Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century

Refugees and the End of Empire

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Also by Panikos Panayi: AN IMMIGRATION HISTORY OF BRITAIN: Multicultural Racism Since ca. 1800 SPICING UP BRITAIN: The Multicultural History of British Food LIFE AND DEATH IN A GERMAN TOWN: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War II and Beyond HISTORIES AND MEMORIES: Migrants and Their History in Britain (with Kathy Burrell, eds) WEIMAR AND NAZI GERMANY: Continuities and Discontinuities (editor) ETHNIC MINORITIES IN NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY GERMANY: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others AN ETHNIC HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945: Nations, States and Minorities THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION: A Documentary History of the Effects and Experiences of Immigrants and Refugees in Britain Since 1945 OUTSIDERS: A History of European Minorities THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY SINCE 1949: Politics, Society and Economy before and after Unification (with Klaus Larres, eds) GERMANS IN BRITAIN SINCE 1500 (editor) GERMAN IMMIGRANTS IN BRITAIN DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, 1815–1914 IMMIGRATION, ETHNICITY AND RACISM IN BRITAIN, 1815–1945 RACIAL VIOLENCE IN BRITAIN, 1840–1950 (editor) MINORITIES IN WARTIME: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (editor) THE ENEMY IN OUR MIDST: Germans in Britain during the First World War

Also by Pippa Virdee: COMING TO COVENTRY: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers

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Refugees and the End of Empire Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century Edited by

Panikos Panayi Professor of European History, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and

Pippa Virdee Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

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Editorial matter, selection, preface and conclusion © Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee 2011 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–22747–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Refugees and the end of empire : imperial collapse and forced migration in the twentieth century / edited by Panikos Panayi, Pippa Virdee. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–22747–7 1. Population transfers – Europe – History – 20th century. 2. Forced migration – Europe – History – 20th century. 3. Europe – Emigration and immigration – History – 20th century. I. Panayi, Panikos. II. Virdee, Pippa, 1972– D820.P7.R44 2011 325—dc22

2011008038

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Preface: Key Themes, Concepts and Rationale Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee Notes on Contributors

vii xxv

Part I Introduction 1

2

3

Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth- Century Europe Panikos Panayi

3

The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration: Some Comparative Case Studies Ian Talbot

28

The Tragedy of the Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–48 Mark Levene

51

Part II Imperial Collapse in Europe and the Middle East 4

5

6

7

Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe Matthew Frank Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War Julie Thorpe Integration without Assimilation in an Impermanent Landscape: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Arab Middle East Dawn Chatty Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival Victoria Rowe

81

102

127

152

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Part III

The Consequences and Legacies of British Imperial Collapse

8 ‘No Home but in Memory’: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab Pippa Virdee

175

9 Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees Ilyas Chattha

196

10 Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands Uditi Sen

219

11 ‘Green for Come’: Moving to York as a Ugandan Asian Refugee Emma Robertson

245

Part IV Conclusion Conclusions and Legacies Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee

271

Select Bibliography of Key Works

292

Index

297

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Preface: Key Themes, Concepts and Rationale One of the most negative legacies of the twentieth century was the development of the refugee as a result of forced migration. Millions of people have been forced to flee their homes and migrate owing to political persecution, conflict, imperial collapse or regime change. In the legal definition constructed by the United Nations in 1951, a refugee is someone who, ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’.1 The scope of this definition originally extended only to deal with people displaced after the Second World War in Europe; however this limitation was removed in the 1967 Protocol to the Convention. Since 1951, when the legal definition of refugee was conceived, the term has undergone vast change and now encompasses displacements caused by multiple factors. These include natural disasters, development projects that have displaced people and, of course, political conflict such as civil war and persecution of minorities. All these forms of displacement have led to the forced migration of people but it is political conflict that has often pushed people into statelessness. While Forced Migration Studies2 has grown as a discipline and has contributed to our understanding of refugees and forced migration, there has to date been no attempt to examine this phenomenon at the end of empire, when the state of flux and vacuum created by the decline of imperial control led to successor nationalisms, exclusionary nationalism and expulsion of people to create purist states. The United Nations Convention, however, represents a key moment in the development of the concept of the refugee, even though the existence of such a person had become recognized earlier in the twentieth century.3 Refugees also existed throughout history, as any general account of the evolution of the Jews from the Bible onwards would indicate.4 Nevertheless, the twentieth century has come to be seen as the century of the refugee and the U.N. figures from the first decade of the

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new millennium point to the continued existence of tens of millions of refugees in the world.5 Certainly there can be no dispute that the twentieth century witnessed a vast increase in the number of refugees in the world. A portent of what would follow emerged during the nineteenth century with the flight of exiles from the European continent as repressive regimes tried to crush emerging liberal and left-wing political movements. The numbers of people involved totalled tens of thousands at most.6 More pertinent are the mass deportations which would take place in the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which, according to some estimates, totalled millions of people.7 In the twentieth century, the figure increased, not simply to hundreds of thousands but to millions and then tens of millions, a situation which remains with us until the present day. The increase in refugees began to take off with the collapse of the empires which had controlled Europe and the Middle East from the Middle Ages, especially the Ottoman Empire, in the era of the First World War, when newly emerging nation-states eliminated people without the correct ethnic credentials from their territories. During the interwar years, the number of refugees decreased but certainly did not disappear, especially as a result of the policies of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. While the victims of the Nazis usually receive consideration under the theme of genocide, they certainly underwent displacement, either internal or between borders, to use current U.N. terminology.8 Contemporary scholars recognized the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as the period when European refugees reached their peak numbers, with estimates of more than 30 million people in the decade following the death throes of the Third Reich. People moved all over Europe, either to return home because the Nazis had transported them to another part of Europe, to satisfy the new borders of the post-war peace settlement, or, in the case of Germans in Eastern Europe, to escape vengeful regimes, which wanted to cleanse their territories of anyone associated with the regime which had decimated their countries.9 The early post-war years, however, did not simply witness an explosion in the number of refugees who found themselves in Europe, but also a similar enormous increase in the number of refugees outside Europe,10 most notably in the Indian subcontinent, where, due to the end of the British Empire and the partitioning of India to create a new state of Pakistan, an estimated 15 million people were forcibly displaced in one of the largest migrations of the twentieth century.11 Consequently, a process seen as a solution to the emergence of nation-states with ethnic minorities in Europe formalized under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne,

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which legitimized the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey, and now became accepted as a method for ending similar conflicts, not only within Europe, but also beyond. Just as importantly, the later 1940s witnessed the emergence of one of the most long-lasting refugee crises following the creation of Israel, which also carried out ethnic cleansing.12 Following the orgy of expulsion in the aftermath of the Second World War, the number of refugees in the world remained relatively low for several decades, despite the continuing imperial collapse, largely as a result of the Cold War freeze. Refugees certainly did not disappear from Europe, as the example of Algeria following independence,13 the expulsion of Indians from Uganda,14 the ethnic cleansing following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus15 and the flight from the Iranian revolution of 1979 would indicate.16 Similarly, the number of refugees as a result of decolonization and its aftermath also grew, indicated by the classic Refugees: A Problem of Our Time.17 One of the most publicized exoduses consisted of those who fled as a result of the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam.18 The post-war period, and more specifically the 1960s onwards, has seen a shift in refugee crises from the European nation-states to the nonEuropean nation-states. When the U.N. High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in December 1949, its scope and agenda was more comprehensive than its predecessor, the International Refugee Organization. However, apart from the Palestinian refugee crisis,19 the UNHCR was largely concerned with the European refugee crisis, even though there were problems elsewhere, including the refugees in India and Pakistan. During the 1960s, we witnessed an increase in population displacements emerging from the developing world, which highlighted the inadequacies of the 1951 Convention on Refugees. This shift is reflected in changes such as the adoption of the 1967 protocol and the broader conceptualization of refugee concerns for the U.N. in Africa which was formalized in 1969 in the Organisation of African Unity Refugee Convention in Africa.20 This broader definition also included refugees escaping from violence and the devastation caused by war. Significantly though, overseas settlement was rarely offered to Africans as a solution, as was the case when the U.N. was dealing with the postwar European refugee crisis: the preferred solution in Africa was repatriation.21 In the early 1970s, the UNHCR further extended its mandate to include people in ‘refugee-like situations’, although the burden on the international community of the mandate quickly highlighted the inadequacies.22

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The number of refugees throughout the world began to increase during the 1980s, partly as a result of the increasingly intolerant and repressive policies of the Soviet Bloc regimes desperately hanging on to power.23 A new global refugee crisis would emerge following the end of the Cold War, as extreme nationalism surfaced in areas which had previously witnessed mild manifestations of this ideology. The collapsing Soviet Empire and death of Yugoslavia represented the key developments in Europe. But the Cold War thaw outside Europe meant an even larger increase in the number of refugees there, especially in Africa and the Middle East, which have become the key areas of concern for the UNHCR.24 Refugees have, therefore, formed a key aspect of the evolution of the world since the First World War. While they may have declined in numbers in particular periods, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people have found themselves displaced globally over the past century. The purpose of the present volume consists of an attempt to explain the emergence of refugees by concentrating upon one particular theme and three particular geographical foci. It does not claim to cover all examples of the relationship between imperial collapse and the end of empire. Refugee creation does not always link with imperial collapse. The establishment of revolutionary regimes wishing to make a break with the past and, above all, total war, have played a central role in displacement in the twentieth century. In fact, the most dramatic examples of forced migration have occurred when these three factors have come together.25 Nevertheless, this volume constitutes the first attempt to examine in detail the link between the end of empire and refugee creation. It aims to analyse the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong credentials and the refugee experience. Rather than taking a global approach to the issue, the volume essentially examines the end of the European empires in the era of the First World War and the British Empire in India and its wider legacies in the second, contextualized with introductory essays, which set the scene in Part I. This focus receives partial explanation in the papers which emerged from the conference upon which this volume is based.26 While more than 30 people spoke at the event, the editors decided to work with those which best illustrated the developments suggested in the initial call for papers. Nevertheless, there are key intellectual reasons for the three geographical concentrations. One of these consists of the fact that the events which occurred in India and Pakistan in 1947 essentially fol-

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lowed the template laid down as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Curzon was the first to phrase this as ‘the unmixing of peoples’ in response to the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire and, subsequently, the complete restructuring of populations.27 It is the end of this regime which prepares the way for much of the forced migration which would take place later in the twentieth century and beyond. The essays in the introductory section in particular provide a background to the developments which would occur in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War and the Nazi Empire at the end of the Second World War. Parts I and II, therefore, set the background for the events in South Asia and its aftermath in 1947. Without the events which followed the collapsing Ottoman Empire in particular, the ethnic cleansing accompanying the partition of India may not have happened in the way that it did. Significantly, the largest population displacements which occurred in the twentieth century did so in the aftermath of the Second World War. While we cannot ignore the plight of the Palestinians, the scale of their expulsion remained smaller in number than that of the Germans in Eastern Europe or those who fled from India and Pakistan. The policymakers who authorized the expulsion of perhaps 30 million people in total from these events had become desensitized to the human suffering inherent in ethnic cleansing as a policy partly because of the precedents set by the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the background of the mass killing of the Second World War in both Europe and Asia must also have played a role in the callous policies pursued. Perhaps at no other point during the twentieth century had the wishes of individuals become so meaningless for policy-makers. The European and Middle Eastern section of the volume partly acts as a background for events in South Asia, while the three parts demonstrate continuities. The essays by Virdee and Robertson, together with the conclusion and the essays by Panayi, Levene and Frank, demonstrate the centrality of ethnic cleansing as a policy throughout the twentieth century. While it may have reached its height in the aftermath of the Second World War, its legacy has continued until the present. The main focus of the book may consist of Europe, the Middle East and the collapse of the British Empire in South Asia, which represent a series of case studies, but it does not ignore events elsewhere. The volume has two key themes. In the first place, it attempts to explain the reasons why forced migration and consequent refugee creation has formed such a key aspect of imperial collapse. As several of the essays will demonstrate, from the end of the Ottoman Empire

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until the present, it almost seems as though ethnic purification had become accepted as part of the process of the move away from imperial to nation-state control. While the former old-fashioned method of rule could operate upon the basis of several ethnic groups living together in relative harmony (although not in the Nazi case) with an imperial people who ultimately remained in control (whether Turkish Muslims in the Ottoman case, or white Britons in the British Empire), this formula could not operate in the early stages of emerging nation-states. The latter require more centralization, which partly operates through the manufacturing of citizens with a common nationality, meaning that those who do not have the right credentials face expulsion. The precedent here again consists of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, where ethnic cleansing happened upon all sides, especially during the era of the First World War. Not only did, for example, the move from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism mean the elimination of Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia, the emerging nation-states in the Balkans expelled their Turkish populations. Several of the essays, especially in Parts I and II of the volume, therefore, tackle the reasons for forced migration and refugee creation at the end of empire. The volume takes a broad definition of empire, uniting both the medieval European regimes, which had controlled much of the continent and found themselves rapidly disintegrating during the nineteenth century, and also the ‘colonial’ empires, which rose and declined more rapidly. Both forms of control had the characteristic of accepting a loose form of rule, which recognized the existence of ethnicity, largely in order to ensure that the loose form of control survived.28 This contrasts, however, with the Nazi Empire, which tried to crush ethnicity, although, according to the Nazi Racial hierarchy, some racial groups had a higher status than others.29 On the one hand, the book deals with traditional concepts of decolonization, as understood when referring to the European retreat from Africa and Asia.30 However, the volume revolves around the issue of imperial collapse, in which the First World War, in the case of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires,31 and the Second World War, in the case of the Nazis,32 played a key role. In the case of the first two, the unravelling of empire had taken hundreds of years, rather than the decades in the case of Britain overseas. The ethnic groups which had emerged in the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British and French empires gradually increased their confidence during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether their ethnic basis relied upon religion, language or appearance. These ethnic groups would eventually emerge into nationalities, help-

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ing to overthrow these empires. Unlike the previous regimes, which tolerated a variety of ethnicities, the new nation-states had a clearer conception of who belonged, as opposed to those who could not fit into this pattern.33 Those who fell into the latter category would face expulsion beyond the borders of the newly constructed national entities. This forced migration became a characteristic of twentieth-century state creation, legitimized by a whole series of treaties which established new nation-states. Thus, while some of the essays in this volume try to tackle the issue of individual experiences, the macro approach taken by some of the others, accepts the tens of millions of people affected by the act of expulsion practised from the end of the nineteenth century and legitimized at the highest state and diplomatic level particularly, as an important precedent and template, by the Treaty of Lausanne. Forced migration, the expulsion of millions of refugees from their homes during the course of the twentieth century, became part of the state-building process.34 The second key theme of the book consists of the experience of the refugee. While policy-makers and governments increasingly ignored the plight of the people on the ground, tens of millions of people suffered loss of homes, relatives, trauma and dislocation: their experiences have been captured with the development of oral history within the discipline. The use of oral history was popularized in the 1960s as a means of democratizing history, but its emergence within the discipline has also coincided with wider social–political developments, namely, decolonization and feminist and civil rights movements in the 1960s.35 These developments demanded new forms of capturing voices that had previously been left out of the history pages.36 Oral history has, therefore, been associated with the marginalized in society, which also aptly fits into the marginal status of oral history itself within mainstream historiography which often refuses to consider personal memories as valid sources.37 Ronald J. Grele, Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli38 have been crucial in pushing the boundaries of oral history, challenging us to consider not just what people remember but rather why they remember.39 Indeed, without the work on memory,40 we would have little understanding of the true horrors of holocaust: the experiences of people in the concentration camps, the fight for survival, and about the pain and loss experienced by individuals.41 Those lived experiences of individuals which cannot be revealed through official documents because they do not capture the emotional and human dimension are more often concerned with the ‘high politics’. For this reason, first-hand accounts are

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more useful in ascertaining perceptions and opinions. The combined approach of documentary sources and personal accounts provides a more balanced picture and, thus, lessens some of the methodological problems associated with first-hand accounts.42 Oral testimonies can, therefore, help us in filling those gaps and provide a more nuanced understanding of individual refugee experiences of migration, resettlement and the associated trauma. For a historian, they can compliment the official source material, providing an altogether more comprehensive analysis. Furthermore, the level of detail required in localized case studies is often absent in official documentation, especially if the emphasis is on the people rather than the place. In the historiography of India/Pakistan Partition literature, developments in oral history allowed scholars to explore events from a completely different perspective. The use of oral narratives have traditionally been associated with the rights of women43 and stem from the association of providing a voice to the ‘voiceless’ in society. Within Partition literature, the human dimension and the female voice has been completely absent and generally overlooked in favour of the nationalist discourse. Thus, the plight of women during the Partition has, until recently, received no scholarly discussion. Sheila Rowbotham’s contention is that gendered accounts were often ‘hidden from history’ and now allow us to challenge ‘historical interpretations based upon the lives and documentation of men’.44 Similarly, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin45 have all contributed significantly to re-address this imbalance and have forced sensitive and often taboo subjects on to the agenda. Oral history has bought the experiences of women to the fore and has begun to expose the harsh realities of abduction, rape and violence against women in a patriarchal society, revealing personal and subjective accounts of individuals who experienced the turmoil of partition first hand. Some of the chapters included in this volume continue this trend within oral history and more specifically within Partition Studies of exploring marginal and localized experiences. For example, Rowe’s study draws on memoirs and narratives by women to explore their experiences of the Armenian genocide; Chatty utilizes a number of interviews conducted with refugees in the Middle East; Sen focuses on the Andaman Islands and the refugees who were relocated from camps in West Bengal; Chattha’s localized study incorporates narratives from Kashmiris settled in Sialkot; Robertson’s study of York focuses on a female migrant expelled from Uganda; while Virdee’s essay brings in narratives from both India and Pakistan to provide a comparative

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dimension. The methodology, therefore, fits aptly into these new directions of understanding refugee accounts and, therefore, the human dimension of ‘population exchange’. However, the different contributors have employed a range of methodologies. Thus, the conceptual essays in Part I are broader historical narratives, while some of the latter essays are narrower in their focus and are based on case studies which utilize personal narratives and deal with individual refugee experiences. This mixture of methodologies and concerns with the macro and micro within these contributions attempts to capture the changes and developments within the study of forced migration and refugees. There is, then, a logical progression from the broad canvas of state politics and exclusionary nationalism presented by Panayi, Talbot and Levene to the narrow and individualized accounts presented in Robertson, Sen and Virdee which help us to understand the impact of these policies on individuals. The key concept under consideration in this volume therefore consists of refugees, both collectively and individually. Most of the essays which deal with their creation essentially tackle the issue as a mass phenomenon. During the Yugoslav conflict, the idea of ethnic cleansing emerged as Serbs, Croats and Muslims expelled their populations, essentially continuing the precedent which had been set in the Balkans and the Middle East in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Some of the articles in the volume, therefore, deal with refugee creation as a mass phenomenon, rather than with the plight of individuals fleeing due to a well-founded fear of persecution, a phenomenon which reached its peak during the nineteenth-century Age of Revolutions and the Cold War in Europe. The processes under consideration have attracted a number of labels over the years, whether forced migration, population displacement, population exchange, ethnic cleansing or even genocide. All of these have led to refugee creation on a large scale, even though Genocide Studies, for instance, rarely tackle concepts such as refugees, especially in the context of events in Nazi Europe. On the other hand, the link between ethnic cleansing and refugee creation in the Armenian case, for example, remains more obvious, especially as the League of Nations Office for Refugees emerged partly from the concern for Armenians.46 This volume tries to fit into two historiographies, covering forced migration and refugees and the collapse of empire. While studies of refugees certainly predate the Second World War, a good starting point consists of its immediate aftermath, when Jacques Vernant and Eugene Kulishcer considered the consequences of the two World Wars for dis-

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placement.47 In 1975, there followed the detailed account by Louise Holborn, which provided a history of refugees in the twentieth century but concentrated more upon the contemporary situation.48 From that time, country-specific studies have dealt with refugees. For instance, while American and British scholars increasingly became obsessed with the crimes of the Nazis, German research devoted much attention to the refugees who had fled to the Federal Republic from further East in the aftermath of the Second World War.49 In South Asia, much of the early scholarly discussion was centred around and influenced by nationalism: for two post-colonial, nascent and fragile nations, the priority was the need to strengthen the nation-state. From a European perspective, a seminal work consisted of The Unwanted by Michael Marrus, published in 1985, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its consequences, which provided a summary of the major catastrophes until that time. More recently, the Journal of Refugee Studies came into existence in 1988, linked with the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford. However, an analysis by Tony Kushner demonstrated that only 4 per cent of papers submitted to the Journal of Refugee Studies covered historical themes.50 While it would be erroneous to suggest that historians have ignored refugees as a theme of study, paradigms have tended to follow particular groups or particular nation-states, with key areas of study including refugees from Nazism, post-war refugees to Germany and Palestinians. While many of the refugee movements studied by historians have looked at the consequences of the collapse of empire, few students have actually focused specifically upon this theme. Books on the Armenian Genocide, for example, tend to use the concept of genocide partly to prove that this constituted such an act against Armenians in opposition to denials by the Turkish state.51 One scholar who has helped the move away from this paradigm is Donald Bloxham, not only in his study of the Armenian Genocide, but also in his more recent volume which has examined the ‘unweaving of Europe’, where the focus remains firmly upon genocide.52 Similarly, the increasing numbers of volumes on ethnic cleansing, while they might take a long-term historical approach, examine refugee creation as a consequence of imperial collapse (if they do at all) implicitly rather than explicitly.53 The essays which follow will examine the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong credentials and personal refugee experiences. The individual essays examine both the structural forces which created refugees as a result of imperial collapse, as well as focusing upon the consequences of these processes for individuals. The book emerges

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out of the De Montfort University Conference on ‘Refugees and the End of Empire’. The organizers and editors have selected the nine best and most appropriate papers, while Panikos Panayi has written a new overview paper on twentieth-century Europe, and Pippa Virdee has added a new contribution. They are also bookended by this preface, a conclusion and a bibliography. Although the remainder of the essays originate in the conference, their authors have revised and significantly extended the original presentations. The editors decided to divide the volume into three distinct sections. The first of these contains three overview pieces, focusing upon the End of Empire in Europe and beyond. Part II focuses specifically upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of the First World War, with individual essays on specific case studies. Part III examines ‘The Consequences and Legacy of British Imperial Collapse’, with a particular focus upon the experiences of South Asians immediately after the Partition of India and the specific case of Uganda. Panikos Panayi’s ‘Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe’ traces the consequences of the end of empire for those groups which found themselves in a series of successor states at key moments. First, the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after the First World War; second, the end of the Third Reich in 1945; and third, the end of the Cold War and its consequences in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Ian Talbot on ‘The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration Studies’ focuses upon the collapse of the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires during the twentieth century and covers a series of key themes. These consist of the consequences of imperial collapse for refugee creation, and, more specifically, the experiences of European settlers and collaborators. He devotes particular attention to the Partition of India in 1947 and its consequences for forced migration, but also demonstrates the ways in which the end of empire sometimes has repercussions for minority populations decades later. Talbot’s contribution further focuses upon the personal experiences for individuals by examining ‘Trauma, Loss and Identity’. Mark Levene’s contribution on the theme of ‘The Tragedy of the Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–1948’ places the mass expulsion of European and Middle Eastern imperial peoples within the context of radical or abrupt nation-state development, particularly in the period 1912–48. By concentrating on the rimland regions of the Ottoman, Romanov and ‘German’ empires (Habsburg and Hohenzollern), Levene demonstrates a fatal synergy between ruptured time – that is from the time of

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the European crises from ca. 1912 – and geographical space, which set on course the creation of new political formations and, in turn, determined a ‘minority’ status for non-dominant communities. By co-relating the European and Middle Eastern incidence of extreme violence, including genocide, to these rimland regions, the essay shows how mass human displacement, whether through conscious ethnic cleansing or ‘voluntary’ migration, was a further consequence of this same pattern. Part II of the book focuses upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of the First World War. Matthew Frank in ‘Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: “Population Transfer” and the End of Empire in Europe’ examines the genesis of the concept of ‘population transfer’ which emerged in response to the rapid retreat of the Ottoman Empire from south-eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and the fear that the minorities left behind – both Christian and Muslim– would continue to be a target of persecution and a focus of irredentism, and therefore a source of instability within the state and between states. The essay locates population transfer in the ‘fantasies of ethnic unmixing’ that emerged in early twentieth-century writing on the socalled ‘nationalities question’, which sketched out radical schemes for the reshaping of the ethnographic and political map of Europe and which became even more far-reaching in scope with the outbreak of the First World War. Frank pays particular attention to the ideas of Siegfried Lichtenstädter and George Montandon who, at the start of the twentieth century, viewed ethnic cleansing as an inevitable outcome of the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. There then follows Julie Thorpe’s contribution on ‘Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War’, which examines how, on the eve of imperial collapse, the Austro-Hungarian Empire incarcerated its displaced internal nationalities, despite the fact that they held the citizenship of the empire. She argues that the internment of wartime refugees became a means of separating ‘citizens’ from ‘unreliable’ nationalities in AustriaHungary along ethnic and civic lines of belonging, which helped create a popular stereotype of the refugee that would re-emerge in the interwar period. Dawn Chatty’s chapter on ‘Integration without Assimilation in an Impermanent Landscape: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Arab Middle East’ outlines the waves of involuntary migration from outside the Ottoman Empire and along its borders into the heart of its former Arab provinces. It then sets out to make sense of the individual experiences within the dispossessed populations, as a step in understanding the mechanisms whereby new ‘communities’ came into being,

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often without a contiguous territorial basis. Such an examination is aimed at understanding the context of such dispossession, statelessness and forced migration, as well as the social, political and environmental price which is paid regionally and globally. Although some groups of self-defined communities forced to move within the region have succeeded in physically assimilating and creating new identities as minorities (e.g. Armenian, Circassian, Chechnyan and Albanian) many others have been left stateless (e.g. Palestinian, Kurds and Bidoon). Still others have found themselves internally displaced, with little recourse to international human or cultural rights protection (Bedouin nomadic pastoralists), while a minority may have managed to escape the region altogether by joining the ranks of refugees and emigrants seeking resettlement in Europe and North America and giving the term ‘diaspora’ new meanings (e.g. Palestinian, Armenian, Assyrian, Yazidis and Kurds). Yet these communities have remained largely coherent, despite the often deterritorialized nature of their social and cultural ideology. Victoria Rowe’s ‘Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival’ examines the experiences of one particular group at the end of the Ottoman Empire as a consequences of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide. Rowe analyses the ways in which women, who had experienced these events, developed strategies of survival. These included the use of networks and accepting their new fate, in the case of those who had married into Muslim families. She examines how these strategies transferred into the refugee experience in Aleppo and impacted on women’s roles in social reconstruction in Armenian communities in Syria. The essay, rooted in the literature on the Armenian Genocide and its consequences, also uses memoirs by Armenian refugees and documents from the League of Nations’s archives. Part III of this book examines ‘The Consequences and Legacy of British Imperial Collapse’, with a particular focus upon the experiences of South Asians in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, which created one of the largest individual refugee crisis of the twentieth century. Many of the themes developed in Part II of the volume, with its focus on Europe in the interwar years, find reflection in India, Pakistan and beyond after the end of imperial rule in South Asia. Pippa Virdee in ‘ “No Home but in Memory”: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab’ explores the legacies of colonial rule in the Punjab and its consequences for those who were uprooted due to Partition. Individual accounts highlight the longevity of the resettlement process, rebuilding homes and lives, which at times went on for 10 to 15 years. Some refugees moved a number of times before finally settling

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down. This restlessness and loss of their homeland is evident through oral narratives that capture those traumatic years of being perpetually displaced. Virdee then focuses on individuals who chose to leave and resettle in Britain. This is at a time when nationalism and patriotism was at its height in the two new states. What compelled these individuals to migrate to a country that had subjugated their land for more than 300 years? And why, having already been displaced, did they choose to go through that process again? Ilyas Chattha’s ‘Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees’ focuses upon the interreligious violence that occurred in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir at the end of the British colonial rule in India, which included a possible ‘genocide’ of Muslims in September–October 1947. One million people were uprooted in the Kashmir region alone. Despite the growing concerns of the ‘new history’ of Partition, the experience of Kashmiri refugees has largely been overlooked because of the tendency of Partition historians to concentrate on events within the Punjab. This essay represents an important contribution to the existing literature by highlighting the attitude and role of the state in mass violence and the development and expulsion of refugees. Uditi Sen, in ‘Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands’ deals with one particular experiment of nation-building in independent India, which was at the same time a project of refugee rehabilitation. The essay tackles the 6,000 Bengali refugee families from different parts of East Pakistan who were used by the Government of India to ‘colonize’ the Andaman Islands between 1949 and 1961. She uses a combination of government records and numerous interviews carried out at a random selection of villages in the Andamans in a free-flowing oral format. The essay seeks to productively de-stabilize the normative framework in Indian historiography for studying refugees born of the creation of East Pakistan, using the voices and experiences of the Bengali refugees of the Andaman Islands. Emma Robertson in ‘ “Green for Come”: Moving to York as a Ugandan Asian Refugee’ demonstrates that the end of empire had an impact on the city of York, Britain, and its inhabitants when Idi Amin expelled thousands of Asians from the former British colony of Uganda, many of whom headed to Britain. Despite holding British passports, they were classified as refugees and most were placed in resettlement camps until they could find ‘appropriate’ work and housing. York was classified as a ‘green’ area suitable to receive a small number of refugees, in contrast to ‘red’ areas such as Leicester where there were apparently already many non-white residents. Drawing on oral history and using

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the case study of ‘Julie’, the chapter explores the processes of migration and of establishing a new life in the local community. How did it feel to move to York in the early 1970s? What was the significance of York’s particular relationship with empire for her individual experience of displacement? The volume, therefore, brings together a coherent range of essays which offer a highly original way of examining the refugee experience and its relationship to the end of Empire on a global scale. The focus upon Europe and the Middle East between 1900 and 1948 and the Partition of India and its legacies from 1947 allows a unique comparative insight into both the short- and long-term causes and consequences of imperial collapse for refugees during the course of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html, Article 1a of the Convention on the Status of Refugees, UNHCR, 1951. 2. www.forcedmigration.org/, ‘Forced Migration Online’, and Forced Migration Review, which is published three times a year, are both run by the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. 3. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985); Claudia Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford, 1995). 4. See, for instance, Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London, 1987). 5. www.unhcr.org/4a375c426.html, ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’. 6. A high point in this process occurred following the revolutions of 1848, when people from all over Europe fled towards a relatively tolerant Britain, the last place of refuge in many cases, for which see Sabine Freitag, ed., Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (Oxford, 2003). 7. See Dawn Chatty’s contribution below. 8. www.unhcr.org/4a375c426.html, ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’. 9. Two classic accounts on the post-war refugee crisis are: Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948); and Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London, 1953). 10. One of the earliest works to look at ethnic cleansing from a comparative dimension was Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939– 1945 (New York, 1946). In Population Transfers in Asia (New York, 1949), Schechtman explores the necessity of population transfers as a viable political solution. 11. See further, Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009). 12. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2003).

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13. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (London, 2006). 14. See, for instance, William G. Kuepper, G. Lynne Lackey and E. Nelson Swinerton, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London, 1975). 15. Peter Loizos, The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge, 1981). 16. Asghar Fathi, ed., Iranian Refugees and Exiles Since Khomeini (Costa Mesa, CA, 1991). 17. Louise W. Holborn, Refugees: A Problem of Our Time, Two Volumes (Metuchen, NJ, 1975). 18. W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response (London, 1998); Barry Wain, The Refused: The Agony of the Indochina Refugees (New York, 1981). 19. The first non-European refugees to be considered by the U.N. were the Palestinians. The U.N. initially created the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and in December 1949 but this body was replaced with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The U.N. has continued to renew UNRWA’s mandate and the agency continues to provide relief work for Palestinian refugees. 20. Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York, 1989), p. 29. See also Richard Plender, ed., Basic Documents on International Migration Law (The Hague, 1997), pp. 187–91, for a complete transcript of the Convention. 21. Gil Loescher, Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis (New York, 1993), p. 82. 22. See Zolberg, Shukre and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, p. 29. 23. George Schöpflin and Hugh Poulton, Rumania’s Ethnic Hungarians (London, 1990), pp. 17–19; Rudolf Joó, The Hungarian Minority Situation in Ceauçescu’s Rumania (New York, 1984), pp. 101–8. 24. www.unhcr.org/4a375c426.html, ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’, p. 10. See further, chapter 4 of Loescher, Beyond Charity, on ‘The International Refugee Regime and Third World Refugees’, pp. 75–92. 25. See Chapter 1 below. 26. ‘Refugees and the End of Empire’, 29–30 June 2007, De Montfort University, Leicester. 27. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 18, (1995), pp. 189–218. See also Marrus, Unwanted, p. 41. 28. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford, 2010). 29. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008). 30. See, for instance, Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States (London, 2008). 31. Aviel Roshvald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–23 (London, 2000).

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38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. Panikos Panayi, Ousiders: A History of European Minorities (London, 1999). See the contributions of Mark Levene and Matthew Frank below. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), pp. vii, ix. See further, Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 3rd Edition (Oxford, 2000), who is considered a pioneer of oral history and life stories. Brigitte Halbmayr, ‘The Ethics of Oral History: Expectations, Responsibilities and Dissociations’, in Marta Kurkowska-Budzan and Krzysztof Zamorski, eds, Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue (Amsterdam, 2009), p. 195. See further, Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson, eds, The Oral History Reader (London, 1998); and Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. See ‘Introduction’ in Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. Maurice Halbwach, On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL, 1992), is considered to be one of the earliest published works examining the construction of collective memory. Halbmayr, ‘Ethics of Oral History’, p. 195. See further, Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. For a further discussion on oral history, see Ronald J. Grele, ‘Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History’, pp. 38–52 and Joan Sangster, ‘Telling Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’, pp. 87–100, both in Perks and Thompson, Oral History Reader. See the section in critical developments in the second edition of The Oral History Reader (New York, 2006). Grele, ‘Movement without Aim’, p. 4. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (London, 1973). See also Sangster, ‘Telling Stories’, pp. 87–100. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998), and Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Jersey, 1998) have contributed considerably to raising the profile of women within Partition literature in India. See, for instance, Laura Barnett, ‘Global Governance and the Evolution of the International Refugee Regime’, International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 14 (2002), pp. 241–5. Kulischer, Europe on the Move; Vernant, Refugee in the Post-War World. Holborn, Refugees. Key works include: Theodor Schieder, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 4 Volumes (Bonn, 1954–61); Eugen Lemberg and Freidrich Edding, eds, Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland: Ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluss auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistleben, 3 Volumes (Kiel, 1959).Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (London, 2001), pp. 51–87, considers the growth of this historiography in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester, 2006), p. 223. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005).

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52. Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London, 2008). 53. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (London, 2001); Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (Basingstoke, 1996); Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006). See also Stevan Béla Várdy, T. Hunt Tooley and Otto von Habsburg, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (New York, 2003).

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Contributors

Ilyas Chattha recently completed his PhD at the University of Southampton examining the 1947 partition-related violence, refugee experiences and urban regeneration in the Pakistani Punjab, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2011 as Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot, 1947– 1961. He is at present carrying out research on the impact of Partition on the Punjabi Christians in Pakistan. Dawn Chatty is University Reader in Anthropology and Forced Migration at the University of Oxford. She is a social anthropologist with long experience in the Middle East as a university teacher, development practitioner and advocate for indigenous rights. Her most recent books include Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2010); ed., Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East (Oxford, 2010); and Handbook on Nomads in the Middle East and North Africa (Leiden, 2006). Matthew Frank is Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds and author of Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2008). Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at Southampton. His four-volume study of genocide is ongoing (see: Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, Volumes 1 and 2, London, 2005). He is also co-founder with David Cromwell of Crisis Forum www.crisis-forum.org.uk and founder of Rescue!History, rescue-history-from-climate-change.org/ indexClassic.php, two networks dedicated to relating the climate change emergency to the emergence of a dysfunctional international political economy. See among other works, with David Cromwell, eds, Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe (London, 2007). Panikos Panayi is Professor of European History at De Montfort University. His most recent of 16 books are Life and Death in a German Town: Osnabrück from the Weimar Republic to World War Two and Beyond (London, 2007); Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (London, 2008, 2010); and An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural

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xxvi Notes on Contributors

Racism Since c1800 (London, 2010). His current projects include a study of German prisoners of war in Britain between 1914 and 1919. Emma Robertson is Senior Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University. She has recently published her first book, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009). Her research interests include the history of music in the workplace and she is currently working on a co-authored book on this topic, Rhythms of Labour, for Cambridge University Press with Marek Korczynski and Michael Pickering. She has also published on the topic of Britishness on the BBC Empire Service in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (October 2008). Victoria Rowe obtained her PhD in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and has taught at universities in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom. Her publications include A History of Armenian Women’s Writing: 1880–1922, 2nd edn (London, 2009). She has also published several articles on Armenian gender history and has edited and introduced collections of Armenian literature for publication. Her current research focuses on international women’s movements, Near Eastern refugees and the League of Nations. Uditi Sen is researching the dispersal of European refugees from independent India as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She was educated in Presidency College, Kolkata and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She obtained a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Her thesis on ‘Refugees and the Politics of Nation Building in India, 1947–71’ explored the rehabilitation of East Bengali refugees in India to derive insights into the patterns of state–society interaction in independent India. She also lectures on ‘Migration and Society in South Asia’ at the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies, University of Cambridge. Ian Talbot is Head of History and Director of the Centre for Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies at the University of Southampton. He has published extensively on the 1947 Partition of India and the history of Pakistan. His recent publications include a revised 2nd edition of Pakistan: A Modern History (Hurst, 2009); a jointly authored work with Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009); and Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1957 (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Notes on Contributors xxvii Julie Thorpe is Research Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. She gained her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2007 and has held teaching and research positions at the Australian National University and the University of Konstanz. She is the author of Pan-Germanism and the Austrofascist State, 1933–38 (Manchester University Press, 2011). Pippa Virdee is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at De Montfort University. She has published several essays on the partition of the Punjab and its consequences for population displacement in 1947, and has authored Coming to Coventry: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers (2006), which documents the South Asian migration to Coventry. She also manages the Punjab Research Groups.

