in a tunnel somewhere in the distance round and promising the city was not ours but taken from others who fled here in the wartime chaos and left everything either buried in the gardens or covered by the rubble or simply on the table red wine in crystal glasses unfinished dark stains on the sides the city was not ours but it flowered for us berries and apple trees in countless gardens violets and lilies in the hedges' shadows flowered the city by the river spilled out along the borders and in this city one heard various languages --like the bushes -- transplanted from east to west someone drawled in from Wilno someone's Lwow gentry maners -- in a whisper someone still spoke in German and the survivors' Yiddish filled the streets and on the riverbanks the city slang already grew like grass among the stones and it is such an image that endures in my mind sometimes somber and then again full of summer glare spring autumn in the smoke of burning branches the city of my childhood
taken from someone so that someone else's childhood would pass by elsewhere
Why would that be the Arab governments' task? I hope you don't think the neighbouring Arab states' military response to Israel's unilateral declaration of independence is an all-Arab war crime comparable to Nazi Germany's, and you don't buy the broad Zionist (I'm afraid to say not just Likudnik) spin that the more recent development of Palestinian identity and the existence of the pan-Arabist ideology means that there are no real inter-Arab distinctions and all refugees are just 'Arabs'.
(Besides, no one thought this situation will last 50 years.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.