New Approaches to Migration?: Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home

New Approaches to Migration?

Transnational communities are historically produced by upheaval and confrontation, creating diaspora populations in pockets away from that which has been constituted as ‘home’. But what does that mean to those who live within these changing socio-cultural circumstances, and which critical tools can be brought to bear upon such patterns of distribution? This book critically evaluates the transnational communities approach to contemporary international migration. It does so through a specific focus on the relationship between ‘transnational communities’ and home. The meaning of ‘home’ for international migrants is changing and evolving, as new, globally oriented identities are developed. In this book these issues are explored through a number of central themes: the meaning of home to transnational peoples, the implications of transforming these social spaces, and how these have been transformed. It pays particular attention to heterogeneity within different transnational migrant groups, particularly where gender and class are concerned. Taking case studies of Sudanese, Moroccan, Evitrean, Senegalese, Palestinian, Croatian, Bosnian, Kashmiri and Kurdish ethnic groups displaced from their place of origin, the book addresses questions key to a study of human migration. By so doing, definitions of ‘community’ and ‘home’ as sites of the formation of national identity are questioned and undermined. This book will be an important resource for students of migration, human geography and cultural studies. Nadje Al-Ali is lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000). Khalid Koser is Lecturer in Human Geography at University College London. He has published widely on the subject of international migration and refugees, including The New Migration in Europe (Macmillan 1998 with Helma Lutz) and The End of the Refugee Cycle (Berghahn 1999 with Richard Black).

Transnationalism Series Editor: Steven Vertovec, University of Oxford ‘Transnationalism’ broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states. Today myriad systems of relationship, exchange and mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread across the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks. Despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), many forms of association have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common arena of activity. In some instances transnational forms and processes serve to speed up or exacerbate historical patterns of activity, in others they represent arguably new forms of human interaction. Transnational practices and their consequent configurations of power are shaping the world of the twenty-first century. This book forms part of a series of volumes concerned with describing and analysing a range of phenomena surrounding this field. Serving to ground theory and research on ‘globalization’, the Routledge book series on ‘Transnationalism’ offers the latest empirical studies and ground-breaking theoretical works on contemporary socio-economic, political and cultural processes which span international boundaries. Contributions to the series are drawn from Sociology, Economics, Anthropology, Politics, Geography, International Relations, Business Studies and Cultural Studies. The series is associated with the Transnational Communities Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council (see http://www. transcomm.ox.ac.uk). The series consists of two strands:

Transnationalism aims to address the needs of students and teachers and these titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include: Culture and Politics in the Information Age A new politics? Edited by Frank Webster

Routledge Research in Transnationalism is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only. Titles include: 1 New Transnational Social Spaces International migration and transnational companies in the early 21st century Edited by Ludger Pries

3 New Approaches to Migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of home Edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser

2 Transnational Muslim Politics Reimagining the Umma Peter G. Mandaville

4 Work and Migration Life and livelihoods in a globalizing world Edited by Ninna Nyberg Sorensen and Karen Fog Olwig

New Approaches to Migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of home Edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2002 Editorial selection and matter, Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Al-Ali, Nadje. New approaches to migration? : transnational communities and the transformation of home / Nadje Al-Ali & Khalid Koser. (Transnationalism) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Emigration and immigration – Social aspects. 2. Refugees. 3. Immigrants. 4. Home I. Koser, Khalid. II. Title. III. Series. JV6225 .A4 2001 304.8– dc21 2001041847 ISBN 0-203-16714-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26194-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–25432–9 (Print Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements 1 Transnationalism, international migration and home

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N A D J E A L - A L I A N D K H A L I D KO S E R

PART I

Transnational communities and the meaning of ‘home’ 2 Homes in crisis: Syrian Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Germany

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H E I D I A R M B RU S T E R

3 Sudanese identity in diaspora and the meaning of home: the transformative role of Sudanese NGOs in Cairo

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A N I TA H ÄU S E R M A N N F Á B O S

4 Shifting meanings of ‘home’: consumption and identity in Moroccan women’s transnational practices between Italy and Morocco

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RU B A S A L I H

5 Senegal is our home: the anchored nature of Senegalese transnational networks B RU N O R I C C I O

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Contents

PART II

The implications of transforming homes for transnational communities 6 The meaning of homeland for the Palestinian diaspora: revival and transformation

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MOHAMED KAMEL DORAI

7 Trans- or a-national? Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands

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NADJE AL-ALI

8 Homeland lost and gained: Croatian diaspora and refugees in Sweden

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M A JA P OV R Z A N OV I Ć F RY K M A N

9 From refugees to transnational communities?

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K H A L I D KO S E R

PART III

Transnational communities and the transformation of home

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10 Mobilizing for the transformation of home: politicized identities and transnational practices

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F I O N A B . A DA M S O N

11 The Kashmiri diaspora: influences in Kashmir

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12 Working for a solution through Europe: Kurdish political lobbying in Germany

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E VA Ø S T E RG A A R D - N I E L S E N

13 Sustaining societies under strain: remittances as a form of transnational exchange in Sri Lanka and Ghana

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N I C H O L A S VA N H E A R

References Index

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Contributors

Fiona B. Adamson is a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University and is a Fellow at the Olin Institute, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. She is currently completing a dissertation that examines the impact of transnational networks and diaspora political mobilization on the contemporary international security environment. She has written on a variety of topics relating to international relations theory, democratization and globalization, and has conducted research in Western Europe, Turkey and post-Soviet Central Asia. Nadje Al-Ali is a lecturer in social anthropology at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. Her research interests include migrants and refugees and gender in the Middle East. Dr Al-Ali has recently published Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2000). In the context of anti-sanctions campaigning with Women in Black Act Together: Women against sanctions on Iraq, she has also carried out research on the social and cultural impact of economic sanctions on women in Iraq. Heidi Armbruster received her PhD in social anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She is currently involved in a research project on European border identities, which is based at the University of Southampton. Mohamed Kemal Dorai is a doctoral student in geography at the University of Poitiers (France) and a Research Associate at Migrinter. His major research interests include Palestinian diaspora in the Middle East and Europe, as well as issues related to refugees and migrants in the Arab world. Patricia Ellis is a senior lecturer in refugee studies at the University of East London, having formerly been the head of the Centre for Ethnic Studies at the University of Luton. Her main areas of research interest have been on the impact of migration on the identity politics of diaspora communities

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of Kashmiris and the relationship with Kashmir as the country of origin. Her recent and current research now focuses on the specific issues associated with the makings of refugee communities and the problems for settlement. She is currently working with some of the London Boroughs looking at the settlement needs of refugee adolescents and with the World University Service on the status of refugee qualifications. Anita Häusermann Fábos is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Program in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. She received her PhD from Boston University in anthropology in 1999. Her areas of interest include ethnicity, citizenship and gender in the context of migration and forced migration. She has conducted extensive fieldwork among Sudanese communities in Egypt. Maja Povrzanovićć Frykman is Assistant Professor, Department of European Ethnology, Lund University, and an external associate of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb. She is interested in experiences and representations of war and exile, as well as in concepts and practices within the semantic domains of diaspora and transnationalism. She co-edited War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives (Zagreb, 1996) and edited Beyond Integration: challenges of belonging in diaspora and exile (Lund, 2001). Zafar Khan is a senior lecturer in South Asian studies and community relations in the Department of Health and Social Organization at the University of Luton. His research interests are in the areas of minority mobilization and social change with reference to the post-war South Asian diaspora in Britain. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the Muslim presence in Britain and their perspectives on welfare to pioneering work on identity and community mobilization of the Kashmiri diaspora. He has an MA in South Asian Studies from the School of African and Oriental Studies as well as a postgraduate qualification in socio-legal studies. He is currently involved with research looking into the incidence of cancer and palliative care of South Asians funded by the Luton Health Action Zone, and developing a project to examine the health and social needs of the South Asian elderly. Khalid Koser is a lecturer in human geography at University College London. He is co-editor of The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social Realities (Macmillan, 1998) and The End of the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction (Berghahn, 1999). Eva Østergaard-Nielsen is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International Relations. She is currently carrying out a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Transnational Communities Programme

Contributors ix on Turkish and Kurdish political networks in Europe. She has published on the issues of migration and diasporas, including Transnational Loyalties and Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany (Routledge, 2001). Bruno Riccio received his DPhil in social anthropology from the University of Sussex in 2000. His doctoral research was on Senegalese transnational migrants and the Italian experience of immigration. A number of his papers based on this project have already been published in books and journals, including Modern Italy, Afriche e Orienti, Etnoantropologia, and further publications are in active preparation. He is currently teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Bologna, Italy. Ruba Salih is currently a research fellow at the University of Bologna, Department of Politics, Institutions and History. She has done research in Italy, Morocco and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. She has completed a PhD at the University of Sussex in social anthropology. Her doctoral dissertation explored the gendered dimension of transnational migration, focusing on the experiences of Moroccan migrant women in Italy. A book based on her doctoral dissertation is forthcoming by Routledge. Her publications include: ‘Shifting Boundaries of Self and Other. Moroccan Migrant women in Italy’ in European Journal of Women’s Studies 7(3): 309–323 (2000), and ‘Shifting Meanings of Islam and Multiple Representations of Modernity: The Case of Migrant Women of Muslim Origin in Italy’ in J. Andall, (ed.) Gender and Ethnicity in Europe (Berg, forthcoming). Nicholas Van Hear is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen, prior to which he was Senior Researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. He has written widely on migration and refugee issues, covering developments in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Preface

What’s really new about the study of ‘transnational communities’ that marks a difference from traditional approaches to the study of international migration and cultural and political diasporas? This is the question most frequently posed to researchers in the emergent field of transnational studies, especially by those who wish to question the very status of this relatively recent field of enquiry. A key strength of New Approaches to Migration? Transnational communities and the transformation of home is that its contributors consistently address this question head on in studies that are theoretically informed, analytically pointed and empirically rich. Their answers lie in the wealth of transnational practices and forms of interconnectivity discussed in the ethnographic and comparative historical case studies that comprise the book. This exciting new collection grew out of a major international conference held at the University of Sussex in the Fall of 1999, co-sponsored by the Transnational Communities Programme of the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. The title of the conference, to which I was invited to deliver a keynote address, was nearly identical to the title of this book. The difference is that in the months during which the book was being prepared for publication a question mark was inserted between its title and subtitle. This added punctuation speaks volumes because it problematizes the celebratory tone of some of the transnational discourses that have been casually inserted into migration studies in recent years. Moreover, it calls into question the very oppositions by which the concept ‘transnational’ has come to be commonly understood, namely as a social space clearly opposed to both national and local social space. Hence, this book pointedly not only interrogates the construction of the transnational, but also challenges essentialized imaginings of ‘community’ and ‘home’ as taken-for-granted sites of national identity formation and local ethnographic enquiry. It is precisely these tensions, and the ways in which they are negotiated in the lives of migrants and refugees and played out in the discourses of state-centred actors and political diasporas seeking changes in their homeland political systems, that make this an exciting volume.

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Despite their differences in approach and the different transnational connections they explore, all of the contributors to New Approaches to Migration? share a common anti-essentialist epistemological stance that underlines the considerable heterogeneity found within each of the transnational migrant, refugee and diasporic groups that they have studied. Indeed, the crosscutting cleavages of class, gender, generation, region, ideology, period of migration, different local sending contexts, urban or rural origin, religion and citizenship status all powerfully mediate the social construction of place, home, membership, community and identity within each of the various groups under study. The studies in this book thus strongly underline our need to capture the difference-generating social bases of identity formation and social practice and thus to move beyond homogeneous constructions of ‘transnational communities’ that advance the field little beyond traditional conceptualizations of migrant groups as singular ethnonational wholes. Another theoretical lesson to be learned from these studies is that there are many ways of ‘being transnational’ and that these are linked to distinctive types of social space. For instance, different kinds of transnational practices are enacted in domestic space by women’s household consumption practices at both ends of a trans-local migrant circuit and by social actors, often men, in the public space of political diasporas. The discursive space of the global human rights arena is another distinct site where differently situated social actors enact different kinds of transnational practices. The same is true for the transactional spaces of trade diasporas, labour recruiters, and cultural and religious brokers; the institutional spaces where NGO (nongovernmental organization) politics are enacted; and the global media space which local and trans-local actors seek to appropriate in their struggles for life, livelihood and political empowerment. All of these spaces of political, economic and cultural engagement are analysed in this book as complex sites where transnational practices are negotiated, enacted and contested. The editors of this book, Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser, are to be commended not only for their theoretical sophistication and willingness to encourage theoretically engaged empirical research from their contributors, but also for the topicality and geographical span of the case studies selected for inclusion in this volume. All of the contributions to this book are based on very recent empirical research, most of which maps the complex contours of transnational connections linking Western Europe to Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Woven into the narrative richness of these essays is a wide range of transnational and trans-local interconnectivity that has been little explored elsewhere in the literature of transnational studies, a field dominated until recently by research linking North American cities and regions to ‘sending’ localities in Latin America and the Pacific Rim. Several of the case studies in this book map the criss-crossing connections linking key ‘receiving’ localities and nations in Western Europe inexorably to the lived experiences of migrants from Morocco, Senegal and Turkey, and

Preface xiii political refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Eritrea. Others, also framed in the context of European migratory flows, detail the diasporic practices of Syrian Christians, Turkish Kurds, Palestinians, Kashmiri, Ghanaians and Sri Lankans, tracing the ties maintained between those who migrate and those who stay in the ‘sending’ place they call or would make their ‘homeland’. A final study depicts the contours of transnational practices across borders within the South, assessing the role of Sudanese NGOs operating in Egypt. Taken together, the studies contained in New Approaches to Migration? offer a solid empirical basis for future comparative analysis of transnational practices both within and across world regions. This is especially important because so much of the current literature on transnational practices rests on single ethnographic case studies. Several chapters of this book are explicitly comparative in approach. These include: Bruno Riccio’s compelling study of different local sending contexts of Senegalese transnational networks in Italy; Nadje Al-Ali’s well-theorized study of heterogeneous Bosnian refugee practices in the UK and the Netherlands; Khalid Koser’s institutionally contextualized study of the identity formation processes of Eritrean refugees in the UK and Germany; and Eva Østergaard-Nielsen’s careful comparative case study of the homeland politics of Turks and Kurds in Germany. Moreover, at the level of comparison across world regions, the findings of this book will allow us to assess the extent to which the transnational networks found by North American researchers are similar to or differ from those found in the European context. This will provide a wider comparative dimension to transnational studies. The inclusion of several studies of the transnational agency of refugee political diasporas in this volume offers us another unique vantage point for theorizing transnational studies. The study of political refugees virtually requires a more sceptical conceptualization of transnationalism than that found in some of the overly celebratory narratives of transnational cultural hybridity carried into the field of transnational studies from post-modern cultural theory. In this volume that scepticism, along with the sometimes painfully conflicted narratives of identity and belonging expressed by members of refugee diasporas, has produced such new and useful conceptual categories as ambivalent transnationalism and even ‘forced’ transnationalism. But this sense of fragmented selfhood is not limited to political refugees. In light of the less receptive context of reception for immigration in Western Europe in recent years, and the changes in lived experience occasioned by the efforts to negotiate a sense of belonging in a new place, many migrants as well as refugees describe a feeling of living in limbo. The sense of being ‘neither here nor there’, rather than hybrid subjectivity, is expressed in equally compelling terms by Moroccan women migrants who live simultaneously in two places across borders but feel that they belong to neither and by Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands who are constrained from

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return migration by poor economic conditions in their ‘sending’ locations but have outlived their welcome in receiving societies. While some of the transnational migrant subjects described in this book do successfully negotiate a sense of pluri-national subjectivity, others express a persistent desire for ontological security or ‘homing’ that thus far has eluded them. Rather than inscribing disembodied subjects orchestrating their lives in an unbounded and ungrounded ‘space of flows’, the studies in this book speak of continuous efforts by social actors to set boundaries and ground identities. In the discourses and practices of migrants, states, NGOs, international organizations and transnational social movements we find a contested terrain for generating differences based upon alternative reimaginings of home, nation, state, democracy, tradition and otherness. Nation-states play a central role in this process by setting the boundaries of inclusion, exclusion and citizenship; determining the legal status that empowers people to pursue transnational lives; generating or failing to create economic conditions favourable to return migration; extending or withholding social benefits to migrants in new surroundings; channelling or ignoring the transnational flow of remittances and investments; and allowing or prohibiting various forms of political mobilization within their boundaries. Several of the ethnographically grounded narratives in this book focus on the social networks forged by transnational migrants and refugees. In setting and crossing boundaries some migrants and refugees encounter barriers to transnational mobility based on gender relations, household structure, legal status and access to entitlements while other, differently situated social actors take full advantage of new opportunity structures available to those who wish to forge transnational lives. For example, the sunk cost of having children who have been educated in the host country and have fully acquired its language and culture may inhibit transnational household mobility or return migration at the same time that unequal exchange rates in the international economy may allow new investment and consumption choices by maids in Europe who hire their own maids in their home villages and engage in the symbolic consumption of ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’ commodities and commodity signs depending on whether they are in the place they earn a living or the place they call their homeland. Other chapters in this book concentrate on the practices of political diasporas. These studies show how changes in homeland political conditions are partially constituted by diasporic practices, which, if successful, may result in the regrouping of these diasporas by means of an uncertain politics of return. For some scholars, this possibility of regrouping may raise the question of the durability of politically constituted ‘transnational communities’. Yet posing the question in this way tends to reify the inherent socially constructed character of all ‘communities’, which are best conceived as everchanging social products of difference-generating inclusions and exclusions. This, after all, is what diasporic political movements are all about – a repositioning of the politics of homeland to the territories of host countries where

Preface xv more political space exists for oppositional politics in hopes of opening up or even transforming homeland political systems. Until transformational moments occur in their homelands, political diasporas are shown in this book to act to improve the conditions and status of their respective migrant cohorts within various host societies in which they have established a political space. In the last instance, New Approaches to Migration? is a valuable contribution to research in transnational studies because it richly reconceptualizes the meanings of ‘home’ as expressed in the discourses of movers and stayers, state-centred actors and their oppositions, different religious and ideological formations, and most of all, in the hearts and minds of individual ethnographic subjects acting within different social contexts and seeking to give meaning to their lives. It shifts our attention from, or better still, it ‘unsettles’, the traditional focus in migration studies on the impact of migrants on the societies of ‘settlement’. Instead, the studies in this book thoroughly document the creative use by migrants, political diasporas and NGOs of new means of communication and travel to construct actively networks of social relations across borders that have profound impacts on ‘sending’ societies. These studies stress the continuing significance of nation-states as shapers of transnational opportunities and constraints, while situating the practices of state-centred actors within a variety of socially constructed networks of meaning and power that also shape individual and group identity and difference within and across national borders. Finally, the contributors to this book are critically aware of the risks of conceptualizing migrant and refugee ‘communities’ in terms of their ethno-national origins or ‘original’ political positionalities. These studies open our eyes to the politics of difference produced by race, class and gender relations, ideological and religious formations, and regional, generational and other differences found within putatively unitary groups such as ‘Bosnian refugees’ or ‘Senegalese transmigrants’. If this were its only contribution the book would repay close attention. Because it does much more than this, bringing together the intellectually stimulating work of a new generation of scholars and addressing many of the central issues facing transnational studies, it is sure to make a major mark upon our field. Michael Peter Smith University of California, Davis January 2001

Acknowledgements A number of the chapters in this volume were presented in an earlier form at a conference funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) Transnational Communities Programme, and hosted by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. We are also grateful to Charlie Pinkerton for his assistance in formatting the chapters.

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Transnationalism, international migration and home Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser

What is new? ‘What is new?’ may be the most common question asked of research which describes international migration as ‘transnational migration’, international migrants as ‘transnationals’ or members of ‘transnational communities’, and their activities and identities as examples of ‘transnationalism’. It is also a question that may justifiably be asked of yet another publication in the burgeoning literature on transnationalism. This question forms the starting point for this volume. A critical approach is sensible – there is little doubt that the term transnationalism is currently en vogue, and that as a result it has been overused and misused, and furthermore often used without conceptual or definitional clarity. Further, where the concept has been applied to international migration, critics argue that it has revealed nothing novel – that in effect new labels are being applied to old processes. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this volume answer the question ‘what is new?’ in three main ways. First, they show how a transnational perspective can result in genuinely new insights into both historical and contemporary international migration. Importantly, every contribution in the volume is based on detailed empirical research, and so the impacts of transnationalism are identified in practice – in the everyday lives of migrants – rather than, as is so often the case, in theory only. Second, these empirical case studies in turn cast a fresh, and often critical, light upon the concept of transnationalism. For example, they move beyond the essentializing tendency that has dominated studies of transnationalism, to show how it has different meanings for different people at different times of their lives. Finally, the real novelty of this particular volume lies in its focus on home. The changing relationship between migrants and their ‘homes’ is held to be an almost quintessential characteristic of transnational migration, and the dynamics of this relationship form the central focus of each of the contributions to this volume. Before discussing in greater depth some of these new perspectives, it is important to start with at least some understanding of how the various contributors to this volume have conceptualized ‘transnationalism’ in the

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context of migration. It has become almost axiomatic to state that there is a lack of consensus and clarity surrounding the concept transnationalism, and true to form different authors have taken different approaches. However, these are more a reflection of their different disciplinary backgrounds, and even the different national contexts in which they have been trained and worked, than of a lack of consensus. In fact, all the contributions share a fairly similar starting point. First, they distinguish between the concepts of globalization and transnationalism, although most contributors acknowledge that they overlap. Although often not explicitly, they tend to subscribe to the distinction made by Michael Kearney (1995) that whereas global processes are often decentred from specific national territories, transnational processes are anchored in but also transcend one of more nation-states. Implicit in this distinction is a rejection of a fairly common assertion that transnationalism is ringing the death-knell for nation-states. Several contributors see the power of nation-states in shaping and delimiting transnational migration, and argue quite the contrary. Second, they distinguish between transnational migration and what might be described as transnational cultural studies. Again there is overlap, but the contributors’ principal focus is social formations that span borders, rather than the wider aspects of transnationalism identified by Vertovec (1999) including, for example, transnationalism as a type of consciousness or mode of cultural reproduction. Within this focus on social formation, most contributors appear to reject as too rigid the efforts by Portes et al. (1999) to insist that transnational migration needs to include a significant number of people engaged in sustained relations over time. In particular, taking a more flexible approach allows the contributors to ponder important questions surrounding the resilience of transnationalism. Finally, although again perhaps not always explicitly, most authors recognize a distinction between ‘transnationalism from above’ and ‘transnationalism from below’, and their focus is clearly the latter. This distinction has been elaborated by Luis Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith (1998), who view the former as effectively synonymous with globalization, concerned mainly with macroeconomic processes that are not anchored in territories. In contrast, ‘transnationalism from below’ examines relationships that emanate from yet span two or more nation-states, and crucially where ‘everyday’ people are the principal agents. Every contribution in this volume focuses analysis on the daily lives, activities and social relationships of people.

Transnational perspectives on international migration The contributions in this book make a convincing case that a transnational perspective can reveal new insights into international migration. These new insights can be categorized in three main ways. First, transnational perspectives can refocus our attention. That is, they can highlight processes that are

Transnationalism, migration and home 3 probably not novel, but have largely been ignored until recently. For example, more traditional approaches have tended to conceive international migrants as exceptions from the norm. Attention has been divided broadly between the process of migration – emphasizing the importance of geographical movement across international borders – and the product of migration – emphasizing the impacts of migrants on societies in which they settle. In contrast, transnational approaches such as those adopted in this volume conceive of international migrants not as anomalies, but rather as representative of an increasingly globalized world. They refocus attention on the utilization by international migrants of modes of telecommunication and transport, their pooling of resources and successful exploitation of global markets, and their association with new social forms, political challenges and cultural resources generated by linkages across several geographical locations. As well as uncovering some of the ‘hidden’ aspects of many migrants’ lives, this change of emphasis also has conceptual implications. A good example, which is explored in some depth in several chapters in this volume, concerns the distinction between labour migrants and refugees. Traditionally, this distinction has been sharp, as labour migrants have been conceived as representing the economic aspect of international migration, and refugees the political aspect. This distinction has rested largely on the different motivations of each migrant type to leave their home country – it is often also depicted in terms of a contrast between voluntary and involuntary migration. In contrast, transnational perspectives remove the focus from motivations for migration. They may be important in determining the extent to which a migrant develops a transnational identity or engages in transnational activities, but no more important than any other number of important factors, such as gender, class or race. Arguably, a transnational perspective allows us to investigate whether there are any empirical differences between labour migrants and refugees, without assuming from the outset a conceptual difference. A second way that transnational perspectives can provide a new insight into international migration is through focusing on processes which once again are not necessarily novel, but which have taken on new or different forms through their interaction with contemporary processes of globalization. First, as transport and electronic communications have grown, migrants have found it possible to have multiple localities and arguably also multiple identities. As a result, family and kinship ties have moved from a largely local to a global scale. In turn, the volume of migrant remittances has grown enormously, and the use to which remittances are put has changed. Finally, several contributions suggest that as the volume and density of family and kin-based economic transactions enlarge, ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies, and the relationship between them, are becoming restructured. Perhaps the most contentious question concerns the extent to which there

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is something genuinely ‘new’ associated with transnationalism, which pertains to international migration. The contributions to this volume suggest three possibilities. One is that states are beginning to reappraise traditional concepts of sovereignty and citizenship. Sometimes this reappraisal has been voluntary – a good example in this volume is the case of Eritrea, which conforms to the depiction by Basch et al. of a ‘deterritorialized nation-state’ (Basch et al., 1994) – and has taken steps formally to institutionalize migrant communities living abroad. At other times change has been imposed upon states, for example where international agreements have guaranteed immigrants’ rights, thus limiting the state’s role (Sassen, 1996). A second outcome of transnationalism which is repeatedly raised in the contributions is the development of new identities among migrants, who are anchored (socially, culturally and physically) neither in their place of origin nor in their place of destination. These ideas resonate with the resurgence of interest in diaspora populations (Cohen, 1997; Tölöyan, 1991). Finally, through their focus on home, several contributors suggest that transnationalism can be conceived as a reconstruction of ‘place’ or ‘locality’.

New perspectives on transnationalism By equal measure, the contributions in this volume at times cast a fresh, and often critical, perspective on the concept of transnationalism. They do this in three main ways. First, all of the contributions are empirically driven. One of the principal criticisms of transnational approaches to international migration is that they have simply used new terminologies to describe old processes. In contrast, the starting point for all of the chapters in this volume is the contemporary everyday lives of migrants, and they try to identify what is old, what is new and what might appropriately be described as ‘transnational’. A second significant way in which we try to expand and problematize existing debates on transnational migration is through the geographical axis of this collection. The prevailing literature on transnational migration has tended to focus on labour migration in the North American context. Instead, our geographical focus is mainly transnational migrants in Europe, originating from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In this way we hope to provide a more global and comprehensive overview of transnational migration. An associated point is the inclusion in this volume of several chapters that focus on refugees rather than the more common research on labour migrants. Widening the research lens in this way allows us to highlight the way that opportunities for, and constraints on, transnationalism vary in different contexts. Another crucial aim, and we hope contribution, of this volume is to move beyond a tendency to essentialize transnational migrants – whether migrants or refugees. Any analyses of transnational practices among certain migrant groups must consider not only consider the specific political, social and

Transnationalism, migration and home 5 economic contexts but also differences within – including age, gender and class. All too often migrant and refugee communities are homogenized and presented in an undifferentiated manner. For example, much of the discussion on transnationalism has been clearly gender blind – a gap which this volume tries to address. Yet gender is but one of the various variables that might influence the ways in which people negotiate and create their lifeworlds and ‘homes’. The need to look for specificities extends to analyses of the role of nation-states in shaping, hindering or encouraging transnational practices. The various case studies in this volume leave no doubt that receiving as well as sending states influence the emergence and maintenance of transnational practices and fields significantly. This is not to suggest that the empirical evidence presented in this book emphasizes ‘transnationalism from above’. Rather we argue that there are factors that create an environment in which ‘transnationalism from below’ is more likely to occur. These include specific state policies towards migrants – which involve both legislation and the shaping of public opinion and attitudes towards migrants’ economic conditions – as well as international relations between given states. To put it more bluntly, far from indicating what has been coined ‘post-nationalism’, the different manifestations of transnationalism addressed in this book reveal that the legal, social, political and economic context of nation-states cannot be ignored. In contrast, it appears pivotal to pay attention to the specific contexts in both sending and receiving states. Finally, the book sheds light on the diversity of underlying motivations and driving forces for transnational practices. And here it is important conceptually to distinguish between motivations for migration on the one hand, and the incentives to become involved in transnational activities on the other. Strategies for survival in the context of war, conflict or natural disasters, political motivations, economic factors, or opportunities in terms of education and work might prompt people to migrate. Obviously, there exists a link between the underlying motivations for migration and for transnational practices. However, empirical research discloses a broad range of factors and reasons why people feel motivated or even compelled to become agents of transnationalism. Apart from the more palpable reasons pertaining to globalized capitalism and international labour migration, migrants might seek transnational ties with their countries because of nationalist sentiments, political motivations and in search of prestige and increased status. These have all been stressed in the context of labour migration from Latin America to the United States. In some cases, transnational activities and engagements are more a result of social pressure, unwelcome family responsibilities or even feelings of guilt. These factors demand a more critical appraisal of transnationalism, away from simplistic notions of transnationalism as being empowering and liberating. In-depth studies of the diverse motivations behind transnationalism also correspond to the previous point we made about the heterogeneity of

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migrant communities. Even within one group of migrants, there can be a range of factors and diverse motivations, prompting people to become involved in similar activities.

Transnationalism, international migration and home Many of these arguments are crystallized through this volume’s specific interest in the relationship between transnational migrants and conceptions of home. One implication of emerging and increasing transnational practices among international migrants is that the ‘meaning of home’ has been changing and evolving. Following post-modern sensibilities, we would assume that migrants and refugees develop new, globally oriented identities and pluri- or trans-local understandings of ‘home’. For example, Roger Rouse has suggested discarding old paradigms in favour of the new social and psychological spaces we create for ourselves. ‘Home’, for the Mexican migrants working across the border in Silicon Valley, he argued, has become a moveable concept, it is ‘pluri-local’ (Rouse, 1991: 14): ‘Home’ has become more than either the Mexican township people left in search of employment, or the place in the United States where they found work. ‘Home’ has become a space, a community created within the changing links between ‘here’ and ‘there’. But to what extent is this conceptualization of ‘home’ applicable to other transnational migrants? This volume explores the links between specific circumstances of migration and distinct conceptions of home. The various case studies presented give evidence of the fact that it is not only transnational fields and practices, but also particular living conditions before and after migration in the country of origin and residence, which impact on migrants’ articulations of ‘home’. Moreover, as is revealed throughout this book, ‘homes’ are gendered spaces, inhabited by people of various social classes, different generations and political orientations with diverse experiences of previous and current homes and the movements between them. Accordingly, conceptions of home tend to vary even within one specific group of refugees or migrants at any given point in time. Equally significant, conceptions of home are not static but dynamic processes, involving the acts of imagining, creating, unmaking, changing, losing and moving ‘homes’. The distinction and movement between ‘here’ and ‘there’ described by Rouse (and referred to by Heidi Armbruster and Nadje Al-Ali in this volume) already presents an abstract ideal that glosses over the multiplicity of ‘heres’ and ‘theres’ as well as the interactions between, and transformations of, these notions. Apart from the physical place of dwelling and shelter, ‘home’ has commonly been linked to ‘family’, ‘community’ or ‘homeland/nation’. Yet all of these traditional meanings of home have been subject to social, cultural, economic and political changes and have been radically redefined (Bammer, 1992: viii). Transnational migration is but one aspect of a series of accelerated changes in (post-)modernity

Transnationalism, migration and home 7 which has unsettled previously bounded, singular and stable conceptualizations of home. That these were more mythical than real in the first place is another issue altogether. What is important in the context of this volume is the fact that socially homogeneous, communal, peaceful, safe and secure homes (Rapport and Dawson, 1998) belong to the past (whether imagined or real). The existing literature on ‘home’ reveals an ongoing tension between definitions pertaining to physical places and those referring to symbolic spaces. Many writers on home would converge to the view that the concept entails both meanings. As Nikos Papastergiadis (1998) puts it: ‘The ideal home is not just a house which offers shelter. … Apart from this physical protection and market value, a home is a place where personal and social meaning are grounded’ (p. 2). The various chapters in this book expose conglomerate notions of ‘home’ including not only territorial attachment, but also adherence to transportable cultural ideas and values. Often a great sense of belonging to a specific place is accompanied by the wish to reproduce and/or reinvent ‘traditions’ and ‘cultures’ associated with ‘home’. It is not only national, cultural and social belongings, but also a sense of self, of one’s ‘identity’, which corresponds to various conceptualizations of home. Sometimes ‘home’ can be recognized in an abstract ideal, a longing for a nostalgic past or a utopian future. It has been suggested that on an everyday level, home is more tangible in certain routine sets of practices, specific rituals and habitual social interaction (Rapport and Dawson, 1998). But what happens if these everyday activities revolve around notions of home that are not fixed in space? To put this another way: how do transnational social fields and practices manifest themselves in daily lives, and how (if at all) do they impact on abstract conceptualizations of home? Several of the authors in this volume challenge the assumption that the people they studied found their home in movement (Rapport and Dawson, 1998). Despite the unsettling of previously rooted and fixed notions of home, people engaged in transnational practices might express an uneasiness, a sense of fragmentation, tension and even pain. Everyday contestations of negotiating the gravity of one’s home is particularly distressing for those who are vulnerable, for example the poor, women, illegal immigrants and refugees. This is not to deny the possibility, and indeed existence, of the more positive experiences of migrants living across physical and cultural boundaries and enjoying a multiplicity of fixed and\or moving homes. Similar to conceptualizations of belonging and identity, ‘home’ has often been defined by its relation to the outside. Fear, danger, the unknown, foreign and alien places and traditions, unfamiliar faces and habits are all part of that what is not home. Just as perceptions of home have been radically changed and redefined in light of migration and emerging transnational activities, so have notions of ‘non-home’, the unfamiliar, the outside. Over a period of time, the taken-for-granted knowledge linked to a specific home – physical and cultural – might prove inadequate in view of

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transformations of previous homes. It appears inevitable that former homes develop strange, unusual and alien elements in the eyes of those who migrated abroad. The ‘here’ and ‘there’ become more and more blurry and difficult to sustain. Many of these issues are explored in greater depth in the various contributions to this volume. One specific focus for the volume as a whole is the dynamic and relationship between transnational migrants and their ‘homes’. On the one hand, the volume explores the impact of changes in homelands on migrant and refugee communities. On the other hand, we will critically examine the social, cultural and political potential of international migrants. Are there any indications that this potential is boosting the traditional contributions that international migrants have made to their home countries, for example through remittances? Throughout this volume, we hope to shed light on the multifarious ways in which we can approach and analyse the relationship between international migrants and their homes.

Structure of the book This book is in three main parts, covering the meaning of home, the transformation of transnational migrants and the transformation of home. Plainly these broad themes overlap, but as the following section shows there is coherence in each part and clear links between the chapters in each. The meaning of home One of the defining characteristics of transnational migrants is that they have multiple allegiances to places. It follows that the meaning of ‘home’ for transnational migrants is likely to be complex and multi-dimensional. The first aim of this book is to explore the way that the concept ‘home’ is being transformed in the context of emerging transnational migrants. Does the existence of these communities necessitate a reconceptualization of the notion ‘home’? To what extent is ‘home’ for transnational migrants no longer tied to a specific geographical place? To what extent do transnational migrants conceive of more than one ‘home’, with competing allegiances changing through time? Heidi Armbruster’s opening chapter on Syrian Christian refugees in Germany (from Turkey) provides a fascinating entry into the varieties of meaning as well as complexities and ambiguities linked to the concept home. The Syrian Christians (Suryoye) interviewed by Armbruster in both Germany and Turkey generally articulate the notion of ‘home’ in terms of identity and belonging. Armbruster points to the intersection of ‘self-identification with hegemonic regulations of identity, such as nation, race, gender, class, religion or else’. She warns of the danger of reifying ‘the nation’ or ‘ethnic community’ and not only stresses heterogeneity among Suryoye but also gives evidence of a range of meanings attached to ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘identity’.

Transnationalism, migration and home 9 The specific history of persecution and suffering of Syrian Christians in Turkey has generally affected notions of home as they are frequently linked to a nostalgic and tragic past. Yet, as Armbruster so eloquently puts it, home is also ‘a universe of moral strength’. It is a memory of a place and an imagination of a space where ‘proper values and functioning social relationships can be found’. Home is multi-located – it could be in the country of origin (Turkey) or the country of residence (Germany), but maybe more significantly, it could be ‘a tension between the two’. Moreover, Armbruster’s contribution reveals that the ‘here’ and ‘there’ referred to on different occasions could have different meanings attached to them, depending on who talks and in which context. Her account pays specific attention to generation and gender as crucial variables in influencing understandings of ‘home’. Armbruster’s micro-level analysis of ‘home’ and ‘community’ entails a focus on migrants’ subjectivities – their individual sense of identity and belonging. In contrast, Anita Fábos’s chapter on Sudanese refugees in Cairo (Egypt) revolves around Sudanese NGOs in Cairo as a specific site where meanings of ‘home’ are being constructed. Through an in-depth ethnographic account of various NGOs and their activities in Cairo, Fábos gives insight into the contestations and internal debates between and within NGOs involved in the process of representing their ‘home’. Culture and tradition are the key concepts which Sudanese exiles in Cairo use to delineate their imagined nation. What becomes obvious is a tension inherent in the ‘reinvention of tradition’, ‘where the Sudan of the past is imagined as the ideal, on the one hand, and the transformation of the “negative” characteristics of home into a “new Sudan”, on the other’. Overcoming gender inequalities as well as the cultural and political hegemony of so-called ‘Northerners’ in favour of a Sudan embracing its multi-ethnic and multicultural make-up are crucial basis of a ‘new Sudan’. Fábos’s analysis of ‘home’, being in the making of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ actively created by social actors with specific trajectories and interests, resonates with Ruba Salih’s contribution about Moroccan migrant women in Italy. By looking closely at the consumption of commodities and the flow of goods between Morocco and Italy, Salih proposes yet another angle from which to analyse meanings and constructions of home. Notions of ‘identity’, ‘belonging’ and ‘culture’ emerge as key to the ways Moroccan women contest and negotiate meanings of homes. Like Armbruster, Salih stresses the ambiguities and tensions involved in articulations of home. Home is understood as both ‘the physical space women and their family inhabit and as the symbolic conceptualization of home where one belongs’. And, as Salih argues, objects of consumption are central to creating home spaces and are carried strategically between Italy and Morocco to increase their sense of belonging in either country. Yet Salih’s chapter leaves us in no doubt that dual belonging allowed by transnational practices does not merely result in pluri-local homes, but

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might also be accompanied by a sense of rupture and discontinuity. Moreover, the sense of home might shift depending on one’s specific location: While some women might think of Morocco as home while being in Italy, they might feel less ‘at home’ when actually in Morocco. What makes Salih’s chapter so compelling is the fact that it does not merely reveal the ambivalence and contradictory feelings towards home, but it also shows how consumption is used as a tool to negotiate identities and establish continuities. Bruno Riccio comes to quite different conclusions in his chapter, which focuses on Senegalese migrants in Italy. He demonstrates how many of these migrants are firmly embedded with transnational social fields, and indeed benefit from transnational networks, yet have not reappraised their definition of home. The migration experience has reinforced for his respondents their Senegalese identity, and this identity draws strongly on specific symbols of home: ‘The holy city, the postcolonial towns, the suburbs of Dakar – these are the homes which most of the Senegalese transmigrants reproduce abroad, from which they set out and to which they want … to return.’ The transformation of transnational migrants Another characteristic of transnational migrants is that they maintain economic, political and social networks that span several societies. What defines membership of these networks is a common country of origin or a shared identity. Members of transnational communities often have a common ethnicity, often retain a collective memory of ‘home’, and often also aspire to return to a ‘homeland’. The second aim of this volume is to examine the extent to which transformations in the country of origin can impact upon the formation, maintenance and even decline of transnational communities. Just as the formation of transnational communities has accelerated in recent years, so too has the unmaking of these communities. Important processes include the regrouping or in-gathering of migrant communities or dispersed ethnic groups, movements of people back to their country of origin, or their integration in host countries. The case of Palestinian refugees appears to present a challenging example to study possible changes between a diaspora and the ‘homeland’. As Mohamed Kamel Dorai shows in his analysis of interviews with Palestinians in a refugee camp in Lebanon, there has been a steady increase in transnational links with Palestine ever since the Oslo Agreement in 1993 and the Gaza–Jericho Agreement signed in 1994. Dorai distinguishes, on the one hand, between transnational links established by an economic and intellectual elite who have obtained citizenship in Western countries and move relatively freely, and, on the other hand, a slowly emerging ‘transnationalism from below’ which involves the reactivation of old family ties and networks. In both cases, the acquisition of citizenship of the country of residence is

Transnationalism, migration and home 11 instrumental in enabling Palestinians to pursue transnational practices and activities. The significance of legal security within the country of residence is also pivotal in the case of Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands. Yet unlike the Palestinian diaspora, Bosnians have only had a few years to cope with the traumas of the war that ended officially in 1995 and to find a ‘new home’ in their country of refuge. Nadje Al-Ali’s chapter gives evidence of the difficulties faced by Bosnian refugees in getting out of their state of limbo – being neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Specific experiences of the war, ethnic background, education, political orientation, gender and generation are variables that affect refugees’ relation to changes at home and perceptions thereof. According to Al-Ali, any analysis of emerging transnational ties, that is sending remittances, travelling regularly, participating in elections, etc., among Bosnian refugees needs to pay attention to the great level of heterogeneity among Bosnian refugees (which might affect their willingness and/or potential to engage in transnational practices). A comparative analysis between refugees in the UK and the Netherlands also sheds light on the ways in which conditions in receiving countries impact on transnational practices of Bosnian refugees. Set against an analysis of the attitude and policies of the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a comparison of different receiving countries sheds light on the significant role of nationstates in shaping, hindering or encouraging transnational ties. The possibility that transformations in the country of origin might be perceived radically differently by members of the same ethnic group is most underlined in Maja Povrzanović Frykman’s chapter on Croatian migrants and refugees in Sweden. While the long-established Croatian diaspora in Sweden thought about the war in former Yugoslavia as the necessary step to gain their homeland (Croatia), Croatian refugees who came to Sweden from former Yugoslavia (Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina) during the war appeared to have lost both homeland and physical home. In her insightful and sensitive analysis, Frykman scrutinizes the link between the revitalization and reinvention of Croatian diasporic discourses and increased transnational links. Especially during the war, a ‘national awakening’ among the Croatian diaspora of the second and third generation led to the mobilization of all kinds of resources, ranging from financial and material support and political lobbying to joining the army in Croatia. Yet for most Croatian refugees the sense of rupture, loss and displacement are too raw and disturbing to allow for intense links with the country of origin. However, similar to Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands, even among Croatian refugees in Sweden there exist differences in terms of experiences of the war and its consequences as well as variations concerning their relations with their country of origin Khalid Koser’s chapter is another that focuses on refugees, in this case Eritrean refugees in the UK and Germany. The framework of analysis is the transformation of Eritrea – from its thirty-year struggle for independence

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from Ethiopia, through seven years of peaceful independence between 1991 and 1998, to the recent conflict with Ethiopia which ended in 2000. This frame is used to analyse three processes which, Koser argues, have resulted in the transformation of Eritrean refugees into a transnational community. First, despite the independence of Eritrea, most refugees did not return, instead securing their statuses in their host countries. Second, since independence most Eritreans have nevertheless developed lasting links with their communities and country of origin. Third, and as a result of the current conflict, the Eritrean state has taken steps to institutionalize the Eritrean diaspora. Besides presenting a case study of a state which has been particularly successful in including and involving its overseas migrant communities in the state-building process, Koser’s chapter also makes a conceptual case for including refugees more centrally in studies of transnationalism. The transformation of home One of the characteristics of transnational communities is held to be that through their global span and as a result of their networks, they can wield substantial political, economic and social power. The third aim of this volume is to ask to what extent this power is targeted by transnational migrants on effecting transformations in their countries of origin. What influences the capacity of transnationals to contribute to development or post-conflict reconstruction? What are their modes of participation, and what are the barriers to participation? The chapter by Fiona Adamson develops a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of transnational communities on the ‘transformation of home’. Her focus is on political interventions, and illustrating her framework with examples from a Kurdish case study, she highlights three ways that political entrepreneurs can effect political change in their home countries. First, they can use the ‘political space’ of the transnational community as a site for mobilizing identities and discourses that either reinforce or challenge the official hegemonic discourse of the home state. Second, they can work for political change through networking with a variety of state and non-state actors, in order to raise international awareness. Third, they can mobilize and transfer resources directly to local actors in the home country. The following chapter by Patricia Ellis and Zafar Khan examines the role of the Kashmiri diaspora in the UK in Kashmiri liberation politics. They argue that the principal function that the diaspora has served over the last twenty years has been to raise international awareness of the unresolved conflict in Kashmir, for example through conferences, lobbying parliamentarians, petitions, rallies and demonstrations. Thus they have tended to adopt the second of the strategies identified by Adamson. More recently, the diaspora has taken advantage of television (ZeeTV) and the Internet as methods for disseminating their message globally. The rapidity and effective-

Transnationalism, migration and home 13 ness with which the Kashmiri diaspora is able to mobilize is clearly illustrated by Ellis and Khan through a case study of the events surrounding a particular flashpoint in Kashmir during the summer of 1999. What is implicit in the chapter by Ellis and Khan, but developed explicitly in the following chapter by Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, is that diasporas can adopt different strategies for influencing change. Direct strategies might include providing economic or even military support, while indirect strategies include working through political institutions or bringing pressure to bear on the international community. Focusing on the activities of the Kurdish diaspora mainly in Germany, Østergaard-Nielsen analyses how, why and to what effect different strategies are adopted. Crucially, one of the most important variables is that different Kurdish groups have different priorities and motivations. Her chapter reminds us once again of the dangers of essentializing diasporas and their activities. In contrast, Nick Van Hear’s chapter introduces a cautionary note. Drawing on research on the impact of remittances in Ghana and Sri Lanka, his assessment is that the contribution of diasporas to their homelands can be overestimated. While remittances have helped to sustain societies at home, he argues that they have not visibly transformed them. He concludes that: ‘The impact of remittances on balance seems conservative, and the potential for transformation of the homeland through them is yet to be realized; herein perhaps lie some implications for policy and practice, particularly for societies that have experienced conflict or other serious distress.’

Where next? It is our hope that this volume contributes to the process of ‘settling the dust’ around some of the preliminary debates surrounding the concept of transnational migration. There seems to be a growing consensus, to which this volume adds, that transnational migration is discernible from international migration, and that there is something genuinely new about the process. Rather than continuing to try to prove this point, it is surely time for the research agenda to move forward, to accept transnational migration as a new starting point. There are numerous avenues for future research, but we would like to focus attention briefly on just three, which arise time and again from the contributions in this volume. The first concerns the role of the state in transnational migration. We have emphasized in this introduction that this volume as a whole does not subscribe to the ‘emancipatory’ literature on transnationalism, which views the process as somehow liberating individuals from the nation-state. The empirical case studies in this volume show how both receiving and sending states continue to impinge on the everyday activities even of transnational migrants. Future research might usefully elaborate in a more systematic manner on the interaction between transnational communities and

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nation-states. While transnationalism is not, we are convinced, synonymous with the end of the nation-state, it certainly has important implications, and such research might eventually cast light on the future both of transnational migration and nation-states. Their futures would seem to be inextricably linked. Examining the link between transnational migrants and nation-states also raises the possibility of more policy-oriented research. The agendas and priorities of transnational migrants and nation-states are not necessarily confrontational or contradictory, and the activities of transnational migrants are not always destabilizing. How might diasporas most appropriately be supported to contribute to development? To what extent might the contributions of transnational refugee communities to post-conflict reconstruction in their home countries be enhanced? To put it more bluntly, transnational migration can represent a threat to nation-states, but it also can represent an opportunity for them. A second interesting and largely underresearched theme that emerges from the volume concerns the motivations for individuals to contribute to transnational activities. There has perhaps not been enough attention paid to how transnationalism evolves among individuals and communities, and how and whether they decide to ‘subscribe’ to the process. Indeed voluntariness cannot always be assumed – there are suggestions in some of the chapters that individuals can engage in transnational activities reluctantly or even involuntarily. Just as migration studies has been accused of ignoring the majority who do not migrate, and refugee studies of ignoring the majority who flee internally rather than externally, transnational studies run the danger of ignoring the majority of migrants who cannot be described as transnational. This gives rise to the third central theme, which concerns the permanence or resilience of transnationalism. If we accept that some migrants are, and some are not, transnational, then it is important to analyse the relationship between them. The contributions to this volume indicate that one of the most fruitful lines of analysis is to see both categories as shifting and dynamic. The implication is that individuals can become transnational, and also stop being transnational. The conditions and circumstances under which both these processes might occur are worthy of further attention.

Part I

Transnational communities and the meaning of ‘home’

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Homes in crisis Syrian Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Germany Heidi Armbruster

The investigation of how ‘transnationalism’ bears on the meanings of ‘home’ in a migrant community presents some difficulties. For instance, from a macro-perspective ‘community’ and ‘home’ seem to be identifiable as things, locations or bounded entities; on a micro-level the reality of ‘community’ and ‘home’ becomes much more difficult to pin down. This is especially so since ‘transnationalism’ permeates both entities with the notion of change and suggests the disjuncture of those social units which form a ‘community’ or live in a ‘home’. Or, to turn this issue into a question, how do we conceptualize ‘community’ or ‘home’ when we study the disruptive forces of migration? This issue has especially presented a challenge for anthropologists who have confronted globalization by problematizing the notion of bounded social units such as ‘community’, ‘society’ or ‘culture’.1 This chapter is concerned with a micro-analytical approach. Without offering a general answer to the question raised above, it investigates the polysemy of ‘community’ and ‘home’ as it emerged in a particular ethnographic research. It suggests that ‘transnationalism’ cannot provide a general paradigm applicable to all migrant groups, irrespective of their geopolitical position, migration history and (variously defined) internal fragmentation.

The research context I conducted ethnographic research among Syrian Orthodox Christians (Suryoye),2 a small ethnic minority in Turkey. Continuous emigration since the 1960s has led to a severe decrease of their number in South East Turkey (from about 30,000 to ca. 2,500 in the 1990s). This relatively rapid and largescale movement has several causative factors: principally, these consist of their fragile status as a minority in a crisis-ridden part of Turkey, the longterm problematical relations between Christians and Muslims, and the experience of economic marginalization in a poor region. I did research in both South East Turkey (Tur ‘Abdin) and in a city in Germany. The latter has become one of the main countries of immigration for Suryoye in Europe (about 45,000). This study thus draws on a ‘multisited

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ethnography’ (Marcus, 1995) which combines different locales and entails realities of discontinuity. Initially, I had set out to study effects of ‘transnationalism’ at both ends of this particular migratory chain, but soon afterwards realized that people were not mainly concerned with transnationalism as it is understood in current debates. I decided instead to focus on issues of ‘community’ and forms of self-understanding in the context of what Syrian Christians have come to call their ‘diaspora’. The main concern of this chapter is with the meanings of ‘home’ as they emerged in both field sites. In order to identify the trajectories of ‘home’ this chapter addresses, there now follows a discussion of three fields in which meanings of ‘home’ are crafted. First, ‘home’ as it emerges in the theoretical debates on transnationalism; second, how nationalist politics in Turkey and Germany may impinge on meanings of ‘home’; and, finally, some implications of ‘home’ as understood by Syrian Christians.3

‘Home’ and transnationalism To begin with, ‘home’ will be limited to a notion of home, as defined by most Syrian Christians I met during fieldwork. For them, meanings of home were linked to meanings of identity and belonging. In order to relate such a definition of home to ‘transnationalism’ we first need to ask how studies of transnationalism explain the identity of those who live ‘transnational’ lives. In general, migrant subjectivities are treated as a side issue of the study of transnationalism. Transnationalism is primarily concerned with the social, economic and political links between migrants and their home communities and with the interdependence of these links with the globalization of capital (Portes et al., 1999). According to some authors, these links have to be intense and continuous and to involve a significant number of people (ibid.: 219). The people engaged in these activities have been conferred with different and often contradictory labels of identity. For instance, in some studies the transnational emerges as a ‘transmigrant’ with ‘dual’ or ‘multiple’ identities, or as a ‘fractured’ subject who operates easily in different cultural worlds (Rouse, 1991) and lives ‘dual lives’ (Portes, 1997: 812); other views label these migrants as ‘long-distance nationalists’ (Anderson, 1992; quoted by Glick Schiller et al., 1995: 52) who engage in politics of cultural essentialism and nationalism. These may be real contradictions co-existing in contexts where people live their lives in differing cultural environments, and where state hegemonies and the ‘globalized neo-liberal ideology’ (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998: 21) affect individual and collective politics of identity.4 However, both ‘multiple’ and ‘essentialist’ identities often translate into homeland politics, grass-roots resistance against the hegemonies of race, nation and capital, or into the affirmation of nationalist and ethnic parameters of belonging (e.g. Basch et al., 1994; Glick Schiller and Fouron, 1999). Concomitantly, ‘home’ frequently means the ‘home nation’. Thus, in a

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number of studies, immigrant identities are fashioned with regard to the nation, or vis-à-vis other nations. Without wanting to deny the validity of these claims, they may nevertheless provide a way of reifying ‘nations’ or ‘ethnic communities’. This approach obfuscates different spheres of action or shifting discourses of belonging within migrant groups, or amongst those remaining ‘at home’. The difference of generation, for instance, presents such an obfuscated field with regards to ‘migrant’ identity, as those who grow up in different locations than their parents may have less (or different) interests in homeland politics. Similarly, what about those who believe they belong to the same community as their relatives abroad, but who do not, or cannot, engage in transnational networking with them? What about those who do not feel ‘homely’ about their state of origin? The above questions suggest that the theoretical confluence between ‘transnational’, ‘community’ and ‘identity’ is problematical. A transnational societal universe, unifying community, nation and identity, cannot be deduced from border-crossing practices and discourses, especially since they vary within, as indeed among, migrant groups (see also Labelle and Midy, 1999: 220). Cultural studies and critical anthropology have shown that migration and globalization reveal that processes of identity are about ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’, that people operate strategically and relationally in shaping their senses of belonging, and that identities ‘emerge within the play of specific modalities of power … and exclusion’ (Hall, 1996: 4). Besides patterns of racialization which intersect with definitions of who is a migrant (in most Western societies), issues of gender, generation or class, for instance, provide other ‘modalities of power’ through which people interact, understand their lives and construe each other as subjects. Practices of connecting, moving and acting across national borders do not in themselves enforce a particular mode of identity or a particular symbolization of ‘community’. Pnina Werbner has shown, for instance, that stratifications of class within a migrant group inform their degree of transnationalism. For her this defines a practice of identity, according to which those are transnationals ‘who move and build encapsulated cultural worlds around them’ (1999: 19). She contrasts this method of closure with a ‘cosmopolitan’ mode of dealing with different cultural experiences. Unlike transnationalism, cosmopolitanism affirms openness to others and is based on a high degree of cross-cultural knowledge. Yet, what Werbner’s study also shows is that ‘cosmopolitans’ can interact closely with people of different ethnic backgrounds, but still be convinced that they belong to an entirely different ‘nation’ or ethnic group. Thus, both expressions of identity are neither mutually exclusive nor absolute, but are rather a matter of degree, strategy and context.5 Again, we have arrived at the contrast between fixed and flexible subjectivities, only that the ‘transnational’ has now come to stand for that which is fixed. However, the fact that a ‘cosmopolitan’ can easily engage in essentialist

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or nationalist politics seems to suggest that we are dealing with the management of knowledge (and experience), rather than with its presence or absence,6 and the modes of ‘managing’ knowledge and experience can vary within a migrant group. These concerns have brought us closer to the subject of belonging and ‘home’. The politics of belonging inevitably asserts the intersection of self-identification with hegemonic regulations of identity, such as nation, race, gender, class and religion. ‘Home’ entails these dimensions: an actual place of lived experience and a metaphorical space of personal attachment and identification or, as Avtar Brah puts it, a ‘mythic place of desire’ (Brah, 1996: 192). She further convincingly suggests that home is about the subjective experience of ‘processes of inclusion or exclusion’ (ibid.: 192), which operate on personal and political levels. The following sections are about some dimensions of ‘home’ as they emerged in the context of Syrian Christian migration to Germany.

Syrian Christians in Turkey and Germany Before presenting actual case studies I will briefly discuss Turkey and Germany as territories where Syrian Christians have established their homes. South East Turkey has been a multi-ethnic and multi-religious area for centuries. For the Suryoye minority, sharing this region with other groups has meant periods of peaceful co-existence, as well as periods of severe persecution, verging at times on the near disintegration of their community.7 Like many other ethnic minorities in Turkey, Syrian Christians are officially non-existent and experience a range of discriminations. The emergence of the modern state in Turkey was closely related to a denial of historical realities, one of which was the ethnic pluralism of the Ottoman Empire. Nationalist and assimilative policies that promoted the image of a homogeneous population were part of the modernizing agenda and informed the dictates of the authoritarian state (Akcam, 1996; Robins, 1996: 67–72). In the south eastern provinces the presence of the Turkish state is very much informed by this scheme. The resurgence of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict since 1984 has led to a militarization of the region, with the army enforcing martial law. The general situation has increased the pressure on local Christians to emigrate, more so where Christian villages were cleared by the military. Economically, the South East is one of Turkey’s poorest regions. The area has long suffered economic neglect while schemes for industrialization have been concentrated on urban regions in the West.8 As a result, the 1960s witnessed the beginning of a polarized process of economic development in Turkey, with industry, infrastructure, skilled labour and markets for manufactured products emerging primarily in the West. During subsequent periods this created a push factor for the local population to leave the

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eastern provinces for economic advancement in Turkey’s industrial towns or abroad. The Turkish state also supported emigration from its ‘backward’ provinces to curtail uneven development (Centre for Turkish Studies, 1993: 9–10). At present, the political tension has somewhat decreased. However, the local infrastructure remains poor, with many villages without sufficient water or electricity. In Germany The history of post-war immigration in Germany is closely connected to the economic and labour policies initiated by the German government during rapid industrialization and reconstruction in the 1950s. One such policy was the ‘guestworker’ scheme,9 which also attracted the first Syrian Christian immigrants. Legalistic frames of immigration were modified over the years, but the basic concepts representing the immigrant as foreign, temporary and spatially displaced have remained.10 Turks, in particular, are marked out as culturally alien and as not belonging. This is expressed in popular understandings of nationhood where the Turkish immigrant population is denied its status as an integral part of the nation. The most recent stage of German nation building displayed this more tragically, as racist violence has accompanied the post-unification years. This situation suggests that for migrants from Turkey, Germany can be a highly ambivalent place to make a home. Judged by overall figures, Syrian Christians make up a small contingent of Turkish immigration in Germany. They are also generally seen as ‘Turks’ by those Germans who have little regard for distinguishing these two groups. From a Syrian Christian perspective, however, their community in Germany is not only distinct, but also the largest in Europe. Overall, ‘transnationalism’ between Turkey and Germany is a matter of degree depending on who is involved. Ethnic Turks and large ethnic minorities surely differ from small, politically weak groups such as the Suryoye, in terms of the transnational links they have established. For Syrian Christians generally the relation to the homeland is not synonymous with the relation to the home nation. The precariousness of their position with regard to the latter has had repercussions on the relations Syrian Christians have sustained, voluntarily or compulsorily. For instance, investments or political involvements by Suryoye in Turkey are prevented by a fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis the Turkish state. Moreover, many migrated to Germany as asylum seekers, a move that legally prevented them for years from visiting Turkey. Remittances were sent but relatives in the villages often did not invest the money there, either because they wanted to leave themselves or because they did not think it wise to invest in an unstable future in Turkey. Furthermore, telephone links and postal services are perceived to be unreliable; in addition, open conversations over the phone are often prevented by the fear that the state is listening in. Thus, as Doreen Massey rightly

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observes, ‘home’ is not necessarily a place people belong to or which belongs to them, neither is it necessarily a place to which they can return at will, and safely ‘afford to locate their identities’ (1992: 14). As will be seen shortly, the hegemonic discourses of Turkishness and Germanness, respectively, inform Syrian–Christian senses of ‘home’ in both countries. A moving ‘community’ in Syrian Christian narratives The 1970s and 1980s in particular were years in which Syrian Christians emmigrated to Germany and established their own geography of settlement throughout the country and across Western Europe. Population growth and considerable improvement in their standards of living took place outside Turkey. This went hand in hand with a collective dispersal and a deeply felt sentiment of loss by those who remained in Tur ‘Abdin. These slightly tensional factors are integral to the histories and stories Syrian Christians tell about their collective selves, both in Turkey and Germany. In these narratives, the search for bread and work is interspersed with a search for protection from persecution in Turkey. For many of these migrants, meanings of home and of movement away from home were determined by meanings of being a Christian in Turkey. Stories about being a Christian in Turkey, or memories about having been a Christian in Turkey, were marked by images of faith and suffering. Persecutions and strained Christian–Muslim relations underpinned the historical narratives of both emigrants and those living in Turkey. The continuity of the sacred foundations of the community somehow corresponded to the continuity of threats to that foundation. This continuity also corresponded to the strong moral force and unrelenting Christian belief people maintained against all odds. Thus, for many the relationship to ‘home’ was the relationship to a past both nostalgic and tragic. For most Suryoye in Germany and elsewhere in the diaspora it was quite clear that they would never return home. But home as it emerged in the memories of many immigrants was not only a territory but also a universe of moral strength. Home was the realm of proper Syrian Christian values, functioning social relationships and religious virtue. It also meant the absence of questioning of the fundamental difference between Muslims and Christians. This image of home was closely related to experiences of crisis in Turkey, against which home had to be defended or protected. In fact, emigration brought about another ‘home in crisis’, first because it almost drained the homeland of its life force and, second, because it confronted a moral universe with strangeness. To a certain extent many Syrian Christians reacted to their emigration in terms of living in besieged homes. Some of those who remained accused the ones who had left of having deserted them for the ‘good life’ in Europe, and also of having abandoned their religion and ‘proper’ moral conduct. The absence of the emigrants as actors sharing in the daily activities of life left

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little hope of a brighter future for those who remained. And many emigrants actually felt guilty for having abandoned home and thereby a sacred legacy. For them, too, the collective had reached a crisis of continuity. In Germany, the image of unity among a group of besieged believers fuelled an important discourse of ‘community’ which also served to discipline the youths. The following section explores a journey to the homeland that was about seeking to (re-)establish the self in home and memory in the above sense.