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Part I Introduction

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1 Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe Panikos Panayi

Refugees in twentieth-century Europe While the twentieth century came to be known as the century of the refugee,1 the numbers of stateless persons on the European continent fluctuated during its course. Peaks occurred at key moments, including the end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism. This does not mean that people did not flee their states of origin due to ‘a well founded fear of persecution’ (to use the 1951 United Nations definition)2 at other times during the course of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the three moments identified above, the numbers of refugees reached peaks due to a combination of factors, including imperial and state collapse. The first of these periods consisted of the First World War and its aftermath, the era in which the refugee and the concept of such a person developed, especially in the early 1920s. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 represents an important point in this process, both because of the sheer numbers of people forced out of their homeland towards Syria and because of the existence of a now large historiography on this subject.3 It is estimated that between 1.5 million and 2 million people fled their homes in southeastern Anatolia towards the Syrian desert, of whom about half died, while others moved westwards.4 But the Armenian Genocide simply represented the most dramatic example of a process occurring throughout Eastern Europe, in particular in the era of the First World War. Mark Levene, with his focus upon ethnic cleansing in rimlands, begins this process in 1912 with the Balkan Wars, when newly emerging nationstates would ethnically cleanse their populations of people who either 3

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represented the Turkish enemy or who fitted in more comfortably into their neighbours’ possessions.5 At the same time, the late Ottoman state had already begun the process of marginalizing, displacing and murdering populations which it had previously tolerated.6 This culminated not only in the Armenian Genocide but also in the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne formalized this concept, which involved at least 1.5 million people fleeing in either direction.7 The Ottoman Empire represented the heart of the refugee problem, especially after the Treaty of Lausanne legitimized the idea of population exchange as a solution to minority problems, which would be copied in the aftermath of the Second World War.8 In addition, refugees emerged in other parts of Europe, especially in the other three collapsing empires in Europe in the form of the Russian, German and AustroHungarian. Peter Gatrell has demonstrated the extent of displacement in the era of the Great War of more than 3 million people,9 while other accounts have pointed to the mass displacement as a result of the political consequences of the Bolshevik revolution, another 3 million of whom made their way westwards, especially towards France and Germany.10 At the same time, the expanding and contracting German Empire in the era of the First World War also created refugees, especially in Belgium11 and Russia,12 although the ethnic cleansing which characterized the Ottoman Empire in this period would wait until the end of the Second World War as German minorities found themselves throughout Eastern Europe.13 Similarly, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted in relatively little population displacement.14 Despite the rise of fascism and the hundreds of thousands of refugees created by Nazi persecution in particular, the interwar years, in the context of the twentieth century, resulted in fewer refugees. However, this period did result in the recognition of the concept of the refugee, especially in the construction of the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees,15 as well as in the concern displayed for exiles from the Nazis during the 1930s, even though hostility would also emerge towards them in the lands to which they moved.16 The era of the Second World War led to even more displacement than the events of the Great War. The advance of the Nazis into Eastern Europe automatically resulted in mass upheavals, whether of Jewish ethnicity or not. While German policies in Poland caused the relocation of Germans, Jews and Poles,17 a process repeated throughout the Soviet Union,18 Nazi invasions also resulted in mass flight, especially further east in the Soviet Union.19 While the tens of millions of people

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displaced during the conflict clearly constituted refugees, they had, in many cases, nowhere to flee and, therefore, differ from many of those considered in this volume. A few hundred thousand Europeans did manage to escape the Nazi War, many of whom eventually found themselves in Britain.20 At the same time as displacement occurred in Nazi Europe, Stalinism within the Soviet Union also resulted in population displacement, although, as in the case of those areas controlled by the Third Reich, few people managed to make it out of the Soviet Union to seek refuge. One group that faced the wrath of Stalin because of its association with the enemy consisted of the long- established Volga Germans, who found themselves deported en masse to Siberia.21 Similarly, the fact that some Crimean Tatars had fought on the side of the invading Nazi armies resulted in the execution of those involved in this act of treachery and the deportation of the remaining 190,000 members of the population to the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekhistan.22 Meanwhile, more localized examples of ethnic cleansing also occurred, as in the case of the expulsion of Poles from Volhynia by Ukranian nationalists in 1943.23 It was essentially the unravelling of the Nazi Empire, as well as the redrawing of boundaries from 1943, which resulted in the creation of refugees fleeing their homelands in this period. Michael Marrus wrote that in 1945 ‘Europe choked with refugees’,24 for it was the immediate aftermath of the Second World War that Europe experienced its greatest refugee crisis. During this phase, which lasted from about 1944 to the early 1950s, a series of migratory streams fled across Europe in different directions, counting as many as 25 million people between 1945 and 1947,25 with Germany as the focus. As a result of the collapse of the Nazi Empire, as many as 13 million Germans may have fled westwards towards rump Germany between 1944 and 1947. These included people who simply escaped the advancing Soviet armies. However, much of the migration occurred as a result of the movement westward of the Soviet border. In turn, the Polish border also moved further to the west, leading to an ethnic cleansing of German parts of Poland. At the same time, those nation-states invaded by, but now liberated from, the Nazis, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Rumania, also expelled their ethnic German populations, which had lived in these nation-states before they had emerged as such entities in the fallout from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. These westward movements received sanction in the Potsdam Treaty. As a result, the rump Germany found itself housing millions

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of refugees. By 1950, out of a total population of 50.8 million living in the newly created Federal Republic, 7.9 million were refugees and expellees. In addition, another 1.6 million people had fled from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a stream that would continue into the 1950s, so that by 1960 German refugees accounted for 23.8 per cent of the population of the Federal Republic. The GDR itself counted 3.5 million expellees in 1966, while the figure in Austria totalled around half a million.26 At the same time as this westward movement occurred, millions of foreign workers and prisoners of war, who had found themselves working in the Nazi Reich during the war, made their way home in all directions, especially towards Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where most of them had originated. Some of the 5 million who eventually reached the USSR were transported there by force.27 Those who refused to return found themselves as ‘Displaced Persons’, living in camps set up for them, especially in Germany, although several European states, above all Britain, imported thousands of such individuals as part of the drive to fill the gap in their domestic labour shortages. Both France and Britain also retained some of the German prisoners of war they had held on their soil for the same reason.28 Jews liberated from concentration camps located in Poland also, paradoxically, made their way to Germany, partly escaping from a resurgence of post-war murderous anti-Semitism in the former, and reaching a total figure of around 200,000 by 1947. Most would subsequently make their way to Palestine/ Israel.29 While Germany may have formed the epicentre of European refugee movements in the immediate post-war years, displacement took place in locations throughout the continent as a result of border and regime change. For instance, 145,000 Poles (consisting of troops and their dependants) who had fought with the British armed forces decided to remain in Britain rather than return to the new Soviet- controlled Polish state.30 Elsewhere, a change in the Italian-Yugoslav border gave the latter an extra 900,000 Italians, 300,000 of whom decided to cross the boundary. Italy also took in Italian nationals from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other parts of Africa. Together with Austria, Italy also attracted about 100,000 anti- Communist Yugoslavs.31 From end of the 1940s until the end of the 1980s, refugee movements in Europe declined with the Cold War freeze. Those which did occur took place as a result of intolerance and persecution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Before the Cold War freeze had solidified, some 100,000 people fled the Greek Civil War and headed towards Eastern

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Bloc states.32 At the same time, the Bulgarian government, pursuing a policy of ‘re- educating’ its Turkish minority, forced around 180,000 members of this group to leave between 1949 and 1951.33 Just as significantly, the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 led to the flight of more than 200,000 people, largely to Austria and Yugoslavia, some of whom would subsequently move to other European destinations including Britain, France, Switzerland and Germany.34 During the height of the Cold War freeze from the 1960s to the middle of the 1980s, few refugee movements occurred in Europe. Those that did included high-profile defections, especially of sportsmen.35 At the same time, refugees also fled from Eastern to Western Germany, attracted both by the greater political freedom and the higher standard of living.36 Similarly migration of both a political and economic nature took place out of Poland.37 In addition, refugee movements also occurred during episodes of Soviet repression such as the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.38 A third mass refugee crisis in twentieth- century Europe reached its height during the 1990s as a result of the fallout from the Cold War. It did not compare in scale with the aftermath of the Second World War or the events of the era of the Great War. However, for the first time in more than five decades, refugees became a fact of European life, as did hostility towards them. A new departure, compared with the previous refugee crises, consisted of the arrival of exiles from beyond Europe. These began to make their way to the continent, partly as a result of the legacies of empire from countries such as Vietnam, Cyprus and Uganda.39 Most of the new refugees consisted of people moving across Europe, especially as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. An increase in the number of Poles fleeing to West Germany during the course of the 1980s in the last years of the intolerant Jaruselski regime provided a sign of things to come.40 Similarly, the dying and increasingly intolerant and impoverished Ceauçescu regime in Rumania also witnessed a loss of population due to a combination of political and economic factors. Many of these consisted of ethnic Germans and Hungarians.41 This also signalled the fact that the mass refugee crisis of the 1990s meant a change from political to ethnic persecution and consequent cleansing. A further bout of Turkish expulsions from Bulgaria, which peaked in the later 1980s, also hinted at this change.42 The collapse of the Soviet Union released old-standing ethnic tensions as well as created new ones, resulting in migration in a variety of directions, especially from one part of the former Soviet Union to

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another. Part of the motivation for movement consisted of economic collapse, especially for those who moved westwards, pointing to the difficulty of separating political from economic factors in migratory movements, although for many refugees, ethnic intolerance acted as the main driving force. The crises that emerged in the Soviet Union affected a series of groups. In the first place, some 25 million people considered ethnically Russian, often as a result of Soviet era migration, found themselves in former republics outside of Russia. By 1995, about 2 million of these people had fled to Russia, migrating in largest numbers from Tajikistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Movement took place partly as result of persecution and discrimination, although a welcoming homeland also helped in the decision to leave.43 Movement within the boundaries of the former Soviet Union also occurred in the Caucasus.44 The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh may, by its seventh year in 1995, have displaced 1.6 million people. Secessionist conflicts in Georgia also led to refugee movements. The war for the independence of South Ossetia, in the centre of the country bordering Russia, which began in 1989, created 120,000 refugees who fled to Russia by 1995. Conflict in Abkhazia, in the northwest of the country, caused 80,000 people to flee to Russia and other post-Soviet successor states by 1995.45 Between 1992 and 1997, more than 3 million had made their way to the Russian Federation from other states. They consisted of ethnic Russians, refugees from conflict in the Caucusus, together with illegal immigrants and asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.46 Emigration from former Yugoslavia had begun to increase before the outbreak of war there so that the number of Yugoslavs abroad grew by 11 per cent between 1989 and 1990, to total 716,000 people. The war in Yugoslavia resulted in a mass refugee crisis, with the majority of movements occurring from one Yugoslav republic to another, partly because of simple reasons of geographical proximity but also due to the policies of ‘ethnic cleansing’ pursued by the various warlords in an attempt to reverse centuries of history overnight, for the purpose of creating ethnically homogenous states in the area. Quite simply, the war in former Yugoslavia resulted in the creation of the biggest displaced persons crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War so that, like the situation in Germany in 1945, Yugoslavia in the early 1990s resembled a vast refugee camp. By August 1992, one in ten Yugoslavs was a refugee, either within their own Yugoslav state, in a neighbouring one or in another European country.47 By 1995, the United Nations High

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Commission for Refugees was assisting 3.7 million people affected by the war,48 which brings the figure close to 20 per cent of the population of Yugoslavia, which stood at 22,427,600 in 1981.49 As the most ethnically mixed republic and the one that faced the most prolonged and violent experience of war, the greatest number of refugees originated from Bosnia-Herzegovina. One estimate placed their numbers within the former Yugoslav states at 1,496,648 at the end of 1992.50 The greatest displacement here took place after the Serb invasion of the area in the summer of 1992, a situation in which people left their homes ‘with what possessions they can grab’.51 But Bosnians formed just one element of the total number of people displaced by the war of the early 1990s in Yugoslavia. In total, more than a million Croats and Serbians, Montenegrins, Slovenians and Macedonians were also affected, not just during the conflict but also at its end, as the solution sponsored by the USA legalized the exchange of populations.52 Further displacement would take place in the conflict over Kosovo.53 Victims of the Yugoslav conflict who fled abroad, totalling 531,412 in August 1992, generally made their way either to neighbouring countries or to states that had liberal asylum policies as well as an established Yugoslav community.54 Hungary also experienced further influxes of ethnic Hungarians moving towards its borders in the early 1990s, especially after violence against this group in early 1990 in Transylvania, which caused 7,848 to flee between March and May of that year.55 Once again, the events in Hungary consisted of an ethnic conflict that had remained dormant in the Cold War freeze and which had come back to life as a result of the thaw.56 Such figures, while still relatively small compared with either of the mass migrations in the aftermath of the two World Wars, point to the fact that the refugee had become a characteristic of European life in the final decade of the twentieth century, having largely disappeared from public consciousness as a result of the Cold War freeze. However, the real consequences of the diplomatic thaw of the 1990s and beyond made themselves felt outside Europe, as the numbers of refugees exploded globally. Only a few of these made their way to Europe because of increasingly tight legislation by the European Union and individual states within it to keep them out.57

Displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide and exile The numbers of refugees in twentieth- century Europe clearly fluctuated, reaching a peak in the eras of the two World Wars, in particular, and in the aftermath of the Cold War. In the periods in between, in the

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form of the first decade of the twentieth century, the period 1924–1939 and, above all the 1950s until the 1980s, numbers of refugees remained comparatively low. This, of course, does not mean that they disappeared, as these apparent dips in the numbers of refugees would ignore some of the most celebrated groups in the twentieth century, above all the exiles from the Nazis, but also those who fled the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. The process of becoming a refugee remains complex. A range of underlying causes lead to this situation, including extremist ideology, state collapse, war or some combination of these developments. The emergence of refugees links with other dramatic events in twentiethcentury Europe. For instance, if we were to examine the ‘exchange of population’ between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, the consequences of Nazi policy in Europe during the Second World War or the wars in Yugoslavia, it seems that all of these developments lead to the creation of millions of refugees. Yet contemporary opinion and subsequent research has not always viewed the victims of these processes as refugees. Terms such as ethnic cleansing, population displacement and genocide usually apply to such developments. Perhaps the concept of exile remains one area that presents fewer conceptual problems. This seems a straightforward process in which a repressive regime prosecutes an individual or group of minorities. Rather than remaining to endure the polices directed against them, exiles choose to voluntarily flee, either as individuals or collectively. The migration has a limited degree of direct force involved, certainly in comparison with the millions of people affected by the upheaval of the era of the two World Wars and the collapse of communism. Such ‘exiles’ have included the celebrated ‘dissidents’ who fled from the USSR, especially towards the end of this regime,58 together with people escaping a whole series of repressive governments since the 1980s, both within the European Soviet orbit, such as Poland and, increasingly, from the nationalistic and ethnically exclusive states and governments that have followed in the aftermath of the Cold War thaw globally, which meant a massive rise in the number of refugees in the world.59 The millions of people who find themselves displaced in Africa, for example, would not fit into the rather romantic conception of exile. Some of the individuals who make their way to Europe might do, despite the all embracing antiasylum feeling which has influenced European policy-makers from the 1990s to keep as many people as possible out of the EU, in particular, leading to the development of the concept of ‘Fortress Europe’.60 One of the most celebrated of such ‘exile’ groups consists of the refugees from

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Nazism. This links in with the attention received by the Holocaust, although much work has focused upon the subsequent impact of these groups upon the countries to which they have moved.61 The concept of exile may prove easier to identify than some of the other processes that cause people to flee their homes, but even this remains complex. We now move to some of the major developments in the history of twentieth- century Europe that have led to the creation of millions of refugees. Displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide essentially cause refugee movements, even though the focus upon these events has rarely conceptualized them as an example of refugee creation. Let us begin with developments during the First World War and its aftermath. The events in Armenia from 1915 have attracted the term of genocide amongst Western scholars62 and, certainly, in view of the numbers of people who died and the intentions of the Turkish state to eliminate Armenians,63 there seems no reason to dispute this concept. Nevertheless, in view of the methods that the dying Ottoman Empire used to eliminate its Armenian population, driving them out of their historic homeland south towards the Syrian Desert, this process also involved the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees, some of whom would survive and move to France and the USA, in particular.64 ‘Population exchange’ may help us to understand the policy level decisions that led to the expulsion of millions of people from Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, but so do other phrases. In some ways, the events of these years are tantamount to genocide because of the violence directed against the Greek community, in particular, over decades.65 Certainly these events also merit the description forced expulsion, especially as the two receiving states in the form of Turkey and Greece accepted that they would rehouse the expellees with similar ethnic characteristics to the majority of their population, within their national borders. But the individuals involved also consisted of refugees who, in the case of those who left the area around Smyrna, had fled even before the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which formalized the exchange of populations. The people affected also found themselves experiencing the problems associated with refugees such as trauma, loss of status, unemployment and family breakup.66 The Second World War created tens of millions of refugees. Nazi policies against the Jews of Europe not only murdered countless people, it also displaced them, whether in the move to the death camps or, preceding that, the concentration of Jews in ghettoes.67 Similarly, Nazi genocidal policy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which aimed at establishing distinct settlement patterns, also caused millions

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of refugees, as did the flight westward to escape the advancing Soviet armies.68 As we have seen, the idea of refugeedom reached its height in the aftermath of the Second World War, largely as a result of the consequences of Nazism and its aftermath. Scholars such as Jacques Vernant69 and Eugene Kulischer70 recognized the presence of millions of refugees on the continent fleeing in all directions, especially from east to west or west to east, whether they consisted of ethnic Germans facing vindictive East European regimes or individuals who had fallen victims to Nazism and wished to return home. The intervention by and recognition of the refugee in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the U.N. also helped to further establish the idea of refugeedom, especially as associated with the fallout from Nazism and the Second World War. Whatever terminology we use to describe the tens of millions of people who found themselves expelled from their homes during the era of the Second World War, the term refugee represents a phrase that covers numerous experiences. However, in the literature that has emerged since the 1940s, the refugee has become associated with the aftermath of the war, whereas those displaced during the conflict usually find themselves covered by a research agenda concerned with Nazi genocide. By the early 1990s, a new phrase had emerged to describe those affected by the breakup of Yugoslavia. While media and United Nations discourse accepted the victims as refugees, the process that actually led to the millions of people who found themselves outside their homes attracted the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘The term exploded into our consciousness in May 1992 during the first stage of the War in Bosnia,’ referring to Serb attacks on Bosnian Muslims,71 and has particularly remained associated with ethnic cleansing by the Serbs, even though members of this national grouping also experienced this process.72 Shortly after the term became part of ‘the international lexicon of crimes associated with Serb aggression in former Yugoslavia’,73 Andrew Bell-Fialkoff published a volume on the subject in which he took a longterm historical perspective and argued that the phrase encompassed ‘forced and deliberate’ population removal, which had clear connections with genocide.74 Ethnic cleansing, as the actions in Yugoslavia have increasingly been described, had the consequence of creating millions of refugees. The actions of the disintegrating remnants of the Yugoslav state do not represent new developments in twentieth- century European history. The policies adopted by Serbia and Croatia, in particular, continue those pursued particularly in the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the Eastern

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European states with German minorities that had survived the Nazi invasion of their countries during the Second World War. Indeed, Benjamin Lieberman has viewed ethnic cleansing as central in the evolution of modern Europe, beginning with the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.75 Ethnic cleansing has similarities to the policies adapted by both the Nazis and the USSR against undesirable ethnic groups during the Second World War, although, as internal displacement often occurred, the victims of such policies rarely attract the label of refugees. But in these processes, the refugee seems to have become irrelevant, especially as the twentieth century progressed and the horror at those forced out of their homes after the Greek invasion of Turkey and the consequent Treaty of Lausanne subsided.76 Following the events of the early 1920s, making thousands or millions of people homeless simply became a policy option, regardless of the consequences for the individuals concerned and the terminology used to describe such actions – whether displacement, ethnic cleansing or even genocide.

Intolerance, imperial collapse, war and the creation of refugees Have any common factors led to the displacement of millions of refugees in twentieth- century Europe? This volume focuses particularly upon imperial collapse as a driving force in the rearrangement of the ethnic map of Europe and South Asia, destroying communities that had lived in their homes for centuries, and even millennia, in some cases. While imperial and state collapse provides a central cause for the emergence of refugees, it also usually links with two other factors in the form of the emergence of intolerant regimes and the proximity or reality of war. Although referring specifically to genocide, Robert F. Melson, comparing the events in Armenia in the First World War and Nazi occupied Europe during the Second, devised a three-stage process which would lead to this eventuality. In the first place, ‘revolutionary governments’ come to power following the ‘breakdown of old regimes’ which ‘need to create a new order that will support the revolutionary state’. Clearly, revolutionary here refers to regimes which wish to make a clean break with the past (even though deeply influenced by their own interpretation of it) rather than those which wish to change the existing social order, as in the case of the Bolsheviks. In the examples studied by Melson, in the form of the genocide of Armenians and the murder of

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the Jews of Europe, two revolutionary regimes existed in the form of the Young Turks (or the Community of Union and Progress), which came to power in 1908, and the Nazis, who took over in 1933. Both of these governments followed intolerant policies against their ‘ethnoreligious’ minorities immediately after coming to power, but it was the First and Second World Wars which led to the implementation of the extreme policy of genocide.77 Melson’s ideas, while they focus upon mass killing, provide a useful starting point for an analysis of the reasons behind refugee creation, especially if we accept the similarities between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Before the revolutionary regime even comes to power, however, we need to accept the existence of both pre- existing ethnic tensions and exclusive policies against minorities. For instance, the Armenian genocide represented the culmination of a period of persecution of Armenians which had developed during the nineteenth century and manifested itself most dramatically in the massacres of 1895–6.78 Similarly, modern anti-Semitism emerged in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, with violent manifestations before 1933.79 At the same time, the events in Yugoslavia in the 1990s tapped into resentments which had existed throughout the twentieth century, especially between the majority Serbs and Croats.80 We could devise a similar list of ethnic resentments for all of the major refugee crises in twentieth- century Europe, including for instance, hostility towards Germans in the eastern half of the continent before the Second World War, or the whole history of ethnic resentments in the dying Ottoman Empire. Following Melson, intolerant or revolutionary regimes do not carry out their most extreme policies until war breaks out. However, they do increase persecution shortly after they come to power. The Committee of Union and Progress, for instance, carried out the Adana massacres in 1909.81 Similarly, the Nazi policies of the 1930s have been well documented,82 while the events in Yugoslavia spiralled out of control partly due to the fact that Slobodan Milosevic moved away from an inclusive Yugoslav to an exclusive Serb nationalism, which caused a reaction amongst the other ethnic groups which constituted Yugoslavia.83 While not all refugee creation has needed war, all episodes of ethnic cleansing have taken place against the background of either the two World Wars or the war in Yugoslavia. In the period 1912–1923, we could point to the Armenian genocide and the population exchanges which took place between newly emerging and expanding states during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and the Greco-Turkish War of 1921–1922. When dealing

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with the Second World War, we are clearly not simply referring to Nazi and Soviet policies but also the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe, although Levene identifies numerous other examples of deportation.84 Finally, the events in Yugoslavia and the Caucasus of the 1990s also occurred in a wartime situation. Melson has argued that war makes extreme solutions more likely because it leads to a rise in hostility towards enemies, ‘increases the autonomy of the state from social forces’ and closes off other policy options, in which he includes expulsion, which I would argue could not happen without war as a background.85 At the same time, as the state becomes more unified and centralized as part of the necessity for fighting twentieth- century total wars, a growing nationalistic and xenophobic propaganda machine assists in this process by increasingly marginalizing those regarded as not having the right ethnic credentials and, most significantly, having connections with the enemy.86 Thus, the justification for the Armenian genocide partly came from the idea that Armenians had fought with the Russians against the Ottoman Empire which faced defeat at the battle of Sarikamish in January 1915,87 while the concept of the enemy within affected virtually all of the Yugoslav states because of the fact that historically evolved settlement patterns did not accord with the boundaries of the new political entities which emerged in the 1990s.88 Key to the intolerant treatment of minorities in wartime, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide, lies the central aim of states in wartime, which ultimately consists of killing. This had become a legitimized action on the battlefields during the early stages of the First World War, although, with German atrocities against civilians in Belgium during the First World War,89 an important precedent was set for the targeting of all sections of the population, which reached a culmination in the Nazi polices in Poland and the USSR90 and the Allied bombing of German cities in 1944 and 1945.91 In a situation in which the killing of enemies, including civilians, had become part of everyday life, the ethnic cleansing and, even worse, murder of perceived enemy populations under the control of a nation-state represented a slight variation in such policies. The enemy within and the enemy without suffer a similar fate, especially in states which have abandoned or have never even adopted democratic checks and balances.92 The driving out and murder of populations may have occurred without total war before the twentieth century, although, even then, conflict acts as a background factor,93 but such policies since 1910 have always taken place against the background of a wider and usually brutal conflict.

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War remains a prerequisite for genocide and ethnic cleansing. However, the main point of this article remains the role of state and, more especially, imperial collapse in the creation of refugees, especially on a mass scale. It may prove difficult to separate the role of state collapse and war in the creation of refugees (as conceived in the broadest sense of the term), but why does imperial collapse lead to ethnic cleansing? In this sense, the periods which act as the focus of this essay follow a common pattern. The end of the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled much of the Balkans from the late fourteenth century and virtually all of this area from the end of the fifteenth, meant the cessation of an essentially pre-modern system of imperial control. The sick man of Europe finally passed away in a violent manner, taking all with him, as viewed from the perspective of the victims of Ottoman genocide and ethnic cleansing. While the final elimination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the peace treaties of 1919 may not have proved as violent, these treaties meant the end of that pre-modern regime and some redistribution of population. Similarly, the Russian Revolution brought a violent end to another empire which had expanded and reached its zenith during the nineteenth century. While some minority problems may appear to have disappeared as a result of the redrawing of borders in the peace treaties following the Great War, they would resurface in World War Two and in the 1990s. Consequently, some of the acts of internal displacement in World War Two involving the Soviet State took place as a result of these unresolved issues, not solved by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in which nationality had played a central role.94 However, as we have seen, the main acts of ethnic cleansing during the Second World War occurred because of the extraordinarily rapid rise and fall of a 12, rather than 1,000, year Reich, which from the point of view of the Nazi Empire outside German borders, really only lasted for six years.95 Our main concern lies with refugee creation as the regime collapsed, forced into the heartland of the German nation-state which had emerged during the nineteenth century, as refugees fled in all directions. While the events of the years 1939–45 caused much of the displacement which occurred, it also had roots in the evolution of ethnic and national consciousness during the nineteenth century in particular. Finally, our third episode of refugee creation in twentieth- century Europe falls somewhere in between the other two in terms of the nature of the empire which collapsed. Once again, if the theme consists of ethnic unmixing, cleansing or purification, the origins of many of the ‘problems’ ‘resolved’ in the 1990s lie in the Ottoman, Habsburg and

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Russian empires. Nevertheless, the immediate spark consisted of the collapse of, what we might describe as, the Soviet Empire, which not only released tensions and created refugees within its own borders, but also helped the unravelling of the Yugoslav mix, whose ethnic complexity evolved in the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Matthew Frank’s essay in this volume views the concept of ethnic unmixing almost as an inevitability as nation-states emerge.96 While he demonstrates that international opinion initially regarded deportation as unacceptable in the aftermath of the First World War, this abhorrence had lessened and almost disappeared as a concern in the aftermath of the Second.97 Clearly, the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century acts as a key to the ethnic cleansing and refugee creation which followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. These developments created new nationalisms, which, to follow Anthony Smith,98 used ethnic raw materials in the Balkans and Anatolia which had existed before the arrival of the Ottomans, to construct new nationalisms, which would emerge as nation-states, either in the era of the First World War or in the 1990s.99 It is important to stress the excluding nature of nationalism and its role in the formation of all ethnic categories. While pre-modern empires accept a level of ethnic difference, which, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, revolved around religious categories, nation-states, with all of the paraphernalia which accompanies them, driven on by an ethnically exclusive ideology, always operate along the concept of insiders and outsiders.100 Consequently, nationalism underlies most of the ethnic cleansing and refugee creation which takes place in twentieth- century Europe, although the other factors described here also play a central role. The Ottoman Empire, like the Soviet Empire, while rejecting self rule for a variety of ethnic groups, did not suppress ethnic, or ethnoreligious, identity, either through the millet system or through Soviet nationalities policy. Both encouraged and accepted difference, as long as these differences did not threaten to break away. In one sense we might use the concept of frozen ethnicities for both cases. When the thaw began, as a result of the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century in the case of the Ottoman Empire, or its renaissance in the USSR, the previously frozen entities emerged and took on their own life, demanding their own nation-states. However, as scholars recognized from the early twentieth century, when these nationalisms created nation-states as the Ottoman and Soviet empires collapsed, a situation which also applied in Yugoslavia in

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the 1990s, they found that, unlike the apparently ethnically homogeneous entities which existed in western Europe,101 the new nation-states could not contain all of those which they regarded as belonging to them within compact borders. A classic example, but one which reflects the situation all over the Balkans, consists of Greece, which, emerging in stages during the nineteenth century, found that its perceived capital, Constantinople, also formed the capital of the Ottoman Empire, while one of the largest Greek cities, Smyrna, lay on the west coast of Anatolia. Encouraged by the allies, the Greek state in the aftermath of the First World War tried to force the issue by invading rump Turkey, but the Greeks of Anatolia would pay the price following the defeat of the Greek Army and fled into what had become the Greek heartland during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ethnic cleansing, therefore, follows the end of empire in all of our European cases, including the aftermath of the Second World War, because of the increasing acceptance of homogeneity within the nationstate, even though such a situation never ultimately exists, irrespective of the extent to which this process occurs.102 Part of the problem lies with the fact that those state structures which preceded nation-states tolerated nascent nationalism, which meant that when the Ottoman and Soviet empires collapsed, these emerging ideologies came into their own. It sometimes seems as if the age before nationalism represents some sort of peaceful golden age, after which there emerged violent passions. The Balkans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, witnessed relatively little ethnic tension. In this period the millet system guaranteed that individual religious communities had their own autonomy and continued to practice their beliefs. The system, however, operated on the basis that the Turks remained top dogs.103 Similarly, while the Soviet Empire tolerated and encouraged nationality from its inception, this tolerance wore thin at any sign of a challenge to a Soviet nationalism which essentially originated in Tsarist Russian nationalism, as the Crimean Tatars found to their cost during the Second World War. We seem to be concluding that the end of empire results in ethnic cleaning, population displacement and mass refugee crises in Europe because of the desire for ethnic purity in newly emerging nation-states. While those ethnic groups such as the Greeks who have come into existence as nation-states for the first time may be responsible for such developments, the worst acts of ethnic cleansing actually occur as a result of the actions of the former imperial power. The obvious example here consists of the actions of the dying Ottoman Empire. While, as we

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have seen, the millet system worked on the assumption that Muslims remained in control, it did tolerate ethnoreligious minorities. One consequence of the emerging nation-states in the Balkans and other parts of the empire during the nineteenth century consisted of the development of a Turkish nationalism by the beginning of the twentieth century, especially following the seizure of power of the Committee of Union and Progress. This meant that all semblance of tolerance disappeared. Justin McCarthy has even gone as far as to describe the war against the Greeks in the aftermath of the Treaty of Sèvres as ‘The Turkish War of Independence’ because the conflict opposed not just the invading Greek armies but also the settlement imposed upon the Turks following their defeat during the Great War.104 We can argue, following Mark Levene,105 that Greeks and Armenians suffered particularly badly because they represented rimland populations. While the Ottomans could ultimately let go of the areas lost in the Balkans, even though, during their rule in the peninsula, Muslim populations had emerged in a variety of locations, the newly nationalist Turkish nation-state could not surrender what it regarded as the Turkish heartland: Anatolia. As ethnic tolerance disappeared, Greeks and Armenians found themselves victims of a vengeful Turkish nationalism, which blamed them for defeat at the battle of Sarikamish and for the invasion of almost half their rump country by the Greek Army in 1921. While we can partly regard this as an issue of rimland populations, we can also see it as a problem of foreign populations which resided in the heartland of a wounded and vengeful state. The end of the Nazi Empire differs from the other two cases under consideration here in several ways. Apart from the fact it constituted a political entity which ultimately lasted for a brief period of six years, it did not pretend tolerance. While Turkish populations may have suffered in the Balkans as a result of the emergence of nation-states there by facing deportation,106 and while Russians found themselves marginalized in the Baltic states in the early 1990s,107 the fate of these two groups remained relatively mild compared with that of the ethnic Germans who remained as collectives in Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. The totally defeated, crushed and dissected rump German state could not carry out the type of actions which the Turkish state had done from 1915–22. Instead, completely unprotected, any perceived representatives of Germany who remained in those states which the Nazis had invaded now found themselves forced back into the rump Germany. In this conflict in which nationalism reached a pinnacle and in which part of the justification for the Nazi expansion into Eastern Europe

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consisted of the presence of German populations there, these remnant groups remained at the mercy of the local populations and also the postwar peace settlement. While Germans as symbols of the former imperial power, rather than minorities (as in the case of Greeks and Armenians), became the victims of ethnic cleansing on this occasion, the principle remained the same in the sense that unitary states with monoethnic populations had now become the accepted norm (despite, for the time being, the USSR and Yugoslavia). While some Germans simply fled invading Soviet armies and while some states, above all Czechoslovakia, carried out an act of revenge for the events of 1938 by expelling their Germans, the moving of the Soviet and, consequently, Polish border by the Potsdam Treaty meant that those rimland populations who found themselves located on the wrong side of new borders had to move westward. Although this represents the most dramatic example of the creation of refugees at the end of the Second World War, changing borders throughout Europe meant people with the wrong ethnic credentials in new states had to move in all directions. In some ways, we might argue that the end of the Second World War meant a thawing in the ethnic relations, which had existed in Eastern Europe under the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires in which, like the Turks under Ottoman rule, Germans remained top dog.108 Nevertheless, not only Germans and other rimland populations became victims of the fallout from Nazi defeat. Because of the numbers of people which the Nazis had moved around Europe as a result of their system of forced labour and genocide,109 millions of individuals found themselves displaced when the conflict ceased. Consequently, a mass refugee movement occurred not simply from East to West but also from West to East, especially of Soviet peoples, while numerous smaller movements occurred on a more localized basis.

Conclusion Imperial collapse, therefore, played a central role in refugee creation during the twentieth century. It usually acted as the key development, along with total war, in the mass refugee crises which emerged in twentieth- century Europe during the three key moments described in the narrative above. While refugees may remain a fact of European history throughout the last century, especially in view of the range of totalitarian regimes which existed during that time, the combination of total war and imperial collapse led to population displacement on the largest scale.

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Melson’s analysis, while dealing essentially with genocide, helps us here. The most intolerant acts of ethnic cleansing have involved totalitarian regimes, whether Young Turks, Nazis or various forms of Balkan nationalists, for example. Nazi empire-building remains distinct from our perspective because its genocidal acts occurred during a period of expansion rather than contraction or collapse. Nevertheless, the actions of this regime help to illustrate the importance of war in leading to murderous solutions when killing becomes part of the everyday reality of political life. The step from shooting soldiers and, just as importantly, civilians, to eliminating ethnic and racial enemies, remains a small one. The importance of imperial collapse in ethnic cleansing lies in the fact that regimes which had displayed a degree of ethnic tolerance, provided that the dominant ruling elites remain at the top of the tree, no longer existed. Using the example of the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Anatolia, the regimes which superseded it moved away from the semblance of tolerance to a desire to cleanse the newly created nation-state of former enemies. Examining former Ottoman territories throughout the twentieth century,110 this seems a phase through which newly created states pass through if they have significant numbers of minorities within their borders. This desire for ethnic purity, which receives legitimacy through the nationalist ideal, underlying many of the developments discussed in this chapter, also combined with revenge in some of the most extreme acts of ethnic cleansing. For example, the Armenian and Greek genocides, when the emerging Turkish state punished its former subject peoples for daring to challenge it. Similarly, the post-Second World War peace settlement also displayed elements of revenge in the plight of the ethnic Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe for centuries. Just as significantly, we need to recognize the role of the ‘Great Powers’, especially following the Treaty of Lausanne. This agreement not only accepted the ethnic cleansing which had taken place between Greece and Turkey in these years, it also set the precedent for the events of the post-war years. Lausanne became the template for dealing with the presence of minorities in nation-states which did not want them. For the ‘Big Four’ at the end of the Second World War, the suffering of individual Germans in particular did not matter, especially as the Nazis had started the war and had inflicted untold suffering on the people of Europe. While most of the refugees created at the end of the Second World War followed vengeful policies of a variety of regimes, as well as the

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straightforward flight of scared Germans,111 some of those who found themselves displaced did so as a result of the fallout from the collapse of Nazism because the regime had moved tens of millions of people throughout the continent as part of its policies of racial engineering. These individuals usually wanted to simply return home, as in the case of Soviet and other East and West European citizens who had worked in Nazi Germany.112 Some Jews who had survived the Polish death camps wanted to move to Israel,113 while some Soviet citizens preferred to move to the West, as they knew that they would face accusations of treachery upon return.114 Imperial collapse therefore played a central role in the development of refugee crises in twentieth- century Europe. War usually accentuated the worst examples of ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the desire for ethnic purity, legitimized by nationalist ideology, meant, in some cases, that the transition from empire to nation-state involved ethnic cleansing as part of the nation-building process. The acceptance by the Great Powers of such processes from Lausanne to the Dayton Agreement legitimized this process.

Notes 1. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985). 2. www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html, ‘Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’, p. 16. 3. See, for example: Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005); Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford, 1995); Richard G. Hovannissian, ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Policy, Ethics (London, 1992). 4. Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (London, 1992), pp. 145–6. 5. Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006), pp. 53–79. See also Mark Levene’s essay below. 6. Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies: Introduction’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 10 (2008), pp. 7–14. 7. Renée Hirschon, ‘Consequences of the Lausanne Convention: An Overview’, in Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (Oxford, 2003), pp. 14–15. 8. See the discussion in Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2007), pp. 13–38.

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9. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War One (Bloomington, IN, 1999). 10. Norman Stone and Michael Glenny, The Other Russia (London, 1990), p. xv. 11. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Attrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (London, 2001); Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England During the Great War (New York, 1982). 12. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking. 13. See, for instance, Panikos Panayi, Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London, 2000), pp. 145–8. 14. See Chapter 5 below. 15. Marrus, Unwanted, pp. 81–96; Claudia Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford, 1995). 16. As an introduction to these issues see, for instance, Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), pp. 126–71. 17. Simon Segal, Poland in World War Two (London, 1943). 18. See, for example, Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005). 19. Omar Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1942–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 129–41. 20. See for example: Martin Conway and José Gotovich, eds, Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain, 1940–45 (Oxford, 2001). 21. See, for instance, Detlef Brandes, ‘Die Deutschen in Russland und der Sowjetunion’, in Klaus J. Bade, ed., Deutsche im Ausland – Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich, 1992), pp. 130–4. 22. Anne Sheehy, The Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans: Soviet Treatment of Two National Minorities (London, 1971), pp. 9–12; Brian Glyn Williams, ‘The Hidden Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in the Soviet Union: The Exile and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 37 (2002), pp. 323–47. 23. Timothy Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, Past and Present, no. 179 (2003), pp. 197–234. 24. Marrus, Unwanted, p. 297. 25. Eugene Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948), p. 305. 26. See, for example: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (London, 1993); Siegfried Bethlehem, Heimatvertreibung, DDR-Flucht, Gastarbeiterwanderung: Wanderungsströme und Wanderungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1982); and Tony Radspieler, The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria (The Hague, 1955). 27. Panayi, Ethnic Minorities, pp. 201–3. 28. Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: A History of European Minorities (London, 1999), pp. 125–6. 29. Ruth Gay, Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War Two (London, 2002).

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30. Thomas Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles and Balts to Britain (Basingstoke, 2004). 31. Panayi, Outsiders, p. 127. 32. Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London, 1953), p. 225. 33. Joseph B. Schechtman, ‘Compulsory Transfer of the Turkish Minority from Bulgaria’, Journal of Central European Affairs, vol. 12 (1952), pp. 157–8; Huey Luis Kostanick, The Turkish Resettlement of Bulgarian Turks, 1950–1953 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1957), pp. 106–8. 34. Panayi, Outsiders, pp. 127–8. 35. Gordon Brook- Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors (London, 1988). 36. Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Population Change and Its Repercussions on the Social History of the Federal Republic’, in Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi, eds, The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949: Politics, Society and Economy Before and After Unification (London, 1996), p. 40. 37. Krystyna Iglicka, Poland’s Post-War Dynamic of Migration (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 42–3, 100. 38. Panikos Panayi, ‘Refugees in Twentieth- Century Britain: A Brief History’, in Vaughan Robinson, ed., The International Refugee Crisis: British and Canadian Responses (London, 1993), pp. 104–5. 39. See Chapter 12 below. 40. Christoph Pallaske, Migration aus Polen in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren: Migrationsverläufe und Eingliedrungsprozesse in sozilageschichtlicher Perspektive (Munster, 2000), covers the range of reasons for Polish migration to Germany. 41. George Schöpflin and Hugh Poulton, Rumania’s Ethnic Hungarians (London, 1990), pp. 17–19; Rudolf Joó, The Hungarian Minority Situation in Ceauçescu’s Rumania (New York, 1984), pp. 101–8. 42. Darina Vasileva, ‘Bulgarian Turkish Migration and Return’, International Migration Review, vol. 26 (1992), pp. 342–52; Erhard Franz, ‘The Exodus of Turks from Bulgaria’, Asian and African Studies, vol. 25 (1991), pp. 91–4. 43. See, for instance: Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London, 1995); Neil Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia (London, 1995); and Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Soviet Successor States (Oxford, 1996). 44. John F. R. Wright, Suzanne Goldenberg and Richard Schofield, eds, Transcaucasian Boundaries (London, 1996). 45. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (Oxford, 1995), p. 24. 46. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (Oxford, 1997), p. 200. 47. Observer, 15 August 1992. 48. United Nations High Commission for Refugees, The State of the World’s Refugees (1995), p. 12. 49. Vladimir Grecic, `Former Yugoslavia’, in Solon Ardittis, ed., The Politics of East-West Migration (London, 1994), p. 131. 50. Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of `Ethnic Cleansing’ in Bosnia (Shaftesbury, 1993), p. 107. 51. Financial Times, 21–2, November 1992.

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52. Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (London, 2002). 53. Florian Bieber and Zidas Daskalovski, eds, Understanding the War in Kosovo (London, 2003). 54. Grecic, `Former Yugoslavia’, p. 127. 55. World Refugee Survey 1991 (Washington, DC, 1991), p. 73. 56. Tom Gallagher, `Vatra Rumânească and Resurgent Nationalism in Romania’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 15 (1992). 57. See ‘Conclusion and Legacies’ below. 58. Brook- Shepherd, Storm Birds. 59. According to the UN, there were 42 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2008, made up of 15.2 million refugees, 827,000 asylum seekers and 26 million internally displaced persons. See www.unhcr. org/4a375c426.html, ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’. 60. Andrew Geddes, Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe (Manchester, 2000). 61. There is, for instance, a large literature on Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from the Nazis to Britain, focusing upon a range of themes, including their impact. See, for instance: W. E. Mosse et al., eds, Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom (Tübingen, 1991); Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler’s Germany (Leamington Spa, 1984); Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London, 2003); Marian Malet and Anthony Grenville, eds, Changing Countries: The Experience and Achievement of German-Speaking Exiles from Hitler in Britain, 1933 to Today (London, 2002); Peter Alter, ed., Out of the Third Reich: Refugee Historians in Post-War Britain (London, 1998); J. M. Ritchie, German Exiles: British Perspectives (New York, 1997). 62. Bloxham, Great Game of Genocide. 63. Argued perhaps most forcefully by Dadrian, History of the Armenian Genocide. 64. Marrus, Unwanted, pp. 74–81. 65. See, for instance, Schaller and Zimmerer, ‘Late Ottoman Genocides’. 66. See, for example: contributions to Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean; Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact on Greece (London, 2002); Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: The Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922–1930 (Oxford, 2006); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London, 2007). 67. See, for instance: Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos (London, 2003); and Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–45 (London, 1975). 68. See, for example: Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study in Occupation Politics (London, 1981); and Lower, Nazi Empire-Building. 69. Vernant, Refugee in the Post-War World. 70. Kulischer, Europe on the Move. 71. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth- Century Europe (London, 2001), p. 2.

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72. Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (London, 2002). 73. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, p. 3. 74. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 1–4. 75. Lieberman, Terrible Fate. See also Stevan Béla Várdy, T. Hunt Tooley and Otto von Habsburg, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (New York, 2003). 76. See the discussion in Frank, Expelling the Germans. 77. Melson, Revolution and Genocide. 78. See, for instance, James J. Reid, ‘Total War, the Annihilation Ethic, and the Armenian Genocide, 1870–1918’, in Hovannissian, Armenian Genocide, pp. 21–52. 79. Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann and Helmut Walter Smith, eds, Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002). 80. See, for instance: Christopher Bennet, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse (London, 1995); and Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1996). 81. See Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London, 1990), pp. 177–89. 82. See, for instance, Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1998). 83. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, 2nd edn (London, 2000). 84. See Chapter 3 below. 85. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, p. 19. 86. Panikos Panayi, ‘Dominant Societies and Minorities in the Two World Wars’, in Panikos Panayi, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1993), pp. 18–19. 87. Liberman, Terrible Fate, p. 99. 88. Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing. 89. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities. 90. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008), pp. 78–178. 91. Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (New York, 2006). 92. Panayi, ‘Dominant Societies’, pp. 19–20. 93. See, for instance, Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (London, 2007), pp. 43–390. 94. See, for instance, Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001). 95. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. 96. See Chapter 4 below. 97. Frank, Expelling the Germans. 98. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1983). 99. See, for example, Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1994); Judah, Serbs.

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100. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford, 2010); Panayi, Outsiders. 101. But see Panayi, Outsiders. 102. Walker Connor, ‘A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group is a ...’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 1 (1978), p. 382, claimed that in 1971, out of ‘132 entities generally considered to be states’, only 12 or 9.1 per cent ‘can justifiably be described as nation-states’ with a unitary ethnic group. 103. See, for instance, Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2005). 104. Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London, 2001), pp. 128–48. 105. See Chapter 3 below. 106. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995). 107. Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics; Melvin, Russians Beyond Russia; Chinn and Kaiser, Russians as the New Minority. 108. See the analysis of the nationality question in Prussia in William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (London, 1980). 109. Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies (Oxford, 1999). 110. Apart from Yugoslavia, another example of twentieth- century ethnic cleansing with origins in the Ottoman Empire consists of Cyprus, which is discussed in the ‘Conclusions and Legacies’, below. 111. The classic work on this subject is, Theodor Schieder, ed., Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 4 Volumes (Bonn, 1954–1961). 112. Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1997); Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Ausländer (Göttingen, 1985). 113. Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945 (London, 1996), pp. 1–36, 85–102. 114. Pavel Markoviċ Poljan and Žanna Antonovna Zajonċkovskaja, ‘Ostarbeiter in Deutschland und Daheim: Ergebnisse einer Fragenbogenanalyse’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 41 (1993); Diana Kay and Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain (London, 1992).

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2 The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration: Some Comparative Case Studies Ian Talbot

The twentieth century was dubbed the century of the refugee.1 War, the dissolution of multinational empires and the social engineering of totalitarian regimes were major factors in causing forced migration within Europe. Armenians, Cossacks, Jews and ethnic Germans in Central Europe were some of the victims of war and conflict in its opening five decades. Europe’s prolonged internal conflicts strengthened the forces of resistance to its far-flung empires. In the three decades after the close of the Second World War, European formal empires were wound up throughout Africa and Asia.2 More than a hundred newly independent states made their bow on the international stage. This process of decolonization coincided with massive displacements of population and resulting refugee flows. Taken together, the uprooting of populations in Europe and the wider world make one of the most terrible and tragic themes of modern history. There are, however, relatively few comparative examinations of forced migration, despite excellent case studies on such regions as the Balkans, central Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Dirk Hoerder, in his analysis of world migration, does, however, make it one of his categories, along with voluntary migration.3 Populations have been forcibly displaced throughout history. The technology of the modern state, however, has enabled this to occur on a much greater scale than in previous epochs. Modernity has also provided the potent brew of racial, scientific, ethnic and nationalist ideas that have prompted attempts to expel and even more terribly exterminate whole populations. Outside of Europe, nationalist struggles and the state-building processes initiated by elites who had seized the apparatus 28

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of the colonial state led to large-scale population displacements. Just under a million and a half French settlers fled Algeria when it became independent. Around 800,000 Portuguese settlers were expelled from the country’s West African territories. Religious conflict accompanying India’s independence created an eventual refugee population of around 18 million. Most study, however, has focused on the European experience of refugees arising from war and revolution. There are numerous works on decolonization, but its impact on forced migration has seldom been acknowledged, save in regional studies. There has been little comparative analysis of why decolonization as a process should have been attended by such profound population dislocation. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first to consider the reasons why decolonization caused large-scale population displacements, second to illustrate the main varieties of decolonization-related forced migration. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on the long-term psychological and social problems arising from exile from the ancestral home. Three clear patterns of decolonization-related displacement can be discerned. First, the return of settlers to the European homeland along with groups of indigenous collaborators; second, migration that anticipated or accompanied independence as a result of ethnic fears and tensions amongst minorities; third, the post-colonial state’s expulsion of scapegoat communities as part of its process of nation building. Only groups involved in the final type of migration have been unequivocally termed refugees. Those caught up in the first two processes have been more frequently regarded as economic migrants or as internally displaced persons, even when their own perception is that of refugee status.

