Not many people know that President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was born in India. Yet he and 7.5 million Muslim refugees are not clamouring to return. So why does the world take seriously the demand to return of Palestinian Arab refugees ? Tom Carew has been pointing out these and other neglected truths to the media.
"The UK Episcopalian leader, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, had recent wide-ranging contacts with official figures in Lebanon, Syria and Armenia and also visited refugee camps. That Arab refugees are languishing in camps since 1948 is appalling but the responsibility for this sad state of affairs is seldom mentioned.
In 1947 when the UK granted independence to India and Pakistan some 7.5 million Muslims were displaced moving from India to Pakistan while some 711, 000 Arabs (UN estimate) left Israel. An equal number of Hindus and Sikhs moved in the opposite direction - exactly as happened with the rarely-mentioned Jewish refugees fleeing Arab lands and Iran to Israel. There was no mention ever of any "right of return" for those Muslims to India or for the nearly 1 million Jews displaced from the Arab world and Iran.
"The 12th Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf was born in India (Delhi 1943) while the first Sikh to become India's 14th PM Dr. Manmohan Singh was born in Pakistan (Punjab 1932). The 15 million displaced persons on the Indian sub-continent were not cynically and callously left to rot in camps; nor were the Jewish refugees who came to Israel. In addition to those who fled to Israel many more Jews fled elsewhere such as to the US; and in 1962 to France from Algeria.
The nearly 1 million Jews in the Arab world and Iran in 1947 have been reduced to 1% of that figure but Israel alone has more Arabs than those in the whole of British- administered Palestine in 1947 (1.4m. against 1.2m.).
"These very relevant facts are often forgotten and little used even by official Israeli spokespersons - yet they provide essential perspective. The unique creation of UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated solely to the Palestinian Arabs may ultimately have hindered, not facilitated their reintegration into society. The 15m. refugees on the Indian sub-continent [21 times the number of Palestinian Arab refugees] enjoyed no such agency. And Muslim oil revenues, even without any US, Israeli or European funding, would be more than sufficient to integrate all Palestinian Arabs into their host societies and/or into Gaza and the West Bank."
TOM CAREW
Dublin, 6, Ireland.