Reconciliation 95: can there be healing after ethnic cleansing?

Can there be healing after ethnic cleansing? Jiri Jiny describes how a citizens' movement began the process of reconciliation between his country, the Czech Republic, and Germany.

One of the worst examples of ethnic cleansing in 20th century Europe was the expulsion of more than three million Germans from the territory of today's Czech Republic in 1945-6.

On a map, the Czech Republic (before that, kingdom) looks like a nut in the nutcracker of eastern Germany. For a thousand years these neighbours co-existed and in the 19th century a large German-speaking minority lived in `Czech' territory.

By the 1930s, however, the German minority was seen as a problem. Hitler `solved' this problem by annexing Czechoslovakia in 1939. Then the war turned. In the space of one year, three million German-speaking people were expelled to Germany, with the approval of the Allies.

This act was a victory for the Czech nationalists, but a victory worse than defeat. Fear of German reprisals bound the Czech state to the Soviet `big brother'. The Czechs convinced themselves that this ethnic cleansing was in fact an act of justice. Our Communist politicians hid it in a fridge for 40 years.

After the collapse of the Communist regime, leaders in both countries wanted to improve relations--but the expellees issue blocked this. As nobody wanted to lose votes, nobody was able to break the deadlock.

Fortunately there were people on both sides who looked beyond elections. They came from different backgrounds--politics, the press, science, community organizations and the churches. They were united by the view that bristling hostility between nations can have dangerous results--and by the opinion that the ostrich approach gets one nowhere.

In March 1995 this group published Reconciliation 95, an appeal for negotiations between the Czech government and leaders of the German expellees. Some 110 people signed it, several of them public figures.

`The response in Germany was not that big,' says Milan Churan, a Czech historian who was one of the fathers of Reconciliation 95. `But in the Czech Republic it was hysterical. For instance, two leading academics accused the authors of betraying their country.'

But, he goes on, the document broke a taboo. `Today you can talk and write about the expulsion of German people and not be crucified. For the first time there is real freedom of discussion.'

In January 1997 the governments of Germany and the Czech Republic signed a `Czech-German declaration of reconciliation' (see FAC Vol 10 No 5) and made the first steps towards reconciliation.