Decolonization and forced migration Decolonization’s circumstances and characteristics determined its impact on migration. Prolonged colonial wars of national liberation were likely to result in the migration of white settlers and of natives closely associated with the security system. Ill-prepared and hasty exits could create vacuums in which rival ethnic groups contended for power.4 If power was transferred to a nationalist elite which had little involvement in the modern sectors of the economy, it was more likely to seek to expropriate comprador capitalists drawn from ethnic minority communities.5 The European response to colonial crisis hinged on a number of factors. These included the impact of domestic and international opinion

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on policy; the strategic and economic value of a colonial possession; the presence or absence of important settler communities and their relationship with the colonial authorities; the type of nationalist struggle with which they were confronted. When nationalist demands were accorded some legitimacy, there was the likelihood of a smooth exit with limited population displacement, if resistance to European authority was treated solely as a matter of law and order the converse was true.6 Colonial police forces and armies were manned not just by Europeans but also, to save costs, by indigenous recruits.7 With the spread of Social Darwinist thought in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, these were drawn from so- called martial races. These local collaborators were particularly at risk from future recriminations, if they were deployed against their fellow countrymen in prolonged struggles to suppress nationalist struggle. In the case of the Ambonese military in the Dutch East Indies, or the harkis in Algeria, they had little choice but to attempt to follow their masters into European exile. Colonial wars of liberation raised the stakes not only for rulers and their local allies, but also for nationalist elites. They were drawn from privileged classes who did not want a social revolution to accompany political freedom. Unless they were given no choice, their preferred option was thus negotiation, rather than armed struggle. Once conflict had commenced, the costs to the rulers in blood and treasure hampered withdrawal. It was also hindered by metropolitan concerns about its impact on domestic and international opinion. Violent decolonizations were especially likely when colonial authorities supported large settler populations’ attempts to deny nationalist demands. In any settler situation violence was likely, although it could be limited if the authorities acted independently of the white population, as in the case, for example, of Kenya. In Algeria, on the other hand, both the local administration and the army identified with the French settlers’ (colons’)cause. This made it impossible for Algeria to undergo a similar transition to a multiracial state as that of Kenya. The colons successfully delayed the passing of French Algeria. But the cost in bloodshed at the time of the 1957 Battle of Algiers and in the fighting in the interior in 1958–9 meant that flight with the departing French army was the inevitable outcome.8 The French authorities estimated that in the final weeks of the conflict some 50,000 Algerians were killed. Reconciliation was well nigh impossible in such circumstances. Algeria, because it was administratively conceived as part of mainland France and because of the size of the settler community, has its own historical specificity. Nevertheless, it may generally be recognized

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that the British system of indirect rule, with the goal of dominion status as the outcome of progressive reforms, was a model that reduced the likelihood of insurgency and warfare.9 Most European colonial systems were of the direct type and had the goal not of self-government, but of assimilation between the colony and the metropole. This was the case, for example, with the Portuguese Empire and is a factor in the bloodshed which accompanied its dissolution and the subsequent large-scale expulsion of Portuguese settlers. In reality, no system of rule was, however, completely ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ in its functioning. What did mark out the British practice was a relatively greater flexibility in response to nationalist demands. The most propitious episodes of decolonization were, of course, those conducted on good terms between rulers and ruled. These would prevent nationalists from having to engage in costly and destabilizing armed conflict and assure the outgoing power that its continued economic and strategic interests in the former territory would be in ‘safe hands’. The British departure from India is frequently held up as a role model for this ideal type of decolonization. Yet even such apparently smooth transfers of power carried the potential for conflict between Europeans and native populations. For at the bottom of any act of decolonization was an unpredictable reversal of balances of power. This is not to deny the fact that the actual day of independence was part of a longer transition, rather than an overnight transformation of power and influence. Nevertheless, any realignment of power on the scale of an act of decolonization could result in conflict between the new rulers and their former masters. This possibility was acknowledged when the British left India in August 1947 after a century and a half of rule. Elaborate contingency plans were drawn up to ensure a safe evacuation of Europeans.10 In the event, they were unnecessary and around 100,000 unofficial British residents stayed on, seeing out contracts in businesses, schools, plantation and missionary work until their retirement home as free migrants. While the British departure from India was not accompanied by an immediate reverse migration of its citizens, it sparked off a massive partition-related population dislocation, involving millions of Indians who overnight became refugees within their own country.11 The circumstances of partition and the reasons for this specific decolonizationrelated forced migration will be discussed later in the chapter. Here, we will focus more generally on why decolonization as a process could generate the levels of ethnic and religious conflict resulting in mass migration.

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In the final stages of numerous acts of decolonization, nationalists turned their attention from the quest for freedom to the distribution of power in the post- colonial setting. The unity of movements could be fractured as ethnic tensions came to the surface. The longer the struggle, the more likely this was to occur, as in the Indian case with the emergence of Muslim separatism. While ethnic entrepreneurs might justify their peeling off from nationalist struggle as a reflection of long-held primordialist identities, much ethno-nationalist conflict was rooted in the colonial era. This was not so much because of blatant policies of ‘divide and rule’ as because of the uneven distribution of power and access to the ‘benefits’ of the European ruling presence. Some communities were better able to exploit the new resources of the Europeans than others in their local contests for power. The Buganda in what became Uganda12 and the so- called ‘writer castes’ in British India exemplify this situation. Minority communities could thrive under the protection of foreign rule and, as a result, overturn old balances. The rise in influence of the Ibo in colonial Nigeria would be a good example.13 Independence threatened a reversal of fortune for previously privileged minorities. It also raised the stakes as to who would dominate in a post- colonial setting. This was because most nationalist elites through their exposure to western ideas and administrative practices imbibed ideas of a centralized state which did not recognize the pluralism of traditional non-European societies. It was, thus, important to jockey for power in the closing stages of colonial rule. The Ashanti for example sought to protect their interests by arguing for a decentralized independent Ghana.14 Northerners in Nigeria had a similar aim. Muslims and Sikhs in India so feared for their future in a centralized Indian state that they demanded their separate homelands. Separatism was the Achilles heel of nationalist struggle. In most instances, sufficient unity was maintained to oversee freedom, although once the common colonial foe was removed, dissensions could break out. The ethnoreligious tensions lying barely submerged in nationalist movements could be especially contentious when contestants for power possessed pre- colonial memories of conflict. The spread of modern education and identity-based politics perpetuated them within the framework of European rule. A classic example was the construction of a neo-Sikh identity by late nineteenth- century religious reformers around memory of persecution and martyrdom at the hands of the Mughal rulers of India. Its existence made it difficult for Sikhs to contemplate being ruled by Muslims in their Punjab homeland if Pakistan was created. This was one of a number of factors which fuelled

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communal conflict resulting in mass migrations in this region at the time of independence. As with anti- colonial violence, ethnic strife at the time of decolonization can be understood in terms of the characteristics of both the colonial state and the nationalist struggle. If the colonial state withdrew rapidly, or had poorly prepared its subjects for independence, violence could fill the resulting vacuum. A good example is the hasty withdrawal of the Belgian authorities from the Congo in 1960. The move had been prompted as much by international and metropolitan pressures as by the strength of nationalist sentiment, as represented by the Mouvement National Congolais within the colony. The situation was further exacerbated by the mineral wealth of the secessionist Katanga region and the encouragement given to this by European commercial concerns in this copper belt region.15 The rapid Portuguese withdrawal from Angola and Mozambique following the 25 April 1974 revolution in Lisbon similarly sparked what was in essence a civil war.16 This was rooted both in ethnic and ideological differences between armed contending nationalist movements. The prospect of immediate independence brought pre- existing tensions to the forefront. An unforeseen consequence of the conflicts was the massive exodus of white settlers, although this was also sparked by the post- colonial Angolan Government’s policy of nationalization. The British decision to hand over its League of Nations Mandate in Palestine in 1947 is another example of the withdrawal of European control forming the prelude to a struggle for territory and power whose outcome was large-scale population displacement. The British were caught between protecting the rights of the indigenous Arab population and promises they had made regarding a Jewish national home (1917 Balfour declaration). After 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust and renewed Zionist influence, it became increasingly difficult to square the circle. International pressures from the United States in favour of receiving up to 100,000 Jewish refugees and the need not to antagonize Arab opinion arising from Britain’s wider imperial interests in the Middle East pulled in different directions. Militant Jewish organizations such as Irgun and the Stern gang were by 1947 tying down as many as 100,000 British troops in Palestine.17 Just as in the simultaneous crisis in India, partition appeared as a solution to irreconcilable demands based on a politicized religious identity. In both cases, London was reluctant to use military force to impose partition against the wishes of the indigenous population. The British avoided the nightmare situation of being stuck in the middle of a civil war in India through the agreement of all

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parties to partition. In Palestine, the British, despite toying with the idea of partition in the 1930s, refused to implement the United Nations proposal for partition of 29 November 1947 because of local Jewish and Arab opposition. They left Palestine on 14 May 1948 without a formal transfer of power, declaring that the Mandate had become unworkable. Israel declared independence and extended its territories through armed struggle. This displaced upwards of three quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs.18 Their plight in refugee camps in such neighbouring countries as Jordan and Syria represented not only a humanitarian tragedy of enormous proportions, but created conflict and instability in the whole West Asian region for the remainder of the twentieth century. European rule in Asia and Africa not only upset existing ethnic and communal balances and introduced a struggle for power and influence as its power waned, it also moved people around as never before. This could involve migration within regions, seen for example in the mass movement of Sikh farmers to the irrigated Muslim- dominated areas of West Punjab – a migration which had to be reversed at independence and the creation of Pakistan. Migration could involve further travel across imperial boundaries, as with the movement of Tamils and Nepalis to work on the tea plantations of Ceylon and Assam, respectively. Finally, migration could be transcontinental, as African slaves, followed later by Indian indentured labourers, were dispatched to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the Atlantic seaboard of North America. In addition to this state- directed labour migration, the circuits of empire provided opportunities for free migrants who were traders and businessmen to greatly extend their overseas activities. Decolonization impacted in a number of ways on all of these imperial birds of passage. They presented not so much a political threat, as did ethnic rivals, as a commercial challenge to the new nationalist rulers. There was also the opportunity to reward supporters with the confiscated properties of such communities. Expropriation could be rationalized in the cause of national security, or to provide justice to previously neglected ‘sons of the soil’. The temptation to dispossess wealthy ‘foreign’ communities was particularly great in times of recession, or if the ‘foreigners’ were the focus of long-running popular resentment. Classic cases involve the Chettiar Indian moneylender community in Burma and the Gujarati and Punjabi Indian communities of East Africa. The post- colonial state could not only expropriate, but in certain circumstances forcibly expel these ‘interlopers’. A final link between decolonization and mass migration is that it was accompanied in some instances by territorial realignment. We will be

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examining this further with respect to India. Palestine, however, was another important instance. State downsizing in Europe has usually been accompanied by forced migrations. Violence and migration in the wake of territorial reorganization is linked in cases from the Balkans to Central Europe. It is, thus, unsurprising that the partition of Palestine and India resulted in massive population movements. These created long-running refugee problems. People displaced by internal ethnic conflicts which fall short of successful secession have fuelled the evergrowing numbers of internally displaced persons in the former areas of the European Empire. The emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 is unique in the sense that the flood of Bengali refugees into India from neighbouring East Pakistan prompted a military intervention which saw the birth of a new state.

Decolonization and forced migration: European settlers and indigenous collaborators Academic attention has only recently turned to the end-of- empire migration of European settlers and their indigenous collaborators.19 The previous neglect of what has been variously termed as ‘refluxes’ or ‘reverse’ migrations20 in part reflects the difficulty in assessing whether these groups were free or coerced migrants and whether they can be categorized as refugees. These issues not withstanding, the sheer scale of this decolonization-related migration requires it to be accorded serious consideration. Some 1,450,000 French settlers streamed out of Algeria at the time of independence, abandoning their homes, businesses and cars, and burning their furniture in huge street bonfires. The vast majority of the colons, 1,380,000, returned to France, while others migrated to Spain or even as far a-field as Canada and Argentina. Between the end of the Second World War and Indonesian independence in 1949, some 45,000 Dutch settlers left for the Netherlands. Ten thousand Dutch settlers chose to go to New Guinea rather than to Europe. Their sojourn was short lived, as the territory became part of Indonesia and they were expelled along with the remaining 50,000 Dutch in Indonesia in 1957. Some 800,000 so- called retornados fled from the Portuguese possessions of Angola and Mozambique in the period between the revolution in Lisbon in April 1974,21 which signalled a rapid decolonization, and early 1976.22 Some of them made their way to South Africa and Rhodesia, but most returned to the Iberian Peninsula. Their arrival in Portugal boosted its population by 5 per cent within less than a twoyear period.23

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Settler migration was in part a spontaneous outflow amidst the chaos and violence of decolonization. In Indonesia and Angola, it also had elements of state expulsion. Following the confiscation of Europeanowned property in Angola, for example, between May and July 1975, some 1,000 people were leaving the country daily.24 Decolonization in Portuguese West Africa, the Dutch East Indies and French Algeria possessed its specific histories and characteristics. In the case of the Dutch East Indies, for example, it was the attempt by the Dutch to put back the clock after the Japanese surrender, despite the fact that their prestige and collaborative networks had been undermined by defeat at their hands.25 Common to the three cases, however, was the fact that the colonial authorities because of the size of the settler community and identification with its interests had closed off avenues of peaceful political change. The settlers had clung to their privileged existence and had been equally inflexible in response to nationalist demands. The end result was counterproductive in that wars and insurgencies polarized native opinion against the settlers. The conflict in Algeria was prolonged and bloody.26 It claimed 16,500 French troops, nearly 3,000 European civilians and as many as 300,000 Algerian nationalist casualties. Moreover, the colons were not mere bystanders in this conflict. Colon terrorist groups had been active as early as 1956 in reprisal for attacks on Europeans. Sections of the settler society had links with the Secret Army Organisation (OAS) which in 1961 began to carry out terrorist acts both in Algeria and mainland France to stave off independence. The OAS offensive became desperate in March 1961 following the failure of a putsch by generals sympathetic to the colons’ cause.27 French army units and officers loyal to De Gaulle were now targeted along with civilians who showed signs of a willingness to deal with the Algerian nationalists. The main victims of the 3,000 or so attacks launched by the Delta Commandos of the OAS were Muslim civilians. The circumstances were created in which settlers had to choose between the ‘suitcase and the coffin’. This was despite the fact that the Evian agreements between the French authorities and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) provided for dual Algerian and French nationality for three years and provided for compensation if property was expropriated. Mainland France was unprepared for the mass exodus across the Mediterranean and initially tried to halt it by limiting ferry services. Nevertheless, between May and August 1962, half a million people had crossed by ferry to France.28 Colons were settled throughout France, with some 100,000 in Marseilles, but significant numbers ended up in small towns and new estates especially constructed in Provence.

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Even a generation later, some colons regard themselves as refugees in exile from their homeland of Algeria.29 This sentiment is especially strong amongst the section of colon society which was naturalized as Frenchmen after their settlement in Algeria from such countries as Malta, Spain or Italy. Despite the sense of loss, which we will see at the end of this chapter is a common element in forced migration, the colons’ experience was privileged in comparison with many refugee situations in terms of their citizenship status, and educational and housing opportunities. These all assisted integration into mainstream society.30 Ultimately, social mobility depended upon the social and economic capital they had brought from Algeria. The French military effort had been accompanied by widespread torture, especially during the notorious Battle of Algiers in 1957. Local colons took part in the atrocities which claimed as many as 3,000 lives.31 Muslim auxiliaries known as harkis had acted as trackers and informants. As the French military presence grew in Algeria, the number of harkis rose from 26,000 in 1956, to 60,000 two years later, to eventually number around 85,000 in total. Their role in the conflict put them at risk from reprisals. Hundreds were tortured to death, and others were forced to clear mines laid by the French, without any protective equipment.32 Amidst the tide of colon exodus, the French Government refused them entry in late May 1962. Around half their numbers still managed to reach France, in many instances having been smuggled out by sympathetic French army officers who faced dismissal if they were caught. They were treated very differently on arrival to the colons, despite the fact that they were officially Muslim French citizens from Algeria. They received none of the benefits accorded the colons, but instead had to eke out a miserable existence in makeshift camps set up in rural areas of France. Race clearly had an important influence on the fates of different communities of decolonization migrants in France. There are similarities in the situation arising from the migration in the Dutch East Indies. As we have already noticed, some Dutch settlers could be regarded as anticipatory migrants, while others were expelled both from Indonesia and New Guinea. Within 15 years, virtually the whole Dutch population had left Indonesia.33 The ‘Indos’, as the Indo-Dutch were known on their return to the Netherlands, included Eurasians, recent settlers and families which had had no link with Holland for a number of generations. Nevertheless, all the ‘Indos’ were granted citizenship rights and similar privileges by way of education, employment and housing. Again, this was not typical of most refugees’ experience. Like most migrants, the younger generation appears to have adjusted

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more quickly to Dutch society. Race was again a crucial element in how the Dutch state reacted to migrants. Like the harkis, Indonesian soldiers in the Royal Dutch Indian Army who were drawn largely from the Ambonese Islands faced an uncertain future after independence. They were expelled following the unsuccessful proclamation of an independent state of South Moluccans. The Hague, however, viewed their expulsion as temporary and both refused to grant them citizenship rights and to integrate them into Dutch society. As late as 1968, 80 per cent still did not have citizenship rights.34 Portuguese settlement in West Africa had grown rapidly from the 1950s.35 This meant that the vast majority of the retornados had been born in Portugal. This not only assured them citizenship rights on their arrival, but also eased their integration, as they could resume employment and residence in the areas from which they had migrated. Initial relief and rehabilitation were provided by the Institute for the Support of the Repatriation of Nationals.36 The success of the retornados’ assimilation into Portuguese life is often linked with their social capital, of interpersonal networks, self-reliance and individual initiative.37 In a faint echo of the racial differentiation seen in the French and Dutch cases, retornados of mixed race were, however, popularly regarded as immigrants rather than as fellow citizens.38 The destitution of many retornados who had lost everything in Africa was more typical of wider refugee experience.

Decolonization, ethnic and communal tensions and migration: The case of India’s partition The waning of European power, as we have noted, could intensify ethnic tensions and conflict. Even nationalist movements, which claimed to stand for universal citizenship rights, could appear threatening if they were dominated by members from a majority ethnic or religious group. These circumstances lay behind the greatest episode of migration in the era of decolonization – the mass movements of population which accompanied the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan. Indeed, the 18 million partition migrants formed the largest refugee movement of the twentieth century. The background to the British decision to partition India has been well chronicled.39 Political interests had become polarized around religious identity. This eroded trust between communities and raised the fear amongst minorities that their way of life was at risk when the British left. Ultimately, their only safeguard was to claim their own territory.

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These attitudes were widely held amongst minority communities across India; whether it was the Muslims in the All-India context, or the Hindus and Sikhs who were living in Muslim- dominated regions. The epicentre of competing Muslim, Hindu and Sikh nationalisms’ claims to territory lay in the Punjab. Large-scale violence first broke out, however, in Calcutta in August 1946.40 The Great Calcutta Killing, which claimed upwards of 4,000 lives, differed from ‘traditional’ religious violence in its political intent, scope and intensity and in the displacement of population. Despite this warning, both Indian politicians and British officials were completely unprepared for the large-scale movements of population that accompanied the division of the subcontinent. Partition had been reluctantly accepted by both the British and the main nationalist party, the Indian National Congress, as a means of heading off civil war.41 Such paramilitary organizations as the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the Muslim League National Guards and the Akali Fauj in North India, nonetheless continued to make preparations for violence in the weeks which followed the acceptance of the 3 June 1947 Partition Plan. Representatives of the Congress, the Muslim League and the Sikh community made irreconcilable territorial claims to the Boundary Commission established by the British to draw up the international boundary lines in the Punjab.42 They also threatened to fight if these were not met. Sikh propaganda in the Punjab heartland of the community was especially virulent. This reflected the community’s anxieties that any division of the region would split their community in two and deliver the West Punjab into Muslim rule. The Sikhs had ironically demanded partition, although they had the most to lose from it, in the wake of the first major outbreak of violence in the Punjab in March 1947, in which they had been the main victims. The so- called Rawalpindi Massacres claimed 7–8,000 lives, and about 40,000 people, mainly Sikhs, had to take refuge in hurriedly established camps. Wealthy and politically ‘savvy’ Hindus responded to the looming threat of violence by moving their business headquarters, bank accounts and family members from future ‘Pakistan areas’ in the weeks before the granting of independence. Children and wives were sent to relatives and hill stations well away from the national border from June 1947 onwards. They were not, of course, strictly refugees nor, for that matter, internally displaced people. A more accurate description would be that of anticipatory migrants. This fortunate few escaped the dangers and traumas of the millions who were unprepared for the mass flight across the new borders which followed the British departure.

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The Punjab was the region most dramatically affected with a demographic transformation in a three month period which saw a two way flight of Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab and Muslims from eastern Indian Punjab. These were initially spontaneous flights brought on by brutal killings which were not only part of cycles of revenge attacks, but also deliberate attempts to drive out minority populations.43 Within a fortnight of the British departure, the situation had so deteriorated that the two new dominions oversaw what was a virtual exchange of around 9 million people in which the Indian and Pakistan military evacuation organizations provided varying degrees of protection.44 The tragedy unfolding in the Punjab dominated national and international headlines, but other regions of North India were also badly affected. Some 300,000 Muslims abandoned India’s capital New Delhi, following violence that claimed about 10,000 Muslim lives. There were also large Muslim population flows from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bombay to Pakistan. The travail of Muslim refugees from Bihar was particularly traumatic. Many fled from the widespread violence in the south of the region in October 1946 to West Bengal. They were further displaced from West Bengal to East Pakistan after independence. In the wake of the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 Biharis were displaced again to Pakistan. These could deem themselves fortunate, however, as Pakistan accepted less than a fifth of those who demanded ‘repatriation’. In the mid 1990s, there were still around a quarter of a million ‘stateless’ Biharis eking out a miserable existence in Dhaka’s refugee camps.45 While the Biharis status became increasingly fraught with the passage of time, Muslim inhabitants of Bombay and the Uttar Pradesh were at risk until the abrogation in 1954 of legislation regarding evacuee property. Up until that time, they could in certain circumstances be designated as an ‘intending evacuee’ to Pakistan and have their property dispossessed while living in India. It would then go into the ‘compensation pool’ for Hindu and Sikh refugees. Vazira Zamindar has seen parallels between the Indian and contemporary Israeli legislation regarding absentee property which emptied the land of Palestinian Arabs and ‘constructed the myth of a voluntary exodus’.46 Large Hindu populations moved from Sindh, the North West Frontier Province, as well as from Punjab. Despite its standardized portrayals, there were vast differences in the refugee experience in Punjab along the lines of caste and gender. Political connections along with wealth could not only secure a safe migration passage, sometimes even by air, but could also enable return visits to secure personal belongings. The

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Lahore High Court Judge G. D. Khosla, for example, returned from Simla in November 1947 with an armed Gurkha guard to remove two truckloads of belongings he had stored in the garage of the Lahore High Court. His father-in-law and his friend, Dr Nihal Chand Sikri, had also secured two trucks each for transporting their belongings.47 The largest displacement involved the Hindus of East Bengal. In contrast with the Punjab migration which was concentrated into one period from August to November 1947, there were waves of Hindus migrating from East Bengal. Their movement coincided with communal tension and violence. Far more Hindus migrated in 1950 (well over a million) than in 1947. Migration continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s,48 although the West Bengal Government wound up the work of refugee rehabilitation in March 1958. Between this date and 1 January 1964, fresh arrivals were not recognized as in need of state assistance. The troubled final years of East Pakistan’s existence encouraged a further massive movement of population; those who entered India between 1 January 1964 and 25 March 1971 were termed as ‘new migrants’ to differentiate them from the partition-related displaced persons. The waves of migration in Bengal made the task of refugee resettlement and rehabilitation much more difficult than in the Punjab region. This was further exacerbated by the failure to agree to exchanges of evacuee property, as in Punjab. Bengali refugees had to self-rehabilitate by illegally squatting in vast sprawling settlements in such areas as South Calcutta. Their spokesmen turned to the Communist Party for support in the bloody conflicts with the thugs employed by the property landlords. They argued that they were the principal victims of the creation of Pakistan because of the Indian government’s half-hearted approach to their rehabilitation. One writer summed up their situation by claiming that they were the Natun Yehudi (New Jews).49 The duration of the displacement meant that it bore characteristics of both end- ofempire-generated migration and that of post- colonial expulsions. It is to this final type of forced migration that we will now turn.

The post-colonial state and forced migration The episodes we are now going to examine occurred in some instances a decade or two after decolonization. The expulsions of minority populations can, however, be linked with it, both in terms of the attitudes to minorities arising from nationalist struggles and the resentments which may have been generated by the former colonial masters, through their ‘pampering’ of minorities and introducing ‘foreign’ labourers and

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traders into the ethnic homeland. Economic indigenization and expulsion were to go hand in hand. In such varied contexts as Vietnam, East Pakistan, Burma, Fiji, Uganda and Kenya, minority communities were forced to leave their homes. Between reunification in 1976 and the 1989 census in Vietnam, about 40 per cent of the ethnic Chinese or Hoa had been expelled. In 1979 alone more than 270,000 ‘boat people’ fled the country.50 Politburo Act 14 of 13 September 1983 expressly forbade ‘Chinese participation in commerce, transport, printing, processing, cultural business, information, opening of schools’. The greatest migration of Hindus from East Pakistan as we have noted came not in 1947, but three years later. It was linked both with communal riots and the socio- economic insecurity felt by Hindus who in colonial times had formed a privileged elite. Another example of status reversal leading to migration is found with respect to the Indian minority community in Burma.51 Indians numbered more than a million and accounted for 7 per cent of Burma’s population by the 1930s. Half a million Indians fled during the Japanese wartime occupation, with about a quarter returning at its end. After decolonization, land nationalization and tenancy reform hit the wealthy Indian Chettiar community. Delays in granting Burmese citizenship to long-term Indian settlers further increased the community’s unease. Between 1949 and 1961, only 28,683 out of 150,000 applications for citizenship had been granted. Indian control of banking as well as landownership and retail activities was deeply resented. The 1962 military coup led to a government committed to the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’. Indian banks and shops were nationalized. The latter affected some 12,000 Indian- owned concerns. Later, the rice and tobacco industries, also Indian dominated, were nationalized. By July 1966, some 154,000 Indians, mainly Tamils, had left Burma. These were the victims of expulsion as much as being economic migrants. A similar fate awaited the Indian community in East Africa. This community was comprised of those who stayed on after they had built railways in colonial East Africa and communities of merchants, shopkeepers and industrialists. The Madhvani group of industries in Uganda included sugar, textiles, steel, breweries and glassware. Nanki Kalidas Mehta had pioneered Asian industry with his interests in sugar production in the 1920s.52 The greatest Asian presence was in the commercial sector, 80 per cent of which was controlled by Indians. As Elspeth Huxley was to note when explaining their expulsion, ‘the trouble with Uganda’s Asians is success’. On 4 August 1972, President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of all Asians who held British passports. Shortly

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before the expulsion order, he accused the Asians of ‘sabotaging the economy of the country’. He warned that any Asians not meeting the 8 November deadline for departure would be put in camps. They were forced to pay for their own departure and many were robbed of their personal effects on the bus journey from Kampala to Entebbe Airport. Within 60 days, nearly 28,000 Ugandan Asians had arrived in Britain. India accepted 15,000 temporary migrants. The United States admitted 1,500 immigrants, and Canada some 8,000.53 A military coup, this time in Fiji in September 1987, also led to forced migration of Indians. They were descended both from indentured labourers who had worked on the sugar plantations and free immigrants who had come increasingly after the First World War, amongst whom Gujarati traders predominated. Self-government intensified native Fijians’ anxieties concerning the ever-growing Indian community, which by 1971 accounted for well over half the total population and put pressure on the landholding Fijian matanggali class.54 The coup was accompanied by a new constitution which gave ethnic Fijians a majority in both legislatures and laid down that the president had to be of ethnic Fijian descent. The large Indo-Fijian population which predominated in business and the professions saw this as an attempt to undermine its status. Within two years of the coup, more than 12,000 Indians had migrated. Common to these episodes was the replacement of colonial rule by indigenous elites who possessed an exclusivist nationalist ideology. This marginalized minority groups and, on occasion, demonized them as an alien ‘other’. Minorities which had prospered during the colonial era were a source of resentment for ‘sons of the soil’. This was intensified if they maintained a perceived cultural distance from the host community. Calls for Africanization, or for a Fijian native state, were primarily about the need to curb wealthy and unassimilated alien minorities. Unsurprisingly, the two communities which have been most vulnerable to nativist threats are the Chinese and the Indians, which together form the largest and most economically successful global diaspora communities. The timing for harassment of minority communities and their expulsion varied from case to case. It could coincide with a shift in political power, as in Fiji or in Vietnam, with the need to house refugees by freeing up properties. An economic downturn could also undermine the precarious balance in plural post- colonial states. Significantly, the 1990s economic downturn in the Asian tiger economies of Indonesia and Malaysia was accompanied by mounting ethnic hostility towards

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the Chinese minority. Victims of harassment could migrate as refugees to the developed world, the ethnic homeland and to other centres of population for transnational communities.

Decolonization and forced migration: Trauma, loss and identity Thus far we have focused on comparative case studies and conceptualization of the circumstances of decolonization-related forced migration. I wish to conclude with some brief comments on its emotional and psychological consequences, although this could form the focus of a separate study. Forced migration has profound long-term socioeconomic, and importantly, psychological consequences. It leaves a sense of ‘unfinished business’ arising from a longing for a homeland to which there is no return. Maurice Eisenbruch has conceptualized this nostalgia as ‘cultural bereavement’.55 It usefully provides insights into what would otherwise be a myriad of localized experiences. It can equally shed light on forced migration in the European and Colonial context. An example of the former situation is the connection to heimat (home) by Breslauers who were expelled from Breslau after the Second World War. There are various Silesian clubs in the United States, Canada, and Israel, as well as in Germany. There is a Breslauer archive in Cologne and a newspaper, Die Schleiser-Breslauer Nachrichten, which has a circulation of around 18,000.56 Within the context of forced migration arising from decolonization, Punjabi Hindus’ nostalgia for Lahore has become almost a cliché.57 The pre- colonial city has been dubbed the ‘Paris of the East’. It has been evocatively evoked in such works as Lahore: A Sentimental Journey and Lahore: Portrait of a Lost City.58 The author of the first work declared early in 2003 that although he had left the city 55 years earlier, ‘In a way, you can say, I never left Lahore because it is always with me. I have carried it with me wherever I have gone and when I look back there is no place on earth I haven’t been and all through these years, Lahore has stayed with me. I am an unreconstructed Lahoria, you can say, who never thought he would live anywhere else.’59 Some Muslim refugees in Karachi similarly mourned the loss of cities like Lucknow, which they had left behind in Uttar Pradesh. These attitudes are reflected in Sirhiyan and other works produced by the renowned Urdu writer Intizar Hussain.60 On the other side of the subcontinent, Hindu refugee communities in Calcutta mournfully recalled the abundance and beauty of the villages of ‘Golden Bengal’, their festivals and boat races. One of

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the Bengali words for refugee, udvastu (outside of home) attested to this painful separation from ancestral roots. Andrea Smith’s recent research has uncovered similar attitudes amongst the colons. One elderly settler complained to her that the official appellation of the community as ‘repatriates’ was wrong, as how could a people be repatriated to a country they had never seen.61 The colons’ clubs are a social centre for the community and ‘collect the material detritus of this lost world; not only novels and memoirs, but also colonial- era newspapers, Michelin guides, and street maps.’62 In Delhi, the writer and partition refugee from Lahore, Som Anand displays a similar attachment. He not only continually talks about Lahore to his circle of exiles, but proudly displays the tickets of the Model Town Bus Service that he had purchased as a student.63 Whether in the European or colonial context, such remembrance can end up in mythologizing a past existence. Of not in the words of Salman Rushdie, ‘reclaiming precisely the thing lost, but, creating fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands.’64

Conclusion There are a number of parallels between forced migration in the settings of decolonization and war and revolution in twentieth-century Europe. The decline of overseas empire opened the way for ethnonational conflict in similar ways to the imperial crisis of the Hapsburgs and Ottomans in Europe. In both situations, killings and forced migrations were not only the work of the state, but of non-state actors. Rather than being a reversal to a barbarous medieval past, they were modern in their political conception and ideological rationalization. The technology of the industrial state increased their efficiency. In both contexts, territorial realignments were a major cause of mass migration. The resultant human misery of the refugee situation was common to the colonial and European setting. Migration arising from decolonization was however more highly differentiated. This is reflected in the range of titles given both by states and academics to these migrants. They have been variously termed: displaced persons, new migrants, repatriates, anticipatory migrants, immigrants, retornados, vacanciers as well as refugees. The last term vacanciers was used for colons and implied that they had temporarily and voluntarily left Algeria. The treatment of the migrants of decolonization ‘back home’ was also highly differentiated. Race and skin colour determined citizenship and state provision with respect to refugees from Algeria and Indonesia. While white

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returning settlers were accorded privileges as the state sought to settle them as quickly as possible into the mainstream, harkis and Muslim Indonesian soldiers were isolated in camps and grudgingly, if at all, recognized as fellow citizens. There is a similar variety of state response with respect to the case of partition-related migrants in the Indian subcontinent. Levels of state provision were much higher for refugees from the Punjab than from the Bengal region, and there was no arrangement for exchange of evacuee property in the latter case. Acute migrants did not officially feature as refugees if they did not request government assistance. Evacuee property legislation meant that individuals could be termed as intending refugees and could have property confiscated while still residing in their ancestral home. The vicissitudes of Pakistan’s history resulted in significant numbers of Biharis being officially declared stateless individuals, two decades after they had first set out as refugees from India. In addition to these contrasting state responses, the whole South Asian refugee experience with respect to vulnerability to violence, and patterns of rehabilitation and resettlement was highly differentiated along the lines of gender, caste, community and wealth. Given this range of experiences, is it meaningful to refer to refugees of decolonization? Regardless of state treatment or citizenship status, it could be argued that coercion to migrate because of hostility towards an individual’s ethnic or political identity provides the basis for a common refugee categorization covering the period of decolonization and its aftermath. Such an interpretation would encompass ‘holidaying’ colons and the ‘new migrants’ from East Bengal to India. This inclusive approach does justice both to the needs of scholarly analysis and the subjective human experience of forced migration.

Notes 1. This term in many texts is used loosely with migrant, and displaced person. However the term is conceptualized, the element of coercion is crucial to differentiating the refugee from the economic migrant. A useful starting point for clarity is the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, which applies the term ‘refugee’ to any person who ‘owing to wellfounded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such a fear, is unwilling to

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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return to it’. www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.html, ‘Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’, p. 16. For an introduction to decolonization, see R. F. Holland, European Decolonization, 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey (London, 1988). Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migration in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). The classic example of this was decolonization in the Belgian Congo. See for example, R. Lemarchand, Political Awakening in the Congo: The Politics of Fragmentation (Berkeley, CA, 1964). Examples of this which are discussed below involve Indian communities in Uganda and, to a lesser extent, Kenya. For the colonial development of the Indian community in East Africa see, J. S. Mangat, A History of the Asians in East Africa c1886–1945 (Oxford, 1969). For reflection on the range of factors prompting decolonization in the British Empire, see J. Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991). For a more recent comparative account of decolonization, see Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States 1918–1975 (London, 2008). For a study of colonial policing and nationalist struggle, see Georgina S. Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame 1945–1980 (Manchester, 2006). See Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (London, 1987); Anthony Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization (London, 1994), pp. 160–74. For a comparative study which highlights the less propitious circumstances regarding French Decolonization, see Tony Smith, ‘A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 20 (1968), pp. 70–102. See University of Southampton Archives Mountbatten Papers Files D 228 and D 229. There is a growing literature on the mass migration in 1947. See: Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives Among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi, 2007); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1998); Ian Talbot with Darshan Singh Tatla, eds, Epicentre of Violence: Partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (New Delhi, 2006); Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009); Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (Karachi, 2006); Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947– 1962 (Karachi, 2005); Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge, 2007). See D. A. Low, Buganda in Modern History (London, 1971). See J. S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, CA, 1958). Jean Marie Allman, ‘The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and Asante’s Struggle for Self-Determination, 1954–57’, in James D. Le Sueur, ed., The Decolonization Reader (London, 2003), pp. 204–18.

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48 Ian Talbot 15. See J. Gerard-Libois (translated by R. Young) Katanga Secession (Madison, WI, 1966). 16. On the background to Portuguese decolonization, see Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London, 1997). 17. W. David McIntyre, British Decolonization, 1946–1997 (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 32. 18. See, Benny Morris, 1948: History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale, 2008); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2003). 19. See Andrea Smith, ‘Coerced or Free? Considering Post- Colonial Returns’, in Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake, eds, Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009), pp. 395–417. 20. Ceri Peach uses the first, while Hoerder has favoured the second. See Ceri Peach, ‘Postwar Migration to Europe: Reflux, Influx, Refuge’, Social Science Quarterly, vol. 78 (1997), pp. 269–83; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 499. 21. A key element in the revolution had been the armed forces’ discontent and radicalization following the long drawn- out struggle in Angola, Mozambique and Guine-Bissau against militant nationalist forces. For further details of the armed struggles, see MacQueen, Decolonization of Portuguese Africa. 22. For details, see James Ciment, Angola and Mozambique: Postcolonial Wars in Southern Africa (New York, 1997). 23. Smith, ‘Coerced or Free?’, p. 403. 24. Ibid. 25. See D. R. Sar Desai, Southeast Asia: Past and Present, 5th edn (Boulder, CO, 2003). 26. For details, see Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, revised and updated edition (London, 2002). 27. The coup leaders, Zeller, Salan and Jouhaud went underground and joined the OAS. 28. Smith, ‘Coerced or Free?’, p. 402. 29. Ibid., pp. 396–97. 30. For a perhaps overly optimistic assessment of the colons’ integration into French society, see Richard Alba and Roxane Silberman, ‘Decolonization, Immigration and the Social Origins of the Second Generation: The Case of the North Africans in France’, International Migration Review, vol. 36 (2002), pp. 1169–93. 31. For details of the widespread use of torture and its political implications, see Clayton, Wars of French Decolonization, p. 132 & ff. 32. Ibid., pp. 175–76. 33. See Hans van Amserfoort and Mies van Niekerk, ‘Immigration as a Colonial Inheritance: Post- Colonial Immigrants in the Netherlands, 1945–2002’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 32 (2006), pp. 323–46. 34. Ibid., p. 331. 35. Between 1950–1973, the white population of Mozambique increased from 48,200–200,000, that of Angola from 78,826 to 335,000. 36. For further details, see Maria Beatriz Rocha-Trindade, ‘The Repatriation of Portuguese from Africa’ in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 337–41.

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37. Ibid. See also, Stephen C. Lubkemann, ‘Race, Class and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados 1975–2000’, in Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 75–95. 38. Smith, ‘Coerced or Free?’, p. 406. 39. For a recent account, see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2007). 40. See Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947 (New Delhi, 1991), pp. 162 & ff. 41. See chapter 2 of Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India. 42. Lucy Chester, On the Edge: Borders, Territory and Conflict in South Asia (Manchester, 2008). 43. For the efforts by the main Sikh organization, the Akali Dal and the rulers of the Sikh Princely States to carve out a Sikhistan in this manner, see Ian Copland, ‘The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36 (2002), pp. 657–704. 44. For the work of the Indian Military Evacuation Organization, see Brigadier Rajendra Singh, The Military Evacuation Organization 1947–8 (New Delhi, 1962). 45. Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (London, 2007), p. 43. 46. Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition, pp. 130–1. 47. G. D. Khosla, Memory’s Gay Chariot: An Autobiography (New Delhi, 1995), pp. 164–8. 48. For a comparative study of the patterns of migration and resettlement in the Punjab and Bengal regions, see Ian Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition of India and Migration: A Comparative Study of Punjab and Bengal’ in Bessel and Haake, Removing Peoples, pp. 321–49. 49. See Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, p. 97. 50. The most authoritative account of the Vietnamese boat people’s travail remains Carol Daglish, Refugees from Vietnam (Basingstoke, 1989). 51. For details, see Nalini Ranjan Chakravarti, The Indian Minority in Burma: The Rise and Decline of an Immigrant Community (London, 1971). 52. William G. Kuepper, G. Lynne Lackey and E. Nelson Swinerton, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London, 1975), p. 27. 53. Ibid., p. 40. 54. See A. C. Mayer, Indians in Fiji (London, 1963). 55. Maurice Eisenbruch, ‘Cultural Bereavement and Homesickness’, in S. Fisher and C. Cooper, eds, On the Move: The Psychology of Change and Transition (Chichester, 1990), pp. 191–207. 56. N. Davies and R. Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London, 2002), p. 484. 57. See, chapter 5 of Talbot, Divided Cities. 58. P. Neville, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey (New Delhi, 1993); Som Anand, Lahore: Portrait of a Lost City (Lahore, 1998). 59. Friday Times (Lahore), 3 January 2003.

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60. See M. U. Memon, ‘Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 14 (1980), pp. 377–410. 61. Smith, ‘Coerced or Free’, p. 397. 62. Ibid. 63. See Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 136. 64. S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London, 1991), p. 10.