Homes in crisis In Turkey I stayed in a Syrian Christian monastery which has increasingly gained the reputation of being the religious and cultural stronghold of the diasporic community. The visible rise of its economic prosperity was a direct result of emigration, for remittances were sent to the monastery as a form of spiritual donation. There was a considerable number of Syrian Christian émigrés who came for pilgrimages and visits. During my stay the monastic community expressed surprise at the increase in the number of visitors over the last few years, an increase which seemed to indicate something of a new trend. One of the visitors I met was Maria. She had come to leave her German-born teenage sons in the monastery for a few months in order that they may receive a ‘proper’ religious education. Maria was a strong-willed woman who had gained a fair amount of international experience. After leaving Tur ‘Abdin at the age of 8, she lived in Istanbul and later moved first to Sweden and then to Germany. She was anxious about her two youngest sons who, as she put it, were ‘confused’ about the cultural differences they had to deal with. She felt she was losing them to another culture and had to take action. She brought them to the monastery so they would learn ‘their mother tongue’. Ironically, Maria did not herself speak the mother tongue she referred to. She had grown up in a Kurdish-speaking village and never learnt Aramaic, the language Suryoye generally refer to as their own.11 Thus, ‘their mother tongue’ was an entirely foreign language to Maria’s sons. She hoped that with close supervision from teachers and the necessary discipline they would relearn what even her own family and village had ‘forgotten’. The language they were to learn was classical Aramaic (Syriac) which is the liturgical language nurtured in Syrian Christian monasteries. As I understood Maria, she was intrigued not merely by the language, but also by the ‘cultural script’ (Wierzbicka, 1992) encoded in the language. It was the concepts, values and practices of the monastic world of Syriac, rather than the language itself that informed Maria’s educational aspirations. She illustrated this to me by describing the disciplinary lessons learning Syriac would impart to her sons: ‘I want them to see this here. I want them to understand that life is not smooth and easy, that you cannot have what you want all the time.’ In further conversations she pointed out that she was most concerned with the code of respect between old and young. She maintained that this

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code still existed in Turkey, but had greatly diminished in the diaspora. Despite the fact that Syriac is taught in all emigrant communities, Maria wanted her sons to learn it in the monastery, the place she believed to be replete with linguistic and cultural authenticity. For her, the mother tongue meant a communicative practice of obedience and respect. Maria had no remaining relatives in the area, and her natal village was completely emptied of Christians. Nevertheless her pedagogic journey was also about ‘coming home’. In a conversation we had on the subject, she said only here, in Tur ‘Abdin, she felt as a whole person. Here is my personality. I lost a lot. Money, I don’t believe in money. I would prefer to have nothing, just to be able to be here. To be close to my self, to my church, and to raise my children in the right way. This is my home. It is even difficult for my own family to understand. Maria was in tears when she said this. Home was a moral place, a reminder of undisputed religious and social relationships. Home equally emerged against another place, where she had spent the greater part of her life and which, in this context, stood for the quest for money. These dichotomies between ‘here’ versus ‘there’ were a common (and uniting) object of conversation between home-comers and home-dwellers. The shared understanding of the meaning of home was synonymous with an agreement about the meaning of what constitutes a good person. Partaking for a while in monastic work, in the everyday lives of the inhabitants and their gatherings, becoming periodically involved in the affairs of the villagers, attending church services or visiting monasteries provided a framework within which emigrant home-comers defined and retrieved the moral significance of things. ‘Here’, as they sometimes exclaimed enthusiastically, people were still on the ‘good path’. This spatial metaphor signified a soothing sense of place, where finding oneself in the actual place was conducive to finding oneself reoriented in moral terms. ‘Here’ was a fair amount of agreement on valued goods and behavioural modes, an agreement which was lacking, for instance, in the German ‘there’. In addition, ‘here’ was a shared feeling of vulnerability vis-à-vis the Turkish state. However, the ‘here’ and ‘there’ as just described were not uniform, rather there were different ‘heres’ and ‘theres’ for different people. Maria’s sons and other young visitors had slightly different views on what here and there stood for, and were far from declaring as clearly as Maria had, that they actually had come ‘home’. Relatedly, but in a different direction, the homedwellers, the monastic community and the villagers were not sure if they provided the home some people were looking for. They sometimes wondered ‘why, if it is so nice here, did they go in the first place?’ and ‘why do they never come back to stay?’ It seemed that in the daily interactions between visitors and dwellers, the identity of home could also provide a possible source of tension.

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Movements to the monastery like the pilgrimages, the sending of sons, the visits and monetary donations were all about relating to home as origin, as a source of the ‘authentic’ pre-diasporic self. They were also about making home travel, because blessings, teachings or healings were expected to be acquired and carried away. Maria even succeeded in taking a bride for her older son ‘home’ from ‘home’. She engaged, as it were, in a form of ‘transnationalizing’ home. But home was also ‘cosmopolitanized’.

Home as routes and roots To explore this further I will now move on to a different location on the diasporic map. I will relate to Syrian Christians who were born in Germany or who emigrated there as children or youths. The individuals on whom I will shortly focus often articulated their positions as oscillating between ‘being’ or ‘feeling’ more or less Suryoyo, or as ‘having’ more or less ‘German sides’ to their selves. They enacted these positions intermittently by using Turkish, Aramaic or German. However, the links they made between themselves and others were not only about cultural difference; they were also about modalities of power in their social environment, such as religion, generation, class or gender. In theorizing intercultural mixing and diasporic or migratory identities, writers such as Clifford (1992, 1997), Gilroy (1993) or Hall (1995) have used the homophone roots/routes to describe two different negotiations of cultural identity. Whereas ‘roots’ refers to visions of common origin, homogeneous tradition and bounded culture, ‘routes’ implies forms of diffusion, intercultural movement and migration. Both are dialogically related, for stories on fixed cores and origins co-exist with stories of discontinuity and difference, and both can be related to the impact of globalization (Hall, 1995: 206). These metaphors are used in the following description of individual positions of belonging, not only because they interweave notions of identity with place and movement but also because they suggest a proximity to Suryoyo metaphors of identity. The Suryoyo terms of duktho, ‘place’, and darbo, ‘path’, come close to the meanings of roots and routes. Duktho can also imply rootedness in the sense of having a home – as a collective and as a person. Darbo approximates to ‘route’, both geographically as well as metaphorically: the course(s) one takes to reach a destination. In order to explain the beginning of migration to Germany, people sometimes said the darbo, the ‘route’, to Germany was opened. Equally, ‘to walk a good darbo’ relates to a successful genesis of identity. To ‘fall off the path’ means to be diverted and live an irreligious life. A so-called serseri, or ‘vagabond’, is someone who hangs around in bad company and spends a lot of time outside the home. Whereas the serseri is more often male, both women and men can be falite, ‘runaways’. This equally connotes an improper way of life, irresponsibility, indolence, and being outside the bayto, or ‘home’. Positively seen, a person performs in life

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by following a consistent route connecting stable places, and a person moves in accordance with the passing of past, present and future. Relationships are equally long term, a commitment for life. That is, persons are settled in reproduction, family and the generations. Negatively seen, persons are vagabonds, with no home, no vocation and no responsibility for family and kin. I am proposing here that the meanings of intercultural ‘routing’ do not emerge in isolation (as theories of cultural hybridity often suggest) but are set against the background of intracultural ‘routing’. Migrant subjectivities are not only about movement and borders between ‘cultures’ but also about movements and borders within ‘cultures’. Even if identity is experienced as cosmopolitanism, that is as intercultural contact, as competent knowledge about different systems of meaning or as openness to strangeness, one does not operate from an extracultural position. In other words, meanings given to intercultural movements are likely to be related to meanings given to intracultural movements. In both cases people are likely to deal with a variety of boundaries. The following section explores a few individuals’ engagement in routes and roots. This is not to depict them as representatives or types but rather to explore forms of relatedness to various discourses of belonging. The individuals all maintained that their community was in crisis. In contrast to Maria’s view discussed above, they believed, however, that the community must ‘change’ rather than stay the ‘same’ in order to overcome its crisis. The biographical sketches presented below evolved from a series of conversations between the three main individuals and myself. Aziz Aziz was born in a village in South East Turkey in the late 1960s and, as an infant, moved to Istanbul with his mother and older siblings to join their father who was working in a hotel as a night porter. The family settled in Istanbul and immersed itself in the local Suryoyo community, then in expansion as increasing numbers discovered Istanbul as an economic and political improvement to Tur ‘Abdin. While he was growing up, his brothers and sisters emigrated to Germany, the brothers in search of work and the sisters as brides to husbands who already lived there. Aziz said it came as a surprise when, in the mid-1980s, his father announced his decision to migrate to Germany with the rest of the family. He felt at home in Istanbul and only followed them reluctantly a year later. He emmigrated to Germany as a ‘student’12 and soon got caught up in the bureaucratic jungle of German ‘immigration’ and Turkish ‘emigration’ laws, both of which not only determined his legal status but drained him mentally for a number of years. The most critical stage was reached in the mid-1990s when the Turkish authorities rejected his application for a passport extension while he was still studying, and the German immigration authority refused to grant him a

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residence permit on an expiring passport. Poignantly, a Turkish embassy official told him to return to South East Turkey and ‘fight for our country’.13 Aziz made several appeals to the German immigration office and to the local mayor in which he asked for intervention on the basis of human rights, claiming that a Christian could not expect to live unharmed in Turkey. The Germans finally granted him a so-called passport-substitute (Ausweisersatz) which legalized his residence, but also made it illegal for him to leave the boundaries of the German state. With longing and nostalgia, Aziz was ironically yearning to go to Turkey. Aziz disliked Germany and the more his legal battles with the German authorities dragged on (his residence permit was later declared invalid) the more he dreamt of returning to, or at least visiting, Istanbul. He had no legal means of doing so and to risk the journey could have resulted in being conscripted into the Turkish Army. His ‘Turkish’ longings were very much focused on Istanbul and the people he knew there, and had little to do with the Suryoyo homeland of Tur ‘Abdin. This bond with things ‘Turkish’ contradicted the powerful Suryoyo narrative of identity that relied on a dissociation and repudiation of Turkishness. Even though Aziz regarded some expressions of this as ‘hypocritical’,14 he handled his friendship with Turks in partial concealment from his relatives. Aziz and Anton Anton was Aziz’s best friend, as both of them declared. Their friendship had developed in Germany. Anton was born in Germany, his parents had migrated there as ‘guestworkers’ around 1970. Anton’s father’s migration was something of a success story: he started as a factory worker and later became a schoolteacher and also a dealer in properties. His mother had worked in a hospital for many years. The family was relatively well-off and carried German passports. Anton’s parents had wanted to facilitate his and his sister’s integration into German society, so they communicated with them in German, sent them to a Catholic school and hardly ever went to the Syrian Orthodox Church. As a result, Anton and his sister socialized mainly outside the local Suryoyo milieu and his sister often answered my questions by saying ‘we are not typical’. Both of them were university students. Anton’s Tur ‘Abdin was the place where both his maternal and paternal grandparents still lived. He had been there for visits, but, in his estimation, it had been more like tourism. He felt scant emotional connection to these people he hardly knew, and he believed that the history of their grandfathers had nothing to do with their lives in Germany. Aziz and Anton were both active members of a Suryoye youth club connected to the local Syrian Orthodox Church. However, neither of them attended church, and the relations between the club and active church members were often tense. During one of our initial meetings in the youth club Anton introduced their problems by explaining Aziz’s position: ‘Aziz

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our chairman is 30 and still a student; he is unmarried, that’s what bothers people. Many of them don’t want their children to come here.’ He seemed to suggest that a Suryoyo man whose situation was considered irregular and who assumed leadership roles provoked the sanctions of parents. Aziz himself often claimed that he was disrespected because of his lower class position and perceived lack of ambition for obtaining a prestigious profession. Anton’s father disapproved of the friendship of his son with Aziz, mainly, as Anton claimed, because of ‘people’s gossip’. Aziz’s unmarried state seemed to be the most disquieting issue and rumours circulated that he was homosexual. Anton’s father even implored Aziz’s parents not to let his son enter their house and tried, at regular intervals, to make him break their friendship. As a result, they had to meet outside their homes. When later on their friendship really entered a crisis, Anton blamed what he called the ‘German side in me’. Aziz and Anton and Malek Malek emigrated from Tur ‘Abdin with his parents at the age of 8. He was in his mid-thirties and married with four children. He was one of the first immigrant Suryoyo children in the city to take a university degree. He had been strongly encouraged to do so by his father and his father’s brother who wanted him to ‘become the successful son of the family’. He was working in a bank, dealt with properties and was fairly prosperous. Malek was good friends with Aziz and Anton and like them he was not a churchgoer. Malek’s Tur ‘Abdin was dominated by a trip he and his wife had made a few years before. As he said, he had returned ‘shocked’ at the deteriorated state of their natal village and at what he called the ‘childlike’ mentality of its inhabitants with whom he could not connect. Malek described aspects of his life and the routes he had taken as an interplay – often marked by conflict – between things ‘German’ and things ‘Suryoyo’. From unwillingly entering an arranged marriage at the age of 17, to studying what his father wished, to the birth of his children and working at a job he did not enjoy he, as he put it, had taken on a succession of roles, not out of choice but out of a design largely created by others and dominated by the ethos of responsibility. This route was deeply ‘Suryoyo’ in his view, with its enforced unidirectional character and the emphasis on blood relations and accountability to an extended circle of family and relatives – in sum, the quintessential bond of Suryoyo belonging. He compared this unrelenting path to a different genesis, that is the ‘German’ one, according to which a person overcomes his ‘infant past’, cuts off links to family and becomes an independent adult. Whereas, as Malek put it, the German conventional forms of belonging implied ‘letting go’, conventional Suryoyo forms of belonging implied ‘sticking to the people from one’s past’.

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In Malek’s narratives Germanness did not mean the law and racism (the most immediate concern for Aziz), but an ethic of ‘routing’ rather than ‘rooting’ in social relationships. On many occasions he expressed disappointment and hurt at the lack of social reciprocity, interest and concern shown by his German co-workers, fellow students or the parents of his children’s friends. They only visited if especially arranged beforehand, they were not hospitable with food and their sense of investing in long-term relationships was minimal. The combined effect of this behaviour presented for him an exclusivist border which he could not overcome. And yet, in his narratives, Germanness and Suryoyoness also related to each other in syncretistic ways. I feel I think like them, and yet when I am with them there is something that divides us. I have never experienced continuity in a friendship with a German. It is completely different with a Suryoyo or Turk. Immediately, you have a certain feeling of home, of understanding. You can gauge your interlocutor. I have never had that with Germans. The to and fro between a closeness in thought, a difference in feeling and acting, between a critique of Suryoyo structures of obedience and family obligation and one of the ‘free’ individual in German culture, between a positive feeling about being a ‘Syrian Christian’ and the difficulty in defining what that is, invoked the incomplete nature of either side, and the impossibility of being a complete, immutably fixed individual. The narratives of Aziz, Anton and Malek unsettled the sameness of Suryoyo identity many other Syrian Christians had postulated. As much as they were about various axes of difference to the ‘outside’ they were also about differences ‘within’.

Gendered positions Aziz, Anton and Malek narrated their conflictual rootedness in Suryoyo culture around relationships with fathers or father-like figures. In these relationships, differences between men became visible as fathers and sons struggled over meanings of masculinity. Notions of male sexuality and economic success were interwoven with ideas of regulated growth into male adulthood. The fact that Aziz was not married and ostensibly abstained from sexual relationships with women gave others the excuse to view his sexual identity as dubious. This raised concern, suspicion, and, at times, aggressive pestering by other men. The vulnerability of such a ‘deficient’ form of masculinity was most clearly revealed in Anton’s father who persistently tried to sever their friendship. It reached its peak when he gave Anton an ultimatum: either to cut the friendship with Aziz or to move out of the family home and lose his status as a son.

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Malek’s situatedness as a man was slightly different. He blamed his father for having forced him into early marriage and into a specific career, and for imposing rigorous ideas of filiation on his only son. Malek claimed to have cut major ties with his father and refused to let him interfere in his affairs. Nevertheless, since he had become a husband and a father himself and was economically quite successful, he had complied with numerous crucial referents of the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ at stake (Cornwall and Lindisfarne, 1994: 20). From a position of a fair amount of masculine credibility, he could operate quite independently. He partly expressed this independence by consciously avoiding exercising control over his wife and children. He shared housework and actively participated in childcare. He ‘allowed’ his wife to go on holidays without him and encouraged her to go out while he babysat. In short, becoming a weak man in relation to his wife and children, and releasing them of the culturally grounded position of dependants, was his way of cultivating his free spirit and hunger for ‘change’. While commenting on the distress both his friends suffered through Anton’s father’s intolerance, he claimed that if he were in Anton’s place he would move out of the family home and be truthful to his own sense of right and wrong. Anton disagreed and reminded him that in his position, it was easier to be a ‘rebel’. If Anton moved out he would lose his home which did mean not only social but also material support. In other words, the cost would be great if he separated his ‘routes’ so radically from his ‘roots’.

The complexities of belonging The narratives of community and identity as they emerged in the stories of Aziz, Anton and Malek in particular contexts can be thought about in terms of a close connection between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. On the level of the individual one might say that roots figure as a referent of belonging, the position and place of a person; and routes as a referent of the lack of fixity and evolving nature of belonging. The three friends were rooted in family bonds and significant relationships within the Suryoyo community. They received and exchanged emotional, social and economic support within these bonds. Even though several routes also led into the world perceived as ‘German’, strong ties of belonging were located among family and Suryoyo or Turkish friends. The routes to which they related were manifold: emigration to Germany, tourism in Tur ‘Abdin, routes as a career and life trajectory, the threat of deportation, visiting each other, going to the youth club, moving through the city, imagining life in another country. These routes were not unbounded but mediated across different boundaries: between Germans and Suryoye, lawful citizens and displaced immigrants, fathers and sons, women and men, married and unmarried, churchgoers and non-churchgoers, old and young, or well-off and poor. Inasmuch as these routes were about locating roots and senses of belonging, they were also about negotiating power relations.

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As Aziz, Anton and Malek disavowed or declared positions of belonging (and communicated their multi-located histories), they did not locate ‘home’ in a unified way or a single concept. Home was rather something undecided, something to be located on a scale of inclusive and exclusive characteristics, or with the attributes of ‘not anymore’, ‘not yet’ or ‘never to be’. One of the uneasiest associations of belonging was Germany or Germanness. The ‘Germans’ were viewed as a people whose sense of nationhood was bound up with whiteness and which excluded immigrants from belonging to their ‘fatherland’. The law – poignantly called the ‘foreigner law’ – located Aziz outside Germanness, and defined him as non-belonging. His sense of place did not evoke belonging to the city or Germany as the right to these places was entirely ‘Germanized’. The German passport was the only thing he desired because it guaranteed his right to move between Turkey and Germany. Malek stated (to Aziz’s dismay) that racism did not affect him. However, he did not define Germany as his home but felt he could only live in ‘Europe’, as it was in tune with his ‘mentality’. Anton was the only one who stated that he had a ‘German side’, which he sometimes called a yearning for ‘freedom from things Suryoyo’. He too, however, articulated this as a problem, something that endangered his friendship with Aziz. For these individuals and many other young people, defining home against exclusivist ‘German’ claims to a territory, against a possible place of return, and against a lack of a remembered homeland was expressed in what Brah calls a ‘homing desire’ (1996: 193), or rather homing desires. This could be a wishing of oneself away from Germany to another place, where one ‘did not look like a foreigner’, or an imagined life in Greece ‘where no Suryoye lived’, that is where familiar patterns of social control were imaginable as absent. However, it could also mean the wish for a self-defined living space, the desire to have one’s own room or flat, to drive one’s own car, to gain professional security, to have one’s own business or the desire to travel freely. Young Suryoye in the city made me understand that homing desires could not be reduced to homeland politics or to forging ‘transnational’ relationships; neither were they exclusively settled in the language of interethnic difference. I came to understand them as desires for security, stability and well-being, complexly interwoven with social regulations of inclusion and exclusion.

Conclusion: meanings of home The formation of the Syrian Christian diaspora took place at a crossroads of labour migration and refugee migration. Transnational practices exist in relation to the homeland but not on an intensive, all-encompassing level. The minority status in host and home country, low prospects for return, political crises in Turkey accompanied by a continuous out-migration, have made the homeland a factor of conjoined insecurity and loss.

32

Heidi Armbruster

As a mode of identity the ‘transnational’ can be seen as generating a sense of continuity, coherence and unity, which excludes heterogeneous experiences from its domain. In this context I related to a dominant Syrian Christian discourse of memory which links visions of self with a long history of suffering at the hands of religious and ethnic others. This positionality vis-à-vis others was combined with essentialist politics of the self, which aimed at self-sustainment in the face of marginalization and threat. I contrasted this mode with ‘cosmopolitanism’, a stance many Syrian Christians felt they could not afford, neither at home nor abroad. However, especially on a micro-analytical level, notions of identity and belonging reveal their multiplicity and the terms transnational/cosmopolitan do not suffice or are misleading as explanatory terms. I replaced them with the homophone routes/roots which signifies in a wider sense that both ‘where people come from and where they travel to are constitutive of identity’ (Friedman, 1998: 178). As we have seen in the emigrants’ travels to the monastery, home can be both where one comes from and where one travels to; it can also be a tension between the two. As such the contours of home are a matter of different orientations affecting each other: a state of imagination and identification, a state of being and experience, a state of agency or the lack thereof. I tried to show that home, thus understood, is mediated in interpersonal relationships and I focused on intergenerational relationships as they revealed the contestations over home. Maria intended to experience a sense of home in the relationship with her sons, whose identity as well-behaved children should be reshaped in the homeland. The three young men in the city located a sense of belonging in friendship and likemindedness that exceeded the boundaries of family and community. However, their routes of friendship resonated with meanings of parent–child relationships, masculinity, social class and with meanings of Germanness and Suryoyoness. In relation to these ‘social regulations of “belonging’ ” (Brah, 1996: 192), home emerged as a multi-located and contested site.15

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

See also Kearney (1995: 556–557). The names Suryoyo (s.)/Suryoye (pl.), and also that of ‘Syrian Christian’ are used in this text. Syrian Christianity includes different subgroups who live throughout the Middle East, India and in various other countries. This chapter only refers to Syrian Christians from South East Turkey, the majority of whom belong to the Syrian Orthodox Church. The personal names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. To the variety of research subsumed under the label transnationalism, see also Vertovec (1999). The analytical usefulness of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is debatable, as it connotes a wide range of meanings (see e.g. Strathern, 1991: 20–22; Hannerz, 1992; Friedman, 1997). A good example of this may be seen in Aihwa Ong’s study on Chinese ‘transnational identities’ (1997).

Syrian Christians in Turkey and Germany

33

7 The massacres of Armenians and Syrian Christians in Eastern Anatolia in 1915–1916 are the most tragic event in their recent history. 8 Between the 1960s and 1980s the government adopted the so-called ‘importsubstituting industrialization’ programme. It sought to guarantee industrial development through the prohibition of imports. This caused deficits in the balance of payments which made the remittances of emigrants particularly valuable (Centre for Turkish Studies, 1993: 6–10). 9 Agreements on labour recruitment were signed, for instance, with Italy (1955), Spain (1960), Greece (1960), Turkey (1961) and Portugal (1964). In 1973 the policy was stopped, as a direct result of the ‘oil crisis’ in Europe (Mehrländer 1978: 116). This changed the legal means to immigrate in subsequent years. Family reunification and asylum provided the legal basis of entry for many Syrian Christians. 10 The exclusionary meaning of nationhood is further cemented in Germany’s legal concepts on citizenship. Citizenship is still defined in ‘ethno-geneaological’ terms (Joppke, 1999: 638) and Germany does not tolerate double citizenship. 11 There are a considerable number of Syrian Christians whose first language is Kurdish or Arabic, a fact that many Aramaic speakers frown upon. They generally regard the adoption of these ‘foreign’ languages as the outcome of external force. 12 This accounts for a specific legal status. In contrast, his parents had immigrated as ‘asylum seekers’. 13 His passport showed his South Eastern birthplace as well as his Christian identity; Aziz assumed that the treatment he got in the Turkish embassy was due to these two identity markers. 14 An indication of this was the predilection of many Suryoyo immigrants for watching Turkish TV channels, their interest in Turkish football clubs, newspapers, or music or, in some cases, their friendships with Turks. 15 I wish to thank Ann Phoenix, Maxim Anderson and Nadje Al-Ali for many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

3

Sudanese identity in diaspora and the meaning of home The transformative role of Sudanese NGOs in Cairo Anita Häusermann Fábos1 Sudan Culture and Information Centre (SCIC): The Centre was registered in London in August 1994. A branch office was also set up in Cairo in 1994. The SCIC is an independent, non-governmental and non political organization, established in order to bring together the power and energies of Sudanese creativity in pursuit of a national democratic culture. The Centre also has a branch in the United States. The Cairo branch, exclusively concerned with culture, considers itself as a centre for the Sudanese people and by the Sudanese people, regardless of tribe, religion, colour, and economic or social status. The founders of the centre are convinced that the on-going national crisis in the Sudan is fed by ignorance, suspicion, distrust, and fear. The long term solution, therefore, is to change people’s attitudes. (From Survey of Sudanese and International Organizations Serving the Displaced Sudanese Communities in Egypt, Tayba Sharif and Jane Lado, 1997)

Introduction This description of the Sudan Culture and Information Centre speaks to the transformative vision of a democratic Sudan enacted through exile. As one of the most visible of the hundred-odd NGOs established by Sudanese forced migrants in Cairo in the 1990s, the SCIC represented a site for reimagining the Sudanese nation through its transnational communitybuilding activities for Sudanese in the diaspora. For Sudanese transmigrants in Cairo, the NGOs established and used by the community have played a significant role in channelling and shaping the discourse of ‘home’. Since NGOs embody a public face of Sudanese transnational identity, reflecting how Sudanese both see themselves and present themselves to their Egyptian hosts, they are an important vector for discussing and contesting the contours of a ‘New Sudan’.2 Yet while the various transformative projects tackled by the SCIC and other NGOs run by and for Sudanese in Cairo may be contributing to the reimagining of the Sudanese nation, it is still a nation that they are imagining. Contrary to the suggestion that the nation-state is in the process of being replaced, the new global identity of Sudanese in the diaspora has not

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 35 led to the widespread questioning of Sudan as a nation. Rather, the debates of the Sudanese transnational community in Cairo over the future of Sudan demonstrate two parallel processes at work – the reinvention of tradition where the Sudan of the past is imagined as the ideal, on the one hand, and the transformation of the ‘negative’ characteristics of home into a ‘New Sudan’, on the other. This discourse is crosscut by ethnic, generational and gender differences, which reflect the enduring asymmetries in Sudanese power relations both at home and abroad. In this chapter, I examine a handful of the wide variety of projects, institutions and players in the Sudanese NGO scene in Cairo, focusing on the internal debates over the politics of representation in the Cairo context and how these contribute to the discourse of ‘home’. I argue that NGOs, despite the transformative agenda proposed by many of the most prominent institutions, do not challenge the sanctity of the nation-state. While the transnational condition of Sudanese forced migrants in Cairo has opened up new opportunities for Sudanese women, youth and ethnic minorities, the space to tackle long-standing inequities has not led, for the most part, to calls for Sudan’s devolution. Part of this stance may be due to the specificities of displacement in Egypt, since one of Egypt’s national projects is to maintain ‘brotherly’ ties to a unified Sudan. Furthermore, contestations of norms upon which Sudanese nationalism rests are continually deflected or undermined by those with more of a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Yet despite this dialectic it is clear that the diasporic experience has allowed for new forms of expression and perhaps even a transformation of cultural norms.

Nationalism and transnationalism Critiques of the prediction that a new transnational era is dawning at the expense of the nation-state have come to the fore recently as a more sober picture develops from empirical research with transnational communities. Guarnizo and Smith (1998: 5), for example, pull back from the generally celebratory studies of transnationalism by cultural studies theorists (Bhabha, 1990; Clifford, 1992; Hannerz, 1996) whose emphasis on ordinary people escaping control and domination through transnational activities neglects the persistent power asymmetries of globalization. Other chapters in this volume (such as Salih’s analysis of Moroccan women migrants) concur with the cautionary point made by Guarnizo and Smith that such transnational practices as developing creolized or hybrid cultural, political or social forms may be counter-hegemonic, but are not always resistant (1998: 5). Indeed, as the authors point out, transnational practices may even perpetuate hegemonic structures in home countries. The authors of Nations Unbound (Basch et al., 1999), by illustration, explore the process by which poor countries export their labour to the metropolitan centre, where these exploited immigrants work to support nation-building projects at home.

36 Anita Häusermann Fábos Liisa Malkki (1992) also demonstrates that imagining the nation is still an enduring feature for Hutu refugees in camps in Tanzania. This national space was in the end a moral destination that could be ‘reterritorialized in displacement’ (Malkki, 1992: 35). The continued role of the nation-state as a mechanism of regulation is another brake on the enthusiasm of some transnational theorists for the concept of unbounded mobility. Ong’s recent work (1999) on Chinese transmigrants shows how important the nation still is to the strategies adopted in different nodes of their transnational network. ‘Indeed,’ she writes, ‘even under conditions of transnationality, political rationality and cultural mechanisms continue to deploy, discipline, regulate, or civilize subjects in place or on the move’ (Ong, 1999: 19). This is not to say that the nation cannot accommodate the changes that its transnational subjects may provoke or require; the Colombian government’s granting of dual nationality to its citizens abroad in order to benefit from their economic and political capital is but one example. Such accommodation of transnational practices by nationstates implies that the dissolution of the ‘national (natural) order of things’ (Malkki, 1992: 32) is far from certain. The case of Sudanese in Egypt offers similar lessons through which to rethink the concept of undifferentiated globalization and the imagined retreat of the state in the new world order. Regarding the transnational movement of people, it is of critical importance to acknowledge that the most significant flows, in terms of numbers of displaced, occur not from the South to the North but within the South itself (Castles and Miller, 1993). The bulk of empirical studies of transnationalism, on the contrary, focus on population shifts from poor countries to the ‘Eurocenter’ (Lavie and Swedenberg, 1996). Addressing the neglect of such a significant phenomenon, marginal as it is to the power shifts wrought by the global movement of capital, reveals a useful critique of our received theoretical approaches to minority populations. Central to this critique is the concept of border cultures, the space–time interactions in the context of late capitalism characterized as bricolage, hybridity, creolization and other metaphors of intermingling where the product is seen as resisting the dominant cultural discourse. As is the case for transnationalism, much of the theorizing on borders and hybridity (Werbner and Modood, 1997; Young, 1995) addresses the strained relations between the ‘Eurocenter’ and its peripheries, leaving little room for interactions between regional groups and the marginal peoples who, through population displacement in the South, are now present within them. What kind of responses can we expect from marginal groups within the periphery who do not frame their identity in terms of resistance or subversion of the dominant discourse? Shami (1996) points out that, in the rush to scuttle local boundaries, we have overlooked regional linkages that shape population flows and give them cultural meaning. While not all Sudanese in Egypt identify as Arabs, the Arab identity of some Sudanese

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 37 has given form to the links with Egypt that continue to draw Sudanese along well-travelled trajectories. Sudanese in Egypt are involved in two contradictory processes, the pull of a regional identity that promotes the idea of an ‘Arab nation’, and a national discourse that transcends national boundaries. This latter process has been speeded up by the recent hardening of Egyptian immigration policy against the influx of Sudanese who see Egypt as a stepping-stone to resettlement in North America or Australia. Despite its role as a strong proponent of Arab nationalism, Egypt’s regulation of movement and residence of Sudanese nationals points back to the importance of national boundaries in defining transnational communities. The legal and political barriers thrown up for Sudanese (and Egyptians!) who wish to travel or resettle in a third country are further proof that modern nationhood is still predicated on defining and keeping out the ‘Other’. The Sudanese NGO discourse in Cairo is a reflection of the national boundaries which structure Sudanese movement. In this context, the concept of the nation remains the most obvious platform for Sudanese who envision structured change without tearing their identity away from its moorings in the ‘national order of things’.

Sudanese transnational communities in Cairo Sudanese nationals comprise the largest foreign population in Egypt, with the majority residing in its capital, Cairo. The US Committee for Refugees (1998) estimates that 2 million to 5 million Sudanese live in Egypt, the vast majority of them Muslim Arab Sudanese.3 Only 2,745 are recognized as Mandate4 refugees, most of whom do not consider themselves Muslim Arabs (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2000). But exact population figures for Sudanese are not made available by the Egyptian government, allowing Egypt to use what many generally acknowledge to be inflated numbers in its fight to discredit the regime in power in Sudan. The Sudanese population in Cairo, nevertheless estimated to be the largest in the Sudanese diaspora, is certainly the most significant for hosting the Sudanese opposition, for the level of its investment, and because of the long-standing Sudanese ties to Egypt. Many Sudanese in Cairo today are highly mobile, experiencing Cairo as a ‘borderzone’ (Lavie and Swedenberg, 1996) between national entities, legal statuses and identities. Even during times of stability in Sudan, Sudanese regularly came to Egypt for such purposes as summer holidays, university education, business opportunities and medical treatment. Visiting Sudanese have long interacted with members of the expatriate Sudanese community in Cairo, largely based in the neighbourhood of ’Ain Shams, who arrived in Egypt in the 1940s and settled to raise families. Cairo is also the site of several of the main opposition movements and the home of a number of exiled political leaders. As such, Cairo is a major hub in the far-flung

38 Anita Häusermann Fábos network of Sudanese politicians, businessmen, academics and professionals in exile and their families. Sudanese in Cairo are enmeshed in networks that include Sudan as well as other diasporic Sudanese communities, including those in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, the UK, the Netherlands and the United States. Many Sudanese in Cairo also travel to Sudan regularly, or have family members who do, carrying with them news, letters, remittances, household items and gifts. Exiles based in Cairo are regularly visited by their relatives back home, often hosting parents or siblings for months at a time. The socially important duty to visit newly arrived or imminently departing Sudanese ensures a constant flow of information between home, Cairo and the other major centres of the Sudanese diaspora. The protracted civil war in Sudan is a major contributing factor to the Sudanese diaspora. Subordinate groups from Sudan’s political peripheries have struggled for decades against the hegemony of the dominant ‘northerners’ whose culture and history have defined mainstream Sudanese identity. While the main casualties of Sudan’s volatile political and economic situation have been non-mainstream ethnic minorities, including peoples from the south and west of Sudan and the Nuba Mountains in the north, representatives of mainstream Muslim Arab – ‘northern’ Sudanese – communities have also left in response to political persecution, accelerated government Islamization and Arabization campaigns, and economic deterioration. They have joined other northern Sudanese in Arab Gulf countries, North America and Egypt. Despite similar circumstances as refugees, northern and southern Sudanese each maintain a fairly separate existence, and northern racial biases – which garner equally stereotypical responses – make socializing between these groups uncommon. Furthermore, Sudan’s historically ‘special’ relationship with Egypt has created a unique political situation whereby the Egyptian government has declined to recognize most Sudanese as refugees, welcoming ‘northerners’ as brothers and criticizing southerners for raising the possibility of secession of southern Sudan from the Sudanese nation. Although settled (expatriate) Sudanese continue to participate in transnational networks linking Cairo with both Sudan and other countries, this chapter focuses mainly on more recently arrived Sudanese, since for the most part they have been more active in Cairo’s Sudanese NGO movement. Sudanese arriving in the late 1980s and early 1990s have come overwhelmingly from the Khartoum area or via Khartoum. They may have left their towns and villages of origin to come to study or work in the capital, or, more usually, their families have been part of the urban elite for several generations. Generally speaking, these Sudanese men and women, their spouses and children who leave Sudan for Cairo are highly educated, most with university educations, and well acquainted with the rhythms, opportunities and hazards of city life.

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 39 Sudanese exiles in Cairo are by and large tied together by a complex web of kinship, intermarriage and knowledge of the kin and marriage relations of the ‘important’ families in Khartoum. Since these families solidified their prominence through their privileged access to education early in the twentieth century (Sharkey, 1998), their members tend to be literate, and often have a high degree of fluency in English. Women as well as men have left professional careers in Sudan as lawyers, professors, researchers, artists, engineers and the like for exile. Their attempts to reproduce their Khartoum lives in Cairo, as much as the circumstances of their displacement, set them apart from the expatriate community. NGOs have been a significant tool for an important cross-section of Sudanese in Cairo to reclaim some of their class and professional status lost through displacement.

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo Since 1992, the number of organizations, projects and activities directed at Sudanese needs has increased dramatically. Expatriates have a long history of establishing social clubs and welfare societies to address their concerns (Hallaj, 1993), but most NGOs serve the exile community, focusing on such concerns as human rights, income generation and children’s education. The flowering of a civil society in the Sudanese diaspora has given a voice to public debates about the establishment of a ‘New Sudan’ upon the eventual departure of the current regime. The world of NGOs is one of the few places where Sudanese from the dominant elite (‘northerners’) interact with Sudanese from other parts of Sudan, though in general organizations served specific segments of the Sudanese community. Several of the institutions with which I had a close association, such as the Sudanese Development Initiative Abroad and the Sudanese Centre for Culture and Information, were formed with the intent of including Sudanese of all ethnic and religious identities under one umbrella. Others, like the Sudan Victims of Torture Group, accommodated any Sudanese survivor of brutal treatment by the regime in Sudan, but were in practice used largely by northern Sudanese. Southern and other marginalized Sudanese appear to be more active both in forming groups and in reaching broad swathes of their communities including, on occasion, northern Sudanese individuals. Church groups, ethnic organizations and income generation projects are largely southern Sudanese associations, for example, but prior to the 1995 renegotiation of the Sudanese right to claim asylum in Egypt, many northern Sudanese exiles turned to relief agencies run by churches for financial and other assistance. I will be returning to the theme of interaction between previously separate segments of the broader Sudanese community in the final section of this chapter to illustrate the transformative aspects of displacement and exile for Sudanese identity and the concept of home.

40 Anita Häusermann Fábos

Tradition and transformation Sudanese in Cairo deal with their displacement in Cairo, and their absence from Sudan, in contradictory ways. Some NGOs seek to reproduce the social norms that they remember from Sudan through their attempts to recapture the Sudanese ‘traditions’ that have been threatened by nearly two decades of civil war and political upheaval. Others are more consciously working to transform ‘Sudanese’ behaviour and beliefs by portraying the circumstances of displacement as an opportunity to overcome racism and sexism in Sudanese society. But organizations of both types are themselves loci for social change – for Sudanese – in the context of displacement. Occasionally, an organization has tried to work on both levels by preserving ‘Sudanese culture’ while articulating a vision of a ‘New Sudan’ to replace the current political and cultural status quo. These efforts, which often incorporate critiques of gender, generational and ethnic relations, have promoted the idea of the unchanging ‘traditions’ of home while simultaneously providing possibilities for its transformation. For example, the organizers of the First and Second Festivals of Sudanese Cultures, held in Cairo in 1995 and 1996, expressed the explicit objective that different ethnic groups would use the opportunity of being displaced in Cairo to develop mutual understanding outside the politicized and racialized atmosphere of Sudan. Representatives of Sudanese ‘tribes’ resident in Egypt were invited to present their ‘culture’ to other festival-goers as a way of recreating ‘home’ in a way that would never have been possible in Sudan. Other NGOs have designed activities for displaced Sudanese in Cairo with similar transformative goals for Sudanese society whether they return home or not. Some of these projects themselves have been transnational, involving the Internet, international workshops and publications to discuss the notion of Sudanese identity. Yet although such projects are self-consciously designed to challenge aspects of mainstream Sudanese culture that are seen as hegemonic, many of them reify the very culture they aim to subvert. Sudanese NGOs in Cairo serve the purpose of providing community spaces and ethnic reference points for Sudanese in Cairo. They connect their constituents to Sudan – literally, in the case of social clubs which approach the Sudan Embassy on behalf of members’ concerns, and figuratively by creating a public discourse about what it means to be Sudanese outside of Sudan. The NGOs established by the Sudanese exile community address this issue more consciously through lectures, seminars and festivals debating the future direction of Sudan and presenting the ‘traditions’ of the past as a model for Sudanese behaviour. The organizations and projects that I have chosen to highlight in this chapter are representative of several types of Sudanese approaches to community mobilization. Initiatives as diverse as human rights awareness, ‘culture’, scholarship, sustainable development and women’s interests have all found a voice through NGOs, converging in a discourse with multiple audiences. Possibilities for transformation are also contained in this discourse, which will be covered in the final section.

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 41 Cultural diversity and national identity: tolerance and prejudice Sudanese living in Cairo often complained that they were ‘losing their culture’ by having been cut off from their homes through displacement. Some people, particularly those from ‘minority’ Sudanese ethnic groups, formed ethnic associations partly as self-help organizations and partly to ‘preserve and transmit’ their groups’ cultures and values to young members. Organizations such as the Beja Culture Association, the Our Roots: Avokaya Group, the Pojulu Family in Egypt, and the Nubian Studies and Documentation Centre all described these objectives. The Sudan Culture and Information Centre (SCIC) took cultural ‘preservation’ to another level, however. Concerned with conflicts which, it asserts, arise from the multi-ethnic character of Sudan, the SCIC has had the goal of developing mutual tolerance between groups as a way of solving Sudan’s political problems. On hot afternoons during the summer of 1997,5 the SCIC typically attracted a sparse collection of Sudanese men – and some women – who came to pass the time with like-minded friends. Passing up through the dark, rubble-filled entrance of 10 Elwy Street, one would occasionally hear strains of northern Sudanese music (recorded in Cairo) before stepping into the blue-carpeted foyer of the SCIC. On a busy day, clusters of Sudanese whose faces reflected the extraordinary ethnic mixture of their homeland would gather in various rooms and corners of the dilapidated office, arranging themselves on red plastic stacking chairs. Esam, a fixture of the SCIC, left his post behind the desk in the library only to fetch someone who had received a phone call. A handful of regulars – Faiza the actress, Shams al-Din the storyteller, Muorwel the poet, Muhammad the theatre producer – could be found in the library chatting and reading Al-Khartoum and Al-Ittihadi Al-Dawli newspapers. Normally, at least one of the key figures of the SCIC, commonly referred to as naas al-Zein (‘Zein’s people’, after director Zein al-Abdin Salih), would be on hand in one of the three offices facing the entrance. Hustling from room to room in his flip-flops, Majdy carried trays of tea-filled glasses or plastic bottles of cold water, his manner alternately enthusiastic and aggrieved. At the time of this writing, however, the SCIC has left its premises and two of its key members have received political asylum in the United States. According to the SCIC’s promotional literature, the NGO ‘provides a venue and a program of activities wherein Sudanese from different cultural traditions can meet each other, and work together for common goals’. The most visible of these activities to date have been the First (1995) and Second (1996) Festivals of Sudanese Cultures,6 which gave an opportunity to the various Sudanese ethnic groups represented in Cairo to present aspects of their cultures to the Sudanese and Egyptian public. The main objective of the SCIC was for the different ethnic groups to use the opportunity of being displaced in Cairo to develop mutual understanding outside the politicized and racialized atmosphere of Sudan. The presentation of dance, song, oral traditions and cultural rituals in the

42 Anita Häusermann Fábos two festivals had meaning for Sudanese on several levels: the chance to practise culturally important forms and transmit them to younger members of the community, to perform them in front of an audience with a heightened sense of the need to preserve ‘Sudanese culture’, and to demonstrate to their largely Sudanese audience that cultural diversity does not necessarily mean conflict. The first Festival of Sudanese Cultures was held on the campus of the American University in Cairo. Five months of organization resulted in an exciting seven days of dance, drama, stories and poetry, and seminars examining aspects of Sudan’s cultural heritage. Despite many organizational, bureaucratic and political snags, Sudanese in Cairo remember this festival in a positive light. The broad success of the project led the SCIC to organize a similar festival a year later. This Second Festival of Sudanese Cultures took place at a sporting club in the island district of Zamalek and sprawled over three and a half soccer pitches; tents were raised for a Sudanese restaurant, book exhibits and sales of Sudanese items, and bleachers and chairs arranged around a central dancing ground. There was also a press tent. The festival organizers estimated that there were 10,000 attendees at the opening ceremony. I observed at least the same number of people or even more each of the six following nights, mostly concentrated around the dance exhibition grounds in four tiers of seating, but also crammed together under the food and material culture tents and congregated in the open space between the two main venues. The Second Festival was notable for attracting members of many different ethnic groups as audience members for the various activities, essentially offering unity through performance. Some of the older expatriate women in particular told me that the atmosphere reminded them of Sudan. Indeed, the sheer number of Sudanese in one place, the open space of the sporting club where it was held, and the atmosphere made many participants nostalgic for home. Other Sudanese who generally do not participate in the type of public activities organized by Sudanese NGOs, particularly Cairo-based businessmen and merchants, arrived late at night in their Mercedes cars, stopping in front of the club gate and majestically opening doors for wives resplendent in tobes (Sudanese sari-like garments), henna and gold jewellery. As the evenings wore on, ladies of the night made their appearance. In a dark corner of the festival grounds, southern Sudanese women sold aragi (date liquor) in little plastic baggies, which were bought by southern and northern men and consumed in little groups sitting on the grass. Virtually all elements of the Sudanese population in Cairo were represented at this seminal event. One NGO cannot heal the most significant division among Sudanese, between the dominant northern elite and the various representatives of the peripheries, but the SCIC was able at least to articulate the goal of mutual respect and understanding to a large audience of Sudanese outside of Sudan. At the same time, the means by which the organization appealed to its constituency was to focus on the ‘traditions’ of the Sudan. Furthermore, the SCIC was largely controlled by a small group of northerners which

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 43 disbursed money, positions and favours. Their role was viewed with suspicion by many of those marginalized community members that they pledged to help. Despite their commitment to tolerance and a unified national culture, the SCIC worked to recreate an idea of Sudan that kept power structures intact, with circumscribed roles for minorities, women and youth. The SCIC’s ideal of a New Sudan was nevertheless couched in the language of the nation-state. Sudanese intellectual activities in Cairo: vested interests The high level of education among Sudanese exiles is a main reason for the prominence given to research institutions, academic conferences, and lectures and seminars by the Sudanese community. Since 1991, the establishment of organizations such as the Association of Sudanese Academics, the Group for Alternative Policies for Sudan (GAPS), the Sudanese Centre for Information and Strategic Studies, and the Sudanese Studies Centre have sponsored research on the problems facing Sudan and disseminated the results through public functions. Attendance is always high, and one of the community newspapers usually sends a reporter to cover the event, sometimes reprinting academic papers or discussions in the paper the following week. With this degree of interest, it is not surprising that the earliest of these to be established, the Sudan Studies Centre (SSC), founded and directed by the Sudanese anthropologist and intellectual Dr Haidar Ibrahim Ali, was long considered the hub of the Sudanese research community in Cairo. The SSC, established in 1991, is still something of a clearinghouse for the publications of Sudanese intellectuals in Egypt, Sudan and elsewhere. One of the self-declared aims of the SSC is ‘to provide the Sudanese people in Cairo with an intellectual platform to discuss the problems facing the Sudan’. The SSC has also presented several conferences with themes that target specific problems confronting the country, such as the Symposium on Cultural Diversity and Nation-building in Sudan held in April 1995. However, in 1996 Dr Haidar told me that it had become more and more difficult to recruit contributors to publish their ideas for combating the myriad political, economic and social problems in Sudan. He felt at that time that Sudanese intellectuals were increasingly frustrated by the endurance of the Islamist government in Sudan and the possibility that their exile could be a lasting one. In addition, academics and writers who had been waiting in Egypt and hoping for a quick return to Sudan had started to make plans for themselves and their families to emigrate to the West. Dr Haidar expected that once settled, it was unlikely that any of them would return to Sudan. Dr Haidar saw a new role emerging for the SSC – maintaining a discussion among diaspora Sudanese on where Sudan is going, and trying to encourage a Sudanese school of thought through interaction between intellectuals. Some younger Sudanese academics, on the other hand, see the SSC as

44 Anita Häusermann Fábos part of the problem. Despite its strong record in publishing the works of Sudanese intellectuals and its well-stocked library, the SSC is something of a solo show. Although Dr Haidar’s door is always open to any scholar interested in Sudan, and for a time he was the first intellectual figure most researchers visited upon their arrival in Cairo, the SSC has made no room for collaborators. Furthermore, most of the Sudanese academics with whom Dr Haidar associates are of the same generation as him – intellectuals who came of age in the heady 1960s, many of whom travelled abroad for their higher education. Younger scholars do not enjoy a mentoring relationship with Dr Haidar, and many have expressed their discouragement at a certain imperiousness that they feel characterize his dealings with them. This alleged state of affairs may indicate fissures at the level of private discourse, since the respect automatically accorded to a senior member of the Sudanese intellectual elite is quietly being challenged by its more youthful members. This is due not only to the familiar tension between older and more recent intellectual trends, but also to the difficulties of finding common ground in diaspora. Many of the Sudanese intellectuals in exile in Cairo were professors at national universities in Sudan, and as such held positions of respect and status. Since coming to Cairo, many have been left without official positions and, while held in high regard by younger academics, are quite transient and thus less in the public eye.7 An international academic conference about Sudan held in 1997 provides one example of the tensions between older and younger generations as played out through NGOs. The Fourth Triennial International Sudan Studies Association (ISSA) Conference,8 held in Cairo under the auspices of the American University in Cairo, offered a previously infeasible opportunity to dozens of younger and more marginal academics. The 1997 ISSA was the largest ever in terms of numbers of papers, participants and activities, the majority of them Sudanese. Owing to the significant degree of community mobilization in the Sudanese community, NGOs were invited to participate for the first time as part of an ‘embedded’ conference with its own exhibit hall and panels that spoke to the applied issues of development, law and human rights. Intellectually, it was an opportunity for scholars to learn about recent research and new critiques in the field, though not all of the scholarship was of the same quality. One of the conflicts that arose between the conference organizers and Dr Haidar, who was on the Programme Committee, was the way in which participants were chosen for inclusion. In keeping with international academic norms, the Conference Chair sent out a call for papers. However, Dr Haidar and other displaced academics in Cairo felt that it would have been more appropriate to invite senior and respected scholars whose names were known to ISSA. Most of these individuals, unsurprisingly, are from Sudan’s dominant Muslim Arab community. The large number of non-Arab Sudanese participants, particularly in the NGO forum, was also upsetting to some senior academics, since they have not traditionally been included in the main-

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 45 stream discourse. There were other organizational problems that caused a great deal of bad feeling between the senior academic set and the conference organizers as well, which are covered in more detail elsewhere (Fábos, 1999). That there were too many youths and not enough senior scholars was taken up by other members of the Sudanese intellectual community, notably the former Sudanese prime minister (and Oxford University degree holder) Sadiq al-Mahdi, who described ISSA as the Mu’tamar al-Talamiidh, the Conference of Students. The fall-out from the conference exposed many of the changes that are taking place in Sudan and that threaten mainstream concepts of home and the interests of older Sudanese men in maintaining the status quo. The transformative voices on the Sudanese academic scene in Cairo come largely from younger individuals and women. For well-established, intellectual men such as Dr Haidar, Sadiq al-Mahdi, and others from their cohort of older generation elite Muslim Arab Sudanese, the youthful challenge to their seniority, knowledge and respect from the community is an understandable shock. All Sudanese in Cairo, whether young or old, male or female, expatriate or exiled, are engaged in a debate over the future of a homeland from which they are distanced through displacement, but by challenging the ideas of the older elite, women and youth are also challenging the very basis of Sudanese social organization. Community development and institution building: challenges from youth Among Sudanese NGOs in Cairo, the most dynamic challenge to Sudanese vested interests has come from a subset of organizations whose members have training in international community development. The individuals involved in these organizations and projects tend to be young, dynamic, and who hold strong convictions regarding tolerance and inclusion of Sudanese from all social categories. The Sudanese Development Initiative Abroad (SUDIA) is one of the most visible of these organizations. After setting up an office in 1995 with a grant from the Near East Foundation, Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and Elham Osman Abd al-Razig and three other young Sudanese created a web site9 to link Sudanese communities abroad, and set about figuring out the best way to ‘empower’ these communities to ‘take care of themselves and find solutions to a lot of their problems caused in their transitional status’ (Sharif and Lado, 1997: 46). An important characteristic of SUDIA is its inclusion of ‘nonmainstream’ Sudanese, that is women and representatives of Cairo’s southern and western Sudanese communities. One of the constant concerns expressed in their literature is the challenges and threats to ‘Sudanese identity’ coupled with the need to work together in a ‘multiethnic, broad-based, participatory, collegial and non-hierarchical’ manner. One of SUDIA’s objectives is to offer technical assistance and support to

46 Anita Häusermann Fábos community organizations so that they can develop a ‘self-help’ perspective in order to ‘reduce reliance on illegitimate and rigged structured programs formulated by international organizations and numerous other nonSudanese institutions currently working with the Sudanese community in Egypt and elsewhere’ (Sharif and Lado, 1997: 47). Much of SUDIA’s work involves training other Sudanese NGOs in budgeting and bookkeeping, setting up administrative systems and training staff. To this end, SUDIA has organized computer training courses to teach Sudanese NGO members tools for producing ‘professional’ quality work in an efficient manner. SUDIA also hopes to surmount the ethnic divisions that characterize many Sudanese organizations; it does not want to erase people’s ethnic identities, but to move forward towards common goals. To this end, SUDIA has encouraged networks, experience sharing, and other international development tools through workshops and publications in order to bring people with different projects but similar goals together. Convincing other Sudanese NGOs of the appropriateness of this vision has been neither easy nor straightforward. I have heard complaints to the effect that SUDIA is trying to control other NGOs, that they are imposing their own agenda on the Sudanese community and so forth. NGOs which have had the experience of working with SUDIA to ‘professionalize’ their administrative and planning systems (or more accurately, establish them in the first place) often resent what they consider SUDIA’s ‘meddling’. Furthermore, SUDIA’s staff are often decades younger than the members of organizations they work with, requiring a balancing act between respect towards their elders and adherence to their transformative credo. For example, SCIC, which had been put under a form of probation by its funder, the Ford Foundation, after community accusations of rampant corruption and graft, endured SUDIA’s probes into its financial and administrative affairs for nearly a year. In addition, a strategic planning workshop was imposed upon SCIC staff in which the core group was admonished for its lack of democracy, and its grant withheld until it addressed SUDIA’s concerns. SUDIA is still wrestling with the issue of Sudanese identity and its reflection in the transnational Sudanese community, though not only in Cairo. Its main forum for tackling such questions is the quarterly journal Sudan Dispatch, published in Cairo in English. Though it has tried to represent various Sudanese ethnic communities in its pages, most stories and articles reflect a heavily Muslim Arab bias. For example, a recent letter to the editor pointed out that a story of Sudanese displaced youth included only middle and upper class Muslim Arab students in Cairo.10 Furthermore, the organization’s concern with preserving Sudanese identity in displacement is similarly narrow, though this bias apparently reflects the views of its mostly Muslim Arab constituency. Another letter to the editor expresses concern about the future of Sudanese children who are facing problems ‘regarding their roots’, particularly in ‘non-Arabic speaking countries where teenagers

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 47 and children speak a very broken Arabic with difficulty’ and that ‘we have to look after their well being and raise them in a healthy environment far from the circles of the west where their cultural norms conflict with our traditions and cultures’.11 This writer clearly considers ‘Sudanese’ identity as a reflection of his own Muslim Arab community and does not address the issue of displaced Sudanese from other communities as relevant to the need to preserve Sudanese traditions and cultures. Organizing women: contesting gender norms Sudanese women are the other main producers of contested ideals through community mobilization. Though opportunities for involvement in NGOs differed according to class and wave of displacement, women have been able to participate in community development, with empowering and potentially transformative results. The political reality of the male-dominated Sudanese NGO scene makes implementation complex. Several of the organizations devoted to women’s concerns listed in Sharif and Lado’s Survey are little more than branches of political parties where dynamic women have been separated out from the main body by the male leadership and encouraged to tackle Sudan’s ‘women’s problems’. But the impression of these women’s organizations I developed from listening to my Sudanese feminist colleagues was that Sudanese women, despite being active in grassroots development and community mobilization in Sudan, are generally marginalized in exile. Two women’s organizations whose leaders I knew well represented attempts to mobilize women at the grassroots and, in doing so, challenge the male hegemony of Sudanese public activities. The Sudanese Women’s Alliance (SWA) is a self-consciously political organization whose aim is to redress the traditional exclusion of women’s voices at the formal political level. Its membership is flexible, and individuals generally camouflage their identities in order not to endanger their colleagues and families in Sudan. Through writing manifestos, presenting petitions, and otherwise lobbying the leadership of the Sudanese opposition alliance, the NDA, the SWA has managed to gain a voice, though a weak one, in the proposed reconstruction of the Sudanese state. The SWA’s philosophy differs dramatically from the earlier women’s movement in Sudan in that it is not interested in mere representation. Its goal is to change the terms of the political discourse and thus society, which in the SWA’s view has historically been organized along patriarchal lines. These sorts of ‘radical’ ideas are trickling down to women’s activists who do not necessarily pursue a self-styled ‘feminist’ agenda. The Women’s Working Group,12 an informal network of Sudanese women, was originally established as an antidote to the depression many women professionals felt at living in exile. Dr Majda Ali, a Women in Development specialist physician, and founding member of the Sudanese NGO Al-Manar, began gathering friends and colleagues at her house for intellectual discussions

48 Anita Häusermann Fábos regarding gender, health, law, and other issues central to community mobilization. Majda recognized that of these issues, the one most central to the future of women’s status in Sudan was law and the legal system. After discussing this idea informally with other participants in the group, she set up a network of women, several of whom were lawyers, to discuss ways that Sudanese women might educate themselves about their rights under the current system and influence the NDA, with its secularist agenda, to discard discriminatory laws. These meetings rotated among the houses of interested women, and Majda occasionally organized meetings to bring the two or three networks together for strategic discussions. The participants ranged from young women who were still pursuing their university studies to well-established lawyers, doctors, academics and development professionals. Nearly all of them were northern Sudanese women exiles from Khartoum. Majda tried very hard to include women from southern Sudanese communities, but only one southern Sudanese woman activist occasionally attended. The intention of these meetings was for one of the women to prepare a talk on reading she had done on an assigned topic, and for the rest of us to join in the discussion when she had concluded. These discussions were often free ranging and usually centred upon gender inequalities in Sudan and strategies for tackling them. Since Majda is a community mobilization authority, she often led the discussions around to grassroots development, cautioning us not to speak for all Sudanese women but to try to understand all of the different voices. Intellectually, the Sudanese women of the Women’s Working Group were trying very hard to find openings in their own social worlds to promote a more equitable Sudanese society. However, these women were drawn from Sudan’s educated elite, and, with a few exceptions, were apt to think of the Sudanese mainstream rather than the multi-faceted communities on the periphery in imagining a New Sudan where women play an equal role in policy making and women’s rights are guaranteed as human rights.

Conclusion The Sudanese NGO movement in Egypt has arisen out of the specific characteristics of the exile community. Like their Egyptian counterparts, Sudanese exiles involved in NGO work tend to be politically aware and highly educated. However, Sudanese professionals are unlikely to find work in their fields in Egypt owing to newly restrictive labour laws. NGOs are a perfect venue for educated Sudanese, particularly men, to practise their skills in ‘respectable’ surroundings. Through their NGO activities, these elite Sudanese have tried to appeal to what they feel is best in Sudanese culture – traditions of hospitality, generosity, and other qualities that are difficult to maintain in the environment of displacement. In the increasingly dire circumstances facing Sudanese in Cairo at the end of the 1990s, Sudanese

Sudanese NGOs in Cairo 49 fear for their nation’s self-ascribed ‘decency’ as they see their compatriots slipping into alcohol consumption or brewing, prostitution, passport fraud and other illegal activities. NGOs remain one way to preserve the image of Sudanese as a dignified, cultured, politically sophisticated people. Yet challenges to this image have existed for decades within Sudan, as socially and politically disenfranchized groups struggle for inclusion in a Muslim Arab male-dominated society. The thirty-year-old civil war is the most evident of these struggles, as peripheral peoples fight for a Sudan that would disperse economic resources and political opportunities more equitably, and barring that, the right for the three southern provinces to secede from the state. But Sudanese women’s organizations have been fighting for women’s rights for decades as well, including during times of relative lack of democracy such as the current period (Hale, 1996). Inside and out of Sudan, new voices from a younger generation with no direct memory of colonialism are suggesting different ways of thinking about the persistent problems facing their country, including devolving power away from the traditional sectarian political parties that have ruled the country in one form or another since its independence. Like exiles and forced migrants in other places, Sudanese in Cairo constantly discuss, analyse and evaluate the political situation at home even as they make their way along trajectories that fracture their communities more and more. While some NGOs in Cairo focus on helping Sudanese deal with and overcome the problems of displacement, the organizations profiled in this chapter self-consciously seek to address the problems of Sudan itself. Challenges to the status quo of Sudanese society as vested in its dominant elite can be found in NGOs set up by hitherto disenfranchized or marginalized groups, such as women and youth. Members of these NGOs look towards Sudan with the intention of transforming their society into a more inclusive and equitable one. Other scholars have noted the possibilities of change offered to transnational communities through their separation from home and the new realities and models provided by host nations (Abadan-Unat, 1982; El-Solh, 1993; Geschwender, 1992; Gross et al., 1992; White, 1997). To be sure, Sudanese transnational communities in Cairo, Dubai, Toronto and Sydney are each interacting with a different set of circumstances that ultimately affect the identity of Sudanese in those places. The Sudanese concept of home as imagined in these different locales will also develop along specific trajectories, despite travel of Sudanese among and between all of these places and Sudan. In Cairo, Sudanese are imagining a New Sudan in contradictory ways depending on ethnicity, generation and gender. Dominant elite men are finding their worldview challenged outside of the home territory that gave rise to their dominance; the subaltern voices issuing the challenge hope to create a fundamentally different Sudan. NGOs are but one site where these new voices can come together to discuss the type of transformation of home they would like to see come about.

50 Anita Häusermann Fábos Yet it should be clear from the descriptions of Sudanese NGOs in Cairo with the most transformative agendas that the model for an equitable society remains in the framework of the nation-state. Sudanese in Cairo want to broaden Sudan’s nationalist programme to incorporate the interests of people previously excluded from the power structure, and many of their activities speak to this objective. Whether a reimagined Sudan can free the creative energies of disenfranchized populations remains to be seen, but the Sudanese transnational community in Cairo is in the process of developing new tools for that eventuality.

Notes 1 My analysis draws upon fieldwork conducted among participants in Cairo’s Sudanese NGO scene from 1994 to 1997. I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Population Council, the Social Science Research Council, and the Ford Foundation for funding the research upon which this article is based. Special thanks to Amira Abderrahman for her contributions to the study and her perceptive reading of NGO activities. This article has been much improved by the comments of various colleagues, particularly Nadje Al-Ali, Majda Ali, Ibrahim El-Nur, and participants in the 1999 Transnational Communities and the Meaning of Home Conference at the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Sussex. 2 This term, first used in the 1980s by southern Sudanese rebels and taken up by the Sudanese Council of Churches, originally referred to those areas of southern Sudan not under government control. Later, this call for a ‘New Sudan’ was adopted by the Sudanese Democratic Alliance. Recently it has been co-opted by the hard-line Islamist government in speaking of its own reformist programme. 3 Perhaps 20,000 or more of the total figure are southern Sudanese, by some estimates (US Committee for Refugees, 1998). 4 These are individuals recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as requiring protection under its legal mandate. 5 The Ford Foundation/Cairo office hired me to carry out an evaluation of the Centre’s activities during this period. 6 SCIC deliberately used the plural ‘cultures’ to emphasize multiple Sudanese identities. 7 I thank Ibrahim El-Nur for this insight. 8 I was the Programme Chair for these meetings. 9 http://sudia.org. 10 Letter to the Editor from Evalyn Achiro, Maadi–Cairo, Egypt. Sudan Dispatch No. 5, January 1999. 11 Letter to the Editor from Abdullahi F. El Mahdi, Sudan Dispatch No. 5, January 1999. 12 The Arabic translation, Al-Munadhama li-l-Amal al-Nisa’i, forms the acronym Ma’an, or ‘together’.

