STATEMENT - 23 August 2010

STATEMENT 

OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OF EUROPEAN UNION OF EXILED AND EXPELLED PEOPLE AT THE COMMEMORATION OF THE EUROPEAN DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR VICTIMS OF STALINISM AND NAZISM

(23 AUGUST 2010)

    On the occasion of August 23, European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism due to the European Parliament Resolution of 2 April 2009 on the European conscience and totalitarianism, the Secretary-General of the European Union of Exiled and Expelled People sent to the Heads of State and Government of EU member states and to representatives of the higher institutions in Europe, the following message:

    «On April last year, the European Parliament adopted the Declaration on European conscience and totalitarianism, delineating with sharp precision the foundations for a true, final unification of Europe as a sign of peace between peoples and nations of the continent.

    By that measure, the European Parliament finally raised consciousness of grief and misery caused thereby to humanity by the two great dictatorships of the twentieth century, National Socialism and Communism, both the highest expression of the fundamental and human rights violations that affect millions of innocent persons before, during and especially after the fratricide Second World War.

    Victims of the Holocaust and all those who perished in Nazi and Communist persecutions everywhere in the continent, must be added to the about twenty million Europeans who were forced into exile or expelled from their lands and who generated the largest wave of migration from the late Roman age, and to those ethnic groups remained isolated and deprived of their fundamental rights outside their national borders, victims themselves of brutal denationalization and assimilation programs.

    More than sixty years after the war and more than twenty years after the final dissolution of Communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, relations between some EU Member States involved or interested in the displacement of population remain still difficult and anachronistically delicate.

    The great challenge of European integration in the near future is therefore, the start of a necessary reform which limits the interest of those who still keep open the wound that, since 1945, divided the peoples of Europe, preventing the intimate and convinced reconciliation, prerequisite for the desired, final reunification.

    The declaration of 2 April 2009, thus, appears as a prerequisite for the planning of a common innovating policy, able to identify in the physical elimination of millions of European citizens in concentration camps, in the rapes of women and children, in the mass killings and internment in the Soviet gulag, as well as in the wild expulsion of millions of people after the war, the carrying out of a crime against humanity.

    No longer it could exist and could no longer be accepted – in a united Europe by specific shared values which must be a single, common historical and cultural heritage – the anachronistic and sectarian categories of crimes, in which devilishly to distinguish the less cruel than others.

    Only through this route, with the adoption of appropriate solutions, the Europe of totalitarianism, of the abuse and violations of the rights of its citizens, will be unified and replaced by that Europe the founding fathers had rightly set out to create». 



The Secretary-General
Massimiliano Lacota