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3 The Tragedy of the Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–48 Mark Levene

Once upon a time there was a world of diverse cultures and civilizations. Within them, peoples of different background, hue, religious orientation (whether orthodox or schismatic), sedentary and traders, in public service or seasonal passers-through, interacted and interrelated with each other. The passers-through, in particular, crossed and re- crossed state or imperial frontiers, with only rare challenges to their right to do so, let alone challenges to their credentials. Polyethnicity was standard and normal. To be sure, life was rarely rosy. Within these premodern societies there were hierarchical pecking orders, both sacred and profane, and severe codes of conducts which, if transgressed, could lead to horrible punishment. There were social and political exclusion zones, too: visible and invisible barriers between this community and that, not to say threats of violence from family, neighbours, religious authorities or the state. The violence might be seasonal or sustained, it might involve armies on the move, and with it the fear of personal or communal obliteration, or even more all- encompassing environmental fears of famine, drought or the sky falling in. Indeed, the possibility of existential calamity was a constant. The civilized feared ‘the barbarians at the gate’: by contrast, nomads at the margins often looked ravenously on the seeming abundance associated with cities, towns and villages. The consequences of these interactions were not always nice. Political dynasties rose and fell; communities at a distance from imperial centres did well where they could cultivate their own habitus unmolested. Yet, few such societies were truly insulated from the wider 51

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world. Practically everywhere in the pre-1492 Eurasian landmass, into Africa if not beyond, human beings were organically, indeed elastically, interconnected through an Oikumene, ‘the habitat of (hu)man kind.’1 It is interesting how resistant we have become to this notion as most keenly celebrated in the work of Arnold Toynbee. The idea of civilization, too, seems rather suspect to informed, contemporary Western sensibilities, hardly helped by Samuel Huntington’s argument that world civilizations do not so much interact as clash. Thus, in-built cultural barriers between such entities make for an innate irreconcilability, especially between the western- Christian derived world and that founded on Islam.2 Grouping the world’s states into blocks of mutually uncomprehending civilizational realms, as Huntington would have us do, those polities which attempt to have a foot in more than one camp will inevitably be ‘torn’, probably with violent consequences. Better for us to reject Toynbee and Huntington alike, and affirm, instead, the normality of nation-states, the empirically observable framework of contemporary human existence. Bounded by clear, internationally recognized borders and organized with rules, regulations and structures which underscore their uniform coherence from end to end, in which everybody who is citizen is equal before the law and with usually one language as taught in schools throughout the land as the standard method of socialization, we instantly know not only where we are in the sovereign nation-state but, equally importantly, who we are. Moreover, are we not freed up in this political mode from the threat of endemic violence? The modern state through army, police, judiciary and other institutions may have a monopoly of violence but only to secure ‘us’ with the conditions by which we can pursue our normal daily lives without fear of the unpredictable, and with the guarantee that the collective self will be defended from outside threat. So enabled, we can get on with the true business of interaction in the contemporary world that we have created. For indeed, nation-states in isolation are meaningless. Their existence is predicated on an international system of such states, the necessary building blocks upon which a political economy of truly globalized interdependence and prosperity is assumed to arise. And thus, have we not arrived by this alternative route at simply a new, more streamlined version of the Oikumene? Surely this version is not only a good deal more palatable but ultimately more sustainable than its defunct predecessor? What exactly is the point of getting nostalgic about ‘civilizational’ world empires, which preceded our present world system, anyway, when we know those self-same empires not only

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meted out mass exterminatory vengeance against communities who challenged their writ but were, as in the Ottoman case, quite willing as a standard operating procedure to enact the time-honoured imperial practice of sorgun: the deportations of whole peoples to distant place?3 Perhaps it is as well to remind ourselves that state-forced migration is hardly a novel innovation of the modern era but as much part of the long duree of human migration as transhumance or swidden culture. But then we would be left with that niggling problem of a traditional milieu in which – in spite of the violence – the old world empires still managed, as a general rule, to embrace and accommodate human diversity. And, set against that, an emerging modern system which only seemed to be able to do so through its own narrowly constrained and, one might say, bio-political prism.4 To which we could not fail to add Toynbee’s own specifically Ottoman insight from the heights of 1923 on a previous dozen years: ‘worse than during the rest of the previous century, worse again during that century than between the years 1461 and 1821’.5 In other words, read through the deeper history, the violence and deportations of the recent past were not simply a continuation of what had happened before but, on the contrary, represented a radical rupture. It is the nature and causes of that rupture which is at the heart of this chapter, and, as we will see, one whose impact was far from only Ottoman. The mass human displacements which went with it were not some aberration; rather, they were an epiphenomena of a much bigger process, which we denote here as a crisis of the semi-periphery. The term ‘semi-periphery’ is consciously borrowed from Immanuel Wallerstein’s formulation of the relationship between an emerging capitalist world system associated with an increasingly hegemonic ‘metropolitan’ West and the residual world- empires.6 In their loss of power and control over their own destinies, the latter found themselves increasingly subordinate to the ‘metropolis’, though not as subordinate as an absolute periphery which was entirely colonized by it. This crisis, however, marks a critical staging post in the overall process and one which in some important sense did mark a ‘clash’, though not in the way that Huntington theorized it. Rather, it was so in the manner in which the nation-state paradigm as derived from the West – or as Toynbee more succinctly has described it, as the ‘Western formula’7 – ran up against and destabilized the normality and indeed survivability of the old world empires. But the ensuing crisis of the semi-periphery was, historically speaking, a more tightly circumscribed sequence. The approximate period of the lead up to the two World Wars and their immediate aftermath provides

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54 Mark Levene

the essential chronology. Geographically speaking, the most serious human consequences were in what I delineate here as the imperial rimlands, more exactly those frontier and (by extension) contested regions of the Ottoman, Russian and Austrian empires, where the ‘Western formula’ most keenly collided with time-honoured notions of sacralized political authority, legitimacy and governance. It was these temporal and spatial elements as they came together which proved such a lethal combination. But it is important to emphasize that the outcomes were not stochastic. Total war was one key accelerator of process. But the two World Wars, while devastating, did not produce the wholesale evictions of entire peoples in western Europe as they did in the rimlands, nor lead in the former case to the radically reshaping of international boundaries. Some other, perhaps more geologically sounding terminology may be necessary to describe the particularity of what happened in the rimlands in the period 1912–48. The term ‘shatter zones’ comes to mind, conjuring up, in turn, a vocabulary of stress points, fault lines and tectonic plates. One might go further and offer volcanic metaphors, as if what we are dealing with is a seismic shift whose explosions of hot viscous, pyro- elasticity left many streams of molten debris in their wake. Is such terminology appropriate to what we are describing in our proposed arena? The issue is not simply one of trying to convey the force and magnitude of what happened but the degree to which it permanently changed the political, social and, above all, ethnographic landscape. Even so, it did not happen all at once. As with fault lines, these human displacements were opened up at one point, closed down again for a while, re- emerging further down the fault, coalescing with other feedbacks, leading not to one all- encompassing ‘event’ but rather a sequence of blasts and after-shocks which we might plot and analyse as part of a bigger pattern. Moreover, like any seismic shift, what happened to the rimlands was no respecter of pre- existing boundaries. Only when the sequence had seemingly passed and the zone ‘cooled’ into new political building blocks were the displacements brought to an end. Even then, some regions proved to have a latent tendency towards continuing instability, again suggestive of the resilience of faultlines. Yet, in abstracting this narrative as if somehow this was all about impersonal forces of nature, we run a tremendous risk of losing the human dimension. Unlike later chapters, this one is trying to explore, albeit in outline, the big ‘macro’ picture. And that somehow has no choice but to encompass the millions who were, each and every one, caught up in a maelstrom of misery, hurt and life-long grieving. There

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are rationalizing ways around these uncomfortable truths. We can wrap ourselves up in the sheer statistics and so not think too much or too closely about what they mean. We can go a further step in the rationalizing stakes and try to convince ourselves that protagonists and victims alike were not quite real people like us with our range of sensibilities and emotions. And that, anyway, they belonged to a world which had to pass, because it was antediluvian and backward. It was sad, of course, for those who became refugees but, by the same token, if the world empires were outmoded discards of history, it was inevitable that in the process of their destruction there would be collateral damage. Ironically, then, something more is at stake here than simply facing up to what forced migration entailed for the individuals, families and communities involved. Equally, one might say that embedded in this ethical dimension of the story is a consideration of what we assume to be the ‘correct’ trajectory of historical development. Perhaps our own tragedy is that we are too accepting of a unilinear version of ‘progress’ which brooks no alternatives. I have to say that as a student not so much of refugees but of genocide, I find any notion that the path of the twentieth century was ultimately for the best profoundly disturbing. Not least because in this particular rimlands sequence, forced migration can in no sense be disentangled from the genocidal violence. So let me begin further exploration with some reference to this interconnection.

Genocide and displacement: Some interconnections Through the U.N. Convention on its punishment and prevention, genocide has been carefully defined. In practice, its lies on a continuum of atrocities with optimal, near- optimal and suboptimal cases. Certainly, what we call the Holocaust as well as the Armenian Genocide are amongst a handful of its most extreme examples. However, massacres, and biological or social attempts at communal group emasculation or disempowerment are also part of, or close to, its broader range. Scholarly discussion remains intense as to what Raphael Lemkin, the original coiner of the term, intended to be understood as constituting this particular form of human rights violation.8 Relevant here, too, are the causative processes involved. Does intent to commit have to be central to genocide, as the Convention implies, or might we turn to a more functional analysis, suggesting that mass killing can arise out of unforeseen or entirely contingent circumstances? Perhaps, in this way, a set of state plans directed against a communal group might not start out as consciously exterminatory but begins to radically evolve

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in this direction because, in conditions of usually self-inflicted crisis, other paths are blocked. A default plan, at this point, perhaps has to be improvised and where this in turn proves inadequate to the needs of the original agenda, a process of cumulative radicalization may set in.9 Genocide, thus, may result as the terminal point from what begins as a scheme to ‘remove’ a group en masse from a particular locale or, from within the locale where that group is living amongst other peoples or communities. The very fact that a state might consider this sort of drastic action against one or more communal groups – however they are self- defined, or defined by the state – itself invites speculation as to what, singly, or as a matrix of factors makes the state so antipathetic to them. A question to which we return a little further on. But just as genocide may not emanate from a precise blueprint, so by the same token, mass deportation may have its origins in various forms of partially enforced or quasi-voluntary migrations over a much longer period. The growing, albeit technically illegal, flow of Jews from Russia to the West, from the 1880s through to 1914, is a case in point. And while government persecution more specifically including laws designed to eruct Jews from the Russian rimlands’ countryside was one clear ‘push’ factor in this flow, the economic ‘pull’ in terms of the possibility of travel to and family resettlement in the West point equally to a conscious choice to leave. In such cases, it is sometimes difficult to determine where violence is the trigger precipitating flight and where this stands upon an already existing layer of ‘difficult life conditions’, including demographic pressures and diminishing socio- economic prospects within the mother country, as the underlying vector. Add to this the fact that most of the direct physical violence against Jews in this period did not come directly from the state but through grassroots pogroms – themselves often spontaneous or seasonal outbursts of Judeophobia – again underscores the fact that while this sort of sequence can be a prelude to something bigger and severer, without the precise participation of military or police enforcement agencies, any assumptions of a state social engineering project may be premature.10 In fact, throughout our entire rimland zone there was large-scale out-migration in this period, some of which, as in eastern Anatolia or Macedonia, was undoubtedly fuelled by intercommunal violence. Here, as in Russia, we might again wish to read the role of intimidation and menaces by neighbours or outside armed gangs, against particular communities, either as evidence of a general regional deterioration – in which the forces of law and order (whether modern or traditional) were

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in retreat – or as proof of state, possibly para-state, or outside state incitement. We know, for instance, that in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s, in response to the Hamidian arming of Kurdish and other tribal regiments against the Armenians, some of the Great Powers were also considering a carefully gerrymandered cantonalization of different ethnic groups to hem in the Kurdish tribes, thereby circumscribing the Porte’s most loyal support base in the region, and so pursuing their own geopolitical interests.11 In terms of our search for continuum, what we can perhaps derive from this protean bed is that what may have begun in particularly unstable parts of the rimlands with local vigilantes (covertly statesponsored or not), taking fire and sword to neighbouring communities had the potentiality to be developed into something more far reaching, in which the protagonists might be forward-thinking indigenous state elites, or, for that matter, exogenous ones. Yet, at the same time, while a high level of precautionary flight, either inside the country or beyond, offered warning signs, the majority of Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement, Armenians in eastern Anatolia, or various Balkan peoples in Macedonia stayed put and were not forcibly removed. As with violence leading to genocide, so violence leading to forced migration demands the scaling up of the exercise into something more systematic, sustained and, hence, state supervised. Paradoxically, because of the very contested nature of the rimlands, states or would-be states (again, whether defending or intruding their territorial power) might consider themselves insufficiently strong to pursue this method directly, or simply lacking the logistical resource to carry it through effectively. Alternatively, they might see advantage in operating behind a screen of paramilitary or auxiliary militias. To an extent, this happened in the first major episode of rimland ethnic cleansing in our precise period, during the Balkan wars of 1912–3. An array of andarte, komitadji, and ceta were assumed in Western media to be the primary actors in an almost continuous round of town and village burnings and accompanying atrocities which, in this several-sided conflict, drove whole populations of diverse Macedonian communities into mass flight. In fact, behind them it was Serb, Greek, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Turkish and Romanian armies who spearheaded the deportations.12 But it also proved highly convenient for their respective state leaderships to hide behind the actions of freebooting irregulars for whom there was no apparent chain of command or responsibility. However, we do not have to read into this Balkan pattern the emergence of a fixed template. This type of operating procedure would certainly be repeated in rimland conflicts, especially in the Greco-Turkish

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conflict of 1919–22, and again in the east European mass evictions – especially though far from exclusively of Volksdeutsche – at the end of the Second World War. But it could equally be enacted through the direct apparatus of a state which had already earmarked a distant internal territory to which a communal cohort was to be sent. Such programmes point to states with an imperial range. A case in point is the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) deportations, mostly by forced march, of Armenians, initially from eastern Anatolia, in the late spring of 1915, to the Jazirah – the Syrian desert region. These rapidly turned into wholesale deportations of Armenians throughout most Ottoman territory. The intended destination of the deportees, the lack of provision or facility for their resettlement, and the dual system of orders – one official, another covert – point in this instance to deportation as a cover for genocide.13 But broader CUP plans to disperse a range of ethnic groups, especially Kurdish tribes, from their native hearth to other parts of the diminishing empire suggest a wider programme of only marginally less lethal social engineering.14 A world war later, Stalin, in a sequence of highly secret, tightly organized NKVD operations eructed a range of ethnic groups in their communal entirety in a year-long sequence beginning with the Karachai, in autumn 1943. If contingency may have played a role in the CUP anti-Armenian drive and, perhaps, in earlier waves of Stalinist deportations, especially from the western rimlands, and later the German Volga region in 1940 and 1941, the drive against the so- called ‘punished peoples’ from the North Caucasus, Crimea and Black Sea hinterland is one of unadulterated intent.15 However, Stalin’s successive waves of deportations from 1930 onwards – and these, of course, not only against ethnic communities, but aggregated social ‘enemies’ most notably ‘kulaks’ (though again in particularly large numbers from the rimlands) – was in considerable part made possible by the imperial range which the Bolsheviks inherited. The punished could literally be transported by cattle-truck to the Arctic north, Siberia or Central Asia, where dumped, they froze, starved and in their multitude died. By contrast, part of the Nazi problem in its intent to remove unwanted people, most obviously Jews and Roma, from its projected empire was the lack of an internal dumping ground. ‘The final solution of the Jewish question’ was precisely predicated on Jews being expunged literally to some nether region, such as the Russian Arctic North. But that could only happen through Germany’s Eurasian hegemony, which, in turn, could only be wrested by way of the USSR’s military defeat. The only alternative was to use menaces against other

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countries, to have them take Jews into their own lands or imperial backwaters. Full-scale Jewish extermination in the rimlands began in the wake of the failure of a string of Nazi projects – Ha’ avera, the RubleeSchacht negotiations, Madagascar – to have the Jews ‘disappeared’ in this way.16 These pre-Holocaust Nazi directions, however, need to be seen in the context of a much wider range of rimland state efforts to do deals aimed at the removal of unwanted communities to some foreign taker. A major plank of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy in the 1930s, for instance, was geared towards getting Turkey to take its remaining Muslims, especially Albanians, or, failing that, finding some other party, such as Italy, who it could cut into a territorial ‘arrangement’ for their exit.17 Yugoslavia’s problem was that what it wanted to enact was a one-way population ‘transfer’. A more supposedly elegant solution was to organize a population ‘exchange’, in other words, a quid pro quo in which you took in the people that you deemed belonged to your state and removed those extraneous people who you took the other side as wanting. The origins of the ‘exchange’ idea date back to the ending of the Balkan wars and a voluntary arrangement for a limited swap of ‘national’ populations in Thrace, between the governments of Athens and Sofia. This was consistent with Hellenic premier Venizelos’ concept of an ‘ethnological settlement in the Balkans’ as the basis for a durable peace and was enacted as international protocol between Bulgaria and Greece as an adjunct to the Neuilly treaty of November 1919.18 This also offered a precedent for the altogether more all- embracing and compulsory 1923 Lausanne Convention ‘Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations’.19 In subsequent years, this would be frequently cited at the League of Nations – who had a hand in the supervision of the exchange – as proof that population policy could be determined at an international level by mutual consent between sovereign states. It was part of the rationalization for the proposed (but aborted) British partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews in 1937, and indeed, two years later in the exchange of populations between the USSR and Nazi Germany in the wake of their secret carve-up of the western rim lands– though in practice it was only Volksdeutsche who were ‘returned’ to the Reich. In all of these cases, however, the notion of peaceful migration by interstate agreement not only lacked the consent of those involved (the Thracian precedent itself was anything but voluntary) but masked the mass killings which either preceded the agreements or which were to come in their wake. The notion of forced migration without violence,

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in short, was a sophistry. So, too, were promises and assurances that deportees would be compensated for their lost property and land. There might be interstate agreements on the resolution of property claims but these were always conducted in the interests of economic nationalization. For the deportees themselves, relief from complete destitution and disaster became the responsibility of the receiving state, or, failing that, international relief organizations. One must remember, furthermore, that all these mass population movements were catalysed by war, or the threat of war, demanding in turn a redoubled consideration of the wider historical- cum-geographical framework in which they took place.

Plotting a pattern The great twentieth- century sequence of rimlands deportations, expulsions and ethnic cleansing were telescoped into the years from 1912, the year of the outbreak of the Balkan wars, and largely completed with the post–Second World War pacification of Soviet border territories by around 1948. While the fate of the Jews balks large, there was an inordinate range of other communities who suffered. We have already signalled that because what the Nazis ended up doing to the Jews involved mass transnational extermination, one cannot but note the distinction between this and ‘standard’ deportation. On the other hand, the fact that Nazi aims began with making Germany judenfrei and, equally noteworthy, one of Stalin’s last projected – but unfulfilled – mass deportations was of Soviet Jewry to the east,20 suggests again, that the Jewish fate was on that continuum shared with others. In all cases, albeit with the Jewish one in its totality the most absolute, forced removal was always accompanied by atrocity. Moreover, if we were to extend backwards to the beginning of our sequence and then, back again into the late nineteenth century, we would find that it was peoples of the Ottoman borderlands, primarily in the Balkans but also on the Caucasian rim, who bore the brunt of the emerging phenomenon. Much of this related to what was becoming referred to at the time as the ‘Eastern Question’: the anticipated collapse of the empire. Certainly, Ottoman territorial retreat in Transcaucasia and in the Balkans has been carried down to the present in Turkish memory as the so˝kumű (the unweaving), in which hundreds of thousands of loyal Muslim refugees (muhajirs) retreated into the empire’s remaining heartlands.21 Nor was this a simple internal traffic. Other Muslim peoples from across the advancing Russian border were also forcibly expunged in this sequence, the most dramatic – and genocidal – of

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which was the 1864 mass military removal of the Circassians of the north-west Caucasus. How many died exactly is unclear, but the impact of anything between half a million and a million survivors who decamped on Ottoman shores had profound knock- on effects on an already vastly destabilized empire.22 This is rather important in terms of plotting a pattern, for what it signals is that deportations once begun are likely to lead to what (in a different context) has been pithily described as ‘the consequences of consequences’.23 Indeed, the Circassians are a good example of a refugee population who found it difficult to settle down or integrate into Ottoman society, while the state seized on their most recalcitrant elements to use as bullyboys against other restive minorities. From the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s, through to the atrocities of the Greco-Turkish war, the use of second- or third-generation Circassians became another fissile element in an increasingly complex equation of ethnic conflict.24 The very nature of the original Circassian eructation also reminds us once again of the fine balance between deportation and genocide. Total figures for muhajir movements of the 1860s and 1870s remain necessarily speculative or incomplete because they rarely included those who had been violently killed either before, or during, transit. If there were more deportees than murdered during the Balkan wars, the Armenian episode in 1915 tilts the balance in the other direction. Of an estimated 2 million Armenians in the empire, an absolute minimum of 1 million were killed.25 In 1919–23, the balance may again have shifted the other way. But only in a partial sense. Figures speak of nearly 356,000 Turks and some 190,000 Greeks who were exchanged, according to the 1923 official agreement.26 But the figure for actual Greek displacement, the vast majority of whom had already panic-fled, is nearer 1.2 million, the same figure which Justin McCarthy happens to cite for Muslims who had previously fled into the Anatolian interior in response to the initial (and ultimately unsuccessful) Greek invasion of Asia Minor. But scratch the Greek figures more closely and again we find that that 1.2 million figure is heavily skewed towards women and children. Where were the majority of the men-folk? McCarthy, who tends to privilege Turkish losses as against Greek or Armenian ones, notes that one-third of Turks died or were killed as a result of the Greek invasion. Yet, he concedes (probably rather conservatively) that some 300,000 Greeks also met violent deaths, the implication being that most of these were men and boys.27 Looking at this pattern offers a sober iteration that forced migration not only involves killing but gendered atrocities, too. The more recent

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ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, with the Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,000 men and boys a notable low-point, has as it corollary the systematic gang rapes of women by Serbian (though not exclusively Serbian) soldiery and paramilitaries.28 But the 1990s events in former Yugoslavia are not only significant in the way that they seem to revisit Ottoman and post- Ottoman ethnic cleansing from the beginning of the century, but in a manner suggestive of a longevity in the Balkan narrative not replayed elsewhere in the rimlands. Thus, if the Ottoman sequence peaked earlier than in once-imperial Austrian or Russian space, the potentiality for recrudescence at the end of the Cold War in what had once been Ottoman Balkan frontier territory points to a fault-line more virulent here than further north. Or, alternatively, to the simple fact that whereas by 1948, primarily under Stalinist aegis, the newly redefined Soviet rimlands zone and satellite arena had been largely expunged of its heterogeneity, its continued presence in former Ottomania proved once again toxic in a post–Cold war environment in which the premium was on a localized but fast-speed enactment of the ‘Western formula’. The implication is serious because, while 1990s Western media and diplomatic interest was fixated on events especially in Bosnia, and later Kosovo, at the eastern end of the Ottoman or near- Ottoman range a parallel sequence of murderous conflicts – again involving mass displacement or ethnic cleansing – unravelled in Chechnya and each of the three Transcaucasian republics, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.29 Perhaps the paradox in all this is that while the Ottoman/postOttoman sequence is the most long-lasting, for sheer intensity and scale of forced migration it would be to the so-called historical ‘Lands Between’: the frontier zone between pre-1918 Austrian, Russian and to a lesser extent German empires that we would have to turn. Again, because this involved on the one hand Hitler, on the other Stalin, as key protagonists, the wider range of state participants in forced rimlands migrations tends to be obscured. However, the fact that all states in the region struggled with the problem of their poly-ethnicity, demands a further final brief note in this section on the rimlands’ human geography. The rimlands of the semi-periphery have been described by Terry Martin as an L-shaped swathe of territory ‘extending southwards from Leningrad through the Balkans, and then eastward across southern Ukraine and Turkey into the Caucasus region’.30 The delineation could be made stronger as well as deeper through the identification of three sub-regions. A first would encompass most of the Balkans (with the exception of pre-1912 Greece) but also leap-frogging both the Aegean and Dardanelles to include western Anatolia and its adjacent islands. A

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second consists of a Caucasus–Black Sea–eastern Anatolia zone, stretching as far as Mosul in the south. A third, more or less equivalent to ‘The Lands Between’,31 would embrace a giant sliver of territory running from the Baltic to include Belarussia and right-bank Ukraine in the east, modern- day Poland as far as Silesia in the west, and through the Carpathians and sub- Carpathian ranges towards an intersection with the Danube at its deltaic point of entry into the Black Sea. At various points such as this, or the Crimea, two or more of these zones intersect. Not everywhere in these zones was there an equal degree of repeated and violent forced population movement. Some areas, to use our volcanic terminology, constituted a hotter core, while beyond our broader delineation there were other ‘cooler’, ‘outer’ layers such as the historic Czech lands or much of sub- Carpathian Hungary, which, while technically outside the zone, at various moments, would almost appear as if they were within it. But what is equally striking is the fact that with a few notable exceptions – such as the explosion of violence and ethnic cleansing which engulfed the Semireche region of Russian Turkestan in 1916 – the closeness of the correlation is a rather exact one. In other words, there was something about the geography of the imperial rimlands which made them susceptible to a violent playing out of crisis at a particular historical moment. The fact that the rimlands were at the interface between an advancing Western- orientated nation-state Europe and the historic heartlands of the remaining European world empires represents one part of the jigsaw. But equally important is the issue of ethnographic heterogeneity. These were regions of great social, linguistic and cultural diversity, with groups such as Jews, Armenians and Greeks in different parts of them a notable indicator of how that diversity could also extend into socio- economic categories. Any project or projects to sculpt these ‘mixed’ regions in the direction of some urbane, imagined community of a like-minded and like-looking monoculture, would come up against this intrinsic reality. And by inference, that could only mean that if the heterogeneous elements could not be transmuted into the homogenous ideal, they would, one way or other, have to be made to disappear.

Statist and geopolitical drivers It was war, most seminally the Great War of 1914–18, which accelerated and then destroyed the empires in their old form, leaving a vacuum which required filling by one or more new political frameworks. A

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tantalizing question one might ask is why the peoples of the rimlands could not have picked themselves up from this catastrophe and created new forms of societal organization founded not simply on passive concepts of coexistence but more active ones, including a genuine celebration of difference? From where we stand today, the idea sounds not only counterfactual but absurdly naïve. How can modern society be organized in anything other than nation-states? Does not the disintegration of the USSR, or closer to home, Yugoslavia, confirm that no other model can work? Yet there were alternative possibilities. There was consociational Switzerland, which had existed for more than a century. It was mirrored – albeit only in part – in the post-1918 construction of Czechoslovakia. Much more thorough going though never implemented was the Austro-Marxist idea of turning the Habsburg Empire into a Danubian Federation. It was primarily conceived by the theoretician, Karl Renner, in 1902, as embracing the same territorial area as Austro-Hungary and with everybody in it a citizen of a unified state. The distinction lay in the formulation of ‘national’ rights, which would operate in a separate realm. With this division of responsibilities and powers, citizens could elect to be a member of any national group or none, wherever they happened to live in the federation. This would be a matter of their personal–cultural affiliation. Such national autonomy, thus, was not predicated on the need for a territorial majority in some defined region to which other national members outside owed their primary allegiance. It could mean, for instance, Czech speakers in Vienna or, for that matter, German ones in Brunn (Brno) having their own schools and further educational establishments, and their complete freedom to develop their own language and culture at a distance from areas where they otherwise were in a demographic majority, alongside any other national groups who might equally wish to have the same facilities, organized in each case through their own democratically elected, constitutionally- embodied national secretariat. Public resource allocation for such needs would clearly have to have been determined pro rata by a parliament of all the nationalities and on the basis of the overall size of funds available. But nobody in this conceptualization needed to feel him or herself an outsider. On the contrary, the design was clearly intended to enable the multinational nature of the old empire to continue and flourish, without breaking up into constituent parts and so, in turn, obviating the potential for forced people dispersal or displacement.32 The problem was that if the Austro-Marxist scheme represented an elite notion of how ordinary people might either be secured in their

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traditional habitus or, alternatively, free to travel and be domiciled anywhere within a post-imperial breadth; its failure was less a product of any assumed fancifulness and more that of strangulation at birth. Or, to put it more bluntly, the chances of a continuation of rimland diversity were wrecked by two other much more unforgiving elite tendencies. At first sight, these two responses, one broadly nationalist, the other broadly post-imperial, appear as diametric opposites. Considered in isolation from one another, neither ultimately could offer the necessary space in which the sort of communal difference posited in Austro-Marxist or other such schemes could be politically sanctioned or even tolerated. But neither actually operated in isolation. Both were intrinsically responses to a first cause: the emergence of a Western global ascendancy. Both too, in their separate efforts to transcend the limitations of semi-periphery status were locked in a potentially lethal competition with the other. The geopolitical directions this competition might take were not necessarily foreseen in 1914, or even 1939. But for communal groups who might wish to go their own way, the dominant political reality of these two tendencies was like being caught between a rock and a hard place. Who, then, are our protagonists? On one side were self-styled representatives of nations who saw their eternal mission in creating states founded on either a single people, or a composite of similar such peoples. The Balkan allies had led the way, their wresting of Macedonia from a retreating Ottomania in 1912–13 justified with the argument that the people there were essentially of the same culture and language as themselves. However, this threw up some interesting problems, given that it was very far from clear to which of the allies all or any Macedonian naturally belonged. In the build-up to the wars, Serb and Bulgarian polemicists, in particular, fought with demographic statistics, coloured maps and historical monographs to prove that the region’s majority population belonged to ‘their’ side.33 Indeed, the notion of ‘national assets’ fast became a tool in nationalist public relations campaigns, as, for instance, waged at the Paris Peace Conference to justify the creation of the large states which in 1919 were to form the ‘New Europe’, west of the Russian–Soviet border. In this sense, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, a much aggrandized Rumania and a Serb-led Yugoslavia, were the special creatures of the West, and their international recognition at Versailles an extension of the Western liberal system. Yet in endorsing their existences, the West bought into the entirely social Darwinian manner in which these states had, like their Balkan predecessors, aggressively and competitively expanded their

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rimlands range by force of arms. Beyond that, they also had chosen to look askance at the ramifications for the approximately 25–30 million people in these states – some 1 in 4 of the total – who now constituted ‘minorities’ amongst the dominant ‘majorities’.34 This, of course, was not the entirety of the picture. The Allies at Paris did belatedly attempt, through the Minorities Treaties, to offer guarantees for the safety, well being and cultural autonomy of the peoples who did not fit the majority prescript, though one might add without any further provisions for safeguarding those who had already been made stateless refugees from the previous years of conflict. Not only, however, did supervision of the Treaties, as handed over to League of Nations, contain no proper provision for the punishment or prevention of infractions but the general verdict on them was pithily summarized by the League Rapporteur, Alfranio de Mello Franco, in 1925 as aiming ‘to prepare the way ... for the establishment of a complete national unity’.35 The West thus knew and acknowledged that the creation of the new states in the multinational environments of the rimlands would lead to an enforced homogenization, on the ‘Western formula’. This, in turn, was bound to lead to minority resistance. A prescient Charles Macartney, himself for many years League secretary, saw one way of minimizing this possibility through a revision of frontiers. But he considered two other options – emigration- cum-population exchange, or physical slaughter – as more likely. His own preferred option – changing sovereign constitutions away from the nation-state form – he himself believed to be firmly off the international agenda.36 Macartney’s verdict dovetails in part with Zygmunt Bauman’s more recent assessment of how nation-states deal with the ethnic ‘other’. Where possible, the method is anthropophagic: namely, ‘annihilating the strangers by devouring them and then metabolically transforming them into a tissue indistinguishable from one’s own’. More prosaically put, this means making those who would otherwise be culturally and linguistically distinct into clones of the dominant self. But what of those perceived by the state apparatus as recalcitrant, recidivist, disruptive, disloyal or even perhaps (as in Nazi racial ideology) containing alleged biological material which cannot be refashioned? Then, the alternative strategy becomes anthropoemic: ‘vomiting the strangers, banishing them from the limits of the created orderly world and barring them from all communication from those inside’.37 The step beyond that – mass physical slaughter – one can perhaps conjecture was held in check so long as the new nation-states felt circumscribed by the rules of

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the metropolitan system. But come the circumstances of the 1939–45 war, this no longer, if it ever had, precluded mass eructation. One critical observer, the later to be Israeli prime minister, David Ben- Gurion, caught the mood in 1941 thus: In the present war the idea of transferring a population is gaining more sympathy as a practical and the most secure means of solving the dangerous and painful problem of national minorities. The war has already brought the resettlement of many peoples in eastern and southern Europe, and in the plans for post-war settlements the idea of a large-scale population transfer in central, eastern and southern Europe increasingly occupies a respectable place.38 Ben- Gurion well had the measure of it. When push came to shove, far from the western Allies attempting to resurrect the Minorities Treaties, they opted quite openly for what Lord Curzon had 20 years earlier described as ‘the unmixing of populations’, Churchill, indeed, in 1944 famously extolling: Expulsion is the method, which as far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting ... I am not alarmed by the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible than they were before through modern conditions.39 There was nothing in fact inconsistent in this position. Mass eructation by all the protagonists in the Balkan wars had not ultimately led to the Allies withholding their recognition of territorial gains. The compulsory Lausanne ‘exchanges’ were in significant degree an outcome of Western diplomacy. Similarly, the Vance- Owen plan at the end of the century signalled Western acquiescence to Serb and Croat ethnic cleansing, at the expense of Muslim Bosnians. The fact that between 1945 and 1947, some 12 million mostly German people were evicted from Eastern Europe with Western imprimatur was no different, save for its scale, the horrendous suffering and huge death tolls which went with it and, of course, the fact that the deportations were entered into at Potsdam as a joint Allied policy linking the West with Soviet Russia.40 So what, then, of the other side of the dialectic, those new post1918 regimes who saw themselves if not as direct heirs to the world empires which had predeceased them but certainly as authentic and legitimate inheritors of all or some the rimland territories over which

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those empires had held sway? Was there anything in these new regimes’ make-up which might suggest they were more conscious of or even more benevolent to the notion of heterogeneity? Three very different contenders present themselves. Kemalist Turkey was the authentic successor to the Ottoman (including CUP-run) Empire, but in a now limited heartland and with a consciously nation-state brief. If this on its own suggests that Turkey was a decidedly ambiguous example, its whole post-1923 trajectory was one geared towards ferociously stamping out any tendencies which might suggest that the country contained anything other than Turkish communities. Indeed, Kemal’s Westernizing- cum-modernizing path in a critical sense carried forward the CUP drive for homogeneity, using anthropophagic and anthropoemic methods to the full, including, in the latter case, mass slaughter against dissenting Kurdish tribes.41 The regime thus represents an ultra-nationalist response to ethnic diversity but not at odds with the Western system. That leaves two contenders who we might denote as consciously anti-systemic, in other words seeking both to disrupt and overthrow the hegemony of the Western world order. The first was Germany, initially territorially circumscribed as a nation-state under the terms of Versailles but with the Nazi ascendancy in 1933, the true inheritor not only to the Hohenzollern Prussian-led Empire; but also, after the Austrian Anschluss, directly or indirectly to the Habsburg lands. This also made it in a sense an amalgam of the ‘Two Germanys’; not to say with territorial ambitions encompassing almost the entire rimlands zone at the expense not only of the ‘New Europe’, but also Soviet Russia. Nazi Germany’s agenda, thus, was not only openly imperial- cum-racial but in its lebensraum drive from 1939, and more stridently still from 1941, geared towards both wholesale deportation of entire rimland populations which stood in the way, but in the anticipation that tens of millions would die in the process.42 Where Nazi policy very occasionally looked to encouraging minority or national groups, the aim was purely tactical. Paradoxically, however, the major forced migration we associate with the onset of its colonial surge eastwards was of the halfmillion Volksdeutsche who were ingathered into the Reich in 1940 from the rimlands zone it had, at that point conceded to the Soviets. Or, put more exactly, in carving up chunks of the ‘New Europe’, the two antisystem polities at this critical juncture colluded to bring down the previous 1919 Western-sponsored reformulation of the rimlands, not with the intention of reasserting the possibility of their heterogeneous existence but precisely the opposite: in order to destroy such a possibility for

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once and for all. German ingathering (or ‘Reich strengthening’ as Nazispeak referred to it) was carried through at the expense of Poles and Jews, in the latter case helping to crystallize RSHA plans for their ‘final’ removal, while their Soviet NKVD equivalents also went into their own overdrive in either deporting or exterminating swathes of their newly subjugated rimlands populations.43 In considering the Soviet side of this coin, though, there is one important caveat. Not only was the USSR the authentic if revolutionary successor to Romanov territory (bar that wrested from it by contending states in the western rimlands in the period 1918–21); its very reconceptualization as an ethnically plural patchwork of national republics, oblasts, national-territorial regions, districts and townships, while clearly contradicting the Austro-Marxist formulation, should ‘have made the Soviet Union a highly unlikely site for the emergence of ethnic cleansing’.44 If this was the principle, Stalinist practice, however, made the Soviet rimlands our zone of forced migration par excellence. There is not space to develop here an in- depth explanation as to why, except to say that concentrating on the person of Stalin himself may take us away from wider Soviet elite anxieties about the rimlands as an internal security threat whose origins lay in an emerging late nineteenth century tsarist consciousness of the way Russia had failed to develop its own nationally unifying control over its non-Russian peoples. Indeed, tsarist political and military obsessions pre-1914 and into the war as to the unreliability and danger emanating from particular rimland groups (Jews, Germans and Muslims, in particular),45 mirror an emerging CUP programme – against its initially stated aim to foster a reconciliation of peoples – to find anthropophagic solutions which included the dispersal around the empire of the allegedly most unreliable of its ethnic groups.46 Paradoxically, having consciously refuted this homogenizing route but increasingly driven to see in his own rimland domains the very anti-thesis of the Soviet drive to create a streamlined and uniform body-politic, Stalin opted from the mid-1930s for an extensive, repeat series of national deportations. In a sense, this anthropoemic pathway was little more than the other side of the projected (but only partially carried out) CUP coin. Yet, in both CUP and Soviet cases, the solution to the assumed rimlands threat involved partial or total displacement of communal aggregates within residual imperial confines, as always accompanied by genocidal, or near-genocidal, violence. The crisis of the semi-periphery thus involved a resort to forced migration from two overt directions, the first from states attempting within a Western rubric (and mandate) of national self- determination

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to assert their ‘one size fits all’ route to modernity over recalcitrant ethnic ‘minorities’, the second from players whose critical challenge to metropolitan hegemony also carried in their respective trains a total repudiation of the limited rules by which the West sought to offer nominal post-imperial protection of non-state ethnic groups. But is there any point at which these two tendencies intersect or even blur into one another? It is clear, for instance, that a subset of actors claiming to represent aggrieved revisionist states or putative states in the context of the 1919 settlement attempted to use the opportunities of the next World War to initiate, under Nazi cover, their own mass removals. The overtly fascistoid Croat Ustasha regime in spring 1941 launched a spectacular if chaotic assault on Serbs (as well as in more overtly eliminationist guise on Roma and Jews) in its midst, involving a mix of forced conversions, direct elimination and removals.47 Similarly, ultra-nationalist elites in Hungary and Slovakia colluded with the Nazis in the expulsion (meaning, effectively, extermination) of most of their Jews,48 while a far-right Ukrainian entity (the UPA), in attempting of its own bat to set up an embryonic state in the obscure backwaters of Volhynia, massacred all Poles it could lay its hands on as a way of driving all remaining ones in the region into flight westwards.49 Yet, states which had previously been in the Western camp were not coy about changing horses either, given the opportunities which war on the Nazi side seemed to present. A major justification for Rumanian subservience to Berlin in 1941 was that it enabled it not only to claim for itself Ukrainian territory to the east but to remove its Bessarabian and Bukovinan Jews and Roma there, not before having massacred tens of thousands of them en route.50 Serb leaders, too, looked on the new conditions as a potential cue to reformulate Yugoslavia, not as a multiethnic but as a ‘purified’ greater Serb polity. A particularly influential figure, Vasa Cubrilovic, could happily articulate to the Serbian Cultural Club in 1937: ‘When it is possible for Germany to force tens of thousands of the Jews to emigrate, for Russia to transfer millions of people from one part of the continent to another, a world war will not break out just because of some hundreds of thousands of displaced Arnauts (Albanians).’51 In other words all parties in, or to, the rimlands were prepared to contemplate forced migration as a state-building exercise. Indeed, when the Nazis decided in 1940 to act as interlocutors between Hungarians and Rumanians for a population exchange in disputed Transylvania, it was almost as if they were harping back to League of Nations precedents associated with the Lausanne model.52 The only difference between

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Nazis and Soviets on the one hand, was that they were sanguine about its murderous implications, compared, on the other, with those like the avowedly liberal Czech prime minister, Beneš, who either naively, or disingenuously, imagined that it could ‘be made amicably under decent human conditions’.53

‘Disappearing’ the victims: The final tragedy Had Turkification and Muslimisation not been accelerated by the use of force, there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a state which is now a valued associate of the United States.54 So wrote a U.S. academic in the 1950s. It aptly summarizes a disturbing but standard Western progressive view on modern forced migrations: ultimately, they were sanctionable because they were part and parcel of a developmental course which was going somewhere. Those who suffered were, in effect, those in that trajectory who had chosen to be left behind. It was not quite a case of blaming the victims but it was, all the same, tantamount to proposing that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It was no accident that the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention – contra Lemkin’s own wishes – studiously omitted reference to deportation, forced exile or mass population displacement. Four years on, when the issue resurfaced in a meeting of the prestigious Institut de Droit International, rapporteur Giorgio Balladore Pallieri concluded by stating ‘with the logic of an ethnic cleanser, that there was nothing in international law to oppose the legitimacy of population transfers and that they were even, in certain circumstances, desirable.’55 Yet, what is this but the discourse of the victors and nationalists – whether in system or anti-system guise? And it is well to remember what has joined these protagonists and apologists together in contradistinction to the people whose lives they sought to dominate or pontificate upon and thereby, directly or indirectly, to ruin. The former were, if not always themselves urban, the products of an urban culture which had no difficulty in reimagining and reorganizing not only the political space,56 but as if the only true value of that space was as an abstractly quantifiable and hence commodifiable resource. In terms of the rimlands, such grand thinking was all the more plausible because the subject of our protagonists’ enquiry was an overwhelmingly traditional

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rural landscape. Just as the forests, fields and waterways were, thus, ripe for makeover, so the people therein could be made useful to the project only if they could be first correctly categorized and ordered into single ‘knowable’ ethnic groups and second, allotted their rightful hierarchical place in the statist developmental drive to ‘get on’ in the world. Or reallocated somewhere else. Or, then again, determined to be surplus to requirements, and so, like the weeds in the garden, eliminated with the appropriate spray.57 Our language may be consciously harsh and cynical but it is only to underscore the nature of a general essentializing logic which itself should have been refuted by the very human issues at stake. To be sure, through the modernist lens, the historic imperial rimlands by the turn of the twentieth century may have become an environmentally degraded, overpopulated set of backwaters in which an embarrassing miasma of seemingly dishevelled, largely illiterate peoples continued to jostle together without any obvious rhyme or reason. But the sharpening of communal conflicts, banditry and localized insurgency aside, there was no spectacular internal breakdown. On the contrary, remarkable, time-honoured resilience in the face of adversity dovetailed with a perfectly sound and stable understanding of self and place. When Arthur Ransome visited eastern Galicia early on in the Great War, he noted: The peasants working on the land were very unwilling to identify themselves as belonging to any of the warring nations. Again and again, on asking a peasant to what nationality he belonged: Russian, Little-Russian, or Polish, I heard the reply ‘Orthodox’, and when the men were pressed to say what actual race he belonged I heard him answer safely: ‘We are local.’58 Such observations by those willing to see and listen were repeated over and over again, not only in the Polish Tresy but throughout the length and breadth of the rimlands. Far from clamouring to be joined to some great exclusivist experiment, most Macedonians before 1912 were intent on identification by way of religion, family, extended family, possibly the fact that they were not Muslim, or rich, or part of a ruling elite ‘but never by nationality’.59 But why should this have been anybody else’s business anyway? Some 150,000 Lemkos of the Carpathians, a people viciously eructed along with others in the great ethnic cleansing sweep of the Polish Operation Vistula in 1946 saw themselves neither as a subset of Ukrainians nor as a nation in waiting in their

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own right. They were simply a people deriving a simple living from their mountain existences, caught up in maelstrom entirely of others’ making.60 Turkish-speaking Karamanli Orthodox had as little desire to become Greeks as Greek-speaking Muslim Cretans had to become Turks, though this was what was determined for them by those who knew better at Lausanne. Bulgarophone communities who had lived in Thrace for centuries found themselves after 1912 forcibly removed and then removed again as political boundaries were drawn and redrawn. Muslim Albanians ejected from the Greek- controlled Epirus to Turkey found that that country’s Kemalist masters did not want them, either.61 A welter of ‘little’ peoples – Kutzo-Vlachs, Kashubians, Gagauz – kept their heads down as best they could and attempted to fit in with new statist imperatives geared towards ironing out of existence the very notion of indeterminacy. The 5 per cent of the post-1923 Bulgarians who were refugees, the 25 per cent of Greeks who were the same, survived in their camp cities as best they could, or took out their bitterness on other indigenous ‘minority’ communities amongst whom they now found themselves.62 Others were not even that lucky. The various Syriac sects of the Tur Abdin and Hakkari regions mostly never made it to being refugees at all but in 1915 were massacred in situ alongside their Armenian neighbours.63 Could it have been not their separateness but actually the exact opposite: the degree to which they repeatedly crossed linguistic, even religious divides with neighbouring Kurdish groups and had such close ties of interdependence with them which, to the nationalizing CUP, made them more than simply suspect? Did the modern treason lay not so much in being different, but in being indifferent to difference? All this may leave us with an irony. We have come to consider ourselves – at least in the West – as living in some global village. Interconnected and, at our most urbane, colour-blind, we take the building block of our system for granted as benign and humane, while the historic world empires of yesterday we assume, by contrast, to be regressive, reactionary and dirty. Yet these same empires were actually the large undivided space in which pastoralists and peasants, diasporic middlemen and itinerant travellers moved around without too much surveillance and interference from state and police, or stayed put and were left alone. To ethnographers, their religious, social and linguistic complexity, their refusal, indeed, to be compartmentalized in a neat set of monocultural boxes has always been a matter of delight. To the rest of us, the rich interconnected mosaic of their lives and existences, not to say environmental adaptiveness

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to local conditions, should equally offer much to learn from and celebrate. For themselves, of course, they were not exotic animals but human beings whose lives were marked by hardship, personal animosity and feuds as much by what we might regard as the most extraordinary conviviality, reciprocity and hospitality to strangers. The modern world – our world – has wiped the rimlands slate clean. But have we really progressed so far in our accelerating, globalizing drive that we can be so proud of that?

Notes 1. Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (New York and Oxford, 1976), chapter 4. 2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (London, 1998). 3. See for examples, Oded Bustenai, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the NeoAssyrian Empire (Wiesbaden, 1979); Mehrdad R. Irzady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (Washington, DC, 1992), pp. 101–8; John Perry, ‘Forced Migration in Iran During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Iranian Studies, vol. 8 (1975), pp. 199–215. 4. While we most associate the notion of bio-politics with Michel Foucault, the concept as a way by which the state would regulate its population at all levels of existence was first coined in the influential study Biopolitica (1926) by the Rumanian, Iuliu Moldovan. See Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford, 2009), chapter 3, ‘Ethnopolitics, Geopolitics and the Return to War’. 5. Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (London, 1923), p. 266. 6. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge and New York, 1979); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 Vols. (San Diego and New York, 1974–89). 7. Toynbee, Western Question, pp. 16–17. 8. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC, 1944). 9. See Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005). Equally critically see Hans Mommsen, ‘The Realisation of the Unthinkable: The “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in the Third Reich’, in Hans Mommsen, ed., From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in German History, trans. Philip O’Connor (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 224–53, for the concept of ‘cumulative radicalisation’. 10. See John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambrosa, eds, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Russian History (Cambridge, 1992), for acute exploration of this theme. 11. See Jeremy Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Amenians, 1878– 1896 (London, 1993), pp. 82–90. 12. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Washington, DC, 1993, originally 1914).