4

Shifting Meanings of ‘Home’ Consumption and identity in Moroccan women’s transnational practices between Italy and Morocco Ruba Salih I know a woman who keeps everything she buys wrapped in the paper to take it to Morocco … in the meantime she lives like a poor person here. … We have just one life, not several, we cannot postpone our life, now we live here … those people will never return. (Fatiha, flexible worker in catering services, Italy 1997) They offered me fourteen1 salaries and paid holidays, a first class ticket and a nice new flat as accommodation. They said they knew I was very good and for this reason they wanted me at all costs. At the beginning I was confused, I was not sure. But my friends convinced me. … They said they would have helped me with any problem and they added that whenever I felt homesick, I could take a plane and be home in three hours. … I have all my sisters’ videotapes. When I feel nostalgic about my parents and my family I put on these tapes and I watch them … sometimes I wear my traditional Moroccan dresses, I watch the tapes and …. I am in Morocco! When I am in my room upstairs, you see … I am in Morocco, I will show you why you should not ask me whether I missed Morocco! (Naima, live-in domestic, Italy 1997)

Until the end of the 1970s migrants were perceived and analysed mainly within the frame of their lives within the host country, or as managing their lives and choices caught in a dilemma ‘between two cultures’ (Watson, 1977a). A growing literature has recently started to shed light on the transnational nature of contemporary migration. Transnationalism allows an understanding of migrants as no longer caught in the trap between either assimilation or nostalgia and the ‘myth of return’ (Anwar, 1979). Rather, it is argued, migrants are more and more able to construct their lives across borders, creating economic, social, political and cultural activities which allow them to maintain membership in both their immigration country and their country of origin (Rouse, 1992; Basch et al., 1994). Yet, with very few exceptions (Bhachu, 1995; Malkin, 1998; Sutton, 1992; Georges, 1992; Mahler, 1998), transnational approaches to the study of contemporary migration have privileged a focus on migrants’ participation in nation-building

52 Ruba Salih processes and on their political involvement across countries, spheres in which migrant women’s agency is usually quite invisible. Scholars of transnationalism, moreover, have tended to use a celebratory language to describe the phenomenon. Glick Schiller and her colleagues, for example, argue that nowadays migrants’ lives ‘cut across national boundaries and bring two societies into a single social field’ (1992: 1). Vertovec and Cohen contend that four main features define the emergence of a new kind of migrant population: the possibility of having multiple identities and multiple localities thanks to new technologies of travel and information, the globalization of kinship and network ties, the extraordinary growth of remittances and finally, and as a result, the disintegration of boundaries between host and home societies (1999: xvi). Transnational practices such as transferring money, buying land and houses or investing in other signifiers of symbolic and economic capital in their country of origin have been a constant character of Moroccan international migrants who held a ‘myth of return’. More recently, extraordinary changes in technological communication, travel and financial services have indeed favoured the maintenance of transnational relations between host and home countries, reducing imaginary and real distances. Moreover, the contemporary post-industrial economic condition and the local effects of the restructuring of the global economy also constitute crucial factors that urge contemporary migrants to be transnational (Rouse, 1995a). In this regard, Grillo (1998b) wonders whether the transnational migrant is ‘simply the gastarbeiter in another guise’ and transnational migration ‘a way of accommodating to the fact of being a gastarbeiter?’ (1998b: 31). Seen from this perspective, transnational relations do not always seem to forge the sense of belonging simultaneously to two countries. On the contrary, they may paradoxically reinforce migrants’ feelings of living in more than one country but belonging to ‘neither’ place. This chapter is about the ambivalence and contradictory feelings Moroccan migrant women in Italy express towards the fragmentation of their life between two countries. In particular, I focus on the objects and consumer goods through which Moroccan women construct the space they inhabit and through which they both negotiate identity ruptures and establish continuities between countries. My aim is to emphasize that narratives and practices of transnationalism not only are gendered but vary according to different ideologies of ‘self’ and ‘home’. In the case of Moroccan migrant women, I argue that Italy and Morocco supply different and complementary symbolic and material resources, equally crucial for the acquisition of social personhood. Indeed, an important aspect of transnational practices is the extent to which they enable migrants to rely on two countries to construct their social personhood by distributing not only economic but also symbolic resources (see Goldring, 1998; Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Basch et al., 1994). Consumption of commodities and the flow of goods between Morocco and

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Italy represent significant arenas through which social meanings and migrant women’s creation and recreation of self and ‘home’ can be analysed (cf. Jackson and Moores, 1995). As well as to the cultural complexity deriving from the flow of ideas, cultural meanings and commodities (Hannerz, 1992), attention is here drawn to consumption as a domain of objectification and expression of social status. Material practices or consumption in a broader sense are becoming significant domains through which ‘people directly participate in the reappropriation of their culture’ (Miller, 1987: 216). Consumption, however, is not a new ‘domain of choice’, but rather it witnesses the fact that ‘increasingly people have no choice but to focus upon consumption as the only remaining domain in which there are possibilities of sublation’ (1987: 221; see also Miller, 1995a). Miller’s analysis of consumption opposes theories that perceive subjects as the signifiers of goods that ultimately create the sense of self and society. He accords subjects an agency in the constitution of society and of their own identities. Central to his theory of consumption is the concept of objectification that embodies the relation between ‘human development’ and ‘external forms’. This relation is not motionless but it develops in ways that make it impossible to reduce it to either of its two components: subject and object (1987: 33). My aim here, however, is not to assess whether and how consumption is a potentially alienating or liberatory practice, but rather to analyse the negotiation of social and cultural meanings that surround the flows of objects between Morocco and Italy. As Gardner has shown in her study of Sylheti migrants, consumption and gift exchange across England and Bangladesh ‘are part of the discourse of power between places’ (1993: 11; see also Wilk’s 1995 analysis in the context of Belize). In the following ethnographic accounts, consumption emerges as a twofold practice. On the one side it represents a complex process whereby women appropriate and negotiate symbols of modernity by interpreting and attributing value to goods that flow from Italy to Morocco and vice versa. On the other side, it serves the aim of operating a ‘distinction’ and affirming a difference with respect to those who remained in Morocco (Bourdieu, 1984). Whereas the perception of the country of origin as ‘home’ becomes more intense for highly transnational migrants such as the Senegalese in Italy (see Riccio in this volume) Moroccan women’s practices of consumption convey in contrast certain tension around where ‘home’ ultimately is, which also emerges powerfully in their narratives around transnationalism as a way of life. Women whose self-definitions and identities are primarily defined via social recognition in Morocco engage in consumption practices and transnational activities that are contested by other women who strive for a more stable and local life. I shall conclude by highlighting how, in women’s narratives, not only do transnational forms of lives constitute a ground for contestation, but also the dual belonging allowed by transnational practices causes a sense of

54 Ruba Salih rupture and discontinuity. At the same time as various forms of time–space compression (Harvey, 1989) and intense trips back to Morocco allow potential transnational membership, they increase migrant women’s need for territorialization and secure identities. Fatiha’s and Naima’s reflections, with which I started the chapter, shed light on the ambivalent and contradictory feelings that displacement brings about and present diverse re-territorialization strategies that convey opposing ways of creating and recreating ‘home’. It is this dialectic of opposing but interconnected desires and needs embedded within transnational practices that constitutes the major focus of this chapter.

Moroccans: a migrant population in a changing socio-economic context At the end of the 1960s Moroccans officially resident in Europe numbered around 160,000. In 1992, almost thirty years later, out of a Moroccan population of 20 million, 1,343,000 were officially living in Europe (Bencherifa et al., 1992). Italy became only quite recently an important country of immigration and the presence of Moroccans started to be visible at the beginning of the 1980s. In 1997 the number of Moroccans living in Italy was estimated to be around 119,481, out of whom 23,919 were women (ISMU, 1998). About 11 per cent of Moroccan women live in Emilia-Romagna, the region where my fieldwork was conducted. Contrary to a popular stereotype that portrays them as by and large followers of their husbands, many Moroccan women came to Italy as single migrants in the course of the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s (Kuider and Calzolari, 1994). At a general level, contemporary international migration flows to Italy occur within a frame of changing socio-economic conditions, in contrast with the industrial expansion of the 1950s and the 1960s in France and other European countries (Lassonde, 1983). By comparison with the previous patterns of migration to France, when migration was mainly the result of agreements between sending and receiving states, the majority of Moroccans in Italy were undocumented and acquired a permesso di soggiorno through amnesty laws. The flexibility that characterizes the Italian labour market also highlights differences between recent experiences of migration with respect to older ones.2 While European industrial societies in the post-war period were characterized by a high level of recruitment within an expanding Fordist industrial sector, in the 1990s, in Italy and elsewhere, migrants’ labour force was employed in highly segmented, flexible and precarious jobs that were not satisfied by local labour supply (De Filippo and Pugliese, 1996). To be competitive within an internationalized and globalized market, small industries in Emilia-Romagna, (one of the economically flourishing regions in Italy) were urged to reduce labour costs and introduce a high level of flexi-

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bility in their recruitment policies. Many such industries, nowadays, employ only seasonal workers. Migrant women, however, are increasingly filling the gaps left by the crisis of the welfare state in post-industrial societies through their (often illegal) jobs in the domestic sector and in care-related occupations. Moreover, the need for migrant women’s labour is a reflection of demographic trends in Italy where death rates outnumber birth rates. The rapidly increasing percentage of aged people in Italy has been accompanied by a major restructuring of the Italian welfare system, due to cuts in public expenditure. By way of confirmation, most Moroccan women I talked to are employed within the domestic and cleaning sectors and, in very few cases, in small industries. Most of them are employed in nero (cash in hand), without insurance or contributory schemes being paid by their employers. Migrant women are thus substituting Italian women in their reproductive roles. What Andall calls ‘the racialization of the live-in sphere’ means, she argues, ‘that an old system could be perpetuated with a new supply of labour’ (1998: 139–140). The recent migration to Italy, therefore, although highly functional (despite populist denials of this fact and racist campaigns) within the most degrading and low-wage economic sectors or in the service and domestic economy, represents a very flexible and often unprotected labour force. The material and normative conditions of uncertainty under which migrant women and men live their lives impinge upon both their socioeconomic strategies and the construction of their social personhood within a transnational field.

Consumption, identity and perceptions of ‘home’ Creating a ‘home’ in Italy Amongst the Moroccan migrant women I met many expressed the desire to buy a house or land in Morocco. Some have already invested their savings in the country of origin. Some others save and economize in Italy to be able to use their money in Morocco. However, investing in activities in Morocco is not always a sustainable practice. Especially when the whole family has migrated, it is harder to save on housing or other expenses in Italy. Although some families tend to go to Morocco every year, for others this becomes more difficult as needs increase with the presence of children. Children often push their families to search for social recognition in Italy, driving them to conform to an Italian life style, in terms of adaptation to certain kinds of commodities and fashions. Nevertheless, in these cases, the forms of consumption women engage with bear a more complex meaning than the simple capitulation to a hegemonic modernity symbolized by access to Western commodities (cf. Friedman, 1994). For example, Samia argued that she considers it very important to be able to buy things for which her daughters express a desire. In her opinion,

56 Ruba Salih whereas in Morocco everything is forbidden or inaccessible, she feels that in Italy children enjoy an ampler possibility of choices and this contributes to fostering a stronger personality. Commodities that children desire are often represented by school bags, clothes, shoes and toys fashionable in a particular moment, which would confer on them a status of equality with their schoolmates. While in some cases parents simply cannot afford these items, in other cases, through directing their choices to those specific objects of consumption, women engage in a politics of negotiating their difference to cope with the mainstream values of a society which emphasizes conformity to certain fashions. The interpretation of consumption as a social practice whereby migrant women cope with the tensions derived from their low status as exploited low-waged labourers has been analysed by Mills (1997) who notes how the analysis of Thai rural/urban migrant women as consumers ‘highlights a powerful avenue by which labour migrants may pursue new forms of autonomy and agency and the construction of socially satisfying and valued identities’ (1997: 41).3 The consumption of modernity (Friedman, 1994) thus becomes a way for migrant women to negotiate their children’s difference from Italian mainstream society. However, the new economic possibilities derived from the migration experience also favour, in the case described above, the emergence of a different model of children’s education. Immigrants’ consumption patterns, especially concerning domestic appliances and other material objects, gave birth in the Italian context to the notion of integrazione consumista (consumptionist integration), to denote a model of integration that pushes towards the adoption of consumption patterns which, however, do not reduce migrants’ social and political marginalization (ISMU, 1998: 148). Whereas Samia is concerned with investing in social recognition in Italy, other women place all their efforts in advancing their status in Morocco, independently from potential projects of permanent return. Karima, who is a single live-in domestic, not only bought a flat in Morocco but also spends a considerable amount of her savings furnishing it and, she told me, enjoys buying and reading Italian fashion magazines to obtain new ideas on how to decorate it. As other scholars have argued, it is not so much the flow of different things, in the form of goods, ideas or cultural meanings, in itself that is significant (Basch et al., 1994; Appadurai, 1986; Friedman, 1994). Rather, we should look at the ways in which things are given new social and cultural meanings, and what kind of relations they produce, modify or redefine in the social field in which they are received and consumed. A significant site of analysis in this regard is the way the flow of goods is articulated with the conceptualization of home. Home is here understood both as the physical space women and their families inhabit and as the symbolic conceptualization of where one belongs. I suggest that women articulate and give meaning to the spaces they inhabit through the objects they bring back and forth.

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Homes in Italy are decorated with things that reflect the double belonging (cf. Beverly-McCloud, 1996, on African–American houses in North America). Typical cheap, popular Italian furniture is displayed together with objects recalling the Moroccan and Muslim world such as covers for sofas, pictures showing Quranic writings on the walls and, in some cases, calendars arriving from France with dates of Islamic celebrations and feasts or posters of Moroccan women wearing the traditional dresses of different areas of Morocco. Moreover, food stored in the kitchen reflects a plural identity. Together with Italian food, spices brought back from Morocco and particular ingredients are kept in big quantities. Some of them are used during Ramadan or on other special occasions. The typical Moroccan terracotta cooking pots used to prepare tajin4 were also present in many of the homes I visited in Italy. The importance of food in forging a sense of belonging and identity has also been underlined also by Gardner, who showed how, for Sylheti people who are leaving their country to migrate to England, food ‘not only nourishes members of the group, but its consumption is also a sign of belonging and socialisation’ (1993: 6). The consumption of Moroccan meals with guests is also a way of objectifying the Moroccan background since the consumption of food is also a symbolic incorporation of the place it recalls. Samia’s mother, when I was leaving my fieldwork to come back to England, prepared an entire box of Moroccan sweets, as a way of remembering her when I was far away. Similarly, in Italy, to celebrate new births, women prepare Moroccan sweets that are offered to visitors as a way of recreating the familiar atmosphere of home. Things are not only consumed but also displayed. As Malkin (1998) has suggested for Mexican women in the United States, in the distribution of tasks within the home, women are responsible for signifying the social identity of the family through displaying and ordering objects. Both in Italy and Morocco women also decide what has to be displayed, when and how, according to the importance attributed to visitors. In visiting women several times, it was not unusual for me to find homes arranged very differently compared with my first visit. While initially I would be served tea with the Moroccan gold-decorated glasses, and I would notice elegant Moroccan stylish material covering sofas, the second or third time, I was no longer a new or special guest who deserved such a display.

Morocco: summer return, modernity and the construction of social personhood5 To most Moroccan women, the summer return is a very important event that involves a long period of preparation and shopping. Women start to arrange things one or two months before their date of departure, although it can be said that, for some families, the whole way of life in Italy is functional and

58 Ruba Salih complementary to the summer return. The life styles migrants display when they are in Morocco for a short period are the result of a hard and difficult life for the rest of the year in Italy. Women’s preparation revolves around buying presents for relatives but also many things for themselves and their children. Typical goods of interest to women are items for the house, especially blankets, sheets and towels as well as domestic appliances to take both for personal use and as gifts. Clothes and shoes for themselves and their children are also amongst the major expenses. Domestic appliances are particularly significant in underlining their expanded economic possibilities, especially in view of their very high prices they have in Morocco. When I asked Samia what could be a suitable present for her mother’s flat in Morocco, she eventually suggested taking a blender which, however, for the period I was in Morocco, was never extracted from its box, serving thus more as a ‘work of art’ (Gell, 1986: 114) than as a domestic device. The same, however, applies to the espresso coffee machine exhibited on a shelf in the lounge of her flat in Italy, in which no coffee seemed to have ever been prepared. When leaving for Morocco, women also tend to take things with them from Italy, especially those goods they have become very familiar with such as baby food, nappies or indeed Parmesan cheese, which are usually too expensive in Morocco and through which, moreover, they constantly remind themselves and others that their habits have changed. Many Moroccans are involved in what they call fare il commercio (trade). This practice is not new and has been described in numerous studies of other groups of migrants. Goods are bought in Europe and sold in Morocco. Usually men are more concerned with the trade of cars and motorcycles. Many of my informants used to travel by car and sell it in Morocco. I was told that until some time ago it was quite easy to bribe the customs officers. Yet, Suheila claimed that after the agreement between Fiat and the Moroccan government, cars that used to be too expensive are now sold at competitive prices. This means that the practice of illegally introducing cars from Italy is harder to accomplish owing to more rigorous controls. In this regard, she was furious with the Moroccan authorities because her father was almost put in prison, and then condemned to pay a very high fine, for having illegally imported and sold a motorcycle. She argued that the Moroccan government, which had previously closed an eye to such practices, has now decided to make money out of migrants (ci vedono come dei polli da spennare). Women are involved in another kind of informal trade. In particular, they buy cheap clothes, which they then sell in Morocco as Italian fashionable trademarks to neighbours or relatives. This practice is very advantageous because women establish prices for these items which are based on invented and unrealistic exchange rates for dirham/Italian lira. Samia, for example, buys clothes on sale in Italy and takes them back each time she goes to Morocco. Her clients are distant relatives, friends and friends of friends.

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Women go to see the merchandise in her house in Casablanca where she has accumulated a small stock of clothes. A partial understanding would consider these goods as representing a self-evident European modernity recognized worldwide as such. This explanation is true in some ways, but it does not take into account the more complex path these objects follow and the politics of meanings and values attributed to them. As Appadurai (1986; see also Kopitoff, 1986) has shown, commodities should be seen in a historical dimension, looking at the trajectory they follow to move from the status of things to that of commodities, that is things with an economic value. What transforms a thing into a commodity is politics expressed in many different ways, such as politics of knowledge, of authenticity, of expertise. What kind of politics of value do Moroccan women attribute to these goods? Most of the goods bought either for trade or as gifts are not considered as particularly fashionable or modern in the mainstream Italian or Western conceptualization of style. In this regard, more than once women told me that the shops where they buy things are those where ‘all Moroccans go!’ In this context, there is probably a phenomenon of adaptation of some stores that have turned towards Italian commodities, especially blankets and towels, suitable for Moroccan migrants in terms of taste and prices. Moroccan families also regularly attend a market in a small village in the countryside near Parma. Women, in fact, buy goods that would be seen as signs of fashion and modernity by the Moroccan recipients according to their own conceptualizations of fashion and modernity. Of course, as Bourdieu (1984) has shown in his study of taste and consumption in France, in Morocco taste, preferences and consumption models (as well as ideas of modernity) vary according to class and educational level.6 Nonetheless, in showing me the clothes she stored in Casablanca, Samia explained that she had chosen shirts and skirts according not so much to what was fashionable in Italy at that particular moment, but bearing in mind the taste and style of her friends and their networks, who surely are not upper class. Similarly, Leila was looking for elegant bed sheets to take as a present for her sister’s wedding, but she could not find what she wanted in the mainstream shopping malls where we went together, since those items did not fit the idea of elegance that she knew would please the recipients of the present. However, these things had to be bought in Italy and sold as ‘Italian’ since their value would be embodied precisely by that quality. This process complicates theories of homogenization that perceive immigrants as assimilated into Western fashion and attracted exclusively by symbols characteristic of mass consumerist and industrial societies. Consumption attitudes cannot be entirely ascribed to the power of dominant ideologies, which impose their cultural representations on people. Neither can people be seen as completely independent and able to resist dominant ideologies by creating their own models of consumption. Rather

60 Ruba Salih this relation is characterized by ‘a mutually constituted relationship of two sets of interests and self-images’ (Miller, 1987: 168). In a similar vein, Friedman argued that ‘consumption within the bounds of the world system is always a consumption of identity, canalised by a negotiation between selfdefinition and the array of possibilities offered by the capitalist system’ (1990: 314). In his ethnography of La Sape in Congo, a club of young people wearing imported designer clothing as symbols of success, he shows how, although expressed through Western stylish clothes, the project of La Sape is not altered by the provenance of the clothes, but on the contrary, ‘the west is encompassed by the practice of La Sape’. The flow of goods to Morocco, and the process of objectification through consumption women engage with, thus, must be seen as a process whereby ‘consumption of global forms is located in ordinary commensurability’ (Miller, 1995b: 8; see also Wilk, 1995). As well as attributing value to those items they buy in Italy to sell in Morocco, in Morocco women choose items to bring back as presents for their Italian acquaintances. Handicraft products, usually sold in tourist markets and feeding the collective imagination of what essentially the ‘oriental style’ is, such as gold-decorated slippers, gold and silver carved dishes, painted pots, objects which one would easily find in hotels but hardly in Moroccan homes, are among the gifts women buy for their Italian friends. Again, but this time in the opposite direction, women interpret what an authentic Moroccan style is, mediating through an essentialized Italian representation of authenticity. Migrant women, hence, come to play a role of mediators of different, although intersecting and self-reflecting, conceptualizations of authenticity and modernity. Interestingly, however, among the things Samia bought in Morocco for her daughters were two outfits used in traditional Moroccan feasts, which she intended to use as fancy dresses for carnival in Italy.

Identities: continuity and rupture In preparation for her summer return to Morocco, Leila let me go shopping with her. On that occasion, I noticed with how much concern and hesitation she would choose the presents for her various relatives, having to consider carefully affordability and desirability of the items offered. That day she told me of how, for many nights in that period, she could not sleep very well because of certain dreams she was having about the summer return, the most recurrent of which was that she had left for Morocco leaving behind all her baggage. The night before she was so anxious that she dreamt she had lost her son. Her dreams were crucial to my reflections on the symbolic meaning of the journey back for women and their families. Not only in containing her gifts and her own new clothes did the luggage embody Leila’s symbolic capital, but it seemed that all her social personhood revolved around the event of the journey.

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Surely, the different transnational activities women are engaged with are not always lived as routine or normal practices, as some scholars seem to represent them (Basch et al, 1994; Glick Schiller et al., 1992). Neither, in the case of Moroccan women in Italy, do these activities seem to be performed as acts of resistance. Rather, transnationalism often exacerbates a sense of discontinuity and rupture. Not only does arranging and organizing the summer return often cause anxiety to women, but the return itself involves stress and tension. Sometimes, discussions between couples arise, since women would like to spend time in their parents’ home, with their mothers and sisters, but it is socially required that they stay with their husbands’ families, to whom they now belong. This is a source of anxiety especially for those women who left Morocco soon after their marriages to join their husbands in Italy, with whom they have developed a rather open relationship, out of the control of their in-laws. Before leaving Morocco, they often did not have the time to be socialized into that world of acts and attitudes that fix the roles and power relations between the bride and her receiving family. Several women lamented that, when they are in Morocco, their husbands change attitudes under the influence of their kin, becoming more strict and conservative. Visiting relatives, organizing and participating in weddings and other celebrations are amongst the principal activities of women when they are in Morocco. After spending the first week in Safi, the town where her husband’s family lives, Samia wanted to spend the rest of her five weeks’ holiday in her house in Casablanca with her mother. Thus, Yusuf, her husband, used to spend many days away from Casablanca carrying out the duties he had as a temporary returnee, such as taking his mother to her marabout Sidi Slimane, or visiting cousins and relatives. This was a cause of great tension since Samia claimed he constantly left her alone with the children, while she needed time and help for the organization of her brother’s wedding, the latter living in the Canary Islands. Samia, nonetheless, was in many ways helped by both her mother and a 12-year-old girl who works and lives in her home. The latter, I was told, ‘works here to help her family’, being the oldest of eight children of a very poor family of Berber origin living in the mountains near Fez. In practice, her family receives some money in exchange for her work as live-in maid. Moreover, another young woman (who had lived in France for some years in the past) also came from time to time to iron or to cook when there were social events and used to stay for the night.7 Many studies confirm that migrants often belong to different social classes within the two countries of emigration and immigration. For example, while in Italy Samia has been working as a maid and carer for elderly people, in Morocco, where she can afford to pay a maid, the social roles are completely inverted. Whereas traditionally the organization of the household and reproductive activities involved the work of the women from the extended family, often fictive kin (Maher, 1984), migrants’ families’

62 Ruba Salih domestic tasks are increasingly performed by women from outside the family. This is particularly evident during the summer celebrations of weddings and other ceremonies by temporary returnees, which contribute to reinforcing the progressive shift of Moroccan weddings from moral to market economies (Kapchan, 1996). Notwithstanding the support she had, Samia was often nervous for a number of reasons. Throughout her stay in Morocco she had to cope with the sense of being mocked by shop assistants, policemen who often try to stop and fine foreign (immigrant) cars, and a number of other persons who, in her opinion, take advantage of the lack of up-to-date knowledge and the familiarity of emigrants with regard to prices, trade mechanisms and day-today bargains. These and other instances epitomize that sense of rupture and discontinuity that deeply affect migrants’ feelings ‘back home’. Yet, women’s narratives revolve also around deeper considerations regarding their social identity. For some women, being Moroccan emerges as a field of complex renegotiation within the country of origin. While women might identify themselves as Moroccans when they are in Italy, they experience a cleavage with this self-definition when they are in Morocco. For example, Badia told me that when she goes back in the summer she does not feel Beni Millal is her town any longer because ‘Everything has changed, prices are higher than last time I was there and children have grown up.’ Ziba accounted for how she feels under pressure when she goes back to Tangier in the summer. In conveying their own version of what migration should involve in terms of the construction of new social status and personhood, Ziba’s relatives expect her to appear extremely modern and European. By virtue of her newly acquired status as a migrant and to convey an image of success, they claim she should adopt a more distant attitude towards those who have never moved. Ziba, in contrast, does not like the fiction of hiding the hard aspects of migrant life in Italy and, when she is in Morocco, she speaks freely about ‘how difficult it is to get to the end of the month’ and tells people that ‘money is never enough’. Her sister criticizes her for this ‘bringing herself low’. Yet, when she is in Morocco, Ziba feels very sociable and she wants to talk to everybody: ‘When I go to Morocco I feel so much like speaking with people. … I would speak even with the wall, for hours and hours.’ Her need for spontaneous sociability, something she lacks in Italy where she does not have many friends, is somehow censured in Morocco. Moreover, Ziba often deplored those Moroccans who tell fake stories to disguise their real economic conditions. Although the need to exhibit inflated success to fellow Moroccans is common in Italy, this is imperative in Morocco, where the new identity should emerge through startlingly self-controlled behaviour. Living in Italy involves a constant process of comparison with Morocco at many different levels. Samia and Yusuf often talk about a dream. They would like to create a nursery in Morocco. In this case, the project represents a way to make value of the experience they have acquired in Italy with their

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daughters’ schools. They often claimed that one of the deepest problems within Moroccan society is the lack of a ‘social’ (Yusuf used this word often) understanding of the problems afflicting their country. He used to say that ‘people do not have collective awareness of their problems’. In his opinion, a bad educational system and a lack of attention to the way Moroccans raise their children are both responsible for that. The summer return to Morocco, once migrants are back in Italy, raises contrasting feelings and opposing desires. Soon after Samia and Mohammed came back from Morocco, we had a long evening recalling the days spent there together. That night, they expressed their reflections, thoughts and sentiments towards their country and the rationale for living in Italy, displaying clashing feelings and desires. Whereas in Morocco they felt somehow unsettled and pervaded by a certain anxiety, once in Italy, where they face another kind of anxiety and unsettlement, their interpretation of the long summer spent back in Morocco changed. In Morocco, they claimed, they had opened up whereas in Italy they feel a sort of closure (chiusura) due to the habitude of ‘thinking always negatively’, of distrusting everyone and assuming a self-defensive attitude. They recounted how, when travelling back to Italy, they had a problem with their car in Spain. Many compatriots, all immigrants driving back to their countries of residence, stopped to help them. Samia and Yusuf felt very touched by this solidarity. Yusuf said that he felt like a ‘boss’ (come un padrone), doing nothing while his compatriots were trying to repair the car. Samia added that in Italy she misses this sense of community: ‘here in Italy we are closed in ourselves (chiusi), we did not have the possibility of developing friendships and we are getting used to that’. To the question of whether, after this long visit to Morocco, they felt they would go back to live there permanently, Yusuf answered and Samia agreed with him: Everyone has a desire to go back to his own country … of course, it would be wonderful! But first many things would need changing: corruption, the political situation and disorder! The evening, however, ended up with them promising to one another that they would go to Morocco every year, because what they gain is worth the economic effort. Transnationalism as a field of contestation Before leaving for Morocco, Leila expressed severe criticism towards those Moroccans who sell items ‘which they collect at the charity services’. Although most women carry out strategies of optimization across countries, at a discursive level some disapprove of the attitude of saving on living expenses in Italy to spend in Morocco and eventually display a better social

64 Ruba Salih status there. Yasmine, a young woman from Casablanca, expressed a very caustic position in this regard, arguing that ‘There are people who live like poor persons here, they go to the Kanisa (the church) to collect things … and these people in the meantime own houses in Morocco!’ When I asked Yasmine whether in her opinion this attitude is typical of those who intend to return sooner or later, she answered that these people claim that they will return but in fact they will never do so, and they are aware of this. She added that ‘the only reason why they are living in such a way is because it is easier!’ While criticizing other Moroccans’ transnational strategies, in a way, Yasmine was also speaking about herself and her situation. Many women are aware of the fact that for most of them permanent return is illusory, yet, as already mentioned, they are unable to make a final decision to settle in Italy not least because of the unpredictable nature of their lives in Italy as immigrants. A deeper level of anxiety takes place around the feeling of transience in women’s life caused by their continuous movements between Italy and Morocco, which paradoxically bear contradictory outcomes. On the one hand, up-to-date knowledge through ongoing visits creates the possibility of building ‘social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992: 1). Moreover, through keeping networks and activities between Morocco and Italy, migrants are able to construct a social personhood that encompasses boundaries and territorialized differences (cf. Rouse, 1995b). Nonetheless, at the same time, transnational links do not have the power of overthrowing the sense of rupture women experience as a result of attempts to maintain membership in both countries, yet being ultimately ‘of ’ neither. I would like to conclude by quoting Leila whose words strive for security and stability against this sentiment of ephemerality: After we came back from Morocco this summer, my husband decided that he wants to go back and live there … in Italy we are neither here nor there. We save all our money to go back to Morocco during the summer and we spend our time in organising the travel. Then, once we are back in Italy, we start working again and saving for the next journey … we don’t save anything for the future. I have to think about my son, about his future.

Conclusions Hannerz has pointed out how: Time is gone when migration implied the attenuation and eventual loss of links to the place of origin … there is some fairly continuous negotiation of meanings, values, and symbolic forms going on there; involving

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cultures of the old place and the new place, as well as the migrants’ intense experience of discontinuity and rupture in itself. (1996: 100) Transnationalism is an historical process that has linked Moroccan migrants to their country of origin ever since they started to migrate. However, the nature and quality of these links have undergone significant changes in time. While earlier examples of transnationalism constituted traditional forms of investments in the country of origin linked to a project of potential permanent return, through current forms of transnationalism migrant women rely simultaneously on two countries as a way of optimizing resources and constructing their social personhood. Particularly significant in this sense are the ways in which, through consumption practices, Moroccan women construct their home and social status by objectifying themselves in the commodities they bring back and forth. Through the things they exchange in the transnational continuum, moreover, women mediate representations of modernity and authenticity between Morocco and Italy. However, these practices push us towards a reflection on what constitutes ‘home’ for Moroccan migrant women. If analysed through the commodities women buy, consume, display and exchange within their transnational movements, the relation to the country of origin emerges significantly as a complex one. To feel ‘at home’ in Morocco women need to bring with them those things that constitute and represent their ‘other home’ in Italy. Through those commodities women display what they have become and affirm their identities contextually and in opposition to those left behind. However, ‘home’ in Italy is also constructed through objects that signal the Moroccan and Muslim belonging. Women, therefore, experience ‘home’ as a space constructed by the interaction and combination of goods symbolizing their double belonging. I concluded by emphasizing the contested nature of transnational forms of life. Decisions on where to invest, materially and symbolically, might constitute a field of negotiation or contestation since transnational practices eventually lead to deeper anxieties on where ‘home’ is and where, thus, one is supposed to build a future for children and their education, to acquire something more than material objects, that is a long-term symbolic capital. Analysed from this perspective transnationalism and ongoing movements do not seem simply to reconcile fractures, but may exacerbate anxieties about the future and amplify insecurities. While keeping a simultaneous relationship with their country of origin, women paradoxically also increase their need for territorialization and secure identities. In interpreting the impact of transnationalism on people’s lives we should therefore be careful not to emphasize a quantitative dimension, focusing on the number of times, frequency or speed with which migrants visit their country (Vertovec, 1999; Portes, 1999), at the expense of an analysis of the qualitative endeavour that every single visit involves in terms of negotiation

66 Ruba Salih of cultural and symbolic resources and, therefore, of repercussions that these connections have on their lives. As the material presented above illustrates, Moroccan migrants may return to their countries of origin once a year, instead of every three months, but the material and psychological preparation to undertake this trip may be overwhelming, to an extent that we may say that some migrants conduct lives in Italy which are predominantly functional to their returns (but not a permanent return, as it used to be in the past). For some families, life ‘here’ and life ‘there’ therefore become complementary. For other Moroccan families, however, transnationalism may paradoxically involve mutually exclusive choices. Indeed, annual visits to Morocco imply sacrifices in Italy. These aspects are salient in Moroccan women’s narratives that often revolve around the tension embedded in managing the family’s budget. For many of them, transnationalism means struggling to distribute resources evenly between Italy and Morocco, satisfying children’s needs in Italy and relatives’ expectations in Morocco, operating a balance between the desire to display their success in Morocco and the concrete requirements of everyday life in Italy. The processes analysed here force us to reinterrogate or redefine the potentials of transnational forms of life for migrants, urging likewise a more balanced understanding of the relation between transnationalism and the global economic restructuring and neo-liberal economic ideologies on the one hand, and of migrants’ agencies and counterhegemonic practices on the other hand.

Notes 1 2

3 4 5

Italian laws state that regularly employed workers earn fourteen wages per year. Two extra salaries are paid in the middle and at the end of each working year. In the United States, Roger Rouse has defined this new stage in the relations of production as a ‘reconfiguration of the landscape of socio-economic experience’ symbolized by the shift in the strategies of capital accumulation from the multinational corporations, where self-contained processes of production were basically located in different countries, to the era of transnational corporations that distribute a single economic process in various countries, trying to reduce the time occurring for technological communication and interaction between these several interconnected parts to take place (Rouse, 1995a: 366; see also Harvey, 1989). Similarly, Johnson (1998) has shown that consumption practices of Filipino migrant women in the Middle East represent an arena where women negotiate the tensions between contrasting values and models of ‘home’ and away. A way of cooking meat and vegetables in special ceramic pots made by a container with a conic cover open on the top. Rouse has used the term personhood instead of identity to describe the attempt by individuals to construct ‘a sameness or continuity of the self across time and space’. He argues that social sciences have intended identities as things that people have or possess, claim, acquire, lose and search for. In these terms continuity of the self depends primarily on the sustained posses-

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sion of particular properties, a condition that applies to both the properties that mark people as individual and those that mark them as members of collectivities. In his opinion, instead personhood is best understood in terms of people’s chronic efforts to acquire and maintain possession of properties that they value; continuity of the self is not given but achieved; an ideal personhood involves a lasting form of self-possession or proprietorship of the self. (1995b: 356–357) 6

7

I entered the house of a very wealthy family in Casablanca only once and, interestingly, the house was furnished with very luxurious objects typical of the Moroccan and oriental traditional fashion mixed with symbols of wealth characteristic of the Western traditional style. Carved wood on the roofs, gold stylish curtains and cushions, wood and mother-of-pearl-decorated coffee tables were together with French-style royal chairs and sofas. This practice of ‘employing’ young girls from very poor families is quite widespread in Morocco and is not exclusive to upper class families. Samia’s family can also afford it thanks to the economic resources acquired through migrating.

5

Senegal is our home The anchored nature of Senegalese transnational networks Bruno Riccio

Introduction In this chapter, I argue against the assumption that the development of transnational communities necessarily implies a change towards a multidimensional or globally oriented meaning of home. The chapter relies on research among Senegalese migrants abroad and on my own multi-sited ethnography in Italy and Senegal (cf. Marcus, 1995; Kearney, 1995).1 I highlight how, although living within transnational social fields and benefiting from transnational networks, most Senegalese migrants preserve and contribute towards shaping a strong sense of identity that reinforces rather than undermines the concept of Senegal as their homeland. At the beginning of the 1990s, Glick Schiller and others (1992, 1995) argued that migrants sustain multi-stranded social relations that link their societies of origin and settlement. They called this experience ‘transnationalism’ in order to emphasize the emergence of a social process in which migrants ‘establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992: ix). Therefore, transmigrants are the people who ‘take actions, make decisions, and feel concerns’ within such social fields. Senegalese migrants can be called transmigrants under such a definition, and in the first half of this chapter I illustrate such transnationality ‘from below’, seen from both the sending and receiving contexts. The three anthropologists also stressed that it becomes vital to examine how the variety of contexts within which transmigrants reside influence ‘constructions of identity that draw on race, ethnicity and nationalism’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1992: 18). Transnationally mobile people seem to imply a ‘plurilocal’ (Rouse, 1991) and more globally ‘mobile’ conception of home (Rapport and Dawson, 1998). The Senegalese, however, although well organized transnationally, do not develop multiple attachments: their meaning of home does not shift dramatically. Conversely, it seems that their identification with the context of origin helps their transnational organization and strengthens their resistance to an occasionally racist and constraining receiving context. The reflections of the second half of the chapter will focus on these constraints together with an analysis of key elements of life –

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such as status, family and religion – that may attract migrants back to Senegal. It may be that Senegalese transmigrants’ dreams of return are never fulfilled, but I will try to show why I foresee a prolonged transnationality followed ultimately by return. One aspect that revealed itself to be important in my research but is not widely considered in the literature on transnationalism is the ‘critical role in mediating the scope and depth of migrants’ transnational practices’ (Portes et al., 1999b: 231) played by specific local contexts. Specific sending contexts play an important role too. For instance, Olwig maintains that mobile people often can be seen to develop an attachment to a specific place which plays a central role as a common source of identity in their global network of relations, but which may not be their place of residence. (Olwig, 1997: 35) Although migration can be conceived as a creative process (Eickelman and Piscatori, 1990; Gardner, 1995; Appadurai, 1996), there exist socio-cultural contexts of greater permanence and sustenance that ‘may be seen to be sustained by institutions which tie them to homelands in much more concrete ways than through the imagined worlds erected by the creative resource of fantasy’ (Olwig, 1997: 35). I will argue that for the Senegalese, as for the Nevisians studied by Olwig, an important key to their transnational organization lies in the fact that despite their deterritorialization they still have a territorial locus where they ‘touch down’ (Olwig, 1997: 23).

Senegalese in Italy: a background Although, as we shall see, migration from Senegal is much studied, little has been said about how well it fits a transnational perspective on migration. But if, as Carmon suggests, ‘the world has a new type of migrant’ (Carmon, 1997: 25), namely the transmigrant, I would argue that the Senegalese, and the Wolof in particular, provide us with an excellent example. Whereas the first migrations toward Europe (France) mainly concerned Toucouleur, Peul (Fulani) and Soninké coming from northern regions, most of the Senegalese migrants in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s were Wolof and belonged to the Mouride brotherhood. They mainly originated in the north western regions of Senegal (Robin, 1996). The Mouride brotherhood was founded in the 1880s by Cheikh Amadou Bamba and has its capital at Touba, the site of his revelation, where the Mourides have constructed the largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa. The highest office in the brotherhood is held by the Khalifa-General who is the eldest surviving son of Cheikh Amadou Bamba. The brotherhood provides a distinctive culture of emigration, and its vertical and horizontal ties provide an organizational solution capable of reproduction in international

70 Bruno Riccio networks (Ebin, 1996; Carter, 1997). These features often help migrants in organizing mobility as well as temporary settlement within their receiving contexts. Schmidt di Friedberg (1994) argues that the practical importance of the solidarity displayed by the Mouride brotherhood in Italy is twofold. The first is for the immigrant, who can move in a universe of meanings that are known and familiar; the second is for the host society, which is confronted with a cohesive group, conscious of the difficulties of integration in a foreign environment, and ready to negotiate its position and avoid conflict. The Senegalese have emigrated for mainly economic reasons and in particular because of the crisis in the traditional agricultural structure, which produced the following historical pattern: firstly urbanization in Senegal, secondly western African internal migration, thirdly emigration to Europe (mainly France), and finally internal European migration (to Italy from France) and a change of direction in migration to Europe (directly to Italy) (Campus et al., 1993; Marchetti, 1994). Most migrants are men who migrate as individuals and follow the paths shaped by migratory chains, and they tend to be highly mobile on Italian territory as well as transnationally (Caritas di Roma, 1998). The number of women has been growing through family reunion, although much less so than within other immigrant communities (ISMU, 1998). The activity practised by many Senegalese all over Italy (especially on the tourist coast of Emilia-Romagna) is street-selling, a practice that is illegal but significant within the informal economy. Most studies stress that many Senegalese have a direct or indirect experience of trade and of migration (Fall, 1992). I would add transnationality.

Senegalese transnationality I: the view from the sending context Contemporary Senegal is characterized by a precarious economic and social situation and a fragile and complex equilibrium of different crosscutting cleavages that have developed historically (Diouf, 1993). Like many African countries it has put its economy under the control of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with little prospect of recovery. Senegalese religious organizations seem to be amongst the most important actors in filling the gap produced by this difficult situation (Villalon, 1995). Muridiyya is one of the four main Sufi synchretic brotherhoods in Senegal. The other three are Tijaniyya, Quadiriyya and Layenne. It has been maintained that by fostering relations of personal dependence combined with an effective organization, these brotherhoods – and the Mouride in particular – offer a solidarity system well adapted to situations of crisis (Cruise O’Brien, 1988). The same can be said for the role they play for the Senegalese abroad (A. M. Diop, 1985; Ebin, 1996). However, this section shows how different local sending contexts inform a ‘variation in the frequency, depth and range of transnational ties’ (Vertovec, 1999: 456). There are many different ways of being a transmigrant, and local contexts tend to affect the outcome.

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The post-colonial town Kebemer is what I would call a small post-colonial town (once flourishing and now surviving, thanks to emigration) in the region of Louga (ancient Cayor), that represents a typical sending context for emigrants to Italy. Almost every household has a member who has emigrated. The investments of emigrants in new houses and shops are immediately apparent. These shops (food, spare parts, beauty products, clothes, Télécentres, bakeries) are managed by emigrants’ wives or friends, who are responsible for their family’s subsistence. After the groundnut crisis, local traders became the main link between emigrants and their families. Through loans of initial capital to assist emigration, local traders ensured that remittances came directly to them, and payments were then disbursed to the migrants’ families and sometimes to people building their houses. In other words, playing the role of an informal bank, traders (sometimes former migrants) secured the regular remittance of money to families, workmen and shops. They have become pivotal characters who reinforce all the points of the network whilst simultaneously investing for themselves (in building and trading too). Similar brokers have also been found in Dakar by Mansour Tall in his research on migrants’ real estate investments (Tall, 1994). A mixture of village friendships and kinship linkages shape the sending contexts of the migratory ‘circuit’ (Rouse, 1991), through which migrants manage their activities from abroad. Meanwhile, members of the family, friends or even the trader who lent the money are directly responsible for emigrants’ shops and businesses at home. Religious adherence is not the main factor in the migratory chain here. Instead, a different organizational solution to transnational migration has been developed by Mourides in Touba. The holy city The phenomenon of Mouridism has been central to so many scholars’ research that Bayart suggests it is to political science what the Rift Valley is to geomorphology (1989, quoted in Perry 1997: 257). It would be overambitious to provide a synthesis of such well-documented research. Relying on my fieldwork experience, I shall focus on two key features that help explain some aspects of Senegalese transmigration to Emilia-Romagna and Europe: the core relationship between marabouts and disciples, and the holy city of Touba as a central pole for transnational configurations. The core of Mouride morality and organization (Diop, 1981, and Copans, 1980, would call it ideology) is represented by the relationship between the marabout or Serin (the saint and guide, ‘the one who wants’) and the Talibe (disciple). Although it is an asymmetric relation, a kind of reciprocity needs also to be stressed. The marabout is a spiritual guide who guarantees grace (baraka)2 and through his economic and political power also provides the Talibe with help in practical matters; the Talibe obeys and works for the

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marabout and his service is considered as prayer (Cruise O’Brien, 1971; Coulon, 1981). A Mouride succeeds in life thanks to his marabout; and this is why every member of the brotherhood tends to be dedicated to his marabout, for example surprising him with occasional gifts (Cruise O’Brien, 1975). Sometimes outsiders can find this behaviour irrational. For example, according to a rumour circulating in 1996, an emigrant Mouride bought an expensive car for the Khalif of Touba. At the same time he exploited the solidarity of his family each time he came back to Senegal … without ever sending home remittances when he was abroad; only a Mouride is able to do something like this. (Ismael)3 Some people may be shocked by the elevation of the bond with the brotherhood and the marabout over the bond with the family. For many Mourides, however, this migrant was a ‘hero’, and such a generous gesture earned him respect and will probably open up many opportunities for business. However, talking about Mouridism’s relationship between marabout and disciple, another of my informants cautiously stressed that talibes are not obliged to give money to their Marabouts, and anyway the money is used to build schools and other services in Touba. … Everything is voluntary. (Modou) Similar caution is needed in analysing Mouridism’s link with emigration. Although there are documented cases of marabouts supporting emigrants, the direct involvement of Mouride brotherhoods in organizing emigration has been refuted by a thorough study by Schmidt di Friedberg (1994). Instead she placed greater emphasis on the general importance of a culture of work and migration, and identification with the exiled founder of the brotherhood, in providing migrants with strong bonds for networking and reciprocal help. Together with, and connected to, these horizontal and vertical ties, Touba, the sacred capital of the order, which symbolizes Bamba on earth, plays a key role in shaping Mouride transnational configurations. ‘Touba “commands” Mourides, wherever they may be’ (Ross, 1995: 233) and is a very important sending context for migration towards Italy since 70 per cent of emigrants from Touba go there (Lallou from ORSTOM, personal communication, 1997). It is a sending context, but also a receiving context of an international as well as an internal flux of people and investments. Up to the end of the 1960s Touba was not very populous. Nowadays, however, it is on its way to becoming the second city of Senegal and is a significant economic and financial centre. During the Magal4 every Mouride comes to Touba bearing gifts, in order to obtain the blessing of the

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marabout. Furthermore, Touba’s big market, Okass, provided and still provides many advantages for traders: ‘they do not pay taxes, this is why they find it such an extraordinary benefit for their businesses’ (Fallou). During my fieldwork I followed Sall, who is the son of a village chief, and is involved in all the stages of transnational trade from Ravenna (Italy) to Touba. He buys products in Italy, comes back to Senegal following the container and he himself sells all the products until they run out. When we met he had sold almost all his products, including stereos, sewing and washing machines and shelving. Besides the organization within its headquarters, it is also worthwhile analysing the Mouride expansionist movement and the flexibility of its organizational power by considering Mouride’s urbanization. The capital city Following desertification, drought and the consequent migration towards Dakar (cf. Antoine et al., 1995; Fall, 1995), Mouridism ‘invented’ a new role and new ways to continue the marabout–Talibe relation within the urban environment. It gave birth to the dahira, the place where all disciples of a marabout go to pray and to discuss religious matters. In this way it has also preserved its social function today with the urban crisis in Dakar (A. B. Diop, 1981; Cruise O’Brien, 1988; Ebin, 1996). The 1960s were years of consolidation for the Mouride community in the capital and the principal open-air market has progressively been ‘conquered’ by Mouride tradesmen (Cruise O’Brien, 1988, 139). Sandaga, in Dakar, is controlled by Mourides and, like Touba, is a major centre for informal activities like import–export and an important departure point for people heading towards Europe and the United States (Ebin, 1992). In Sandaga I met Matar, who works and lives in Italy. He was only in Dakar for a couple of weeks, just enough time to see his parents and to do some business. He had filled his brother’s small shop, situated at the main junction of Sandaga, with all sorts of fashionable and trendy clothes bought in Italy. At the same time he was purchasing cassettes to sell in Italy. Another typical sending context is the ‘village artisanale’ (Salem, 1981). It is the centre of Laobé carvers who produce African art objects such as masks, bags and carving of all sorts, and acts as a sort of springboard for Mouride commercial migration to Europe. However, following the devaluation of the CFA in 1994, emigration has affected every category of people, not only the Mouride street-peddlers who have been the object of so much research. To the internal ‘survival’ migration engendered by drought and desertification, one may now add the international economic emigration of the urban elite hit by the financial crisis (Courade, 1997). Interestingly this recent wave includes people leaving ‘good’ jobs (although wages are never guaranteed) because they are affected by the ‘illiterate’ traders who come back with money and enhance their

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status. Thus a momentum has developed around a transnational circulatory model of migration – in Portes’s words (1998), ‘it becomes the thing to do’. Ideally, Bubacar, who left an administrative post in a hospital, wants to work seasonally in Italy, and return at least once a year to Senegal. When he is back home he looks for opportunities to sell different products imported from Italy, ranging from clothes and beauty products to spare parts. In this section I have tried to give a sense of Senegalese transnationality when viewed from the context of the origin society. As Smith and Guarnizo cogently argue, ‘migration from the same country is formed by a heterogeneous rather than unitary group of people’ (1998: 14). There exist different stages, different sending contexts, different forms of organization, different backgrounds of class, urban or rural culture. In addition, as a kind of transnational circulatory model of migration is seen to be successful, it tends to be imitated.

Transnationality II: the view from the receiving context Most Senegalese I worked with stated explicitly that their ideal organization is a transnational one. They do not use this term but they mean ‘living part of the year in Italy and the other part in Senegal making the best of the two countries’ (Thierno). However, as with Bangladeshis in Italy (King and Knights, 1994), acquisition of the permesso di soggiorno (permit to stay) affects the possibility of transmigration. It is only when the permit is obtained and re-entry to Italy guaranteed that Senegalese can start going back and forth and thus manifest transnational mobility (cf. Perry, 1997). Far from being in a post-national era, transnational organization still needs to negotiate with nation-state regulatory and exclusionary practices. Senegalese migrants arriving in the mid-1980s were received by a very well-established Senegalese trade organization. The Senegalese newcomer often finds that a system of selling is established and that there are wholesalers who will supply products to sell and will pass on street-peddling strategies (Campus et al., 1993; Schmidt di Friedberg, 1994). One of my respondents, Ousmane, said that when you first arrive in the province of Ravenna, ‘either you go selling or you look for a job, but because you do not have the documents the only solution is selling’. The scholars who study the Senegalese and especially Mourides’ trading diasporas stress the power of the self-sustaining system of networks linking ties of belonging and trade. Mourides ‘are now involved in trade at all levels, from selling on the streets to organising a flourishing international electronic trade’ (Ebin, 1996: 96; cf. Cohen, 1969). Theirs is an international – or better transnational – system of networks. However, these networks are not closed systems with ‘rigid boundaries’ as some sociologists suggest (Scidà, 1994). Ebin, for example, stresses how sometimes students, tailors, or even those with white-collar jobs also rely on such trade networks to supplement their income (Ebin, 1996; Carter, 1997). Furthermore, I noticed how some Tijanes use Mourides’ networks.

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Thus, although they are linked, networks of belonging and trading networks do not overlap mechanically (Salem, 1981). The most important organizational features seem to emerge from religious attachments (Schmidt di Friedberg, 1994; Carter, 1997). Mourides’ transnational organization is kept alive by oral conversation and the selling of cassettes, which include prayers and Kasaids (Amadou Bamba’s poems) as well as information about ndiguel (orders, decrees) from the Khalif or from the establishment in Touba. Another channel is represented by transport: for instance, when Ababacar wanted to go to the Magal of Touba he sought information on how to gain access to flights reserved specifically for the Mourides. Such transnational social fields are shaped and strengthened mainly by the activities of the numerous dahira widespread in the receiving countries (Carter, 1997; A. B. Diop, 1985) and by the frequent visits of marabouts from Senegal. These visits are very important from an organizational as well as spiritual point of view. Money is collected by the marabout but he also provides followers with blessings and advice. These moments reaffirm the link and the identification between the sacred place (Touba), the saint (Cheikh Amadou Bamba as represented by other important members of his family) and the transnational community of Mourides. Ebin’s explanation is worth full quotation: Three features seem essential to creating Mouride space. First, they bring Touba and everything it connotes – the mosques, Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the home of the saints – into their present space. The frequent visits of their cheikhs – when ‘Touba comes to town’ – reinforce Touba’s presence. The invariable objects in their living spaces – posters, tapes of the qasa’ids, the highly spiced ‘Touba’ coffee – refer to the sacred town like a series of mnemonic notes. Mourides carry Touba in their hearts. At the da’ira meetings, their chants and songs make the ‘inside outside’. They claim that singing the poems of Amadou Bamba transforms the space where da’iras are held, creating sacred space and unity. (Ebin, 1996: 107) In this context, I will briefly consider an important visit to Emilia-Romagna. On 5 June 1996 Serin Murtada, the last son of Cheikh Amadou Bamba and one of the most important itinerant marabouts, was visiting Italy and stopped in Rimini where he met many groups of Senegalese who had come from different parts of Italy. The meeting took place in a public place, located with the help of Italian associations. In the hall were several sellers who arranged their material (mainly clothes) on the floor. Near the entrance of the hall most of the people (around 200) were praying, and there were people selling and distributing different kinds of material – religious artefacts, cassettes, pictures of Cheikh Amadou Bamba and his sons, books of poetry and sacred books for prayers, mostly in Arabic. Awaiting the marabout,

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everyone was praying on their own, except for a group set aside who were chanting Kasaids in a circle. Suddenly, two Baye Fall (a sub-movement of Mouridism) communicated the arrival of the marabout, an impressive silence filled the hall and everyone knelt. He was preceded by a long queue of followers. Inside the elaborate ceremony of greeting and blessing began. He blessed his followers and also collected their offerings. Groups from different towns in Italy formed a queue to greet the marabout. He stood in one place as people filed past him. Intermittently, there were moments of silent prayer at the end of which every believer lifted his hands to his face. These were the moments where everyone was collecting the baraka. This continued for hours. Finally, the marabout left in a procession similar to that in which he had arrived. These events testify to the Mourides’ ability to sacralize space through ritual. Werbner argues that the sacralizing of space is centrally embedded in Sufi Islam, Sufism being a missionizing, purificatory cult (Werbner, 1996). Yet, she also contends that Sufi centres and cults ‘wax and wane’ (Werbner, 1996: 329). This comment fits her ethnography of Pakistani Muslim migrants who have created new Sufi cult centres in the UK and new saints. It seems to fit less well in the case of the Mourides, for whom rituals in a foreign country try to recreate Touba, rather than to create a new space. The centre remains the same and is symbolically recreated anywhere. As Metcalf suggests, ‘it is ritual and sanctioned practice that is prior and that creates “Muslim space”, which thus does not require any juridically claimed territory or formally consecrated or architecturally specific space’ (Metcalf, 1996: 3). Thus, it is the capacity to reproduce Touba wherever one goes and the identification with a clear and definite home that allows Mourides to feel at home abroad. The religious organization is very important in the maintenance of transnational identity, as it provides transmigrants with spiritual points of reference and, mainly indirectly, it aids the development of networks. Yet in order to relate to their receiving contexts, some Senegalese have developed a rather different form of organization – through the numerous non-religious Senegalese associations united by a ‘Coordinamento’ (CASI) (Schmidt di Friedberg, 1994; Carter, 1997). These associations of foreign communities are often shaped by the immigrants who most successfully ‘speak the language’ of the institutions in the receiving societies (Grillo, 1985). These are often the better educated – the elite – who are rarely fully representative of the foreign community (cf. Vertovec, 1996). Among the Senegalese in Romagna one may encounter some ‘cosmopolitans’ (Hannerz, 1992; 1996) but many would be better cast as transnationals or ‘translocals’ (Werbner, 1997; cf. Grillo, 1998a): Cosmopolitans … are multilingual gourmet tasters who travel among global cultures, savouring cultural differences as they flit with consummate ease between social worlds. … Transnationals are people who

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move … in order to create collective ‘homes’ around them wherever they happen to land. … [They] have to contend with incredible social and economic hardships, and they draw on culturally constituted resources of sociality and mutual aid for survival. (Werbner, 1997: 11) Drawing on this distinction between two tendencies – albeit challenged by various exceptions – the findings of my research can be summarized by saying that the cosmopolitans among the Senegalese in Romagna are the ones who tend to enter the formal labour market and interact with the institutions of the receiving context. They have tried to organize a non-religious form of socio-political representation relating to the logic of the Italian associational structure, and shape their own personal networks as well as relying on the community networks. The translocals are the majority; they may enter the labour market too but tend to prefer informal trade, and they identify the religious circles as the most important organizational form. These transnationals follow an inward-looking life strategy and tend to avoid contact with Italians; instead they benefit, spiritually as well as materially, from life within a transnational social field. A certain degree of accommodation with a variety of local contexts seems possible because these migrants can rely on effective transnational networks both in trade and religion. Whatever the strength of a transnational social formation these have to relate to the constraints and characteristics of the local receiving context (cf. Guarnizo and Smith, 1998). For instance, Schmidt di Friedberg, in order to demonstrate that locals tend to welcome the Senegalese rather than view them as a threat, cites interviews with Italians who explained that the Senegalese ‘are not fanatics … they know that they are not in their own homes’ (Schmidt di Friedberg, 1994: 178; my translation). As we shall see, the perceptions of outsiders are also important in casting the meaning of home for a transnational community.

Senegalese home I: the view from the receiving context The expulsions of large groups of immigrants from houses or former hotels declared to be in an unacceptably unhygienic condition by the local health authority are among the events that characterize the practice of the people mostly involved in the implementation of local policies towards immigrants. From these experiences a specific image of the Senegalese emerged amongst those people. As someone working in the reception centre in Rimini stated: the Senegalese are the best accepted but the least integrated. … Their devotion to return is a problem too. This is why they do not care about integration here. (Moretti)

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I came across similar opinions among social practitioners in Ravenna. After six years of work Galli declared that she was sick of working with the single men: their situation seems schizophrenic, they adapt themselves to living in difficult situations, but they are not bothered about their life here, they live thinking about their family in Senegal. Their life seems to be in Senegal, but they can end up living twenty years here in this manner. (Galli) A colleague provided similar comments: ‘The Senegalese have no attachment to the place where they are living’ (Ferretti). Senegalese attachment to the context of origin together with their circular and mobile mode of existence contrasts with the sedentarist logic on which ‘institutional housing’ (Grillo, 1985) relies. This might be the reason why projects that try to stimulate entrepreneurship in accordance with the Senegalese own strategies are beginning to be conceived. A comparison with France helps us to understand better the Wolof commitment towards transnational mobility by providing a comparative case. The Soninké, Toucouleur and Peul (Fulani) came from the Senegal River valley in the 1960s and early 1970s and still represent the most important West African presence in France. The Wolof traders came later in the 1970s and many moved in the 1980s to other destinations in Europe, especially Italy. The Soninké in France went through a very different process of integration than that observed of the Wolof in Italy. Timera (1997) identified the following stages: ‘marginal communitary integration’, ‘sedentarization’ and ‘familization’. The first refers to individual males oriented towards return who find a precarious foothold in the industrial labour market and community housing in the foyer (cf. Grillo, 1985). The 1970s tertiarization of migrant labour provides a background to the second and third of Timera’s stages which refer to the unexpected consequences of the post-1974 French government’s shift towards a closed regime, namely an increase in family reunion together with new prospects for settlement and a shift in housing from the foyers to family accommodation in the cités. In summary, unlike many Senegalese in France in the 1980s and 1990s the majority of Senegalese in Italy are still single, male and highly mobile within the territory as well as transnationally. The Wolof commitment towards male mobility also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that when settlement and family reunion seemed the only available model in France in the mid-1970s, they opted to move to Italy or the United States instead. Analysing the receiving context and its constraints also provides a perspective on the long-term motivations of the Senegalese, especially towards the possibility of return. As Hellman cogently remarked:

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In Italy, the strict regulation of work hours and store openings, and corporativist licensing practices … have the effect of excluding immigrants from virtually all areas of Italian life. … The most modest commercial pursuit, such as selling goods in a street market, requires a special vendor’s licence, obtainable only after passing a special exam set by the municipal agency in charge of commerce. The would-be vendor must then purchase a licence, and must prove that he or she has passed prima media (the sixth grade of Italian elementary school). (Hellman, 1997: 45) The Afro-Muslim critique of the receiving context There is a peculiar way of making sense of the racism that Senegalese migrants have the misfortune to encounter. Racism as well as racist representation are often explained as stemming from ignorance. A Senegalese man who was explaining to me that people from Rimini are afraid of black people said: ‘I do not want to live here. People do not respect us. … Some Italians are ignorant. They do not know anything about Africa’ (Mamadou). In a way, this description of Italian ignorance permits an empowering self-positioning on the part of the Senegalese (cf. Zinn, 1994; Carter, 1997). Such a critical view can develop into a more complex socio-cultural critique of Italian society which partially affects the unwillingness to ask for family reunions. A Senegalese man who had lived in Italy since the mid1980s, and is married with two children, explained why he had opted not to have his family join him through the family reunion programme: It encourages you to stay in this country for good. … If you leave the children here it is difficult for them to follow you in your religious logic and your normal life … because this society has lost a lot of values. When I asked him to tell me more about the loss of values in Italian society, he said: many Italians … do not respect their parents, when they become old their children want to forget their responsibility, putting them into an old people’s home. In Senegal it would never happen. Another thing is that here there is less faith. Faith helps people to think about life. Here people are too materialistic. (Modou) The narration of Senegal as the ‘moral home’ contrasts with the European loss of values. The danger of temptation provided by the Italian environment

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is also a concern for others who recognize that ‘it is difficult to be a good Muslim in Italy’. This is one reason why it is so important that the marabout comes to visit and give his blessing, and why it is so important to go back to Senegal to see the family: Senegal is our land and we would not exchange it for any other. When I went back to Senegal, I understood that even if I could have a lot of money here, I would not be happy because of the lack of sincerity. With my people even if you are poor you feel comfortable. This pushes me to go back. Here I would always lack something, I will always miss Senegal. Even if I had many friends here, I would always want to go back. (El Hadjy) Perry too suggests that ‘Wolof immigrants’ economic strategies in New York result largely from their recognition that their stay in New York City is but a brief interlude in a long life based not “here” but ‘there” ’ (Perry, 1997: 238). Furthermore, by expressing his commitment towards return El Hadjy is also distancing himself in moral language from what he perceives as a cultural difference between ‘us’ (Senegal) and ‘them’ (Europe). El Hadjy’s narrative presents Senegal as the emotionally warm place to live in, also confirming that ‘home brings together memory and longing, the ideational, the affective and the physical’ (Rapport and Dawson, 1998: 8). Although anxious to avoid easy generalizations, looking at the Senegalese life histories I am tempted to contrast their life projects with their migratory projects. Despite the lack of a linear and precise plan of what to do as a migrant (keeping their options open), many of my informants knew what they wanted to be in their lives. They wanted to go back to Senegal and many wanted to live in a ‘straight way’, in the ‘right way’. Although the meaning of home is always shifting and ambivalent (see Heidi Armbruster and Ruba Salih in this volume), the location of the warm and personally meaningful place that is home seems beyond question for most Senegalese transmigrants.

