Mr. Speaker, dealing only with the refugee issue, because that is the one before us, I will point out that the last century has been the century of mass refugee movements. One of the maps that Sir Martin Gilbert provides includes a list of the top refugee movements in the world in the 20th century. All of them are astounding catastrophes. This is probably an apocryphal quotation, but the story is that Stalin said that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. When one reaches the level of 30 million people in the 20th century forced from their homes and forced to leave as refugees, one gets some idea of the kind of tragedy that has been involved.
The Palestinians who had to leave Israel and the Jews who had to leave the Middle East are actually very far from the largest refugee movements. The very biggest movement was five million Jews who were driven out of what is now western Poland but, at the time, was an area of Germany that had been German ethnically for hundreds of years. There have been Romanians driven out of Bessarabia; the Tatars, as I mentioned, were rounded up and driven out of the Crimea, only to return some five decades later. There are so many others that is hard to keep track of them all, but one gets the point. The India-Pakistan partition was another terrible example with millions of victims.
In each of these cases, it seems appropriate to try to deal with the human tragedy separately from the geopolitical considerations of who was right and who was wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that in the great war between the Soviet Union and Germany, the Nazis were in the wrong. That does not change the fact that those five million refugees were human victims. I think the same thing can be applied to any other situation, including this one.
Let us deal intelligently with those human tragedies and say that the same standard of justice must be applied to all people from all countries who were affected by this, regardless of what political affiliation they had and regardless of the merits of those states that were involved back in 1948 and in the present.