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13. The contours of Armenian destruction are a subject of intense ongoing debate. Vakahn N. Dadrian has been notable for the development of the notion of a CUP twin-track approach to the deportation project, one official and benign, the other secret and consciously lethal. See his ‘The Convergent Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Reinterpretation of the Concept of Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 3 (1988), pp. 151–70, for a succinct rendition of this argument. For broader, measured analyses, see notably Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005); and Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York, 2006). ˝ mit Ungºor, ‘Seeing like a Nation- State: Young Turk Social 14. See Ugur U Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–1950’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 10 (2008), esp. pp. 25–7. 15. Walter Comins-Richmond, ‘The Deportation of the Karachays’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 4 (2002), pp. 431–9. For wider explorations, see Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York, 1970); Aleksandr Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Tragic Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York, 1978), and more recently, using the opened Soviet archives, Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest and New York, 2004). 16. See most obviously, Gőtz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans. Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (London, 1999). Also Christopher Browning, ‘Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939–1941’, in Christopher Browning, ed., The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 3–27. 17. Dorde Stefanovic, ‘Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and their Critics, 1804–1939’, European History Quarterly, vol. 35 (2005), pp. 465–92. 18. See Michael Llewellyn Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922 (London, 1998, originally 1973), pp. 46–7, for the Venizelos 1915 memorandum; and Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York, 1932), pp. 18–20, for the follow-through. 19. Michael Barutciski, ‘Lausanne Revisited: Population Exchanges in International Law and Policy’, in Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Oxford, 2003), pp. 23–37, for close analysis. 20. See Alexander M. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, translated by Anthony Austin (London, 2002), pp. 209–10. 21. Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London, 2008), for emphasis on the emerging Eastern Question as beginning of the rimlands deportations sequence. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995), for estimates of the refugee flows involved. 22. For an overview, see Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, Vol. 2, The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide (London, 2005), pp. 293– 302. See also Stephen Shenfield, ‘The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?’,

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23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

Mark Levene in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds, The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 149–62. Dan Smith and Janani Vivekanda, A Climate of Conflict: The Links between Climate Change, Peace and War (London, 2007), p. 10. Cathie Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust (London, 2009), pp. 14–19, picks up on this theme with some acuity. See Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (London, 1992), pp. 145–7, for a careful analysis of the figures. Barutciski, ‘Lausanne revisited’, p. 28. Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, ‘Economic Consequences Following Refugee Settlement in Greek Macedonia, 1923–1932’, in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, p. 63; McCarthy, Death and Exile, p. 292. See notably, Adam Jones, ‘Gendercide and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2 (2000), pp. 185–211; and Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, trans. Marion Faber (London, 1994), for further exploration of the gender aspects. Significantly, no major study in a western language considers the totality or interconnections of this violence to date. Fikret Adanir is currently writing such a work: ‘The Caucasus and Its Hinterland’ for the Mark Levene and Donald Bloxham edited series ‘Zones of Violence’ (Oxford, forthcoming). Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 70 (1998), pp. 813–61. See Alan Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East- Central Europe since the Congress of Vienna (London, 1970), for the concept and history. Also, Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992 (Oxford, 2010). See Theodor Hanf, ‘Reducing Conflict Through Cultural Autonomy: Karl Renner’s Contribution’, in Uri Ra’anan et al., eds, State and Nation in MultiEthnic Societies: The Breakup of Multinational States (Manchester, 1991), pp. 33–52. See Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements 1893–1903 (London, 1988), especially p. 19; Henry R. Wilkinson, Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia (Liverpool, 1951), p. 103. Raymond Pearson, National Minorities in Eastern Europe, 1848–1945 (London, 1983), p. 136. For the best rimlands survey of this period, see Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London, 2001). See also Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations and Civilising Missions’, American Historical Review, vol. 113 (2008), pp. 1329–33, for a recent succinct commentary on the emergence of ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ in international political discourse. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 297. Quoted in Mann, Dark Side, p. 67. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge, 1997), p. 18.

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38. Quoted in Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC, 1992), p. 128. 39. Churchill’s speech to House of Commons, 15 December 1944, quoted in Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth- Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. 110. 40. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (Basingstoke, 2nd ed., 1993). See also Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2001) for a more recent exploration. 41. See Soner Çagºaptay, ‘Crafting the Turkish Nation: Kemalism and Turkish Nationalism in the 1930s’ (unpublished Yale University Ph.D thesis, 2003). 42. Mechthild Rőssler and Sabine Schleiermacher, eds, ‘Der Generalplan Ost’ Hauptlinien der Nationalsozialistischen Planungs-und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin, 1993). 43. See Aly, Final Solution; Phillip T. Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Programme for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence, KA, 2007); Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ, 1988). 44. Martin, ‘Origins’, p. 816. See also: Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001); and Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001), for fuller development of this theme. 45. See especially Peter Holquist, ‘ “To Count, to Extract and to Exterminate”: Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in Suny and Martin, Ibid. pp. 111–44; and Joshua A. Sanborn, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War 1’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 77 (2005), pp. 290–325. 46. Fuat Dűndar, ‘The Settlement Policy of the Committee of Union and Progress, 1913–1918’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser, ed., Turkey beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities (London, 2006), pp. 37–42. 47. Edmond Paris, Genocide in Satellite Croatia, 1941–1945: A Record of Racial and Religious Persecutions and Massacres, translated by Lois Perkins (Chicago, IL, 1963). 48. Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 Volumes (New York, 1981); Christian Gerlach and Gőtz Aly, Das Letze Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/45 (Stuttgart, 2002); Tatjana Tonsmeyer, Das Dritte Reich und die Slowakei, 1939– 1945 (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 136–62. 49. See Alexander V. Prusin, ‘Revolution and Ethnic Cleansing in Western Ukraine: The OUN- UPA Assault against Polish Settlements in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, 1943–1944’, in Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Boulder, CO, 2003), pp. 517–35. 50. See Jean Ancel, ed., Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust, 12 volumes (New York, 1986); Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago, IL, 2000).

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51. H. T. Norris, ‘Kosova and the Kosovans: Past, Present and Future as seen through Serb, Albanian and Muslim Eyes’, in F. W. Carter and H. T. Norris, eds, The Changing Shape of the Balkans (London, 1996), p. 15. 52. See Weitz, ‘Vienna to Paris’, pp. 1341–2. 53. Quoted in Oscar I. Janowsky, Nationalities and National Minorities (New York, 1945), p. 136. 54. Lewis V. Thomas in Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, MA, 1951), p. 61. 55. See William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 195–6. Compare Lemkin, Axis, p. 77. 56. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996), p. 3. 57. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (London, 1998). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), chapter 10 ‘Census, Map, Museum’, for more by way of exploration of this theme. Also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford, 1989), p. 91, for the famous weeds metaphor. 58. Quoted in Z. A. B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe (Oxford), 1991), p. 24. 59. Perry, Politics, p. 21. 60. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (London, 2003), pp. 189–91. 61. For more on the fate of these groups, see Cagaptay, ‘Crafting’, pp. 15, 172, 459. 62. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia at the End of Empire (London, 1983), p. 157; Renée Hirschon, ‘Consequences, of the Lausanne Convention: An Overview’, in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, pp. 14–15. For the ensuing tensions between particularly Pontic Greek refugees and Macedonians, including Salonika Jews, see Andrew Rossos, ‘Macedonianism and Macedonian Nationalism on the Left’, in Ivo Banac and Katherine Vedery, eds, National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Europe (New Haven, CT, 1995), pp. 219–54; Aristotle A. Kallis, ‘The Jewish Community of Salonica under Siege: The Antisemitic Violence of the Summer of 1931’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 20 (2006), pp. 34–56. 63. David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim- Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War 1 (Piscataway, NJ, 2006).

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Part II Imperial Collapse in Europe and the Middle East

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4 Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe Matthew Frank

In his 600-page work Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten, published in 1931, the German legal scholar Georg Erler dedicates a considerable amount of space to dissecting, in painstaking detail, the technicalities and imperfections of the existing international framework for guaranteeing the rights of national minorities in the New Europe.1 One of the innovations of the post-1919 international order had been the massive expansion of non-reciprocal minority rights into the successor states of east- central Europe, in the first instance to protect the Jewish populations there. The so- called Minority Treaties – the minority protection clauses which were inserted in the Paris peace treaties – were one of the principal tools which the peacemakers used to break the link between imperial collapse, nation-state creation and refugee flows, and to control the process of ethnic unmixing that has accompanied the end of empire in the modern period. Ever the good German nationalist, Erler passed over the ways in which the system had been exploited and overburdened with complaints by well- organized, disaffected (invariably German) minorities since the mid-1920s, and overlooked the genuine sense of resentment in states with minority statutes towards what was seen as undue outside interference in their internal affairs and constraints on the sovereignty of the nation-state.2 He concentrated instead on the lack of political will on the part of the League of Nations to enforce existing minority provisions and to reform and improve the system of protection. ‘Have no doubt’, Erler wrote, ‘a state which wants to torment [quälen] its minorities can do so today with impunity’.3 Deeply pessimistic about the future, he warned that if the problem of minority rights was not addressed, then one day ‘the battalions of unredeemed’ 81

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(die Bataillone der Unerlösten) would try to solve the minorities question with ‘stronger methods’.4 Yet, for all his disappointment with the international regime of minorities protection, Erler reserved his strongest language for another, quite different postwar phenomenon: the bilateral treaties for ‘reciprocal intermigration’ signed between Turkey and Greece (1923), and Greece and Bulgaria (1919), which formalized and facilitated the mass resettlement of their respective national minorities. Although Erler did not dwell long on the subject, he made his views on ‘forced transportation’ (zwangsweiser Transport) clear: it was an innovation in international politics that contemporary Europe could well have done without, for which ‘the twentieth century ha[d] reason to be ashamed of itself’.5 Read with the knowledge of the massive uprooting of population that would occur in Europe in the 1940s, including the internationallysanctioned resettlement of national minorities which all of the major powers supported and assisted to varying degrees, Erler’s deep misgivings about ‘forced transportation’ seem almost quaint.6 Yet, Erler’s views were representative of a body of opinion that saw the forcible relocation of populations as a sin against the individual and property; a distinctly liberal nineteenth- century notion, to be sure, but one that had not been entirely extinguished this far into the new century. When the idea was first put into practice on a large scale in Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, it was roundly condemned as a ‘nefarious’,7 ‘iniquitous’,8 ‘deplorable’,9 ‘monstrously wicked’,10 ‘evil’11 and ‘abominable measure’,12 which even diplomats responsible regarded as a ‘bad and vicious solution’13 and ‘a return to barbarism’.14 Forced resettlement as a solution to the European minorities problem shocked because of its very novelty, not, as some claimed, because it was an ‘anachronism’.15 It was an idea that would not even have entered the minds of previous generations. This essay will focus on two of the earliest and most detailed proposals for the compulsory resettlement of European national minorities organized and regulated by interstate treaty: schemes for what would subsequently be called ‘population transfer’. These proposals can be found in two short works published around the turn of the twentieth century, long before ‘population transfer’ became a widely accepted and legitimate instrument of state policy. Die Zukunft der Türkei (1898) by Siegfried Lichtenstädter – a German-Jewish civil servant – provides an uncannily prescient blueprint for a future Turkish nation-state; Frontières nationales (1915) by George Montandon – a Franco-Swiss ethnologist – sketches out an ambitious plan for the postwar territorial settlement

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in Europe. Both authors not only anticipated the fall of multinational empires and the process of ethnic unmixing which accompanied it, but also recognized that the creation of compact, homogeneous and politically stable post-imperial nation-states would require an extensive state- directed and compulsory resettlement of national minorities. Although it is possible to locate other scattered references to the notion of ‘population transfer’ from the earliest part of the twentieth century – particularly during the First World War in connection with ‘war aims’ and ‘peace plans’ – none of them were developed in such detail or were as far-reaching as the plans for the mass resettlement of populations outlined by Lichtenstädter and Montandon.16 These two case studies, as well as reflecting some of the basic assumptions in turn- of-the century European thinking about the so- called ‘nationalities question’, are also indicative of a new mindset which sought self- consciously ‘bold’ and ‘progressive’ solutions seemingly more attuned to the political realities and challenges of the twentieth century, such as the disintegration of the multinational empires and the rise of a post-dynastic nationalist Europe. These early reflections on population transfer are ‘fantasies’ because they bore little relation to what was possible, practical or permissible at the time of their writing. The contention here, however, is that although these ‘fantasies’ were peripheral to mainstream policy debates, they nevertheless need to be fully contextualized historically as they provide a missing link not only in the development of the notion of population transfer itself but also in explaining the fundamental shift in the interwar period away from the protection towards the elimination of minorities as collective entities. Much of turn- of-the- century Central and Eastern Europe was comprised of regions which, to borrow a phrase coined by the British historian Ramsay Muir, were ‘unnationalized or very incompletely nationalized’.17 Any attempt at constructing nation-states in areas with such high levels of ethnic intermixing and where national identity was increasingly defined along narrow and exclusive ethnolinguistic lines was bound to be fraught with political difficulties. Cartography alone could not reconcile the frontiers of the nation and the state, and satisfy competing nationalisms. Implicit in any discussion of the nationalities question in the early twentieth century therefore was a potential minorities question, or ‘minorities problem’ as it became known, given that the presence of these ‘alien bodies’ was seen in mostly negative terms as posing a threat to the viability and stability of the nation-state.

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Historically, the modern state has had two sets of options for dealing with minorities once frontiers have been redrawn. What might be termed policies of ‘reconciliation’ aim to keep the minority within the borders of the state and reconcile both the minority and the majority to this eventuality; while policies of ‘elimination’ seek to remove the minority by fair means or foul. Forms of reconciliation might include statutory protection for minorities as a group – so- called minority rights – as well as varying degrees of local or regional autonomy. Forms of elimination, on the other hand, cover the whole spectrum of repressive measures available to the modern state from forced assimilation to administrative measures which stimulate ‘voluntary’ emigration, to expulsion and the refusal of the right of return, to deportation and dispersal within the state. The most extreme measure is, of course, mass murder: to exterminate the minority, which might be an end in itself and/or a means of generating refugee flows.18 The notion of population transfer, in fact, emerged as a supposedly more humane eliminatory alternative to exterminatory pressures on minority groups. It was with the recent Armenian massacres (1894–6) firmly in mind that the firstever exploration of the concept of population transfer, Die Zukunft der Türkei, outlined its stark choice for the minority populations in what remained of the Ottoman Empire – emigrate or perish. Siegfried Lichtenstädter, the author of Die Zukunft der Türkei, was a selfstyled ‘expert’ on geopolitics and racial questions. A prolific and eclectic writer, he published nearly 40 works under a variety of pseudonyms during his lifetime, on themes ranging from international politics to Jewish birth control.19 Born in the Bavarian town of Baiersdorf in 1865, he spent most of his adult life working as a civil servant in the Bavarian audit office in Munich, after having abandoned his studies in Oriental languages in favour of jurisprudence.20 For more than 30 years, he lived a double life – writer and polemicist by day, bureaucratic by night – and even after his retirement in 1932 he continued to publish, right up until the outbreak of the Second World War.21 In June 1942, he was deported from Munich to Theresienstadt, where he died in December of the same year.22 Before the publication of Die Zukunft der Türkei, a still relatively youthful Lichtenstädter was endeavouring to establish himself within the long-since forgotten but once fashionable field of Völkerpsychologie (‘folk psychology’, or the social psychology of national groups),23 and was enjoying moderate success and recognition with his first and what remained his best-known work, Kultur und Humanität (1897).24 However,

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in deciding to tackle the political aspects of the Eastern Question, Lichtenstädter was joining a long line of amateur politicians, diplomats, academics and cranks convinced that they had found the answer to this ‘six hundred year- old problem’.25 Lichtenstädter shared the prevailing assumptions about the decline of the Ottoman Empire – that it had to reform or face ruin – as well as about the nationalities problems within it. Recent developments – the Armenian massacres (1894–6) and the Greco-Turkish war (1897) – seemed to underscore a belief that as long as Christian populations remained under Turkish suzerainty there would be instability in the region. Where Lichtenstädter diverged from his contemporaries, however, was in the measures he proposed for resolving these problems. In Die Zukunft der Türkei, Lichtenstädter offered both a detailed diagnosis of the ailments afflicting the ‘sick man of Europe’ and a radical cure. Lichtenstädter argued that the European possessions of the Ottoman Empire ‘form[ed] a frightful running sore in Turkey’s body politic’.26 By attempting to hold on to them, the Turks were playing a ‘losing game’ that they could not hope to win. Better that the Turks should cut their losses, withdraw into their Anatolian redoubt and, like the Christian minorities in Ottoman Europe, construct a nation-state. But for this nation-state to be viable it had to avoid all the nationality problems associated with Ottoman Europe. There could be no place for the vast majority of Anatolian Christians. Modern Turkey had to be homogeneous. Lichtenstädter was adamant about this. Christians must ‘disappear’ (verschwinden) from a Turkish nation-state. This was ‘the most important, and essential condition’, he argued, ‘for the cure of Turkey’s Body Politic’. In administering this ‘cure’, Lichtenstädter dismissed genocidal solutions – what he variously called the ‘killing’ (die Tödtung), ‘slaughter’ (die Abschlachtung) or ‘massacre’ (der Massenmord) of minorities – as a ‘most shocking cruelty’. ‘Immense butcheries’ (grosse Metzeleien), as recently practised against the Armenians, were ‘unconditionally out of the question’, as were ‘wholesale expulsions’ (Massenvertreibungen). What he proposed instead was a ‘milder means for the elimination [Beseitigung] of the non-Muslim population in Turkey’. The Turkish government should encourage their ‘voluntary emigration’ and offer material incentives and assistance to the emigrants. If the Christian population proved stubborn, then ‘compulsory emigration’ (Zwangsauswanderung) was the only option. Any Christian elements remaining would be concentrated into urban areas, restricted to practising certain professions and compelled to learn Turkish. Through a

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mixture of forced emigration and denationalization, Anatolia would in time become modern Turkey. Lichtenstädte pre- empted ‘violent opposition’ from ‘humanitarian theorists’ by arguing that this was not ‘an offence against humanity, provided sufficient care [wa]s taken to secure a new home for the emigrants’. On the contrary, forcible relocation was a humanitarian act: To drive a man from house and home, and leave him bare upon the street, is, of course, an act of distressing inhumanity. But to transfer [versetzen] him forcibly to a new home would, as a rule, imply no great cruelty – on the contrary, it might, if the man were helped thereby to secure a better existence, be an act of kindness. Financial objections to this ‘transfer’ were also brushed aside. The cost of ‘compulsory emigration’ would be offset by the money saved by not going to war with restless minorities in the first place. If necessary, ‘European philanthropists’ could bankroll the undertaking. The economic impact of losing the Christian population would be outweighed by the political advantages their departure would bring. Moreover, the demographic hole left by the departing Christians would soon be filled by Muslim immigrants. Because the position of Muslims remaining in former Ottoman territories in Europe would become untenable, similar measures would need to be put in place for their ‘compulsory emigration’. This gave Lichtenstädter the bright idea: to attempt by suitable organisation to bring about an inter-relation of the two-fold emigration [doppelte Auswanderung]. If the Moslems ... were given the possessions of the Christian emigrants from Anatolia, and the latter, in their turn, were allotted the property of the Moslem emigrants, I imagine that all parties would thereby profit. Such a scheme would respond, not only to the interests of peace, but, in a special degree, to the claims of right and reason. The result of what he called this ‘exchange of population’ (Bevölkerungsaustausch) would be ‘the removal of religious antipathies and the creation of peace and order’. For Turkey, the compensation for its losses in Europe would be ‘the completion of the conquest of Asia Minor’. Although it purports to be a comprehensive and bold study of the Eastern Question, Die Zukunft der Türkei nevertheless leaves several knotty questions unresolved or unaddressed. Lichtenstädter does not specify

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where exactly the Anatolian Christians would go, nor what the criteria for determining ‘compulsory emigration’ would be (though the implication is that ethnoreligious rather than ethnolinguistic criteria would be applied). ‘Greeks’ would presumably be settled in a Greek nationstate bounded by the northern and western shores of the Aegean. But Lichtenstädter gives no clear indication as to the fate of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. He sympathizes with the desire of Armenian nationalists for an independent homeland as ‘most natural ... praiseworthy and noble’, but does not offer any concrete proposals as to the location of this nation-state (though Australia and the United States are hinted at). The wider international and diplomatic context is also unexplored. Given that Die Zukunft der Türkei contained so many glaring omissions while offering such definitive solutions, it is hardly surprising that reviewers such as Martin Hartmann, one of Wilhelmine Germany’s leading Orientalists,27 dismissed Lichtenstädter’s ideas as ‘crazy’ (wahnwitzig).28 That Die Zukunft der Türkei was mostly ignored on publication, and when reviewed dismissed as the ramblings of a fantasist, only reinforced Lichtenstädter’s firm belief in his prophetic powers as a Nostradamus of ‘population transfer’. Subsequent developments in south-eastern Europe and Turkey did bear an uncanny resemblance to the programme for Turkish renewal which Lichtenstädter sketched out in 1898, and seem to confirm his fears about what would happen if his ‘cure’ was not followed through. Most remarkably, a series of population exchanges were carried out in the Balkans and Anatolia in the decade after 1914, culminating in the Greco–Turkish compulsory exchange of populations, which was formalized under international treaty at Lausanne in January 1923.29 ‘I may be permitted to note that my then predictions have come true and that my suggestions have been justified’, Lichtenstädter noted in an English translation of one of his books published in the early 1930s: Especially I think I was perhaps the first to proclaim the idea of an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey being desirable, an idea that was, at the time, mostly ignored by the German and British press, and, in part, ridiculed as absurd.30 Encouraged by his own powers of predictions, Lichtenstädter also speculated on other instances where ‘planned and state- organized population exchanges’ (planmässiger und staatlich organisierter Bevölkerungsaustausch) could be carried out. In the 1920s, his pet scheme involved solving the South Tyrol problem through a population exchange between the

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German-speaking population there and the Italian-speaking population of the Swiss canton of Ticino.31 He later added Slovenes from Carinthia to the mix in a three-way population exchange.32 His most ambitious exploration of the theme, however, was developed during the First World War. In Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch (1917), Lichtenstädter called for a ‘far-reaching reordering of nationalities’ (weitgehende nationale Flurbereinigung) as part of any peace settlement.33 In arguing for the shifting of populations rather than of frontiers, Lichtenstädter was again ahead of his time. In this new scheme, the dynastic empires of Central and Eastern Europe – Russia included – would largely remain intact. In the case of AustriaHungary, there would be greater concentration of national groups within the empire: Czechs could be ‘transplanted’ (verpflanzen) from Bohemia to south Moravia, and swapped for Germans in a ‘national exchange’ (nationaler Tausch); other German Sprachinseln (islands or pockets of German language), which were a ‘tiresome, painful and dangerous’ presence, would also be relocated. But this ‘national reordering’ would not only be ethnolinguistic. Muslims would be concentrated into a southern frontier province as a counterweight against Serbia, while in the northeast Lichtenstädter suggested creating an autonomous Jewish province where the Diaspora could seek refuge from Russian and Romanian ‘slavery’ and Polish ‘boycotts’. In some respects, Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch also outlined for Germany what Die Zukunft der Türkei had offered Turkey: the prospect of a compact, stable and robust nation-state. Rather than seeking huge territorial gains in the east at the expense of Russia, Lichtenstädter argued that Germany should instead aim to consolidate its own ethnic frontier, as well as that of its new eastern neighbour: Poland. The creation of a Polish nation state would allow for the ‘rounding off’ of the German frontiers through the shortening of the ‘Polish inlet’. The Polish population would ‘vacate’ these areas, to which the Polish state would have to renounce all claims. As a ‘sweetening’ or ‘gold-plating’ of this ‘bitter pill’, Poland would not only be liberally compensated at Russia’s expense in the east, but could expect to govern these new territories without their German or Russian minorities, who would also in turn be relocated in what would become a three-way population exchange. Newly delimited nation-states would then act on populations in the same way as ‘magnets attract iron’. The ‘return migration of Germans back to the motherland’ would, meanwhile, help create a ‘strong, numerous German nation’ (ein starkes, volkszahlreiches Deutschtum) ‘concentrated’ against neighbouring Slavs rather

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than ‘dispersed’ amongst them. Elsewhere, the consequence of this ‘farreaching reordering of nationalities’ would be the emergence of clearly defined borders of nation and state. In Frontières nationales, George Montandon also sketched out plans for a ‘far-reaching reordering of nationalities’, but on an even more ambitious scale. Written just a year earlier than Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch, Montandon’s work approached the question of the post-war settlement from a different, distinctly Entente perspective, yet also extolled the virtues of an extensive, state- directed mass resettlement of national minorities. While it is tempting to draw out further parallels between these two central European ‘founding fathers’ of population transfer – their training and status as men of science and the authority they derived from this, their increasing involvement with the ‘Jewish Question’, the violent ends both met during the Second World War – one of the key biographical differences is that while Lichtenstädter remained in almost complete obscurity, even during his lifetime, Montandon enjoyed a certain notoriety, because of a highprofile career which ended in ignominy. If Montandon is remembered at all it is as a prominent anti-Semite and racial ideologue in Vichy and collaborationist France. As well as writing the infamous Comment reconnaître le Juif? (1940) and editing the anti-Semitic periodical l’Ethnie française, he also played an important role in the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives and later headed the German-sponsored Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives et Ethnoraciales where he made a fortune in bribes and fees from physical examinations to determine ‘Jewishness’ (a ‘scientific’ link which Montandon claimed to have pioneered).34 Yet the world of applied ethnoracism in 1940s Paris was a far cry from his youth in turn- ofthe- century Switzerland. The son of a wealthy French industrialist, Montandon studied medicine in Lausanne and Zurich before embarking on the first of many overseas expeditions to satisfy what he saw as his true calling as an anthropologist. Returning to Switzerland to practice medicine during the First World War, he then turned his back on a life of respectable oblivion as a provincial Swiss surgeon, when, at the age of 40, he led a Red Cross repatriation mission to Siberia. During his spell in Russia from 1919 to 1921, he was won over to the Bolshevik cause, and also met and married a Russian woman. Back in Lausanne, he became a member of the Communist Party, and wrote extensively on his Russian experiences.35 After moving to France in the mid-1920s, he gradually reinvented himself, separating from his Russian wife, leaving the

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Communist Party, switching to anthropology, and becoming a naturalized French citizen. In 1931, he joined l’École d’Anthropologie in Paris, where two years later he was appointed to a Chair. His subsequent rise to the forefront of French pseudoscience as one of the Nazis’ favourite French anti-Semites is well documented.36 He did not, however, survive the war. He was assassinated in his home by the Maquis in August 1944, and was posthumously convicted of ‘national unworthiness’ (indignité nationale) by the postwar French authorities. Given Montandon’s later incarnation as a leading French racialogue, it is surprising that historians have largely overlooked his first foray into publishing and polemics. Although Frontières nationales is a slim contribution, even when judged by the standard of his later work, it nevertheless contains much of the same fondness for crude categorization and self- consciously ‘bold’ thinking that characterized his writings on ethnoracism. Far more important for the discussion here, Frontières nationales provides a succinct and forceful argument in favour of population transfer, or ‘mass transplantation’ as Montandon called it. While Frontières nationales may not be ‘the modern founding document’ of population transfer that some scholars,37 and not least Montandon himself,38 have claimed, it nevertheless clearly outlines general principles on which a durable peace involving mass resettlement was to be based. Frontières nationales was published to coincide with the Conference of Nationalities held in Lausanne in June 1916. Organized by the proEntente Union of Nationalities, this was the third such gathering of ‘dissatisfied nationalities of Europe’, involving some 400 delegates representing 23 nations.39 On one level, yet another wartime pamphlet like Montandon’s on la paix durable was remarkable only in that so few of his contemporaries seem to have read it or to have subsequently cited it.40 Even his proposal for state- directed relocation of minorities was not really that original by 1915, given the recent treaties for ‘organized intermigration’ which followed the 1912/13 Balkan Wars, and the fact that the idea was beginning to be discussed in official and unofficial circles in various European capitals in connection with postwar claims of the belligerents to Alsace-Lorraine,41 the Polish–German borderlands,42 South Tyrol,43 and Macedonia.44 What distinguished Montandon’s contribution from those of his contemporaries, however, was a willingness to look beyond the parochial. Montandon took a solution to a specific problem (in this instance, the French obsession with recovering Alsace-Lorraine), developed from this a set of principles that were just as applicable to the eastern as they were to the western half

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of the Continent, and then sketched out a European settlement based on a localized solution. In other words, if France was to be allowed to consolidate its postwar gains by reordering frontiers and populations, why shouldn’t its allies? According to Montandon, the main obstacle in the way of a lasting and permanent peace was the continued existence of the ‘Marches’ (les marches): disputed areas like Alsace-Lorraine where political frontiers had shifted but the population had remained in place, only then to become a focus of irredentism.45 ‘Abolish the Marches’, Montandon argued, ‘and a fundamental reason for major conflict will be eliminated’. Once future frontiers had been drawn – if possible along ‘natural’ lines – these could then be ‘fixed’ by the ‘mass transplantation’ (transplantation massive) of ‘non-nationals’ (non-nationaux) on both sides of the new frontier. ‘Why should [ ... ] two nations, after establishing a mutual frontier, not call back their nationals on their side of the frontier?’, Montandon asked. If necessary, force would be used. Foreigners – the non-nationals – would then be banned from owning property or residing in the frontier provinces. The ‘transplantation’ could take place with or without indemnity being paid. What was important was that for ‘a long period of established order’ to be created this measure had to be universally and strictly applied. A rather crude map which accompanied Montandon’s text gave a fair indication of the scale of the proposed territorial changes and the principal population movements. Arrows indicated the direction in which certain populations would have to be – and here Montandon chose a chess term – ‘castled’.46 There would be a ‘population exchange’ (un échange de populations) across the new Russian–German frontier. In areas such as Transylvania, the ‘principle of the transplantation of populations’ would also be applied, leaving Hungary and Rumania ‘equally and equitably compact’. The ‘supposedly insoluble’ Macedonian problem would also be dealt with along similar lines. Montandon’s was clearly an Entente peace; in particular, a French one. France recovers Alsace-Lorraine without its German population; AustriaHungary is broken up. The most glaring omission, of course, is that of an independent Polish state, which greatly simplifies the proposed changes in the northern tier. The Russian Empire remains intact; in fact, it gains predominantly ethnic Polish areas from the Central Powers. Yet, even with the Russian Empire left in one piece, these changes still represent a blueprint for the extensive dismantling of the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe, and a far-reaching and radical reshaping of its ethnographic order. In short, it was a recognition, as Montandon

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himself concluded, that Europe was on the cusp of a new era: ‘[The] glory days [les beaux temps] of dynastic Europe have now passed ... It is now a time of nationalist Europe’. Montandon and Lichtenstädter had quite different visions of what a post-imperial political settlement in Europe might look like, their proposals for dealing with any ethnographic misfits emerging from the redrawing of European frontiers were remarkably similar and shared three basic characteristics common to all schemes for the mass resettlement of minorities to which the label ‘population transfer’ was subsequently applied. First, this was to be an orderly, planned and, if possible, reciprocal arrangement. Second, while compulsion might be applied to individuals, the states involved would be entering into the arrangement freely. In authorizing mass resettlement, states were, therefore, also assuming responsibility for regulating and overseeing the process as well as indemnifying those affected. The rights and responsibilities of states to each other and to populations meant that these proposals also had an international law dimension, which became more explicit in later decades. Third, and perhaps most importantly, preconditions such as these meant that ‘population transfer’ was conceived of as a process distinct from other coerced movements of population. The terminology used by Lichtenstädter, Montandon and later proponents reflects this distinctiveness: ‘transfer’, ‘transference’, ‘transplant’ or ‘transplantation’; all of them value-free words implying the ease of a rational transaction – free of conflict, clean and bloodless – and the logical outcome of approaching geopolitical problems, as Montandon put it, in a ‘neutral, objective [and] scientific way’.47 The use of ‘neutral’ terminology to describe processes which in practice are far from conflict-free, clean or bloodless, brings to mind George Orwell’s landmark 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in which he singled out the phrase ‘transfer of population’ as an example of how contemporary political writing employed euphemism in ‘defence of the indefensible’. Euphemistic phraseology allows one ‘to name things without calling up mental pictures of them’ and therefore avoid making arguments ‘too brutal for most people to face’. But Orwell is not only arguing that thought corrupts language; language also corrupts thought.48 The use of the term ‘transfer of population’, in other words, allows the brutal uprooting of national minorities to be re-imagined and for the ‘indefensible’ to become permissible. For historians, this interaction between language and thought offers further insights into what might be called, in this instance, the mid-twentieth- century

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mindset and its approach to problem solving. As far as patterns of thinking which informed and which were reflected in political writing on ‘population transfer’ are concerned, there are five features worth noting here: determinism; positivism; gigantism of vision; tendency to gross oversimplification; and disregard for individual agency. Determinism is inherent within the notion of population transfer, which at its core sees the disintegration of multinational empires as being as inevitable as the rise of nationalism is inexorable. Unavoidable, also, is the clash of competing nationalisms in areas with intermixed populations, which will lead to violent and recurring conflict unless clear lines of demarcation are drawn. If the main source of instability in the region has been its heterogeneity, so it follows that its future stability depends on its homogeneity. Definitive ethnographic as well as political frontiers are needed, requiring a reordering of nationalities as part of a more general European settlement and a permanent and lasting peace. Population transfer, then, becomes one of the mechanisms with which to facilitate the peaceful transition to a Europe of nationstates in a post-imperial era. Ends, therefore, justify the means. ‘The solution envisaged here’, as Montandon writes in Frontières nationales, ‘could be accused of being cruel: yet it is less cruel than war itself!’49 The second characteristic is an almost boundless faith in the capacity of the bureaucratic state, equipped with the advances of modern science, to operate as a rational and progressive force in engineering a better future. This mindset is reflected most noticeably in the way that proponents of population transfer employ the language of medical science in their analysis of the minorities problem. The minorities problem is invariably characterized as a disease or an illness; the unfortunate state with the minorities problem, the patient or the organism. Minorities themselves are foreign or alien bodies, a running sore or, if particularly troublesome, a cancer or a plague. Population transfer, then, becomes the cure or the treatment. As it is a skilled, skilful, planned, precise and deliberate operation, putting population transfer into practice is a form of surgery. Lichtenstädter was especially fond of medical metaphor. ‘When alien bodies are present in an organism, and cause unhealthy disturbances’, he writes when introducing his ‘cure’ for Turkey, ‘the methods of treatment naturally vary according to the state of the case’.50 But the propensity for medical metaphor was also shared by the ‘doctors’ themselves. ‘The vast migration and the exchange of populations [ ... ] between Greece and Turkey’, a senior League of Nations official who worked with the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission in the 1920s wrote in his memoirs, ‘was like

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a surgical operation, performed skilfully though without anaesthetics, followed by an inadequate medical attendance but a generously assisted convalescence. Much was saved, and some enduring benefits were built upon the great disaster’.51 Reliance on medical metaphor reflected a belief not only that such solutions were possible but also that they were urgent and desirable, and that the international community had an obligation to carry out the ‘operation’; another instance of how language, to return to Orwell’s point, shapes thought. Population transfer, then, becomes a humanitarian act, ‘a work of real humanity as well as of political wisdom’, as two of the leading early twentieth- century Balkan experts put it.52 The wonder of the ‘scientific method’ is that a formula based on sound and rational principles can be replicated elsewhere if undertaken under similar conditions. The temptation for proponents of population transfer, therefore, was to think big and experiment on a grand scale. This gigantism of vision meant that it was not enough that a particular scheme for population transfer was suited to Alsace-Lorraine, the Polish Corridor, or Macedonia; it had to have more universal aspirations and look beyond a specific locality. Gigantism of vision led in turn to oversimplification. In grand and sweeping schemes of ‘national reordering’, complicating factors, exceptions to the pattern, and anomalous groups – for example, non-state or diasporic groups such as the Jews and Armenians – were brushed aside in the interests of conceptual clarity, as were the wishes of the populations concerned. Indeed, the fifth and final characteristic is the almost flagrant disregard for the individual and individual agency implicit in all plans for compulsory population transfer. Interests of the individual are completely subordinated to that of the collective – in this case, the state in the name of the nation. ‘A nation is not only the sum of individuals, but an organic unity’, Lichtenstädter writes in Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch, ‘whose interests are not identical with those of its members. The individual has not only its own but also higher, national interests.’53 And the individual must not only be willing to make this higher national sacrifice, but also be willing to be sacrificed for the greater good. ‘It is far more important that hundreds of millions of people should not suffer or die’, wrote a popular British author and mid- century proponent of population transfer, ‘than that thousands of families should be temporarily inconvenienced’: a familiar argument used in support of the case for compulsion.54 Compulsion also meant individuals not only had no choice whether or not to remain, but also had no control over their own identity: categories were imposed; indeterminate or parallel

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identities were not permitted. The state became the ultimate arbiter of identity. The collapse of the multinational empires of Central and Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1920 ushered in a series of new and expanded nationstates and smaller multinational states, it occurred without the farreaching reordering of nationalities as countenanced by Lichtenstädter and Montandon. As the Czech representative to the Paris Peace Conference, Eduard Beneš, noted a generation later, after he himself had come to see the forcible resettlement of national minorities as an essential component in reconstructing Czechoslovakia as a national state, compulsory population transfer ran counter to the ‘idealist tendencies governing the 1919 plans for a new Europe’.55 Peacemakers instead settled for imposing on the successor states a regime of minority protection and inserting in the peace treaties option clauses which regulated voluntary emigration.56 But these ‘idealist tendencies’ did not go unchallenged for long. The Lausanne Convention of 1923 – which formalized a Greco–Turkish exchange of populations, and which might be seen as being the first of a series of revisionist challenges to the post-1919 settlement – was the first time ever that the principle of compulsion had been included in any international treaty regulating intermigration.57 With the Lausanne Convention, population transfer exited the realm of fantasy, passed through the stage of being a viable option and was now being implemented as a policy of last resort. Although by the early 1930s population transfer was still far from being seen as a respectable alternative in liberal Europe – witness Erler’s remarks, which echoed expert European opinion during this period – nevertheless, the following decade would transform the prevailing discourse on ‘solutions’ to the European minorities problem. By the late 1930s, population transfer had become the fashionable panacea. ‘Everywhere I go I find there is a general belief that transfer is the right solution for minority problems’, one British authority on the subject commented in 1941. ‘People ... now speak as if transfer were a simple and straightforward solution’.58 Lichtenstädter and Montandon can hardly be credited with bringing about this paradigm shift. Lichtenstädter was the first to complain that few ever paid his proposals any mind. The uncanny resemblance between the programme of Turkish national renewal as outlined in Die Zukunft der Türkei and subsequent developments in south- eastern Europe was only ever coincidental.59 Montandon was also quick to trumpet his prophetic powers when opportunity arose, and was less than modest about his place in history. Not only did he claim to have single-handedly

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come up with the idea of large-scale population transfers, but also with having inspired Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer–diplomat, who is often credited with having brokered the Greco–Turkish population exchange.60 Montandon, of course, was wrong on both counts. In policy-making terms, his work was inconsequential. But that does not in itself mean that his and Lichtenstädter’s contributions are nothing more than historical curiosities. The significance of their work in any case lies not in the part they might or might not have played in shaping policy, but in the very characteristic that would otherwise disqualify them from historical enquiry. Hovering on the outer edges of contemporary debate, these ‘fantasies’ act as a counterpoint to mainstream thinking and help clarify the limits of the permissible. The proceedings of the Conference of Nationalities of 1916, for which Montandon wrote Frontières nationales, illustrate this point. Although Montandon later claimed that he had ‘presented’ his paper to this conference, amongst all the memoranda, reports and accounts of the gathering there is no reference at all to Frontières nationales and only the faintest allusion to the concept of ‘population transfer’.61 ‘Forced emigrations’ (emigrations forcées), as the conference chairman stated at the opening of the proceedings, should have no part in a peace settlement.62 Schemes for the forcible relocation of population, therefore, simply did not warrant discussion as a legitimate option.63 The notion of population transfer was at this early stage of the twentieth century still firmly in the realm of ‘fantasy’, not to be taken seriously, or at least not to be seen to be taken seriously. While Lichtenstädter’s and Montandon’s contemporaries might have shared the same basic assumptions about national minorities – a ‘problem’ which needed fixing – mainstream thinking, nevertheless, drew more optimistic conclusions, and offered less drastic remedies than that of population transfer. Contrast this with wartime discussions some 30 years later when population transfer was openly countenanced by public bodies rooted in a liberal internationalist tradition.64 Indeed, by the mid-1940s, even the Interparliamentary Union, an organization which can always be relied upon to opt for the path of least resistance in its pursuit of consensus at all costs, agreed that forcing people from their homes was justified as long as these were ‘transfers of population organized under international agreements’.65 As well as underscoring what the consensus was at a given point in time, ‘fantasies’ such as these also offer an insight into conceptual origins. Lichtenstädter’s and Montandon’s ‘fantasies’ provide a missing link between the conceptual void when the notion simply does not

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exist (when it is inconceivable) and the point where it is openly and widely discussed (when it becomes permissible). These ‘fantasies of ethnic unmixing’, therefore, represent the genesis of the notion of population transfer from which point historians can determine more precisely the context in which the idea emerged (the disintegration of empire) as well as the direction in which thinking on national questions was heading (the engineering of mono- ethnic nation-states). But these fantasies of ethnic unmixing also serve as a reminder of the extremes to which European thinking on the minorities problem travelled in the first half of the twentieth century. ‘If “fantastic” is the right epithet for a plan which aims at the organisation of peace and prosperity, what is the one which ... a critic would consider appropriate to the existing situation [in Europe]?’, asked one such convert to the cause on the eve of the Second World War. ‘The policy followed by the nations today ... is so fantastic that any alternative might be regarded, in comparison with it, as eminently sane’.66 In the space of just over three decades, the notion of population transfer made this rapid transition from fantasy to reality, from inconceivable and ‘indefensible’ to permissible, from wahnwitzig to ‘eminently sane’. The fantasies of obscure polemicists, in other words, had become, by the mid- century, the policy choice of wise and rational statesmen.

Notes I would like to acknowledge the support of the British Academy. Part of the research on which this essay is based was made possible through the award of a Small Grant from the Elizabeth Barker Fund. 1. G. H. J. Erler, Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten (Münster, 1931). 2. See C. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 295– 335; Martin Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren (Marburg, 2000). 3. Erler, Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten, p. 512. 4. Ibid., p. 516. 5. Ibid., pp. 173–4. 6. For details on the international agreements which sanctioned the resettlement of these national minorities, see J. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 1945–1955 (Philadelphia, PA, 1962). See also Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White, eds, The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–1949 (Basingstoke, 2010). 7. ‘Turks Find Greeks Divided in Politics’, Christian Science Monitor, 20 November 1923, p. 1.

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98 Matthew Frank 8. ‘Critical Stage of Lausanne Conference’, Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1923, p. 9. 9. ‘Comments’, New Statesman, 13 January 1923, pp. 417–8. 10. ‘Convention Signed at Lausanne’, The Times, 31 January 1923, p. 9. 11. Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 160, cols 206–7 (14 January 1923). 12. ‘Deportation or Worse’, New York Times, 15 February 1923, p. 18. 13. Great Britain, Foreign Office, Lausanne Conference on Near East Affairs 1922–23: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace, Cmd. 1814 (London, 1923), p. 212. 14. M. Weygand, Mémoires: Mirages et réalités, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1957), p. 196. 15. ‘Delays at Lausanne’, Daily Telegraph, 19 January 1923, p. 8. 16. It is possible that the earliest proposal for a population transfer dates back to February 1878, when the Ottoman delegation at San Stefano suggested organizing an exchange of Turkish and Bulgarian populations, a proposal which the Russians rejected. See Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London, 2000), p. 105. 17. R. Muir, The National Principle and the War (Oxford, 1914), p. 10. 18. See C. A. Macartney, National States and National Minorities (London, 1934), pp. 427–501; Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nationalism: A Report by a Study Group of Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London, 1939), pp. 277–95; I. L. Claude, Jr., National Minorities: An International Problem (Cambridge, MA, 1955), pp. 51–109. 19. ‘Dr Mehemet Emin Efendi’ was Lichtenstädter’s nom de plume for matters relating to the Eastern Question. Later in life, he increasingly used his given name. However, on matters relating to Judaism, he was ‘Ne’man’ (literally, ‘no man’). He also published under the pseudonym, ‘U. R. Deutsch’. 20. S. Winniger, Grosse jüdische National-biographie: Mit mehr als 8000 Lebensbeschreibungen namhafter jüdischer Männer und Frauen aller Zeiten und Länder, Vol. 7 (Cernăuti, 1936), pp. 254–5. 21. These publications were almost exclusively on the ‘Jewish Question’: Naturschutz und Judentum (Leipzig, 1932); Geburtenregelung und Judentum (Leipzig, 1933); Jüdische Politik (Leipzig, 1933); Zionismus und andere Zukunftsmöglichkeiten (Leipzig, 1935); Jüdische Fragen (Leipzig, 1935); Jüdische Sorgen, jüdische Irrungen, jüdische Zukunft (Winnenden b. Stuttgart, 1937), translated into English as, Perish or Change? A Memorandum about the Jewish Distress by Siegfried Lichtenstaedter, trans. R. Pope (Winnenden b. Stuttgart, 1939). See also V. Dahm, Das jüdische Buch im Dritten Reich, 2nd edn. (Munich, 1993), p. 179. 22. See the biographical sketch in G. Gröning, ‘Siegfried Lichtenstädter: “Naturschutz und Judentum. Ein vernachlässigtes Kapitel jüdischer Sittenlehre” – Ein Kommentar’, in G. Gröning and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn, eds, Naturschutz und Demokratie!? (Munich, 2006), pp. 144–5. 23. For discussion of Völkerpsychologie as ‘the grandfather of cultural psychology’, see R. Diriwächter, ‘Völkerpsychologie: The Synthesis That Never Was’, Culture & Psychology, vol. 10 (2004), pp. 85–109; also E. Klautke, ‘The Mind of the Nation: The Debate about Völkerpsychologie, 1851–1900’, Central Europe, vol. 8 (2010), pp. 1–19. 24. M. E. Efendi, Kultur und Humanität: Völkerpsychologische und politische Untersuchungen (Würzburg, 1897); also in French translation as S.