Home II: the view from the sending context Even for those who tend to dwell and settle for some years abroad, return is a practical as well as an existential project, it is not a myth. This is probably true for most Senegalese transmigrants – it is certainly true for the Mourides. In 1973 the Khalifa-General in Touba – Abdul Ahat – decreed that all Mourides should have a house in Touba to guarantee their after-life (Coulon, 1981). This decree not only influenced urbanization in Touba, it also influenced motivations towards return migration. Fallou is an old blacksmith who was born and has always lived in Touba:

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Touba is above all a holy city and must be an example for the rest of the world. It is the Mecca of West Africa, all good things must converge on Touba, and this explains the luck of Touba. Migration is good. … You see this in the urbanisation of Touba, old houses are different from new houses which are similar to the European ones. Touba’s changes have been very fast: every five years there are new districts founded by people from various regions. (Fallou in September 1997) Most Mouride transmigrants’ investments target the holy city. According to Talla, ‘Touba is growing thanks to the talibe migrants, for example look at the programme of construction of a hospital by migrants’ associations’. This involvement testifies to the identification of Touba as the moral and sacred place that is central in the lives of Mourides. Besides religion, other factors also attract migrants back. A widely acknowledged expert on rural development who talked with me about migration underlined the importance of return, especially when it is characterized by ostentation. He gave a very striking example of a new house built in the middle of nowhere in the countryside that was European in style. Although, as Watson wrote in 1977, ‘emigrant communities almost invariably experience a housing boom as returnees invest their savings in new dwellings’ (Watson, 1977a: 4; Ballard, 1987; Olwig, 1997), in this case I paid particular attention to the style of the houses. In particular, the status attached to having multi-storeyed houses quickly became apparent. Many migrants, especially of the first waves, belonged to the lower classes, yet if successful they returned with enough money to show off and wield economic as well as symbolic power. An informant in Senegal told me about his journey home from France. He introduced himself to the person sitting next to him on the aeroplane who replied: ‘My name is Mamadou Lo, and I have built a house with three floors’. Houses with two or three floors testify to economic achievements but also to the fact that people have spent time in Europe or the United States. They represent the success of the migratory mission as well as the identification of the context of origin as the most meaningful place to express that success. The same can be said about transnational organizations of migrants abroad competing for the construction of public services at home. One often comes across wells or even communal housing with signs showing that they were constructed with the assistance of migrants in Italy or France. Assane suggested to me that ‘Associations do not directly contribute to development; they invest in mainly infrastructural work which is often not functional but always very visible’. Yet improving the services and infrastructure of the locality of origin not only enhances migrants’ status, it can also contribute at least indirectly to development (Quiminal, 1991). I subscribe to Goldring’s opinion when he contends that

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Bruno Riccio transnational social fields, and localities of origin in particular, provide a special context in which people can improve their social position and … also participate in changing their place of origin so that it becomes more consistent with their changing expectations and statuses. (Goldring, 1998: 167)

Another pull factor for return is members of the family who did not migrate. According to A. B. Diop (1985) communalism and a hierarchically organized solidarity are the organizational premises for the Wolof family. We have already seen that the Senegalese in Italy are the least enthusiastic about family reunion. Bubacar represents a revealing exception to this general trend. He asked his pregnant wife to come to Italy with their 4-year-old daughter, Mariama, who was greatly missed by all the members of her family when I was in Senegal. The problems they focused on were twofold: giving birth to a baby in Italy and also raising the first born there, who they had intended would attend the Koranic school in Dakar. When the second baby was born in September, everyone in the Dakar part of the family was excited, but the wife’s mother joked: ‘I don’t care – that one is “Italian” now, Mariama is the one I care for’. The oldest brother of Bubacar’s wife also expressed his dissatisfaction about Bubacar’s decision, because he was afraid that Mariama would lose her cultural and religious points of reference by living in Europe. This conflict is quite revealing about the pull factor presented by families’ expectations in the context of origin.

Conclusion Guarnizo and Smith (1998) urged scholars to specify the different levels of transnationalism they are dealing with. I may answer that, adopting a perspective of the ‘here and ‘there’ (Quiminal, 1991), this chapter has focused on both the macro-level of a Sufi religious social formation (cf. Werbner, 1996) and the micro-level of individual transnational activities. This is because the ‘history and activity of individuals’, Portes and colleagues suggest, are ‘the most efficient way of learning about the institutional underpinnings of transnationalism and its structural effects’ (Portes et al., 1999: 220). In this way I have also shown that Senegalese transnational networks display their effectiveness in different receiving countries precisely because they are anchored symbolically and concretely in the sending contexts. The holy city, the post-colonial towns, the suburbs of Dakar – these are the homes which most of the Senegalese transmigrants reproduce abroad, from which they set out and to which they want periodically and finally to return.

Notes 1

This article draws on the research for my DPhil in social anthropology at the University of Sussex which was funded by an EU Marie Curie Scholarship. I

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want to thank my supervisor, Professor Ralph Grillo, for all the support he gave me to carry out this project. Ethnographic research was done over the course of eighteen months (1996–1997), first within two provinces on the coast of EmiliaRomagna (Ravenna and Rimini) and then in Senegal in different contexts (Dakar, Touba, Kebemer, Kaolack). Compare Gilsenan (1982). All names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. The Magal is the annual celebration of the Mouride brotherhood held in Touba (for a recent analysis of the ritual see Coulon, 1999).

Part II

The implications of transforming homes for transnational communities

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The meaning of homeland for the Palestinian diaspora Revival and transformation Mohamed Kamel Dorai

Lost partially in 1948, and completely in 1967, the idea of a homeland continues to live in Palestinian social practices and through the construction of a diasporic territory – a symbolic substitute for the lost homeland. This chapter aims to analyse the mechanisms by which the homeland has been perpetuated in exile, and focuses in particular on Palestinian refugee camps and settlements. It shows how a refugee community can partially transform itself into a transnational community, and examines what role the transformation of home plays in this process. After fifty years of exile, Palestinian refugees continue to claim their right to return to their country of origin. ‘Durable’ solutions – traditionally repatriation, local integration or third-country resettlement – have been elusive for these refugees. Return has been impossible in the absence of a homeland, those in Lebanon in particular have faced obstacles to settling permanently, and only the elite have been able to take advantage of resettling in a third country, usually in the capitals of the Arab world or Europe or North America. During fifty years of exile, relationships between the expatriated Palestinian refugee communities and their homeland have evolved significantly. This process has accelerated during the protracted Peace Process. The transformation of the homeland can lead to significant changes in the diaspora–homeland relationship. After the total loss of the Palestinian territory in 1967, the relationships between Palestinians in the diaspora and their homeland became mainly symbolic. The political and economic networks of the diaspora have been centred on countries of exile such as Jordan and Lebanon. However, after the Oslo Agreements and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) on some parts of the Palestinian territory, parts of the diaspora have begun concretely to refocus their attention on the homeland. This chapter is structured as follows. First, I examine the emergence of a Palestinian transnational community, resulting in part from the transformation of Palestine following the Oslo Agreements. Second, I analyse the role of the homeland in the construction of transnational migratory networks. Finally, the role of these networks in the formation of a Palestinian identity in exile is explored. This chapter is primarily based on interviews with

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refugees as well as observation during fieldwork trips in Lebanon, Jordan and Sweden.

The Palestinian diaspora: towards the emergence of a transnational community? The transformation – and loss – of their homeland in stages between 1948 and 1967 led among the Palestinians to the evolution of a range of transnational actors and networks. At an informal level, contacts were maintained between Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living inside the Occupied Territories, particularly between Jordan and the West Bank. More formally, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) structured itself in exile and evolved a strong political and associative movement that continues to federate the dispersed communities (Picaudou, 1989; Kimmerling and Migdal, 1994). And private organizations such as the Badil Centre in Bethlehem, Al Awda and the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR) in the United States also continue to assist refugees and to disseminate information internationally. The ‘transformation’ of the Palestinian homeland has taken a new direction since the beginning of the Peace Process, which started with the signature of the Declaration of Principle (Oslo I), in 1993. The Gaza–Jericho Agreement, signed in 1994, enabled the partial return to Palestinian leadership of the West Bank and Gaza. The Oslo II Agreement, signed in 1995, placed under Palestinian authority more than thirty administrative functions in these areas, including health, taxation, education, industry, justice and the police. In January 1996, a Palestinian legislative council (PNA) was elected, so that two structures now co-exist to govern the Palestinian people – the PNA in Palestine and the PLO in the diaspora. It is important to stress that the political evolution of Palestine has not yet resulted in the creation of a full Palestinian state. The transformation of the homeland has only been partial, and its impact on the diaspora has similarly only been partial. It has had a particular impact on the Palestinian elite, who generally hold European or North American passports, and have been able to travel back and forth to Israel/Palestine on an increasingly regular basis. What is suggested in this section is that from within the united Palestinian diaspora there is emerging a new transnational community, focused on the commercial activities of the elite. The emergence of a transnational community Gabriel Sheffer (1993) identifies three main criteria to define a diaspora. One is a common ethnic identity, a second is internal organization and the third is a significant level of contact with the homeland. According to Portes et al. (1999), the central difference between diasporas and transnational

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communities lies in the nature of their relationship with the homeland. For the former, the relationship is normally symbolic; for the latter they are real. Before the beginning of the transformation of their homeland under the peace process, the Palestinians’ only relationship abroad with their homeland was symbolic. However, for certain elements of this diaspora – particularly the elite – contact has now become real and physical once more. They represent an emerging transnational community. Following the typology elaborated by Portes et al. (1999), several constitutive elements of transnational communities are now beginning to be found in the Palestinian case. In the economic realm, there has been the formation of ‘small businesses created by returned immigrants in their home country’ (ibid.: 222). For Palestinians ‘home country’ might be taken to include both Palestine and neighbouring countries (Lebanon, Jordan) from which many subsequently departed for Europe and North America and in which they are now investing once more. In many cases Palestinians have not physically returned; they are investing and managing their businesses from abroad. An example of a transnational business on a much larger scale is proved by the Shuman family that founded the Arab Bank – a top-ranking bank in the Middle East with branches all over the world. Sari Hanafi (1997) provides other examples of transnational Palestinian entrepreneurs in the United States, Canada and Egypt. The economic development of the town of Ramallah in the West Bank has also largely been a result of investment by Palestinians overseas. These transnational activities arguably take place from a privileged position. They reflect Palestinian social organization prior to 1948. While most Palestinians were displaced locally, the elite migrated to the capital cities of the Arab world and Europe and North America. By the 1960s many had acquired citizenship in these host countries, which generally has provided them both freedom to migrate and a source of international security. Sari Hanafi (1997) has observed how the Palestinian entrepreneurs in Canada shuttle back and forth between Canada and the Gulf pursuing business opportunities, while opting to live permanently in Canada for an enhanced standard of living. The Palestinian elite have therefore taken on many of the characteristics of a transnational community. They have dual citizenship and live and work between at least two countries. Transnationalism for them minimizes the risks related to war, terrorism and the blockading of Palestinian territories by Israel, while maximizing their benefits in the economic, legal and educational spheres. The political and economic significance of the Palestinian elite clearly outweighs its numerical significance. It is worth observing, however, that the creation of a Palestinian state and the normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours may enable a larger proportion of Palestinians to ‘become’ transnationals. It would allow them to establish effective relationships with their homeland, to engage in regular visits and

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investments, and would mean that they would not necessarily have to leave their actual place of residence to enjoy these rights.

Migratory networks and identity: reconstruction of homeland solidarity For the time being, however, these transformations in the homeland have yet to take place, and transnationalism, at least at a more commercial scale, has yet to filter down beyond the Palestinian elite. At the same time, a different type of transnationality characterizes many other Palestinians, particularly those living in refugee camps and settlements, in the form of migratory networks. Gradual changes in the homeland have yet to impact on these networks. A point to make straight away, therefore, is that while transformations at home can impact on certain members of a transnational community, they can leave others largely untouched. The Palestinian diaspora is geographically dispersed – in countries that neighbour Israel/Palestine, across the Arab world and also in Europe and North America. Studying the networks that have evolved between these geographical locations highlights the significance of family and village organizations, inherited from the social organization of Palestine prior to 1948, and rebuilt in exile. Where once society was organized locally, around a village, today it is organized transnationally, between different countries. The evolution of transnational migratory networks While the Palestinian elite can move relatively freely, on the basis of dual nationality and passports issued in Europe and North America, the movement of most Palestinians is much more severely restricted. Still they move, and their movement is facilitated through transnational migratory networks. In what approximates to a migration system (Gurak and Caces, 1992), friends and family overseas send back information and money, to assist Palestinians to migrate from refugee camps in countries such as Lebanon. The social links on which these migratory networks are founded are characterized by strong interpersonal transactions, based on common interests, obligations, understanding and memories. They are especially found within restricted communities, such as the family. An example of the importance of social networks in facilitating migration is provided in this excerpt from an interview with Jaber,1 a Palestinian from Al Buss camp: I chose Berlin because obtaining refugee status there is easy. Also, it was easy to find work … illegal work of course. Many people from my village of origin in Palestine have restaurants or work in the building industry in Berlin. We all help each other when in need. When I arrived,

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I stayed for three months at my brother’s place before finding a flat. They found me work at one of their friends’ restaurants, I washed the dishes. Now I work legally on a building site. The owner is an Arab. I am a painter. While Palestinians who arrived in the industrialized countries in the 1960s and 1970s were usually granted refugee status, it is now rarely granted to Palestinians. In addition, formal routes for labour migration have largely closed. As a result, Palestinians are often forced to migrate clandestinely – and this increases their need for information and money from transnational social networks. Muhammad, a young Palestinian who had since returned to the Al Buss camp, explains: I left for London to work, one earns more money there than here. I chose London because my brother is already there, he knew people from the same village as us who helped him settle down and find a job. It is easier to immigrate when one knows people. In my case, they sent me money to travel, it costs a lot to leave clandestinely from here, about $5,000; when one has relatives in the host country to help, it is easier. It is not only restrictions in Europe that oblige Palestinians to draw on the resources of transnational networks. Their situation in Lebanon is also an important driving factor. Nearly 150,000 Palestinian refugees arrived in Lebanon in 1948, within just a few months. They mostly come from north Palestine. About 90 per cent of them are Sunni Muslims, and their arrival disturbed the sectarian balance upon which the Lebanese political system had depended. Since they first arrived, Palestinians have faced difficulties with the Lebanese authorities. The civil war in Lebanon (1975–1991) and the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982 increased the gap between the two peoples. Palestinians face legal discrimination and have no political or social rights. For example, more than fifty professions are prohibited for the Palestinians. They also face restrictions on travel abroad. They need a visa to leave and to enter Lebanon. Many do not have passports – they have only been issued a travel document by the Lebanese authorities – and as a result many other countries refuse to give them visas, or even to let them transit their territories. Abu Taraq, who migrated to Germany with his family in 1994, explains his motivations: In Lebanon, we do not have any rights, to work, to education, nor to health. What is the future for my children? The Oslo Agreements have forgotten us. … At least in Europe they respect us as human beings; we have the same rights as everybody else. My children can get an education, they can work, build a future.

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What is striking about all of the above excerpts is that they are from interviews with men. Rather than reflecting any methodological bias, this is a reflection of the fact that migration tends to be dominated by young males. Indeed their migration has created a significant sex imbalance in the refugee camps. Young women are finding it harder and harder to marry, and this can make their status and security even more precarious. On the whole women have little access to transnational resources, even though they play the major role in maintaining social practices. Again, the point to emphasize is that transnationalism is by no means a universal phenomenon. Besides providing a motivation for emigration, the exclusion of Palestinians in Lebanon has also reinforced their ethnic identity. This is reminiscent of what Portes (1999) labels ‘reactive ethnicity’, which he explains can be an important underlying cause for the maintenance of transnational identities. The last part of this chapter focuses on the process of identity building among Palestinians, and shows how they have used the homeland as a resource in that process.

Homeland as a resource for Palestinian identity In order to maintain their ethnic identity, the scattered Palestinian people have needed to build common identity references around the lost homeland and the exodus that created the diaspora. These references take different forms. For ‘rank-and-file’ Palestinians ethnic identity is more important than for the elite. Palestinian ethnic identity is based primarily on two elements: the village of origin and family networks. The village is a privileged place of memory for the Palestinians because it represents the very expression of their Arabic Palestinian culture and identity. Family and group links were very strong there. This reference point for identity has its roots in Palestinian history when religious and political power was centred on the Palestinian village.2 Colonization by the Ottomans, then the Zionists and British, progressively deterritorialized the Palestinian people. The village of origin came to symbolize the lost territory and became a central part of the diasporic consciousness. Memory in exile In exile, camps have replaced villages: The camp thus continues to fulfill the function formerly performed by the village, namely the maintenance of a moral balance of the individuals who make it up, but on a level of organization and a demographic scale of a higher order, that of the Palestinian national identity. (Ghazzawi, 1989: 37) Oum Fahd, a refugee in the Rashidiyyeh camp, explains:

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Here, we all gathered according to our village of origin in Palestine, otherwise how would we have survived here, far from home? We continue to perpetuate our Palestinian traditions, so that the younger generations know how things were prior to 1948 – they know everything about Palestine, even though they never saw it. It is always astonishing to hear children of the third exiled generation name the village of their grandparents when asked where they come from. Their answers are all the more astonishing given that most of the villages were completely destroyed long ago, and exist nowhere but in the memories of the refugees.3 In the camps photographs, and even small gardens, evoke memories of villages in Palestine. Berque (1990: 79) observes that ‘the speeches on the landscape are often metaphorical speeches on the national identity, and blossom when the latter seeks to be affirmed’. Special attention must be given to the oral history of the exodus that has been transmitted from one generation to the next, and acts as a true account of the nekba (catastrophe). In a way oral history also transmits the land, the Palestinian landscape. Not only can children name villages, but also they can even describe them too. Farid, a young Palestinian from Borj Shamali camp, told us: My parents and my grand parents told me so much about Palestine and our village that I’ll be able to find my way the day we go back to Palestine. Oral history serves as an identity reservoir, where the images of the past are read again and again and idealized in the light of the difficult circumstances in which many Palestinians currently live. It is primarily produced within families. Family memory: core of the Palestinian village society Family memories are transmitted orally through narrations of the exodus and recalling a past life. Life in the camps is thus justified by the history of the exodus and the camps therefore assume a new meaning for their inhabitants. The camps have become more simply than somewhere to survive, they also symbolize the exodus. It is as if Palestinians brought with them a piece of their land and deposited it in the camps, thus recreating a part of Palestine. There is a relationship between memory and territory. This is particularly true for those who live in camps and settlements. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, who live outside camps or in Arabic cities or in the West, do not share the same attachment to the place where they live. In a more literal sense, the camps often spatially recall settlement patterns in Palestine, as refugees have tended to settle according to their village or area of origin. Different parts of the refugee camps often bear the names of

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the villages of origin of the refugees in Palestine. Abu Yasser, an old Palestinian refugee who lives in a settlement, explains how he settled in Lebanon: When I arrived in Lebanon, I did not come directly here. I was in a Red Cross camp. I only came here when I knew that my family was here. Up to the 1960s, people of our village came to settle here, we were almost all here. It was the best way not to lose our culture, it made it easier for us to adapt here, we helped each other to build houses, to find work and we thought that it would be easier to return to Palestine if we stuck together. The geography of Palestine is thus to some extent reformed in exile. Insisting on organizing their own settlement patterns was one way that Palestinians found to maintain their identity in the face of bureaucratic obstacles. An old refugee, Abu Ziyad, from Borj Shemali, told us: They tried to settle us far from here, but we didn’t want to go, we resisted. So we settled here without any authorization. We built our houses on our own, without any help. We wanted to be together and to settle close to our homeland in order to always be able to go home quickly, and not forget Palestine. The refugee camps have simultaneously become a place to recall the homeland (by safeguarding the old social order, and by the dissemination of memories and Palestinian images) and a place to wait to return home. They can be understood as memory areas, where the permanence of the homeland is registered in everyday life. Palestinians have recreated, in the space of the refugee camps, a temporal continuity. They ‘feel at home’.

Conclusion This short chapter begins the part of this book that is concerned with the implications for ‘transnational communities’ of transformations in their homeland. The Palestinian homeland has begun to transform in recent years, as a result of the Peace Process in the Middle East, and its transformations have been suggested to have impacted differently on different parts of the large Palestinian diaspora. There are indications, for example, that they have engendered the evolution among the Palestinian elite of a transnational community, which is increasingly investing in the ‘new’ homeland. In contrast, the transformations appear so far to have had less of an impact on the majority of Palestinians, and especially those living in Lebanon. A form of transnationalism also characterizes them – many have transnational social networks that they mobilize for migration, and even more maintain a transnational identity in refugee camps. Yet these networks

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and identities have been largely unaffected by ongoing changes in Palestine. Instead they draw on an idealized version of the homeland, and bear the imprints of pre-1948 Palestine. Arguably, the elite had the resources to respond to changes at home, while for the majority maintaining a crystallized view of Palestine has become a central survival strategy. The key conclusion is that transformations at home have had a differential impact on the diaspora, and in this way the Palestinian case study provides some broader insights into the process of transnationalism. First, it is a differentiated process. This chapter has highlighted differences not just between the elite and the ‘rank and file’, but also between the genders and between the young and old. Significantly in the case of the Palestinians, these differences do not appear to have undermined their unity or community. Second, the case study reveals how transnationalism can be – but is not always – dynamic. It has evolved within the elite in response to changes at home, while it has remained virtually unchanged among the majority. Finally, and here there are echoes of the conclusions made by Khalid Koser later in this volume, this case study has shown how refugees can ‘become’ transnational. In different ways, both the Palestinian elite and the rank and file have evolved transnational networks, activities and identities. For them, transnationalism has provided an alternative ‘durable’ solution. The Palestinian refugees have ‘transformed’ into a transnational community, and what remains to be seen is how further changes in Palestine will impact on that community.

Notes 1 2 3

All of the names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. The head of the village as well as the imam of the mosque were elected with the agreement of the population of the village (Ghazzawi, 1989: 22). Of the 475 Palestinian villages which existed before 1948, 385 were destroyed by the Israeli Army.

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Trans- or a-national? Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands Nadje Al-Ali

Our refugees are very much connected with Bosnia. They escaped from hell. They want to change the situation in Bosnia. As long as they do not get their legal status in their respective host country, they try to inform and mobilise people about the situation in Bosnia. Everyone gets a special disease ‘Telefonitis Bosanska’. They spend hours and hours on the phone talking to their relatives and friends in Bosnia and in countries all over the world. They live as refugees who want to return back. But because the situation in Bosnia changes only very slowly, they start to get disillusioned and disappointed with Bosnia. Many start wondering whether they could live somewhere else. You know, the situation does improve slowly, but in their view it is too slowly. Some try to find new partners in their host country. They start to try to organise a new life, try to find a way to stay in the West. The obsession with the fate of Bosnia slowly transforms in ‘ein Verdrängen’ [repression]. First, they believe that one can live better in Bosnia; slowly they start to adapt to the place and the culture they live in. But only those who manage to learn the language and who find friends among local people can actually adapt. Those who do not manage end up with the psychiatrist and they continue to only think about return. Of course there are different mentalities in different host countries. Many Bosnians find it difficult to establish friendships with locals. ‘International marriages’ happen only rarely. Most refugees stay in their own circles and men often bring a wife from Bosnia. (Marko O., Bosnian Croat Priest from Sarajevo, July 1999)

Marko O.’s self-assured portrait of Bosnian refugees and the different stages of their refugee existence certainly raises many questions and doubts. For one, his observations are simplifying and homogenizing the complex issues and conditions that shape Bosnian refugees’ changing relations to their receiving country as well as to Bosnia. Yet, more than his reference to ‘Telefonitis Bosanska’ rings a bell. Leaving aside the linearity of his description, Marko O. quite vividly articulates the tension around loyalties and sense of belonging to Bosnia on the one hand, and survival strategizing and the sense of new beginnings in their country of refuge on the other. The

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 97 sense of ‘home’ gains new meanings in a situation where people are simultaneously involved in building a new life outside Bosnia and maintaining their links with and options to return to their country of origin. However, rather than leading ‘dual lives’, many Bosnian refugees still find themselves in a state of limbo – they are ‘neither here nor there’. More than five years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, the majority of over half a million Bosnians who sought refuge in countries of the European Union have not returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina. And most are not planning to do so in the near future. In fact, for many refugees, their ‘host’ country has virtually become a new ‘home’ country. Even in Germany, the country that has devised a forced repatriation scheme, more than half of the 342,000 Bosnians have remained so far.1 In the UK, about 7,000 Bosnian refugees (living in fifty-five different cities!) are hoping to have their ‘temporary protection’ extended into the right to reside permanently within the country. The vast majority of the 25,000 Bosnians who live in the Netherlands were granted refugee status shortly after their arrival, granting them not only residence but also citizenship after five years.2 Despite significant efforts by international organizations such as UNHCR to implement Dayton’s stipulations concerning the return of refugees in general and minority return in particular, numbers have not so far matched expectations. The reasons for the relatively low numbers of returnees to Bosnia are manifold and can only be briefly discussed in the frame of this chapter. Without doubt, the Dayton Peace Agreement (November 1995) brought an end to a horrid war, but in the view of many it was not a solution as much as ‘an uneasy temporary truce’ (Bojičić and Kaldor, 1999: 92). The agreement, which was brokered and drafted by North American politicians, diplomats and lawyers (aided by the small input of some Europeans), was signed by Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders. It called for the creation of a single state and the return of over 2 million refugees and displaced people to their homes. In reality, Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into a Muslim–Croat federation (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and a Serb entity (Republika Srpska). Within the federation, tensions between Croats and Muslims run high, particularly in the areas dominated by Croat nationalists (HercegBosna). Many of the political leaders of the nationalist parties who were in power during the war are still holding government positions, even if their authority is severely restricted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Office of the UN High Representative (OHR). The removal of public offices is one of the various ways OHR controls and restricts local political forces.3 All three ethnic groups have accused the OHR and leading international institutions of breaking the Dayton Agreement guarantees of ethnic autonomy in policy making (Chandler, 1999: 71).4 In the case of Bosnian Serbs, there has been virtually no co-operation regarding the arrest of war criminals, while other ethnic groups have co-operated only in a limited way (Bojičić and Kaldor, 1999: 112). Even now, political instability and human rights violations translate

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into fear of personal security, especially for those refugees who would become minority returnees in their places of origin. Aside from the difficulties of implementing Dayton’s stipulations concerning democratization, interethnic co-operation and the protection of minority rights, the reconstruction process has been slow and unsystematic. The economy continues to be in crisis or, as Bojičić and Kaldor put it, ‘abnormal’ (1999: 93): dependency on humanitarian assistance is coupled with widespread unemployment (about 60 per cent), industry has faltered and investment is virtually absent. And let us not forget the transition from a command to a market economy which poses a great challenge in and of itself. Lack of housing, adequate health care and education is another feature of post-Dayton Bosnia. It comes as no surprise then that not only is return minimal, but also Bosnians continue to leave the country or at least express their wish to do so. Often forgotten in the accounts about reasons people choose not to return are factors related to personal experiences and motivations. Several Bosnians I interviewed gave accounts of their traumas experienced during the war. Return to the very location where individuals witnessed or experienced mass killings, torture or rape seems inconceivable to many. For others, personal motivations have to be sought within the receiving country. Especially for refugees in their twenties or thirties, or those with children, the possibility of a better education and prospects for employment are crucial in their decision to remain. And for others, even if only a small number, life-style options and possibilities in cosmopolitan London or Amsterdam appear more attractive and preferable than the return to relatively small-scale cities like Banja Luka, Tuzla and even Sarajevo. While ‘return’ remains one of the most vexed issues in post-Dayton Bosnia, this chapter grew out of a larger project, which takes a very different angle on the theme of reconstruction and nation building. It challenges the common view that in order to contribute positively to the reconstruction of a war-torn society, refugees have to return. Exploring the activities and capabilities of ‘exile communities’, the project focuses on Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands, and Eritrean refugees in the UK and Germany.5 Comparing our findings, we hope to analyse the activities towards, capabilities for and obstacles to participation in reconstruction processes. In this contribution, I would like to address issues revolving around the question whether and how Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands engage in transnational activities: To what extent have post-Dayton developments in Bosnia encouraged or prevented the engagement in or emergence of transnational ties? To what extent have receiving states (the UK and the Netherlands) enabled or hindered transnationalism? One of the underlying questions, of course, is whether it is possible to speak of ‘transnational practices’ in a context where a large number of refugees do not have ‘two homes’ but none, and where their ‘home country’ might be described at best as a

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 99 nation-state in the making or in transition and at worse as a neo-colonial protectorate. Another emerging question relates to definitions of transnationalism. Are transnational activities exclusively driven by the globalization of capital and the transnationalization of labour, or can we identify other forces and dynamics which account for the emergence of transnational practices? Stressing heterogeneity among Bosnian refugees, I will point to the limits and boundaries for transnationalism and analyses thereof. But before delving into the (trans)nationality of Bosnian refugees, I would like briefly to share a few problematic issues that arose when trying to apply and/or challenge the existing literature on transnationalism in the context of my research.

Problematizing ‘transnational communities’ Every social scientist is familiar with the common dilemma of balancing the continuous tension between theoretical stipulations and empirical findings. We see what we are looking for. And too often we are blinded by our preconceptions and expectations. The importance of keeping an ‘open eye and mind’ is particularly compelling in a context such as the ESRC programme on ‘transnational communities’ which is based on the presupposition that the groups of people we study not only are ‘transnational’ but also constitute ‘communities’. Contestations about meanings and definitions of transnationalism6 have so far mainly taken place within the context of labour migration to the United States (Basch et al., 1994; Goldring, 1998; Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Portes, 1996; Ong, 1999; Rouse, 1991; Smith, 1998). Recently, several scholars have started to explore transnational social fields and practices in other geographical locations (Shami, 1996). These studies give evidence to the way that variations in context can influence both opportunities and constraints for transnationalism. Any analysis of transnational fields and practices within European countries, for instance, must pay close attention to the specific historical, social, cultural and political contexts that characterize migration to and within Europe. A useful analytical tool in this context might be Nicholas van Hear’s conceptualization of ‘migration orders’ (1998) and their changes. In his conceptualization, specific migration orders comprise individual and household decision making, economic and political disparities between countries, the development of migrant networks and institutions, national and international legal and policy institutions as well as macro-political economy developments (1998: 14–16). A ‘migration transition’ refers to a fundamental change in a given migration order (ibid.: 21–22). The case of Bosnian refugees in the EU represents a rapid and drastic rupture in the existing migration order. Since the 1960s and prior to the war in Bosnia (1992–1995), Bosnians of all ethnic backgrounds were part of a

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large-scale labour migration from former Yugoslavia to countries of the EU, particularly to Germany. However, Bosnian Muslims – like virtually all southern Europeans – did not generally choose the UK as a destination for labour migration.7 A combination of geographical and economic factors rendered Germany and the Netherlands a far more attractive destination for labour migration than the UK. Networks of Bosnian Muslim labour migrants in Germany, and to a lesser extent in the Netherlands, helped in the reception of thousands of refugees during and after the war. In the UK, reception programmes initially found it difficult even to find interpreters who could speak the Bosnian dialect as opposed to detectable Serbian or Croatian dialects. In the Netherlands, labour migrants had not only established informal networks but also created more formal community associations. Some labour migrants not only tried to provide assistance to refugees, but also sent material help to Bosnia, especially during the war. A comparative analysis of different receiving and sending countries might also shed light on the role of nation-states in shaping the boundaries, limitations and possibilities for the emergence of transnational social fields. This is not to suggest that nation-states create transnationalism: it is precisely one of the strengths of transnational theories to emphasize human agency in the age of globalization, universalizing capitalist forces and time–space compression. However, as most ‘gurus’ of transnationalism stress, nationstates play an essential part in creating and maintaining transnational life (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Ong, 1999; Smith, 1998). Aiwha Ong stipulates that the nation-state – ‘along with its juridicial-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities’ – continues to define, discipline, control and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence’ (1999: 15). Nation-states not only shape transnational space by setting its boundaries (which, in some cases, might be ‘transcended’), but might also provide channels for transnational activities. What also needs to be emphasized is that nationalism in all its forms, ranging from more subtle versions to fierce nationalist struggles, often goes side by side with transnationalism, and might even be a reaction to it. The question of the specific context of opportunities and constraints (Guarnizo and Smith 1998: 13) gains particular significance with respect to the study of forced migration. For obvious reasons, transnational practices have generally been described and theorized with reference to labour migrants. Indeed, some of the literature almost seems to conflate transnationalism with the transnationalization of labour, which in turn is often directly linked with the globalization of capital. Alejandro Portes, for example, speaks about a ‘world-roaming capitalism’ and suggests that ‘the emergence of transnational communities is tied to the logic of capitalism itself’ (1998: 4). In my mind, it seems imperative to ground transnational practices firmly in material circumstances and avoid getting lost in postmodern landscapes of elusive, hybrid nomads and cosmopolitans. Yet,

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 101 without wanting to diminish the significance of a political economy approach, I would like to question whether the same force which drives late capitalism (and one might argue whether it is one force anyway) is the same force that motivates all transnational activities and engagements. Or to go a step further, perhaps the emphasis on the accelerated circulation of people, goods and money in the context of labour migration only partially accounts for transnational practices and social fields which are also motivated and driven by other historically specific social, cultural and ideological factors. Apart from the necessity to contextualize, critically apply and challenge the prevailing body of literature on transnationalism, it is also crucial to problematize the notion of ‘communities’. Assuming that migrants who originate from the same country or belong to the same ethnic group constitute a community might run the danger of homogenizing and essentializing a diverse group of people (Rouse, 1991; Smith, 1998). Gender, class, political and religious affiliation, regional origin and personal motivations and resourcefulness are often glossed over in the attempt to analyse the emergence, motivations for and reproduction of transnational ties of migrants. My research among Bosnian refugees in two different host countries (the UK and the Netherlands) reveals that the intensity and simultaneity of current long-distance, cross-borders activities (Portes, 1998; Vertovec 1999) varies greatly, indicating different levels of transnationalism (or lack thereof) within the same receiving country. Political, social, religious and personal frictions among Bosnians even challenge the concept of a community altogether.

Diversities within Bosnian refugees in the UK and the Netherlands differ most obviously with respect to their gender and age, their ethnic background (Muslim, Croat, Serb),8 their education and professional background, their political views as well as their attitudes towards religion. Another significant element differentiating people, especially in terms of their actual and potential links with Bosnia, relates to their place of origin. Some Bosnians escaped from areas in which they would now constitute a minority (e.g. Bosnian Muslims in towns of the Serb entity of Republika Srpska, such as Banja Luka), while others originate from areas in which their ethnic group constitutes a majority now (e.g. Bosnian Muslims in places belonging to the Muslim–Croat federation, such as Sarajevo). The specific experiences of the war in Bosnia and the circumstances of flight present another pivotal cause of heterogeneity. About half of the Bosnian refugee population in the UK arrived through international programmes run by organizations such as the Red Cross or UNHCR. Many of these refugees had just been released from concentration camps, or they were close relatives of those who had been released and brought to the UK. Among the refugees I interviewed in the Netherlands,

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most had arrived outside organized programmes. Those refugees who came individually to the UK or the Netherlands tend to report less immediate experiences of terror and war crimes, although specific stories vary greatly. In some ways, the great level of heterogeneity should not come as a surprise. The danger of ‘essentializing’ weighs heavily on any contemporary social scientist. If my fieldwork had mainly entailed ethnographic research in Bosnia, I would have looked for differences and heterogeneity right away. The warning against essentializing is particularly compelling for feminist researchers who do not cease to stress differences within the categories of ‘women’ and more recently also ‘men’ (race, class, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc.). The fear of essentializing has started to make an impact on writings about ‘refugees’. Yet, until recently the emphasis has been on vast movements of groups of people, their underlying motivations, legal and policy aspects, refugees’ experience of flight and their levels of integration in the receiving country. Persistent essentialist, globalizing and functionalist biases and the uneven balance towards macro analyses are being challenged by more recent writings (mainly feminist!) within forced migration (Malkki, 1995; Indra, 1999). One of the most articulate and moving attempts to challenge homogenizing accounts of refugees has been put forward by two anthropologists in an edited volume entitled War, Exile, Everyday Life. In the introduction they argue: Treating refugees from the same country, or even a certain group of refugees, as homogeneous – not only when it comes to providing aid, but also in anthropological research – leads neither to efficient help for people in need nor to an accurate explanation of their problems and potential solutions. In dealing with individually and culturally shaped processes of adaptation to the life in exile, ethnography stands to gain considerable analytical power by revealing the manifold levels of refugees’ problems and strategies of their resolution as they are played out in their constant effort towards regaining their lost secure and familiar patterns of life. (Jambrešić, Kirin and Povrzanović, 1996) Paradoxically then, there exists a parallel in the way refugees and transnational labour migrants tend to be homogenized. Yet, in the context of my research among Bosnian refugees it became obvious that variations in intensity and frequency of transnational activities are linked to the great level of heterogeneity among refugees. Again, this is not to suggest that human agency, creativity and innovation do not play a role, but that likelihoods and possibilities for the emergence of transnational social fields are shaped by factors which distinguish Bosnian refugees from one another. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give an in-depth account of all the layers of difference among refugees or present a great number of case studies.

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 103 Instead, I will use a detailed account of one family’s changing relationship with Bosnia to spin off a number of themes and issues related to the questions raised above and to highlight differences of refugees’ circumstances and practices.

‘Living like a piece of wood’? The first time I had visited Edin and his wife Amra in their council flat north of London, I was introduced to the rest of the family. Photographs taken before and after the war showed the couple with family members in Sarajevo and their native Gorazde. On my next visit I watched two videos, recorded during their recent visit to Bosnia. While watching the family walking through the old town in Sarajevo, having lunch with Edin’s brother in Sarajevo and hanging out with Amra’s family in Gorazde, Edin and Amra did not cease to comment on the other family members visible on the video. And both talked about the life they missed ‘back home’. Edin said: I really want to go back. I think I would find work, especially now that I have completed several computing courses. Before the war I was an economist, but that would not help much these days. Computer skills are needed and I am really working hard on it. What worries me more is the political situation. It is still very unstable. Especially in Gorazde.9 If SFOR [Stabilization Force] would leave, the war would start again. I want my daughter to be safe. But look at us, we live as if we were pieces of wood.10 In the course of my interviews, several people expressed a similar feeling to Edin’s metaphor of ‘living like a piece of wood’: being dependent on income support, having no regular employment or working in an unskilled job totally unrelated to that in which one had been trained, the lack of regular socializing with neighbours and relatives and missing friends and the ‘good old times’ in general. Amra was very apologetic about her ‘poor English’, and hesitated before she finally said: It is very boring for me here. I have no work. I am staying at home most of the time. I tried to look for a job but I could not find anything. It is partly because of my English. It is still not good enough. I was a lawyer in Gorazde. People in Gorazde always ask when I am coming back to resume my work. But because of our daughter’s education and my husband’s health, we have to stay. Edin had been medically evacuated by UNHCR in 1994 after being wounded in fierce fighting in his home-town. Amra and their daughter Selma were not allowed to join Edin initially but were able to enter the UK

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when his medical condition was rapidly deteriorating and doctors feared for his life. Despite a series of medical conditions which seriously affect Edin’s well-being even today, he recovered to a large extent. During the past two years, he has been concentrating on improving his language skills and has registered in several computing classes. For more than a year, Edin also got involved with a Bosnian community association in London, organizing social events and collections to send money to Bosnia.

Forging communities Social clubs and community organizations exist in both the UK and the Netherlands. They are generally perceived to be important venues for social gatherings, for maintaining links with other refugees and for accessing information about issues related to the receiving country and Bosnia. Some organizations have started to provide premises where people can socialize spontaneously in the form of social clubs or ‘cafés’, while others organize more formal gatherings. In the UK, these social clubs and gatherings are mainly attended by Bosnians who arrived via UNHCR or Red Cross programmes, while those who came individually are often not even aware of their existence. There is also very limited individual socializing between these two groups of refugees within the UK. In the Netherlands, I detected evidence of tensions between the more established labour migrants and newly arrived refugees. Ironically, a number of refugees complained about the conservative and nationalist attitudes of some labour migrants. Hussein P., for example, is a Bosnian labour migrant who had arrived in the Netherlands in the 1970s. He established a Bosnian community association in Amsterdam at the beginning of the war. He is known to be a supporter of the ruling party and of Alija Izetbegovic,11 whose picture is there for everyone to see when entering the premises of the association. During the past years, the majority of people visiting the association have been Bosnian Muslim refugees. Many Bosnians who do not visit the association perceive the organization to be exclusively Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim). Several of the younger refugees who frequently visit the association and participate in its activities have recently challenged its president and original founder, and have called for a multi-ethnic organization which is independent of any political party and open to Bosnian Croats and Serbs. Edin, who had been instrumental in establishing one of these associations in London, stopped any kind of involvement a while ago because of tensions with other Bosnian refugees: They were really ungrateful. You know they envied me because I have a bit more money than they have. This is because of the disability allowance I receive after the war.12 But, believe me, I would rather have my health back than have the money. They are not educated people.

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 105 Tensions and conflicts between Bosnian refugees within the same ethnic group became obvious on several occasions during my research. Apart from personal squabbles, tensions can often be found among people with different levels of education, urban vs. rural origins, and different political views and attitudes towards religion. Indeed, there is very little interaction or communication taking place between refugees who used to be farmers in the countryside before the war and educated refugees originating from urban centres. Varying political views and attitudes towards religion crosscut all social classes and educational backgrounds. The support or opposition to nationalist parties (in the case of Bosnian Muslims the Party of Democratic Action – SDA) and differing levels of religiosity and political meanings given to religion are further sources for antagonism. These different meanings attached to, and attitudes towards, politics and religion translate into varying degrees of identification with the Bosnian state. Needless to say, tensions exist across ethnic lines. In this context, it is important to stress that Bosniaks tend to have a greater sense of belonging to Bosnia and Herzegovina than many Bosnian Croats or Serbs. Yet it is not only Bosnian Serbs and Croats but also several Bosnian Muslims who see themselves as Yugoslavs from former Yugoslavia rather than Bosnians. Another complexity to consider is that the majority of Bosniaks who were expelled from the areas of Bosnia which are now in Republika Srpska do not accept the existence of the Serb entity and feel reluctant to obtain a Bosnian passport with ‘Republika Srpska’ printed on it in Cyrillic (Serb). There was little evidence for transnational activities that link Bosnian refugees with political developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While it was not possible to obtain statistics about participation in political elections in Bosnia, less than half of the respondents in the UK and a slightly higher number in the Netherlands participated in the recent elections in 1998. However, participation in the first elections (1996) appeared to be greater in both receiving countries than in the subsequent election in 1998. The reasons for the relatively low participation rate vary. Several refugees I interviewed in either the UK or the Netherlands expressed their disillusionment with politics in general and Bosnian politicians in particular. Others did not believe in the election process which, in their minds, was a farce staged by the international community to create the illusion of democracy. In the UK, many people did not partake in ‘out-of-country voting’, fearing that their participation would be registered by the Home Office and subsequently endanger their legal status. This fear was partly triggered by ambiguous signals given by the Home Office to the NGO community – with the result that the Bosnia Project (a reception programme set up by various NGOs such as Refugee Action and Refugee Council) sent a note of warning to all community associations in the UK. Apart from organized collections for humanitarian causes in Bosnia, community associations in both the UK and the Netherlands organize social and cultural events, such as parties, concerts, debates, poetry evenings and

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film showings. Occasionally, these events involve artists or musicians from Bosnia or other receiving countries. The exchange between Bosnian ‘communities’ in different receiving countries appears to be limited to these occasional visits of artists and personal visits between friends and relatives. Through word of mouth information flows and Bosnian satellite TV, refugees are, however, generally aware of the existence of community organizations and activities in other receiving countries. In both the UK and the Netherlands, I came across ties between Bosnian and Islamic community organizations. These connections take place both on a national and a transnational level. The Bosnian Islamic Centre in London, for example, is a member of the Muslim Council of Britain, which in turn is connected to Islamic organizations worldwide. In the Netherlands, several associations are in regular contact with other Muslim refugee organizations, particularly Moroccan and Turkish ones. Religiously oriented Bosnian Muslims often stressed their increasing links with Islamic organizations within the Middle East and Pakistan. The concept of the Islamic nation (umma) – an imagined transnational community, par excellence – has been gaining ground among Bosnian refugees and those who remained ‘at home’. Yet, it needs to be stressed that it is too early to provide any conclusive analysis about the extent, content and practices of transnational Islam among Bosnian refugees. It is a newly emerging phenomenon and, so far, only marginal to the overall attitudes and practices of the refugees I interviewed.

Negotiating across gender and generational lines Conflict and tensions related to different degrees of attachment with and involvement in the home country can also be found at the level of the household, particularly across generational and gender lines. The latter was also obvious between Edin and Amra. Despite his medical condition, Edin has been able to spend much more time outside the flat than Amra. While he has been taking courses or socializing with other Bosnians, she has been mainly looking after Selma and taking care of the flat. It is no surprise that her English is much worse than Edin’s, which in turn makes her feel reluctant to speak and venture outside the flat. Instead Amra has been spending lots of time writing letters to her friends who are dispersed in different countries. And then there is ‘Telefonitis Bosanska’: I used to call my friends and relatives in Bosnia, Germany and the States a lot. Every three months we had to pay about £300. Now I am trying to restrain myself, but I get very lonely at times. Edin is out a lot and when Selma is in school I am on my own. I know we need the money. Edin bought a computer so that he can practise what he is learning in his courses. And we are also sending some money home.

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 107 The pattern of wives feeling more isolated than their husbands and trying to compensate by having contact with friends and family was widespread among many couples I interviewed. On several occasions I spoke to women who had been professionals in Bosnia and found themselves stuck at home upon arrival in the receiving country. Several women described a vicious circle of being initially in shock (due to the war, circumstances of flight and the separation from family and friends), and experiencing insecurities related to language barriers and the perceived strangeness of physical and cultural surroundings and a sense of feeling isolated. In other cases, women proved to be more resourceful and adaptable while their husbands appeared to suffer from greater levels of isolation, loneliness and the sense of ‘living in limbo’. This was particularly true for several women in the Netherlands who reported that it had been much easier for them to find work than it had been for their husbands. Despite the fact that most jobs were not related to their actual professions – many Bosnian women refugees I talked to work as cleaners or nannies – they stressed that their work enabled them to leave the house, improve their language skills, get in contact with the local population and gain some financial independence and decision-making power. Amra has been unsuccessful in finding work related to her field (law) and attributes it partly to her poor English and the fact that her training was not in English law. In the context of job hunting as well as in various other contexts, both Amra and Edin bring up the issue of discrimination against foreigners, ‘especially Muslims’. She acknowledges that she did not put much effort into learning English when she first arrived as she was convinced that the family would return to Bosnia within a short time after the end of the war. It is only during the last year and after several visits to Bosnia that she realized return will be nearly impossible in the near future and difficult even in the long run. Her wish to go back to Bosnia has not changed but practical considerations have forced her to improve the very tools needed to start a life in the UK. This strategic shift in ‘home-base focus’ is not unique to Amra and Edin. Many other Bosnians I interviewed share Amra’s recognition that their stay in the UK or the Netherlands will be long term if not permanent. Yet, many refugees who lack any prior language skills and higher education find it nearly impossible to study either English or Dutch, not to mention acquire new skills required to find jobs. In comparison with the UK, refugees in the Netherlands seemed to be better equipped to learn the necessary skills to start a new life. Many people praised the efficiency and usefulness of the Dutch language and culture courses they had attended. Overall, Bosnian refugees in the Netherlands were also much more complimentary about the local population in helping them during their initial phase of their stay. Most Bosnians interviewed in the UK stated that they have little or no contact with English citizens. However, several Bosnians I interviewed mentioned their contacts and

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friendships with other minority populations, especially Pakistanis. This was evident throughout the country, even if contact with other refugee communities is generally easier in the capital London. In general, language barriers were more of an issue among Bosnians I interviewed in the UK than among the ones I talked to in the Netherlands. However, with a population of 25,000 one can certainly expect great variations in the level of language competency among Bosnian refugees in the Netherlands. At the same time as Amra went back to study English (she is currently attending classes three times a week during the morning), she decided that she has to spend more time with her daughter Selma improving her Bosnian: Selma speaks perfect English. She sometimes corrects me. Her teachers all say that she is doing really well. But her Bosnian was getting worse with time. So now I am spending a few hours almost every day and read Bosnian stories to her, practise writing and talking. I don’t want her to lose our language. Language skills are valued highly with regard to children’s education and many Bosnians fear that their children will lose their mother tongue as time goes by. However, a Bosnian-language teacher described the level of Bosnian-language skill as being very low among most of the children she had been teaching. During the past years, several communities in the UK established Bosnian supplementary weekend schools. The Bosnian Embassy has provided an official curriculum issued in Bosnia which includes Bosnian language, history, geography, music and art. Currently there are about ten schools in the UK with more than 250 pupils between 6 and 16 years attending classes. The teachers are professionals who used to teach in Bosnia. Most work on a voluntary basis, although some receive a small stipend. The need for more schools was expressed by many people, but owing to a lack of premises, funds and professional teachers the numbers have been restricted. In the Netherlands, some associations informally organize language or art classes for children, but the Bosnian Consulate has not been involved in setting up their curricula. Some parents I talked to expressed concern that their children refused to attend Bosnian supplementary schools during the weekend. Saliha stopped sending her two children to the school after she and her husband got fed up with the children’s opposition: I know they just want to play during the weekend. Every time we used to drag them and it was a terrible fight. Two months ago my husband and I gave up. We discussed it for a long time. We both think that they do not want to be different from the other children in their school. Even at home they speak English with each other. But Mirsad and I force them to talk Bosnian to us.

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 109 Children and adolescents generally find it much easier than their parents to adapt to their new environment. Sometimes they start rejecting their alleged state of ‘being different’, their parents’ strong emotional links to Bosnia and the constant references made about ‘return home’. Several adolescent Bosnians I talked to told me that they would stay behind even if their parents returned. They complained about their parents’ inability to start a new life and their constant mentioning of a past life left behind. In contrast, other teenagers, like 15-year-old Anisa, feels that she misses Bosnia ‘all the time’. She said: Bosnia is so different from the Netherlands. I am looking forward to the summer when we will go back to Sarajevo. It is so much more fun there. I am going out with my friends and cousin all the time. People are so much nicer and warmer there. Most of my best friends here are from former Yugoslavia. Not just Bosnians. We are trying to have fun here as well. But here everything is so expensive and my parents won’t let me stay out as long as in Sarajevo. And the food … I hate Dutch food! Have you tried our pies? Tensions across generational lines can also be found among middle-aged refugees and their elderly parents. For many of the elderly refugee population, the wish to die in their native homeland overrides all practical and security considerations. In those cases, where elderly parents have remained in Bosnia, refugees feel particularly compelled to send remittances and visit Bosnia.

Financial strategizing Amra’s dilemma about spending too much money making phone calls to Bosnia or other places where her loved ones live, raises the wider issue of financial strategizing and budgeting. Like many other refugees interviewed, Amra and Edin have constantly to negotiate how much money to invest in their lives in London, how much money to send back to Bosnia and how much to save. But unlike those refugees whose only source of livelihood is income support and who need to juggle with an extremely tight budget, Edin and Amra have a bit more flexibility due to his disability allowance. Refugees in the Netherlands appeared on the whole to be more satisfied with state allowances than those in the UK, although there exist variations in perceptions about the amount of income support in both countries. Most people who do send money, however small the amount might be, stated that the money was usually a direct response to the basic needs of their relatives, for example food, housing, medicine and clothes.13 Refugees whose entire families have been killed or displaced by ‘ethnic cleansing’ do not send money to their original towns and villages but tend to send money to their displaced relatives inside Bosnia.

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Those refugees who are in contact with existing Bosnian community associations frequently participate in organized collections aimed at donating money to war invalids, orphanages or hospitals in Bosnia. Among members of these community organizations there exist lots of pressure to donate, however small the amount, in order to show loyalty to one’s ‘home country’. Names of those contributing to donations in Bosnia are usually mentioned in circulating newsletters. Two refugees in the UK made reference to an incident when a Bosnian local newspaper accused a number of Bosnian refugees (mentioning them by name) of not wanting to participate in charitable collections. Outside of community associations, there is little concerted effort to send money or goods to Bosnia. Ferid, a mid-thirties refugee from Tuzla, who is not in contact with any community organization in the UK, complained about the lack of channels to donate for charitable causes: When I first came in 1993, I washed dishes to make some money. After less than a year, I worked in a patisserie and now I have a coffee shop with a partner. It was really hard in the beginning but now I am managing. Most of my relatives are abroad. I would like to send some money to Bosnia but I do not know to whom and how. In both the UK and the Netherlands, I noticed that refugees who were not active members of community organizations were generally not aware of the activities of these associations. And some did not even know they existed. In light of the lack of an adequate banking system in Bosnia, it is generally difficult and expensive to send money to one’s relatives. One woman in the UK mentioned £20 as the price for sending money by mail order to Bosnia. For this reason many refugees prefer to send money directly with people travelling to Bosnia.

Occasional visits or transnational travelling? Edin, Amra and Selma have themselves been back to Bosnia several times to visit their friends and families. In addition to family trips during the summer, Edin has also been to Bosnia on his own: the first time to check out the situation before bringing his wife and children and then twice to help a British journalist to do research about his native Gorazde: I have been going regularly during the past three years. The first time I was really scared to go, but now it gets easier every time. The last two times I taught my brother and his wife to use a computer. Now they have bought one and use it in my brother’s business. Before the war no one was using computers in Gorazde. More than half of the Bosnians I talked to in each receiving country reported having visited Bosnia for a short period of time. A considerably

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 111 smaller number had returned twice or more in order to see family and friends. These visits often take place during summer months, especially for families with children. Those who return on a regular basis tend to think more seriously about the option to return than those who have visited only once or twice or not at all. Others stated, however, that their initial wish to return changed after a visit to Bosnia when the continuing unstable political situation, the economic crisis and poor health care became apparent. For many of these refugees, the disappointment with the ongoing crisis in Bosnia not only led to the decision to remain in either the Netherlands or the UK, but, as in Edin’s and Amra’s case, motivated many to shift their ‘home-base focus’ to the receiving country. Legal status and travel restrictions can impede the movement between the UK or the Netherlands and Bosnia. Both countries offer a three months’ ‘test the waters’ scheme14 which allows refugees to visit Bosnia, check out the possibility of return and re-enter their country of refuge without legal difficulties. Yet, the fear that participation in the ‘test the water’ scheme might endanger the possibility of obtaining permanent residence status in the receiving country prevents the majority of refugees from making use of it. A much more common practice is to visit Bosnia by circumventing travel restrictions, for example entering Bosnia via Croatia with a Bosnian passport.15 A number of people initially felt ambiguous or were even opposed to visiting Bosnia, but felt compelled due to circumstances, for example elderly parents, a sick family member, death in the family, or bureaucratic matters – especially those related to property issues and particularly housing. Others revealed that they had wanted to visit for a long time before they finally dared to visit the place they had fled. Experiences of these visits vary greatly. The majority of refugees perceive their visits to Bosnia as essential in maintaining links with their families and friends in particular, and social ties to Bosnia in general.16 Most people describe reunions with their families as positive experiences, but some people mentioned resentment and envy by those who remained in Bosnia. As Edin had been medically evacuated after being wounded fighting for the Bosnian Army, he had not experienced the resentment shown towards many other refugees who escaped during the war. Especially in places which had been under siege and where heavy fighting took place over a long period of time (e.g. Sarajevo and Gorazde), male refugees are often perceived to be ‘cowards’ and ‘deserters’ by the population who remained behind. Others believe that refugees have been accumulating wealth abroad while they themselves have to struggle with an ongoing economic crisis in Bosnia. By and large, refugees belonging to the same ethnic group as those who remained behind are perceived in a more sympathetic light than those of a different ethnic group. During my visit to Bosnia I detected a whole range of attitudes and opinions towards refugees, depending on a series of factors such as specific

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experiences of the war, the refugees’ circumstances of leaving Bosnia, having immediate family members as refugees abroad, and the kind of contacts and links people have with friends and family who are refugees. Indeed, attitudes towards refugees constitute one of the most precarious and sensitive issues in post-Dayton Bosnia. There is no space in the frame of this chapter to carefully analyse the complex issues involved in shaping people’s attitudes towards refugees. What can be said with certainty, however, is that despite Bosnia’s obvious brain drain as the consequence of the enormous refugee flight abroad, by and large, Bosnian politicians have not encouraged the involvement of refugees in current developments. Some people would even suggest that the Bosnian government, that is leaders of Bosnian nationalist parties, have propagated resentment against refugees in the national media and are partly responsible for the negative attitudes held by many inside Bosnia towards refugees.

Ideas and knowledge crossing borders Sometimes, it is not only people who travel to Bosnia, but also knowledge, ideas and skills. Yet, so far, Edin’s ability to share his newly gained computer skills remains one of the rare examples where education and knowledge travel quickly across national boundaries. For the most part, refugees who have visited Bosnia only mention the exchange of experiences as a significant aspect of their visits. Some people remembered discussions about values and morals with their relatives in Bosnia and recounted that they eagerly provided information about ‘the ways people live and think’ in the Netherlands or the UK. Several Bosnian intellectuals and artists stated that they aimed to produce writings and art which could be distributed in both their country of residence as well as in Bosnia. Some journalists continue to work on a freelance basis for the Bosnian media, but others have either changed their profession or tried to establish themselves as journalists in their ‘new homes’. Those who continue to write for newspapers, or work for either radio or TV, stressed their aim to promote ideas of tolerance, a multi-ethnic Bosnia, democracy and freedom of speech. This was also true of artists, such as writers and painters, who are often concerned with changing ideas in both Bosnia as well as their respective country of refuge. In addition to the ideas mentioned above, several artists addressed ‘creativity’, ‘enthusiasm for change’ and ‘hope’ as one part of their work that they wanted to spread to Bosnia. Only a small number of refugees use electronic mail and the Internet as tools for communication and information exchange. Access to the Internet is still limited within Bosnia, and also among refugees within the UK or the Netherlands. It is mostly students or young professionals who have access to the technology required to establish ‘transnational virtual communities’. It became obvious throughout my research that ‘access’ really means extensive

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 113 usage. Computers play an important part in the lives of those who own one. They are used for personal communications via e-mail and Bosnian chat rooms, but also to gain information about recent developments in Bosnia and Bosnian refugees in other receiving countries. Yet, for the vast majority of Bosnian refugees ‘old-fashioned’ letter writing and low-tech telephone calls remain the only tools to facilitate contact and exchange.

Trans- or a-national? Whether exploring the means and forms of communication with friends and relatives in Bosnia, the frequency, length and significance of travels to Bosnia, the involvement in Bosnian community organizations or the identification with the Bosnian state, refugees display a great level of heterogeneity. This also holds true for the relative levels of ‘adaptation’ and ‘integration’ in either the Netherlands or the UK. Conflicts related to gender and generation crosscut ethnic, political and social divisions among the people I interviewed. Different places of origin and varying experiences of the war and flight further enhance the gaps between refugees. If we were to believe Portes (1998), Bosnian refugees do not qualify to have the title ‘transnational’ bestowed on them: the vast majority of refugees interviewed do not lead dual lives, are not bilingual and do not move easily between two cultures. Neither do they maintain homes in two countries, let alone engage in financial investments. Yet, while it would be misleading to present Bosnian refuges as transmigrants, I would argue that there are emerging transnational practices and social fields among refugees in both the UK and the Netherlands. As mentioned earlier, the notion of living ‘neither here nor there’ could signify living in two places simultaneously, but it could also describe a state of limbo. The latter seems to apply to a large number of Bosnian refugees who are caught between their wish to return, unfavourable circumstances in Bosnia and the difficulties of starting a new life in their country of residence. Yet, for a small but growing number of refugees, the realization that return would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, is accompanied by the search for possibilities and life strategies allowing them a new start while maintaining links with their home country. Political, social and economic developments in post-Dayton Bosnia as well as factors within their current country of residence shape refugees’ shifting strategies and practices. A sense of political and economic security within the respective country of refuge can give rise to the confidence needed to create and venture into transnational domains. The sense of security or anxiety which arises in relation to the question of the legal status of refugees plays a very significant role in creating or hindering the space from which transnational practices can occur. As long as refugees are not certain about their legal status, that is their right to reside permanently in the country of refuge, they will tend to avoid anything that might jeopardize their status.

