UNWANTED PEOPLES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 95, 21 March 1938, Page 8

UNWANTED PEOPLES.

Though beset by difficulties which, because of repeated failures to solve them, seem almost insurmountable, there are still scattered here and there influential individuals and groups who are seeking to cure tor tiie unwanted peopie of the once great Assyrian nation and the thousands of German Jews who have been forced to flee the country because of Nazi persecution and intolerance. Their task will be rendered much greater by the latest developments in Austria, where at present many Jews are trapped under Nazi rule because of the closing of the frontiers by the adjoining nations. A proposal to settle the scattered remnants of the Assyrian nation in Cyprus was recently engaging the attention of influential people in England. At present twelve thousand of the Assyrians who survived the World War and the massacres in Iraq are in temporary homes on the River Khabbur in Syria. Most of the remainder, about twenty* thousand, are more or less homeless in Iraq. During the last twentytwo years many of them have seen the houses they had built to live in destroyed no fewer than eight times. Plans to find permanent homes for the Assyrians in Brazil, in British Guiana, and on the River Ghab in Syria, have one by one fallen through, and a few months ago the League of Nations announced with regret that as no solution had been found it had decided to leave these unfortunate people where they are —part in Iraq, part in Syria. Mention of Brazil is interisting, for in the past few years many German Jews have found their wmy to that country. All types —poor and rich ; young and old; craftsmen, scientists, and artists—have settled in a land in which the main sources of wealth are agricultural and not industrial or urban. Many of the refugees have failed and now constitute a serious social problem. In addition, anti-Jew-ish activity is commencing _in certain sectors of Latin America, the real reasons for which are at present hidden. There. is room in that country for millions more people, but the influx of German Jews has been too rapid for absorption into the economic fabric of the territory, and the repercussions may make themselves .heard before long in other parts of the world.