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

Lichtenstädter, Civilisation et humanité: étude de moeurs polit. et de psychologie sociale (Paris, 1920). See A. Huonder, Die Teilung der Türkei: Ein 600 jähriges Problem, Sonderausdruck aus den Stimmen der Zeit, vol. 90 (1916), pp. 562–71. For what follows, see M. E. Efendi, Die Zukunft der Türkei: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der orientalischen Frage (Berlin, 1898). S. L. Marchand, German Orientalism in an Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 356–61. M. Hartmann, Der islamische Orient: Berichte und Forschungen, Vol. 3, Strassen durch Asien (Berlin, 1900), p. 90. He was also highly critical of Lichtenstädter’s more ‘scientific’ work such as Kultur und Humanität; see M. Hartmann, Islam, Mission, Politik (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 38–9. This was another eventuality which Lichtenstädter foretold in M. E. Efendi, Die Balkankrisis in völkerpsychologischer Beleuchtung (Leipzig, 1912). S. Lichtenstädter, The Future of Palestine: An Appeal to Zionist Jews and the Civilized World (London, 1934), p. 5. S. Lichtenstädter, Süd-Tirol und Tessin: Zwei national-internationale Fragen mit einer gemeinsamen Lösung (Diessenvor München, 1927), pp. 15ff. See also L. Steurer, Südtirol zwischen Rom und Berlin 1919–1939 (Vienna, 1980), pp. 315–24. S. Lichtenstädter, Das Ausland-Deutschtum in Europa: Seine Kämpfe, seine Gefahren, seine Rettung (Diessen vor München, 1928), pp. 21–5. For what follows, see S. Lichtenstädter, Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch: Eine Studie für den Friedensschluss (Dresden, 1917), pp. 39–56. See D. Evleth, ‘Montandon, George’, in B. M. Gordon, ed., Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance, 1938–1946 (Westport, CT, 1999), pp. 246–7. The most comprehensive biographical sketch and overview of his work is M. Knobel, ‘George Montandon et l’ethno-racisme’, in P-A. Taguieff, G. Kauffmann and M. Lenoire, eds, L’antisémitisme de plume, 1940–1944: études et documents (Paris, 1999), pp. 277–93. See also M. Marrus and R. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA, 1983), pp. 300–1. See G. Montandon, Deux ans chez Koltchak et chez les Bolchéviques pour la Croix-rouge de Genève (1919–1921) (Paris, 1923). Knobel, ‘George Montandon’, pp. 280–93; J. Billig, Le Commissariat général aux questions juives (1941–1944), Vol. 2 (Paris, 1957), pp. 238–48, 310–15; W. H. Schneider, Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth- Century France (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 257–63; P. Birnbaum, La France aux Français: Histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris, 1993), pp. 187–98. See comments in J. Drew, ‘Population Exchanges and Human Rights’, Current World Issues, vol. 37 (1994), pp. 87–8; W. R. Keylor, ‘The Principle of National Self-Determination as a Factor in the Creation of Postwar Frontiers in Europe, 1919 and 1945’, in C. Baechler and C. Fink, eds, The Establishment of European Frontiers after the Two World Wars (New York, 1996), p. 47. G. Montandon, ‘La Pologne Future’, Mercure de France, 1 February 1940, p. 314. ‘La 3me conférence des nationalités’, Journal de Genève, 28 June 1916, p. 5. For a fuller account of the conference and the work of the Union of

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40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

Nationalities, see A. E. Senn, ‘Garlawa: A Study in Émigré Intrigue, 1915– 1917’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 105 (1967), pp. 411–24. It languished in obscurity until the scholar and mid- century proponent of population transfer, Joseph Schechtman, unearthed it for his European Population Transfers 1939–1945 (New York, 1946), pp. 454–5. A. Sardou, L’indépendance européenne: Études sur les conditions de paix (Paris, 1915), pp. 48–9. I. Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck, 1960), pp. 70–115; E. Ludendorff, Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922), pp. 286–7. G. Framke, ‘Ettore Tolomei – “Totengräber Südtirols” oder “patriotischer Märtyrer”?’, in K. Eisterer and R. Steiniger, eds, Die Option: Südtirol zwischen Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (Innsbruck, 1989), pp. 80–2. K. Kairophylas, Eleftherios Venizelos: His Life and Work (London, 1915), pp. 179–81; A. Gauvain, The Greek Question (New York, 1918), pp. 42–4. For what follows, see G. Montandon, Frontières nationales: Détermination objective de la condition primordiale nécessaire a l’obtention d’une paix durable (Lausanne, 1915). Montandon used the verb rocquer: the chess move where the king and castle/rook are transposed in order to bring the king into safety. Montandon, Frontières nationales, p. 5. G. Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, Horizon, April 1946, reprinted in G. Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London, 1957), pp. 153–4. Montandon, Frontières nationales, p. 5. Efendi, Die Zukunft der Türkei, p. 21. A. Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (London, 1961), p. 184. N. Buxton and C. R. Buxton, War and the Balkans (London, 1915), p. 108. Lichtenstädter, Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch, p. 12. B. Newman, Danger Spots of Europe (London, 1938), pp. 42–4. E. Beneš, ‘The Organization of Postwar Europe’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 20 (January 1942), p. 235. See Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, pp. 133–264. The classic work on this subject remains S. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York, 1932). See also O. Yildrim, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco- Greek Exchange of Populations 1922– 1934 (London, 2006). Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), London, RIIA/8/760, J. Mabbott, ‘The Effect of the War on the Minority Situation in Europe’, Address given at Chatham House, 30 September 1941. There are also parallels between Lichtenstädter’s ‘far-reaching national reordering’ in Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch and the ‘far-sighted ordering of the life of Europe’ (weitschauende Ordnung des europäischen Lebens) outlined in Hitler’s 6 October 1939 Reichstag speech. In order to establish ‘better dividing lines’ and to remove ‘the reason and cause for continual international disturbances’, Hitler called for a ‘new order of ethnographic relations’ through a ‘resettlement of nationalities’ including the recall of ‘splinters of the German nationality’. See D. A. Loeber, ed., Diktierte Option: Die Umsiedlung der Deutsch-Balten aus Estland und Lettland 1939–1941, 2nd edn (Neumünster, 1972), pp. 79–81.

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Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing 101 60. Montandon, ‘La Pologne Future’, p. 314. 61. See, for example, Office Central de l’Union des Nationalités, IIIme Conférence des Nationalités: Lausanne 27–29 juin 1916: Étude du problème des nationalités en vue du congrès des puissances après la guerre: Documents préliminaires (Lausanne, 1916); idem., Compte rendu de la IIIme Conférence des Nationalités réunie à Lausanne 27–29 juin 1916 (Lausanne, 1917). The work and conclusions of the conference also inform the content of J. Gabrys, Le problème des nationalités et la paix durable (Lausanne, 1917). Gabrys was SecretaryGeneral of the Union of Nationalities. 62. ‘3me conférence des nationalités’, Journal de Genève, 29 June 1916, p. 2. See also ‘Déclaration des droits des Nationalités votée par la IIIme Conférence des Nationalités’, in Les Annales des nationalités: bulletin de l’Union des Nationalités, 5me année, nos 9–11 (Lausanne, 1916), pp. 275–6. 63. Other international bodies, such as the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, while recognizing that national minorities were a ‘source of extreme weakness for every state’, likewise ruled out forcible relocation. See Central Organization for a Durable Peace, A Durable Peace: Official Commentary on the Minimum-Program (The Hague, 1916), p. 12; also Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable, Avant-projet d’un traité général relatif aux droits des minorités nationales (The Hague, 1917); Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable, Avant-projet d’un traité général relatif aux transferts de territoires (Stockholm, 1917). 64. See M. Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2008), pp. 39–93. 65. Inter-Parliamentary Bulletin, vol. 27 (May 1947), pp. 23–5. 66. C. Hatry, Light Out of Darkness (London, 1939), pp. 221–2.

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5 Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War Julie Thorpe

Up to 2 million civilians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were internally displaced between 1914 and 1918, the equivalent number of displaced civilians in France for the same period and almost a third of the total displaced in Russia before 1917.1 This chapter shows how the displacement of Austria-Hungary’s wartime refugees from the eastern and southern peripheries of the empire contributed both to the empire’s collapse and to the legitimacy of post-imperial successor states in East Central Europe. It argues that by creating social and economic categories − nationality, religion and class − the multinational state unwittingly nationalized its own citizens and gave legitimacy to nationalists who sought to claim non-national people for their political projects of liberation from imperial rule. Not only the state and its agencies, but also the various groups and politicians who sought to represent the refugees as co-nationals, each claimed the displaced. International actors after the war also made claims on the displaced as part of their larger humanitarian mission in the region. Therefore, the discourses about and responses to wartime displacement – what Peter Gatrell has called ‘refugeedom’ in the case of Tsarist Russia − were the very process by which the empire itself was displaced and replaced by nationalizing successor states.2

Forced migrations in a total war The link between population displacement and war is self-evident for the second part of the twentieth century, but it has less often been 102

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recognized as a feature of the First World War. More recent studies of the Great War have established the relationship between total war, displacement and political upheavals such as revolutions or imperial collapse.3 In these accounts, the displacement of populations is a precondition for the displacement of whole states and their replacement with radical and often violent political ideologies and movements. The Paris peace treaties that concluded the war were merely a full stop to the process of moving, sorting, classifying and removing populations that had begun in 1914. Making war and peace was no longer principally about gaining or losing territory, but about populating or depopulating territorially contested spaces. As Eric Weitz has argued, belligerent countries fought wars on territorial fronts while simultaneously fighting for legitimacy over populations within their borders: What had started as a war between states swiftly became also a war among peoples. In the course of the conflict, the goals of the belligerents became ever more expansive and went way beyond the conquest of territory or self- defense. Germany’s imagined Mitteleuropa contained within it an understanding of discrete populations, some of which might be allied with Germany, while others, notably Slavs, were slighted for economic exploitation and subjugation to a German elite.4 Like Germany, Austria-Hungary also imagined a political space in which German-speakers ruled over non- German-speakers, but it was the sudden displacement of populations from the fringes of the empire that turned this imagined space into a legal entity framed by ethnic and civic notions of citizenship. Thus, the ‘entanglement’ of civilizing missions and forced migrations was present in the Habsburg domain, just as it was elsewhere in the multinational empires that collapsed in 1918 and in the international system of nation-states that came to replace them. Austria-Hungary’s war began on two fronts in 1914 − against Serbia in the Balkans and against Russia in the east − but with the entry of Italy into the war in May 1915 fighting was on all three fronts. Miscalculating the speed of Russian mobilization, the Austro-Hungarian military command initially sent divisions to Serbia and then immediately had to redeploy them to Galicia to fight off a swift Russian invasion at the end of August. The result was defeat on both sides: with Austro-Hungarian troops departing from the Balkan front before they had even fought, Serbia won early victories in 1914 and suffered defeat only at the hands

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of Bulgaria joining the Central Powers in 1915; while on the Eastern front, Austro-Hungarian troops dispersed across nearly 300 kilometres of land were outnumbered and outgunned against the Russians, who captured the capital of Galicia, Lemberg/L’vov/L’viv in early September, forcing the Austro-Hungarian troops to retreat to the Carpathian mountains. Fighting in the east continued from October to December with little gains, and another offensive by the Austro-Hungarians in January 1915 failed spectacularly, with the fortress town of Prezmyśl falling to the Russians in March. Less than a year into the war, the AustroHungarian army had lost more than 1.7 million men either through death, injury, capture or desertion. The increase in desertions in early 1915 followed the losses in 1914 of most of the experienced Habsburg officer corps, who were replaced with reserve officers and soldiers whose patriotism to the empire was not conditioned by a career of service in the army. Only after the Germans joined their allies in the GorliceTarnow offensive in May 1915 could the Austro-Hungarians push back the Russian line and recapture most of Galicia by September 1915. But the following year, under the command of General Alexei Brusilov, the Russians launched a counter- offensive to occupy most of eastern Galicia and all of Bukowina and led to Germany taking control over the AustroHungarian command for the remainder of the war.5 On the Italian front, stretching along the Isonzo river, the AustroHungarians managed to hold off the Italians in a series of 11 battles from May 1915 to September 1917, but the near- collapse of the AustroHungarians after the 11th battle, which reached the outskirts of Trieste, compelled the German army to come to its ally’s rescue once again. The Battle of Caporetto, the 12th and final of the Isonzo battles, resulted in humiliating defeat for the Italians in October 1917.6 But there was a fourth front in Austria-Hungary’s war, fought not against enemy invaders but against its own civilian population. Immediately after war broke out, the Austro-Hungarian War Ministry and the Austrian Interior Ministry implemented a programme of forced migration and internment of civilians to expedite the total evacuation of the war zone. Above all, the military and civilian authorities targeted the Ruthenian population in Galicia and Bukowina, as well as the entire Serb-speaking population in Bosnia, and later Italian-speaking South Tyroleans. Serb and Italian nationals deported from areas occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops were also interned, but as enemy aliens rather than as civilian internees.7 Jewish civilians from Galicia did not need rounding up, fleeing the Russian invasion for fear of pogrom attacks.8 The distinction between refugees and civilian internees was anyhow

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blurred, since a person might be interned at the start of the war and later end up in a refugee camp, or a refugee might be transferred to an internment camp if she or he was deemed to be a threat to the public order.9 Not until 1917 was there an attempt retrospectively to define all displaced people − internees or otherwise − as war refugees. The first wave of refugees followed in the wake of the Russian occupation of Galicia in September 1914. The second wave in late November came from areas surrounding Cracow and included returning Galician seasonal agricultural labourers from Germany who had been caught in the Russian offensive.10 The process of repatriating refugees began in July 1915 after the successful Gorlice-Tarnow offensive led to Austrian reconquests in Galicia, but the repatriation efforts there were complicated by the arrival of another wave of refugees from the Italian front in September. A small trickle of refugees from the Eastern front followed the Brusilov offensive in early 1916, small only because the rest of the civilian population from the region were either still in refugee camps or held up in the slow repatriation process. But from the end of 1916 to 1918 the numbers of refugees steadily reduced as repatriation efforts intensified.11 War refugees were civilian casualties of the war at the mercy of military commanders and strategies: forced to flee the front only to be interned like prisoners in the hinterlands, they were treated as aliens from the beginning to the end of the war despite their legal status as citizens of the multinational state.

Classifying refugees Exact or even approximate numbers of refugees are notoriously difficult to quantify, not only in the Austro-Hungarian case, but across the spectrum of European refugee movements in the twentieth century.12 In its first statistical report of the refugee situation published in October 1915, the Interior Ministry estimated that the total number of official refugees was 600,000, although that figure excluded refugees in Hungary and those not registered for state welfare.13 A further 300,000 to 400,000 ‘unofficial’ refugees were estimated to be living off their own means. But even the combined figure of just fewer than 1 million still excludes refugees who had not been evacuated from the war zones or had avoided registration for fear that they would be interned in a camp. These refugees living between the margins of state welfare and community networks in the cities do not appear in any data, though their numbers probably push the overall figure of displaced civilians to more than one and a half million, particularly when we include those

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who fell into the blurred category of civilian internee.14 A report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace investigating the economic and social history of the war in Austria-Hungary showed that the number of refugees eligible for state support in 1917 had risen to 760,000 (not including returnees). The report found the increase from 600,000 in 1915 was due to two factors: first, the numbers applying for state support increased with the duration of the war as refugees were no longer able to fend for themselves; and second, refugees who had found work in the cities did not always return home.15 The perception that refugees held off registering with the authorities and lived off the generosity of private charities or worked on the black market until they ran out of means to support themselves and were forced onto the government welfare system when the state could no longer afford to help anyone created a wartime stereotype of refugees as a double burden on society – as freeloaders and as foreigners taking the apartments and food of ‘native’ Austrians – that persisted into the interwar period.16 The 1930 Carnegie report, written by an Austrian statistician, Wilhelm Winkler, merely sanitized this stereotype for the international humanitarian and diplomatic community. The real problem of counting refugees in Austria-Hungary was that the authorities had devised a rigid system to classify them according to nationality, confession and economic status. In a memorandum dated 6 September 1914, four days after the fall of the Galician capital, the Austrian Interior Ministry circulated instructions to provincial and police authorities setting out the criteria for sorting and classifying refugees at multiple points during the journey: at the evacuation station, at interval stations between the front and the hinterland − the so- called Perlustrierungsstationen − and on arrival in the camps or village where they were to be accommodated. Refugees deemed to be without means (mittelos) were selected for transport to camps, while those who were bemittelt − having sufficient means to support themselves − were sent to Vienna, Prague and other larger cities in the Austrian half of the monarchy.17 The memorandum listed factors such as the number of accompanying family members, profession and general ‘earning capacity’ (Verdienstvermöglichkeit) for determining a refugee’s economic status, suggesting an approximate amount of 200 crowns as a guideline for classifying refugees as bemittelt, but the decision was to be made on a case-by- case basis. Refugees registered as mittelos were then sorted by nationality and confession: ‘Ruthenes’ were to be sent to camps in Carinthia, ‘Poles’ to Bohemia and Carniola, and refugees of ‘Mosaic confession’ to Moravia.18 But there were no criteria for determining

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nationality and the memorandum assumed that authorities were familiar with bureaucratic practices of assigning a nationality to imperial subjects.19 In the absence of school certificates, birth certificates and proof of involvement in confessional or national associations, as was the practice before the war in legal and political disputes over the national belonging of local populations, such ‘objective’ criteria as mother tongue and everyday use of language had to be determined in haste, a desperate word spoken or cried by the refugees.20 No consideration could be given to whether the family were Polish- or Yiddish-speaking Jews, nor to the multilingualism of the children of a Ukrainian-speaking Catholic married to a German-speaking Catholic. Once a category was assigned, the main objective was to keep the refugees in their designated groups, telegraph ahead to the central transport authorities to report the numbers and categories on board each transport, and ensure the refugees arrived as counted and classified in the camps and villages where they were to stay.21 In reality, collecting objective data from refugees was a futile exercise, as the primary goal was to maintain the efficiency and credibility of the military and administrative operation. If a mittelose refugee turned up in Vienna, the porosity of the registration system was blamed. Or when a transport of 2,000 refugees from Galicia arrived in a town in Moravia with only 200 refugees on board in mid-September 1914, the military and civilian authorities were criticized for letting the refugees escape.22 Journeys could take up to several weeks as trains were left standing at the border and refugees froze, starved and sickened in appalling conditions in open cattle wagons crowded with up to 30 people to a wagon, along with their possessions and a few animals in some cases. Some refugees tried to escape while the trains were moving, prompting police to use violence, and eventually soldiers were recruited to patrol the platforms at the interval stations between the front and the hinterland. In addition to physically menacing the refugees, soldiers and police made elaborate shows of punishing the refugees for deserting the front, in some cases assaulting them, but more often by refusing them food or water along the journey and locking them in trains at the stations to prevent them escaping or trying to find nourishment for infants.23 Functionaries of the Interior Ministry, who assumed responsibility for the refugees once they were in the camps, also disregarded the refugees’ individual identities and concerns. In December 1915, the former Austrian prime minister, Baron Max von Beck, visited the Gmünd refugee camp in Lower Austria and reported back to the Interior Ministry that Croatian and Italian-speaking refugees declared their nationality

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to be Polish because they believed (falsely in his view) that the camp had been built for the Polish-speakers from Galicia and they would be treated better as Poles than as Italians or Croats.24 The camp in Gmünd had in fact been designated in November 1914 for Ukrainian-speaking Catholics from Galicia and Bukowina, but Slovenes and Croats were also included in the figures for Gmünd in the Interior Ministry’s official report in October 1915.25 The baron’s sweeping observations about the nationalities of the refugees, who may well have been Slovenianspeakers with Italian or Croatian linguistic abilities, and his ignorance of the Ukrainian-speakers in the camp, highlights the rigidity of the authorities’ classification system, rather than any deliberate subversion of that system by the refugees. Moreover, when it came to confession, authorities tended to overlook national differences if the refugees could be classified as protestant ‘Germans’ rather than as Catholics with multinational loyalties. This pattern can be observed in the activities of the Welfare Committee for German Refugees from Galicia and Bukowina, which had been receiving funds from Germany since the end of 1914. 26 A report from the committee to the Interior Ministry in August 1916 included an index of the German-speaking refugees from eastern Galicia, listing them in family groups with their confession marked according to the town or district they came from. Karoline Witowska from Mariahilf in Galicia with her five children was listed as ‘German- Catholic’, despite her Polish surname, while Maria Bilinska from Baginsberg and her two children were ‘German-Protestant’, although her Polish surname and her maiden name of Skoczdopole might also have indicated a Catholic background. Julie Freier from Czernowitz was similarly ‘German-Protestant’, but Julie was also a common name for German-speaking Jewish women. 27 All of the refugees except those from Mariahilf were listed as ‘German-Protestant’. My own assumptions about the refugees’ possible confessional and national backgrounds are not intended to contradict the official classifications, but rather to show where classifications of entire families and townships created national and confessional identities out of non-national and perhaps bi- confessional (or even non- confessional) German-speakers, who may have hidden their Ukrainian or Polish linguistic roots in the hope of preferential treatment by the authorities, just as their co-linguists often did when they joined the army. 28 The report was signed ‘with German greetings’, indicating that if the refugees did wish to be identified as Germans, and German Protestants as distinct from Catholics, then they already had the support of the committee

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members who sought to assist the refugees from eastern Galicia by first claiming them as their own.

Rescuing refugees The process of classifying refugees according to nationality, religion and class was one aspect of wartime refugee politics in Austria-Hungary. Another aspect was the efforts of civil society groups, newspapers in particular, to represent refugees to a reading public in various shades of sympathy, curiosity and recoil. Newspapers depicted the refugees as homeless citizens, who had suffered much, but whose identification with the empire depended on their being rescued by their fellow German-speaking citizens. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Galicia and Bukowina in August 1914, the liberal Neue Freie Presse urged its readers to stand alongside their ‘fellow citizens’ who had escaped the war zones and sought refuge in Vienna, declaring that ‘those who fled the perils of war suffer in the interests of the whole, and it is the duty of the whole to help them’. Combining an unswerving loyalty to the empire with the rhetoric of transcendence over nationality, confession and class, the newspaper reiterated what was to become its wartime mantra: ‘Let that same solidarity towards all people, of all confessions, of all classes ... find expression in everyday acts for your fellow citizens who were forced to flee westwards from the enemy.’ ‘It is our duty’, the newspaper continued, to show ‘the thousands of refugees [who] are without a roof’ that ‘all of Austria-Hungary’s citizens have a home wherever Habsburg sceptres rule’.29 An editorial on 22 November 1914 described the refugees as the staunchest of the empire’s citizens, whose loss of home, possessions and family members was the ‘costliest sacrifice that love for one’s fatherland could bring’. Not only had they paid the ultimate price, the newspaper explained, but more importantly, ‘the heart of these people remained free of treason. They do not kiss the stick that beats them, they want to be Austrians, Austrians at every price’.30 The editors’ rhetoric of solidarity did not mask their view that the loyalty of these Austrian citizens was dependent on the state and public assistance to them in their hour of need. Unlike war widows, orphans and the war wounded, refugees belonged to a separate category of war victims: the empire did not share the refugees’ losses, and recompense for refugees was seen as a duty, rather than a collective act of empathy and reciprocity. The more sympathetic accounts of refugees in the socialist ArbeiterZeitung included another variation on the theme of rescue. An article

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on 15 October 1914 depicted the flight of refugees in an unnamed town ‘on the eastern border’: A woman drags herself along. A child in one arm, a heavy parcel in the other. It holds everything she could possibly take with her; two more children hang onto her skirt. One child falls to the ground. The mother places the parcel on the ground, leans it against her leg, helps her child up with her right hand, grasps the parcel again, cheers the little ones up with kind words and puffs along further. Her husband is in the war. Two little girls lead their elderly grandfather to the train station. Another grandfather, supported by a walking stick, carries his grandchild in one arm. Nearly limping, he continues on his way. Three elderly women, one very frail in the middle, move forward with great difficulty. One woman cries, another groans over and over, ‘God, oh God, God, oh God!’ Rather than the journalist interpreting this scene as evidence of familial and community self-help networks amongst the refugees, the article went on to describe the chaotic scene at the railway station that required the intervention of soldiers to bring under control. In the huddle of people trying to keep warm, children crying and women praying, a person shouted that the train was coming, but someone else misinterpreted it and shouted that the Russians were coming. Panic erupted, people tripped over each other to get outside, women passed their children through the windows, and ‘piles of wriggling and screaming people’ lay on the floor, before the soldiers finally calmed the people down. The article ended with reference to the valiant troops fighting against the Russians and the sight of a few Russian prisoners of war arriving at the train station. In this account the refugees became part of the landscape of war itself: embodying a physical, emotional and spiritual battle to survive, their plight in a distant frontier town served to highlight the heroics of the soldiers winning battles on the eastern front. The war also presented an opportunity to lift the empire’s displaced nationalities out of their impoverished circumstances so that they would return to their homelands after the war with minds, bodies and souls improved as a result of the help they received. The refugees were to be civilized as citizens of the empire, and newspapers and journalists became agents of this wartime civilizing mission. In carrying out such a momentous task, journalists visited the refugee camps on reconnaissance missions from their newspapers, becoming privy to the deprivation of

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the refugees and spokesmen for a noble cause of rescuing these victims of the war and elevating them to a higher social standing. The Neue Freie Presse’s Emil Kläger exemplified the role of war correspondents in the civilizing mission to refugees. In February 1915, the Neue Freie Presse sent Kläger to two refugee camps in Moravia, one in Nikolsburg and the other in Pohrlitz. Kläger discovered that the 4,000 or so refugees housed in the camp at Nikolsburg were living in damp barracks and a recent measles epidemic had claimed many lives amongst the children in the camp. The hospital barracks were still under construction. In Pohrlitz, the conditions were a lot better. There was a fully equipped and operational hospital, a school, meat was served five times a week and the living quarters of the refugees were clean and dry. Kläger also reported his conversations with camp authorities and the governor of Moravia, who had personally assured Kläger that immediate provisions would be made to improve the conditions in the camps.31 A month and a half later, the newspaper reported that the Interior Ministry had kept its word and published a directive from the Ministry that mentioned Kläger’s article in the Neue Freie Presse.32 On a similar mission for the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung in August 1915, Max Winter visited the brickwork factory in Wilhelmsburg in Lower Austria, where some 400 Italian refugees from Görz were being temporarily housed. On his arrival, Winter talked to camp officials and the refugees to gain an accurate picture of the camp conditions. Winter discovered that the refugees in Wilhelmsburg received very little food, had no water supply, and no soap, blankets or sheets. He made a recommendation in his report for the Arbeiter-Zeitung that the district authorities buy bulk quantities of food for every camp under their jurisdiction in order to maximize the 70 heller budget per refugee per day set by the Interior Ministry. Before departing the camp, Winter met a woman who had just had a baby and gave her a penny for the baby’s baptismal gift.33 In his conversations with different refugees, noting down their stories and their requests for help, his attempts to reassure them that things would improve and in his final gesture of goodwill to a new mother, Winter personified the journalist as mediator of the state’s efforts to rescue the refugees and provide short-term as well as longer-term provisions for their eventual return home. In response to the earlier critical press coverage of the refugee camps, the Interior Ministry invited a delegation of journalists to tour the camp facilities in Gmünd in September 1915. They were reassured that the refugees were well fed and cared for, learning basic hygiene skills, and the children were learning German as the handwritten signs hanging

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on the classroom walls showed.34 One enthusiastic journalist from an Austrian weekly magazine recommended readers organize mass excursions to the camp not to visit the refugees, but rather to marvel at the modern achievement of a ‘German-administered city in America’. The rapid expansion of the small village of Gmünd into a town of 30,000 inhabitants showed to the world that ‘the winds of New-Austria are blowing in New- Gmünd’.35 Since a family excursion to the refugee camps was in fact prohibited by the authorities’ strict segregation of refugees from other civilians, the Interior Ministry sponsored a special exhibition in Vienna to showcase the refugee relief work to a larger audience. On display were graphs and charts documenting the contributions of the government, business, labour, charitable organizations and private financial donations to the refugee work over the 16-month period of war, as well as photographs of the refugees in the camps, drawings of the camp layouts and model replicas of the camp barracks. One of the highlights of the exhibition was a collection of the embroidery, woodwork, and artefacts made by the refugees in the workshops and sewing rooms in the camps. Boots made out of straw for the soldiers on the front and handmade dolls in traditional costume that could be purchased as Christmas gifts by visitors of the exhibition showed that refugee work could be useful for the war effort and stimulate a sluggish war economy. In its report on the exhibition, the Neue Freie Presse lauded this aspect of the refugee welfare programme as ‘a meticulously thought- out system of remuneration’ by which ‘the poor, temporarily homeless are not simply housed and sustained by the state, and the children provided with education, but also that the noble cultural mission is accomplished through their return home with broadened horizons and education and an increased capacity to work’.36 Max Winter from the Arbeiter-Zeitung was also at the opening of the exhibition and was struck by the artistic value of the handmade items on display and especially their practical use in war. He marvelled at a farmer’s cart designed and built by Polish refugees in Bohemia along with the 40 replicas that had been sent back daily to Galicia to help with the rebuilding of the land. Winter ended his report by reflecting on what the refugees’ handiwork revealed about the war itself: When one sees the amount of pieces of work, some of them crafted with extraordinary skill, one is reminded anew that it is the war that has brought all this ability and all these skills of humankind to our attention for the first time. In peacetime we knew so little of these

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things, in peacetime these people of the borderlands could hardly come near us with their talents. The greater the thought becomes, the more painfully it touches us that all these peacetime products of art have to be shown to us in an exhibition called: War Aid.37 Winter’s comment that the ‘people of the borderlands’ had finally come to occupy a place of recognition by people like himself reveals the broad support for the government’s civilizing mission. Winter was critical of other aspects of the state’s refugee assistance, in particular the meagre daily allowances for refugees in the camps, and he pointed out statistical inaccuracies in the Interior Ministry’s attempt to show a higher rate of repatriation and a lower incidence of disease and mortality in the camps. But, like the correspondent from the Neue Freie Presse, he found merit in the combination of artistry and utility in the vocational training programmes for refugees and linked the cultural output of the refugees with the larger war effort. Humanitarianism went hand in hand with state building not only during the course of the war, but also in its aftermath of building the successor states. Francesca Wilson, a Friends’ Relief worker who worked with refugees across Europe and North Africa during the First World War, spent three years at the Friends’ Austrian headquarters in Vienna between 1919 and 1922 assisting the relief work amongst orphans and malnourished children in post-war Austria alongside other international agencies, including the Hoover Relief Fund and the American Red Cross. As part of her mission, Wilson set up an Arts and Crafts Department in Styria and Graz to sell the embroidered handiwork of local Austrian women in England. She also visited the art schools set up by Franz Čizek after the war and selected some of the artwork to be reproduced as postcards and lithographs that were sold at exhibitions in England to raise money for the Austrian children. Wilson was particularly taken with the religious motifs of the children’s artwork and she wrote to her sister in England that ‘it was interesting to see how like the primitives were the results’.38 While humanitarian organizations like the Friends cannot be equated with wartime interior ministries of state governments, the parallels between their work is striking, nonetheless, for what they reveal about displacement as a process of rebuilding and improving the lives of previously ‘primitive’ people on the margins of society. Liberal and socialist, religious and humanitarian voices, all asserted the value of the displaced for rebuilding states and citizens, but it was the displacement brought about by war that triggered these projects in the first place. Until the refugees arrived in the hinterlands

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of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no one gave a thought to the place of the ‘people of the borderlands’ in the empire, except to categorize their nationality, confession and living standard. Once they were displaced and under the care of the state, the provision of welfare to refugees could serve the interests of the state itself.

Nationalist activism The civilizing mission of the state and its agents was entangled with the nationalizing mission of activists who saw the refugees as fodder for their own nationalist goals. The state lent legitimacy to these nationalist projects, first by creating national categories for the displaced, and second by incorporating the various national committees for refugees within the larger state welfare programmes. We have already seen the efforts of the committee members on behalf of the ‘German refugees’ of eastern Galicia. The majority of charitable groups assisting refugees were organized along national and confessional lines with the exception of a few, such as the Styrian Provincial Committee for the Refugees from Galicia and Bukowina, whose members included a socialist editor, the wife of the former German-nationalist mayor of Graz, Jewish representatives from the Israelite Cultural Association (IKG) and a Catholic university professor.39 The nationalization of refugee politics shifted into a higher key with the formation of the Refugee Committee on 26 June 1917. The committee’s first task was to draft a refugee law that would define the legal status of a refugee and thereby do away with previous distinctions between official (mitellose) and unofficial (bemittelt) refugees. The law was also intended to abolish the system of internment in camps and eventually turn over refugee welfare from the state to municipal authorities.40 Throughout the summer of 1917, committee members continued to propose reforms and passed resolutions to prioritize the repatriation of refugees to rural areas by the end of September, standardize the duration of support for refugees from towns, ensure repatriated refugees had the protection of military authorities in areas still under military occupation, and ensure each refugee received two months’ support upon return.41 The men who sat on the Refugee Committee were seasoned politicians who had continued their nationalist activism during the war in the absence of a parliament. Count Sigismund Lasocki, member of the Polish Club, the Galician parliament (diet) and the imperial parliament in Vienna (Reichsrat), had been particularly outspoken about the

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Interior Ministry’s exhibition on the refugee work. In a report addressed to the Galician diet and forwarded to the Interior Ministry in February 1916, Lasocki accused the Interior Ministry of falsifying mortality rates in the camps and exaggerating the numbers of returnees and refugees receiving state benefits. Despite the exhibition having been ‘skilfully and tastefully put together’, he regarded it as largely meaningless from the point of view of the refugee work.42 After the war, Lasocki wrote a book about the refugee camps and published it in Cracow in 1929.43 The creation of a parliamentary committee for refugees was thus not a departure from pre-war and wartime activism, but it did provide a platform for Polish and other nationalists in the empire to claim the newly displaced for their political projects of self-rule in the multinational state. For Lasocki and his fellow members of the Polish Club in Vienna, on the one hand, the Refugee Committee became a vehicle for rebuilding Galicia under Polish rule following the so- called ‘Two Emperor Declaration’ in November 1916 that sought to establish an autonomous Polish kingdom under German and Austrian tutelage. The plan had the support of the new Emperor Karl, who wished to be the monarch of a Polish kingdom, as he already was for Hungary, but Germany rejected the proposal for Polish self-rule in Austria following the Treaty of Bucharest in 1917, installed a military governor and made German the official language of the administration. On the other hand, the Ukrainian deputies, who were fighting a double battle against the Polish deputies in Galicia and the Austrian authorities in Vienna, saw the Refugee Committee as a platform for heroicizing the suffering of the Ruthenian population and agitating for an autonomous Ukrainian province of East Galicia.44 In the opening sentence of a bill to increase the daily allowance for refugees on 12 June 1917, two weeks before the official formation of the Refugee Committee, the Ukrainian deputies Wassilkó and Łukaszewicz declared: ‘Of all the peoples of our glorious monarchy, the Ukrainians, whose territory has been a direct theatre of war now for three full years, have borne the greatest sacrifice for the fatherland.’45 That there was also a story of Jewish suffering in the war was a concern neither of the Polish nor of the Ukrainian deputies, despite the efforts of Jewish politicians like Henryk Reizes, who also signed Wassilkó and Łukaszewicz’s bill, to draw attention to that story in the parliament.46 Following the fatal shooting by a soldier of a young boy in the Wagna refugee camp in Styria on 4 October 1917, the Refugee Committee sent a delegation to Wagna to interview refugees and camp officials. At that point in the war the camp housed mainly refugees from the Isonzo

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front, so the committee sent a delegation composed of three Italianspeaking deputies, Bugatto, Degasperi and Pittoni, the provincial governor of Gorizia/Gorica/Görz, Monsignor Luigi Faidutti, and two other members of the Refugee Committee, Fon and Hruška. On arrival at the camp, the delegates attended the boy’s funeral and burial in the camp cemetery and placed a wreath on the coffin. They met the mother of the dead boy the following day and discovered that the family had originally come from Dalmatia, but had been living in the Isonzo region when they had been evacuated. The boy’s father and his four brothers were all fighting in the war.47 In their report to the parliament on 9 October 1917, the deputies recommended that a military court investigate the shooting, that the soldier in question be immediately suspended from his duties in the camp, and that the Wagna camp administration be restructured and turned over to those who spoke the language of the refugees and knew their customs and traditions, in accordance with Paragraph 4 of the refugee law that the committee had drafted in July. The deputies who visited Wagna also expressed deep regret that the law had still not reached the upper house of the parliament.48 The Arbeiter-Zeitung reported long sections of the three-hour debate in the lower house of representatives during which the members of the Wagna delegation openly denounced the system of internment, the policies of the military and civilian authorities to treat the refugees as ‘dangerous elements’ instead of fellow citizens, and the refugees’ daily living conditions that had not improved since the Refugee Committee had made its first demands in June. Pittoni was enraged, describing the camps as ‘fenced in prison camps’ patrolled by police of every rank who did not even speak the language of the refugees.49 Pittoni’s emotional outbursts in the parliament had previously been noted by the Neue Freie Presse, which had reported his loss of composure when describing the refugees’ living conditions in the camps. Pounding his fist on the table, the normally reserved deputy who had witnessed many battles in parliament in his long political career, spoke bitterly against the government and then, as suddenly as his outburst had began, sank silently back in his seat as other deputies leapt up to speak.50 Degasperi accused authorities of treating both the Slovenian and Italian refugees as political prisoners, deliberately placing them under a ‘foreign’ administration and welfare system so that they could not be understood by the camp’s medical staff in the camp hospital. Finally, Bugatto claimed that the refugees from Fiuli were amongst the most loyal of the empire’s subjects, but when shouts of ‘Abbasso Tedesci! (Down with

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the Germans!)’ could be heard in Wagna, the government needed to heed this dire warning.51 Thus, although it had been the Interior Ministry that had first sought to classify the refugees by nationality and confession and intern them in their constituent groups in the camps, it was the members of the Refugee Committee, ostensibly acting on the refugees’ behalf, who now sought to nationalize the camps and their inhabitants. Would a Slovenian or Italian monument be erected in Wagna in memory of 11year- old Antonio Pucli from Dalmatia, whose death at the hands of an Austrian soldier had prompted the swift intervention of the Slovenian and Italian deputies? Would the camp administration have equal representation of Slovenian- and Italian-speaking officials, teachers and priests to care for the refugees in the handover from state to municipal authorities? When the new refugee law took effect from 31 December 1917, refugee policy not only underwent a shift in the legal definition of who was eligible for state support, but also in the shift from state to local administration of the refugee camps, rendering the displaced vulnerable both to local hostilities and to national projects of liberation in the empire.