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Refugees in the UK who have been granted ‘temporary protection’ and who are anxiously waiting for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ are often reluctant to travel to Bosnia, to participate in elections, and to display any interest in possible return. Until quite recently, refugees in the Netherlands felt more secure about their right to remain. Their refugee status entails the taking up of Dutch citizenship after five years of residency. During the past few years, however, several political parties in the Netherlands have challenged the justification of this status. Prior to local elections in 1999, the Liberal Party led calls for the return of all Bosnians, arguing that ‘their country is safe now’. This call triggered a huge political debate in the Netherlands that received significant press coverage and reached the wider population. Some refugees I interviewed felt extremely unsettled and betrayed by a ‘host country’ that initially seemed to welcome them. Others stress that the government’s position has not changed and dismiss the debate as a political game, which should not be taken seriously. In any case, insecurities have been raised and seem to have had an adverse effect on the confidence of some refugees. The role of education and social background in facilitating the engagement in transnational practices cannot be overemphasized. Bosnians who had travelled prior to their experiences of becoming refugees, who knew a foreign language, who had either a formal education or informally ‘plunged into unknown territories’ are, by and large, much better prepared for finding their feet in a totally new environment and to create a life across borders. In the same vein, my findings reveal that refugees originating from urban Bosnia tend to be more flexible, mobile and prone to transcend boundaries of cultures, political entities and economic systems than those who lived in small villages in the countryside. Developments within Bosnia had a diverse and manifold impact on refugees’ connections and ties with Bosnia. Disappointments with the ‘uneasy truce’ established by the Dayton Agreement, and perhaps even more so with its partial and slow implementation, have augmented anxieties and fears concerning political stability among many refugees.17 Problems related to the reconstruction of economic and social infrastructure have further diminished the likelihood of permanent return. Consequently, many refugees have started to perceive their initial temporary place of residence as a long-lasting if not permanent one. Depending on some of the factors outlined earlier, the immersion into a new life in the country of residence can be accompanied by increasing links with their home country. Financial remittances, regular contact and visits, the exchange of ideas and knowledge and the involvement in community associations promoting and upholding social ties and cultural practices, as well as organizing charitable collections to Bosnia, are different ways in which refugees ‘turn transnational’. My emphasis is on the process rather than a state of being. The very fact that Bosnian refugees have only relatively recently become refugees certainly needs serious consideration. Furthermore, developments within post-

Bosnians in the UK and the Netherlands 115 Dayton Bosnia are difficult to analyse in a situation of rapid transition and change. Time is a very important factor when trying to assess possibilities for return on the one side and options for a new life in the country of refuge on the other. For a large number of refugees, this dilemma has not yet been solved and creates a tension which could either result in a paralysing state of limbo or give birth to transnational practices. Even if more serious research needs to be carried out to compare the level of transnational activities in receiving countries other than the UK and the Netherlands, it can safely be said that refugees currently living within Europe are more prone to creating and maintaining transnational links than those who live in the United States or Canada. In addition to the geographical factor, Bosnians can draw upon a long history of migration to Europe while earlier migration to the United States, for example, was relatively insignificant. No doubt, labour migrants are generally much more mobile and flexible than refugees. Nevertheless, the very networks, patterns of connections and paths of travel shaped by earlier migrants can potentially be appropriated by refugees seeking links with their country of origin. The motivation for the engagement in transnational fields and practices has to be sought in the specific circumstances of being a Bosnian refugee and cannot simply be explained in terms of globalizing capital, time–space compression and the internationalization of labour. Apart from the unresolved dilemma of deciding which place to call home, other factors come into play. Even those refugees who have decided to remain in their country of refuge often feel close emotional, social and cultural ties to the very place from which they were forced or decided to flee. Most significant, however, is the fact that the specific history and background of the war that led to their displacement is directly linked to nationalist aspirations and struggles. If people were raped and ‘ethnically cleansed’ because of their religious and ethnic backgrounds, it comes as no surprise that that the sense of ‘being Bosnian’, and more specifically Bosniak, very much governs people’s sense of identity and sense of belonging. It could be argued that forced migration sometimes leads to ‘forced transnationalism’. Family responsibilities and bureaucratic affairs such as property claims might push refugees into a greater involvement with their home country than they might wish for. Assisting families and friends financially or with goods, such as medicine and clothes, is generally perceived to be a responsibility, occasionally even a burden. The element of social pressure not only arose with regard to individual financial assistance, but became even more obvious in relation to collective donations. Community organizations can work as a channel to contribute to development in the home country. They can, however, also be domains that restrict refugees’ individual choices and exert pressure to display loyalty and compassion for the home country. As specific as my research findings were, I suggest that they raise wider issues related to transnational practices and social fields among refugees as

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opposed to labour migrants. It remains to be seen whether and what kind of contributions refugee studies can make to the current debate and theorizing on transnationalism and transmigrants. My study suggests the importance of looking for differences among a certain group of people, whether forced or labour migrants. It also highlights the dynamic and processional nature of ‘becoming transnational’ (or not!). The possibility of forced rather than actively sought-out transnational practices needs to be further explored. And finally, this research sheds light on the necessity to look for motivations and rationales for transnationality apart from those brought forth within strict political economy approaches.

Notes 1 A total of 161,985 Bosnians have returned from Germany between 1996 and 1998 (UNHCR Sarajevo, 1 July 1999). 2 Between 1996 and 1998, 257 Bosnians in the Netherlands and 102 Bosnians in the UK returned in the frame of assisted repatriation programmes (ibid.). 3 The removal of the nationalist Serb President of Republika Srpska, Nicolas Poplasen, by the previous High Representative, Carl Westendorp, is one of the most controversial examples of this policy. 4 OSCE and OHR directly intervene in election processes, encouraging or removing candidates, and imposing power sharing among ethnic groups through threats of sanctions. They also monitor the national media (largely controlled by nationalist parties) and encourage independent media. 5 ‘The Mobilisation and Participation of Transnational Exile Communities in Post-Conflict Reconstruction: A Comparison of Bosnia and Eritrea’, Richard Black, Khalid Koser and Nadje Al-Ali, University of Sussex , University College London and University of Exeter; funded by ESRC Programme on ‘Transnational Communities’. 6 I am using transnationalism in the broadest sense to denote increasing processes of mobility and interconnectedness of people as well as the accelerated circulation of goods, money, information, ideas and values across national and cultural borders. 7 Historically, the UK did not offer the access to migrants originating from Europe as other countries did (Germany and France, for example). 8 Most of the Bosnian refugees I interviewed are Muslim, even though I also interviewed people in mixed marriages or of different ethnic backgrounds. 9 The status of and access to Gorazde was one of the many points of fierce contention during the negotiations in Dayton, Ohio. The town, which had suffered terribly during the war, belongs to the Federation but is surrounded by villages and towns under Serb control (Republika Srpska). The remaining predominantly Muslim population feels isolated and lives in a constant state of fear and insecurity. 10 Quotes and excerpts from interviews are based on notes taken directly during the interviews. If the interview took place in Bosnian, my research assistant translated it for me. Throughout this chapter, I am trying to maintain the original ‘flavour’ of the interview. I have edited only those cases where the original quote would have been too difficult to understand owing to grammar or syntax mistakes. 11 Former leader of the Muslim Nationalist Party (SDA). 12 Edin is receiving a Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and his wife Amra a Personal Care Allowance (PCA) from the UK which significantly raise the

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family’s monthly income. In addition, he receives an insignificant amount of money as a pension from the Bosnian government because he was wounded fighting as an officer in the Bosnian Army. Most people did not provide me with any concrete figures with respect to the frequency and amount of money they are sending to relatives in Bosnia. In the Netherlands, this scheme is called ‘look and see’. The Home Office tends to turn a blind eye to this practice. A small number of Bosnians interviewed in the UK and the Netherlands reported that they were visited by relatives or friends from Bosnia. A slightly larger number stated that they had managed to be reunited with their families – including wives, husbands, parents or siblings – who had followed them to their country of refuge. What complicates the question whether it is justifiable or useful to speak about transnationalism in relation to Bosnian refugees, is the fact that the very agreement which brought an end to the war in Bosnia is the example par excellence of transnational politics. The transnational regime governing Bosnia (OSCE, OHR, UN, IMF, World Bank, SFOR, etc.) challenges state sovereignty and highlights the situation of a nation ‘in the making’. The issue of transnational politics and regimes in the context of Bosnia is extremely interesting but I will have to explore it elsewhere.

8

Homeland lost and gained Croatian diaspora and refugees in Sweden Maja Povrzanović Frykman

Regarding the implications of ‘transforming homes’ in the context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, two aspects should be taken into consideration: ideological shifts in political discourses, and the transformations of everyday life in concrete lifeworlds.1 The collapse of Yugoslavia brought about radical changes of definitions, perceptions, memories and experiences of ‘homeland’ for most of the people who once lived there. The ‘Yugo-nostalgics’ – a term for those who would have preferred to continue living in Yugoslavia, or simply those who did not want to depreciate the Yugoslav part of their lives – felt deprived of their public voices, possibilities and choices.2 Others were celebrating the end of what they saw as the unjust or even violent Yugoslav rule. They were positioning themselves somewhere on the continuum of standpoints reaching from those merely claiming that it is more lucrative to have an independent economy, to those defining either the communist rulers or entire ethnic groups as the enemy. Most of the Croats living abroad (either as labour migrants, or as political opponents to the former Yugoslav regime) shared these celebratory attitudes regarding the end of Yugoslavia. Their homeland was ‘born’ as an independent country.3 At the same time, large numbers of people from Croatia and BosniaHerzegovina became internal or international refugees. It is not only their concepts of homeland that have been transformed, but also their homes in the most basic, physical sense. From sites of personal control, they were transformed into sites of danger and destruction (cf. Povrzanović, 1997). People were forced to leave their homes in response to threats, fears, military orders and violent attacks. Many homes literally ceased to exist. In order to contextualize the implications of ‘transforming homes’ discussed in this chapter, I will first present the differences among Croatian diasporic communities today and point out the most important issues pertaining to Croatia’s official efforts to revive and maintain transnational links with its diasporas. I use the term ‘diaspora’ for migrant communities numerous and active enough to mark their presence in both the home country and the host countries. I have discussed the relations between transnational experiences and diasporic identities, different definitions of

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‘diaspora’, as well as some analytical distinctions between ‘diaspora’ and ‘exile’ elsewhere (Povrzanović Frykman, 2001a). The impacts that the war in the 1990s had for the Croatian diasporas’ homeland-related sentiments and actions will be analysed in the following section. I will then offer some insights into the activities of the Croatian community in Malmö. Some examples of the personal narratives of Croatian refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina will be presented. They will be compared with the narratives of the Croats who have lived in Sweden for several decades. Although the people cited are co-ethnics who occupy an equal legal position in Sweden (being Swedish citizens), their narrations on home and homeland show considerable differences. The examples discussed here are chosen for their eloquence and their almost ‘ideal–typical’ quality, in order to stress the differences between these two groups of people. However, they are representative of the basic trends discernible in a much larger body of material collected in the Malmö area in 1998 and 1999.4

Croatian diasporas According to 1995 data, there are almost 7 million Croats worldwide. Some 3.7 million – just over 50 per cent – live in Croatia, and 760,000 in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina. A total of 830,500 live in West European countries, including 30,000 in Sweden (see Cohen, 1995b, for details on migrations from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and former Yugoslavia). After the Second World War, a new diaspora of between 200,000 and 300,000 people was produced (Mesić, 1992), owing to the collective guilt ascribed to the Croats for the crimes of the Ustasha-based Nazi-puppet state of Ante Pavelić (who founded the fascist Ustasha organization in the 1930s). Pavelić fled to Argentina, and Ustasha sympathizers formed radicalized diaspora communities in several countries, most importantly in the United States, Canada, Australia, Chile and Argentina. During the 1960s and the 1970s former Yugoslavia was one of the most important sending societies in the international migratory system (Schierup, 1995). The German word Gastarbeiter was adopted into the Croatian language (in the form gastarbajter), as a term for ‘workers temporarily working abroad’ (radnici na privemenom radu u inozemstvu). The terms ‘emigrants’ (emigranti) and ‘emigration’ (emigracija) were highly politicized, in effect meaning ‘nationalist enemies of the Yugoslav state’. In the official discourse of Croatia since 1990, the term ‘diaspora’ (dijaspora) as a unifying concept is supplanting both. It seems that people to whom it applies use it with great satisfaction. As opponents of Tito’s regime fled, especially after the suppression of the ‘Croatian Spring’, Croatian diaspora communities in Europe, but also overseas, were given new political impulses. Their local histories reveal what people refer to as ‘the fight for Croatia’. In different ways, they were trying not only to support the political opposition in the homeland, but also to

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make the public in their respective countries understand their quest for an independent Croatian state. As one of the consequences of the wars in Croatia and BosniaHerzegovina in the 1990s, new ethnic communities emerged in exile. Between 1991 and 1993 more than 5 million citizens of former Yugoslavia became refugees or displaced persons; 700,000 of them went to Western Europe (Fassmann and Münz, 1995: 476). Some 74,000 people came to Sweden, Bosnian Croats among them (as well as a smaller number of Croats from Croatia). Most were granted Swedish citizenship after spending five years in the country. The point is that there is no unified ‘Croatian Diaspora’. It is also obvious that people of different ages and with different experiences are involved in Croatian diasporic discourses and politics today, ranging from people of Croatian heritage who do not speak Croatian and have never visited the country to those who were forced to start living abroad as adults. Nevertheless, an umbrella organization of diaspora Croats called The Croatian World Congress was initiated in 1994 by the then leading Croatian nationalist party Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In 1999, it was accepted into the UN as the first Croatian NGO. The establishment of the Croatian state and the subsequent war made the relationships between Croatia and Croatian diasporas livelier then ever. It is widely believed that the economically most potent and the politically most radical overseas diaspora groups’ financial support was decisive in HDZ’s victory in the first democratic elections in 1990. In return, diaspora Croats became formally included in the homeland politics and economy. A weekly supplement ‘Dom i svijet’ (Home and the World) appears in the Frankfurtam-Main edition of a widely read daily Večernji list. Satellite television programmes selected to suit diaspora Croats’ interests and at the same time confirm their political attitudes have been transmitted since 1991. In 1998, a digital system was introduced which allows worldwide direct reception of all Croatian television programmes. The Croatian Information Centre was also established in the 1990s. It has web pages in Croatian, English and Spanish and distributes (for free) Croatian newspaper articles into diaspora Croats’ e-mail boxes on a daily basis. The ‘Croatian Task Force’ organizes and financially supports summer programmes for all interested Croatian youths living abroad. The Ministry of Return and Exiles has been established. Most importantly, in the elections in 1995, twelve seats were reserved for diaspora representatives in the Croatian parliament (about 400,000 Croatian citizens not residing in Croatia have the right to vote, which is equivalent to around 10 per cent of Croatia’s total voting population). All of them come from HDZ party branches worldwide (out of 121 such branches abroad, 3 are in Sweden). That is why the opposition successfully demanded changes in the electoral law in 1999, to lessen their pro-HDZ political influence.5

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Impacts of ‘The Homeland War’ Zlatko Skrbiš (1995) documented crucial differences between the second generation of Croats and Slovenes in Australia with regard to their responses to the wars accompanying the decay of Yugoslavia. He explains these differences by ‘the historical baggage’ these two groups carry with them in Australia, as well as by the different public attention they are given. For example, between 1955 and 1988, in an influential Australian newspaper: none of the articles which mentioned Croatians in one way or another was favourable of them. Furthermore, Croatians were subjected to an extensive public scrutiny in the early 1970s for alleged (but never proved, however) ‘terrorist activities’. … Vietnamese refugees were given the pungent name: Yellow Croatians. (Skrbiš, 1995: 160–161) The impacts of the 1990s war in Croatia, called ‘The Homeland War’ (Domovinski rat), with regard to the revitalization and reinvention of Croatian diasporic discourses and the intensification of transnational links, have been documented by anthropologists in Australia (Kolar-Panov, 1996; Skrbiš, 1995) and Canada (Winland, 1995). Even the communities which have historically kept a low profile, like those in Canada, began to assert their ethnic pride primarily by identifying with the political cause of their kin in former Yugoslavia (Winland, 1995). Such revitalization and intensification have been clearly present in Sweden as well, where the dominant part of the community consists of people who have close relatives in Croatia. It goes without saying that the Croatian Television reports on war destruction and sufferings raised strong emotions and confirmed the old rhetorical designation of the Yugoslav communist state as the ‘enemy’. Throughout the world, then, the Homeland War has affected the second and the third generations of Croats in diaspora. They have undergone a strong ‘national awakening’. Some even came to fight in Croatia, and were given considerable media attention in the country. The mobilization of all kinds of resources among the Croats was characteristic of literally every Croatian community. The abundant exposure and celebration of national symbols described in the Australian context by Dona Kolar-Panov (1996: 301) is prominent in the Croatian clubs in Sweden too. Yet, the second generation of Croats, just like their parents, have much more intense personal relations with Croatia than their peers outside Europe, mostly as a result of regular visits to the country and relatives living there. They do not need to enrich their cultural capital and foster some new cultural competence: the majority of them have been raised ‘in Croatian spirit’. The primary focus of most Croatian expatriate organizations and

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publications was the overthrow of the communist Yugoslav state, regardless of the differences within particular diasporic communities resulting from the timing and cause of migration, social status, education or region of origin (Winland, 1995). Thus, from the disaporic point of view, the war in the 1990s was the peak of Croatia’s pledge for independence: the most difficult, but decisive, step towards a freedom that has long been dreamed of. The exultant exclamations of, ‘We have Croatia!’ at home and ‘We have been given Croatia!’ in the diaspora in January 1992 implied the end of history for the Croatian struggle for independence. ‘The millennial dream’, to quote the first Croatian president, had come true. The impacts of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina for people living there and those who eventually became refugees were of a different quality. But they were common for both internal and international refugees, in that they all lost their concrete physical homes. The internal refugees’ narratives on war and exile collected in Croatia during the 1990s (see Čale Feldman et al.,1993b; Jambrešić Kirin and Povrzanović, 1996) show that people revealed a striking need for self-explanation and re-narration of the recent history. In other words, the war as a historical turning point overlapped with turning points in their own lives. On the one hand the war-induced rooting of identity in spatial categories (from the neighbourhood to the state territory) is a remarkably persistent theme. On the other hand, the narratives also reveal a multiplicity, diversity and complexity of experience that often challenge the official uniqueness of the ‘prescribed’ national narrative (Prica and Povrzanović, 1996). Parallels are found with the material collected in Sweden among Croatian refugees (from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia) who came to Sweden in the 1990s. Both refugees and people living in Sweden for a couple for decades, who consider themselves as part of the diaspora, are also parts of transnational networks that include the homeland not as something left behind, but as a crucial place of attachment which defines their strategies of identification. Immigrants and refugees could also be called ‘old and new immigrants’, because most refugees became Swedish citizens after five years of residence in Sweden. However, as discussed in more detail elsewhere (Povrzanović Frykman, 2001a), I prefer using the terms diaspora and exile to stress the difference between the starting points – freely chosen vs. violently imposed – of these groups’ transnational identity formation processes.

Croatian Malmö in the 1990s ‘Our beautiful Homeland, oh, you dear heroic country’ is the starting line of the Croatian national anthem. The text hangs on the wall of the ‘The Croatian Home’ in Malmö, shared since early 1999 by five out of six local Croatian clubs. The sixth club that has also belonged to the Association of Croatian Clubs in Sweden since Croatian independence has always had a

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reputation of being ‘pro-Yugoslav’. Unlike any other Croatian club in Malmö, this one has been taking part in cultural events organized by the Yugoslav Embassy in Stockholm and receiving support (e.g. in the form of books and sound-tracks) from Yugoslav institutions dealing with ‘workers temporarily working abroad’. Malmö and Gothenburg are Swedish industrial centres in which the majority of Croatian labour migrants have lived since the 1960s, together with the political exiles who came in the 1970s. The official leaders, as well as active members organizing the Malmö clubs’ activities – sport, folklore for women and children, festive gatherings and dance evenings – have been friends since they arrived in Sweden. They form the core of the tightly connected Croatian community in Malmö. The Croatian ethnic community in Malmö in a wider sense consists of all people who visit the clubs on a weekly basis or on festive occasions like celebrations of national or Catholic holidays (with dance and performances by singers invited from Croatia). They listen to the weekly local radio programme in the Croatian language (supported by the Association of Croatian Clubs and sponsored by a private bus-company that specializes in weekly rides between Sweden and Croatia), and read the Croatian Messenger (Hrvatski glasnik), which is published quarterly and distributed to all 6,000 members of the 33 Croatian clubs in Sweden.6 The war in Croatia in the 1990s mobilized all kinds of resources among the Croats in Malmö. Most importantly money and medical aid was collected. For several months in 1991 regular weekly demonstrations supporting Croatian independence were organized in one of the town’s biggest squares. They attracted not only the people mentioned above, but also Croats who otherwise do not take part in the community’s activities. A women in her thirties who had lived in Sweden since she was 6 years old told me that she had met and made friends with more Croats during those demonstrations than during her entire life in Sweden. Some people wrote letters to the editors of various Swedish newspapers, reacting to what they perceived as unjust reports on and analyses of the war in Croatia. The Homeland War raised strong emotions – fears, worries and sorrow, but also hope and national pride. A strong consensus on the rightfulness of Croatian plight was thus reconfirmed in the 1990s (cf. Povrzanović Frykman, 2001b). Some younger Croats from Malmö did go home to fight, but they should be regarded as exceptions. Still, offering one’s own life ‘for the Homeland’ has been seen by many as the ultimate proof of love for, and loyalty to, Croatia – a proof more convincing than any other. Although Croats living abroad are by no means obliged to answer a call-up in Croatia, there is a tacit feeling of guilt among some people, and resentment from others. It is illuminating to specify some of the war-related attitudes of people in the diaspora towards refugees from all the post-Yugoslav countries – including people of their own ethnic affiliation. Some enthusiastic contacts

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and friendships have developed, but in general attitudes have been negative. They range from disinterest (‘they were taken care of by the Swedish authorities’), silent disapproval (reflected in an unwillingness to help), antipathy (creating new stereotypes) and envy (for the refugees’ ‘easy’ access to the benefits of the welfare state on the one hand, and ‘ruining’ the old immigrants’ social status in Sweden on the other), to open and direct reproaches for not staying behind and ‘fighting for homeland’. ‘No one hates us like our people’, a young Bosnian refugee woman told me. One way refugees themselves account for this is their social and educational background which has proved beneficial in the labour market. Regarding the reproach for not staying behind in order to fight, the refugees angrily reply by pointing to their basic (not legally, but spontaneously conceptualized) human right to give priority to their individual, and not ‘national’, interest: ‘We should be dying, and they would send us socks to the battle-field!’ They are ‘so detached from concrete experiences’, commented a Croat refugee from Bosnia. He was ‘very, very disappointed’, and had little motivation for any kind of involvement in diaspora Croats’ activities (cf. Povrzanović Frykman, 2001b).

Diaspora: blessed by the homeland At the yearly Festival of Croatian Culture in 1998, the secretary of the Association of Croatian Clubs in Sweden said that ‘the Festival is supposed to present our culture, but more importantly, our togetherness – today, when we are blessed by the greatest gift of our Homeland’, referring to the independent Croatian state. She belongs to the second generation of Croatian labour migrants. Nevertheless, her words summarize the attitude towards the homeland widely shared among diaspora Croats, that it is a blessing.7 The man I am going to quote below shares this attitude and expresses it with great emphasis. He was born in the 1940s in a Herzegovinian village, to a father who was an Ustasha soldier. After the Second World War, his father spent seven years in a Yugoslav prison and was systematically threatened by the local police afterwards.8 Because of the stigma attached to his father, this man was not admitted to the local high school. Fleeing from Yugoslavia without a passport, he came to Sweden at the age of 19. He became politically active in the local body of the Croatian National Council, and later in the local HDZ organization. He was able to visit Croatia only after 1990, when independence was proclaimed. Arriving at the central square in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, he felt ‘happiness beyond description’. Surrounded by a neat garden, his house in Malmö looks like other small, middle class villas in the neighbourhood. However, the interior of his home makes obvious the importance of his Croathood. The souvenirs and pictures on the walls, arranged in a horror vacui manner, reveal the salience of national symbols. The prominent place of the replicas of historical paintings

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showing Croatian kings and great Croats who were killed for their struggle for the Croatian cause is in accordance with his narrative inclination towards historic examples and quotations. The excerpts below are cited in the order of their appearance in the narration (with my explanations put in square brackets). The poems quoted in the course of narration (which my respondent was not reading, but reciting) also appear in my – literal – translation. I escaped in 1961, first I went to a collective centre in Italy. A friend of mine was with me. … We were reading his father’s letter over and over again; it made such an impact on me. It said: ‘Love any country, love any people, but love your homeland Croatia above all. Do never forget it. Your Daddy’. Believe me, we were crying when reading it. It is difficult to live in a foreign land, only those know it who were forced to make their choice in those difficult times – between seeing my home, my father, and defending Croatia which was attacked so much, and so was Croatian people. [‘Croatian people’ is always used in singular, not referring to individuals, but to what equates to the German concept of Volk.] If there is no Croatia [no Croatian state], it exists here where we are. We dreamt about Croatia, we were suffering for Croatia, and – thanks dear God, today, after all those years. … A mother has given birth to the Croatian son, in the person of Franjo Tuđman, who united Croatian people, led it into the fight, and created a free, independent state of Croatia. A day before he died, my friend – he was my co-fighter – told me: ‘My dear B., we, Croatian patriots … [can see that] … our historical dream of Croatian people has been accomplished: a free and independent state of Croatia. I know, everyone has to die, but it is somehow easier to die now. Even from my grave I will be happy for the fact that tomorrow, the child of my child, born here in Sweden, when he comes to Knin or in any other Croatian place, will be free to stand there and say – this is Croatia, this is my Homeland!’ All wealth of this world and whatever one owns cannot be compared with the wealth of Homeland. Didn’t the great poet Petar Preradović [1818–1872] … and he was a general on the Franz Joseph court, he wore silk clothes and golden sabre, he lived in luxurious palaces in Vienna, the town where the first waltz was danced in the world: who would not like a life like that? But the wish to return has been born in him. It reminds us here [Croats in Sweden] especially older people … his wish to die in Croatia. As told in the last verses of his poem ‘The Traveller’:

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Maja Povrzanović Frykman Oh, Homeland, you mother of happiness, Your son is coming back. The sun again warms you, Tears of joy are flowing. Take your child back, It will be yours forever! Give me a grave in your field, Adorn my grave by your flowers! He was leaving Vienna and palaces and his silky clothes and his golden sabre, to be eternally embraced by his homeland Croatia. Many of us [Croats in Sweden] you should believe me, feel that way.

In his letter to the HDZ party branch members that he showed me in the course of the interview, the famous Dubrovnik poet Ivan Gundulić’s (1588–1638) most renowned verses are quoted: ‘Oh, you beautiful, oh, you dear, oh, you sweet Liberty!’ While showing me the letter, he said: Those are terrible emotions [meaning ‘terribly strong’]. One simply cannot believe what one is able to bear. … We were hoping, we were living for those ideals. … My whole life I was living for Croatia and her ideals. During the war he donated a relatively large amount of money to Croatia. He stressed that he was not doing this for any kind of personal gains within the Croatian community. If I needed to sell half of the house, I would do it, to make that Croatian dream come true! … Whatever one gives, one gives from one’s heart. Nothing should be asked in return, if one is a Croat. Some thirteen years ago, when he still could not travel to Croatia, a Croatian priest visiting Malmö brought him a precious present from Zagreb: a stone that fell from the façade of the Zagreb cathedral and was consecrated in that cathedral. I told my children: ‘Children, if I die in Sweden, I want to embrace Croatia when dead. You can keep a piece of it if you want, but you will put this stone into my grave. Since the establishment of the Croatian state, this man no longer takes part in local Croatian community affairs. He thinks, ‘it is normal’, since ‘the main goal is accomplished, the holy goal’. This man’s native village in Herzegovina belonged to The Independent State of Croatia at the time of his birth, but that is not the reason for his entire narrative being directed towards Croatia as his homeland. Being a

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political dissident, he could never think of returning to his village. In his narrative, Croatia, in which he never lived, appears as a symbol, as a fulfilment of his efforts, and as a satisfaction for his exile and yearnings. His many historical references, including the frequent quoting of some key passages from Croatian patriotic poetry, tally with efforts (championed by the first Croatian president) in Croatia in the 1990s to establish a narrative continuity of Croatian political history as a continuous – finally completed – struggle for freedom, and of Croathood as a fixed identity marker, implying love for the homeland and sharing Catholic values. However, this man’s narrative is lacking the fierce nationalist tone that has often been heard within Croatia in the 1990s. He is expressing neither hatred, nor the faintest deprecation, of the Serbian nation. His ‘idealist’ ways of expressing nationalist concerns may partially be due to the Swedish standards of democratic behaviour that people living there have learned to appreciate. It may also be due to his modest and good-hearted personality. But it also may be due to the fact that he did not experience first hand the violence of the war. When he mentions ‘the enemy’, he thinks of the communist Yugoslavia and its secret police that have been monitoring the life of ‘emigrants’ in Sweden. He does not talk of ‘the Serbs’ as an enemy nation. He does not talk about the Croatian refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina either, for he hardly met any. When asked directly about his acquaintances with them he said that the Croats active in Malmö clubs ‘saw them as taken care of by the Swedish institutions. We were more focusing on sending help to the ones who stayed behind’ – to the Croat-held parts of BosniaHerzegovina.

Refugees: the loss of home In war, and especially in a war deliberately targeting civilians, the physical space of home is of primary importance as a place where one’s personal identity is situated and confirmed by maintaining at least some basic everyday routines. Home is a place where the imposed (abnormal) identity of a war victim is kept at bay by the identity aspects rooted in peaceful normality. The majority of the narratives on war experiences collected in Croatia in the 1990s explicitly reveal awareness of people’s lives being anchored in the spaces of their daily interactions. Preserving at least a semblance of normality became the main objective of people under threat. Perhaps because their efforts to keep their lives together had worn most of them down physically and emotionally, the breeding ground for nationalism seems to have remained distanced from their everyday suffering. For those people encountering military attacks, their towns and home regions were not political spaces negotiable in war, but primarily sites of traumatic experiences (Povrzanović, 1997).

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Some people, who came to Sweden as refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993–1994, told me that they would never go back, not even to visit. ‘I would have gone to Iceland, if I only could, as far away from there as possible’, a man said who had to flee in order to stay alive. His two brothers were killed in neighbouring houses, and two other brothers became refugees in Germany. One of my respondents, who fled Bosnia in 1991 together with his family, claims that his Croathood was always important to him for he stems from a ‘nationally aware’ family (unlike those people from Bosnia-Herzegovina who presented themselves as Yugoslavs). Yet, it was normal for him and for everyone he knew in Sarajevo to have close friends of Serbian and Muslim ethnic affiliation. He kept in touch with them – they all became refugees. His decision to leave was propelled by the practical possibility of joining his wife’s family who already lived in Sweden. He left when ‘the “celebrations” of extreme nationalists in the streets became everyday’, and when men were called up at their doorsteps by the Yugoslav Army military police, in order to take part in the siege of Dubrovnik (in Croatia) as ‘reservists’. After seven years in Sweden, he was still unemployed, in possession of a university degree that is not recognized in the Swedish labour market. When we first met, he introduced himself as ‘a man with no identity’. Although he claims to speak Swedish rather well, he cannot express his ‘values and potentials’ in that foreign language. Sweden is a nice country … but still, it is being away from a surroundings I was used to. … When a person leaves at a certain age [he was in his forties], perhaps with a lost hope of return, it is something else. Until there is that feeling, until there is a subconscious knowledge of the possibility of return, it is far easier. But when that thread breaks, when the last feeling is lost about the temporariness of the stay here, then it is more difficult – it is like spinning around your own self. The loss of property is relative – that can be compensated for – some things remain in the sphere of memories. But the loss of identity … that feeling that I will never ever again be what I was before, that I am a person who came here due to unhappy circumstances, that I am a personnummer [Swedish for national insurance number], someone who, together with his name and surname, has another, general name: foreigner. That moment, when I went to the school, to tell the teachers that my children were not returning, that was terrible. … And that collecting of the last remnants, of contacts with people, greetings, had its load. … I mean, that parting from friends. … I was telling everyone: ‘Oh, we’ll come back; I am leaving for I still have some vacancies – we’ll be back.’ But subconsciously I knew – it was somewhere deep in the subconscious – that there would be no return.

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Together with his family, he spent two years in different refugee camps in Sweden. On occasions when his wife became desperate – because of the uncertainty of their legal status, because of the inquisitive nature of police interviews, or because she had to share the toilet with twenty other people – he tried to comfort her by repeating: ‘We came to Sweden offering ourselves at the altar of the children’. I cannot tell if this formulation is a conscious play on the phrase ‘altar of the Homeland’ that has been central to the Croatian nationalist discourse throughout the 1990s, but it certainly implies a ‘reversed order’: the primary importance of the personal and the private over the national. Children’s well-being and a cluster of values connected to the family are a recurrent theme in this man’s narration. He also believes that he made a good impression when interviewed (‘interrogated for four hours’) by the police: When I told them that I did not want to be sent to Dubrovnik battlefield [to attack it as a Yugoslav Army soldier], and that I value my head [his own life] just as much as any of the political bigshots values his, I think they were impressed. His family was the first in the refugee camp to be granted ‘the papers’, that is a permanent residence permit: The year 1993 passes … the conflict between Muslims and Croats is culminating. … Information on individual deaths … my sister’s son is at the battlefield. … On August 5th our assistant [the camp’s official] is coming, calls me into her office. Of course, she shook my hand and I thanked, then we left to the kitchen where people were sitting and she said: the N.-s are given ‘the papers’. My wife jumped up and started to cry out of happiness, she was overwhelmed, the uncertainty was over. I was totally calm. So people were asking me: How come you are not happy, you are not jumping, nothing at all? And I told them: I am happy with one eye only, with the other eye I am crying. It was really like that. At that moment, as much as I was glad for ending that uncertainty, for having a safe future, so to speak, I knew that I lost my homeland, definitely. My homeland, my property and everything I had there. I knew that my former life is bound to stay only in the sphere of memories. No one will ever expel me from my memories, but I am definitely expelled from my homeland. Concluding the long story about their time in a refugee camp, he said: ‘Wherever one goes, he has to leave traces, to build a house, as a Bosnian saying has it’. He believes that his family behaved accordingly, and feels rewarded by having been appreciated by other refugees. He told me how happy and proud he was when everyone came to see them off, ‘even the Albanians’.

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As the excerpts from this man’s narrative clearly illustrate, new forms of longing, memory and (dis)identification (Clifford, 1997: 247) are added to the spectrum of meanings of homeland for people living somewhere else, owing to the radical transformations in the country of origin. We kept thinking: It will pass, we’ll be back. … Practically everything stayed behind. We could take some things, very valuable to us, like family albums. And some personal things. Everything else remained in the flat. He visited the flat that used to be his Sarajevo home in 1998. Some Muslim people now live there, so he stayed with Muslim friends who lived in the same building. These friends thought that they should accompany him when visiting the flat, but he rejected the idea: No, no one is coming with me, I am going alone. If someone is going to shoot at me on my very door step, then let it be! When I came there, those people simply said: Come in. They did not know who I was. But they didn’t get the chance of saying anything before I presented myself, and explained why I came … I believe they were impressed, maybe a little surprised, so they really showed maximal courtesy. … So we sat down, had a coffee, talked for a while. But I have to say when I stepped over the threshold, at that moment I was deeply permeated by emotions, even shaken. Every detail, every memory of those beautiful moments – there, where the children were born, where we lived together – all that was in front of my eyes, and it was not easy. Property, those material things, that is all relative. But the ambience, I mean, the general impression that it was the flat in which I lived with my children only yesterday. … Some massive things remained in the flat, but others were stolen, taken away. I was very sorry – most of the books were stolen. Some were burnt [for heating or cooking during the war]. I dragged some books through my entire life, I was collecting them. There was a book ‘Why I did not kill myself’, by Doctor Frankl. A man who spent four years in a concentration camp wrote it. When there was not any realistic chance for survival, and life was deprived of any sense, he was searching for sense. … That book disappeared. I am terribly sorry for that. The differences in the homeland-related positions of the Croatian diaspora and refugees are most poignantly expressed by the use of the concept of dream: Believe me, not one of my dreams … I might dream of you, perhaps, but there is no chance that I dream of you in Lund or Malmö. I would dream of you down there, somewhere in Sarajevo or in K. All my dreams are down there. Therefore I even say that in a certain sense I am

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an ex-person, torn, split in two parts. Here – only in my physical appearance, while my soul is down there – it is staggering somewhere down there. Either I will go back down there, perhaps, once again, or my soul will come here. It remains to be seen. Here ‘dreams’ are not a metaphor, but simply dreams dreamt night after night. As opposed to the notion of ‘dreaming about Croatia’ and the ‘Croatian dream coming true’, these dreams reflect intimate aspects of personal identity, they are dreams about places filled with happy memories. In the statement ‘I feel that I permanently lost my homeland, but also my identity’, homeland again is not an ideological construction, but the frame of former – chosen, individually designed, normal – everyday life. It is the life in the lifeworlds that the refugees cannot re-establish, but only remember with regret and the overwhelming feeling of loss. We have a ‘war plan’, to go down there, to Croatia. We plan to visit Sarajevo, too, and, if only possible, to reach my native village in K. municipality. Where the Muslims live nowadays in my house, my grandfather’s and my father’s house … in my house where my wife and I, together with the children. … Where I, for fifteen years, have invested – almost taking it from my mouth [saving money], where I left the traces of my very fingers, where it is written on the staircase: P., R., S. [the names of his children written in the concrete] …When we start talking about it, P. begins to cry. P. cries, cries, and so does my wife, too.

Imagined and inhabited homes ‘If you don’t know where the home is – it is here, in every dream.’ This was a starting line of one of the songs in the local Malmö radio programme in the Croatian language the day after the first Croatian president Franjo Tuđman died in December 1999. In the rest of the songs in the programme the rhetoric on the Croatian homeland as (the most) beautiful and in the search for God’s blessing was also significantly present. The general message was about Croatia being the object of love and devotion: ‘I love only you, oh, dear nation, I serve only you, oh, Croatia!’ Such ‘dense’ statements on homeland are usually not prevalent in the programmes; they were marking the occasion. In the historical moment, which could be regarded as a moment of crisis loaded by political uncertainty, the conflation of home (dom) and homeland (domovina) needed to be reconfirmed. One of the refrains made it obvious: ‘I know that here is my beautiful country, I know that here is my home!’ The programme concluded with the song known as the ‘anthem’ of Tuđman’s HDZ party: ‘God, guard Croatia, my dear home’. It hints at an ahistorical understanding of the homeland as directly related to God, protected by God or in need of protection for ‘its’ people are not strong

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enough (or responsible enough) to decide on its destiny. It should just be loved, for it is a completed home, not in need of any change. However, if necessary, one should also be prepared to die for the homeland. As stated in another song from the same programme: ‘I know it is little – everything I offer you, you only country, you Croatian flower! Therefore, call me to the guard, I have to give my life to you.’ The ideas of a ‘sacred Homeland’ and ‘sacrifices for the Homeland’ are particularly resonant for those members of the Croatian diasporic communities in Sweden who were politically organized dissidents of the communist regime. Most of them left Yugoslavia without passports and could not visit their families and their home towns for decades, until Croatia had been established as a separate state. For them, Croatia has been ‘worth any sacrifice’. For a number of people the sacrifices included not only devoting most of their free time to their ethnic community’s cultural or political activities. In addition, it was to sacrifice their peace of mind, for they were exposing themselves to the possibility of revenge by the Yugoslav secret police. Many political dissidents lived in insecurity and fear: ‘It was not easy to step out on the balcony, knowing that a sniper might kill you’. For a number of them ‘sacrifice’ also included not being present at their parents’ funerals, a recurrent theme that seems to be important in the analysis of the complex meanings of ‘home’. It implies material, territorial aspects of belonging, as well as different identity layers of customs, traditions, religiosity, local communities, family links and personal histories. This interpretation of ‘sacrifice’ highlights the intertwining of the ideological and experiential aspects of defining home and belonging even for those people engaging in what could be seen as ‘ideal–typical’ nationalist discourse. Theoretical recognition of identities as shifting and complex frames of experience, judgement and action (Taylor, 1989) contradicts the introduction of fixed ideological markers such as ‘nationalist’ versus ‘antinationalist’. Identities are created through action determined by ground-level personal biography, in exile and diaspora alike, but with different outcomes. For both the Croatian diaspora and the refugees there has been a juxtaposition of the imagined and the inhabited home and of ideological and experiential concepts of home and homeland. These concepts explain the differences in the narrative strategies through which immigrants and refugees of the same ethnic affiliation produce symbolic spaces and collective images of ethnic and national belonging. While the refugees’ concept of homeland relies on the experiences of everyday life in the physical spaces of their lost homes, the diaspora people’s ideological concept seems to be concomitant with the centralizing and essentializing practices of nationalist nation-states’ attempts to deny individualized senses of home. As Ladislav Holy (1998) observed in his research on the metaphor of ‘home’ in Czech nationalist discourse, most people (who considered themselves patriots, and not nationalists) found it difficult not to talk about

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homeland and home interchangeably, even though in Czech, unlike in English and Croatian, there is no semantic relationship between the two terms. They often stated that ‘their homeland was not only where they felt at home, but also was their home’ (Holy, 1998: 128). ‘Home’ is where family lives. It is imagined as ‘a place of harmony providing a homogeneous haven of refuge from external conflict’ (Olwig, 1998: 226). It is precisely the assumed solidarity of the family, of those who inhabit the same home, that answers the question of why the space inhabited by a collectivity of people who imagine themselves to be a nation should be conceptualized as home. In the case of Czech nationalist discourse, as well as in the Croatian case, when people construct as home the space that they inhabit as a nation, they resort to a discursive strategy aimed at promoting the desired solidarity among the nation’s members. … As home is first of all a place where a family lives, constructing the country as the home of the nation implies the image of the nation as a family: a collectivity whose members are bound together by primordial ties stronger than those established as a result of any kind of practical expediency, whether economic, political or whatever. (Holy, 1998: 129) This is why highlighting differences within the ‘Croatian community’ has proved to be highly irritating from the nationalist point of view – in Croatia and abroad. This explains criticisms of the ‘local patriots’ in some parts of Croatia, who are not ‘true Croats’, as well as the emphasis placed on the Festival of Croatian Culture in presenting ‘our togetherness’. It also explains the shock among the nationalist parts within the Croatian diaspora worldwide when the HDZ party was defeated in the parliamentary and presidential elections in Croatia in January 2000. Finally, it explains why some prominent members of the local Croatian community have reacted so badly to the attempt by Croatian refugees from Bosnia to start their own club in Malmö (rather than joining the existing ones) (cf. Povrzanović Frykman, 2001b). Home is a moral place, a reminder of undisputed religious and social relationships (see Armbruster in this volume). Home is the source of the ‘authentic’, pre-diasporic self. When establishing an analogy between ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ and referring to Croatia as their ‘true home’, diaspora Croats in Sweden are expressing this understanding of home. At the same time, they are implying a traditional Croatian model of the nation, according to which national identity is not political but linguistic and cultural. For them, nation is an organic, ethnically based community.9 Underlying the conflation of homeland and home is a traditional conceptualization of home not only as ‘a safe and still place to leave and return to (whether house, village, region or nation)’ (Rapport and Dawson, 1998: 6),

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but also as ‘a principal focus of one’s concern and control’ (ibid.). Importantly, the quest for ‘control’ could explain the strong inclination to negate the historical character of (one’s own) nation. People engaging in nationalist discourse fail to recognize (or refuse to accept) that the standards of inclusion and exclusion, the meanings of loyalty and the modes of belonging can be negotiated and changed. In the case of refugees, they had no ‘control’ over their homes – they were forced to leave them. They had no political control over their homeland’s destiny – fighting negated any political means of control. A lack of control also applies in the Swedish socio-cultural setting where institutions assert all the significant frames not only for the refugees’ everyday life, but also for their homeland concerns. The fact that people who came to Sweden as refugees were granted Swedish citizenship after five years, but only if they denied their former citizenship, not only defines their legal relation to the homeland, but also influences their memories, sentiments and imagination. As aptly voiced by the man from Sarajevo, the final emotional blow in his refugee experience was – paradoxically – the moment when he was granted permanent residence rights. On the one hand he was relieved from the uncertainty of his status in Sweden, but on the other shaken by the certainty of what he felt as ‘the loss of homeland’. For the same reason, although they decided to live in Sweden, some of my interviewees chose to keep their original passports and thus restrict their legal rights in Sweden, for they could not imagine themselves ‘not belonging’ to their homeland any more.10

Conclusion A sense of continuity, shared memories and collective destiny are foundations upon which identities are constructed in relation to the wars in former Yugoslavia. They are revealed in the ways that respective groups of people are positioned by and position themselves within the narratives of their lost and imagined homes and homelands (cf. Ganguly, 1992; Winland, 1995). The field insights acquired in the Malmö area in 1998 and 1999 point to different interpretations of historical conditions, political outcomes and cultural impacts of the war among Croats in the diaspora and recently arrived refugees. Although war, as an epochal event of crucial importance for the identity of the (in this case ethnic) community which it affects, establishes a more or less unified basic ‘narrative identity’ (Ricoeur, 1990) for its members, the formation of that identity also requires the processing of internal, personal experiences of historical events (Prica and Povrzanović, 1996). The differences of narrative strategies through which the symbolic spaces and collective fantasies of ethnic and national identity are produced by the refugees and immigrants of the same ethnic affiliation depend on their different war experiences. These experiences range from non-experience, such as only seeing the war on television in their Swedish living rooms, to

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being exposed to military attacks and fleeing from their soon-to-bedestroyed Bosnian homes in order to stay alive. The refugees’ multi-vocal narratives on their war experiences and the univocal myth-like national narrative characteristic for diaspora people are coherent with their different strategies of remembering/imagining home and homeland. From the diasporic point of view, the war in the 1990s was the peak of Croatia’s pledge for independence: a hard, but necessary transition towards a better future. For refugees, on the other hand, the war was first and foremost a personal tragedy, encapsulating rupture, loss and displacement. The diaspora Croats were finally ‘given’ their homeland – an independent Croatia with which they proudly identify, and which provides a new, positive frame of reference for contacts with the Swedish people and institutions. The diaspora Croats’ national victory is contrasted by the personal loss of the Croatian refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. For them, it is a double loss, of home and of the homeland they knew before the war – ‘home’ encompassing the immediate socio-cultural context in which they had a name, a status and an occupation. Today, their homes are either destroyed or inhabited by other people, and the country has undergone not only political, but also radical cultural changes in the 1990s. They are oriented not so much to roots and national belonging, as to an ability to recreate a culture in diverse locations (Clifford, 1997: 249). While many diaspora Croats decorate their Swedish homes with Croatian national symbols, the refugees are struggling to create agreeable material surroundings in the flats they seldom could choose, that in the course of everyday life might hopefully turn into their new homes. The narratives presented in this chapter point to salient differences among people who share an ethnic affiliation, but not the same war experiences. The impacts of war seem to be decisive not only for objective political transformations, but also for memories and imaginations of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. Ethnographic insights into the interplay between symbolic and material aspects of homeland show the complexity of implications that transformations in the country of origin have for identity formation among members of ethnic communities living in situations of diaspora and exile. They show that the notions of ethnic and transnational communities, even in the case of a single and relatively small group, might comprise diverse social situations and identity formation processes.

Notes 1 2

On the disintegration of Yugoslavia see Magaš (1993), Ramet (1996) and Silber and Little (1995). On the ‘broken narratives of home in Yugoslavia’ see Jansen (1998). The article is focusing on the autobiographical writings of three female authors regarded as ‘privileged refugees’ for their cosmopolitan networks and professional success. For different types of narratives on the lost home see Prica and Povrzanović

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(1996), where refugee children’s autobiographical essays are quoted. See also Jambrešić Kirin (1996, 1999) on personal narratives on war. See Goldstein (1999) for an overview of Croatian history, and Allcock (2000) for a long-term sociological study of ‘the historical transformation of society in South Slav lands, united intermittently in a state which has been known as “Yugoslavia” ’ (Allcock, 2000: 1). A bibliography of ethnographic articles on the war in Croatia published by Croatian scholars in the 1990s is available in Povrzanović (2000). The field insights this article is based upon were enabled by the scholarships I was granted in 1998 by The Swedish Institute and STINT (The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education). In 2000 and 2001, an ethnological research project ‘Seeds of war: Narrative construction of identities in diaspora and exile’ is being financed by HSFR (Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences). It questions some aspects of the common ‘ethnic conflict’ explanation of the wars in former Yugoslavia, namely the generalized notion of ideological (nationalist) homogenization along ethnic lines. It aims at showing how the homogenization in post-Yugoslav countries caused by the war is counter-pointed in manifold divisions. The positions of the HSK (Hrvatski svjetski kongres – Croatian World Congress) are revealed, for example, in the newspaper article ‘Croatian diaspora opposes cancellation of special diaspora ticket’ (Vjesnik 8 March 1999), in which HSK President Simon Sito Ćorić is quoted. He said that the special diaspora ticket is a ‘bridge between Croatia and its Diaspora. If it is cancelled, Croats throughout the world would feel abandoned by their homeland’ and that would be ‘psychologically very negative if the Croatian Diaspora was told it could not have its representatives in the Croatian National Parliament’. He stressed the HSK ‘insists’ on diaspora representatives in the parliament. According to Ćorić, non-HDZ politicians (the ones who came into power less than a year later, in January 2000) ‘do not show a lot of love toward Croats in, for example, Australia or New Zealand, rather they are more interested in power relations within the Croatian National Parliament’, so they ‘hurt Croats living abroad’. The content analysis of the 1990s issues of the quarterly Hrvatski glasnik is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, some of the headlines from the issue 1/1999 can illustrate the concerns with the homeland voiced in the journal: ‘In defence of togetherness’, ‘The importance of the return to the Homeland’, ‘The visit the Croatian archbishop paid to the Croats in Sweden and Denmark’, ‘The first book published on the Croatian ground – Hrvatski misal 1483’, ‘The best known Croatian maps, from the times of Illyrian movement’, ‘From the world to Croatia: The Croats from Sweden present at the gathering of all Croatia football clubs from all over the world’, ‘The Winter School of Croatian Folklore’, ‘To study in Croatia’, ‘From the Croatian community Herceg-Bosna: On Internet – Muslim interpretation of the medieval history of Bosnia and Hercegovina’, ‘No conspiracy, but Bildt continues to promote a Balkan Federation’. Nationalism expressed in such terms can be regarded as a secular religion of modern society (cf. Holy, 1998: 122). Although discussion of religious connotations of ‘being blessed by the Homeland’ is beyond the scope of this chapter, a parallel should be noted of the remarkable presence of catholic martyrdom complex during the war in Croatia (see Čale Feldman et al., 1993b). Also, in the Croatian nationalist discourse, a good Croat is a good catholic. Also, his two uncles were killed in Bleiburg, an Austrian village close to the former Yugoslav (today Slovenian) border. The events that started around Bleiburg in May 1945, where soldiers and civilians fleeing from the partisans were returned to them by the Allies and subsequently killed or let die (for details

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see Goldstein, 1999: 155–157), were never publicly discussed in Yugoslavia. Many Croats see them as a grave injustice done against the Croatian people on the whole. For them, Bleiburg is a symbol of Croatian national suffering under communism. 9 The political climate has been changing in Croatia since the elections in January 2000: a civil–territorial model of the nation has been promoted that raised, to say the least, ambivalent feelings among a number of Croats living in the diaspora. 10 This is also the case of a woman in her fifties who has lived in Sweden since she was 17. Having married young to a Croat who already was a Swedish citizen, she never applied for Swedish citizenship. She told me that she would be embarrassed if her (Swedish) colleagues found out about it, for she feels it could be interpreted as ungratefulness to the Swedes who were always kind to her and made her feel at home.

9

From refugees to transnational communities? Khalid Koser

Introduction Refugees seem destined to suffer the same fate at the hands of transnational community studies as they have at the hands of international migration studies – at best exceptionalism, at worst exclusion. Three reasons can be suggested. First, refugees are generally expected to return home, after the end of a conflict or the creation of a new state. Second, where refugees remain in host countries, attention has usually focused on their integration, and refugees are assumed to maintain few links with the ‘homeland’ to which they have chosen not to return. Third, and often as a result of their decision not to return, refugees can be ‘disowned’ by the home state. This chapter proposes one way of incorporating refugees into the mainstream of transnational community studies, by charting the transition of refugee communities into transnational communities. The focus of the chapter is Eritrean refugees mainly outside Africa, and especially in the UK and Germany. The framework of analysis is the transformation of Eritrea – from its thirty-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia, through seven years of peaceful independence between 1991 and 1998, to the recently ended conflict with Ethiopia. This frame is used to analyse three processes that have indexed the transition into transnational communities. First, despite the independence of Eritrea, most refugees did not return, instead securing their statuses in their host countries. Second, since independence most Eritreans have nevertheless developed lasting links with their communities and country of origin. Third, and as a result of the current conflict, the Eritrean state has taken steps to institutionalize the Eritrean diaspora. The research on which this chapter is based forms part of a project on ‘The Mobilisation and Participation of Transnational Exile Communities in Post-Conflict Reconstruction’.1 Since November 1998, forty-four semi-structured interviews have been conducted with Eritreans in the UK and Germany, as well as with key informants from Eritrean communities, and representatives from governments and NGOs. During fieldwork in Eritrea from July to August 1999, thirty-three semi-structured interviews were

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conducted with Eritrean residents, returnees and visitors, as well as with representatives from a range of government and civil institutions.

Transformations in Eritrea After a thirty-year struggle, Eritrea was effectively liberated from Ethiopian occupation when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) captured the capital city, Asmara, on 24 May 1991. Exactly two years later, on 24 May 1993, Eritrea was formally declared independent on the basis of a worldwide referendum amongst Eritreans (Cliffe and Davidson, 1988; Connell, 1997; Firebrace and Holland, 1984; Pateman, 1998). Most commentators have reflected positively on how the new state rose to the challenges of reconstructing a devastated society and economy (Connell, 1997; Pateman, 1998). A first step was political democratization, the principles of which were established in a new constitution that was ratified in 1997. A second step has been multi-sector economic reform, targeting human resource development, agriculture and the environment, finance and banking, trade and industry and natural resource development (Tesfagiorgis, 1993). A hallmark of development in Eritrea has been the principle of ‘unity through diversity’ (Minority Rights Group International, 1997), and features of social reform which have attracted particular attention have been attempts to institutionalize gender equality and to integrate Eritrea’s two main religions – Christianity and Islam – as well as nine ethnic groups. A more controversial principle has been that of self-sufficiency – Eritrea has generally resisted external assistance, and notoriously expelled UN agencies and international NGOs in 1997 (McSpadden, 1999). Another symbol of self-sufficiency in Eritrea was the withdrawal from circulation in 1997 of the Ethiopian currency, and its replacement with a new Eritrean currency – the nakfa. In May 1998, this process of reconstruction became stalled by a conflict with Ethiopia. The causes of the recent Eritro-Ethiopian conflict, which finally came to an end in the last months of 2000, remain unclear. Ostensibly it started as a localized conflict over a small, disputed area of the common border between the two countries. However, most analysts now agree that the border issue did not lie at the heart of the conflict. For some analysts the conflict was essentially economic, sparked off by the decision by Eritrea to launch its own currency (Clapham, 1998). For others, the central issue was strategic, as Ethiopia became land-locked when Eritrea won independence, and has become reliant on access to Eritrean ports. For still others, the conflict was driven by internal politics in Ethiopia, or expansionism by Eritrea. Eritrea’s refugee communities It is within the frame of these transformations in Eritrea that this chapter analyses the transition of Eritrea’s refugee communities. The focus is refugees who fled during the struggle for independence and sought asylum in Europe

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(and also North America). Many refugees were also displaced to neighbouring countries, especially Sudan (Bascom, 1998). In contrast, relatively few Eritrean (or Ethiopian) refugees have been generated by the recent conflict. However, it is estimated that over 60,000 Eritreans have been expelled from Ethiopia since the beginning of the conflict (significant numbers of Ethiopians have also been expelled from Eritrea). In addition, some 250,000 Eritreans have been internally displaced from border areas (ERREC, 1999). There are no accurate data on the size of the Eritrean refugee population in Europe or North America. The main reason is that the refugees were registered upon arrival in most host countries as ‘Ethiopians’, and very few censuses have yet disaggregated Eritrean refugees from Ethiopian refugees. One indicator is the voting figures for the 1993 Referendum for Independence. According to these data, a total of 84,370 votes were cast by Eritreans outside Eritrea (Referendum Commission of Eritrea, 1993). They indicate that the most significant host countries for Eritrean refugees are Saudi Arabia (37,785), the United States and Canada (14,941) and Germany (6,994). Most sources do not dispute assertions by the Eritrean Constitutional Commission that the turnout for the referendum was over 98 per cent (Styan, 1993). Nevertheless, these data almost certainly significantly underestimate the true size of the Eritrean refugee population, because they only cover Eritreans eligible to vote, that is over 18 years of age. In addition, the data are by now some eight years out of date, and as is discussed in greater detail in the following section, the vast majority of Eritrean refugees have remained abroad. In Europe and North America there were broadly three main waves of arrivals of Eritrean refugees during the struggle for independence. The first was in the mid-1970s, and coincided with the deposition of Haile Selassie and the accession of the Derg (military committee) in Ethiopia in 1974. Respondents report that the Derg transformed intermittent harassment of Eritreans into systematic imprisonment and persecution. Many Eritreans fled initially to Sudan, from where resettlement programmes brought them to various countries during the mid-1970s, including the United States, Canada, Germany, the UK and Sweden. The second wave occurred in the year after the so-called ‘Red Star Campaign’, which launched the largest attack by Ethiopia during the struggle, and involved some 90,000 Ethiopian soldiers (Connell, 1997). The final major wave arrived at the end of the 1980s, as the EPLF launched a sustained series of attacks which were to culminate in 1991 with victory. Many Eritreans who arrived at this stage came as ‘unaccompanied minors’ (i.e. unaccompanied children under the age of 18).

From the struggle to independence: the decision not to return and security of status in host countries During the euphoric years immediately after independence, it was widely predicted that most Eritreans abroad would return home. Some eight years

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later, it is clear that this has not been the case. The only reliable data on return to Eritrea from Europe come from Germany, where since 1993 there has been a formal return programme for Eritreans, which incorporates a range of generous incentives (Black et al., 1997). Up to the end of July 1999, 242 individuals had returned under the auspices of the programme, from a total population in Germany of some 25,000. Even though the programme is restrictive, and applies mainly to qualified Eritreans, Eritrean communities in Germany reckon that only a handful more have returned permanently. Similarly, returnees from the UK, the United States, Canada, France and Sweden in Asmara report that no more than fifty people have returned from any one of these countries. Obstacles to return Most Eritreans in the UK and Germany still maintain a ‘dream to return’. But a series of practical obstacles make it unlikely that this dream will be fulfilled in the foreseeable future. The explanation that has recurred most often during interviews has related to the education of children. It is probably a function of the timing of the arrival of Eritrean refugees that in many cases their children were of a school-going age at independence. Although there is one International School in Asmara, its fees are prohibitively expensive, and in other schools the language of instruction until the sixth grade is Tigrinya. Beyond these specific issues, many parents have spoken more generally of the disrupting effect of relocating their children. Another specific obstacle that is often referred to is the housing shortage in Asmara. All land in Eritrea was nationalized upon independence, and the government of Eritrea has placed tight restrictions on further development in Asmara, in a hope to decentralize development. The incoming mayor of Asmara, who took up office in September 1999, admitted during an interview that this policy has been a disincentive for return. One effect has been that rents and house prices are currently beyond the range of the salaries of even senior civil servants (I met several who live in hotels). Ironically, the only people who seem to be able to afford to buy houses in the few new housing developments in Asmara are Eritreans from overseas who are buying them as holiday homes. While these two explanations have recurred most often during discussions, a range of other obstacles compounds them. Some similarly relate to conditions in Eritrea, including low salaries, the absence of social welfare, and a shortage of reliable health facilities. Others are focused on host countries, and include debt – ironically often incurred by people who took out loans for higher education in order to educate themselves to return after independence. Looking to the longer term, many respondents are acutely aware that they will benefit from pension schemes after retirement, which on the whole cannot be transferred to Eritrea.

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As attested by Nigisti’s story, there can also be social obstacles to return. She did stress, however, that even now, after a year back in Asmara, this remains the only clear instance of resentment she has experienced. In contrast to Nigisti, who returned with her husband, Tsuhainesh returned to Asmara from the UK as a single woman. After only six months she returned to the UK. She spoke of an ‘unbearable patriarchal system’, where she was frowned upon for not marrying, where she had no female friends who were unmarried and could not establish platonic friendships with men, and where she experienced at least informal discrimination in the job market. Although Eritreans at home and abroad display a remarkable unity of support for the current government – the EPLF which has renamed itself the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) – it would be naïve to deny that there are opposition groups, and that for their members there may also be political obstacles to return. Generally, opposition groups have coalesced around the political cause of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and/or the religious cause of Islam. Both groups claim that they would be repressed or persecuted were they to return, although such claims are flatly denied by government officials in Asmara, and do not seem to be based on any specific experiences. Still, perceived obstacles can be as powerful as actual obstacles to return. Security of status in host countries Such obstacles to return have been mitigated for most Eritreans by secure status in their host countries. It is a function of the length of Eritrea’s struggle for independence that the majority of Eritreans who fled to Europe and North America had been granted refugee status by independence. Those who arrived in the first ‘wave’ described above were automatically granted refugee status under the terms of resettlement programmes. Although these programmes had mostly ended by the mid-1980s, the arrival of the second ‘wave’ coincided with a period of relative generosity towards refugees, and most reported having received refugee status within a year of arrival. The only group over which uncertainty still hangs are the unaccompanied minors who arrived in the ‘third wave’. While unaccompanied minors tend to be permitted to remain until the age of 18, there is some debate, particularly in Germany, about whether those who have become 18 since independence should now be required to return to Eritrea (after the current conflict). It is also a function of the timing of their arrival that those Eritreans who

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received refugee status in their host countries have been permitted to remain even after it is safe to return to their home country. In some cases, Eritreans have spent long enough periods in their host countries to become entitled to citizenship there – the conditions and required period of residence vary across host countries. Others have gained citizenship through marriage. In most cases, however, Eritreans still have refugee status. Their status was nevertheless granted during a period when refugee status in most industrialized nations conferred de facto (if not de iure) permanent residence rights upon refugees (Hathaway, 1997). This contrasts with contemporary trends in the European Union and United States to grant displaced people only ‘temporary protection’, on the understanding that they will return once it is safe to do so (van Selm-Thorburn, 1998).

Independence 1991–1997: the evolution of links with communities and country of origin The decision by most Eritrean refugees not to return after independence put in place the geographical requirements for their transition into transnational communities. However, the majority of literature on refugees who do stay in their host countries after it is safe to return conforms to what has been described as the ‘citizenship model’ – the focus is integration, and the transition of refugees to ‘ethnic minorities’ (Portes and Rumbaut, 1990). The literature on transnational communities challenges this model – although rarely in the case of refugees. For example, the ‘post-national model’ argues that immigrants have transcended the individual nation-state, thus escaping its hegemony (Kearney, 1995; Rodriguez, 1996). One way this can occur is through migrants deepening long-term links with communities and countries of origin and holding identities from these places, thus producing ‘hybrid’ or ‘transnational’ identities in host countries (Smith, 1998). By focusing on the development of such links, this section demonstrates how the ‘post-national model’ provides a far more accurate explanation than the ‘citizenship model’ of the evolution of Eritrean communities since independence. Links with communities of origin Of the forty-four Eritreans interviewed in the UK and Germany, forty-two have close relatives (defined in the survey as parents, spouses, siblings or offspring) living in Eritrea. Almost all of these maintain close contacts with their relatives – via telephone calls, letters and in a few cases e-mail too. Thirty of the forty-two had returned to Eritrea to visit relatives within the last two years of the interviews (many had planned to visit during the summer of 1998 but cancelled their visits because of the conflict). Indeed, it is estimated by the Minister for Tourism in Asmara that some 40,000 Eritreans from Europe and North America visit Eritrea each year.