The 1917 refugee law The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) defined refugees in 1951 by a generic category of displacement − a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ − as opposed to the specific national categories of displacement that its predecessor, the League of Nations, had applied to refugees from Russia and Armenia following the collapse of the Tsarist and Ottoman empires. In Michael Marrus’ words, the UNHCR definition was ‘a startling innovation’.52 But an even earlier innovation in refugee policy took place before the end of the First World War through the agency of a multinational state, not an international body. The 1917 refugee law in Austria-Hungary did not lead to permanent legal protection for the empire’s displaced citizens, nor did it govern every case of repatriation and relief for the refugees whose homecoming and reintegration in society was abruptly interrupted by the confusion of revolution and imperial collapse in 1918. Yet the 1917 definition of war refugees as ‘persons who left their permanent place of residence or are unable to return home’ owing either to the authorities’ wishes or their own wish to flee the immediate threat of war, was startling in its departure from the military and administrative practices of classifying displaced persons on the basis of class,

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nationality and confession, and of interning them for social, cultural and political reasons.53 The Refugee Committee’s definition of unbemittelt in the 1917 law was also a departure from the previous distinction between mittelos and bemittelt. Whereas the Interior Ministry had previously drawn an arbitrary line between those who had some money and possessions and did not pose a public threat to society on the one hand, and those who were unable to support themselves and were, therefore, a burden on society unless they were interned and put to useful work inside a camp on the other, the Refugee Committee defined war refugees as all displaced persons in need of state support if they could not provide for themselves or their families.54 Paragraph 9 of the law attracted the most heated debate by members of the parliament because it called for a retrospective cash payment to all refugees who fell under the new definition but had been cut off from state benefits under the Interior Ministry’s earlier practice.55 After several revisions, the upper house passed an amendment in January 1918 allowing refugees to backdate their daily allowance at the rate of 1 crown per day per refugee for up to 16.5 months, or 500 crowns, to compensate for the period of displacement without state support.56 This amendment applied to those refugees who had stayed in the war zone and been evacuated at a later stage of the war, but had in the meantime lost possessions and income. What is important is not that the law had limited effect in the short space of time it was in place, falling under a pile of ‘wastepaper’ after the empire’s collapse in October 1918 in the words of one historian.57 More significant were the continuities between the state’s refugee policy in the last year of the war and the policies of the successor states in the wake of imperial collapse. First, the increased repatriation efforts of state authorities from 1917 intensified after October 1918, resulting in the ‘wild’ repatriations by local authorities in each of the successor states. In the new Czechoslovakian state, refugees were given their notice and date of departure; in one town in Bohemia refugees were given three days’ notice to leave.58 Refugee camps were turned over to local Czech authorities to be used for housing and schooling Czechspeaking orphans, or orphans of mixed parentage whom the authorities wanted to reclaim for the Czech fatherland.59 The transports of refugees from camps and towns in the hinterlands of the empire were accompanied by plundering and looting of their possessions, not just by locals but also by members of the soldiers and workers councils, who took the clothes and food from Jewish orphans in the camp at Nikolsburg in Moravia.60 Czechoslovak leaders later tried to authorize

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the repatriations by calling for quotas on minorities in Czechoslovakia: President Masaryk wanted to ensure national minorities everywhere would be ‘as small as possible’, while his foreign minister, Eduard Beneš, proposed to exchange Slovaks in Hungary for Hungarians in Slovakia in an effort to boost the overall majority of Czechs and Slovaks in the new state.61 This early experience with ‘wild’ transfers and population exchanges explains the policies after the Second World War and their positive reception by Allied leaders. Second, laws on citizenship in the successor states excluded wartime refugees on the grounds of nationality and confession in an inverse of the Interior Ministry’s classification system. Legislation on Austrian citizenship in the new Republic of German-Austria (the prefix ‘German’ was dropped following the Paris peace conference in 1919) was promulgated on 5 December 1918 and restricted citizenship to those whose legal residence (Heimatrecht) had been in the territory of the republic prior to August 1914. This meant that refugees from the empire’s borderlands who after 1918 found themselves on the territory of ‘GermanAustria’ were excluded from citizenship in Austria. The 1918 law directly affected the 70,000 Jewish refugees from Galicia who had remained in Vienna after the war but could not claim their place of domicile in the new Austrian state. A legal loophole for these refugees was introduced a year later under Article 80 of the Treaty of Saint- Germain. Under the terms of Article 80, citizens of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire could opt for citizenship in any successor state in which they identified ‘according to race and language’ with the majority of the state’s population. Article 80 was adopted into Austrian legal practice in August 1920 with the proviso that proof of one’s identification with the German language by way of graduation certificates from German primary, secondary or tertiary schools had to be shown in citizenship claims. But this was an exercise in vain for many Jewish refugees who had no such proof available and for whom retrieval of the necessary documents was next to impossible. Even if they had been able to prove their German language credentials, anti-Semitic bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry and federal administrative court could still reject applications for citizenship on the grounds of race instead of language.62 The continuities between the empire and its successor states can, therefore, be seen not only in legal practices of tying refugee claims during the war with citizenship claims after the war, but also in the administrative personnel who made the decisions on these claims. Significant also are the parallels between the refugee policies and practices of the multinational state and the international organizations that

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sought to replace the empire with new nation-states after the war. The League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, was appointed in 1920 to the task of finding homes and identities for the millions of displaced in Europe and Transcaucasia. The ‘Nansen passport’ is perhaps the best known initiative of this international refugee agency. It provided a legal identity for stateless people and was originally intended for Russian refugees, but expanded to include Armenians and, later, Polish Jews, Italian anti-fascists and a broad category of stateless people known as ‘Assyrian, Assyro- Chaldean and assimilated refugees’ from the former Tsarist and Ottoman empires. Countries were not obliged to accept refugees holding a Nansen passport, but they could grant access through the country and permit return to the country in which the document had been issued. In addition, the League High Commission became the consular representative for the Nansen refugees abroad by validating their identity and status under international law.63 The Refugee Committee in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was nothing of the scale of Nansen’s international agency, but its attempts to define and govern refugee status, support and return within the boundaries of the multinational state were, nonetheless, important precursors to the international efforts after the war. In comparison to the international crisis created by the mass displacement of Armenian and Russian refugees, Central Europe was able to manage its refugee populations, thanks first to the Austro-Hungarian authorities’ system of classification, internment and repatriation, and second to the successor states who took over the system and turned war refugees into a nation building exercise. Indeed, when the Czechoslovak government approached Nansen with a proposal for a vocational training programme to assist refugees to return to Russia with skills to rebuild the country, Nansen gave his approval for the scheme.64 The Czech proposal mirrored the Austrian Interior Ministry’s earlier scheme for refugees from Galicia and Bukowina, and may well have been the brainchild of those same civil servants who had supervised the scheme in the camps in Bohemia and Moravia and were now working for the Czechoslovakian government. There are other parallels between Central European efficiency and the decisive action of Nansen’s agency after the war. Together with his deputy commissioner, Vidkun Quisling, Nansen insisted that the League’s refugee assistance scheme and the famine relief in the Ukraine, for which his agency also took responsibility, was a necessary humanitarian and political effort to stave off radicalism and prevent further flows of refugee populations across Europe. Moreover, the long-term benefit of this assistance to the displaced and starving was

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to raise ‘by the distribution and resettlement of industrious and highly educated refugees, the standards of civilization in various parts of the globe’.65 This international civilizing mission to the displaced across state boundaries followed and bore some resemblance to the civilizing mission of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire within its own borders, as we saw also in the efforts of Friends’ humanitarian workers after the war. Therefore, not only in legal definitions and classification systems, but also in the practices of claiming the displaced for larger political, cultural and social projects, empires, nation-states and international humanitarianism, all acted on behalf of refugees in ways that defined and reinforced their own legitimacy, reducing refugees to passive, infantilized subjects seemingly incapable of developing the kinds of self-help initiatives that non- displaced groups had done.66

Conclusion Peter Gatrell has argued that the state and public efforts to assist wartime refugees in Russia along national and confessional lines shaped the successor state nationalism in the independent Baltic States after the war. ‘Refugeedom’, a term describing both the self-help initiatives as well as the ethnic stereotypes and discourses created by wartime encounters with refugees, was, thus, the precursor to nation building after the war.67 This was true in Austria-Hungary, as well. Just as wartime refugees were classified and counted as discrete populations within the multinational empire, so, too, minorities in the successor states were subject to quota restrictions, and hostile groups called for their expulsion or ‘exchange’ with other minority populations. Refugees were treated as second- class citizens, ‘unreliable’ nationalities who needed to be interned, re- educated and civilized to turn them into loyal subjects of the empire. Minorities were also treated as second- class citizens, if they were granted citizenship at all. Almost overnight authorities in the successor states moved to deport minorities with the wrong linguistic or ethnic credentials, or to claim and retrain those who could be classified as having the right credentials. In Czechoslovakia, children of mixed German and Czech parentage were placed in former refugee camps that were turned into Czech patriot schools, and in ‘German Austria’, Galician Jewish refugees were liable for deportation if they could not produce school certificates to prove they had attended German-speaking schools. Those who had previously tried to assimilate as Polish-speakers and had declared Polish as their everyday language in pre-war censuses had no prospect of being naturalized in the new

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Austrian state. The ‘new Austria’ that appeared to have dawned on the horizon of Austria-Hungary’s military barracks and bureaucratic innovation in wartime cast a deep shadow onto the interwar Austrian state and the fascist policies that targeted Jews and non- German minorities in the ‘Austrofascist’ period between 1933 and 1938.68 Gatrell’s approach to war and population displacement is novel not as much for showing the relationship between refugees and radical nationalism, which historians of anti-Semitism and Zionism have also done, as for the link he draws between the displacement of multinational empires and the legitimacy of post-imperial states.69 Wartime refugees in Austria-Hungary were symbols that served to reinforce the legitimacy of the multinational state, so long as that legitimacy was understood to be the role of the dominant German language and culture to integrate citizens on the margins of society. When the multinational project failed, collapsing in the face of military defeat, the integrative function of a dominant nationality was no longer a premise but a constitutional necessity to forge a new legitimacy in the successor states. This legitimizing function can be seen most clearly in the processes that brought refugees into contact with authorities. When a refugee went to the state welfare office to collect her payment and then picked up schoolbooks and second-hand shoes from a charitable house, that displaced citizen came into direct contact with the state and its agents of civil society. However, when those structures of state and public welfare were removed and refugees were forced out of the arms of the state and into those of local authorities acting not in the name of the state, but in the name of the national community, then the displaced were placed outside of state boundaries and outside of the new national boundaries that came to replace them. Only the international community acting on behalf of stateless individuals could intervene to rescue the refugees. Unlike in post-Tsarist Russia where the international community intervened to protect the welfare of displaced non-Russians (or non-Bolshevik Russians), no such international responsibility for Austria-Hungary’s refugees was assumed because the international community had already intervened on behalf of the empire’s successor states, thereby legitimizing their actions towards stateless people within the new state boundaries. Thus, we can observe a process that has occurred throughout the twentieth century that when the state is removed from the state-building process either through force or loss of legitimacy, nationalized discourses and behaviours assume new legitimacy where there is no alternative legitimizing role played by the international community.

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Notes 1. Walter Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania im Ersten Weltkrieg’ (Unpublished University of Vienna PhD thesis, 1997), p. 447. On the comparisons with other belligerent states, see Matthew Stibbe, ‘Introduction: Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration during the First World War,’ Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 26 (2008), pp. 1–2. 2. Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999). 3. In addition to Gatrell, see also Josh Sanborn, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 77 (2005), pp. 290–324. The recent comparative volumes on population displacement and forced migration and captivity in Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 4 (2007), and Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 26, no. 1 (2008), respectively, show that wartime displacement is increasingly becoming an important theme in new scholarship on World War One. 4. Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,’ American Historical Review, vol. 113 (2008), pp. 1313–43 (quote is on pp. 1323–5). On German subjugation or ‘tutelage’ of nonGermans in German- occupied Baltic territory, see Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000). 5. Rudolf Jeřábek, ‘The Eastern Front’, in Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth Century Europe, Revised and Expanded Edition (Exeter, 2002), pp. 149–65. See also Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of the First World War (Basingstoke, 2005), Map 8: The War between Austria-Hungary and Russia. 6. See Map 20: The Italians on the Isonzo, 1915–17 in The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas. 7. Matthew Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–20’, Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 26 (2008), pp. 61–4. 8. David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford, 2001), pp. 69–71. 9. Threats to public order were defined loosely and changed constantly throughout the war. Refugees could be interned if they had an infectious disease, were refused residency in a town, sold goods on the black market or complained about the quality of food in the refugee camps. See Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 305–8. 10. Katharina Stampler, ‘Flüchtlingswesen in der Steiermark 1914–1918’, (unpublished University of Graz Ph.D thesis, 2004), pp. 20, 23. 11. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 5–6. 12. Michael Marrus has pointed out that the complete statistical data on refugees is impossible to obtain since refugees were excluded from census counts and the definition of who was a refugee varied in every country. See Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985), pp. 12–13.

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124 Julie Thorpe 13. Hungary was providing provisional accommodation for more than 30,000 refugees by mid-1915, at Austria’s expense. See Rechter, Jews of Vienna, pp. 80–1, and also Beatrix Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914 bis 1923 (Vienna, 1995), p. 34. 14. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 5–6. The estimate of 1.5–2 million is given by Mentzel in his conclusion. 15. Wilhelm Winkler, Die Einkommensverschiebungen in Österreich während des Weltkrieges (Vienna, 1930), pp. 25–6. 16. On wartime and post-waranti- Semitic stereotypes, see Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’ and Bruce Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992). 17. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 248. Austrian authorities also made a similar distinction for enemy aliens between Internierte − those interned who were sent regular food parcels from the Red Cross − and Konfinierte, who were able to support themselves at least at the beginning of their period of confinement in specially designated villages and towns. See Stibbe, ‘Civilian Internment’, p. 58. 18. Österreichische Staatsarchiv (ÖstA)/Allgemeine Verwaltungsarchiv (AVA), Ministerium des Innern (MdI), Allgemein (Allg.), Sign. 19, Zl. 11,854 (in Zl. 38,756), 6.9.1914, Instruktion betreffend die Beförderung und Unterbringung von Flüchtlingen aus Galizien und der Bukowina. 19. Studies of the Bohemian Lands have shown how local bureaucracy, small town political elites, imperial demographers and nationalist organizations all sought to categorize and group the ‘non-national’ peoples in the multinational empire. See, for example, Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1981); Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ, 2003); Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006); and Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY, 2008). 20. For the definition of ‘objective’ criteria in nationality claims, see Gerald Stourzh, ‘Ethnic Attribution in Late Imperial Austria: Good Intentions, Evil Consequences’, in Edward Timms and Ritchie Robertson, eds, The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective (Edinburgh, 1994). 21. ÖstA/AVA, MdI, Allg., Sign. 19, Zl. 11,854, 6.9.1914. 22. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 237–8. 23. Ibid., pp. 238–40. 24. Hermann J. W. Kuprian, ‘ “Entheimatungen”: Flucht und Vertreibung in der Habsburgermonarchie während des Ersten Weltkrieges und ihre Konsequenzen’, in Kuprian and Oswald Überreger, eds, Der Erste Weltkriegim Alpenraum: Erfahrung, Deutung, Erinnerung (Innsbruck, 2006), p. 300. 25. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 267–8. 26. Stampler, ‘Flüchtlingswesen in der Steiermark 1914–1918’, p. 86. 27. ÖstA/AVA, MdI, Allg., Sign. 19, Zl. 39,231, 3.8.1916, Ankunft von Flüchtlingszügen. 28. This practice of concealing nationality led to inflated statistics of Germanspeaking officers and soldiers so that military figures do not accurately reflect the linguistic diversity of the multinational army. See Jeřábek, ‘The Eastern

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Front’, p. 151, citing the work of István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1992). Neue Freie Presse, 16 September 1914. Ibid., 22 November 1914. Ibid., 2 February 1915. Ibid., 21 March 1915. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 22 August 1915. Ibid., 22 September 1915. Österreichische Rundschau, vol. 45 (1915), cited in Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 331. Neue Freie Presse, 15 December 1915. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 15 December 1915. Francesca Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London, 1944). Ibid., p. 42. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 355. Wiener Zeitung, 5 September 1917. ÖStA/AVA, MdI, Allg., Sign. 19, Zl. 12,829, 9.3.1916, Bericht des Reichsratsabgeordneten Grafen Lasocki über die Flüchtlingsfürsorgeausstellung. See also Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 182. Walter Mentzel, ‘Weltkriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithanien 1914–1918’, in Gernot Heiss and Oliver Rathkolb, eds, Asylland Wider Willen: Flüchtlinge im europäischen Kontext seit 1914 (Vienna, 1995), p. 40[note 2]. Harald Binder, Galizien in Wien: Parteien, Wahlen, Fraktionen und Abgeordneteim Übergangzur Massenpolitik (Vienna, 1995), pp. 493, 503. Beilage 263 zu den stenographischen Protokollen des Abgeordnetenhauses, 22 Session, 12 June 1917. Binder, Galizien in Wien, p. 503. Neue Freie Presse, 8 October 1917. Beilage 650 zu den stenographischenProtokollen des Abgeordnetenhauses, 22 Session, 9 October 1917. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 10 October 1917. Neue Freie Presse, 6 July 1917. Arbeiter-Zeitung, 10 October 1917. Marrus, Unwanted, p. 356. The official German translation is: ‘Personen, welche, sei es infolge behördlicher Verfügung, sei es freiwillig infolge drohender unmittelbarer Kriegsgefahren ihren ständigen Aufenthaltsort verlassen oder in denselben nicht zurückkehren können.’ See Paragraph 1 of the Law for the Protection of War Refugees, Beilage 487 zu den stenographischen Protokollen des Abgeordnetenhauses, 22nd Session, 12 July 1917. Ibid. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 357. See Beilage 1087 zu den stenographischenProtokollen des Abgeordnetenhauses, 22nd Session, 1918. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, p. 359. Ibid., pp. 420–9. The former refugee camp in Moravská Třebová/Mährsich Trübau was used for this purpose, though the German residents of the town had also for a

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60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

time tried to turn the camp into a school for German children. See Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, pp. 111–12. Mentzel, ‘Kriegsflüchtlinge in Cisleithania’, pp. 426–7. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System’, p. 1335. For a discussion of the 1918 citizenship law and amendments under the Treaty of Saint- Germain, see Edward Timms, ‘Citizenship and “Heimatrecht” after the Treaty of Saint- Germain’, in Timms and Robertson, The Habsburg Legacy, pp. 160–1. On the effects of the legislation on Jewish refugees, see: Margarete Grandner, ‘Staatsbürger und Ausländer: Zum Ausgang Österreichs mit den jüdischen Flüchtlinge nach 1918’, in Heiss and Rathkolb, Asylland Wider Willen; and Hoffmann-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’, pp. 229–34. Marrus, Unwanted, pp. 94–5. Ibid., pp. 74, 90. Russian exile groups and the London Times’ editorship suspected Nansen of his Bolshevik sympathies for this retraining scheme. Ibid., p. 91. Gatrell, ‘Introduction: World Wars and Population Displacement in Europe in the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History, vol. 16 (2007), pp. 415–26. Interestingly, the debate about refugees as passive or capable of selfhelp initiatives mirrors the recent historiographical debates about Jewish responses to the Holocaust and the evidence of Jewish self-help networks that are only just starting to be written into the dichotomous accounts of victims and perpetrators. Gattrell, A Whole Empire Walking. See Anton Staudinger, ‘Austrofaschistische “Österreich”-Ideologie’, in Emmerich Tálos and Wolfgang Neugebauer, eds, ‘Austrofaschismus’: Politik−Ökonomie−Kultur 1933–1938, 5th edn (Vienna 2005), pp. 28–52. Amongst the studies of Jewish refugees and interwar politics in interwar Austria, for example, see Hoffman-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’ and Rechter, Jews of Vienna, which links Jewish refugee relief efforts to Jewish associational politics during and after the war.

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6 Integration without Assimilation in an Impermanent Landscape: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Arab Middle East Dawn Chatty

We came in carts – big carts – we didn’t stop. Eating and drinking were all done in the carts – all the way from Abkhasia to Sham [Syria]. What can I say? Death would have been much better. When a person dies, he is rested. But those grandfathers of ours suffered a lot, as no other people ever did. They came from Abkhasia in carts, as I told you, all the way through Turkey to the Jolan [Golan Heights]. In the Jolan, you know, it was like implanting a piece of wood in a member of your body. If a piece of wood were inserted in your arm, would your arm accept it? It has been continuous tragic mishaps and suffering. Then, just when we started to belong, to become rested, and as if to make things worse, the Jew took over and we were driven out [6 Day War, June, 1967]. We left the Jolan empty-handed with nothing but the clothes on our backs.1 Dispossession, dislocation and involuntary movement of populations in the Middle East have indelibly marked the region throughout the past 100 years. Arising as part of the outcome of the decline of empires, and carried further by the post–First World War colonial encounter, forced migration has come to be a defining feature of life in the twentyfirst- century Middle East. This chapter aims to identify and make sense of the numerous waves of involuntary migration from outside the Ottoman Empire as well as from within the heart of its former Arab provinces. It seeks to contextualize the experience of dispossession 127

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within the international and regional political arena of its time. Then, highlighting the individual experiences of forced migration within the dispossessed populations, it sets out to understand the mechanisms whereby new ‘communities’ have come into being, often without contiguous territorial bases. Understanding the context of such dispossession and forced migration permits us to grasp the social, political and environmental price which such upheaval demands. Although some groups of involuntary migrants have succeeded in physically assimilating and creating new identities as minorities (e.g. Armenian, Circassian and Chechnyan), others have been left stateless (Palestinian and Kurdish). Significant numbers left the region altogether, joining the ranks of diasporic refugees and émigrés resettled in Europe and North America. Those who remained have formed both real and imagined social communities; they remained largely cohesive and connected to their diasporic kin despite the often- deterritorialized nature of their ‘homeland’ and cultural ideology. These socio-historical experiences can enlighten contemporary policy which leaves twenty-first- century refugees neither integrated not assimilated but, rather, in a state of limbo. The narratives contribute to the debate in Europe regarding assimilation, as they clearly reveal a set of communities that are integrated in their new states of residence: but not assimilated. They exhibit a version of successful multiculturalism. Between 2005 and 2007, I set out to interview, where possible, the oldest surviving members of the social groups who had been forced into the Middle East over the last 100 years. Using research assistants in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt from the communities themselves, I set out to identify a representative sample of these elderly members of social communities which had made new homes, if not virtual homelands, in the last century. My sampling choices were more purposive than fully representative, as I needed to take into account age and gender as well as mental acuity. In a few cases, I had to cut short and discard interviews with participants who were unsure of the veracity of their memories and appeared to be confused by the interview process.2 Using a snowball technique, I was able to identity and negotiate permission (informed consent) to interview a total of 36 key informants from amongst the Circassian, Kurdish, Palestinian and Armenian communities. Some were very old and were living in church- organized shelters or nursing homes (Armenians). Others were living with the families of their children and sometimes grandchildren. I developed an interview guide which sought to stimulate the interviewees’ memories of their childhood and youth, of forced migrations or those of their parents, their recollections of the places they sought refuge, the supporting

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institutions and networks in their new physical spaces, as well as their perceptions and aspirations regarding home and homeland. All the interviews were taped and digitally recorded in order to accommodate what I anticipated would be requests for copies of the interview by the younger family members. The tapes represented a tangible ‘oral history’ which the extended family could listen to again and again in the future. At many of our meetings, these interviews became occasions for significant family gatherings, with the grandparents or great-grandparents opening up and talking about a past that had never before been shared with the family. For some of the oldest subjects who were very frail or terminally ill, there was the added pressure of knowing that this occasion was possibly the last opportunity to gather this information. My father was born in Yozghak, Turkey. His father had been killed (burnt alive with lime water) in the town and so his mother had left Turkey with him and his older sister. His mother and older sister were both kidnapped by Muslims and he knew nothing more about their whereabouts. He arrived in Deir-ez-Zor by himself in 1915. He must have been 6 or 7 years old. He stayed there for a while and then was taken to Aleppo where he was put into an Armenian Church boarding school until he was 14. Then he was asked to leave the school and manage on his own because they needed the space for younger children. He knew nobody. First he went to Banias, in the hope of joining some relatives there, but they couldn’t support themselves so he had to leave. Then he went to Latakiyya. There he slept in the street and managed to get small jobs as a porter. Sometimes he was paid and sometimes he wasn’t. He used to eat the peel of the fruits left behind in restaurants. Later, he left with a couple of other Armenians and went to Beirut. There he managed to get a job with an electricity company. After a few more years, he came to Damascus looking for an Armenian family he had known back in Turkey who had a girl he still remembered [early 1930s]. Her grandmother had a little money, which meant she was able to smuggle her granddaughter and her son into Syria. The girl was only 5 years old when she came to Damascus with her father. He was an upholsterer and was able to find a job in Damascus in no time. My father found this girl. He married her and took her back to Beirut. He lived and worked there until 1957, when the Camille Chamoun troubles started. Then he left Lebanon and moved his family to Damascus to live in Bab Touma with three or four other Armenian families in one house. I went to a private Armenian school in Beirut. My younger brother also went to the same school. My father could not afford to keep us

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both there, so I had to leave after grade 10 and start working. My brother finished and got the Baccalaureate. We studied in Armenian and also French. The school was sponsored by an Armenian charitable association, but we still had to pay something ... I got married in 1956. My wife’s family was also from Turkey. They came to Deirez-Zor and then to Beirut. She had three brothers. They were my friends. Then they all died suddenly, one after the other, in just a few months. I felt so sorry for the family. I started to visit them frequently and bring them food. They were very poor. That is how I got to know her. We got married and lived together for 40 years. After two years, I got an offer to establish a furniture factory in Damascus. We came here and when I had made some money I bought an apartment. My wife used to work with the Armenian Charitable Association. She raised funds for them. She was a strong intelligent woman. She was educated, with a high school certificate, and was the director of an Armenian school. Her school is supported by the Armenian Church. We have a certain number of poor students. We cannot afford to offer free education to all. Instead, we take 2000 SP [$40] from an Armenian family, and from an Arab who wants his child to attend, we take 5000 SP [$100]. The number of non-Arab students in the school is increasing. It is the reputation of the school that counts. We have 400 students in our school and the numbers are increasing. We had three sons and a daughter. My oldest is an engineer. The second, who is smarter, attended college for a year then dropped out. He preferred to work in our furniture factory. The third was not interested in studying. He dropped out at grade six. He worked in the factory for a while and then migrated to Canada. He has been there for 20 years. He is going very well. He established a very reputable furniture factory. He got married to an Armenian there. When my daughter finished high school and got the Baccalaureate, a young man from Lebanon proposed; I did not hesitate to accept. All our children speak Armenian at home and Arabic in public. Two of my sons married Arab women. When they are present, we have to speak Arabic, whether we like it or not. But their children speak Arabic and Armenian. I sent them to a course to learn Armenian. When they come to visit, I insist that the grandchildren speak Armenian ... I have more Arab friends than Armenians. I have a couple of Armenian friends with whom I get along well. On the other hand, I have 20 Arab friends who keep visiting me and with whom I go out and have good times. I thought to visit the place where my father was born. But when I went to Turkey, they warned me not to go there. They told me that the people there are monsters. If they knew you were

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Armenian, they would kill you. Would I consider going to Armenia? That depends on the political situation there. That is what I care for most of all. So far, I don’t approve of what is going on in Armenia. It has a ‘mafia’, so going to settle there is out of the question.3 The prominent features of this narrative, as with so any others I collected, reveal consistent elements of personal tragedy, survival, hardship, coping and resilience, social networking and institution building, and finally integration without assimilation. Hagop’s story is that of an Armenian orphan in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire, dispossessed and forced out of his homeland. It is the tale of death and immense suffering with a grandfather murdered, and a grandmother ‘disappeared’. It is the story of exceptional resilience as a small child is forced to march hundreds of miles along the Euphrates River until he reaches Deir-ezZor where he is picked up and given care by a Church charity. After an upbringing in an Armenian Church orphanage, it tells of the survival strategies of a young adolescent and then a youth who searches for and finds links back to his village of origin and Armenian community. It is a snapshot of survival and refuge in both Syria and Lebanon during the French mandate period, followed by gradual success in re-establishing links to a similar community of Armenian survivors both in Beirut and in Damascus. The Church-based education, with its priority on Armenian history and language, becomes the central core of the new family as it knits together, with the next generation entering the same profession established by the first-generation survivor, not only in Syria but also in Canada. Marriage is both from within the refugee community and from the host community of Arabs. Yet, the Armenian language and culture is perpetuated by the rise of charitable associations providing language lessons for both the young Armenian children and adults who have married into the community. The actual homeland is lived within the family and its social networks as well as in the determined effort in perpetuating Armenian language and culture. It is not the same as the imagined ‘homeland’, nor is the Armenian Republic the ‘mythical’ home. The latter is run by ‘mafia’ and is not the idealized place to which he might one day return. He is settled in Syria where his identity is as a member of one of a number of minorities. He is both a Syrian and an Armenian.

Background and history Most human beings reside somewhere near their places of birth. Willingly leaving home to live and work elsewhere or being dispossessed

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and expulsed is more the exception than the rule of human existence. Yet, migration is the story of human life. It is the story of population movement across the face of the earth and it is the great adventure of human life. Migration has seen the planet conquered and societies and cultures shaped and reshaped by successive waves of human movement. It describes the Viking colonization of Normandy and then the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. It is also part of the legacy of the end of imperial and colonial empires and the coming- of-age of the nation-states of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, that highly contested stretch of land well-watered by rivers and other water- carrying systems, has been the focus of centuries, if not millennia, of movements of people. Invading hordes from the East, mounted fighting forces from the Arabian heartland and colonial armies from the West have resulted in the terrified flight of communities and the opportunistic entrance of others. For the last 500 years, much of this, largely involuntary, movement of people was supported by a system of government which encouraged and tolerated variations amongst people, drawing out differences between neighbours and encouraging the formation of unique identities based on cultural, linguistic and, particularly, religious grounds. A system based on Islamic rules regarding the treatment of non-Muslim minorities (the dhimmi) gradually became institutionalized so that by the nineteenth century, the millet, an Ottoman term for a confessional community, referred to an ethno-religious community which had its own legal courts pertaining to personal law under which the minorities were allowed to rule themselves with little interference from the Ottoman Government. The empire upon which such multicultural identities were based – the Ottoman Empire – came to an end with the First World War. Amid the rubble left behind with the demise of the Russian, AustroHungarian and Ottoman empires were the discrete communities of people sharing common beliefs about their identities based on ideas of ethnicity4 and, as often, religious variation. In the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, belonging was based not on a physical birthplace alone, but specifically included the social community of origin.5 It was rooted in the connections and links between and amongst a specific group of people as much as, if not more than, in a territory. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen a startling array of movements of communities once rooted in the frontier zones of empires. This has included communities on the Russian- Ottoman borderlands, such as the Circassians, the Abkhazi, the Chechnyan, the Armenians,

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and other Northern Caucasus peoples.6 Other dispossessions have their origins in the lines drawn on maps by the Great Western Powers to create new nation-states.7 These include the Palestinians, the Kurds, the pastoral Bedouin and a variety of ‘stateless peoples’. Other migrations, such as those of the Yazidis, the Assyrians and some Armenian groups, are closely linked to the regional efforts at creating a pan-Arab, socialist or Islamic society.8

Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the ‘unmixing of peoples’ The mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century marked the beginnings of modern, large-scale involuntary population movements across the Eurasian continent as the European, Russian and Ottoman empires were facing pressures to transform themselves into nation-states. The first such modern ‘nation-state’ to emerge from the Ottoman Empire was Greece in 1832, which became a client state of Russia and Britain. Greece then steadily encroached on Ottoman territory and each of these gains precipitated the flight of part of the local Muslim population.9 There followed the establishment of Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro. Each new state sought to ‘unmix’ their nationalities as their minorities came to be regarded as obstacles to state-building.10 As a result of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, and the ‘unmixing’ of peoples, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish minorities generally moved from what had become a new state, in which they constituted a minority, to another where their nationality was dominant. The Muslim refugees largely resettled in Asia Minor.11 Consequent to the establishment of these nation states, millions of people fled or were expelled, many of them Muslims and Jews who moved south seeking refuge in the Ottoman heartlands. As the three great empires of Europe and the Middle East fell, the movement of people into and within the Middle East far surpassed that of those fleeing the region. The history of Ottoman tolerance for minorities and its multicultural make-up is part of the explanation of this great inflow. However, the fact that Muslim refugees from the borderlands of the three empires had no welcome either in Europe or in the new Soviet Union also determined that the first – or perhaps only – choice of movement was south and then west. Four such groups are the focus of this chapter: the Muslim Circassians and related peoples, the Armenians and other Eastern Christian peoples, the Palestinians, and the Kurds. They represent a full span of ethno-religious communities which were

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dispossessed, uprooted and re-homed in the Arab Middle East. Their stories reveal much about the nature of refuge and networking as well as the basic features of successful resettlement and integration.

Circassians and Chechnyans Muslim refugees from the frontiers of the empire In 1887, 23 families came here and settled in this area around Damascus. They came from Turkey after having been in Bulgaria in the Balkans. The 25 families who settled in Marj-l-Sultan came to Damascus by land – through Aleppo and Homs. At the time, Madhat Basha was the governor of Damascus. His daughter-in-law was a Circassian and he liked the Circassians. He met with the Circassians as they arrived in Damascus and suggested that they stay on the outskirts of Damascus on empty land, called Mezzeh. At that time, Mezzeh was an unpopulated land completely given over to wild cactus fields. The Circassians refused. They were afraid of getting assimilated if they lived so close to the city. Some of them went on to the Jolan, where the environment was very close to their homeland: heavy rain, snow, woods and mountains. Others were brought here to Al Marj. It was springtime. In spring, this area used to be extremely beautiful, with plenty of water, trees and grass. Al Marj was the private property of the Sultan himself. In the spring and fall, the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul-Hamid, had his 3,000 horses graze in this area. It was the grazing land for his military horses. The Circassians who came here liked the place. In this village ran a small river – a tributary of Barada, and the place was very suitable for them to establish a settlement. Gradually, relatives of the existing families started to come. The Ottoman Government gave each family two cows, two oxen, poultry, food supplies and tents. After building their homes, the first thing they set out to do in the next year was to build a mosque. That was built in 1879 – one year after they had arrived. The religious factor was decisive in the forced migration of the Circassians. Back in those days, the religious factor was very important. The Ottomans also played a role in the forced migration of the Circassians; it was not only because of the massacres carried out by the Russians. The Russians were the main reason, of course, but the Ottomans needed to have brave soldiers and to patrol and make safe the dividing line between Al-Ma’moura (sedentary areas) and the desert (and its Bedouins) in order to help protect those villages and cities. I myself did witness the last clash between the Bedouin and the Circassian protectors of people of the village in 1954 when I was a student at university.12

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It was the Russian imperial expansionist agenda which caused the most damage to the Ottoman Empire. The Russians repeatedly invaded the Ottomans, capturing lands in both Europe and in Asia. They forced the creation of an independent Bulgaria, Serbia and Rumania by defeating the Ottomans in wars they themselves initiated. The Russians, as detailed by Justin McCarthy, dispossessed and ejected the native populations of Circassia and Abkhazia in the Caucasus, forcing the Ottomans to take in more than 800,000 Caucasian peoples, at great human and civil costs.13 A further 900,000 Turks were also forced by the Russians into the Ottoman Empire, which then had to find food and shelter for them when the existing population was already poor.14 Much of the economic and military disaster which constantly threatened the Ottomans in the nineteenth century was due to the Russian Tsars. As an outcome of the Crimean War (1854–6), for example, it was estimated that 400,000 Tatars were forced to leave their homeland. Most sold their property and moved to the southern Balkans, as had an earlier group of Tatar forced migrants. But then after the Russo- Ottoman War of 1877–8, the Tatars who had settled in the Balkans were moved a second time and resettled on the Anatolian plateau, with concentrations in and near Izmir, Ankara and Konya. The total number of Tatar forced migrants to Ottoman lands between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century is estimated to be about 1.8 million people.15 The decades that followed saw the Ottoman Empire lose additional European territory and the expulsion and involuntary migration of many more hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks into Thrace, Anatolia and Syria. On the other side of the Black Sea, another wave of Muslim dispossession came from the Caucasus. There were Circassians and Abazas who had been unhappy with the outcome of the earlier Russo- Ottoman War of 1828–9 but who had stayed on and resisted the continuing Russian campaigns to occupy their homelands. These groups were finally defeated in 1865, a few years after the Russians captured their Northern Caucasus leader, Sheikh Shamil in 1859.16 During this 30-year period of fighting and resistance to Russian incursions (1830s–60s), few Circassians left their homeland. Only in the 1860s did the emigration of Circassians turn into a mass movement. Russia had entered into a treaty with the Ottomans regarding the ‘cleaning out’ and transfer of peoples from these newly acquired lands.17 Russia wanted to create a Christian majority on its newly conquered territory. Thus, it was agreed by the Russian Tsar and the Ottoman Sublime Porte that the Greek Orthodox from the Eastern Black Sea region were to be sent to Russia

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and the Muslims in this frontier area were to be moved out and into the Ottoman heartlands. By 1865, as many as 520,000 Muslims had been forcibly moved into the Ottoman Empire, while only a few thousand Greek Orthodox subjects from the Ottoman Empire had agreed to migrate north to Russia. Then, during the Russo- Ottoman War of 1877–8, the Ottomans sent two Circassian units to help in the fight against the Russian invaders in the Caucasus. Inevitably, the local Circassian population rose up against the Russians. In view of the Ottoman defeat and local Caucasian uprising, Russia was able to insist in its treaty with the Ottomans at the close of the war that the Circassians on these newly acquired Russian lands now had to be moved out and resettled away from the new Russian border. As a result, 2 million people were forced to leave the Caucasus for Anatolia in terrible conditions, travelling overland and by sea between 1859 and 1879. Many died along the way from disease and starvation. It is estimated that only 1.5 million survived. It was perhaps the first ethnic cleansing or genocide in the modern era. These forced migrations of Muslim groups from the Caucasus regions carried on throughout the 1880s and 1890s (1881 through to 1914) and increasingly included Chechnyan and Dagestan refugees from new areas of Russian conquests in the Caucasus. This last wave of forced migrants was estimated at another 500,000 people.18

Armenians and other Christian refugees on the Russian- Ottoman borders My father was from Zeitun, which was very well known in Armenian history. There were many rebellions in Zeitun against the Ottoman authorities. His secondary education was in Marash. Marash was the main town, Zeitun being just an adjacent village or town. So afterwards my father came to Aleppo. He was given a scholarship in the Sultaniyye School in Aleppo. It was the most advanced educational institution of Northern Syria. The diploma from this school was something! When my father finished his school in Aleppo he returned to Zeitun to be incorporated into the municipality. He was the one person in Zeitun who was educated. He was taken immediately into the administration [Ottoman Government]. My father joined the railway administration. So he escaped from the deportation or massacres, because he was working, because he was working in the Ottoman administration and had graduated from a prestigious school. He was a chef du guard for a small railway in the Bekaa which is now in Lebanon.

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During this time he saved his parents from the death marches. The railway gave him the chance. All these people [refugees] used to come and say please help, use your position. And so my father extended his assistance as much as he would. Then in the French Mandate period [after the fall of the Ottoman Empire], my father was appointed director of the post administration in Izmir. This lasted one year. Then he had to flee because the French left suddenly Cilicia. And the poor Armenians who had returned to Cilicia with the French were massacred. My father escaped through Constantinople. Some came to Syria. He went there and then went to Lebanon by boat to where his parents were. As he knew French, Turkish and Arabic, he found a job at Radio Orient in Beirut Lebanon.19 As with most facts and figures regarding nineteenth century Ottoman history, the exact number of Armenians in the empire was disputed. Some European travellers and missionaries put their numbers at 2 million. Stanford Shaw, using Ottoman Census Department figures, put the number at closer to 1,125,000.20 There was general agreement that Armenians only made up about 5 to 6 per cent of the total population of approximately 21 million people in the Ottoman Empire.21 They were spread out far and wide and, thus, did not make up a majority or even significant minority in any place. The only exceptions were perhaps Van (making up 25 pe rcent of the population at the beginning of the twentieth century) and Bitlis (making up approximately 30 per cent of the total population at that time). This tight ethnoreligious community was recognized by the state and had its own patriarchate and millet within the Ottoman Empire. Armenians had always played an important role in Ottoman trade and industry, specializing in money changing, goldsmith, jewellery, foreign trade and medicine. After the withdrawal from Anatolia of Ottoman Orthodox Christians to become part of the newly created Kingdom of Greece in 1832, Armenians filled many of the high government administrative positions left open by the departing Orthodox Greeks. Because of their knowledge of foreign languages, Armenians rose high in particular ministries such as Finance, Interior, Foreign Affairs, Education, Justice and Public Works. The profound Armenian tragedy and genocide to follow, however, was set into place by Russian imperial meddling. Stanford Shaw posits that Russia, frustrated in its hopes of creating large satellite states, such as Greater Bulgaria in southeast Europe, turned its expansionist attention to Transcaucasia and the eastern frontier with the Ottoman Empire.22 Here it sought out one of the minorities that had not revolted

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against the Ottoman Sultan, the Armenians, and cultivated their insipient nationalist interests and cultural distinctiveness. However, the Armenian Gregorian millet was well integrated into the Ottoman Empire and opposed these nationalist aspirations. As Russia expanded into Transcaucasia, it annexed Georgia in 1800 and then between 1804 and 1829 took over areas that today are the Azerbaijan and Armenian republics. Local Armenian militias, imbued with a sense of nationalists struggle, aided these campaigns, perhaps feeling that Christian Russia would be more likely to help them to create their own independent Armenian homeland than would the Muslim Ottoman state. In 1855 and 1877, Ottoman Armenians are known to have assisted the Russians in their invasions of Anatolia. However, when the European powers forced Russia to return some of these areas to the Ottoman Empire, their Armenian allies fled with them to Russia. These numbered tens of thousands. In the vacuum they left behind came the Muslim refugees forced out of the areas newly conquered and kept by Russia. A forced exchange of peoples was taking place, in areas which held Armenian minorities, creating tension, hatred and fear in the newly resettled and returning population. This enmity was made worse by the arrival of more than 1.2 million Muslims – the Circassians, Abhazians and Chechnyans – expelled by Russia from the western Caucasus in the 1860s.23 The simplest outline of events leading up to the Armenian forced marches and genocide is that in 1914, war erupted again between Russia and the Ottomans along the eastern Anatolian frontier. In 1915, the Ottoman Government – worried about the loyalty of the Armenian community – ordered the deportation of the entire Armenian population in the eastern Anatolia war zone southward into the Syrian Desert. The rationale and the outcome of these orders are highly contested. What we do know is that between 1.5 to 2 million Armenians were forced from their homes and sent out on death marches along the Euphrates River towards Deir-ezZor and Mosul. At least half that number – somewhere between 750,000 to 1.2 million Armenians – perished. The remaining 750,000 dispersed into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt or found asylum abroad, particularly in France, Canada and the United States.

Palestinians In 1936, there was an outburst of fighting against the new Jewish settlement in Safad. It started with a quarrel between an Arab and a Jew who came to take his clothes from a shop. The Jew was killed. So suddenly instead of the cooperation which used to distinguish the

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relations between the Jews and the Arabs, everybody kept to themselves and didn’t mingle. I was born in Safad, Galilee, in 1941. In 1948, the war began outside Safad and in other villages, but even when these villages were controlled (by the Jews), we were protected by Jordanian troops and some Syrian volunteers. Then one day the Jordanian troops pulled out without telling any of the inhabitants that they were going to leave. Of course, the local Arab defenders had very simple weapons and they realized that they could not beat back an attack. At that time, the balmakh began to fire mortars. Most of the mortars felt like atom bombs when they landed. My mother used to say, ‘The missiles! The missiles!’ There was no defence. So we left. Always there was the belief that we would all go back in one week’s time. We were promised, ‘Just go out of the town and the Arabs will regain it in one week’. I remember I left in short trousers. We took no papers, not even our birth certificates – nothing – because we were promised that we were going back soon. My sisters, who were older, carried myself and my younger brother. It was May but it was rainy and I remember that groups of people were walking with us. And we moved north, not to Syria. There was with no cover, nothing. There were also soldiers walking with us, Syrian soldiers. We were two boys and one girl. There was me and my younger brother, because my older brother had moved to be with our uncle a few days before we fled Safad. So we were just two brothers. My older sister stayed in Tyre because she was a nurse and she decided to work in a hospital in Tyre. My other two sisters with us, too, but the oldest of these two was married and went to Jordan with her husband. So we were six; one, two, three children, my mother, my aunt and my father. We went to Homs and then after two years we moved to Damascus. My older brother had found a job in a cement factory in Damascus. He wrote to us and said, ‘Come to Dumar just outside of Damascus, I have enough resources to take care of you.’ So he brought us to Damascus and he took care of us. My father was not working during this time because he had no skills. He was illiterate. He was from a notable family but he had no skill and he couldn’t manage to find any work. That was why my mother was always angry with him. He was illiterate and he never worked. In Safad he was a landowner. He was from a rich family.24 Palestine was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, after a period of Ottoman reform (the Tanzimaat) which impacted positively on Palestine, Europe began to look enviously at the potential for trade

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and raw material which the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire represented – as well as securing safe passage to its Indian colonial domain. European powers started to vie for control of the Arab Ottoman provinces. In 1915, Great Britain was eager to secure Arab support in dividing up the Ottoman Empire and also in opening a southern front in its war against the Central Powers (German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria). Responding to British overtures, the Sherif of Mecca, Emir Hussein, issued a call to the Arab people to revolt against Ottoman rule and to fight on the side of France and Britain.25 Yet, France and England had other plans and were simultaneously engaged in secret negotiations with regard to these territories.26 Between July 1915 and March 1916, Sir Henry McMahon began to correspond with the Sherif of Mecca. Their exchanges resulted in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, whereby Great Britain agreed to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs, should they revolt against the Ottomans. A few months later, in May, Sir Mark Sykes (Secretary to the British War Cabinet) revealed a contradictory agreement with France and Russia which would have the lands of the Arab Ottoman Empire divided up so that France would take the territories that emerged as Syria and Lebanon, Britain would take control of what would become Iraq and Transjordan, while Palestine would be placed under international administration, with Russia agreeing to the management of Jerusalem.27 The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, however, undermined that agreement, when Russia withdrew and divulged the, until then, secret, Sykes–Picot Agreement to the rest of the world. Less than a year after the Sykes-Picot Agreement had been signed, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration was declared. On 2 November 1917, Lord James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, sent Lord Rothschild, a British leader of the Zionist movement in London, a letter pledging support for the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home for the Jewish people.’ For the next 30 years, the Arabs of Palestine fought against this declaration which undermined the entire spirit of the British League of Nations Mandate to bring Arab Palestine to full independence. By 1947, the British had given up its League of Nations Mandate and handed Palestine over to the United Nations. Within a few short months, in the spring of 1948, nearly 750,000 people in Palestine were forced from their homes and pushed by land and by sea to neighbouring states. It was an exercise in ethnic cleansing which culminating in the Nakbah (The Catastrophe), as Palestinians called this dramatic upheaval.28 The same period of time in the same physical space was described by others as the War of Independence and the birth of the state of Israel. The

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1947–8 War was a struggle which came to a climax as armed Jewish militias occupied most of Palestine and forced the indigenous people to flee. The Palestinians took refuge in camps hastily set up by the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Today, the largest number of Palestinian refugees is found in Jordan, with more than 1.6 million registered with United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Syria acknowledges 391,651 registered Palestinian refugees. In Lebanon, 382,973 Palestinian refugees are registered with UNRWA. In the West Bank, 37 per cent of the population – 607,770 Palestinians – is made up of refugees and in Gaza, 852,626 Palestinian refugees make up 75 per cent of the total population.