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While kinship is one motivation for the maintenance of these transnational networks, another equally important motivation is social obligations relating to the extended family. Forty of the forty-two respondents with close relatives in Eritrea reported that they send to their families – either occasionally or in some cases regularly – remittances, mostly in the form of cash, but also in the form of clothes and other gifts. The Economic Advisor to the President of Eritrea estimates that some US$300 million are remitted by overseas Eritreans each year. A third motivation for the deepening of links with communities of origin relates to status. For most public projects in Eritrea, members of the local community – or other direct beneficiaries – are required to contribute, and they in turn often turn to relatives abroad for support in meeting their payments. By making contributions, Eritreans in the diaspora can raise their status both within the community in which they live and in their ‘home’ communities. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this process is in a small village outside the town of Decamhare, called Mai Edaga, where an individual Eritrean woman who lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, paid 1 million nafka (about £70,000) for the construction of a new mosque. When I interviewed her in Mai Edaga in 1999, her status within the village was apparent, and she told me that she had also earned the respect of both Eritreans and Arabs – especially men – in Jeddah. In addition to links with specific communities of origin, links have also gradually evolved between Eritreans overseas and the wider community in Eritrea. The most important link has been established through the e-mail discussion group DEHAI. The group was founded in 1992 by five Eritreans in the United States. By 1998 membership had grown to 4,000, an average of 523 e-mails were being posted each month, and e-mails were being read over 80,000 times per month. Initially DEHAI’s membership was focused on the US west coast, but within a year its members were widely spread throughout the United States, in Canada, and across Europe. In Eritrea e-mail access remains very limited – one of DEHAI’s founders who now runs an e-mail server in Eritrea estimates that no more than 200 people in Eritrea have access to DEHAI. However, newspapers published in Eritrea are increasingly using DEHAI as a source of information. As several of these publish in Tigrinya, their intervention effectively overcomes restrictions imposed both by access to e-mail and by DEHAI’s usage of English as its main language. Links with the country of origin It is also possible to distinguish links developed between refugees and the Eritrean state since independence. One such link is economic. Since independence, every adult Eritrean in the diaspora has been asked to pay 2 per cent of their annual incomes to the Eritrean state. This rate applies across the entire diaspora, and includes the unemployed and all social categories. Even though it is voluntary, every respondent in this research stated that they pay

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this contribution, and none – not even those in open opposition to the PFDJ – seemed to resent paying. Most Eritreans view the tax not as a burden, but rather as a duty towards their homeland. When I asked one respondent, Taza in Berlin, if he ever thought of missing a payment, he responded: ‘No, because then I would be declaring that I am not an Eritrean.’ Eritreans in the diaspora have also developed political links with the state in Eritrea. The most obvious example of such links was participation in the 1993 Referendum for Independence alluded to earlier in this chapter. After the referendum, they were also closely involved with the drafting of Eritrea’s Constitution, and its ratification in 1997. The diaspora had formal representation in the Assembly of the Constitutional Committee, amounting to six members of a fifty-member assembly. Three separate drafts were circulated to Eritrean communities overseas (as well as within Eritrea), and on each occasion feedback was invited and incorporated into the next draft. According to the President of the Assembly, the contribution of the diaspora was central both to the Constitutional process and to the final wording of several parts of the Constitution. ‘Transnational’ identities Despite the evolution of economic and political links with the Eritrean state, many Eritreans in the diaspora feel that the government of Eritrea has deliberately distanced itself from them since independence. They feel that the government has viewed their economic contributions as purely functional, and their participation in the referendum and Constitution merely as formalities, and they feel that they have been denied the opportunity fully to participate in the development of the new state. These feelings can best be understood in the context of the very close co-operation between the EPLF and the diaspora during the struggle. Through a system of ‘mass organizations’, Eritreans in the diaspora were mobilized by the EPLF to campaign and increase public awareness in their host countries, and to raise money to pay for the costs of the war and of relief and welfare services in the liberated areas. Nevertheless, to a large extent these perceptions are accurate. Government representatives admit that after independence, it became a deliberate policy to encourage the autonomy of the diaspora: When we won Independence, suddenly there didn’t seem to be any need to mobilise the diaspora. Our attitude was that they should get on with their own lives – if they wanted to contribute they should have come home. (Spokesperson for Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Asmara) The most obvious way that this distancing took place was through the closure of EPLF political offices in the main host countries of the diaspora

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immediately after independence in 1991. In their place, local community organizations were established. The government’s formal policy was that all Eritreans would be welcome to return, and that those who chose not to should refocus their energies on their futures in their host countries. The government also closed all the overseas offices of the Eritrean Relief Association (ERA) – an NGO established by the EPLF during the struggle – with the exception of the UK office that had registered itself in the UK as an independent charity. A number of reasons can be suggested for the government’s policy. The most benign is that the government recognized that many Eritreans in the diaspora had made very significant sacrifices – of their free time and money – during the struggle for independence, and that they should now be encouraged to pursue their own lives. It is equally true, however, that the government was concerned to avoid criticism from within the diaspora. There was also a sense of disappointment – betrayal would be too strong – that most Eritreans had chosen not to return, and as a result a determination not to involve them too greatly in determining the future of the state. As a result of the government’s attitude towards Eritreans in the diaspora, many of them have developed contradictory relationships with the state. On the one hand they have maintained links, primarily through economic contributions and political participation. On the other hand, and particularly when compared with their relationships with the struggle, they feel they have been cast off by the state to pursue their lives in host countries. It is perhaps not surprising in this context to find that many Eritreans profess to having confused, or mixed, identities, which also conform to portrayals of ‘transnational identities’: I pay taxes in Britain and Eritrea, I vote in Britain and Eritrea – but I guess I don’t feel like I’m either British or Eritrean. (Amanuel – London)

From peace to conflict: the institutionalization of the diaspora by the Eritrean state Since the transition of Eritrea from peace to conflict, the government of Eritrea has tried to develop closer links with the diaspora once more. Since the beginning of the conflict, this has been taking place in three main ways, and it remains an ongoing process. First, the government has moved to reopen political offices in the principal countries for the diaspora – the United States, Germany and Saudi Arabia. It is planned that senior members of government will be dispatched to these offices. In other host countries the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has instructed embassies and consulates to conduct censuses within the diaspora, to establish a demographic profile and especially a profile of skills and qualifications. Second, the ERA network is also being revitalized, although under a series of new

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names – the Eritrean Development Fund in the United States, Eritrea Hilfswerk in Germany and Citizens for Peace in Canada. Third, the government has initiated an information campaign within the diaspora. One method has been through visits to host countries by government representatives – a senior representative of the Ministry of Justice returned to Asmara in July 1999 after a one-month tour of six countries in Europe and North America, and in July the Secretary-General of the PFDJ attended the annual Eritrean festival in Frankfurt. During these visits seminars have been held at Eritrean community centres, where Eritreans have been invited to ask questions and provide feedback. In another initiative aimed at ‘opening’ the government to the diaspora, the Ministry of Information has begun regularly to post information and respond to questions via DEHAI. In his analysis of the attempts of the Mexican state to develop links with Mexican immigrants in the United States, Robert C. Smith characterizes the process as one of the ‘institutionalization’ of the diaspora. He suggests three reasons. One reason is simply to tap the wealth of the migrants, a second is to try to establish control over autonomous political linkages which have grown between civil society in Mexico and the migrants, and a third is to ‘channel, co-opt and reorganize the disaffected energies of Mexicans in the United States’ (Smith, 1998: 224). Smith’s analysis provides a useful framework for explaining why the government of Eritrea is currently attempting to ‘institutionalize’ the diaspora. Financial contributions The diaspora’s financial contribution has been needed not only to help pay for the rising costs of an army engaged in a protracted conflict, but also to provide relief and assistance to those Eritreans who have been expelled from Ethiopia since the conflict began, to the internally displaced in Eritrea, and to as many as 250,000 other families affected in other ways by the war, for example through the absence of productive members of the household (ERREC, 1999). Eritrea’s dependence on the diaspora has been exacerbated by the government’s deep suspicion of foreign aid. The government has sought financial contributions from the diaspora in a number of ways. Most directly, the contributions already being asked of the diaspora have been increased. Eritreans in the UK are currently being asked to contribute an additional £1 per day, plus a one-off annual payment of £500 for 1999. In Germany, in December 1998 the rate of 2 per cent was raised for one month to 10 per cent, there has been a request for a one-off payment of DM1,000, and Eritreans are also being to asked to contribute an additional DM30 per month. The additional payments continue at the time of writing – mid-2001 – even after the end of the conflict. As another way of raising money, the government issued bonds for the first time in Eritrea at the beginning of 1999. There are seven types, which range in duration from three to ten years, and in cost from US$300 to

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US$1,000. According to the termination date, interest rates vary from 3.5 per cent to 3.69 per cent. The Economic Advisor to the President estimated in July 1999 that already some US$20 million worth of bonds had been purchased in the North America, US$20 million in Europe and US$15 million in the Middle East. Controlling autonomous political linkages The increasing importance of DEHAI, and increasing access to the information from the e-mail discussion group in Eritrea, have challenged the government of Eritrea’s ability to exert political control over its citizens at home and abroad. DEHAI’s archives provide two good examples. The first occurred in March 1999, when, it is agreed by all international observers, Eritrea suffered a heavy defeat by Ethiopia at the Badme border. The government of Eritrea has never formally acknowledged this defeat; however, immediately after Badme DEHAI recorded its highest number of e-mails in any single week since its inception, focused on the thread ‘Are we losing the war?’ In the second example, criticism from Eritreans overseas actually influenced government policy. In March 1998, an Eritrean journalist, Ruth Simon, who was at the time a ‘stringer’ for a French press agency, was imprisoned in Asmara after writing reports critical of the conduct of the government in the new conflict with Ethiopia. Her imprisonment resulted in an intense period of debate and criticism on DEHAI. A senior official at the Ministry of Justice told me during an interview in 1999 that criticism on DEHAI had been an important factor in the decision to release the journalist after two weeks. Just as was found in Smith’s Mexican case study, it seems that another reason why the government in Eritrea is re-engaging with the diaspora is to attempt to influence – if not control – criticism from within the diaspora which has the potential to influence people in Eritrea too. This was particularly important in the context of the recent conflict, in which propaganda proved to be a crucial weapon for the Eritrean state, especially in uniting Eritreans against what was portrayed as aggression from neighbouring Ethiopia. In the longer term, there have already been indications on DEHAI that Eritreans in the diaspora are willing to voice their criticisms over such issues as the government’s attitude to the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech, and over continuing delays in holding democratic, multiparty elections. Channelling the energies of the diaspora A third reason for ‘re-engaging’ with the Eritreans in the diaspora has been to mobilize them as a vehicle to represent and further Eritrea’s cause in the aftermath of the recent conflict within host countries. The main way this has

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been done is through financial collections. On a formal basis, the ERA network has been revitalized primarily in order to raise money among host country NGOs. In the UK, for example, ERA is currently planning a nationwide campaign. Less formally, many local Eritrean community organizations have been raising money through hosting events such as concerts and poetry recitals, as well as organizing street collections. On an individual basis several respondents have organized jumble sales and car boot sales in their neighbourhoods or at local schools. Besides sending money directly to Eritrea, there have been several cases where Eritreans have also used the money they have collected to buy medicines to send back. Eritreans in the diaspora have been rather less successful in championing Eritrea’s cause either through bringing political pressure to bear on their host governments, or through raising the profile of the conflict among host populations and media. On 26 March 1999 a series of ‘Demonstrations for Peace’ took place in assorted cities in Europe and North America. In Frankfurt the march attracted only 200 Eritreans (from a local population of some 10,000), and received no media coverage at all. Reports from three other cities in Germany indicate that marches there were no more successful. For the past few months in the UK various Eritrean community organizations have proposed submitting a petition to the UK government; however, this petition has yet to be produced and circulated for signature. It seems that Eritrean communities in the United States are generally better organized than those in Europe, and recently a letter-writing campaign has been launched on an Eritrean web site. This site automatically identifies the name and address of the local member of Congress, and provides for downloading and signature a letter demanding pressure to be placed on Ethiopia to pay compensation for the Eritreans who have been expelled.

Conclusions: from refugees to transnational communities? Using transformations in Eritrea as an analytical framework, this chapter has tried to chart the transition of Eritrean refugee communities into transnational communities. It has suggested that there have been three crucial processes in this transition: the decision not to return and security of status in host countries; the deepening of links with communities and country of origin which has nourished ‘transnational identities’; and attempts by the Eritrean state to ‘institutionalize’ the diaspora. In the Introduction, the chapter was proposed as one way of incorporating refugees into the mainstream of transnational community studies. However, if this specific case study is to support the broader proposition, three qualifications need to be considered. First, to what extent have these processes of transition applied across all Eritreans in the diaspora? Second, to what extent can they be expected to apply to other refugee communities? And third, to what extent is this a permanent transition, or might ‘transnationals’ equally transform into refugees?

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Differentiation between Eritreans in the diaspora By no means would it be accurate to suggest that every Eritrean has ‘transformed’ from a refugee into a transnational, and the chapter has alluded to several reasons. Clearly, for example, obstacles to returning to Eritrea apply to some refugees more than others. It was suggested that obstacles have been particularly acute for those with young children, for those without sufficient funds to buy a home in Asmara, for young single women, and for Eritreans in opposition to the PFDJ. As a corollary, not every Eritrean has secured his or her status in a host country. In particular doubts have been raised in Germany over the long-term security of those Eritreans who arrived as unaccompanied minors at the beginning of the 1990s. Similar variation can be identified in the other two processes in the transition. It was shown how the deepening of links with communities of origin have been motivated by kinship, social obligations and status. Plainly, however, such motivations only apply to those Eritreans who actually have relatives still living in Eritrea. Similarly, even though every respondent involved in this research reported regularly paying contributions to the Eritrean state and participating in the referendum and Constitutional political processes, most respondents also know of other Eritreans who have not maintained these links with the state. There are certainly cases of Eritreans who cannot be described as having developed ‘transnational identities’ – who are either actively making plans to return to Eritrea, or who psychologically have ‘abandoned’ their Eritrean identities. It is also clear and understandable that the government’s efforts to ‘institutionalize’ Eritreans in the diaspora have focused specifically on political supporters. From the opposite perspective, it is not just political opponents who have sometimes resisted the government’s policies. Many Eritreans simply cannot afford the extra payments that are being requested of them, and deeply resent the way that the government has effectively exposed their lack of economic success in host countries. Applicability to other refugee communities It is also worth considering to what extent the three processes of transition might also be expected to be found among other refugee communities. First, it is clear that refugee repatriation has often proved to be a far more difficult solution to achieve than is often expected (Koser and Black, 1998). Although the very low rate of return that has taken place amongst Eritreans may be unusual, the general decision by the majority not to return at least in the short to medium term is not unusual, particularly amongst refugee communities in the industrialized nations. Just like the Eritreans, most refugee communities who arrived in the industrialized nations before the 1990s have also effectively secured their status in these host countries. There is, however, a new momentum in these countries to reform the refugee regime so that protection becomes tempo-

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rary rather than conferring permanent residence rights. ‘Temporary protection’ may result in increasing returns among ‘refugee’ communities, and thus undermine their potential to evolve into transnational communities. It is certainly true that many Kosovar Albanian ‘refugees’ who were granted ‘temporary protection’ in states of the European Union have already returned to Kosovo. On the other hand, the majority of Bosnians, who were also granted various forms of ‘temporary protection’ in the EU, have not returned, and indeed many have secured a more permanent status (Koser and Black, 1999). Nevertheless, and depending on one’s perspective on the value of transnational communities, the undermining of the potential for refugees to evolve into transnationals might be added to the growing list of criticisms of ‘temporary protection’ (Koser and Black, 1999). A general lack of research makes it difficult to assess the extent to which other refugee communities also maintain links with their communities and country of origin. Specific case studies might support the assertion that they do: of remittance behaviour amongst Cuban and Nicaraguan refugees (Diaz-Briquets and Perez-Lopez, 1997), and of political linkages with ongoing struggles in their home countries by Tamil asylum seekers in Switzerland (McDowell, 1997) and Kurdish refugees in the UK and Finland (Wahlbeck, 1999). More generally, such studies would seem to contradict the assumption so often made of refugees in the literature, ‘that to become uprooted and removed from a national community is automatically to lose one’s identity, traditions and culture’ (Malkki, 1995: 508). In a similar plea for further research on this subject, Daniele Joly argues that ‘refugees’ pattern of group formation and social interaction with the receiving society must be examined in relation to their position within and vis-à-vis the structure of conflict in the society of origin’ (Joly, 1996). For the same reason of a lack of research, it is similarly difficult to draw conclusions about the extent to which other governments are willing to involve or ‘institutionalize’ refugees in the diaspora – even those who have opted not to return after the end of a conflict or struggle for independence. Clearly a crucial factor will be the final outcome of the conflict and the political affiliations of the refugees with the new government. Where there are not major political obstacles, there seems no reason not to assume that for reasons similar to those found in the Eritrean case – mobilizing financial contributions, controlling autonomous political linkages and channelling the energies of the diaspora – other states may also benefit from institutionalizing refugees. From transnationals to refugees? The principal theoretical implication of this chapter is that it might be possible to conceive of refugee communities and transnational communities as co-existing on a single continuum. The question that arises is that if refugees can move along this continuum to ‘transform’ into transnationals,

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to what extent can the transformation take place in the opposite direction along the continuum? The chapter has alluded to several ways that this might occur for Eritreans. For example, multi-party elections in Eritrea might result in a government that attracts less support among Eritreans in the diaspora, thus reducing linkages between them and the state. However, in the short term, the most important factor will be the developments following the end of the conflict with Ethiopia. It has been shown how, between independence and the beginning of the conflict, the government of Eritrea adopted a deliberate policy to ‘distance’ or ‘disengage’ Eritreans in the diaspora. Several government representatives in retrospect feel that this was a mistake, and that the diaspora might usefully have been more centrally involved in the process of post-conflict reconstruction. What remains to be seen is whether, and how, the state will maintain the current level of mobilization amongst Eritreans in the diaspora now that the conflict is over, to target their contributions on the many challenges that still lie ahead.

Notes 1 2

The project is funded by the ESRC Transnational Communities Research Programme. It is a comparative study of Eritrea and Bosnia, co-ordinated jointly by University College London and the University of Sussex. To ensure anonymity all names used in this paper are pseudonyms.

Part III

Transnational communities and the transformation of home

10 Mobilizing for the transformation of home Politicized identities and transnational practices Fiona B. Adamson Introduction1 Contemporary patterns of migration, and the transnational communities formed by such patterns, cannot be understood without taking into account their relationship to global inequalities in levels of political and economic development. The relationship of migration-based transnational communities to their ‘homes’ is therefore often a deeply ambivalent one – on the one hand, the concept of ‘home’ provides a means of maintaining dense social networks and articulating social, cultural and political identities within new contexts. On the other hand, many of the transnational communities that are analysed in this volume are produced in part as a consequence of severe economic dislocation, political repression or violent protracted conflict in their home states. The relationship of a transnational community to its ‘home’ is therefore as likely to be defined by a desire for transformation, contestation and political change as it is by nostalgia, continuity and tradition. The political activities that make up the repertoire of transnational strategies and practices employed by members of transnational communities for the transformation of home is a subject that has been understudied in the literature on migration, which has tended to focus to a greater extent on issues of citizenship, incorporation and political participation of migrants within their ‘host states’ (Ireland, 1994; Koopmans and Statham, 2001; Soysal, 1994). Yet, as the essays by Østergaard-Nielsen and Ellis and Khan in this volume demonstrate, the distinction that is commonly made between participation in a host state polity and practices directed towards transforming the home state is an artificial one. This is one of the many reasons why the concept of ‘transnational communities’, which has been coined largely by anthropologists and sociologists, should also be of interest to political scientists. Without the transnational perspective afforded by conceptual categories such as ‘transnational community’ or ‘diaspora’ it is difficult to theorize the ways in which political conditions and political activities in migration-receiving states are connected to dynamics of domestic political change and transformation in migration-sending states. The transnational political strategies and practices which are carried out by

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migration-based networks and transnational communities have been largely ignored by the literature in political science, since they tend to ‘fall between the cracks’ of the subfields of comparative politics, which concerns itself with politics within the state, and international relations, which concerns itself with interactions between state actors. This chapter sets forth a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of transnational communities on the ‘transformation of home’ by focusing on three ways in which political entrepreneurs within transnational communities mobilize politically as a means of effecting political change in their home country. First, members of transnational communities can use the political space of the transnational community as a site for the mobilization of identities, discourses and narratives that either challenge or reinforce the official hegemonic discourse of the home state regime. Second, members of transnational communities may work for political change by networking with a variety of state and non-state actors, such as NGOs, in order to raise international awareness, thereby increasing pressures for political change in the home state. Third, actors within a transnational community can mobilize and transfer resources directly to actors in the home country, thus altering the local balance of resources and power. These three ways of ‘transforming home’ all take place within the context of transnational political fields that stretch between and therefore tie together the political environments of home and host states.

Migration-based transnational communities and transnational political fields The anthropological and sociological literature on transnational communities has outlined how new and cheaper communication and transportation technologies change the dynamics of migration by allowing migrant communities to play social and political roles in both their host and home societies (Basch et al., 1994; Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Georges, 1990; Appadurai, 1991; Danforth, 1995; Portes, 1996). Migration-based transnational networks or transnational communities provide just one example of the types of sustained cross-border social interactions that are now possible owing to advances in information, communication and transportation technologies. They are particularly illustrative of the nature of globalization processes, however, in that the transnational communities formed by migration demonstrate how contemporary globalization processes ‘unbundle’ various elements of the nation-state, such as territory, national identity and political community (Basch et al., 1994; Ruggie, 1998). Examining the political activities of transnational communities therefore provides a useful means of critiquing the standard categories we use for understanding the nature of political life, and for expanding our analysis of politics to include practices which take place in the transnational spaces which exist ‘beyond’ or ‘between’ states.

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Until recently, much of the literature on migration had assumed that immigrants either assimilate into a host country society and engage in ethnic or immigrant politics within their host society, or migrate temporarily with the plan to return eventually to their country of origin. Today, however, there is an increased awareness in the literature of the role that global communication infrastructures play in allowing ethnic enclaves and migrant communities to maintain sustained diasporic connections with other enclaves, and real or imaginary homelands over time. This means that migration-based communities increasingly define themselves and articulate political identities and demands that are formed within a transnational and global, as opposed to simply a local or national, context. The political identities and interests of migrant communities are therefore partially deterritorialized and disembedded from their local and national contexts, and re-embedded within the structures of an increasingly integrated global economy. These processes contribute to the formation of dense transnational political fields that stretch between migration-sending and migration-receiving states. How are we to understand the politics which takes place in the new transnational spaces created by globalization, and what types of practices do migration-based transnational communities engage in within these new transnational political fields? Are the political practices carried out by transnational communities of consequence for our understanding of processes of domestic political transformation and change in migrationsending states? While the conventional wisdom of political science views diasporic practices and activities as marginal to larger questions of international relations or domestic political transformation, this ignores the important role that transnational communities play as conduits for the flow of information and resources between migration-receiving and migrationsending states. The important economic role that migration diasporas play through labour remittances and other financial transfers is a case in point. With the global value of migrant labour remittances estimated at $75 billion annually, the economic stakes for migration-sending states are high.2 Remittances to Algeria total almost $1 billion annually, to India over $3 billion annually, to Egypt almost $5 billion annually, and to Pakistan approximately $3.2 billion annually, constituting the country’s largest single source of foreign exchange earnings and financing 86 per cent of the country’s trade deficit.3 This economic power of transnational communities is matched by their potential political power. Many migration-sending states have already recognized this and have attempted to harness the political power of diasporas as domestic actors within the political system of migration-receiving states. Cyprus, for example, holds an annual conference of its diaspora in which diaspora elites are treated as VIPs and mobilized politically to lobby on the Cyprus issue. This tactic has produced a strong and vocal Greek–Cypriot lobby in the UK, which seeks to maintain British support

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for a united Cyprus (Demetriou, 2001). Similarly, a number of East European countries have organized diaspora lobbies, which together played a crucial role in mobilizing support in the United States for the eastward expansion of NATO (Grayson, 1999). Such patterns have been labelled by Huntington and others as the ‘domination of foreign policy by transnational and non-national ethnic interests’ (Huntington, 1997). Yet a return to a ‘unified national interest’ assumes either that it is both possible and desirable to put the breaks on globalization and limit transnational flows, or that foreign policy making should not reflect current realities. As Shain has argued, a multi-cultural foreign-policy making process accurately reflects the identities and interests of a multi-cultural society in a globalizing world (Shain, 1995). Diasporas and migration-based transnational communities form bridges that stretch between and connect migration-sending and migration-receiving states within the context of an increasingly global economy. What these bridges carry, and how they impact upon the domestic politics and foreign relations of the home and host states, will obviously vary based on a wide range of factors. This makes it difficult to speak in general terms about the ‘impact’ or ‘behaviour’ of transnational communities on either host or home states, as has been attempted in much of the literature. In reality, the increased ‘diasporization’ of ethnic groups around the world is a structural development related to the new opportunities for communication and transportation presented by available technologies. Owing to the fact of uneven globalization, however, which creates discrepancies in the economic and political opportunities across states, it can be hypothesized that transnational communities have access to resources and strategies which can play a significant role in affecting the course of domestic political change in their home societies. This access to resources and political networks in the context of uneven economic globalization constitutes one of the reasons why the relationship between ‘people who leave’ and ‘people who stay’ in the home state is often fraught with ambivalence (van Hear in this volume). One of the ways of modelling the relationship which exists between the home state, host state and transnational community is through a ‘triadic model’ which has been put forth by authors such as Weiner (1970) and Sheffer (1986). The triadic model portrays the relationship between transnational communities, home states and host states as a three-way interaction that produces a variety of feedback and interaction effects. What this triadic model fails to capture, however, and what is clearly demonstrated by many of the case studies in this volume, is the degree of internal differentiation and complexity found in most transnational communities, and the resulting difficulty of making any concrete generalizations about their political activities (or lack of political activities, as most members of a community may well be largely apolitical). In other words, the triadic model conceives of both transnational communities and states as being unitary actors, which ignores the fact that transnational communities, like other communities, are

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‘stratified by class, caste, education, occupation, religious affiliation, cultural interests, urban or rural background, and so forth’ (Werbner, 1999: 24). The social spaces inhabited by transnational communities are not uniform but should rather be viewed as constituting what Appadurai refers to as a ‘diasporic public sphere’ (Appadurai, 1996: 147). The internal variegation and complexity of any transnational community is especially important to keep in mind when one examines the ways in which it influences the direction of political transformation in the home country. There is, of course, a danger of reifying a certain segment of political activities within a given transnational community, without regard to the larger political context or the extent to which such activities are representative of the full spectrum of political actors and stances within the community. The types of political activities employed by members of a transnational community to effect a transformation in their ‘home’ not only vary in terms of character and intensity, but may also be the subject of highly contested debate and discussion within the transnational community itself. A fruitful way of analysing the political activities of transnational communities is to view the interlocking networks which characterize a transnational community as constituting a transnational social space which is partially embedded in and interacts with other networks, institutions and social spaces in its environs, while at the same time retaining its quality as a partially autonomous space defined by a common homeland or migration experience.4 The political identities and networks that inhabit this space stretch across and interpenetrate the spatial and institutional structures of states, thus functioning as ‘bridges’ that connect migration-sending and migration-receiving states. Embedded in the transnational social space formed by a migration-based transnational community is a corresponding transnational political field that is open to contestation, mobilization and/or capture by political entrepreneurs. To adapt Brubaker’s reading of Bourdieu, which he uses to conceptualize a national minority straddling state borders, we can view a transnational community not as a fixed entity or a unitary group but rather in terms of the field of differentiated and competitive positions or stances adopted by different organisations, parties, movements, or individual political entrepreneurs, each seeking to ‘represent’ the [community] to its own putative members, to the host state, or to the outside world, each seeking to monopolise the legitimate representation of the group. (Brubaker, 1996: 61) The specific character of the contested political field which surrounds any given transnational community will vary significantly, largely as a function of the interrelationship between political opportunity structures and

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incentives in both migration-sending and migration-receiving states, as well as the larger political context provided by regional institutions, international norms and other factors.5

Transforming ‘home’ from abroad: political identities, strategies and practices What are the concrete strategies and practices available to actors in migration-based transnational communities who wish to transform the domestic politics of their home countries? In this section, three avenues for effecting political change in the home country are briefly outlined and explored. These three avenues include: (1) the construction of new political identities and discourses within transnational spaces; (2) the development of networks and lobbying relationships with ‘third parties’ which may include hostcountry governments and political parties, international organizations (IOs) or NGOs; and (3) the direct provision of material resources to political actors within the home state. The transnational community as a ‘space’ for constructing new political identities and discourses The political activities of transnational communities take place within networks and structures that stretch across two or more states. As political actors situated at the interstices of states, members of transnational communities are able to reframe and rearticulate their political identities in ways that can either challenge or strategically reinforce hegemonic conceptions of national identity in both the home and the host states. The ‘home’, in a sense, becomes the ‘transnational space’ which is constructed and inhabited by the transnational community. Several of the case studies in this volume point to examples of strong political or religious identities within transnational communities which run counter to official constructions of national identity in those communities’ home states. For example, Syrian Christian and Kurdish nationalist identities (see Armbruster and also ØstergaardNielsen in this volume), as well as a range of other religious identities, such as Alevi, Nurcu and politicized Islamist identities, are all examples of articulations – and, in some cases, constructions or reconstructions – of political identities which are subjected to various degrees of political suppression in the home state of Turkey. Østergaard-Nielsen (this volume) points to the ways in which the articulation and attempt to achieve political recognition of a Kurdish identity involves strategies which are directed both ‘inwardly’ towards the transnational community and ‘outwardly’ towards the larger German and West European publics. In addition, however, much of the articulation of a Kurdish nationalist identity has taken place in ‘spaces’ which are explicitly transnational in ways that bypass official state discourses and hegemonic

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constructions of identity in both the host and the home state. In the 1980s cassettes and video cassettes, and since the 1990s, satellite television, have been used to foster and systematize an independent Kurdish national identity in the dispersed communities living throughout Western Europe. This has involved the standardization of language, national history and cultural practices, and the production of a body of cultural symbols, such as music, art and literature (van Bruinessen, 1998). Kurdish nationalism in the diaspora is therefore actively constituted through the social construction of national symbols, practices and identifications by political elites, and consists of more than simply the maintenance or politicization of cultural and affective ties with an ancestral homeland. The construction and mobilization of a Kurdish nationalist identity by members of this transnational community has been so successful that the number of self-identified Kurds in Germany and Western Europe has steadily increased over the past twenty years (Leggewie, 1996). Kurdish political entrepreneurs in Europe have therefore been able to produce and sustain an alternative ‘imagined community’ beyond that defined by either the host state which they reside in, or the home state from which they emigrated.6 The communications technology which characterizes current processes of globalization has made it possible for dispersed communities of Kurdish activists and intellectuals to pool their assets and thereby take advantage of the variations in resources and political opportunity structures which exist between different states. This division of labour and pooling of resources is manifested, for example, in the organizational structure of a Kurdish satellite television station that broadcasted as MEDTV between 1995 and 1999, and as MEDYA-TV since February 2000. The headquarters of the Kurdish station is in London, from where it broadcasts via satellite to Europe, North Africa and the Near East. Most of the production work, however, is carried out in various other European capitals, at studios in Brussels, Berlin, Stockholm and Moscow. This transnational organizational structure makes use of the various resources available in local contexts – for example, the studio in Sweden produces cultural and children’s programming, taking advantage of the fact that the Swedish state sponsors the translation of children’s literature into Kurdish and pays for children’s native language programming, whereas the studio in Moscow is responsible for more technical tasks such as dubbing and providing subtitles (Hassanpour, 1998; 1997: 246). Many observers agree that satellite television has played an important role in developing and expanding the use of Kurmanji and other Kurdish languages/dialects (as opposed to Turkish) within the Kurdish diaspora community in Western Europe. In addition to reaching the Kurdish diaspora, MEDYA-TV is able to bypass Turkish state authorities and broadcast in Turkey, despite Turkish laws against broadcasts in Kurdish. The existence of Kurdish satellite television poses a problem for Turkey, since satellite programming of all kinds (including CNN and MTV) is widely popular. As it is not technically

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possible to ban such broadcasting, the government’s only options are to use diplomatic means to shut down the station (which were successful in 1999) or to intimidate potential viewers or destroy satellite dishes. The existence of Kurdish satellite television therefore ‘reflects both the problems Turkey has in suppressing Kurdish identity in the age of technology and open borders, as well as the growing role of the usually wealthier and better educated Kurdish diaspora in Europe’ (Marcus, 1995). The Kurdish example demonstrates how alternative ethnic or religious identities can flourish in the diaspora, away from state controls on language use, religious practice and political expression. Cultural and religious associations, which serve as social centres for migrant and ethnic communities, may take on highly symbolic and politicized meanings within the context of the transnational political fields which stretch between host and home states. Transnational communities are physically removed from the coercive and juridical powers of the migration-sending state, and – at least in cases where the migration-receiving states are liberal democracies – are relatively free to engage in cultural and political practices which depart from those which are officially sanctioned in the home state. This can lead to the strengthening of identities that are repressed within the migration-sending state or even facilitate the creation of new political identities, which are then reimported into the home state from the diaspora abroad. Some commentators, for example, argue that the ‘imaginary homeland’ of Khalistan is largely a result of the success that overseas Sikh communities have had in creating or rearticulating a politicized Sikh identity through the use of technology and transnational strategies of political mobilization to counteract official constructions of identity by the Indian state (Appadurai, 1996; Dusenbery, 1995). One may also note the success of Tibetan and Uigur exile groups in challenging official constructions of Chinese state identity from abroad. The transnational community as a transnational advocacy network and social movement A second way that actors in migration-based transnational communities can organize to effect a political transformation in their home state is by mobilizing to raise international awareness of the domestic political or economic conditions which they seek to change. The importance of ethnic lobbying has long been studied as a feature of US politics, but fewer studies have examined this process in other political contexts. Both Østergaard-Nielsen and Ellis and Khan in this volume point to the ways in which political actors in transnational communities have been successful to various degrees in gaining access to the political systems of Germany and the UK as a means of articulating grievances and engaging in homeland politics. In the cases of Kurds in Germany and Kashmiris in the UK, access to hostcountry political systems has been gained by networking with political

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parties or actively engaging in local or national politics by supporting candidates or running for office. As Østergaard-Nielsen notes, this has been a strategy taken up even by the Kurdish community in Germany, despite the fact that many members of that community do not have full citizenship rights. Political scientists have recently devoted attention to studying political lobbying and advocacy work that goes beyond the national level and either links or bypasses individual states. Much of the literature has focused on transnational advocacy and principled-issue networks in areas such as human rights, women’s rights and the environment (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Risse et al., 1999; Wapner, 1995). This literature provides a useful means of analysing the political strategies available to members of transnational communities, since it reminds us of the multiple channels at local, regional and global levels that can be used by political entrepreneurs as a means of bringing about political change. Parallels can be made, for example, between the methods used by human rights organizations to lobby transnationally for domestic change in target countries, and the strategies available to political actors in transnational communities. Both types of actors can help to put issues on the international agenda and engage in framing activities that reshape public opinion on a specific issue. Both can empower and legitimate certain forms of domestic opposition groups in the target state or, in the case of a transnational community, of the home state. And both can engage in actions that simultaneously create political pressures from above and below for specific states (Risse et al., 1999; Brysk, 1993). Members of transnational communities who seek political transformation of their homeland therefore engage in many of the same strategies and practices as other transnational advocacy networks. At the same time, part of their strategy often includes coalition building with other types of advocacy networks. Thus, successful framing strategies will be targeted not just to the general public, but to specific NGO and principled-issue network constituencies. For example, coalition building with human rights NGOs will involve framing political events in the home country in the discourse of human rights violations. Successful framing will increase the level of public and international awareness of the political situation in the home country and open up new avenues for pressing for political change from both above and below. In their efforts to press for political change, actors in transnational communities often put much effort into setting up and providing alternative sources of information regarding the political situation in their homeland. These alternative sources of information highlight features of the political situation in the ‘home’ that are either underreported or suppressed by media in the home and/or host states. Thus, information networks, web sites and educational events all serve to inform and mobilize the general public about political conditions in the ‘home’. In cases of severe suppression of information, such as is the case in the civil conflict in Algeria, access to unofficial

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sources of information is heavily dependent on personal networks, travel or cell phone conversations. Once attained through these avenues the information is then redistributed through press outlets within the Algerian transnational community in Europe (Silverstein, 2000). Increasingly, web sites play an important role as venues for the provision of alternative sources of information. A number of studies of political mobilization in the diaspora have highlighted the importance of the Internet. Sikh diaspora web sites, for example, regularly carry information on torture and disappearances in the Punjab (Axel, 2001), and similar information regarding the political situation in Sri Lanka is carried by Tamil web sites (Fuglerud, 1999). Depending on the political opportunity structures available to members of a transnational community, transnational political strategies that seek to effect political transformation in the home state may take place either within or outside institutional channels in the host and home states. In addition to lobbying and providing information through formalized institutional channels, therefore, political action may also involve a wide range of activities and strategies that bypass formal institutions. When access is denied to formal channels, or resources are too limited to engage in collective action targeting formal institutions, social movements compensate by engaging in contentious politics as a means of agenda setting and raising public awareness. Contentious politics refers to strategies which groups use to challenge and confront elites, authorities and opponents, and includes strategies of political violence, mass demonstrations and large-scale protests, civil disobedience and other creative disruptions (Tarrow, 1998: 2–4, 91–105). Strategies of contention, which have long been a part of local and national social protests and social movements, are increasingly being organized transnationally, and are becoming part of the repertoire which transnational communities use to engage in the politics of ‘transforming home’. The types of contentious politics engaged in, of course, can vary immensely, from organized demonstrations, to organized political violence, to setting up parallel institutions, such as governments or parliaments in exile, which challenge the legitimacy of home state institutions (Shain, 1991). Collective action, writes Tarrow, becomes contentious when it is used by people who lack regular access to institutions, who act in the name of new or unaccepted claims, and who behave in ways that fundamentally challenge others or authorities. … Contentious collective action [is employed] because it is the main and often the only recourse that ordinary people possess against betterequipped opponents or powerful states. (Tarrow 1998: 3) By this definition, therefore, it is not surprising, given the economic and political marginalization which many members of transnational communi-

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ties have experienced in both host and home states, that attempts to effect political change and a transformation of ‘home’ often involve repertoires of contention and identity formation processes which critique and call into question official state discourses and policies in both migration-sending and migration-receiving states. Transnational communities and the mobilization and transfer of material resources A growing body of literature has begun to highlight the role that members of transnational communities play in providing material support for armed conflicts within the so-called homeland. A World Bank report, for example, found that countries which had recently experienced internal conflict and which had unusually large American diasporas had a 36 per cent chance of conflict recurring, whereas countries with an unusually small diaspora had only a 6 per cent chance of conflict recurring. The report claims that ‘diasporas appear to make life for those left behind much more dangerous in post-conflict situations’ (Collier, 2000: 6). Other authors have reached similar conclusions. Benedict Anderson, for example, argues that transnational communities are increasingly marked by a politics of ‘long-distance nationalism’ that he describes as a serious politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. The participant rarely pays taxes in the country in which he does his politics; he is not answerable to his judicial system … he need not fear prison, torture, or death, nor need his immediate family. But, well and safely positioned in the First World, he can send money and guns, circulate propaganda, and build intercontinental computer information circuits, all of which can have incalculable consequences in the zones of their ultimate destinations. … That same metropole that marginalises and stigmatises [the migrant] also allows him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero. (Anderson: 1998; 74) The financial contributions of diaspora and exile communities raise tens of millions of dollars annually for opposition groups around the world. Such funds, of course, differ from labour remittances in that they are collected and redistributed by organized opposition movements that are actively engaged in challenging the legitimacy of the home state government. The means of collecting such political contributions varies from voluntary donations and the sale of political literature, to collecting ‘taxes’ either voluntarily or through coercion, to a range of illegal activities, including extortion or organized crime. In addition, transnational communities provide a source of recruitment of volunteers and combatants for many armed opposition groups engaged in violent struggles in the home country.

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According to a US State Department report (1996), many active, nonstate, armed organizations are financed by revenues from expatriate or diaspora communities. A classical case is the financial support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by the Irish community in the United States, but dozens of other examples exist. Tamil groups, for example, raise more than a million dollars every month in Canada, according to the police, and the diaspora community is so important to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that a portion of its leadership moved to London in order to better manage their empire of fundraising and financing activities.7 Similarly, Sikh diaspora organizations raise millions of dollars every year for fighting the conflict in the Punjab.8 And it is well documented that the transnational community of Kosovars and Albanians provided a source of both financial support and recruits for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The 3 per cent war tax on all earnings abroad was collected by the KLA’s ‘Homeland Calling’ fund, and the Zurich-based newspaper Voice of Kosovo routinely appealed for donations to the KLA (Hedges, 1999). Active political organizing of transnational communities can serve either to protract or hasten a resolution of violent conflicts in the home country. At the minimum, political organizing around home-country conflicts makes it difficult for migration-sending states unproblematically to employ force and domestic political repression as a means of resolving protracted political and armed conflicts. Such policies receive increased media scrutiny as a result of the efforts of transnational communities to raise international awareness. Perhaps more importantly, such policies are rendered partially ineffective, owing to the relocation of sites of political organizing and strategic planning to locations outside of the physical territory and legal jurisdiction of the migration-sending state.

Transnational mobilization and the political transformation of ‘home’ This chapter has outlined three activities – identity-based political mobilization; the raising of international awareness; and the provision of material resources to actors in the home state – as strategies which can significantly alter the political landscape of ‘home’. These activities, which are examples of how transnational communities can affect the dynamics of political change in their ‘home’ countries, have received scant attention in either the comparative politics or international relations literature in political science. The main premise of the literature on transnational communities – that migrants are social and political actors in both their home and host countries, and that they ‘live lives stretched across national borders … [and] take actions, make decisions and develop subjectivities and identities that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-states’ (Basch et al., 1994: 4 and 6), provides a useful theoretical perspective and empirical resource for modelling some of the transnational dimensions of domestic political

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change, thereby highlighting forms of political action ‘from below’ that are neither strictly international nor domestic, but are rather characterized by political practices which take place within transnational spaces. There are at least three important areas of future research that would shed further light on the impact of political organizing by migration-based transnational communities on domestic political change in their home countries. The first area for future research concerns the impact of domestic factors in the host, or migration-receiving, state on the type and extent of transnational political organizing around home country politics by transnational communities. A number of potentially important factors to examine would include the available avenues for and rates of political participation by transnational communities in host country politics; the forms of migration incorporation regimes in the host country and form of integration (or lack of integration) into host country social, cultural and political institutions; economic opportunities and stratification of the transnational community; and foreign policy orientation of the host country towards the home country. A second area which would benefit from further research regards the type and range of responses of home state regimes to the forms of political organizing which have been discussed in this chapter. Just as the political identifications and mobilization strategies employed by transnational communities are partially deterritorialized and partially disembedded from their original geographical settings, migration-sending states are counteracting this by adopting a variety of strategies, which range from the enactment of policies designed to formally incorporate the political activities of transnational communities into home country political institutions; to creating incentives for citizens or co-ethnics abroad to maintain their political loyalties to the home state; or to putting pressure on the governments of migration-receiving states to repress certain forms of political organizing by transnational communities within their territories. Finally, it is useful to ask to what extent transnational political organizing by migrant and diaspora communities is a new phenomenon, and to what extent it is an old phenomenon that is simply acquiring new characteristics or a new symbolic meaning in an age of globalization. In other words, are the ways in which transnational communities are impacting upon home country politics today significantly different from past examples of transnational organizing which have sought to politically transform the ‘home’ – for example, by overseas Chinese in the 1911 revolution; the Jewish diaspora in the creation of Israel; or the activities of Irish-Americans over time with respect to the conflict in Northern Ireland (Cohen, 1997)? Is contemporary migration-based transnational organizing around home country politics a qualitatively new phenomenon that can best be understood by thinking in terms of the impact of globalizing processes on the changing nature of political mobilization? Or, on the other hand, is transnational organizing ‘from below’ a long-standing feature of domestic political change that has

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simply been ignored by the mainstream literature of political science? This general question of newness, of course, is a question that plagues the literatures on both transnational communities and globalization – but which also has important theoretical implications for the way in which political scientists conceptualize the relationship between the international and domestic realms of political life.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Thanks to Khalid Koser and Eva-Østergaard-Nielsen for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and to Madeleine Demetriou for many interesting discussions on the topic of transnational communities. Support for this research was provided by a Social Science Research Council–MacArthur Foundation Fellowship on Peace and Security in a Changing World. Martin (1994), cited in Vertovec and Cohen (1999). World Bank (1995) and Noman (1991), cited in Werbner (1999). On migration and transnational social spaces see Faist (2000). Political opportunity structures are defined as the external institutional and material resources available to a group for the purposes of engaging in contentious collective action. See Tarrow (1998: 18–20). See Anderson (1983) on the concept of an imagined national community. Wayland (1999) and Neue Zürcher Zeitung 19–20 June 1999 (‘Neue Militär Offensive in Sri Lanka’). Thandi (1996: 232), cited in Axel (2001: 140).

11 The Kashmiri diaspora Influences in Kashmir Patricia Ellis and Zafar Khan

Kashmiris have a long history of migration not only within the South Asian subcontinent but also to the West. Whilst most of this migration can be categorized as ‘economic’ in impetus, the complexities of the political situation surrounding Kashmir since 1947 have influenced population movements as well as contributing to the development of particular and enduring identifications within the diaspora. The nature of the social, economic and political networks that have evolved within and between the diasporic communities and the homeland bear all the hallmarks of a transnational community. Portes et al. (1999) suggest three types of transnationalism: economic, political and socio-cultural; and two levels of action initiation: those undertaken by powerful institutional actors and those that are the results of grassroots initiatives. ‘Most social scientists working in the field may agree that “transnationalism” broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states’ (Vertovec, 1999: 447). In this chapter we identify the nature of ties and the range of interactions between members of the diaspora and of the population in Kashmir including examples of all three types and at both the institutional and grassroots level. The processes and activities involve significant proportions of the relevant communities and have stability and continuity over time and across borders. It is on this basis that the Kashmiris can be seen as operating as a ‘transnational community’. Particular focus is given to those interactions and institutional linkages that are concerned with political influence in the affairs of Azad Kashmir and also with the politics of the wider ‘Kashmir situation’, and this latter is illustrated by a case study of a rally organized in London during summer 1999. The research that forms the basis of this chapter was undertaken in the UK as well as in Azad Kashmir1 and is supplemented by contacts with political actors in the diaspora in Western Europe and North America.

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Kashmiris: a territorial or deterritorialized nation? The formation of the Kashmiri diaspora and its continuing development and activities are integrally bound up with the events of 1947 which left the status of Kashmir in dispute. It is this political situation which has contributed to the Kashmiris operating as a transnational community. This means that no study of the diaspora can be meaningfully undertaken without an understanding of this history. The ‘Kashmir dispute’ is ever present in the politics of South Asia. The situation has simmered for over fifty years with much loss of Kashmiri lives and two major wars over Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Since May 1999, there has been renewed fighting involving the Indian and Pakistani governments in not only a war of words as well as military engagement but a potential threat of nuclear confrontation. As Jalal concluded in her analysis of political developments in South Asia: By far the most serious problem in the region is the popularly backed armed uprising in Kashmir that raises the spectre of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. An acute manifestation of India’s federal dilemma, Kashmir also exemplifies the inter-connectedness of domestic, regional and international problems. It is a supreme irony of the times that a region with a long history of working out creative political arrangements based on layers of sovereignty appears today to have declared sovereignty a non-negotiable issue. (Jalal, 1995: 158) This ‘dispute’ between the two major powers of South Asia stems from the British withdrawal from its Indian Empire. Kashmir was not part of British India but was the fourth largest of the 565 princely states. Under the Act of Independence, the rulers of all these states were empowered to accede to either India or Pakistan if they wished, with the proviso that they took into account the geographic contiguity, religious composition and wishes of their people. It was the individual rulers who took the decision, usually without consultation with their subjects. Saraf (1979) considers the treatment meted out to the 90 million inhabitants of these states as the most tragic part of partition, stating that they were ‘treated like a herd of dumb driven cattle who had no voice in deciding the question of accession to either of the two dominions’ (p.735). As Kashmir bordered onto these two new states rather than being within their borders, independence was also a realistic option at the time. The majority of the population was Muslim and the general expectation was that if there was accession it should be to Pakistan. However, the despotic Hindu ruler wavered. In the region, which is now Azad Kashmir, a full-scale popular uprising took place supported by tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The Maharajah then subsequently signed a treaty of accession to India, in circumstances that have long

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been the subject of academic (Lamb, 1994; Malik, 1993; Wirsing, 1994) as well as political dispute.2 Following accession, the Indian government mounted a strong military offensive in Kashmir that resulted in conflict with Pakistan. The UN Security Council set up a commission that passed a number of resolutions calling upon both countries to cease military hostilities, and institute a UNsupervised plebiscite to ascertain the wishes of the Kashmiris. The cease-fire line became a de facto border. It is incursions over this line that are the subject of the present resurgent hostilities between India and Pakistan. No plebiscite has been carried out, and the dispute remains the longest unresolved conflict on the books of the UN. Azad (free) Kashmir and Northern Territories were liberated by the populace from the Maharajah’s rule and are now controlled by Pakistan. Kashmir Valley (which includes the Kashmiri capital Srinagar), Jammu and Ladakh are under Indian control. Aksai Chin was seized by China when it took over Tibet. The majority of the population of Kashmir are Muslim, but with a major Hindu presence in Jammu and major Buddhist presence in Ladakh. Since 1947, there has been a strong military presence in both the Pakistani-controlled and the Indian-controlled areas. However, since 1989, there has been a sustained popular uprising in Kashmir Valley, and there are now over half a million Indian troops and special forces in this territory. Most of the Kashmiri deaths and injuries have occurred in this period. Academic writers have variously labelled the Kashmir dispute as an ethnic dispute (e.g. Madan, 1998) with religion – Islam – as the predominant factor, or as an example of ethno-nationalism (e.g. Kellas, 1991; Singh, 1993; Kaul, 1994). However, the basis of such labelling needs to be examined very critically. As Shami (1998) argues in her paper on the Circassian return movement, ethnicity and nationalism are intersecting sentiments and ideologies. Whilst they both use forces of belonging, community, identity and loyalty in advancing claims, they have been analytically situated at different societal levels. ‘Ethnicity was observed through “minority” cultures while nationalism was interpreted through state ideology. In this way, the former has often been de-politicized while the latter was de-culturalized’ (p. 619). A critique of the use of the term ethno-nationalism by academic writers can be made because of the unquestioning way in which a dichotomy is set between ethnic and civil forms of nationalism based on assumptions of ethnic being natural, violent and retrograde and civil being democratic, rational and cosmopolitan (Shami, 1998). Putting ‘ethno’ in front of nationalism thus turns it into a negative and dismissive term. The Kashmiris were members of a state that was taken over against the will of most of the population by another, in this case a newly created state. The analyses tend to ignore the fact that the Indian state has had to create a modern Indian identity which has drawn strongly on a Hindu cultural base whilst declaring an overt position of secularity. To enable resistance to this situation of subjugation, the Kashmiris have emphasized a Kashmiri

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nationalism based on the concept of Kashmiryat (a Kashmiri consciousness). So a political position has been labelled ethnic by writers and politicians, thus removing from discussion the political basis for resistance, whilst the Indian state promotes its responsibilities as a secular democracy to suppress terrorism and thus covers up a distinct cultural basis to its actions. As Shami further comments, the creation of any nation is based on the silencing of competing identities which can be seen as a threat to nation and state building. The constant use of the term ‘terrorism’ by Indian spokespersons and ethno-nationalism by writers places the resistance of the Kashmiris into a primitive, chaotic, violent and non-modern arena. For the diaspora living in the West, this increases the legitimacy problems of engaging the countries of settlement with the politics of Kashmir. Another important issue in conceiving nationalism is the issue of territory and sovereignty. In many parts of the world in the early years of the twentieth century, nationalism was caught up with anti-colonialism and the idea of territorial sovereignty. In the late twentieth century, there has emerged the ‘deterritorialized nation’ in the form of diasporas with a strong relationship with their national government of origin. As Duara (1998) argues, whilst this may represent a ‘better response to global competitiveness today, the conception of territorial citizenship entailed by the older concept of sovereignty remains politically very significant, particularly for those outside core cultural and racial groups of the nation’ (p. 648). This is the situation for the Kashmiris where they are at the periphery of both Pakistan and India in all ways. Sovereignty is the claim to be the ultimate political authority within a territory and the international system is based on mutual recognition of such claims. However, for the Kashmiris there is a feeling of being an invisible nation in relation to their territory. Territorial citizenship for Kashmiris is complex. For those living in either Pakistan-controlled or Indian-controlled territory, their citizenship is that of the controlling state. For those in the diaspora, they may retain full citizenship of their former homeland or may have taken citizenship of their country of settlement or hold joint nationality. In all cases, the citizenship emanates from an internationally recognized sovereign state. However, according to a senior member of the judiciary in Azad Kashmir, all Kashmiris, whether living within the territorial boundaries of the princely state or in the diaspora, are entitled to Kashmiri citizenship under a law of 1858 laid down by the Maharajah of the time. This law has never been revoked and applies to all those who lived in Kashmir at the time and their descendants, including up to two generations of those living outside Kashmir (Ellis and Khan, 1999a). So those in the present diaspora are technically citizens of Kashmir with all the legal implications this would have in the event of a UN plebiscite being honoured. But more importantly, the perception of diasporic Kashmiris as citizens is important in bonding people psychologically and politically. War or even an incipient threat to territory can strengthen previously weak links between governments and the ‘deterritorialized nation’. In

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Croatia, the war following the breakaway from Yugoslavia ‘reconfigured many relationships within the diaspora and, in particular, prioritised the homeland-diaspora relationship’ (Stubbs, 1999: para 9.1). The idea of the nation included ‘Croats Abroad’. After the cessation of military action, elections were held in Croatia with the diaspora being given twelve seats in the House of Representatives. Duara (1998) discusses how the nationalists in China, in the early twentieth century, commandeered the ideology of transnationalism to gain the support of the Chinese, whilst holding on to ideas of territorial sovereignty. Political interaction between governments and their diasporas or ‘deterritorialized nations’, especially at time of threat or need, are part of the phenomenon of transnationalism and would appear to be a feature of the contemporary world at the turn of the century. This is a significant aspect of the relationship between diasporic Kashmiris and their ‘homeland’ and unlike the situation of many other diasporas, the political crisis has lasted over fifty years.

The formation of the Kashmiri diaspora Following separation from the rest of the princely state at the time of partition, Azad Kashmir became an area under the overall control of Pakistan but with its own government in 1947. No one in Azad Kashmir was untouched by the events of partition with many families split from relatives, land and property. The border has remained closed ever since. There is in fact only one border crossing for the whole of Pakistan and India and that is between Lahore and Amritsar and it has been made very difficult to use. The Pakistani- and Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir have therefore developed quite separately since partition. The vast majority of those who form the Kashmiri diaspora in the West have come from Azad Kashmir. The economic conditions in Azad Kashmir have been determined by its status as a disputed territory, and the physical dangers associated with the constant potential for military engagement with India. There has been a permanent Pakistani military presence since 1947. The government of Azad Kashmir is almost totally dependent on the Pakistani state. There is a general perception of a deliberate underdevelopment of Azad Kashmir in comparison with other parts of Pakistan, and that this reflects the semi-colonial position in which Azad Kashmir finds itself. The education system for example has a curriculum designed to develop a Pakistani rather than a Kashmiri national identity.3 From the late 1950s, men began to migrate to the West, particularly to the UK. The ‘push’ of lack of economic opportunities in Azad Kashmir and the ‘pull’ of economic expansion in the West brought about a continuous migration of peoples throughout the 1960s. At the same time, the Pakistani decision to build the Mangla Dam in Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, to produce electricity for the burgeoning industry of the Punjab, precipitated a major movement of the population many of whom used their compensation

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to buy tickets to the UK. It soon became clear that ‘return’ was a ‘myth’, especially once families moved to join the men and the diaspora began to develop.4 Because people entered on the basis of Pakistani passports, most receiving countries classified them as Pakistanis. Evidence suggests that, certainly in the UK, the majority of those so classified are in fact Kashmiris (Ballard, 1991). Research by the authors has found that, over time and especially with the worsening political situation in Kashmir since 1989, members of the community in the UK are increasingly identifying themselves as Kashmiri in contradistinction to the label Pakistani or Mirpuri (Al-Ali et al., 1996). The UK has the largest settlement of Kashmiris, and for diasporic activities is the most important centre. There are also major settlements in Canada and the United States. Primary migration has established Kashmiri communities in all West European countries. These movements have been supplemented by secondary migration of Kashmiris from the UK in particular to the Netherlands and Denmark, which are now both important diasporic centres. Regular political contact on the Kashmir issue is maintained between the various sites of the diaspora. There has been much questioning of identity within the diaspora: as a racial minority, a religious minority, a cultural minority and as a national minority. Confronting racism within countries of settlement such as the UK has led to alliances being forged with those in a similar position and an identification as ‘South Asian’ or even in some circumstances as ‘black’. Identification with fellow Muslims in Europe at a time of widespread ‘Islamaphobia’ in the West has been strengthened. Questions raised by the majority population about British and particularly English identity in relation to migrants along with general ignorance about the Kashmir issue means that for many members of the diaspora national identity has been provided increasingly by invoking Kashmiri identity.5 These findings support the argument of Portes (1999) that the nature of the reception that an immigrant group receives from the majority society helps give: ‘direction to their adaptive strategies, including those of a transnational character’ (p. 465), the phenomenon of ‘reactive ethnicity’. Economically, the flow of remittances back to Azad Kashmir has been important not only for the family recipients but also for the country. Housebuilding is one example where the use of remittance income has fuelled an unprecedented expansion throughout Azad Kashmir, particularly in Mirpur and Kotli districts with the inevitable rise in land prices. Another outcome of these economic transfers is that Mirpur now has more banks per capita than Karachi, the financial and trade centre of Pakistan. However, this development has proved to be of more benefit to the economy of Pakistan than of Azad Kashmir (Ellis and Khan, 1999a). Again this outcome is a direct reflection of the unresolved nature of the Kashmir situation and the strong control by Pakistan of financial affairs in Azad Kashmir. Research suggests that linkage to the biraderi with all its features of

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support and obligations is extremely important for Kashmiris. Socio-culturally, the system of biraderi has supported the continuation of marriage within that system across national boundaries. Cross-continent marriages maintain links with the community of the homeland and the endogamous nature of these marriages further reinforces traditional ties within the kinship networks and biraderi. It is these strong relationships that give a major basis for the operation of social and political influence that can be found throughout the ‘domestic’ arena of Azad Kashmir politics. Such links are exploited to achieve benefit for family in employment, social position and local services. Members of the diaspora influence such decisions through their family and biraderi networks, and often advise on voting behaviour. Some have returned to stand successfully for membership of the Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly. For the past fifteen years, there has been one seat specifically set aside for a representative of ‘overseas Kashmiris’. Until recently, British Kashmiris have always been appointed but the last incumbent was from the German community. When he resigned because of ‘internal politics’, the prime minister decided, as an interim measure, to set up three advisor posts – religious affairs, political affairs and diplomatic affairs. All three are British based. The continuing strength of this influence by members of the diaspora is recognized by the Azad Kashmir government and politicians. It is very common to see politicians and government ministers visiting the various sites of the diaspora especially prior to national elections. Reports and photographs of these meetings are regularly published in the Daily Jang, the Urdu newspaper printed in the UK but distributed throughout the European diaspora. Such interaction with the diaspora is seen as having mutual benefit. For the Azad Kashmir establishment there appear to be three objectives in keeping contact with the diaspora. First, it keeps the unresolved Kashmiri struggle on the agenda. Second, it reinforces the establishment’s political position in Azad Kashmir; the struggle is a convenient platform which it is expedient to use and so generate support from diasporic settlers – the politicians tap into ‘roots’ for their own benefits. Third, it keeps financial support flowing from the diaspora. In raising money politicians exploit the social structure of the Kashmiri community, the biraderi, and they also cut across all sections of Kashmiri society by appealing to their emotional attachment to the unresolved Kashmir situation. For members of the diaspora, these links and meetings maintain their identification with Kashmir as a nation and also maintain links with particular geographical locations, biraderi or political parties. These layers of affiliation reflect the strong social/family links which are likely to survive for several generations. They maintain social structures, the establishment, and systems of patronage and influence which are delivering dividends for the political establishment in Azad Kashmir and provide opportunities for those within the diaspora who want to exert influence at ‘home’.

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The role of the diaspora in Kashmiri liberation politics Historically there have been two major players in Pakistani politics. These are the People’s Party (PP) (led by Benazir Bhutto) and the Muslim League (ML) (led by Nawaz Sharif, and which was in power until overthrown by a military coup in October 1999). There are also a number of smaller national and regional parties such as the Jama’at Islami. Party politics organization in Azad Kashmir is a direct reflection of that of Pakistan and, whilst nominally independent, is, in reality, fairly closely controlled by the Pakistani political parties. The Azad Kashmir People’s Party (AKPP) is led by Sultan Mahmoud and is currently in power. The Muslim Conference (MC) has recently split into two factions, one led by Sardar Qayyum and the other by Sardar Sikander Hayat. Jama’at Islami of Azad Kashmir is led by Rashid Turabi. The former Chief Justice of Azad Kashmir, Majid Malik, has recently assumed leadership of the Liberation League after retiring from the judiciary. All the political parties in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir are committed to the reunification of Kashmir and its incorporation into Pakistan – the position as of 1947. It is important to note that the Azad Kashmir Constitution of 1974 excludes anyone who does not support the idea of accession to Pakistan of Kashmir from standing for the Legislative Assembly. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) was formed in Birmingham in 1977 and is headed by Amanullah Khan, a former resident of Luton. The aims of the organization are to work for the reunification of Kashmir and self-determination by Kashmiris of its future status. There is no necessary assumption that this would mean incorporation into Pakistan with the preferred option being full independence. The continuation of the JKLF is the most important manifestation of diasporic mobilization around the Kashmir issue. As Portes (1999) argues, participation in transnational political activities can ‘empower immigrants and invest them with a sense of purpose and self-worth that otherwise would be absent’ (p. 471) but more important, perhaps, is the impact on the sending countries. Communities living outside their homeland are likely to be unsympathetic to the traditional elites, beyond their control and because of their freedom to organize abroad ‘migrants can wield much greater influence than comparable sectors of the sending country’s population’ (p. 474). This has very much been the situation for ‘liberation politics’ in relation to Kashmir. Having started in the UK, JKLF headquarters is now in Muzzafarabad, in Azad Kashmir, with a presence throughout Azad Kashmir and Indiancontrolled Kashmir as well as within the diaspora. Amanullah Khan has remained chair throughout this period. JKLF was a leading founder member of the All Party Hurriyet Conference (APHC) that co-ordinates about thirty-five organizations involved in the popular uprising against Indian control over Kashmir. No member of JKLF could stand for the Azad Kashmir Legislative Assembly because of the necessary commitment to unification with Pakistan. At the last elections, in 1996, it was clear travel-

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ling through Azad Kashmir that JKLF, in terms of posters, graffiti and flags flying, commanded more support than any of the traditional political parties. This impression of the level of support was further confirmed in discussions in villages and towns (Ellis and Khan, 1999a). The main contribution of the diaspora has been in bringing the unresolved nature of the Kashmir issue into the international arena. This has been achieved through meetings and seminars within the communities, meetings with politicians from the majority population in all the countries with sizeable settlements of Kashmiris, lobbying of national parliaments in the West as well as the European parliament, petitions, rallies and demonstrations. By 1990, pressure from the British diaspora resulted in the formation of the All Party Kashmir Group in the UK parliament that in 1995 had a membership of nearly seventy (Ellis and Khan, 1998). Members of the group used questions and early day motions in the House as a way of getting the Kashmir issue discussed. However, for many Kashmiris the most important event in relation to British politics was using their pressure to bring about an explicit change in 1995 in Labour Party policy on Kashmir. Pressure on British political parties and politicians was continued in the runup to the 1997 general election with a campaign run by the All Party International Kashmir Co-ordination Committee (APIKCC), a coordinating group for about fifteen or so major Kashmiri political and cultural organizations. This campaign used leaflets sent to all political party candidates accompanied by meetings. At the same time, it was working on members of the Kashmiri community encouraging them to register as voters and to make the Kashmir issue a central deciding factor in their voting behaviour. Whilst the UK parliament was being targeted, groups in other countries, often with British Kashmiri help, were pressurizing their own governments. Lobbying meetings were set up with the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UN Secretary-General’s Office. Subsequently the European parliament was targeted. Informal links had been set up between British MEPs and the Kashmir Group which resulted in a three-day conference being organized in 1993 in Brussels hosted by the European Parliament Socialist Group. Amanullah Khan of JKLF accepted an invitation to speak there. The potential influence of such an event did not go unnoticed in the subcontinent, and the Indian government persuaded the Belgian government to arrest him as he arrived in Brussels. Amanullah Khan was subsequently exonerated of all charges of terrorism but it had stopped him from fully participating and addressing this conference in a European forum. The diaspora has also worked in a co-ordinated way with political actions being taken in the subcontinent. In February 1992, a symbolic but peaceful mass crossing of the border between Pakistani- and Indian-controlled Kashmir was planned. Some individuals from the diaspora travelled to Azad Kashmir to participate directly in the action. However, the key role for the

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diaspora was the organization of worldwide publicity for the event that was achieved. The Indian government reacted to the plans by sealing off villages close to the border and imposing a dawn-to-dusk curfew. On the Pakistani side, the military attempted to stop marchers reaching the border. Over 10,000 people got through to this area in spite of the crackdown by the army and seven people were killed and more injured. As a result of the efforts of members of the diaspora, this event and the negative image for the Pakistani state was given international coverage. A further attempt to cross the ceasefire line was made in October 1999. Again the JKLF in the diaspora was instrumental in the mobilization of international media and public opinion. It is not only the Indian government which recognizes the importance of the political activities of the Kashmiri diaspora. In interviews with all the leading politicians of Azad Kashmir, in 1996, it became clear that they too recognized the level of influence that the diaspora, particularly those from the UK, had in progressing the Kashmir situation in the international arena (Ellis and Khan, 1999a). Many quoted the change in Labour Party policy as illustration of the work of the diaspora. Rashid Turabi voiced an opinion that the British Kashmiris had achieved what the High Commission of Pakistan had failed to manage. Several comments were made about the worldwide influence of the BBC and the success of the diaspora in gaining coverage of the issues in this medium. Perhaps the most telling comment came from a leading judge, and echoed by others, that the diaspora had played a much more important role than the people of Azad Kashmir in sustaining Kashmir as an issue. This same judge was also critical of the efforts of the Pakistani government. Like many others, he saw moral responsibility for the British as they were seen to have created the situation. Most interviewees believed that the diaspora had the right to a voice in future decision making because in the first place its members were Kashmiris and also in recognition of their ‘contribution to the struggle’. These sentiments were reiterated in village interviews. This grassroots-level knowledge of diaspora activity is not surprising as most families have connections with members of the diaspora. The technological developments of the latter half of the century have provided a major basis for the emergence of transnationalism on a mass scale (Portes et al., 1999). Not only have they introduced new ways of communicating but mass production and global markets have brought prices down and made access a possibility for many more of the population, in the West at least. The increasing speed and affordability of transportation systems has been particularly significant for diasporas of non-European origin settled in the West. The majority of passengers on PIA flights between the UK and Pakistan are members of the Pakistani and Kashmiri diasporas with families making regular visits to the subcontinent. Traffic in the opposite direction is much more limited because of UK government entry visa policies. Whilst travel is important for the maintenance of family relationships, it

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is the telecommunications developments that are potentially of more significance. As Delanty (1999) asserts, ‘the essence of community is not mobility but communication’ (p. 371). Satellite telephone and television systems and electronic communication networks mean that information can move rapidly across continents. Families and political colleagues can have regular and instantaneous communication. Regimes around the world have recognized the threat posed by these developments, many of which are difficult to control and monitor by conventional means. Kashmiri families exchange videos of key life events such as marriages and new births so bringing families closer together. Videos are also a means by which footage of events in Indian-controlled Kashmir involving death and destruction by the military can be quickly circulated within the diaspora and therefore keep alive a commitment to the liberation of Kashmir. ZeeTV, an Indian satellite television channel, is widely available in Britain. It has provided a news service for those interested in the subcontinent and which is not generally available in the European media. The company has recognized that the diasporic South Asian communities are interested in more than Bollywood films and South Asian ‘soaps’. They have opened a studio in London. The Kashmiri diaspora has been quick to exploit this facility, which has meant that it is able to ensure that its views on the Kashmir situation are regularly broadcast across the world. During the 1997 British general election, ZeeTV ran programmes on those parliamentary constituencies with high South Asian settlements and investigated their views on a number of political issues including Kashmir. ZeeTV interviews and discussions, to which members of the Kashmiri diaspora contributed, over Robin Cook’s ill-judged pronouncements on Kashmir in 1995 played their part in the subsequent change in Labour Party policy on Kashmir. Since October 1999, the satellite Pakistan Channel has become operative. With this development, ZeeTV, with its transmission of an Indian perspective, may well be forced, for commercial reasons, to rethink the emphasis in its broadcasts especially in relation to political issues in the subcontinent. Until recently, the fax machine was seen as a powerful means of distributing information worldwide. However, this has been superseded by email and the Internet. These developments have been exploited by various diasporic groups and in the process have come to change relationships. The existence of computer-mediated diasporic public spheres deepens the understanding of what have been termed transnational and postnational imaginings since, as complex discursive and historical fields, they represent particular constructions of the national space from diverse global sites, which become, effectively, a unified imagined place or homeland. (Stubbs, 1999: para 1.2) There is a disparity between access to computers for those living in the West and those living in less developed countries. For many Kashmiri villagers, an

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international telephone call means a trip to the exchange in the local town unless a local entrepreneur has acquired a portable satellite telephone, as is beginning to happen. However, political organizations are usually based in sizeable towns and connection to the Internet is a real possibility especially with the continuing decrease in the cost of the hardware. Consequently emails now supplement the use of faxes for rapid dissemination of news about Kashmir. This is particularly important when travel in and out of Indian-controlled Kashmir is highly restricted and carefully monitored. JKLF maintains its contact between both parts of Kashmir and the various sites of the diaspora using such means. The Usenet group, Kashnet, includes regular bulletins from the APHC in Srinagar and very much conforms to the situation described above by Stubbs. The time spent by some of the regular contributors on minutely examining and countering arguments on various aspects of Kashmiri history and identity suggests that membership of this virtual community has become a central focus of their lives. Whilst Benedict Anderson provided a very important starting point for examining nations as imagined, his subsequent development of the concept of the ‘long distance nationalist’, as Stubbs (1999) says, descends into caricature: While technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but to which he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating (via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the conflicts of his imagined Heimat – now only fax time away. But this citizenless participation is inevitably non-responsible – our hero will not have to answer for, or pay the price of, the long distance politics he undertakes. He is also easy prey for shrewd political manipulators in his Heimat. (Quoted in Stubbs, 1999: para 5.1) Stubbs saw little evidence of this happening in the Croatian dispute although this was explicitly targeted by Anderson. The strength of the social structures and political networks within the Kashmiri diaspora would tend to militate against this type of lone, somewhat alienated participation in political activities. That is not to say that there are not instances of those who have been manipulated, often with serious consequences for themselves and others. However, this happens within and not outside of the social networks of the diaspora community and bears with it known responsibility.

Liberation politics meets domestic politics: a case study In early May 1999, conflict between Pakistani and Indian forces flared up over the cease-fire line in the very high mountainous area around the Kargil region of Kashmir. The Indian Army had discovered that the high-level bunker posts on its side of the border, from which it had withdrawn in the

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winter because of the inclemency of the climate, had been taken over by mujahidin supported by the Northern Light Infantry of the Pakistan Army. Heavy weapons and fighter aircraft were brought in by the Indians to dislodge the Pakistan-backed forces. Pakistan responded with like and Kashmir was once again on a war footing. The difference from previous times was that both powers had within the previous year demonstrated their nuclear missile capability framed within strong nationalistic exhortations. In addition, the BJP was seeking to restore its power base as the party of government in India prior to a general election – a situation set to send tremors around the international community. In late May, an Indian aircraft was shot down. Clashes continued and both governments increased the propaganda to support their actions. Pakistani ministers visited the forward lines. Tensions increased down the whole length of the cease-fire line from Kargil in the north to the Punjab in the south. Kashmiri civilians on both sides of the border were killed and villages close to the line were evacuated. In this instance, the Pakistanis were seen as the aggressors. A meeting was set up in Washington between Nawaz Sharif and President Clinton for 5 July to be followed by one with Tony Blair, in London, on 6 July. Mobilization of the Kashmiri diaspora began in May as events unfolded. The British diasporic organization APIKCC organized a demonstration at the Indian High Commission on 29 May. This was followed by a demonstration at Downing Street on 14 June. The APIKCC operates in the UK over the Kashmir issue and by and large is independent of control and influence by Azad Kashmir. The Daily Jang contributed to the mobilization of the Kashmiri diaspora by several special eye-catching inserts on the situation. Importantly, it also included articles on Kashmir in the English-language section clearly targeted at parliamentarians and young Kashmiris. During June, Azad Kashmir politicians began arriving in the UK and started organizing around the events in Kashmir. They had come to mobilize the Kashmiri diaspora culminating in a rally on 4 July. Politicians appealed directly over the heads of diasporic organizations operating in the UK and they largely ignored the APIKCC. Mobilization was organized through party followers in the diaspora and through political party advertisements in the Daily Jang. The latter were almost all published between 29 June and 6 July. Each party had several advertisements over that time and every day there were differences in layout or text. Analysis of these advertisements suggests that, whilst ostensibly about building up support for the rally, they were as much about influencing the diaspora over domestic Azad Kashmir party politics. They were clearly aimed at the migrant generation as they were almost entirely placed within the Urdu-language section of the newspaper (most of the generation born in the UK would not be expected to read Urdu). A common approach to design underlay all the advertisements: identification of the party, photograph(s) of

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the leadership of the party, a central exhortation, and a section detailing the sponsors. There are many nuances to be found within this design, such as choice and position of photographs, length and nature of text. The implicit messages are primarily about boosting the image and standing of the particular party leader. The main advertisements placed by the Muslim Conference (the party presently out of power in Azad Kashmir) all contained photographs of not only Sardar Qayyum, the leader, but also Nawaz Sharif (Muslim League), the since-deposed Prime Minister of Pakistan, and Atiq Khan, Sardar Qayyum’s son who is the MC organizer and heir apparent. Two images were clear: the first was a demonstration of the close alliance with power in Pakistan; the second was the promotion of the son whose photograph in one of the advertisements is placed centre in the trio. The slogans built up as the day of the rally approached. Initially they were simple and based on the statement Kashmir bane ga Pakistan (Kashmir will become Pakistan) made by the widely revered founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, who is also referred to as Quaid-e-Azam. This statement was repeated in subsequent advertisements thereby giving Sardar Qayyum an ‘esteemed heritage’. A later advertisement also includes the statement ‘All directions lead to London for the freedom of Kashmir and the defence of Pakistan’ which linked the diaspora with Kashmir and Pakistan whilst acknowledging its importance in this struggle. The position of Pakistan was further reinforced by an advertisement by the Muslim League of Pakistan assuring its Azad Kashmir ally of its support at the rally. Not surprisingly, the Pakistani leadership photographs are placed above those of the Azad Kashmir leaders in this instance. The advertisements for the AKPP carried only the photo of Sultan Mahmoud during this period, apart from one special advertisement. Mahmoud’s photographs were much more commanding than those of Sardar Qayyum partly because of their larger size and also because of the pose. The image was of strength and ease, a leader confident in himself. He professed himself to be against Indian atrocities and in solidarity with the mujahidin confronting India in Kargil. On the day of the rally, the AKPP ran two advertisements of which one was a very eye-catching display on the front page of the Daily Jang. Five photographs were ranged across the top of this advertisement: in order, they were of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Sultan Mahmoud, Zulfiqar Bhutto and Jinnah. The text explained the explicit link between the photos. The rally was to start at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The main slogan was that on this day Kashmiri participants at the rally were demanding justice from all these former barristers of this famous institution. The underlying message was that Sultan Mahmoud was the equal of and ranked with these prestigious world-class leaders. The second advertisement that day, which was in the normal format, exhorted the Kashmiris to bring their families and friends to take part in this ‘historic demonstration’. The text invoked the idea of democracy and the support of justice.

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On 6 July, there was a final advertisement from AKPP in which Sultan Mahmoud thanked all his Pakistani and Kashmiri brothers who had taken part in the rally. He finished with the statement: ‘I am going back now with the expectation and hope that in the future you will support me and that you will continue your work even without your leaders being here’. This was a message that put the Kashmiri diaspora very much in its place. Its leaders were the politicians of Azad Kashmir and therefore the diaspora should look to Azad Kashmir for direction. The strong British diasporic leadership, which had been acknowledged by all levels of the Azad Kashmir political hierarchy in the earlier research interviews, had been ‘airbrushed’ from the picture. The rally had been set in London because, thanks to the work of the diaspora, this had become a particularly significant location in international politics in relation to Kashmir. The politicians from Azad Kashmir and Pakistan needed the support of the Kashmiri diaspora in this setting. They mobilized the diaspora through a call on its emotional attachment to the territory of Kashmir. However, it was for support for the Pakistani line, which had been developed without the inclusion of Kashmiri ideas. This could be seen as an exercise in exploitation of the Kashmiri diaspora for the mutual benefit of Pakistani and Azad Kashmir politicians. The Portes argument, as outlined earlier in this chapter, about the diaspora developing beyond the control of the sending country and the problems that come from this situation, seems very pertinent in analysing the events of the summer rally. This appeared to be very much an instance of the sending country trying to regain control over the diaspora. It is clear that this whole event was a careful co-ordination between the Azad Kashmir political parties and the Pakistani government and was designed to build on the anticipated triumph of Nawaz Sharif’s visit to Washington and then to London. The American visit did not work out as expected by the Pakistani government with Sharif being told that the LOC (Line of Ceasefire) was inviolable and having to agree to pull the troops back from Indian-controlled Kashmir. The Kashmiri people were not even mentioned – not an agreement that would be easy to sell to the Kashmiri diaspora in London. With the international scene having moved against Pakistan, it was also difficult to capitalize on the rally in the subsequent meeting with Tony Blair. Following the withdrawal of Pakistani troops, Amanullah Khan, on behalf of JKLF, declared that the LOC was not ‘a sacred cow for Kashmiris’ – hence the attempt to cross it in October 1999 which, as previously, was prevented by Pakistani forces. The ‘defeat’ at Kargil could be considered a major contributory factor in Nawaz Sharif’s overthrow. First, the Kashmir issue was a central plank of Pakistan foreign policy. Second, despite having had the upper hand militarily in the Kargil region, Pakistan diplomatically was forced on the defensive by Nawaz Sharif’s handling of the situation. India gained the advantage in Washington and London.

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Third, the Pakistani Army felt betrayed by the subsequent events. The overthrow of Nawaz Sharif and his government has firmly entrenched the Pakistani position in relation to India over Kashmir. To date there has been no attempt by the military rulers to intervene in the governance of Azad Kashmir. The Azad Kashmir government is not likely or able to be hostile to the change in Islamabad. The relationship between the Kashmiri diaspora and the people in Azad Kashmir is unlikely to be affected by the changes in Pakistan, as these socio-political networks are not Pakistani based. It is clear that the liberation movements will not be controlled by Pakistani (and, by default, Azad Kashmir) policies on Kashmir and will continue to see themselves as representing the explicit wishes of Kashmiris across the world.

Conclusions There is much evidence to demonstrate that the Kashmiri diaspora has a significant level of influence over events in the subcontinent. This is not just to be seen in social and economic interactions, as is the case for many other diasporas, but it is particularly manifest in the political arena. The 1980s and 1990s have seen an increasing level of involvement of the diaspora in supporting the expanding liberation movement in the subcontinent and being involved with its organization and activities. The diaspora has played a key role in the development and maintenance of a consciousness of Kashmiryat both overseas and back into the homeland, challenging the socialization into a Pakistani identity. It is those in the diaspora who have spearheaded the placing of the Kashmir issue onto the international agenda. In this they have been more successful than the politicians in Kashmir and many acknowledge that debt. However, this success is a threat to the hegemony and standing of these politicians. The summer rally revealed very clearly the tensions for the Azad Kashmir politicians between the need to exploit the success achieved by the diaspora and the need to bring the diaspora under their control if they are not to find their own positions severely challenged. Members of the Kashmiri diaspora have demonstrated their ability to fuse their nationalism with a new type of cosmopolitanism. This is not the enlightenment cosmopolitanism of operating across national cultures and engaging with universalist values which involve detaching oneself from a national identity. Consciousness of Kashmiriness is at the heart of the engagement with the universalist notions of social justice and democracy in the fight for a resolution of the Kashmir situation. This fits with the arguments of Delanty (1999) that diasporas and transnational communities are the ‘best concrete example we have of postnational consciousness, even if what gets affirmed is a multiplicity of nationalisms’ (p. 368). As he further argues in his analysis of post-national cosmopolitanism, the culture of tradition and the culture of reflection are not exclusive but interwoven. For the

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Kashmiri diaspora, this can be seen in the arguments that are used, the arenas that are chosen and the methods of operation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

The fieldwork in Azad Kashmir in 1996 was funded by a Nuffield Foundation Social Sciences Small Grants Scheme award. Detailed examination of the circumstances of the disputed accession have been covered by the authors in Ellis and Khan (1999a). Extended discussion of the political and economic development of Azad Kashmir can be found in Ellis and Khan (1999a). Fuller analysis of Kashmiri settlement in the UK can be found in Ellis and Khan (1999b). Further exploration of this issue of overlapping Kashmiri identities and reaction to the British majority population can be found in Ellis and Khan (1999c).

12 Working for a solution through Europe Kurdish political lobbying in Germany Eva Østergaard-Nielsen Introduction Migrant or refugees’ political engagement in the place that they perceive to be their original homeland is not a new phenomenon, but recent decades have witnessed an increased proliferation of such activity. Migrants, refugees and their descendants mobilize order to bring about change – or maintain status quo – in the homeland. To this end a variety of strategies are employed. Some movements seek to change things at home directly by providing economic or even military support. Others work indirectly through the political institutions of their host countries in the hope that they put pressure on political actors in the homeland. This chapter mainly focuses on such diaspora political strategies and activities and how they are shaped and mediated by relevant state institutions and government priorities. The main example employed here to illustrate such dynamics is the Kurds in Germany. What are the strategies and means by which Kurdish organizations seek to introduce, either directly or indirectly, their homeland-related agendas to the policy makers of their host countries? Which movements within the community employ which strategies? Kurdish activities are often associated with those of the violent campaigns of the PKK within both policy-making and academic circles. It is therefore a point in itself to illustrate that these extremist and violent activities only constitute a fraction of the overall Kurdish activities. Indeed, it will be argued that Kurdish diaspora political movements within the communities employ a multitude of strategies. Some employ ‘confrontational’ strategies, others ‘institutional participation’, and many a combination of both. I argue that the choice of strategy is related not only to the political structures of opportunity in the host country, but also to the particular movement/organization’s agenda, its degree of opposition or support to the homeland regime, and the extent to which its agenda is compatible with the agenda of political actors in the host country. The analysis will, in particular, draw on the work of two of the main Kurdish organizations in Germany: the PKK and KOMKAR. Political strategies exist at the level in between political mobilization and

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 187 its impact. The analysis presented here does not try to explain why migrants, refugees and their descendants mobilize around political events in their homeland. Homeland political mobilization, as illustrated in the first part of this volume, is a highly complex phenomenon, which is not done justice by being reduced to a function of the socio-economic status or vaguely defined transnational ties of the particular migrant or refugee community (see Armbruster in this volume). It is also not the main aim of this chapter to explain the impact which homeland political activities have on the homeland. As will be further discussed at the end of this chapter, diaspora political movements clearly constitute a factor in both intrastate conflicts and international relations (see Sheffer, 1986; Shain, 1991; Adamson in this volume; Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001a). However, more often than not they are not the decisive factor, as most of their activities are mediated by state institutions and governments whose priorities are guided by other interests such as trade relations or security and political considerations.

Homeland political movements among Kurds in Western Europe Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world, and of the estimated 20–25 million Kurds approximately half live in Turkey and the rest in Iraq, Iran, Syria and the former Soviet Union (McDowall, 1996). The statelessness of the Kurdish people in Turkey has led to a number of uprisings throughout the twentieth century, and the formation of a range of Kurdish political movements and parties with different ideologies and priorities.1 Some want an independent Kurdish state, others regional governance within a federation. Others again merely challenge the Turkish Kemalist notion of unitary national Turkish identity, by wanting recognition of Kurdish distinctiveness in Turkish public space such as the right to use the Kurdish language in schools and in the media, and the right to use Kurdish names. However, the road to such recognition is haltered by the lack of freedom of speech and political organization granted to Kurds in Turkey. Kurdish political activity is, still, regarded as a security threat and treated accordingly. The abolition of such practice has become an important first point on the agenda of all Kurdish organizations and those sympathetic to the Kurdish cause. This analysis is based on research among Kurds from Turkey only. The relationship between these groups and Kurds from other states is of relevance to understanding intra-Kurdish dynamics (see Gürbey, 1996). It is, however, also important to understand Kurdish political mobilization within the context of the Turkish minority because both groups relate to the same political regime in Turkey. Political mobilization among Kurds and Turks is, more often than not, inseparable. The size of the Kurdish minority from Turkey in Germany is a contested issue, but most estimates range from 500,000 to 700,000, which is approximately a third of the overall number of

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Turkish citizens and their descendants living there. A range of Kurdish movements supports the struggle for expression of ethnic distinctiveness in Turkey – and within the Turkish minorities abroad. The relatively large number of Kurds is usually argued to be important for the political impact of this lobbying. It is, however, difficult to equate numbers with strength because the vast majority of the Kurds in Germany originate in Turkish guest-worker immigration – that is, they arrived and registered as Turkish immigrants rather than as Kurdish refugees. By no means all of these Kurds from Turkey feel represented by the political movements claiming to speak on behalf of Kurds in Western Europe. Not least due to the assimilation policies of the Turkish state, the silent majority’s Kurdishness is not an incentive for political mobilization as it often merely consists of some Kurdish phrases and songs. ‘Long distance nationalism’, as defined by Benedict Anderson (Anderson, 1992), is not dominant throughout the community and accordingly the Kurdish political organizations are only representative of parts of the Kurdish minority abroad.2 Yet, there are a substantial number of political activists who include both descendants of Kurdish guest-workers from Turkey and refugees. Kurdish activists were working within the Turkish left-wing parties, trade unions and student organizations of Marxist–Leninist orientation in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular in the late 1970s and early 1980s the Kurdish struggle took on its own momentum and Kurdish organizations began to form networks throughout Turkey and Western Europe.3 Of these, the best known is the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK) which has led an armed struggle against the Turkish state since the beginning of the 1980s. The civil-war-like situation in south eastern Anatolia has claimed the lives of an estimated 30,000 people, of which a vast majority are civilians, destroyed thousands of villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The initially Marxist PKK is well organized in Western Europe. Its main organization was until recently called the Eniya Rizgariya Netwa Kurdistan (ERNK).4 In addition a substantial number of Kurdish and Turkish organizations are supportive of the increasingly modified goals of the PKK throughout Germany and in the rest of Western Europe. The PKK was estimated to have 11,000 members in Germany in 1999 (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1999). Another main organization in Western Europe is KOMKAR, a network of organizations supporting the Partiya Sosyalist a Kurdistan (PSK) which was founded in 1974 by the now exiled leader Kemal Burkay, former leading member of the communist Turkiye Ișci Partisi (TIP).5 The PSK stands for a Turkish–Kurdish federation like that of Belgium, so in that respect it does not differ from the more recent political agenda of the PKK. The main difference between the PSK and the PKK is that PSK is against any use of violence (Gürbey, 1996: 24). Indeed it is the different strategies rather than ideologies (to the extent that those two dimensions are inseparable) which have been a source of

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 189 contention between notably KOMKAR and the diaspora political organizations supporting the PKK. The PKK represents one extreme with its attempts to intervene in Turkish political affairs directly and its image as violent and extreme. KOMKAR, on the other hand, has a wide range of contacts with German political institutions and is perceived as being more ‘intellectual’.

Classification of the main strategies of Kurdish movements in Germany As mentioned, a diaspora political organization can choose to intervene directly in the political affairs of its homeland by providing economic, political or military support, or indirectly by exerting pressure on the political authorities of its host countries. The former dimension is very difficult to research. Turkish authorities do not welcome intervention by opposition groups abroad and do their outmost to curb such activity (see ØstergaardNielsen, 2001b). Accordingly most movements abroad are reluctant to disclose information on this part of their work, although it is a well-known fact that it is happening. For instance, the PKK has been reported to collect an estimated DM20 million from Kurds in Germany – using violent means of persuasion if someone is not willing to pay up (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1997: 148–154). The PKK has also been accused of recruiting young Kurds in Germany for the guerrilla army in south east Anatolia. But information on such issues is ambiguous and hard to come by and mainly stems from more or less sensationalist journalistic accounts or the German Verfassungsschutz. The following account will therefore mainly focus on the indirect dimension of diaspora political activities: the information and lobby campaigns abroad. Such diaspora political activities of Kurds from Turkey in Western Europe take very different forms. For the sake of analytical clarity the following description (see Table 12.1) presents the work of the various movements and their organizations as a continuum spanning: (1) being illegal and using confrontational strategies; (2) being legal and using confrontational strategies; (3) institutional participation as independent organizations; (4) institutional participation within political organizations, such as trade unions and local authorities, or being affiliated with a political party.6 This categorization builds on Ireland’s (1994) distinction between ‘confrontational’ and ‘institutional’ participation, but differentiates each category further. That is, categories (1) and (2) are confrontational participation but make a distinction between legal and illegal activities. Categories (3) and (4) are both institutional participation, but in (3) the organizations maintain an independent profile vis-à-vis German political institutions, and in (4) the activity is carried out by individuals within the realm of a host-country political institution. These distinctions recognize the importance ascribed to ‘independence’ by the diaspora political organizations themselves.

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Table 12.1 Type of activity

Examples

1 Confrontational and illegal

Use of violence (such as attacks on German and Turkish property), unannounced and/or violent demonstrations, political graffiti Political mass meetings, demonstrations, hunger strikes Events co-organized with German political institutions: seminars and panel discussions, meetings with individual politicians

2 Confrontational and legal 3 Institutional participation as independent organizations 4 Institutional participation within German political institutions

Membership of and representation within trade unions or political parties

Applying this categorization does not leave room for a number of important features in recent years of Kurdish political activism in Europe. First, particularly in the first three categories it is important to bear in mind that Kurdish political activists do not liaise with counterparts in Germany only. Their activities are directed not only at local and national political authorities but also international actors. In particular European institutions such as those of the EU or the European Council are increasingly approached by more resourceful Kurdish organizations including those sympathetic to both the PKK and KOMKAR (see also Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001b). Second, Kurdish organizations, as is the case with most other diaspora political actors, form a network of political, economic and social links with counterparts elsewhere in the diaspora.7 They draw on resources from these organizations elsewhere in the diaspora and the co-ordination of events in different countries (mainly via faxes and mobile phones) plays an important role particularly in the campaigns of organizations supporting the PKK. Within a short time simultaneous demonstrations can be organized in main cities throughout Europe (in some cases even the world). Likewise, Kurds may cross borders to add to the number demonstrating at a particular European venue. Third, the use of the media and the Internet are both becoming increasingly important vehicles for disseminating information by Kurdish organizations. Through the 1990s the Kurdish TV channel MED-TV has struggled to find hosting satellites which could withstand the Turkish government’s pressure for a ban of the channel. While this struggle continues the Internet has joined TV as a source of transnational communication. In the last couple of years a wide range of illegal newspapers, newsletters, virtual libraries and other sources of information have become available on the net.8 However, one gets the impression that such web pages do not serve to mobilize the Kurdish diaspora in Western Europe where only a few members have access to the World Wide Web. The figures for number of visitors to Kurdish homepages are very low. For instance, KOMKAR’s

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 191 main web page only registers approximately 2,500 visitors – 5 per cent of its membership in Western Europe. There is, in other words, an increased salience of diaspora political activities which take place in dialogue with international organizations or through means unbounded by national borders. Still, the main bulk of the activity does play itself out at the level of the state, as demonstrated in the following accounts of different Kurdish strategies to promote homeland political agendas. Illegal and underground activities To this category belong activities such as violent activities in the form of attacks on German or Turkish institutions in Germany, and unannounced and/or violent demonstrations. By definition, the organizations employing these methods and strategies all belong to the more extreme movements. There has been a marked increase in the illegal and violent activities of all foreigners residing in Germany from 1980 to 1997, and the total membership of Kurdish organizations watched by the Verfassungsschutz has increased.9 However, only a few movements, almost all of which sympathize with the PKK, have resorted to illegal acts. Notably, two waves of violence mainly directed at Turkish diplomatic representations, travel agencies and banks in different German cities, in June and November 1993, led to the ban of PKK-related organizations in November 1993. Most of the targeted property was completely destroyed and the damage amounted to hundreds of thousands of Deutschmarks (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1993: 168–169). The PKK came under immediate suspicion as its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, had warned about the possibility of violence in Germany. After the ban there were more attacks on Turkish property in Germany and violent demonstrations in 1994 and 1996 until Öcalan ordered an end to the violence in Europe in relation to the wider attempt to reorient the PKK from a military to a political organization. With the dramatic capture of Öcalan in 1999, demonstrations, bombings and occupations of embassies (Greek, Kenyan and Turkish) broke out throughout the world within a day of the dissemination of the news.10 Within studies of diaspora politics it is generally noted that opposition to the homeland political regime may more easily be carried out in the host countries, in which freedom of speech and assembly exists to a greater extent than in the homeland. Yet, the measures taken by the German authorities demonstrate that Germany is not a completely free haven for Turkish or Kurdish homeland opposition. These movements have to comply with the rules and laws of the host country. Not only have the PKK-related organizations been banned, but there have been continued incursions of organizations thought to be sympathetic to the PKK and a range of trials of Kurdish activists prosecuted for illegal activities have taken place since the

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1990s. Among the wider consequences of this is that concerns with extremist foreigners’ groups in general and Kurdish organizations in particular dominate discussions of foreigners’ organizations in the German Bundestag. This perception of homeland political organizations as mainly extremists is informed by the radicalism of a small minority of the organizations, but still this radicalism has fed a vicious circle: Kurdish homeland political activities become increasingly stigmatized and excluded from the political system, as German debates on Turkish or Kurdish homeland political activities centre on how to restrict extremist activities, rather than how to channel the more moderate activities into the political system. While PKK-related organizations themselves call this ‘the criminalization of Kurds in Germany’, other organizations, such as KOMKAR, have criticized them for giving all Kurdish organizations a bad name. These developments have contributed to the reorientation of the PKK. In particular after the capture of Öcalan, the PKK is seeking to transform itself from a militant to a civilian organization, and stresses issues like ethnicity and minority rights rather than promoting Marxist paroles. The PKK Central Committee’s repeated calls for non-violence at demonstrations and other events are largely being followed by organizations throughout the diaspora whose activities are thus moving to the next categories outlined below. Legal and confrontational strategies This category includes events such as hunger strikes, demonstrations and political mass meetings. Hunger strikes may seem like a curious thing to include but they occur with such frequency that they deserve mentioning. They are a political tool favoured by the more radical Turkish left-wing movements as well as Kurds – mainly those sympathizing with the PKK (see Çürükkaya, 1997). Indeed, according to reports in the media and the Verfassungschutz, the use of hunger strikes by Kurds in Germany is increasing. That is, it is a strategy more used in the first half of the 1990s than in the latter half of the 1980s – in particular by Kurdish asylum seekers who hunger strike against their deportation back to Turkey.11 One of the most widely used strategies of all is demonstrations.12 The group which has been able to attract most people for demonstrations are the Kurds sympathizing with the PKK. Since the mid-1980s their events have attracted larger crowds with often tens of thousands of participants, peaking in 1995 with a demonstration in June in Bonn where an estimated 70,000 (the PKK itself estimated several hundred thousand) assembled under the motto: ‘For a political solution in Kurdistan – No to the PKK ban’ (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1995: 215). Since the ban of the PKK in Germany it has been illegal to display banners of the PKK and Öcalan publicly at such events. One way to overcome such restrictions is to organize political mass meet-

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 193 ings inside big buildings such as sports stadiums. Mass meetings range from annual meetings/party conferences, cultural festivals, to the commemoration of founders, martyrs or defining moments in Kurdish history. Despite the very different ideological content, mass meetings are remarkably similar in their form. In a Sporthalle 5,000 to 15,000 participants are expected; at a stadium up to 50,000. During the events it is possible for the organizations to display and promote radical messages, propaganda and political slogans since, legally speaking, these events take place ‘inside’ private buildings. Thus Kurdish movements have been able to display the banners of the PKK at large-scale events such as the Peace Festivals in Köln Sportstadium in 1996 and 1997 attracting an estimated 60,000 and 70,000 supporters of Kurdish nationalism from all over Europe (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1996: 190; 1997: 152). Other studies of exile movements have noted how ‘a ceremonial calendar’ is a common device for evoking loyalty among refugees or immigrants. A diaspora political movement may celebrate ritual marking points, commemorate fallen martyrs or founding fathers, or some event leading to exile (Shain, 1989: 60). Such symbolism also serves to impose an important yearly homeland-related ‘calendar’ on the diaspora, thus subtly maintaining the emotional homeland connection. The ERNK/PKK has for instance been known to encourage celebrations of 4 September, the first day of its armed struggle against the Turkish state (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, 1993: 169). More commonly, both the Kurdish organizations of KOMKAR and ERNK/PKK celebrate Nevruz, the Kurdish New Year, in Germany. This event, until recently suppressed by the Turkish state, is saturated in homeland politics and a much used opportunity to signal cultural distinctiveness to the Turkish – and German – authorities. Institutional participation while stressing independence Besides marching on the streets or filling stadiums there are a whole host of organizational activities which, although stressing the independence of the diaspora political actor, are organized with German counterparts on a more co-operative than confrontational basis. A main activity in this category is the more elite-level seminars and panel discussions to which German or Turkish politicians are invited. These panels provide an immediate means to convey concerns and opinions to the German or Turkish politicians present. In particular, the Kurdish movements related to KOMKAR successfully cooperate with German NGOs, notably human rights organizations, to a much larger extent than other organizations, such as those related to the PKK.13 Many organizations are increasingly seeking meetings with German politicians. KOMKAR and its sister organization, Internationale Menschenrechtes Komite, are very active in this respect. Organizations interviewed place great emphasis on this dimension of their work. As formulated by a member of the board of KOMKAR:

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Eva Østergaard-Nielsen one good talk with a politician or a journalist on for instance the subject of village burning in Turkey is often much more worth than a demonstration of 1,000 people in town. (Firtinar)

These meetings are then listed in annual reports of activities to demonstrate to the members of the organization that the federal executive committee is active. Similarly, the organization’s representativeness and dedication are stressed in meetings with politicians in order to strengthen the organization’s credibility as a relevant spokesperson. In the interviews conducted for this study there has been a tendency among Kurdish organizations to stress that they are seeking German interlocutors from the bigger and influential parties instead of focusing on the Bundnis90/Die Grüne and the less influential PDS. More extreme Kurdish organizations have, however, found it difficult to gain access to spokespersons from these parties. For instance, when the German-based PKK-sympathetic Kurdish organization YEK-KOM wanted to be part of a delegation that delivered signatures for a petition against deportation of asylum seekers it was refused access since neither the other Kurdish and human rights organizations nor the receiving politician wanted them to be part of the action (interview with Zozan). The organizations in close and regular contact with German political institutions display signs of adjustment to German political ‘discourse’. Most importantly, the way in which these organizations formulate their demands has shifted towards a more human-rights-based language rather than the more anachronistic rhetoric of old revolutionary movements of Kurdish organizations more closely associated with Turkish left-wing Maoist or Marxist–Leninist movements. Thus, seminars and panel discussions deal with particular dimensions of human rights abuse by the Turkish state; pamphlets refer to Human Rights Convention paragraphs, scholarly work on the subject, and recent summits or events in relevant international fora. Left behind is the more unfocused meeting where the participants are encouraged through paroles of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism to fight against the general oppression of the Turkish state. Working within German political institutions Along with the developments of immigrant and homeland political organizations, Kurds have organized themselves within German political institutions. The two selected cases in this section are the trade unions and the political parties at federal level. The primary incentive to become a trade unionist or join a German political party is, of course, not necessarily to further a homeland political agenda. However, as will be described below, issues pertaining to the Kurdish situation have been unfolding within these institutions.

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 195 Working within the trade unions Kurdish workers have been organized within German trade unions since the early 1980s. The work within the trade unions mainly concerned foreign workers’ rights, but also political conflicts in Turkey spilled over to the trade unions in Germany from the early 1970s up to today, as ‘every [Turkish and Kurdish] political group sought to use the trade-union as a platform’ (interview with Karahasan, 17 December 1998). In addition, representatives of the executive boards of Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DBG) or IGMetall have also been invited to be present at, or send their messages of support to, mass meetings organized by organizations from these parts of the diaspora. (KOMKAR, Liste der Grußbotschaften in Selbstdarstellung). At events organized by trade unions, such as 1 May celebrations, Kurdish members especially have put forward their agenda (Die Tageszeitung 2 May 1991). Indeed, a newspaper coverage of 1 May celebrations organized by DGB in Bremen in 1991 ran the headline ‘Kurds as the largest trade-union’. The otherwise meagrely attended event had a large group of Kurdish activist with banners saying ‘End the Massacre in Kurdistan’, and a speech included in the formal programme by Sertaç Bucak, leader of Internationales Menchenrechts Kommission, a human rights organization with close links to KOMKAR (Die Tageszeitung 2 May 1991). Working within the political parties As the rate of naturalization of Turkish citizens (including Kurds) is increasing rapidly, the mutual interest of German political parties and the potential electorate of Turkish/Kurdish origin is growing. Kurds, with or without German citizenship, are joining the various parties, both as individual members and through membership in Turkish organizations which are explicitly tied to a German political party.14 The dialogue between a selection of Kurdish members and the German political parties to which they have explicitly attached themselves provides an interesting prism through which the various common viewpoints and tensions regarding homeland politics may be viewed (for a more detailed description of this, see Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001b). In particular the Kurdish issue has been at the forefront of such debates. Kurdish – or for that matter Turkish – individuals have not managed to gain a foothold within the more right-wing parties. Apart from a few representatives, these parties are generally less in direct dialogue with ethnic minorities in Germany on both immigrant and homeland political issues. Indeed, on the contrary, the political party most explicitly supportive of the Kurdish perspective is the former communist and quite marginal PDS. The PDS is in dialogue with more radical Kurdish organizations than any other party and has proposed that Germany should stop military aid and help find a solution to the problems of human rights and the Kurdish problem. Ulla Jelpke of the PDS has asked more than a thousand questions related to Turkey in the thirteenth election

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period in which many urged the government to lift the ban of the PKK. Indeed the representation of the PDS of this part of the Kurdish movement led to the following comment during a debate on the PKK in the German Bundestag: one gets the impression that we have given the time for speaking to the PKK rather than to a member of the German Bundestag. (Christian Schmidt, DCU/CSU, to Steffen Tippach, PDS, in Bundestag (BT), 18 April 1996, 13/98: 8785) Yet, the fact that the Kurdish minority in Germany exists alongside a much larger Turkish minority means that German political parties may fear a backlash from Turkish supporters if they come out too strongly in favour of Kurdish political lobbying. In particular the SPD has had to employ a more ‘sensitive’ stance towards Kurdish lobbying because it also has a substantial number of Turkish members with opposing views on this issue. For instance, in 1994 Rudolph Scharping, then leader of the SPD, remarked that ‘the federal government, EU and NATO have been passively watching the genocide against the Kurds in Turkey’ (Die Tageszeitung 13 April 1994). The reactions in the Turkish media and among Turkish social democrats were strong. With the headline ‘Worse than Shirinowski’, the Hürriyet sharply condemned the statement and also reprinted an open letter from the HDF executive committee to Scharping which expressed disappointment with such ‘thoughtless and malicious’ remarks (Die Tageszeitung13 April 1994). Representatives of Kurdish origin have become elected at national level through the PDS and in particular Bundnis90/Die Grüne. Like the PDS, albeit in less confrontational terms, Bundnis90/Die Grüne take a very critical stance towards Turkey’s human rights record and German arms deliveries to the Turkish Army. The Kurdish representatives at local level mainly use their position to advocate immigrant political issues and take care not to be associated with any particular Kurdish organization. However, they have also promoted a critical perspective of the Turkish state’s handling of the Kurdish issue. For instance, in 1996, concomitant with a visit by then Turkish President Suleyman Demirel, the senate representatives of Kurdish origin organized a hearing with Kurdish leaders (own observations, November 1996).

From confrontational activities to multi-layered strategies The above descriptions illustrate the scope and width of Kurdish political activities in Germany. It is, in other words, important not to reduce Kurdish activism to the more violent campaigns of PKK sympathizers only. But beyond this fairly general point, several conclusions serve to highlight trends and developments within the field of Kurdish politics in Germany over the last two decades.

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 197 A process of institutional channelling has taken place whereby the forms of Kurdish political activities are adapting to their German political institutional environment. First, Kurdish activists are increasingly using German political institutions to further their cause, either as organizations which involve German policy makers more closely in their information campaigns, or as individuals running or voting for parties sympathetic to their cause. Second, in tandem with this process the contents of the political messages are becoming more well defined in terms of getting the attention of German policy makers. Organizations and individuals find leverage within the system by pointing to particular contradictions in policies towards Turkey such as the granting of asylum to citizens of a country which is at the same time considered a ‘safe’ third country for other asylum seekers. In particular the linking of the issue of minority rights of Kurds in Germany and in Turkey provides German-based Kurdish organizations with arguments that German policy makers are finding it harder to ignore. As argued elsewhere (see Østergaard-Nielsen, 2000), demands for rights such as mother-tongue teaching in Kurdish in Germany sends a dual message of recognition of ethnic distinctiveness to policy makers in both Germany and Turkey. Thus, while Kurds have the freedom to organize and act politically in Germany in a way that they do not in their homeland, Turkey, there are still several layers of barriers to such political organization. Among the more visible constraints on Kurdish political activism is German law. Demonstrations blocking highways or attacks on Turkish institutions are not tolerated. Organizations which carry out such acts are considered a threat to the domestic security of Germany, watched by the Verfassungsschutz and can be banned as in the case of the banning of over thirty organizations sympathetic to the cause of the PKK in 1993. Yet, also more subtle constraints on lobbying are also imposed as some Kurdish organizations find it hard to get the attention of central policy makers in Germany. The reasons for this are plentiful. Their relative lack of financial resources and their lack of numerical strength at the ballot box do not make Kurds in Germany a domestic political actor to be reckoned with in the style of the Armenians in France or the Greek Cypriots in the UK. On top of this, the phenomena of ‘homeland politics’ or ‘diaspora political lobbying’ are not really welcomed in Germany where foreigners are encouraged to, at least, political assimilation. That is, they are urged to concentrate on their place and role in German and not Turkish society (see Østergaard-Nielsen, 2000). Finally, the not always brotherly but always important bilateral relationship between Germany and Turkey may make German policy makers more sensitive to groups which ask them to criticize Turkey’s human rights record. And similarly Germans are aware that the majority of the 2.3 million Turkish citizens is sensitive to support of Kurdish groups and may lead to a backlash from the rapidly growing number of Turkish-descent voters. This type of institutional channelling makes Kurdish organizations turn

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to the level ‘beyond’ and ‘above’ the state. ‘Beyond’ in the sense that they use the Internet and international media to mobilize Kurds and those sympathetic to the Kurdish cause throughout the world. ‘Above’ in the sense that they turn to the level of international organizations in order to put further pressure on nations and have ways of surpassing these barriers. Although information on these issues is hard to come by and it seems a somewhat initial and sporadic relationship at this stage, it is the case that Kurdish organizations have sought contact with human-rights-oriented organizations in particular. At the same time Kurdish organizations are more frequently quoting international treaties, conventions and norms on relevant human rights issues such as minority protection, asylum laws, and conditions for prisoners. While acknowledging these mechanisms of institutional channelling it is also important to take seriously the fact that different Kurdish organizations work in different ways within the same (German) political system. This may relate to how independent a German-based Kurdish organization is allowed to operate by the main central party committee based in Turkey or elsewhere in the diaspora. Organizations sympathetic to the PKK receive frequent directives on the general policy orientation of the central committee. Organizations such as KOMKAR which have allegiances to a much ‘weaker’ party such as the PSK also receive material, but generally operate more independently in terms of their political strategies. In any case Kurdish organizations are keenly aware that direct linkage with any political party serves to hinder rather than further their cause abroad because most middleground German policy makers prefer to deal with organizations representing Kurds in Germany rather than a Kurdish political party which is illegal in Turkey. Therefore an organization like KOMKAR plays down its links with the socialist PSK and stresses that it is an organization fighting for the rights of Kurds in Germany in its German-language information material, while organizations known to be supportive of the PKK rarely have access to the central political institutions of their host country.

Kurdish diaspora political lobbying and the transformation of home So far, this chapter has primarily aimed to describe Kurdish political activism in Germany in order to argue that interactions with host-state political institutions shape diaspora political activities. To what extent, then, have Kurdish diaspora political efforts managed to bring about transformations at home in Turkey? And to what extent are the Kurdish campaigns in Europe, particularly in Germany, effective? This last section will briefly discuss first the impact of direct support of diaspora political organizations to the solution of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, and second the effectiveness of the diaspora political campaigns in West European pressure on Turkey to solve the issue. In addition the section will highlight how the methodological

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 199 and theoretical problems involved in trying to identify the effectiveness of Kurdish diaspora politics are important points in and of themselves. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the Kurdish issue has been one of the most difficult problems in Turkey’s domestic politics and foreign relations in the last two decades in particular. A range of different political groups and parties have tried to represent the cause of the Kurdish people. Some movements have challenged the Turkish state through military confrontation, such as the PKK, and some through the parliamentary process such as the political party Halk ve Demokrasi Partisi (Hadep). In terms of direct support, it is clearly important for Kurdish political parties and movements in Turkey to receive financial aid and political support from abroad. For instance, the PKK’s armed struggle has been aided by economic support from the diaspora obtained by more or less legal means. Likewise non-militant political movements surely benefit from overseas financial aid although this is difficult to document. Furthermore, one of the main problems that Kurdish political movements and parties face is the right to be allowed actually to participate in a democratic political process without fear of persecution. As has also been observed in the case of women’s movements and human rights issues (Keck and Sikkink, 1998), outside support not only secures the economic basis for local organizations but also lends legitimacy to their work within a restricted and censured political environment. That is, the political support from the outside could be thought to be of great value to Kurdish political movements in Turkey. However, the relationship between Kurdish diaspora political organizations and legal Kurdish political movements in Turkey is ambiguous. Legal political Kurdish activists in Turkey, such as those from the political party Hadep, welcome support from foreign human rights organizations or government institutions rather than specific Kurdish organizations. The relatively radical rhetoric and claims of most diaspora political organizations are already scrutinized by the Turkish authorities. Indeed, Turkey actively tries to persuade West European authorities to curb Kurdish diaspora political activities operating outside Turkey’s jurisdiction. Therefore interviewees from Kurdish political groups in Turkey are very careful not to point to particular links between them and Kurdish political groups abroad. Close ties may serve to damage and further marginalize Kurdish political movements or parties in Turkey. Still, the information campaigns by these organizations are generally valued as they are thought to bring the Kurdish issue to the attention of central political actors in Western Europe who can then put pressure on the Turkish authorities. However, appreciating whether this is actually the case, that is measuring the effectiveness of these information campaigns, is not easy. Political actors, both at national and European levels, are certainly aware of the Kurdish issue. Indeed, the Kurdish issue is widely recognized as an important part of European–Turkish relations, and West European calls for a political rather than military solution and measures to rectify Turkey’s human rights deficits

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are often linked to the plight of the Kurds. Yet, major European governments have employed a cautious tone towards Turkey. Turkey is an important partner for the West and European demands for a political solution to the Kurdish issue are interwoven in a complex web of economic, security and political relations. More importantly, in this context, it is questionable to what extent critical attitudes towards Turkey’s way of handling its Kurdish minority are linked to the diaspora political campaigns as such. The outbreaks of PKK-staged Kurdish violence and large-scale demonstrations in the early 1990s certainly made German politicians more urgently aware of the need for a solution to the Kurdish problem in Turkey. Government representatives’ repeated calls for an end to Turkish–Kurdish intra-communal violence on German soil were always linked to the hope that Turkey would embark on a political solution to the Kurdish problem. However, at the same time these activities were perceived as a real security threat and have served to stigmatize Kurdish political activism at large. Consequentially, representatives from major German parties are more reluctant to be seen at PKK-sympathetic events, and organizations thought to be close to the PKK find it difficult to gain access to relevant party officials. KOMKAR’s systematic dissemination of information, discussion panels and individual meetings with politicians have provided German politicians and NGOs with detailed information on and solutions to the problems. However, such work would carry more weight if the Kurds in Germany were more resourceful in terms of economic status and electoral power. Indeed, at times it seems as if it is fear of further immigration of Kurdish asylum seekers, rather than the active efforts of diaspora political movements, which leads German politicians to call for domestic political change in Turkey. Thus actual transformation at home is difficult to trace back to Kurdish diaspora political actors abroad. Instead the efforts of the more peaceful organizations’ lobbying work must be measured with a more finely meshed tool than is usually the case in the analysis of political change at domestic and international level (see Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001a). That is, obtaining a sustained dialogue with relevant policy makers in the host country is an achievement in itself. In this way diaspora political groups help keep the issue on the agenda in Germany as well as other West European countries and may serve as a linking point between political actors at home and abroad.

Notes 1

2

During the last decade a fast-growing body of literature has dealt with the Kurdish conflict in general and in Turkey in particular. For analysis of Kurdish society and history see, among others, Van Bruinessen (1991) and McDowall (1996). For analysis of the domestic political and international ramifications of the Kurdish struggles see Olson (1996) and Barkey and Fuller (1998). Generally one needs to be cautious as to the representativeness of diaspora political organizations (see Østergaard-Nielsen, 2001a).

Kurdish political lobbying in Germany 201 3 For descriptions of the Kurdish diaspora in Germany, see Stein (1994) for a somewhat sensationalist account of the political movements, and ØstergaardNielsen (2001b) for a description of Kurdish diaspora in the context of wider mobilization within the Turkish communities abroad. 4 For information on the PKK and PKK-related organizations in Europe see ; ; and . 5 For information on KOMKAR see and for further information on the PSK see . 6 ‘Affiliation’ is used here in a more narrow sense designating an organization which is partly funded by a political party, whose members largely support that party, or which aspires to be an official organization affiliated with the party in question. 7 See and for lists of linked organizations working on the Kurdish issue outside of the Kurdish region. Names of Kurdish organizations change constantly as groups break up, merge or simply change name to evade surveillance by the Turkish intelligence service. 8 See, among many others,; ;and. 9 Note that statistics are difficult to unpack since the organizations, which are deemed illegal or threatening, often dissolve or change their strategies. 10 See Rogers (1999) for a detailed summary of news coverage of these events. 11 This observation is based on going through the Verfassungsschutz reports and the TAZ (Die Tageszeitung) archive, which have more reports on hunger strikes by the diasporas from Turkey in recent years than in the 1980s. However, in part, this may also be due to the better public relations strategies of the hunger strikers. 12 Although such things cannot be quantified, it seems indicative that more than 1030 entries came up when the data-archive of the German newspaper most attentive to the political activities of immigrants, Die Tageszeitung, was researched on demonstrations of Turks in Germany between 1986 and 1996. 13 Kurdish movements co-operate with both German NGOs which are specifically working on Turkish affairs as well as more general NGOs. To the first category belong organizations such as the Solidaritätsverein für Demokratie und Menschenrechte in der Türkei (TÜDAY) or Dialog-Kreis ‘Krieg in der Türkei: Die Zeit ist reif für eine politische Lösung’. To the latter category belong organizations such as Amnesty International. 14 Unfortunately, no precise data exist on the number of Turkish citizens or Germans of Turkish or Kurdish descent who have joined the various German political parties, since the parties do not register members according to nationality.

13 Sustaining societies under strain Remittances as a form of transnational exchange in Sri Lanka and Ghana Nicholas Van Hear Introduction This chapter looks at the potential for diasporas to assist their homelands, particularly those that are ailing through socio-economic disintegration or conflict and its aftermath. From the point of view of those at home in such societies, the presence of family members abroad may be a lifeline, particularly in times of distress. More generally, expatriate populations increasingly determine many aspects of their homelands’ society, economy, politics and culture. Indeed, arguably some countries could not sustain themselves without the support of nationals abroad (Brown, 1992; de Montclos, 1999). The chapter investigates one concrete way in which those abroad shape the living conditions of those at home: the transfer of remittances. As many other studies, particularly of ‘economic’ migration, have shown, remittances from abroad can have profound impacts on those at home (see Massey et al., 1998: 221–274); this chapter will show that this is true, if not more so, for societies in conflict or otherwise in distress. Again as has been shown elsewhere, while remittances have helped to sustain households and communities back home, the evidence for transforming the homeland is much less clear. The impact of remittances on balance seems conservative, and the potential for transformation of the homeland through them is yet to be realized; herein perhaps lie some implications for policy and practice, particularly for societies that have experienced conflict or other serious distress. Does the ‘transnational communities’ approach add anything to our understanding in this arena, or is it just a passing fad? Overall, I suggest that the ‘transnationalism’ approach is not radically different from what has gone before in migration and refugee studies, particularly exploration of the impact of migration at home and abroad, in investigations of integration and adaptation, and in the field of ethnic relations. What is perhaps new is the insistence on seeing those who leave and those who remain as a single socio-economic field. This connection is exemplified in concrete, material terms by the approach in this chapter to remittances. I suggest that it is misleading to see them as a one-way transfer, from those abroad to those at home. Rather remittances should be seen as part of an exchange, a return

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for the outlay or investment of the household in the migration of some of its members. It is in this link between home and abroad that ‘transnationalism’ lies. Two countries that have experienced heavy out-migration in recent years are considered here: Ghana and Sri Lanka.1 The chapter first briefly elaborates the conditions that prompted the migration of Ghanaians and Sri Lankans in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the emergence of diasporas among expatriate populations of both countries. Household migration strategies are then briefly examined, and how socio-economic background increasingly determines the forms of migration undertaken, and its outcomes; the focus is on the outlays households must make and the returns they may expect from the migration of some of their members. The chapter then considers whether and under what conditions Ghanaian and Sri Lankan diasporas sustain, conserve or transform the living conditions of those at home. Finally some conclusions are offered about the usefulness of the ‘transnationalism’ approach.

Migration from Ghana and Sri Lanka: mass exodus from distress While there are great differences in the culture and societies of West Africa and South Asia, there are also significant similarities between the two countries under review. Their populations are similar in size, both are former British colonies, and they have similar political economies, not least in their dependence until recently on a single soft export commodity: cocoa in the case of Ghana and tea in the case of Sri Lanka. Both have had an unhappy post-colonial history after a promising start at independence. Their problems culminated in crises in the early 1980s. Curiously, the year 1983 figures prominently as a watershed in the recent history of both countries, and marks the date from which mass exodus from distress began in earnest. For Ghana 1983 was the country’s nadir, when the accumulated mismanagement of previous decades combined with adverse external conditions to bring the country close to collapse. Near bankruptcy, a valueless currency, widespread scarcities of essential goods, drought and a failure of the harvest coalesced in near social and economic breakdown – epitomized by the ‘Rawlings necklace’, the name for the protruding collar bones on emaciated Ghanaians with not enough to eat, a condition wryly associated with the President, Flight Lt Jerry Rawlings. The year of 1983 was also a watershed year in terms of migration, for it was then that Nigeria expelled perhaps a million Ghanaian migrant workers, compounding the country’s dire socioeconomic situation. The throttling of one of Ghana’s principal outlets for migration marked the acceleration of diasporization as Ghanaians sought other diverse destinations, increasingly outside Africa, from the later 1980s. They joined and reinvigorated a prior diaspora of migrants who had sought professional and educational advancement abroad. By the 1990s, between 10

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and 20 per cent of Ghana’s population of about 16 million may have been abroad (van Hear, 1998). Since the early 1980s the country has climbed back from the abyss. A recovery in the later 1980s faltered but was just about sustained in the 1990s when fragile democracy took root, with elections in 1992 and 1996. For Ghana the years since 1983 might be compared with a period of post-war reconstruction: it moved from a society that did not work, dogged by scarcities, lack of trust, the necessity to act corruptly or starve, and general dislocation, to a society that in the 1990s did function. Despite the improvements emigration has continued, however. Substantial numbers of Ghanaian migrants have sought and in some cases received political asylum, although in many if not most of these instances the case for asylum would seem hard to sustain. There has certainly been repression and persecution of political opponents of the Rawlings regime (Nugent, 1995; Jeffries, 1998); sometimes this has resulted in deaths and disappearances. That these were unstable, insecure times for many Ghanaians socially, politically and economically is beyond question. But it was this general insecurity, rather than violent conflict or widespread persecution, that drove so many Ghanaians to seek better times abroad. The year of 1983 was also a crucial year for Sri Lanka. It was the time of the country’s most serious ethnic riots, and is usually regarded as marking the beginning of the civil war that has afflicted the country ever since. The riots were the worst in a series of disturbances since independence in 1948, as ethnic tension escalated against the background of increasing discrimination against the Tamil minority (about 18 per cent of the population2 and mainly Hindu) and in favour of the Sinhalese majority (about 72 per cent of the population, and mainly Buddhist). In retaliation for the killing of Sinhalese soldiers by the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the northern town of Jaffna, anti-Tamil violence broke out in the south, resulting in several thousand deaths, large-scale destruction of homes and massive displacement of Tamils within the country. The riots polarized the two main ethnic communities, and foreshadowed a period of ethnic ‘unmixing’. The armed conflict that followed sparked the exodus of thousands of Tamils, at first mainly to south India, but later further afield to Europe, North America and Australasia. Later another minority, Tamilspeaking Muslims (about 7 per cent of the population), were drawn into the cycle of displacement and ‘ethnic cleansing’. By the 1990s, out of a population of about 18 million, there were some 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees in India, 200,000–300,000 in Europe and North America, and up to a million Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese displaced within the country as a result of the protracted conflict (US Committee for Refugees, 1998). Flight from conflict was just one layer of emigration. Tamil asylum seekers joined a prior diaspora that had been deployed by the British in the empire, and that had resulted from emigration for educational and professional purposes as discrimination took hold in Sri Lanka. Sinhalese

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professionals also sought educational and occupational advancement abroad. There was a further, separate stream of labour migration drawn from poorer Sri Lankan households, mainly though not exclusively Sinhalese. From the later 1970s increasing numbers of Sri Lankans were drawn to work in the oil-rich Gulf states, usually on two-year contracts; these migrants were mainly unskilled women employed as domestic workers, but some semi-skilled and skilled men were also engaged. By the 1990s about 200,000 such workers went each year to work in the Middle East, as well as in South East and East Asia (Sri Lanka Ministry of Labour, 1998). Both Ghanaians and Sri Lankans have made use of the services of brokers or agents to arrange their travel. There were two main types of agent in Sri Lanka. In keeping with the country’s migration order generally, they were more institutionalized than in Ghana. Overseas labour recruiters had burgeoned in response to the demand for Sri Lankan labour, particularly housemaids, in the Middle East since the late 1970s. They were licensed by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, under the Ministry of Labour; but despite its legitimate status, the sector was not well known for its probity. Not all agencies were regulated, some licensed agencies charged migrants greatly inflated fees, and many relied on the services of ‘sub-agents’ who sought out recruits in villages and towns, and who were not regulated. Other brokers, operating as travel agents, arranged the illicit movement of people, including asylum seekers, to the West. By the early to mid-1980s there was reported to be a network of contacts operating in Colombo and Europe to facilitate movement of Tamil asylum seekers to Europe (McDowell, 1996), but it is not clear that the professionalization of ‘travel agents’ in Sri Lanka had emerged by this stage. By the 1990s, however, few managed to seek asylum without the assistance of such agents. In Ghana the agents were more disparate, varying widely in form and legality. Among those most often resorted to were travel agents, who organized tickets and visas, both legitimately and illegally. Such ‘connection men’ were in contact with staff at foreign embassies, who for a fee might be able to organize visas for countries which were difficult to enter. Hajj agents specialized in arranging pilgrimage travel to the Muslim holy places, their business diversifying into arranging travel to the Middle East, sometimes with a view to onward movement to Europe, North America or Asia. Other agents arranged travel for the purposes of sports, cultural exchange or education, both legitimately and fraudulently. The pentecostal and charismatic churches, which have exploded in numbers in Ghana since the late 1970s, also provided an avenue for migration, legitimate and illegitimate, through their strong transnational links: church leaders acted as brokers arranging travel to Europe and North America for church work or marriage to other church members (Van Dijk, 1997). Mosques in Ghana could also organize accreditation for study in the Middle East. While usually utilized for legitimate reasons, this means might be used for onward travel if the opportunity arose.

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The outcome of the various migration streams from both countries has been the emergence of substantial diasporas of Ghanaians and Sri Lankans, on whom substantial numbers of households at home depend for a large part of their livelihoods. As entry was tightened in many destinations from the later 1980s, particularly in the affluent West, the various forms of ‘people movers’ became increasingly important in both countries. Their charges also increased, so that international migration became more and more expensive, involving households in substantial outlays, as the following section shows.

Remittances as a form of transnational exchange It has become widely accepted that migration is often a matter of household strategy – one among several – particularly for coping during times of adversity. When and how to move, who should go, how to raise the resources to travel, how to use any proceeds from migration, and other decisions are commonly matters for the whole household rather than the individual migrant. This approach has been well demonstrated for ‘economic’ migration (Stark, 1991; Massey et al., 1998). As this chapter shows, it is also a useful approach in circumstances of forced migration. Like other household strategies, migration involves outlays or investment, and there is an expectation of return from that investment. Conceiving migration in this way suggests that remittances are not a simple one-way transfer from those abroad to those at home, but rather that the process may be better viewed as a kind of exchange. While migration from both Sri Lanka and Ghana has been prompted by some of the same factors – which might be glossed as distress migration – the strategies of migration are rather different in the two cases. Household decision making and strategies are in evidence to different degrees in Sri Lanka and Ghana: households as collectivities are more involved in migration decisions in Sri Lanka than in Ghana. In Sri Lanka migration is routinized, while in Ghana it is speculative and opportunistic. As would be expected, migration strategies also vary with social class, ethnicity and gender in the two cases. In this section I consider the different strategies pursued, how the means to migrate are raised, the expectation of a return from such outlays on the part of those left behind, and the extent to which those expectations are satisfied. Sri Lanka: routine migration There have been broadly three migration strategies open to Sri Lankans against the background of conflict since the early 1980s: labour migration, usually to the Middle East; seeking asylum, initially in India and later in Europe or North America; and marriage to a partner abroad in Europe, North America or Australasia. Whatever the form of migration, migration decisions are usually firmly a

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household matter. Among most of the households in the Sri Lanka sample, the decision to go was jointly made between spouses or was a collective household one. Even if the decision to migrate was the individual migrant’s, household resources were often used. There was often considerable household investment; most raised the money needed for migration from relatives or from their own savings. Resources accumulated for the dowries of daughters might be invested in migration, meaning that marriage might have to be delayed. Substantial numbers of households, especially those displaced or otherwise war affected, and those with members who had sought asylum, resorted to moneylenders, or sold, mortgaged or pawned assets like land, equipment, houses, shops or jewellery. Partly because the different migration strategies require very different levels of outlay or investment, these strategies divide broadly along class lines, or at least according to the scale of resources that a household can muster. Strategies also vary along ethnic lines. Migration for work in the Middle East and elsewhere requires considerable outlays, but is within the reach of farming and working class households who have some resources: it is pursued by poorer rural and urban Sinhalese families, both displaced and not, and among poorer Muslim and (to a lesser extent) Tamil households who have been displaced. In the 1980s, poor Tamil households displaced by the conflict were able to find refuge in south India. That option faded with the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE in 1991, after which India’s general tolerance of Tamil asylum seekers hardened and the authorities attempted to repatriate Sri Lankans or otherwise pressured them to leave (US Committee for Refugees, 1995). Asylum migration to other destinations, particularly in Europe or North America, has become increasingly costly. It has therefore become largely (though not exclusively) the preserve of well-to-do Tamils, who have both the grounds and resources to pursue it. (Well-to-do Sinhalese families rather pursue migration through education, professional employment or family reunion.) Migration for marriage may also be costly, for the outlay that must be found is likely to be high when the spouse-to-be has residence status abroad. Labour migration: the poorer households’ option A Sri Lankan household might lay out 5,000–15,000 rupees3 for a woman to secure work as a housemaid in the Middle East; the figure might be double for men to secure work as drivers or in construction, with correspondingly higher earnings. This might entail borrowing money at high rates of interest – 15 per cent per month was common – meaning that much of the first year’s earnings could be swallowed up in debt repayments. Many poor households were prepared to undertake such a risk. For those households displaced or otherwise affected by the war, whose margins for survival were slimmer, the risk was correspondingly greater. Sending a member abroad was nevertheless an increasingly common strategy. The following cases show

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how labour migration to the Middle East was used as a means to sustain displaced and war-affected households, and in some cases to assist them to recover after displacement or distress. A SINHALESE SETTLER HOUSEHOLD IN EASTERN SRI LANKA

This household was relocated from the populous west under a government settlement scheme in a hamlet in territory traditionally peopled by Tamils. The family was allocated land to develop a paddy farm and to build a house. In 1992–1994, the wife went to Lebanon as a housemaid to earn money to strengthen the family finances while developing the farm. They paid an agent SLRs12,000, part of which was raised by mortgaging paddy land; the woman remitted most of her monthly salary of SLRs4,000. The house was destroyed and the household displaced after the hamlet came under attack by the LTTE in 1995. The wife again went to work in Kuwait after the attack; the family paid another agent SLRs12,000, borrowing the money from him; with interest, a debt of SLRs20,000 accumulated, which they were still paying off in 1998. Some of her earnings abroad, of SLRs4,500 a month, were used to fund rebuilding the house and restarting the farm. Though apprehensive about further attacks, they were expecting their first harvest soon after the time of my visit. A M U S L I M H O U S E H O L D I N A D I S P L A C E D P E R S O N S C A M P, EASTERN SRI LANKA

This household of small farmers was displaced from a village in eastern Sri Lanka after an LTTE attack in 1990. The wife had worked as a housemaid in Kuwait in 1989 before their displacement, but her stay was cut short by the Gulf crisis and she had to return empty handed late in 1990, shortly after which they were displaced by the LTTE attack. The household thus experienced two serious crises in 1990. They borrowed SLRs18,000 from an agent to send the wife to Kuwait, with their house deeds as security. Her limited earnings – seven months at SLRs4,900 – were used for the household’s daily needs, to pay off some of the debt to the agent, and to buy bullocks and a cart; however, when her earnings were discontinued because of the Gulf crisis, payments for the bullock cart could not be kept up, and it was repossessed. The woman went to the Middle East again in 1991–1993, by which time the family was living in the camp; this time the agent charged SLRs12,000. During this two-year contract, she managed to remit her monthly salary of SLRs6,900. More than half of the money she earned was used to mark the circumcision of their son; some was spent on the purchase of some livestock; and the remainder on jewellery which could later be sold in case of need. In the settlement as a whole, about fifty women had been to the Middle East as housemaids. Most had gone since being displaced and coming to the camp; few had gone before.

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The two cases show how displaced families with modest resources used the labour migration option to sustain themselves or to reconstruct their lives after displacement. In both of these cases, household members had already migrated before displacement, and did so again afterwards. In other cases, labour migration was adopted as a strategy only after displacement. In both cases described above, the households went into substantial debt, but there was some success in that the debt was paid off and some earnings were left over to invest – although the outcomes of this investment were mixed. Other households were not so fortunate. The early end of contracts through abuse or ill-treatment, failure of employers to honour pay and employment conditions, sickness, or other misfortune could be disastrous for the household, particularly if a loan at a pernicious rate of interest had been taken out. Asylum migration: a middle class strategy While the amounts laid out to send members abroad to work were substantial for poor households, the outlay to get Tamil asylum migrants to the West was in a different league altogether. By 1998, sums of SLRs400,000 (about £4,000) and above paid to agents were commonly reported. Given the size of such outlays, the strategy of those families who could afford it was to secure a future abroad for one child, usually a son. Where several household members had to use agents to secure refuge abroad, the drain on household resources would be substantial, as was the case with a Tamil household from a well-to-do background in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka. Following a series of arrests and in one case torture of the three sons in the family, together with displacement as a result of fighting, this household sent them abroad as asylum seekers or students to Canada and Switzerland between 1990 and 1997. The departure of the three sons involved substantial outlays – some 1,400,000 rupees in all, the equivalent of more than £14,000. Their safety was assured but at the cost of the disposal of substantial assets, houses and shops. It is also likely that the two daughters had had to forgo marriage, because there were not enough assets left for dowries. The family income came from remittances, a small pension that the mother received from her former local government employment, some rent from two shops, and a little income the daughters received. Remittances of about SLRs15,000 were sent each time, irregularly. While this family, though seriously affected by the conflict and spending much of their capital, were still comfortably off, others were not so fortunate. For some of the many thousands of Tamil households displaced by the conflict and languishing in government-run ‘welfare centres’ (actually tantamount to detention centres) in the areas bordering the conflict zone, remittances from those who had sought asylum abroad, and the hope of resettlement abroad, could be a lifeline, as was the case with a femaleheaded Tamil household in a camp in the northern town of Vavuniya. The husband was abroad, in Toronto. His brother and younger sister had gone to

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Canada in 1985 and 1990; they were married to Tamils who came from the home area, and both had Canadian citizenship. The family came from a small town in Kilinochchi district, close to the Jaffna lagoon in the north of the country, where they had had a large house, 5 acres (2 hectares) of paddy land, a tractor and some livestock. They fled to Kilinochchi town in 1990 as a result of fighting. The husband left there for Switzerland in 1991, and went on to Canada in 1995. The wife and two young daughters stayed with a relative in a village near Kilinochchi. In 1996 they were forced by fighting to move again, fleeing to Vavuniya where they were put in a camp. The whole family had decided that the husband should go abroad. They used agents based in Colombo and Switzerland, and paid SLRs250,000 for the travel there; part of this money was raised by the sale of their tractor, and part by relatives abroad. The household left behind now subsisted on rations supplied in the camp and on remittances from the husband and other relatives abroad. The husband and the husband’s sister in Canada pooled their money for remitting to the family in Vavuniya; about SLRs20,000 were sent monthly. The objective now was to join the husband in Canada, but there were formidable obstacles to overcome. Not least, the stringent system of government control of Tamils’ movement made it extremely difficult to secure the paperwork necessary to migrate, even if permission to come was given by the destination country. The woman’s frustration was obvious. The family had secured the safety of the husband, but she and her children had been stranded in camps for nearly two years. She had suffered an attack by a deranged man in the camp. At the same time, the family were receiving substantial income in remittances – at SLRs20,000 monthly, perhaps four or five times as much as a manual worker’s pay – and much of this could be saved because the family subsisted at least partly on rations. The two cases show how asylum migration was essentially the preserve of those with substantial resources, although they might be impoverished in the process of sending household members abroad. Raising the necessary funds required the disposal of substantial assets, and often the support of those already abroad. The returns from such outlays might be substantial relative to standards of living in Sri Lanka, as they were in both of these cases; but those at home might still languish in displaced persons’ camps, and efforts at family reunion might be stymied. Moreover, many displaced households were not so fortunate in terms of returns from migration, even after substantial outlays that may have been crippling. Migration for marriage As has already been suggested, marriage is another integral part of many households’ migration strategies, also involving heavy outlays. After getting established abroad, the priority of an asylum seeker or other migrant will be to pay off loans from relatives and moneylenders that have financed the migration: as has already been shown, these costs may be substantial. After

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this, attention may turn to family unification and/or marriage. If the migrant is married, efforts may go into bringing over the spouse and children. If the migrant is unmarried, starting a family will be the priority. Achieving this in exile has become more difficult as time has gone on, for the right to family reunion is associated in most destination countries with full refugee status – and that status has been granted less and less since the later 1980s (Fuglerud, 1999: 99). The dowry system further complicates the migrant’s aspiration to marry. Fuglerud points out that a migrant is under an obligation to procure his sisters’ dowries before establishing his own family. This is because, in the circumstances of conflict, the realizable capital of his family – which might normally be earmarked for dowries for the daughters – has been invested in his migration abroad. Depending on the status of the husband, the dowry will be substantial, and if a migrant has several sisters, the sums involved will be very large (ibid.: 98–100). All this has far-reaching implications for remittances. If, after paying off debt, a large sum of money has to be accumulated to pay the dowries of sisters, little or nothing will be left for other uses by those at home. If the objective is to get sisters or daughters out of the war zone, then little of the resources accumulated abroad will be transferred for the use of those back home. At least, this is the case in the short term. Later, when a male migrant abroad marries, a dowry should pass to him or his family. Meanwhile, the pressure both on those at home to raise funds and those abroad to remit will be substantial (Fuglerud, 1999). All three forms of international migration – for work, for asylum and for marriage – involve substantial outlays for households, the more so for those that have been displaced, whose margins are slim. As the cost of migration to the West has inflated, it has increasingly become the preserve of those that can mobilize very substantial resources. For the less well-off, labour migration may be an option to help rebuild lives damaged by the war, but even this requires large outlays for poor households. However, while the returns from migration may be substantial, there is no guarantee that they will be commensurate with the outlay. The poorest households cannot afford to send any members abroad. Ghana: speculative migration Although the culture of migration is well established among Ghanaians, the strategies of migration are rather more diffuse than in Sri Lanka. Ghana does not have the well-established labour migration option of Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Nor, while many have tried the asylum route, has there been much of an established asylum migration nexus. Ghanaian migration tends to be more individualistic, more opportunistic and less institutionalized than in Sri Lanka. As elsewhere, migration strategies are shaped by socio-economic background. Migration of Ghanaians for education or professional advancement

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is long established, but depends on resources and connections; as elsewhere it is largely the preserve of the more prosperous. The former colonial power, the UK, and the United States and Canada are the main destinations aspired to. The less well-off pursue a number of different strategies, of which asylum migration is just one among several in the repertoire, which also includes marriage, stowing away on ships and other forms of illegal migration. Destinations are more disparate and generally less affluent. Such migration is often very speculative. Poorer Ghanaians who have modest resources to invest in migration, and not much to call upon by way of networks abroad, often have no particular idea – although maybe some preferences – of where they are making for. This kind of speculative migration is well exemplified by stowaways, many of whom board ships at Ghana’s ports with no notion of where they may end up. Those who attempted to use the asylum route often did so in a similarly speculative way. Some made for certain countries, such as Libya or Lebanon, with the idea of using them as stepping stones to more prosperous destinations. Such speculative migrants described their ventures in the following terms: ‘I went to Lebanon because that is as far as my money would take me’; or ‘I just decided to gamble and see which place would be good for me’. For those with relatives already abroad, perhaps through education or marriage, the migration may be more purposive in terms of destination. A little more wealth in the family and a network of relatives abroad could make a speculative trip successful. The household may be involved in the decision to migrate, and help with resources for it, but the process is more individualistic than in Sri Lanka. There is less direct household investment in the migration and less of a sense that migration is a collective household strategy: the view of remittances as part of an exchange is less compelling. The migrant usually resolves to go him- or herself, and the necessary funds are commonly raised from his or her own resources. Relatives in Ghana or abroad may help, but commercial moneylenders are rarely resorted to. Ghanaians commonly send remittances for use ‘in their own projects’ – usually housing – rather than for collective household use. There is nevertheless expectation by the household of support from the migrant. However, remittances are not built into family finances in the way they are among Sri Lankan households. They are rather seen as windfalls, or as a kind of insurance that may be drawn upon in times of need. For Ghanaians, the outlays for migration were usually rather less than in Sri Lanka. Although some utilized ‘connection men’ at considerable expense, most appeared to go with the help of their own contacts rather than agents. Funds for onward travel might well have to be supplemented by earnings en route, otherwise the trip would have to be curtailed early. It was increasingly the well-to-do, usually already with links abroad, who could afford the substantial charges made by ‘connection men’ to secure some kind of legitimate presence in a desirable destination. One man from a comfortably-off family in a small town north of Accra paid a Nigerian

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agent the equivalent of $2,000 to get him entry into Germany in 1988. He used his own savings, and the help of a brother. He left from Nigeria for Germany, where he applied for asylum, which enabled him to stay for fifteen months. He was eventually deported, and returned to Ghana in 1991. While abroad, he sent back modest sums occasionally, and eventually retrieved some 3,000 Dutch guilders and some electronic goods after his return. He had brothers abroad in the United States and Italy who also occasionally sent money. The United States was the most favoured and expensive destination through an agent. The wife of an Ashanti man from Kumasi, a former sawmill operator, claimed that he had paid an agent the equivalent of $10,000 in 1995 to secure some kind of residence in the United States. A sister had helped him find the money. The journey involved at least four transit stops, so was likely to have been circuitous. The returns from this outlay were good so far by Ghanaian standards: he sent about $500 twice a year to his wife. The money was used for daily needs, for the children’s schooling, for their medical bills, and to invest in her second-hand clothing business. Some clothing and electronic goods were also sent, and some money was contributed to the church. The woman hoped that she would be able to join her husband in the United States. Charges appear to have escalated as destination possibilities have contracted. Households from poorer backgrounds (drivers, tailors, traders) in Accra suburbs reported that their members had paid agents between $750 and $1,500 to arrange travel to Libya and Lebanon in 1996–1997. Relatively small sums – perhaps $50 a time – were sent back occasionally, hardly a worthwhile return from such an outlay. If most of these returns seem modest compared with the outlay, there were material success stories. One such appeared to be a 30-year-old northerner living in his own house, a prominent building in a suburb of Accra. He described himself as a trader or a ‘hustler’, with rental income from three houses. His father was a wealthy commercial farmer in his home town, and his mother a trader. He left Ghana in 1988, first to Egypt and then to Japan, using his own savings and the help of his father. He worked for an airline servicing tyres, and returned when he thought he had made enough money. Three of his brothers were abroad, in the United States, Germany and Japan. He was involved in an association of his Dagomba ethnic group while abroad. The migrant claimed to have remitted and to have brought back with him tens of thousands of dollars. The money was used for daily needs of the household at home; for the travel abroad of the three brothers; to buy land to build houses; and for the purchase of a BMW car. He also claimed to have brought back goods like sound systems, air-conditioners, washing machines, motorcycles, computers and video cameras, which were distributed among family and friends. He said he had contributed $2,000 and some goods towards the mosque and the local community. He had saved some of the remainder. If his story and the amounts of money claimed to have been accumulated

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were true, this migrant and his extended family had benefited substantially from his migration. His well-to-do background had laid the basis for the migration. His largesse in the distribution of money and goods to family and friends, the contribution to the mosque and local community, the heavy investment in land and houses, and the purchase and distribution of conspicuous consumer durables would have led to the accumulation of substantial social as well as economic capital. While Ghanaians’ migration strategies and the deployment of remittances were on the whole more individualistic than that of Sri Lankans, a loose collective strategy could sometimes be discerned among Ghanaian extended families. Such was the case with the extended family of a household living in the port of Tema. The household head ran a transport business and his wife a hardware store; they also had a farm and rented out some houses. There were six brothers and two sisters abroad, two in the United States, two in Germany and four in Korea and Japan. The man went abroad in 1994, financing the travel from his own savings. He went first to Senegal, and then took a ship to Germany; he went with a brother who later left Germany for Belgium. He found work in a laundry and sent some money home; he thought he brought back the equivalent of about £5,000. This money was spent on daily needs, schooling of household members, the purchase of some land for house building, and vehicles for his transport business. The brothers in the United States had gone in the 1980s: the first, a seaman, had helped the second to go. Those in Germany had gone in the 1990s; one had sought and got asylum there. Those in Asia had gone between 1994 and 1996. The brothers abroad were involved in their Kwahu ethnic association overseas. Those abroad sent money to be deployed on their various ‘projects’ – principally land purchases for house building, but also for schooling and for a funeral and other life passage events; lathes, sawmills and other machinery had been sent, and were being used by the family. Contributions were also made to the church. These cases show the variety of migration strategies deployed, sometimes by members of a single household – speculative economic migration, seafaring, asylum seeking – and the importance of overseas networks of kin and ethnicity, particularly for chain migration. They also show some success in terms of investment in housing and livelihoods of the extended family as a whole, as well as modest contributions to the wider community. However, such collective benefits were the exception rather than the rule. The two cases were also exceptional in their material success. Many migrants returned or were repatriated with little to show for their efforts, apart from an adventure and the questionable prestige of being known as a ‘burger’ or ‘been-to’.4

The deployment of remittances In the previous section, the kinds of outlays Sri Lankan and Ghanaian households make for migration and the returns they receive as part of a kind

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of transnational exchange were explored. Some of the uses to which remittances were put were also indicated. Those uses might be divided into those which sustain households, or enable them to survive (such as spending on daily needs, medical expenses and perhaps clearing debt) and those which improve, advance or transform the living conditions of the household (such as improving housing, education of children or investment in a business). Social investment (on weddings, funerals, other life passage ceremonies, or contributions to the wider community) might be seen as a subset of the latter. As with migration strategies, decisions on the deployment of remittances depend on the circumstances of the household receiving them. Given utilitarian decision making, it might be expected that households in distress – such as impoverished families or those displaced or otherwise war affected – would need to satisfy the requirements of physical survival before investing in advancement. Labour migrants might be expected to support household members at home, but also perhaps to invest for their eventual return. Refugees might be expected to pursue two main remittance strategies. One would be to send money to assist the survival of those back home, particularly at times of hardship, such as during the intensification of conflict. Another might be to accumulate funds to pay for the passage of family members abroad, either to the same country as the refugee, under family reunification, or to another safe destination. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, but might be pursued consecutively, depending, among other things, on assessments of the situation at home, on the ability of those at home to move, and on the capacity for supporting newly arriving family members abroad. Scrutiny of the uses of remittances among the two country samples and among different kinds of migrants within them only partly bears these expectations out. In Ghana, most households spent remittances on daily needs and subsistence, as would be expected. The next priority appeared to be schooling of family members, followed by investing in housing – buying land, building or improving housing. Then came investment in a business – overwhelmingly other than farming. Savings and paying off debt were among the lowest priorities in this sample. Examination within this sample of households whose members had sought asylum abroad revealed broadly the same pattern of priorities, except that the proportion of households that invested in businesses was rather less, and that paying off debt was more important than in the general sample. This is not surprising considering the greater cost of asylum migration relative to other forms of movement. The Sri Lankan sample revealed some differences in the pattern of priorities. As in Ghana, satisfaction of daily needs was the chief preoccupation, and investing in housing and paying for schooling were of roughly equal importance. Then significant differences from the Ghana sample were apparent. Settling debt was much more of a priority, reflecting the greater outlay on migration, and the resort to credit outside the family.

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Investment in businesses was negligible. However, savings (or rather the accumulation of reserves in the form of jewellery) were rather more prominent than in the Ghanaian case, as was social investment in the extended family, in life passage events like weddings and funerals. Among households with members who had sought asylum and households that were displaced or otherwise affected by the conflict, most spent on daily needs and schooling, but fewer households spent on housing, fewer saved, and there was correspondingly greater concern with clearing debt, again reflecting the high costs of asylum migration. Interestingly, the priority given to spending on social functions was maintained or even increased among these households. How should these different patterns of spending be interpreted, particularly with respect to investment in livelihoods? The differences in remittance use might of course be put down simply to social and cultural variation between the two countries, but some differences are likely attributable to the presence or absence of conflict. In Ghana, in the absence of conflict and with a measure of relative stability, conditions are more conducive to investment in livelihoods, seen in the resources put into businesses. In the more uncertain circumstances of the Sri Lankan conflict, investment in livelihoods or businesses is less attractive. After housing, education and clearing debt, any funds left over are put into savings or reserves, which can be seen as a form of insurance in times of uncertainty. For households with asylum seekers abroad, or which have been displaced or otherwise affected by the war, the margins are even more narrow. What, if anything, should be made of the weight given to spending on social functions in the Sri Lankan cases? The importance accorded to it, even among poor households, is reflected in one of the cases outlined above: that of the Muslim family in a displaced persons camp in the east of the country. Here a substantial proportion of a woman migrant’s earnings were spent on a circumcision ceremony for her son. The ceremony involved much of the population of the camp. Consideration of this episode brings us back to an old debate about the use of remittances (for a summary see Massey et al., 1998: 257–262). If we accept that cultural imperatives are as important as material ones (see, for example, the contributions to Ager, 1999), spending on this life passage ceremony should be seen as an understandable and legitimate outlay. It shows how a household tries to reconstruct its social life in times of displacement and stress. In the context of forced displacement – these people were violently uprooted by the LTTE – it can be seen as a reassertion of identity, a reconstruction of social cohesion in the face of adversity. It also fostered the accumulation of ‘social capital’ by the male household head, who was a prominent figure in this section of the settlement. But there is an alternative, neo-utilitarian view. Given the circumstances of this household in the camp, spending at this level on the ceremony can be seen as wasteful, conspicuous consumption. In utilitarian terms, the house-

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hold could not possibly afford such an outlay, which represented a high proportion of the wife’s hard-earned income. There were much more pressing material and social needs to be met – such as improved housing, investment in income-generating ventures, education of the children, health care – that should surely have come first. From this perspective, the material, social, spiritual or psychological benefits of the ceremony were hardly commensurate with the level of spending on it. These two perspectives on remittance use – socio-cultural versus material – are perhaps irreconcilable. The importance of reasserting social bonds in situations of displacement is obvious. So too is the psychological importance of showing to oneself and the wider community that one’s standing still counts. On the other hand, there was an air of desperation about this household, as about others in similar circumstances, and at least part of the reason for holding the circumcision ceremony seemed to have been an impetuously expressed need to demonstrate that the household could do something successfully. Given their material circumstances, it is also difficult to avoid the conclusion that the remittance income would indeed have been better spent on immediate and longer term needs. Whatever the conclusion, however, the deployment of remittances here, as elsewhere, was essentially conservative or restorative, rather than transforming. Indeed, perhaps the most notable feature of the findings overall is a seemingly unexciting one: that, apart from the predictable variations that have already been alluded to (more spent on sustaining households and less for investment), there are not great differences between economic and forced migration in respect of uses of remittances. Some of the ways in which remittances are used may acquire different or special significance in circumstances of forced migration (such as spending on social events, as illustrated above), but overall the differences in deployment are slight: usually they are deployed to conserve rather than to transform or innovate. How should the overall lack of divergence between the uses of remittances between labour and forced migration be interpreted? From the point of view of the folks back home, the form of migration – seeking asylum, migration for work, for marriage or for education – does not matter. From their perspective, the motivation is the same: the aspiration is for greater household security and, if possible, betterment. Whatever the form of migration, there will be an expectation of something from those who made it abroad, the more so if the household back home has invested much in that migration. In this sense, migration that was not necessarily initially for economic purposes cannot help but transmute into economic migration. For the household as a whole, conflict and displacement may be seen as like other misfortunes or afflictions, such as a bad harvest, a natural disaster or general socio-economic collapse, from which the household must recover or at least must ride out. Remittances are deployed to effect that recovery or to assist in sustaining the household while reconstruction is under way. It is

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therefore not surprising that remittances are used in similar ways: the common feature is society under strain. In a way this conclusion concurs with the perspective of what has been called the ‘New economics of labour migration’. Confronting the widely held pessimistic view that remittances are ‘wasted’ on consumption, luxuries, ‘rituals’ or housing, rather than being ‘usefully’ invested in productive enterprises, this approach suggests that remittances are deployed on subsistence needs and other ‘non-productive’ uses so as to reduce risk among (or within) households. By underwriting such household risks – by meeting immediate households needs (subsistence), longer term demands (such as housing, or schooling for children) or providing liquidity for the household (or to other households by providing credit) – the deployment of remittances may open up the possibility that other surpluses can be invested in more directly ‘productive’ ventures ( Massey et al., 1998; Taylor, 1999). A convincing argument can be made that this is precisely the strategy of displaced households or those otherwise under strain.

Sustaining or transforming societies under strain? Remittances have sustained households in trouble against the background of socio-economic near collapse in the case of Ghana and vicious conflict in the case of Sri Lanka. As was indicated above, Ghana in the early 1980s was in severe straits. Scarcities, the ‘Rawlings necklace’, the disintegration of trust, and ubiquitous corruption to avoid starvation were indicators of acute socio-economic dislocation, coming to a head in 1983. The recovery of the 1980s, which faltered but was sustained in the 1990s with the emergence of a fragile democracy, can be seen as akin to the reconstruction undergone by some countries that have experienced serious conflict. The mass exodus precipitated by the socio-economic crisis, an exodus perpetuated even after some of the reasons driving people to leave were alleviated, provided part of the means, through remittances, for the society to sustain itself and recover into working condition: the possibility of leaving the country and the receipt of remittances relieved desperation at household level. As in other countries, there is room for argument about whether money transferred has been deployed productively; but there is a case to be made that remittances have helped the survival of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Ghanaian households, by giving them the breathing space or supplemental resources needed to claw back and reconstruct since the 1980s. If the sample interviewed is at all representative, there appears to have been substantial investment in housing and in schooling of family members, and considerable investment in businesses, even if these were frequently unsuccessful. Of the cases analysed, those leaving in the later 1980s seem to have been notably more successful in terms of accumulating funds from abroad and investing them at home than those who left in the 1990s. The contribution of remittances to Ghana’s socio-economic recovery thus may have

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peaked in the later 1980s and early 1990s, thereafter declining as migration opportunities were closed off and remittances therefore slackened. If this is a general pattern, it is not unreasonable to suggest that those remittances assisted in the socio-economic reconstruction of Ghana from the later 1980s. Arguably, such transfers have been more effective than aid in fostering socio-economic recovery (the term ‘socio-economic’ is used deliberately here, since the ‘social’ was in as poor condition as the ‘economic’ in the early 1980s). Perhaps more speculatively, as opportunities to migrate were curtailed in the 1990s, and more migrants were deported with nothing to show for their migratory efforts, earnings abroad will have contracted and will have been less likely to sustain Ghana’s recovery. At the same time, remittances have arguably had corrosive effects. Socioeconomic differentiation has been accentuated, not least between those households with migrant members abroad and those without. There has also been differentiation between those households with successful migrants and those with migrant failures. These differences will have contributed to those exacerbated by the pursuit of structural adjustment since the early 1980s (Brydon and Legge,1996). Furthermore, relations between migrants and those at home may be tense, not least over the deployment of remittances in the absence of the migrant. In Ghana there are numerous and sometimes bitter disputes within extended families, which sometimes reach the courts, about the ownership or disposal of property, commonly housing, financed from abroad. The disputes commonly centre on the amount of finance provided by those abroad compared with the labour invested by those at home in the building or maintenance of property. Conversely, there are often complaints voiced by those at home about the lack of reciprocity from the migrant for the help they may have been given by those left behind: ‘we helped him to go, but now we never hear anything’. Some of the same observations may be made of Sri Lanka. As in Ghana, migration and remittances have contributed to the survival and reconstruction of perhaps hundreds of thousands of households – both those directly and those indirectly affected by the conflict. Here class differentiation in migration patterns is much clearer, with the distinction between asylum migration and labour migration apparent to a much greater extent. There is also a distinction – largely based on ethnic background – between those communities with a diaspora and those without. Remittances from migrants by asylum or marriage have helped to sustain displaced and war-affected Tamil households in and outside camps, and assisted some in the long haul to reconstruction after displacement or return. However, this has increasingly become the preserve of the relatively well-off. While poorer households earlier had the exit option of south India and some made it to refuge in the West, the cost of asylum migration and the fading of the south India option now meant that poorer households were rather displaced within Sri Lanka. It might be expected that more poorer Tamil households would go for the labour migration option in these

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circumstances, but it is far from clear if they have been doing this. Remittances from temporary labour migrants to the Middle East and South East Asia have helped to sustain displaced Muslim and Sinhalese households who have few if any members abroad in the diaspora. Beyond just survival, investment of remittances in housing and particularly schooling are encouraging trends among displaced and war-affected households, as among those outside the zones of conflict. However, there are also socially corrosive aspects of the relations between those outside and those inside the country. To give just one example noted in passing above, migration has not only inflated the cost of dowries, but has fundamentally changed their deployment. As Fuglerud puts it, ‘Instead of one dowry helping to finance another, floating as capital within the system of family networks, the cost of transport and settlement now siphons off this capital to greedy “agents”’ (Fuglerud, 1998: 9). An even more serious charge is that migration and remittances have helped to perpetuate the conflict in Sri Lanka. Most obviously, exactions from migrants and their families by the LTTE have been a lucrative source of income for the organization (Davis, 1996; McDowell, 1996), and can be seen as another form of transnational transfer. The LTTE regulates movement out of the areas it controls. Exit taxes are levied on people leaving, and appropriations are made from households with members abroad. The LTTE is also said to be involved in migrant trafficking itself. Exactions continue once the migrant is abroad: house-to-house collections, taxation of incomes from paid work and businesses, and the staging of cultural and sporting events all bring in money for the organization. The LTTE is also said to be directly involved in the remittance transfer business, from which it takes a cut – another form of transnational transfer (McDowell, 1996). The extent to which exactions were contributed willingly by migrants abroad varied. Many Tamils abroad do support the Eelam cause. Others take the line of least resistance, mindful of relatives back home who may still live in areas controlled by the LTTE, or accessible by them (Davis, 1996; McDowell, 1996). At the same time migrants also arguably contribute (with no choice) to the conflict through general taxation they paid as citizens to the government. Sales duties and other taxes and fiscal measures include a defence levy component which goes into the government’s war effort. Turning to less direct ways in which migration and remittances may help to perpetuate the conflict, there is quite a strongly held view among some Sri Lankans, that has some foundation, that the conflict is being prolonged in other ways than finance for arms. It has been suggested that those in receipt of money sent by refugee or asylum seeker relatives abroad live a comfortable life in Sri Lanka – or at least one considerably more comfortable than it might otherwise be. Some were said to be renting or living in accommodation that they could not otherwise possibly afford. For those abroad, particularly those whose status is uncertain, the attitude to the conflict is to

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say the least ambiguous, for it is the continuation of the war that justifies their asylum claim and therefore their stay (McDowell, 1996) – and hence makes possible the sending of remittances.

Conclusion The term ‘transnational community’ is not a synonym for ‘ethnic minority’ or ‘ethnic community’. In my view, one cannot speak of a ‘transnational community (still less a diaspora) in country x’. Nor should we speak of the relationship between the transnational community and home. The transnational community includes the people at home who are integral to it. The members of the ‘community’ in question are those at home as much as those abroad. It is the connections between those at home and those abroad, and among different sections of those abroad when they are dispersed, that constitute ‘transnationalism’, and it is recognition of the increasing importance of these connections as ‘globalization’ has proceeded that makes the ‘transnational communities’ approach an advance on earlier ways of looking at migration. As this chapter has shown, remittances and other transfers from abroad can be seen as concrete, material manifestations of ‘transnationalism’. Remittances should be seen as two-way exchanges, for households’ investment in the migration of some of their members – as labour migrants, asylum seekers, for education, marriage or other reasons – is usually a prerequisite for movement. As constraints on migration have increased, particularly in destination countries, and the cost of movement (often necessarily clandestine) has correspondingly increased, individuals’ and households’ migration choices are increasingly constrained by the resources they can mobilize; class is therefore an important determinant of the kinds of strategy pursued. This was less pronounced in Ghana than in Sri Lanka, where asylum migration has increasingly become the preserve of the well-to-do and well connected; labour migration or internal displacement were the forms of movement that poorer households could afford; and the poorest often could not move at all. One important policy issue that this implicitly raises is the question of who is more deserving of assistance: those who leave, who may be relatively welloff, or those who remain, who may be worse off ? If the need for assistance is greater for those who stay than for those who leave as refugees, the current focus of relief and assistance efforts may be misplaced. Households invest substantially in migration of their members as labour migrants, as asylum seekers, for marriage or family reunion, and those left behind expect something in return from those who go. In this sense there is convergence between economic and forced migration, to the extent that asylum seekers and other forced migrants are unavoidably confronted by economic issues (of the livelihood of those left at home as well as their own) similar to those encountered by labour or ‘economic’ migrants. There is a similar convergence in terms of the outcomes of or returns from forced and

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economic migration. The evidence from Sri Lanka and Ghana confirms the ambivalence associated with the use of remittances sent back to societies in conflict or distress that has been noted in numerous studies of conventional economic migration, where assessment of the impact of migration in general and remittances in particular ranges from the ‘optimistic’ – remittances are productively deployed and contribute to ‘development’ – to the ‘pessimistic’ – remittances are wastefully spent and do not contribute to ‘development’ (Taylor, 1999). Ambivalence concerning remittances is still greater in the context of conflict and forced migration. On one hand, remittances and other transfers from abroad have certainly helped to sustain displaced, waraffected or otherwise distressed households and communities, sometimes for long periods, even if the durability of such underpinning is questionable. On the other, remittances have sometimes helped sustain the very conditions that lead to forced migration, both directly by funding conflict and indirectly by giving some of the recipients of transfers an implicit interest in those conditions continuing. This ambivalence poses serious policy dilemmas for countries that host refugees and other migrants. On one hand, those expatriates may well be fuelling conflict, which governments hosting them may well wish to discourage. On the other hand, the authorities of countries hosting migrants and refugees should be aware of possibly far-reaching consequences if such people are repatriated, or indeed if harsh restrictions are put on immigration. The consequences include the possibility that a diminution of remittances may lead to hardship, instability, socio-economic or political upheaval, and even the resumption or provocation of conflict – and then quite likely renewed out-migration. The curtailment of immigration and the implementation of repatriation may therefore likely imperil the very economic and political security (or in broader terms the human security) that the international community claims to want to foster. In the longer term, remittances have the potential to be harnessed for the reconstruction and development of societies recovering from the distress of war or economic collapse; diminution of such transfers through repatriation will likely undermine such potential. It follows that migration policies that purport to be oriented to the country of origin of migrants cannot afford to leave those abroad, especially those hosted by relatively affluent countries, out of consideration. It is in this link between those at home and those abroad that the relevance of ‘transnationalism’ lies for states hosting migrants and refugees. In the two cases examined, which are unlikely to be atypical in recent times, the net result of the ‘transnational’ relationship has so far been essentially conservative so far as remittances are concerned: households and communities have at best been sustained, rather than radically transformed. For many in both countries life is on hold: transfers from those outside to those inside appear to both sustain and perpetuate that limbo. While sustaining households in societies under strain may be a positive outcome,

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the potential for remittances to reconstruct or transform such societies has yet to be realized.

Notes 1

2

3 4

The chapter draws on fieldwork among about 800 households with migrant members in Ghana and Sri Lanka in 1998. The households interviewed had economic migrants or asylum seekers as members; the Sri Lanka sample included in addition households which were displaced or otherwise directly affected by the war. In Ghana I was assisted by Latif Abdul-Rahman, Iddrisu Haruna, Jeffery Boham and Ibrahim Abdullah (the Burger Team). In Sri Lanka the research team included Renuka Senanayake, Brian Jeganathan, Iftekhar Zuri and Iranganie de Silva; the assistance of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, is also gratefully acknowledged. In Oxford Eirini Flouri assisted with entry and analysis of quantitative data. The support of the Leverhulme Trust for this research is gratefully acknowledged. This figure includes the ‘Indian Tamil’ population, brought by the British in the nineteenth century to work the tea plantations in the central highlands of the country, and distinct from the larger, longer established Tamil population whose heartlands are in the north and east. In 1998 SLRs100 were approximately equal to £1. ‘Been-to’ and ‘burger’ were two ironic popular terms for returnees. ‘Been-to’ is self-explanatory. ‘Burger’ was coined in the 1980s to refer to Ghanaians who went to Germany (specifically Hamburg), but was extended to other returnees – particularly young men who dressed flamboyantly to flaunt their ‘been-to’ status.

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Index

Abadan-Unat, N. 49 Adamson, F. 12, 187 Akcam, T. 20 Algeria: civil conflict 163–4; remittances to 157 Al-Ali, N. 6, 11, 174 al-Mahdi, Abd al-Rahman 45 al-Mahdi, S. 45 Al-Manar, 47 al-Razig, E. O. Abd 45 Ali, M. 47–8 All Party Hurriyet Conference (APHC) 176, 180 All Party International Kashmir Coordination Committee (APIKCC) 177, 181 Anderson, B. 18, 165, 180, 188 anthem, Croatian national 122 Antoine, P. 73 Anwar, M. 51 Appadurai, A. 56, 59, 69, 156, 159, 162 Arab Bank 89 Arabic language 46–7 Armbruster, H. 6, 8–9, 80, 133, 160, 187 armed conflicts, funds for 165–6, 189 Armenians in France 197 artists 112 Association of Sudanese Academics 43 asylum migration 209–10, 221 Avokaya Group 41 Awda, Al 88 Axel, B.K. 164 Azad Kashmir: border crossings 177–8; Constitution 176; elections 176–7; government 173, 175; history 170–1, 173; Legislative Assembly 175, 176; party politics 176; remittances 174; wars 170–1, 180–4

Azad Kashmir People’s Party (AKPP) 176, 182–3 Badil Centre 88 Ballard, R. 81, 174 Bamba, C.A. 69, 75 Bammer, A. 6 Basch, L. et al. (1994) 4, 18, 51, 52, 56, 61, 99, 156, 166 Bascom, J. 140 Bayart, J.F. 71 Beja Culture Association 41 belonging 30–1 Bencherifa, A. 54 Berque, A. 93 Beverly-McCloud, A. 57 Bhabha, H. 35 Bhachu, P. 51 Bhutto, B. 176 Bhutto, Z. 182 biraderi, system of 175 Black, R. 141, 150, 151 Blair, T. 181, 182, 183 Bojicic, V. 97–8 Bosnia: visiting 110–12; war (1992–5) 99, 101 Bosnia-Herzegovina: elections 105, 114, 133; government 11, 97 Bosnian Islamic Centre 106 Bosnian language 108 Bosnian refugees 11, 96–9; diversities within 101–3; financial strategizing 109–10; forging communities 104–6; ideas and knowledge crossing borders 112–13; life in UK 103–4; negotiating across gender and generational lines 106–9; problematizing transnational communities 99–101; returnees 97–8,

240

Index

111, 151; ‘test the waters’ scheme 111; transnational or anational 113–16; visits and travelling 110–12 Bourdieu, P. 53, 59, 159 Brah, A. 31, 32 Brown, R. 202 Brubaker, R. 159 Brydon, L. 219 Brysk, A. 163 Bucak, Sertaç 195 Burkay, K. 188 Caces, F. 90 Cairo, Sudanese in 9, 34–5, 37–9, 48–50 Cale Feldman, L. 122 Calzolari, C. 54 Campus, A. 70, 74 Canada: Eritrean refugees 140, 141, 147; Ghanaian migrants 212; Kashmiris 174; Palestinian entrepreneurs 89; Tamil asylum seekers 209–10; Tamil fundraising 166 Caritas di Roma 70 Carmon, N. 69 cars 58 Carter, D.M. 70, 74, 75, 76, 79 carvers 73 Castles, S. 36 Centre for Turkish Studies 21 Chandler, D. 97 children: Croatian in Sweden 129; Eritrean 140, 141, 142, 150; Moroccan in Italy 55–6; unaccompanied minors 140, 142; see also education China: Aksai Chin occupation 171; revolution (1911) 167; state identity 162; Tibet occupation 171 citizenship: Canadian 210; in host countries 143; Kashmiri 172; Swedish 119, 120, 122 Clapham, C. 139 Cliffe, L. 139 Clifford, J. 25, 35, 130, 135 Clinton, B. 181 clothes: Italian 58–9, 73, 74; Moroccan 51, 60 Cohen, A. 74 Cohen, R. 4, 52, 119, 167 Collier, P. 165 community: development 45–7; issues of 18; moving 22–3; see also transnational communities computer: access to 179; training 46,

103, 112; use 112–13; see also e-mail, Internet Connell, D. 139, 140 consumption 53, 55–7, 59–60 Cook, R. 179 Copans, J. 71 cosmopolitans 76–7 Coulon, C. 72, 80 Council for Palestinian Restitution (CPRR) 88 Courade, G. 73 Croatia: elections 120, 173; Homeland War 121–2, 123–4, 134–5 Croatian: diasporas 119–22; language 131; refugees in Sweden 11, 118–19, 122–35 Croatian Information Centre 120 Croatian World Congress 120 Cruise O’Brien, D.B. 70, 72, 73 Cuban refugees 151 cultural diversity and national identity 41–3 Cyprus, diaspora politics 157–8, 197 Czech nationalist discourse 132–3 Dakar, Mouridism in 73 dance 41, 42 Danforth, L.M. 156 Davidson, B. 139 Davis, A. 220 Dawson, A. 7, 68, 80, 133 Dayton Peace Accords 97–8, 114 De Filippo, E. 54 de Montclos, M. 202 DEHAI, e-mail group 144, 147, 148 Delanty, G. 179, 184 Demetriou, M. 158 Demirel, S. 196 Denmark, Kashmiris in 174 Diaz-Briquets, S. 151 difference-generating social bases xi Diop, A.B. 71, 73, 75, 82 Diop, A.M. 70 Diouf, M. 70 displaced persons (DPs) 208–9 Dorai, M.K. 10 drama 42 dress see clothes Duara, P. 172, 173 Dusenbery, V.A. 162 Ebin, V. 70, 73, 74, 75 education: in Bosnia 98; Eritrean children 141; Kashmiri 173;

Index 241 Moroccan children in Italy 62–3; Sudanese expatriates 38 Egypt: immigration policy 37; remittances to 157; Sudan relations 35, 38 Eickelman, D.F. 69 Ellis, P.: and Khan (1998) 177; and Khan (1999a) 172, 174, 177, 178, 185; and Khan (1999b) 185; and Khan (1999c) 185; and Khan (this volume) 12–13, 155, 162 El-Solh, C.F. 49 e-mail 112, 144, 148, 179, 180 employment: Bosnian refugees 107, 112; Moroccan women 55, 61–2; Sri Lankan labour migration 207–9; see also trade English language 144 Eritrea: Constitution 145; government 142, 152; Referendum for Independence (1993) 140, 145; transformations in 139–40 Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) 139, 140, 142, 145 Eritrean refugees 11–12, 98, 138–9; channelling the energies of the diaspora 148–9; differentiation between 150; financial contributions 147–8; influence on government policy 148; links with communities of origin 143–4; links with country of origin 144–5; political linkages 148; return issues 140–3; transnational identities 145–6, 149, 150 Eritrean Relief Association (ERA) 146, 149 ERREC 140, 147 Ethiopia: conflict 12, 139–40, 148; Derg 140 European Parliament 177 European Union (EU) 190.196 Fábos, A.H. 9, 45 Fall, M. 70 family reunion programme 79, 82 Fassmann, H. 120 faxes 179, 180 Festival of Croatian Culture 124, 133 Festivals of Sudanese Cultures, First and Second 40, 41, 42 Finland, Kurdish refugees 151 Firebrace, J. 139 food, Moroccan 57 Ford Foundation 46

Fouron, E.G. 18 France: Armenians in 197; Eritrean refugees 141; Senegalese migrants 69, 78 Friedman, J. 55, 56, 60 Friedman, S.S. 32 Fuglerud, O. 164, 211, 220 fundraising 165–6, 189, 220, see also tax funerals 132 Gandhi, R. 207 Ganguly, K. 134 Gardner, K. 53, 57, 69 Gaza-Jericho Agreement (1994) 10, 88 Gell, A. 58 gendered positions 29–30, 47–8 Georges, E. 51, 156 Germany: Bosnian refugees 97, 100; Eritrean refugees 11, 98, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149; foreigner law 31; Ghanaian migrants 213, 214; Kurdish illegal activities 191–2; Kurdish movements 189–96; Kurds in 13, 162, 163, 186–7; Palestinian migrants 90–1; political institutions 194–6; political parties 195–6; repatriation schemes 97, 141; Syrian Christian refugees 8–9, 17, 21–2; trade unions 195; Turkish immigration 21 Geschwender, J.A. 49 Ghana: expatriate population 203; migration from 203–4, 205–6; remittances 13, 214–18, 221–3; speculative migration 211–14; sustaining or transforming societies under strain 218–21; travel agents 205 Ghazzawi, H. 92 gifts see presents Gilroy, P. 25 Glick Schiller, N.: and Fouron (1999) 18; et al. (1992) 52, 61, 64, 68, 156; et al. (1995) 18, 68 Goldring, L. 52, 81–2, 99 Grayson, G.W. 158 Grillo, R. 52, 76, 78 Gross, J. 49 Group for Alternative Policies for Sudan (GAPS) 43 Guarnizo, L. and Smith (1998) 2, 18, 35, 52, 74, 77, 82, 99, 100 Gundulic, I. 126 Gurak, D.T. 90 Gürbey, G. 187, 188

242

Index

Hadep 199 Haidar Ibrahim Ali, Dr 43–4, 45 Haile Selassie 140 Hale, S. 49 Hall, S. 19, 25 Hallaj, A.R.H. 39 Hanafi, S. 89 Hannerz, U. 35, 53, 64–5, 76 Harvey, D. 54 Hassanpour, A. 161 Hathaway, J. 143 Hayat, S.S. 176 Hedges, C. 166 Hellman, J. 78–9 Holland, S. 139 Holy, L. 132–3 home: conceptions 6–8; creating a 55–7; ideologies 52; imagined and inhabited 131; loss of 127–31; meaning 8–10; perceptions 53, 55–7; political transformation of 166–8; as routes and roots 25–9; Syrian Christian notions 18–20, 31–2; transformation of 12–13, 155–6, 166–8; transforming from abroad 160–6; transnationalism and 18–20 homeland: Palestinian 92–4; real or imaginary 157 housing: Bosnian 98; communal 81; Eritrean shortage 141; in Italy 77; multi-storeyed 81 hunger strikes 192 Huntington, S.P. 158 Hutu refugees 36 identity (identities): consumption and perceptions of home 55–7; continuity and rupture 60–4; Palestinian 92–4; political 160–2; transnational 145–6, 149, 150 India: Kashmir dispute 177–8; remittances to 157; state identity 162; Tamil refugees 204, 207; wars over Kashmir 170–1, 180–4 individuals, motivations 14 Indra, D. 102 integration 77, 113, 143 intellectual activities 43–5, 112 international migration: transnational perspectives 2–4; transnationalism and home 6–8 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 70 international organizations (IOs) 160

International Sudan Studies Association (ISSA) 44–5 Internet 12, 112–13, 164, 179, 190–1, 198 Ireland, P.R. 155, 189 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 166 ISMU (1998) 54, 56, 70 Israel, state of 89, 167 Italy: Ghanaian migrants 213; Moroccan migrant women 9–10, 52–66; Senegalese migrants 10, 53 Izetbegovic, A. 104 Jackson, S. 53 Jalal, A. 170 Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) 176–7, 180 Jeffries, R. 204 Jelpke, U. 195 Jewish diaspora 167 Jinnah, M.A. 182 Joly, D. 151 Kaldor, M. 97–8 Kapchan, D. 62 Kashmiris: citizenship 172; diaspora 12–13, 169, 184–5; dispute 170–1; formation of diaspora 173–5; liberation politics and domestic politics 180–4; role of diaspora in liberation politics 176–80; territorial or deterritorialized nation 170–3; in UK 162 Kashnet 180 Kaul, A. 171 Kearney, M. 2, 68, 143 Keck, M.E. 163, 199 Kellas, J. 171 Khan, Amanullah 176, 177, 183 Khan, Atiq 182 Khan, Z.: Ellis and (1998) 177; Ellis and (1999a) 172, 174, 177, 178, 185; Ellis and (1999b) 185; Ellis and (1999c) 185; Ellis and (this volume) 12–13, 155, 162 Khartoum, Sudanese expatriates from 38–9, 48 Kimmerling, B. 88 King, R.L. 74 Knights, M. 74 Kolar-Panov, D. 121 KOMKAR 186, 188–9, 190, 192–3, 195, 198, 200 Koopmans, R. 155 Kopitoff, I. 59

Index 243 Koser, K. 11–12, 95, 150, 151 Kosovar refugees 151 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) 166 Kuider, S. 54 Kurdish languages 161 Kurds: in Germany 13, 162, 163, 186–7; illegal and underground activities 191–2; institutional participation 193–4; legal and confrontational strategies 192–3; nationalist identity 160–1; political activities 189–91 (Table 12.1); political entrepreneurs 12; political lobbying 198–200; political strategies 196–8; refugees in Finland 151; refugees in UK 151, 162; transformation of home 198–200; working within German political institutions 194–6 Labelle, M. 19 labour: migration 100, 102, 115, 116, 124, 207–9; recruiters 205 Lado, J. 34, 45, 46, 47 Lamb, A. 171 languages: bilingualism 113; see also Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, English, Kurdish, Syriac, Urdu Lassonde, L. 54 Lavie, S. 36, 37 Lebanon: civil war 91; Ghanaian migrants 212; Israeli invasions 91; refugee camps 10, 87–95 Legge, K. 219 Leggewie, C. 161 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) 166, 204, 207, 208, 216, 220 Libya, Ghanaian migrants 212 London: Bosnian Islamic Centre 106; Bosnian refugees 103–4

Marcus, G. 68, 162 marriage: dowries 209; Kashmiri 175; migration for 210–11; Moroccan practices 61–2; Palestinian refugees 92 masculinity 29–30 Massey, D. 21–2 Massey, M. 202, 206, 216, 218 MED-TV 190 Mesic, M. 119 Metcalf, B.D. 76 Mexico, migrants 147 Midy, F. 19 Migdal, J.S. 88 migrants: labour 100, 102, 115, 116, 124; transnational 10–12 migration: asylum 209–10, 221; labour 207–9; for marriage 210–11; orders 99; speculative 211–14 Miller, D. 53, 60 Miller, M.J. 36 Mills, B.M. 56 Minority Rights Group International 139 mobilization, transnational 166–8 Modood, T. 36 Moores, S. 53 Moroccan: migrant population 54–5; migrant women in Italy 9–10, 52–4 Morocco, summer return 57–60, 63 motorcycles 58 Mouride brotherhood 69–77 Münz, R. 120 Muridiyya 70 Murtada, S. 75 Muslim Conference (MC) 176, 182 Muslim Council of Britain 106 ‘myth of return’ 51, 52

McDowall, D. 187 McDowell, C. 151, 205, 220, 221 McSpadden, L. 139 Madan, T.N. 171 Maher, V. 61 Mahler, S.J. 51 Mahmoud, S. 176, 182–3 Malik, I. 171 Malik, M. 176 Malkin, V. 51, 57 Malkki, L. 36, 102, 151 Malmö, Croatian community 119, 122–4 marabouts and disciples 71–3, 75–6 Marchetti, A. 70

nationalism: Kashmiri 171–2; Kurdish 161; as secular religion 136; and transnationalism 35–7 Netherlands: Bosnian refugees 11, 98, 100, 101, 104–15; Kashmiris 174 networks, migratory 90–2, 156 New York, Wolof migrants 80 newspapers 112, 144, 166, 175, 181 Nicaraguan refugees 151 Nigeria, expulsion of Ghanaians 203 non-governmental organizations (NGOs): in Cairo 9, 34–5, 39, 40, 48–50; relationships with 160, 163 Northern Ireland, conflict 166, 167

244

Index

Nubian Studies and Documentation Centre 41 Nugent, P. 204 Öcalan, A. 191 Office of the UN High Representative (OHR) 97 Olwig, K. 69, 81 Ong, A. 36, 100 oral traditions 41 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 97 Oslo Agreements 10, 87, 88, 91 Østergaard-Nielsen, E.: (2000) 197; (2001a) 187, 200; (2001b) 189, 190, 195; (this volume) 13, 155, 160, 162, 163 Our Roots 41 outsiders, perceptions of 77 Pakistan: Kashmir dispute 177–8; military presence in Kashmir 173; politics 176; remittances to 157; wars over Kashmir 170–1, 180–4 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 88 Palestinian National Authority (PNA) 87, 88 Palestinians 10–11, 87–8, 94–5; homeland as a resource for identity 92–4; migratory networks and identity 90–2; transnational community 88–90 Papastergiadis, N. 7 passports 26–7, 31, 105, 111, 132, 174 Pateman, R. 139 Pavelic, A. 119 Perez-Lopez, J. 151 Perry, D.L. 71, 74, 80 Peul (Fulani) migrants 69, 78 Picaudou, N. 88 Piscatori, J. 69 PKK 186, 188–9, 190, 191–4, 196–200 poetry 42, 125–7 Pojulu Family in Egypt 41 political: lobbying 198–200; mass meetings 192–3; movements among Kashmiris 162, 176–84; movements among Kurds in Germany 162–3, 189–98; movements among Kurds in Western Europe 187–9; parties in Germany 195–6; strategies 162–5, 189–96; transnational fields 156–60 Portes, A.: (1996) 99, 156; (1997) 18;

(1998) 74, 100, 101, 113; (1999) 65, 92, 174, 176; and Rumbaut (1990) 143; et al. (1999) 2, 18, 69, 82, 88–9, 169, 178 Povrzanovic, M. 102, 122; (1997) 118, 127; (2000) 136; Prica and (1996) 122, 134 Povrzanovic Frykman M.: (2001a) 119, 122; (2001b) 123, 124, 133; (this volume) 11 Preradovic, P. 125 presents 58, 60 Prica, I. 122, 134 Pugliese, E. 54 Qayyum, S. 176, 182 Quiminal, C. 81, 82 racism 79 Rapport, N. 7, 68, 80, 133 Rawlings, J. 203, 204, 218 recruiters, overseas labour 205 Red Cross 101, 104 Red Star Campaign 140 Referendum Commission of Eritrea 140 refugees: Bosnian 11, 96–116; Croatian 11, 118–19, 122–35; Eritrean 11–12, 98, 138–40; Hutu 36; loss of home 127–31; Palestinian 90–1; political xii; status 91, 142–3; Sudanese 9, 34–5; Syrian Christian 8–9, 17, 21–2; transnational communities 138–9 religion: Christianity 21–2, 139; identities 160; Islam 106, 139, 160, 171; Mouride brotherhood 69–77; pentecostal and charismatic churches 205; pilgrimage 205; Sufi Islam 70, 76; travel arrangements 205 remittances: Bosnian refugees 109; Cubans 151; deployment of 214–18; Eritreans 144; as a form of transnational exchange 206–14; in Ghana 13, 206, 212–14, 215, 219; global value of 157; growth of 52; Kashmiris 174; Nicaraguans 151; role of 13, 202–3, 221–3; in Sri Lanka 13, 206, 209–10, 215–16, 219–20; sustaining or transforming societies under strain 218–21 return: low rate of 97, 141, 150; myth of 51, 52; obstacles to 141, 150; repatriation schemes 97, 141; summer 57–60, 63; ‘test the waters’ scheme 111

Index 245 Riccio, B. 10, 53 Ricoeur, P. 134 Risse, T. 163 Robin, N. 69 Robins, K. 20 Rodriguez, N. 143 Ross, E. 72 Rouse, R.: (1991) 6, 18, 68, 71, 99, 101; (1995a) 52; (1995b) 64 Ruggie, J. 156 Rumbaut, R.G. 143 runaways 25 Salem, G. 73, 75 Salih, R. 9–10, 35, 80 Salih, Z. al-Abdin 41 Saraf, M.Y. 170 Sassen, S. 4 Saudi Arabia, Eritrean refugees 140, 144, 146 Scharping, R. 196 Schierup, C. 119 Schmidt di Friedberg, O. 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77 Scidà, G. 74 self: ideologies 52; perceptions 53 Senegalese migrants: home 77–82; in Italy 10, 53, 68, 69–70; transnationality 70–7 sexuality 29–30 Shain, Y. 158, 164, 187 Shami, S. 36, 99, 171 Sharif, N. 176, 181, 182, 183–4 Sharif, T. 34, 45, 46, 47 Sharkey, H.J. 39 Sheffer, G. 88, 158, 187 Shuman family 89 Sikh: diaspora 164; fundraising 166; identity 162; Punjab conflict 164, 166 Sikkink, K. 163, 199 Silverstein, P.A. 164 Simon, R. 148 Singh, G. 171 Sinhalese migrants 204–5, 208 Skrbiš, Z. 121 Smith, M.P., Guarnizo and (1998) 2, 18, 35, 52, 74, 77, 82, 99, 100 Smith, R.C. 99, 100, 101, 143, 147, 148 social clubs: Bosnian 104; Croatian 122–3, 127, 133; Sudanese 40 songs 41, 131 Soninké migrants 69 Soysal, Y.N. 155 Sri Lanka: ethnic riots 204; expatriate

population 203; migration from 204–5, 206; remittances 13, 214–18, 221–3; routine migration 206–11; sustaining or transforming societies under strain 218–21; Tamils 151, 164, 166, 204 Stark, O. 206 state, role of 13–14, 100 Statham, P. 155 stories 42 Stubbs, P. 173, 180 Styan, D. 140 Sudan: Eritrean refugees 140; civil war 38 Sudan Culture and Information Centre (SCIC) 34, 41–3, 46 Sudan Victims of Torture Group 39 Sudanese: culture 40, 48–9; identity 46–7; NGOs in Cairo 9, 34–5, 39, 40, 48–50; refugees in Cairo 9, 34–5; transnational communities in Cairo 37–9 Sudanese Centre for Culture and Information 39 Sudanese Centre for Information and Strategic Studies 43 Sudanese Development Initiative Abroad (SUDIA) 39, 45–6 Sudanese Studies Centre (SSC) 43–4 Sudanese Women’s Alliance (SWA) 47 Sufi Islam 70, 76 Sutton, C.R. 51 Sweden: citizenship 119, 120, 122; Croatian migrants 11; Croatian refugees 11, 118–19, 122; Eritrean refugees 140, 141 Swedenberg, T. 36, 37 Switzerland, Tamil asylum seekers 151, 209 Sylheti migrants 53, 57 Symposium on Cultural Diversity and Nation-Building 43 Syriac language 23–4 Syrian Christians (Suryoye): biographical sketches 26–9; nationalist identity 160; research among 17–18; in Turkey and Germany 8–9, 20–3 Tall, S.M. 71 Tamil: asylum seekers 151, 204, 205, 221; fundraising 166, 220; web sites 164 Tanzania, Hutu refugees 36 Tarrow, S. 164

246

Index

tax: diaspora collection 165; Eritrean diaspora 144–5, 147; Tamil migrants 220 Taylor, C. 132 Taylor, J. 218, 222 telephone contact 96, 106, 113, 179, 180 television, satellite 12, 161–2, 179, 190 Tesfagiorgis, G.H. 139 Thatcher, M. 182 Tibetan exile groups 162 Timera, M. 78 Tölöyan, K. 4 Touba, holy city 71–3, 75, 76, 80–1 Toucouleur migrants 69, 78 trade: Moroccan 58; Senegalese 70, 73–4 trade unions 195 tradition and transformation 40–3 transnational community (communities): concept 155; migration-based 156–60; mobilization and transfer of material resources 165–6; problematizing 99–101; as space for constructing new political identities and discourses 160–2; as transnational advocacy network and social movement 162–5 transnationalism: concept 1–2, 169; as field of contestation 63–4; and home 18–20; identities 145–6; international migration and home 6–8; Moroccan migrants 65–6; nationalism and 35–7; new perspectives 4–6; permanence 14; practices 52 transnationals 76–7 transportation systems 178–9 travel agents 205 Tudman, F. 131 Turabi, R. 176, 178 Turkey: domestic policies 198–200; Kurdish illegal activities 191–2; Kurdish political movements 187–9; Kurdish satellite television 161–2; relationship with Germany 196, 197; Syrian Christians 8–9, 17, 20–1, 23 Uigur exile groups 162 United Kingdom (UK): Bosnian refugees 11, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103–15; Cypriot lobby 157–8, 197; Eritrean refugees 11, 98, 140, 141, 143, 146, 149; Ghanaian migrants 212; Kashmiris 174, 176, 177, 181–3; Kurdish refugees 151; Palestinian migrants 91

United Nations: High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 37, 97, 101, 103, 104; Secretary-General’s Office 177; Security Council 171 United States: Eritrean refugees 140, 141, 146–7, 149; Ghanaian migrants 212, 213, 214; Kashmiris 174; Mexican immigrants 147; Palestinian entrepreneurs 89; Wolof migrants 78, 80 Urdu language 175, 181 US Committee for Refugees 37, 204, 207 Ustasha 119 vagabonds 25 Van Bruinessen, M. 161 Van Dijk, R. 205 Van Hear, N. 13, 99, 158, 204 Van Selm-Thorburn, J. 143 Vertovec, S.: (1996) 76; (1999) 2, 65, 70, 101, 169; and Cohen (1999) 52 vested interests 43–5 village society, Palestinian 93–4 Villalon, L.A. 70 voting: Bosnia-Herzegovina elections 105, 114, 133; Croatian elections 120, 173; Eritrean 140, 146, 152 Wahlbeck, Ö. 151 Wapner, P. 163 Watson, J.L. 51, 81 weddings 61–2 Weiner, M. 158 Werbner, P. 19, 36, 76–7, 82, 159 White, J.B. 49 Wierzbicka, A. 23 Wilk, R. 53, 60 Winland, D.N. 121, 122, 134 Wirsing, R.G. 171 Wolof migrants 69, 78, 80, 82 women: Bosnian 107; Eritrean 142, 150; Moroccan migrant 9–10, 52–66; Sudanese 47–8 Women’s Working Group 47–8 World WYEK-KOM 194 Young, R. 36 youth, challenges from 45–7 Yugoslavia, collapse 118 ZeeTV 12, 179 Zein’s people 41 Zinn, D.L. 79