Kurds I was born in Al-Hasakeh – three km from the Turkish borders. My father, too. But my grandfather was born in ‘Turkey’ in 1904 and he died last year at the age of 104. By ‘Turkey’, I mean what is now called Turkey [the Ottoman Empire]. Because, prior to the Sykes–Picot Accords, these artificial borders did not exist. There was no ‘Turkey’ as defined today. The Syrian borders in those days extended from the Taurus Mountains [in Iraq] to, and including, Palestine. People lived within the natural geographic borders. When the artificial, manmade borders were drawn, my grandfather preferred to continue living in what is now Syria. Needless to say, during that time, he moved amongst many villages in a kind of seasonal migration – until he finally chose to settle in Al-Hasakeh district, where he remained till he died. His children are still there. From what I know, my grandparents did farm work and herded sheep. They grew fruit trees, such as figs and grapevines. When war broke out, there was a lot of smuggling work done. We say smuggling because before the war, there were no borders and goods used to be exchanged freely. Tobacco and figs smuggled from Turkey, while items like sugar and tea were smuggled into Turkey. In those days there was a lot of simple trading activities was going on with Iraq, especially through the city of Mosul. These trade activities supported the famers until it was time to harvest their seasonal agricultural products. There were strong ties between the Kurdish people living in Syria and those across the borders in Turkey and Iraq. The lifestyle and customs were very similar. You couldn’t tell an Iraqi from a Syrian Kurd, for example. Later, clothing style

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started to be different across borders, but elderly women kept wearing the old-fashioned costumes. My aunt, for example, whom I hadn’t seen for 35 years, came recently to pay their respects on the death of my grandfather. She was born in Syria but got married to cousins in Turkey. The reason she had been unable to visit for more than 35 years was because of the census of 1962. At that time, Syrian citizenship was withdrawn from some of the Kurds living in the northern area of Syria. All those whose citizenship was withdrawn have been unable to travel abroad. In turn, those who happened to be on the Turkish side of the border at the time of the census were no longer able to travel to Syria. They could leave Turkey, but they would not be admitted into Syria except for very compelling excuses such as the death of a close relative. I hold a ‘red card’ as a result of the 1962 census. The red card I hold states, ‘In accordance with the census of 1962, the hereby mentioned person has no reference whatever in the records of Syrian Arab citizens.’ Later on, a phrase was added to this document in bold italic font to state that the card is ‘Not valid for obtaining travel documents for travelling outside (the Syrian Arab Republic)’. I am not allowed to travel abroad.29 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman’s grip on its European provinces began to slip, it sought to recruit ever more troops to bolster its failing campaigns against the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. It turned to Kurdistan as an important source of manpower. This move, however, began to be regarded by some Kurdish traditional leaders and princes as an infringement of their privileges. In addition, outside influences such as the Western penetration into Kurdistan in the form of missions, consulates and schools also began to impact negatively on the Kurdish tribal leadership’s sense of privilege. Up to the very end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few Kurds regarded themselves as anything other than members of their particular religious community or millet. The Kurdish peasantry continued to struggle with the demands of feudal landlords or pastoral tribal leaders, while in urban settings, local Kurdish workers and artisans had to deal with the demands of their leaders (aghawat), local Kurdish power brokers and hereditary princes (Beys or Pashas). The struggle to maintain distance and independence and to remain outside of state control, which had been part of Kurdish tribal ideology and activity, gradually came to be integrated into the nationalist movements emerging from the urban power centres. The mountainous terrain of Kurdistan, as well the general unwillingness of its nomadic peoples to submit to central authority, made anything other than local governance in this region very difficult.

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As early as a year into the First World War, in the autumn of 1915, secret talks had begun between Britain and France and Russia regarding the division of the Ottoman Empire. Russia made it clear that it wanted all of Ottoman Kurdistan and Ottoman Armenia. An agreement was reached whereby Russia would have the northern-most Armenian regions of Erzurum, Trabzon, Van and Bitlis, as well as the Kurdish regions to the west of Van and Bitlis. The British established claims to Mosul province as part of its plan for control of the oilfields and the outlets in the Middle East. The French, however, wanted some of the southern Ottoman Kurdish areas to protect its interests in the railway concession in Anatolia. These secret agreements – many of them contradictory – were setting the stage for one of the most dramatic land claims in colonial history, dismissing and, at the same time, toying with the aspirations and destinies of the Arabs, the Armenians and, in particular, the Kurdish people.30 Before the First World War had ended, however, Tsarist Russia had come to an end with the October Revolution of 1917. The new Soviet state withdrew from the Allied consortium and disassociated itself from the secret treaties of the previous regime. The new Soviet government denounced the European colonialist secret diplomacy and published some of these texts relating to the quibbling, bartering, and horsetrading that had taken place. Although these revelations were highly embarrassing to the Europeans, they resulted in a new land grab of Anatolia amongst the French, British and Italians. Ottoman Armenia and Kurdistan were basically at the mercy of whichever power was strong enough to occupy it. In 1918, the Armistice of Mudros was signed and the former Ottoman troops withdrew to await the outcome of the Peace Conference in Paris. Two years later, the Treaty of Sèvres was signed by the representatives of the Ottoman Sublime Port. However, the conditions of the treaty were so harsh and uncompromising, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire so complete, that the former Ottoman general, Mustafa Kemal, refused to accept it. Instead he withdrew and pulled together a force of nationalists to claw back, at the very least, the Anatolian Peninsula from which to set up the modern Turkish Republic. His victories over the next three years spelt the end of any Armenian or Kurdish nationalist. In October 1923, the Nationalist government of Mustafa Kemal agreed a new treaty at Lausanne. All Allied demands that did not touch directly on the heart of Turkish independence in Anatolia were accepted by the Turks. Thus, Mustafa Kemal accepted British and French rule in Palestine, Syria and Iraq. He also begrudgingly agreed that the Council of the League of Nations could decide the status of the Kurdish province

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of Mosul, which the Turks viewed as an integral part of Anatolia.31 The Treaty of Lausanne completed the expulsion of populations, with a final exchange of Greeks and Turks between Greece and Anatolia. Kurdistan was divided between four newly created states carved out of the Old Ottoman Empire: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. There are today somewhere in the region of 25 million Kurds living in the Middle East. About 13 million live in modern- day Turkey and make up about 20 per cent of the population;32 4 million live in Iraq and make up about 23 per cent of the population of that country; in Iran Kurds number about 5.7 million and represent about 10 per cent of the population; and in Syria they are about 2 million, mainly living along the northern border with Turkey and Syria. Many of the Kurds in Syria have been there for centuries, but in the 1920s a wave of Kurdish refugees arrived seeking to escape Turkish repression after their failed bid for independence during the Shaykh Said rebellion. Although the Syrian Kurds represent the smallest minority of this largely mountainous tribal people, the forced migrations in the past century into Syria most clearly illustrate the struggle of the Kurds for recognition as a nation. Turkey, Iraq and Iran have similar mixes of indigenous as well as refugee Kurdish populations as a result of numerous intra-tribal power struggles and conflicts followed by group expulsions as well as abortive efforts to establish a Kurdish state.33 Similar power struggles amongst the Kurdish tribal leadership, as well as periodic nationalist uprisings, have each left the border regions with Kurdish exiles, refugees and forced migrants living amongst longsettled and variously resident kin. Their failed bids for recognition as a nation-state beginning in the 1920s and continuing, off and on, in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s have each resulted in many thousands of Kurds taking refuge in Syria, Iran, Turkey and neighbouring Caucasian states as part of the general international and regional power politics of the day. Seen alternatively as valiant nationalist struggles or as treacherous separatist revolts, these events, in our modern era, have displaced and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Kurds, leaving many ‘stateless’ in their places of refugee.

Discussion and conclusion Over the past 150 years, the Middle East has provided refuge and asylum to numerous groups of people dispossessed of their property and forced to leave their lands in the upheaval of the end of empire and ensuing neo- colonial enterprises endorsed by the League of Nations. The

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Middle East has provided comfort and relief both on an individual basis and also for social groups. Perhaps as a residual trait of the tolerance which the Ottoman Empire had enshrined in its ‘millet system’ towards multi- ethnic and plural societies, the states to emerge from the former Arab Ottoman provinces after the First World War and the League of Nations Mandate tolerated, if not actively, the emergence of these ‘deterritorialized’ social groups and ethnoreligious minorities. Integration without assimilation emerged as a definitive trait in these post-empire and post–colonial societies. Each of the narratives I collected between 2005–7 from amongst the oldest surviving generation of exiles and migrants, whose families were forced out of their old homelands, tells a similar story of extraordinary courage and resilience, as well as a little luck. Amongst the Muslim Caucasians, the Christian Armenians and Assyrians, the Palestinians and the Kurds driven out from Turkey and Iraq, the tales of the journeys to escape death or forced religious conversion are all similar. They describe traumatic physical hardship, accompanied by disease, starvation and death. Generally, these journeys are made by familial groups or small bands of orphans. The recollections are transformed by the imaginations of the listeners. In the telling, the stories are ‘cleaned up’ and made more bearable by the games which memory plays on human minds. They become heroic stories of exile, the backdrop to contemporary homelands both imagined and lived. In comment, they revealed the capacity for group survival aided by local networks and religious associations. After numerous moves, these peoples generally managed to put their tragedies behind them and to find accommodation in close quarters with others from the same background. And in this manner they set about creating social communities which were nearly all close knit but not exclusive. From within, they created social and cultural associations where their languages, social traditions and transitional youth-to-adult activities could take place. Charities, even amongst the poorest of these communities, were often funded from within to look after the less fortunate of their group. Occasionally they invested in their religious institutions and, hence, the church or the mosque becomes an important source of respite and education. Marriage was largely arranged from within the community, although marriage out was not uncommon, with language classes and other related activities widely available for the outsider ‘spouse’ to be better integrated into the existing social community. What these interviews also reveal was the significance of the social support and tolerance which the local host community gave these

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newly arrived ethnoreligious minority groups. Local churches, mosques and synagogues were often the first point of contact and emergency relief. Local governorates also raised taxes to help temporarily house and feed the new arrivals. Except for the first wave of Circassians and Chechnyans into the region, all successive waves of exiles found kindred souls who had moved and travelled to these parts during earlier periods of Ottoman rule. They were established citizens of the new states. Hence, Armenians found co-religionists in modern- day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. Palestinians found brethren in these same countries, as did the Kurds. These contacts, as well as the general sympathy of the host populations, where one could argue a ‘culture of compassion’ prevailed, were important in helping the new arrivals ‘settle’. These forced migrants did not generally remain in the temporary camps or housing set up for them nor were they ‘forced’ to remain, as so often happens in contemporary crises. Rather, they found their way to urban neighbourhoods and set about creating mechanisms through their traditional religious and social institutions for maintaining their special identity in the context of the social configurations of their host society. More than any other factor, my interviews revealed the extraordinary significance of language in grounding their identity. It was the transmission, and in some cases the rediscovery, of the language of the social group which most of these groups saw as the link to the past, the imagined homeland and the contemporary spaces they occupy today. It was this feature, language, which fundamentally supported their integration without assimilation. In Amman, certain parts of the city are known to be Circassian or Chechnyan, the same in Damascus and in certain outlying Syrian towns. For the Armenians, parts of Cairo, Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo are closely associated with them; road signs and shop fronts accommodating both Arabic and Armenian script. The languages spoken on the street also support the otherness of the cultural identity of the community. The same is true for Palestinian refugees and their particular Arabic dialect. Although many Palestinians are physically integrated into the cities and towns which gave them refugee in 1948, others remain in the U.N. refugee camps dispersed throughout Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, even here, the camps have been framed by the Palestinian villages of origin; families often living adjacent to others from their village of origin. Their village dialects are reinforced and passed down the generations, as are the particular recipes for foods and spices. Although the Caucasian refugees of the nineteenth century were in many ways the pioneers for later forced migration of their Transcaucasian

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brethren, the Palestinians, the Kurds and the Armenians were already present in the region. The history of migration within the Ottoman Empire in previous centuries was such that movement for trade or family reunion was common, and small communities of urban Armenians, Palestinians and Kurds were spread out throughout the region. Armenian communities had existed for centuries in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, as had the Kurds, who often delighted in tracing their origins back to at least the twelfth century and the troops of Salahadin and occupied well- defined quarters in the major cities. These communities have absorbed the stories of ‘origin’ and generally accepted a multiplicity of identities to accommodate both the past and the present. The language or dialect and the culture of these forced migrants is clung to and passed down from one generation to the next. It is rarely reinforced in the state education curriculum, but it comes alive in both non-formal (out of school)and informal (social and cultural) education as exemplified in the after school clubs, the social centres and the charitable associations which promote their language and particular customs, which they see as differentiating them from others. The Armenians in Egypt are Egyptian and Armenian, those in Lebanon, Lebanese Armenians, and in Syria they are both Syrian nationalists and Armenians. Palestinians maintain their nationality and their right to return to their ancestral homes even when they take on citizenship, such as Jordanian. Similarly, the Kurds in Syria maintain their language, music, literature and customs and live in close quarters to each other. Many are Syrian citizens, but a small minority are stateless and are protesting being denied Syrian citizenship. Yet that protest does not diminish their Kurdishness. These ethnic and religious minority communities in the Middle East have found a way to physically and socially integrate themselves in their new surroundings, but at the same time have resisted the natural phenomena of assimilation over the long-term. Although discrimination in one form or another exists in each of the states in which these forced migrants have created a new ‘homeland’, the pull to remain different, to maintain their otherness is more powerful. Patronage and real as well as ‘fictive’ kinship networks are powerful positive forces; so, too, are the religious and charitable associations which these groups have set up to help those less fortunate in their community. These are peoples who are assured of who they are and how they fit into the broader picture. There is no sense of liminality so commonly associated with contemporary refugees. They are confident in their language, their education and their culture. They know they are at home and occasionally they are specific

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in their rejection of the post-colonial created ‘state’ which is meant to replace their ‘imagined’ or ‘mythical’ homeland such as the Republic of Armenia, the Palestinian National Authority or the Kurdish Regional Authority in Iraq. These are a people who are more post-modern than many of us. They are living in places where their ‘imagined’ homelands can thrive. This allows them to integrate into the physical spaces they occupy, but not to culturally assimilate or lose their de-territorialized roots. Without access to the kind of contemporary assistance associated with the humanitarian regime (physical camps, food rations, third country resettlement or voluntary return), these forced migrants of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East have succeeded in creating new identities, homes and homelands. They have integrated without assimilating. We have much to learn from their examples.

Notes I am grateful to the Leverhulme Foundation for the Major Research Fellowship I received from 2005–7 and to the British Academy for a large grant which I was awarded in the same years. A special thanks goes to Tawfikal-Asadi for his assistance in arranging, transcribing and translating several interviews in Damascus. 1. Interview with Adel Marjal- Sultan, Syria, 8 October 2005. 2. In a few cases, the children and grandchildren of potential informants were more eager for the interview to take place than the key informant himself or herself. In such cases, I renewed the negotiation of informed consent and if I found the interviewee still unsure or hesitant, I cut the interview short and moved on. 3. Interview with Hagop, Damascus, Syria, 21 April 2006. 4. See Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Oslo, 1969); and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London, 1993). 5. Michael Humphrey, ‘Migrants, Workers and Refugees: The Political Economy of Population Movements in the Middle East’, Middle East Report, vol. 23 (1993), pp. 2–9; Elie Kedourie, ‘Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 25 (1984), pp. 276–82. 6. Karen Barkey and Mark Von Hagen, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO, 1997); Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 18 (1995), pp. 189–218. 7. Dawn Chatty, From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World (New York, 1986); James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Christina Helms, The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia (London, 1981); John Wilkinson, ‘Traditional Concepts of Territory in South East Arabia’, Geographical Journal, vol. 149 (1983), pp. 201–315.

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8. Madawi Al-Rasheed, ‘The Myth of Return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian Refugees in London’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 7 (1994), pp. 199–219; Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, 1997). 9. Greece acquired Thessaly in 1881, Crete in 1908 and Macedonia in 1913. These locations were largely evenly divided between Greek Orthodox and Muslims, resulting in massive flight of the Muslims to the remaining Ottoman territories. 10. The term ‘unmixing of peoples’ was attributed to Lord Curzon in his reflections on the Balkan Wars in Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985). 11. Eugene Michel Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York, 1948). 12. Interview with Adel Marjal- Sultan, Syria, 15 April 2006. 13. Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London, 2001). 14. Ibid. 15. Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, WI, 1985). 16. Sheikh Shamil, or Imam Shamil (1797–1871), was a political and religious leader of the Muslim tribes of the Northern Caucasus. He was the third Imam of Dagestan and Chechnya (1834–59) and led the resistance in the Russian efforts to conquer his peoples. See Ilhan Tekeli, ‘Involuntary Displacement and the Problem of Resettlement in Turkey from the Ottoman Empire to the Present’, in Seteney Shami, ed., Population Displacement and Resettlement: Development and Conflict in the Middle East (New York, 1994), pp. 202–26. 17. The transportation of these Circassians was so large an operation that the Ottomans as well as the Russian governments had to cooperate to effect this mass clearing. The two governments had to employ war ships – after their guns had been removed as well as hiring numerous steam and sail vessels from other countries – to effect this mass transfer. The majority of Circassians being sent to Anatolia were landed at Trabzon and Samsun on the Black Sea. There, the refugees were reported to be dying at the rate of 200 per day as a result of typhus and smallpox. The Ottoman authorities had to bring in convicts to bury the dead or throw them into the sea. See Mark Pinson, ‘Ottoman Colonization of the Circassians in Rumili after the Crimean War’, Etudes Balkaniques, vol. 8 (1972), pp. 71–85. 18. James Meyer, ‘Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 39 (2007), pp. 15–32, maintains, however, that except for the 1877/78 mass expulsions, return migration of Russian Muslims was also typical and that emigration was not always perceived (at least initially) as a one-way voyage, but rather as a temporary necessity. He documents for the close of the nineteenth century a certain regularity of cyclical migration as Ottoman Muslims of Russian origin sought family reunion or trade. 19. Interview with Varukan, Damascus, Syria, 9 November 2005. 20. Stanford J. Shaw and EzelKural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1977).

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150 Dawn Chatty 21. Even in Istanbul, which was known to have the highest concentration of urban Armenians, they made up only 18 percent of the total population in the 1898 census. 22. Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire. 23. McCarthy, Ottoman Peoples. 24. Interview with Ali, Damascus, Syria, 12 October 2005. 25. Eight months earlier, Great Britain had reported to be ‘prepared to recognize and uphold the independence of the Arabs in all regions (with some noted modifications) lying in the frontiers proposed by the Sherif of Mecca’. Earl (Lord) Peel, Palestine Royal Commission Report (London, 1937); George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (London, 1938). 26. James Zogby, ‘The Palestinian Revolt of the 1930s’, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Baha Abu-Laban, eds, Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Endurance (Wilmette, IL, 1974) regards this move as a reflection of the need of Great Britain to maintain access to ever-increasing raw materials to fuel its industrial growth. It needed to protect these sources and markets from its rivals and, hence, Britain needed Palestine to protect the north- eastern flank of this sea route to India and the East – the Suez Canal. Control of Palestine and the Fertile Crescent (Iraq /Mesopotamia) would make a land route to India possible. Thus, in his analysis, the Arabs were only temporary allies of Great Britain. A more permanent and safer client was the Zionist movement – a colonial movement in search of a patron. Herzl and his organization had actively engaged and sought out the Ottoman Sultan in the late 1900s in efforts to persuade him of the benefits to the Ottoman Empire if he were to agree to their plan of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. When Herzl and his group failed to persuade the Sultan, he turned to Great Britain, where he found sympathetic listeners. 27. Izzat Tannous, The Palestinians: Eyewitness History of Palestine under the British Mandate (New York, 1988). 28. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford, 2006). 29. Interview with Adnan, Aleppo, Syria, 25 March 2006. 30. The Allied forces were courting the leaders of these peoples and signing agreements with some of them, providing assurances of independence for their countries as soon as the war was over in exchange for their support in the war effort. This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the 1915 Hussein-MacMahon Correspondence guaranteeing the Arab nation independence from the Ottomans. 31. The Council of the League of Nations later gave Mosul to British-mandated Iraq. See the decision of the 37th session of the Council of the League of Nations, 16, December 1925. Ismet Sheriff Vanly, ‘Kurdistan in Iraq’, in Gerard Chaliand, ed., People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan, (London, 1980), pp. 153–90. 32. An estimate made by Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London, 1992), p. 15. This is about the same percentage of Arabs in the state of Israel. 33. In January 1946, a Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was declared in the remote mountainous northern corner of Iran. The Kurdish government sought to convince the United States that the Kurds wished to form a democratic

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province under a federal system similar to the American model. All efforts were made to keep evidence of Russian influence out of sight. This, according to William Eagleton Jr., The Kurdish Republic of 1946 (London, 1963), was not difficult as there was only one Soviet official in the town. By December 1946, the Kurdish State had collapsed and many Kurds involved in this venture took refuge in the Soviet Union and Iraq.

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7 Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival Victoria Rowe

Introduction: End of empire, genocide and refugees This article examines the positioning of Armenian women in the late Ottoman Empire in relation to state and nationalist ideologies, genocidal deportation and forced assimilation policies in order to uncover the processes through which Armenian women were made refugees between 1915 to 1930, while paying close attention to the ways in which Armenian women tried to resist victimization through developing survival strategies and informal networks of support. In Rogers Brubaker’s study on the end of empire, he observes that ‘most post-imperial migratory unmixing has been linked to actual or threatened violence, particularly during or immediately after wars.’1 The unmixing of multiethnic states has typically occurred in order to create ethnic–nationalist states in which configurations of female refugees are of real and symbolic value because women ‘as biological reproducers and as cultural cultivators’ are constructed as central to nationalist demarcations of ethnic inclusion/exclusion.2 The differences between men’s and women’s positioning within nationalist discourses and state structures become of greater relevance ‘in the context of ethnic–national upheavals, when they are accompanied by state interventions to ensure ethnically homogeneous territories.’3 This was true of Ottoman Armenian women whose positioning in relation to the Ottoman state meant that there were significant differences between how Armenian women and men were thought about and treated during the First World War and the Armenian Genocide. Despite this the study of women during the Armenian Genocide and in the aftermath as 152

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refugees has been largely neglected, apart from articles by Sanassarian, Sarafian, Derderian and Tachjian.4 The neglect of Armenian women’s experience, apart from these authors, is curious because the ways in which the late Ottoman state, under the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (henceforth, CUP) Government, carried out the extermination of its Armenian populace was gendered and was acknowledged to be so by contemporary eyewitness accounts.5 For example, the Bryce and Toynbee report, which is composed of eyewitness accounts throughout the Ottoman Empire, describes adult males as having been killed outright while women and children were ‘deported’, that is to say, forced to walk to the Syrian Desert from their towns and villages in conditions designed to bring about their deaths. These include denial of food and water as well as outright killing, stealing of their personal possessions and the abduction of attractive young women, girls and boys. At the same time, many accounts by eyewitnesses describe how in some towns Armenian women and children were allowed to live if they converted to Islam or were incorporated into Muslim households as wives or domestic servants.6 The erasure of Armenian identity amongst such women was a prerequisite for allowing this group to live in order to construct an ethnic and religiously homogenous state after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Despite such knowledge, apart from the four aforementioned historians, serious consideration of Armenian women during the genocide and as refugees has not occurred. The 2009 publication of Vahé Tachjian’s path-breaking article analysing the reintegration of Armenian women into Armenian communal structures may signal an end to the neglect of Armenian women’s refugee experience, as he has opened up an extremely valuable field of inquiry. Nevertheless, questions remain about the impact not only of the Armenian leadership’s policies on female refugees but also the attitudes and policies of the League of Nations and the Syrian and Lebanese states, where large numbers of refugees settled, and, most crucially, female refugees’ own conceptualization of their experiences and the strategies they devised to cope with violation, abuse and their status as refugees. In this chapter, stress has been placed on refugees’ narratives of their experiences, following Marina Blagojevic’s contention that ‘the metanarration about the national project (failed or realized?) must be supplemented by those fragmented and chaotic yet important elements which relate to personal experiences.’7 In order to examine some of these issues and to foreground Armenian refugee women’s neglected voices and experiences, this chapter focuses on women’s experiences

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and testimonies of what had happened to them during the deportation, the survival strategies Armenian women refugees developed, and the informal networks of support they created, often outside the contexts of governmental and humanitarian policy-making. The primary sources for this research are the League of Nations records, the most important of which are the admission files Karen Jeppe kept of incoming refugees to her Reception House in Aleppo, which recorded what Armenian refugees told of their experiences of deportation and of their early experiences as refugees. In addition to these sources of information, a number of Armenian women refugees wrote accounts of their experiences of genocide, refugee status and immigration. These memoirs, typically written later in refugee women’s lives, often provide detailed information on women’s lives and feelings as refugees and immigrants.8 This chapter draws upon such sources, with the aim of highlighting the unremembered aspects of refugee women’s narratives in order to re-insert women’s lived experience into the historical record.

Reclaiming Armenian women at the end of empire: The League of Nations and Karen Jeppe’s Reception House The contemporary emphasis in refugees studies on the ways in which ‘dislocation and [the] attendant loss of social belonging affect men and women differently’ since ‘the damage has socio-political roots, the nature of trauma is constituted in the interaction of the individual with society, mediated by institutions, social groups and other individuals’,9 is relevant to the circumstances of Armenian women refugees in Aleppo, particularly after the British Army occupied the territory in 1918, following which an organized system of aid to the refugees was gradually established, first and foremost by Armenian humanitarian organizations such as the Armenian General Benevolent Union (henceforth, AGBU), the Armenian National Union, the Armenian Red Cross and the Relief Society and international organizations such as the American-based Near East Relief Society and the International Red Cross, and, from 1921, the newly established League of Nations.10 These institutions began a process of locating Armenian women and children who had been incorporated into Turkish, Kurdish or Arab households during the Armenian Genocide and setting up programmes to rebuild Armenian society through reintegration of women and children, many of whom had been severely traumatized during the deportations and, in some cases, later forcibly married or

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violently torn from family members, into newly constituted refugee communities. Thus, institutional mediation became an important factor in the claiming of Armenian women and the construction of social belonging amongst Armenian refugees. The institutional mediation of refugee women’s integration by the League of Nations was represented by its support for Karen Jeppe’s Reception House in Aleppo. At its first Assembly in 1920, the League of Nations had discussed Armenian women and child refugees and agreed that they were entitled to international assistance and called for a commission to examine the matter. In September 1921, Karen Jeppe officially became a member of the League of Nations’ Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East.11 She was supported by the League of Nations from 1921 until December 1927, when the League ceased funding, due largely to financial constraints, although she continued to run an independent relief program in Aleppo until her death in 1935. During her years on the commission, Karen Jeppe interpreted the concept of protection to include establishing a shelter for adult and child refugees, which due to the severe housing shortages in Aleppo consisted of a tent in a refugee camp in the earliest days. Later, she rented buildings in the city and there established a soup kitchen, a medical clinic, and employment training workshops – a sewing room for women and for men carpentry and shoe-making workshops – later she began to implement a policy of establishing villages to employ refugees in the agricultural sector of the Syrian economy.12 The centre she established in Aleppo was called the Reception House and, upon admittance, each refugee’s information was entered into the Admission Files book in English by Jeppe or one of her workers. The information collected in the files includes the person’s name, age, parents’ names, place of birth and date of admission. There is a section describing the circumstances in which the individual became a refugee and entered Aleppo. The length of the latter section seems to depend on whether or not the person writing the information chose to write down full details or not, as some accounts are lengthy while others are quite brief. Distinctions between the persons writing down the information, who are not named, are evident from the handwriting. The date when the individual left the Reception House is also recorded and a description of what sort of training he or she received and what job they went to or if they had located family members is also recorded. Jeppe worked closely with the Armenian community to locate Armenian women and children and let them know that they could, if they chose, rejoin their community. She worked to provide a safe house for women and

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men needing shelter, to locate relatives in order to reunite families and provided basic training so that adolescent and adult refugees could become self-supporting. If relatives of children could not be found, they were sent to orphanages for Armenian children. In her research on Armenians and Jews in France, Maud Mandel argues that the French state, which took in 65,000 Armenian refugees after the First World War, ‘saw no reason to implement policies to preserve “Armenianness” ’ and was distrustful of Armenian refugees’ transnational identity.13 In contrast to France’s model of assimilation, Jeppe’s work with Armenian refugees emphasized the need to preserve Armenian identity, since she and the Armenian community recognized that this identity was the focus of state hostility during the genocide, as demonstrated by the fact that Armenian lives could (sometimes) be saved if they were willing to give up their ethnic and religious identities. In contrast to this campaign of eradication of Armenian Christian identity, Jeppe’s policy was to encourage those who wanted to return to the Armenian fold to come to her to be reunited with family (if still alive) and community. Although a Protestant herself, Jeppe did not try to encourage Armenians to convert to her denomination of Christianity and in the 1880 admission entries to her Reception House it is evident that the person’s religious affiliation, whether Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Protestant or Armenian Catholic, was respected when connecting people to their respective denominational institutions. Karen Jeppe’s humanitarian activities under the auspices of the League of Nations were part of the development of a global network of states and organizations, distinct from the religious missions of the nineteenth century, involved in humanitarian assistance, creating international, and increasingly secular, refugee policies. The League of Nations’ involvement represents one of the earliest international efforts at creating a refugee settlement programme and in defining ‘refugee’ as a specific legal category. For instance, there was no legal travel documentation for refugees until the creation at the League of Nations of the ‘Nansen passport’ in 1922 for Russian refugees and 1924 for Armenians.14 Aleppo was a particularly important city not only because it contained a large number of Armenian refugees at the end of the war, but also because its subsequent history as a briefly occupied Allied military zone (1918), a short-lived Arab kingdom under Emir Faisal (1918–20) and a League of Nations-sponsored French Mandate (1920–46) encompasses the mixed governance of the territory after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, each of which impacted on the reclamation of Armenian women and children and their status as refugees. Raymond Kévorkian and Vahé

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Tachjian observe that as soon as the area around Aleppo was under Allied suzerainty in 1918, the AGBU, a pre–WWI Armenian humanitarian agency headquartered in Cairo but serving the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire, began to establish humanitarian aid and sought to save the lives of Armenian refugees. The AGBU requested Allied assistance by asking the military leadership to record information on the refugees they encountered and to lend their support to rescue missions and to distribute the food and clothing the AGBU had collected for the refugees.15 Refugees who were able to flocked to the Armenian Church in Aleppo in order to obtain food, clothes, medicine and shelter, as well as to search for family members.16 In light of this historical context, it is necessary to explore how Armenian women experienced refugee policies, and the social and institutional attitudes they encountered when returning to the Armenian community. Kévorkian and Tachjian note that Armenian leaders wholeheartedly desired the reclamation of Armenian children where possible and from 1918 on supported the efforts of groups composed of adult Armenian men who established search parties to locate such children amongst the Bedouins.17 Kévorkian and Tachjian emphasize that children were regarded as the site upon which the Armenian nation would be reborn. Emphasis was placed on gathering orphaned or abandoned children and either reuniting them with family members or, if family members could not be found, in placing children in orphanages where they would be taught, or retaught, the Armenian language and Armenian Christian practice.18 The desire to regenerate families is evident in the poignant tale of a refugee girl who, when narrating her story, stated that she was brought back to the Armenian community after her uncle’s wife found her playing on the street and recognizing her, said, ‘You are the sole survivor [of your family]’ and took her to an orphanage.19 However, as Vahé Tachjian points out, unlike children who were regarded as the foundation upon which national regeneration could take place, nubile Armenian women constituted a special and problematic category for the Armenian community leadership because many of these women were living with non-Armenian men and had given birth to children.20 In the context of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian female body had been violently ruptured from her kin and social group through rape, abduction and forced marriage. Although Armenian and international humanitarian organizations attempted to reclaim women who wanted to rejoin the Armenian community, such efforts were not without ambivalence. Tachjian cites several Armenian

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leaders as suggesting that if women were living in relative comfort with new families and children they should be left in peace, in part because Armenian resources were limited, but also because a suspicion lingered that such women would be ‘morally unfit’ for the national regeneration project.21 Ambivalence was the result of particular meanings ascribed to the female body because, as Lisa Plummer Crafton succinctly expresses it: ‘[the] female reproductive body itself, of course, assures a continuing lineage for a family, but a female is also expected to maintain and preserve custom, thus functioning as a social and cultural body as well. For the first, a woman is characterized as a sexualized body, but for the second, she becomes a part of the network of kinship and social bonds.’22 These multiple socio- cultural meanings ascribed to the Armenian female body were particularly evident in the problematic question of what to do with the children of mixed unions. Armenian women who gave birth to children as a result of rape had mixed feelings towards such children. For example, one survivor described how during deportation she was raped and gave birth to a baby, whom she left alone on a rock each day while she searched for grass to feed herself and after returning many hours later would find it crying until the day she returned to discover it had died.23 In cases in which women were living in households with their children of forced unions, examples from the Reception House files show a complex picture of refugee women’s attitudes towards such children when they joined the refugee community. Reception House files demonstrate that while some women simply left these children behind, others brought children fathered by non-Armenian men with them but gave them Armenian names. The case of Choushan is illustrative of such complexities. She was married to an Arab with whom she had a son and a daughter. In 1927, she obtained permission from him to rejoin her people. Choushan did so; however, she left their son behind with his father while taking their daughter with her. The daughter is named as Anahid in the Admission files, very likely the new name given to her by Choushan, as it was common for children of mixed unions to be given Armenian names after arrival at the Reception House.24 Whether or not a woman was able to bring her child with her when she desired to rejoin the Armenian community was dependent not only on individual choice but on governmental policy as well as community and familial attitudes. The Syrian authorities, represented by the government of Emir Faisal, supported efforts to retrieve women and children from Bedouin tribes and allowed them to be transported by train for free: however, they did not support Armenian women leaving with children

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born of unions with Muslim fathers.25 It is very likely that in the case of Choushan’s son and daughter, she and the father came to an agreement over the division of the children. Based on the Reception House files, the majority of women who had children left them behind with Muslim fathers. It must be acknowledged, however, that women at the Reception House were those who had already made a choice to rejoin the Armenian community and there may have been many thousands who never attempted to leave households where they had children because they did not want to part from them. In some cases, there is evidence that women were forced to give up children by Muslim fathers due to family pressure. For example, Tachjian describes a case in which a young woman, named Arpuni, who had given birth to a baby fathered by an Arab, was forced by her family to choose between her newborn baby and her original, Armenian, husband, in Smyrna. Arpuni refused to give up her baby and stayed in Damascus.26 Despite ambivalence towards Armenian women who had been sexually violated, such women remained a significant and contested site for both Armenians and the communities and governments where they were found because of their reproductive capacity and the need for Armenian women as mothers to pass on Armenian language and culture to new generations needed to ‘make up’ for the dead. Therefore, the Armenian and international community made it a policy to offer women the chance to return to the Armenian community by constructing shelters and offering Armenian women vocational training such as instruction in spinning, carpet making and embroidery, and educational programmes to teach refugee women to read and write.27

Rape and abduction during deportation In order to contextualize women refugees’ narratives, it is necessary to know what women’s typical experiences were. In correspondence with the Danish society Armeniervennen [Friends of Armenia], dated 1926, Karen Jeppe wrote that of the women who had passed through the doors of the Reception House all but one had been raped.28 Although it is true that the group of women Jeppe admitted to Reception House consisted of women and girls who had been absorbed into Muslim households and, thus, constituted a very particular group who had been typically brought into such households to act as wives or domestic servants, their experiences of sexual assault do not appear uncommon, as refugee accounts and eyewitness reports document the fact that rape was a common occurrence during the Armenian Genocide

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and in its aftermath. This is because rape was used as a weapon against women. For, as Cynthia Cockburn writes, ‘It is perhaps in brutality to the body that the most marked sex differences occur in wars. Men and women die different deaths and are tortured and abused in different ways in wars, both because of physical differences between the sexes and because of the different meanings culturally ascribed to the male and female body.’29 She continues by arguing that in political terror, the instruments with which the body is abused are gender differentiated and, in the case of women, sexualized.30 Cockburn’s assertion of the connection between cultural meanings of the body and sexual violence as a means of political terror offers a framework for analysing one of the most common, and remarked upon by observers, experiences of women during the Armenian Genocide. Eyewitness accounts, consular reports and refugee testimonies document sexualized violence directed at Armenian women, including gang rape, sexual humiliation through stripping women of clothing and exposing them to public mockery, sexual slavery, the disembowelment of pregnant women, forced pregnancies of foetuses fathered by rapists and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. The British Parliament’s Blue Book, compiled by James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee in 1916, and based on numerous eyewitness accounts from consular officials, missionaries, European observers and Armenian, Greek and Kurdish witnesses from different parts of the Ottoman Empire, specifically mentions the rape of women as a component of the Armenian Genocide.31 To address the question of why sexual violence was so prevalent, Anu Pillay’s suggestion that when analysing violence against women during wartime, and this seemingly holds true when examining genocidal processes, scholars should pay attention to the attitudes towards women and the level of violence that existed prior to war and how this transmits during periods of conflict.32 Although a full-scale study of the representation of the Muslim and non-Muslim female body in the Ottoman Empire awaits its writer, in a study of women’s bodies in Ottoman imperial edits, Nora Şeni has shown that sixteenth- century Ottoman edicts required Armenian women’s bodies to be identifiable as female and Christian in the public domain by issuing orders requiring Armenian women to wear red veils and prohibiting them from wearing the same clothing as Muslim women. She concludes that this gave the observer the power in urban space to ‘read’ religious affiliation merely by looking at a person’s body.33 That this could turn into violence during peacetime is illustrated by the Armenian author Zabel Yesayian’s account in the city of Constantinople in the mid-nineteenth century of

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her grandmother’s veil being torn from her body by Janissaries claiming that it had designs in green, a colour reserved for Muslims.34 There are also indications that the local Christian woman was exoticized and perceived as a sexual figure more freely available than the Muslim woman in Ottoman literature. For instance, Robert Finn notes that in nineteenth- century Turkish novels, local Christian women feature as figures the Muslim hero can fall in love with or even have a sexual affair with.35 Besides these cultural and literary representations, prior to 1915 Armenian women were targeted for sexualized violence during times of massacre, such as in 1895 and 1909.36 In addition to the image of the exoticized other who, in the context of the lawlessness of genocide, was made freely available, the rape of women of the targeted, or enemy, group functions as what Nancy Nordstrom has identified as a ‘tactic of intimidation’ and ‘an instrument of social destruction’.37 She argues that, ‘Rape, when used as a tactic of social destruction in war, takes specific forms. It is perpetrated on a mass scale. Women are abducted and used as sex slaves. Rape is often perpetrated in public, in the presence of family and compatriots ... In the context of war, the fact that large numbers of women are violated, and in public and perverse ways, combine to undermine social stability. Sexual violence perpetrated on a mass scale threatens the continuity of family and community.’38 Claudia Card identifies this process as contributing to ‘social death’. Card’s discussion of the relationship of rape to the process of social death and genocide is crucial in examining the experiences of Armenian women in 1915 and its aftermath, because the common occurrence of rape and abduction resulted in what Card describes as a ‘loss of social vitality’ which ‘exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to a life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence.’39 Sexual violence resulted in the brutal and horrific severing of Armenian women and girls from normative family and social relations. Refugee accounts describe the terrifying circumstances in which women and girls were detached from the protection of family members during the death marches to be raped or abducted and forced to join new, unfamiliar households where women were subject to rape by the men and resentment by the other women of the household.40 An example of this is the case of Khatoon, who in 1925 recounted her experience as a 15year old in 1915 when she was deported with her mother and two sisters. After her mother died of illness, the group of deportees Khatoon was travelling with was sent on when her caravan was attacked and

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robbed: ‘most of the people were killed, some kept as slaves, others married to Kourds [sic] and Arabs. Only a few continued on their way. Khatoon was taken by an Arab who brought her to his house and married her. This Arab had two other wifes [sic]. Those ill treated Khatoon and used her to every hard work in the house. Also she had to take care of the sheep and other animals. One day a cow was lost. Her husband sent her to look for it. She walked until midnight, but being not able to find it, she was beaten cruelly.’41 In the Reception House files, ‘married her’ is often used to describe forced sexual unions. The legality of such ‘marriages’ seems to have been dubious, as well, and the women never describe wedding ceremonies as part of these procedures. Ruth Seifert and others have proposed that the widespread rape of women in war occurs because women are viewed as legitimate wartime booty. Seifert argues it is an unwritten rule of war that violence against women in conquered territory is conceded to the victor.42 The experiences of Armenian women support Seifert’s contention, as it is quite clear in refugee accounts that women were considered booty. They were used sexually and, in some cases, given as gifts or sold to other men. Matthias Bjørnlund cites the case of the chief police officer of Trabzon who brought Armenian girls to Constantinople as gifts from the Governor- General to members of the CUP Central Committee.43 The sale of women and children appears to have been commonplace and was not confined to the upper echelons of the government. The admission files of Karen Jeppe’s Reception House report many cases in which women and children were sold for very little money or bartered for goods, as was the case of Khatoon, a young woman who, after being abducted from the deportation caravan, was sold for seven sheep.44 Rape contributed to social death because it was deeply shameful for the women involved and, in some cases, made women feel that they would not be able to rejoin the Armenian community. As one young woman expressed it, ‘I don’t dare go home, because I’m ashamed to look my relatives and friends in their faces.’45 The aforementioned account was told to the well-known Armenian male author Yervant Odian, who described her statement in an article published in a Constantinoplebased newspaper in 1919. Both Tachjian and Hervé Georgelin remark on Odian’s initial judgemental attitude to the young woman who was accompanying her Turkish partner and Tachjian notes that this sense of anxiety about sexually violated Armenian women remained commonplace amongst the Armenian communal leadership.46 In contrast to Odian’s, and the male leadership’s, attitude, female refugee accounts suggest a variety of attitudes to rape by women. Although shame was

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common, these responses include proactive behaviour to avoid rape, as well as a pragmatic view when it occurred. In the case of proactive measures during deportation to avoid rape, memoir accounts document mothers blackening young daughters faces with ash to render them unattractive as well as cutting long, beautiful hair and removing eyecatching colourful headscarves and, in some cases, dressing daughters as young boys, or bodily shielding nubile daughters in the middle of the family group to avoid their being snatched away by passing gendarmes on horseback. For example, Elise Hagopian Taft describes how her mother and older sister smeared themselves with mud and tried to make themselves as horrible looking as possible in order not to attract the attention of men.47 Alice Muggerditchian Shipley describes how her mother cut her daughters’ hair short and dressed them in boys clothing in preparation for deportation.48 In extreme cases, women committed suicide or killed daughters in order to avoid being ‘shamed’. This response was considered appropriate and valourized in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, as it removed difficult questions about women’s purity and national identity and is, to some extent, the preferred response by many Armenian scholars today. In such patriarchal circumstances, in the immediate aftermath of the 1915 genocide and in contemporary scholarship, it is difficult to tease out alternative responses, as it appears even women refugees writing memoirs years later felt constrained by familial and societal censorship. For example, although memoir writers mention witnessing rapes, very rarely do they state it happened to them personally. A notable exception to this is Vergeen Kalendarian’s account, which will be discussed in greater detail subsequently. In spite of such silences, however, there are hints that women refugees viewed women who had been raped or forced into marriages in the context of the Armenian Genocide with greater tolerance than the culture of shame permitted. In this regard, the testimony of Vergeen Kalendarian is particularly instructive. In her memoirs, Vergeen described how, after being raped by her captor, she confided to an older Armenian woman what had occurred and expressed fears that she would be shunned by the community as was done to Armenian girls abducted by Turks and returned shamed to their families prior to the Armenian Genocide. When she became hysterical imagining herself being ostracized, the older woman comforted her by saying that the circumstances were not the same because so many Armenian girls had been raped that people would not condemn her.49 This woman, who was living as a ‘wife’ of her captor, offered an alternative view of rape and displayed a shrewd idea of the extent of the problem, nor was

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she necessarily wrong, despite the later official community valorization of women who committed suicide in order to ‘remain pure’. For, as Vergeen discovered, the experience of rape was common, and although she struggled with feelings of being tarnished and unworthy of marriage, when Vergeen later met the man whom she had been betrothed to prior to 1915, he told her that he did not condemn her and was only sorry for what she had been through.50 Nor was his attitude necessarily uncommon. In an informal conversation I had with an Armenian woman in 2000 in the Republic of Armenia, this woman told me the story of her neighbour who had, after keeping silent for years, revealed in 1965, when on the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide a widespread popular resurgence of discussion of it occurred, to her granddaughter that she had been abducted and sold into a brothel in 1915 and that she was later helped out of the brothel by the Armenian man who became her husband. When her granddaughter asked if the woman’s husband (her grandfather) had ever condemned her for having been a prostitute, the elderly respondent stated that he had never done so. Vergeen’s account and the aforementioned elderly woman’s story hint at alternative narratives and understanding by those who had directly experienced the conditions of the Armenian Genocide. The truth is that had all Armenian women who had been raped committed suicide or had Armenian men en masse rejected all women who had been raped, many families extent today would not have been formed, proving that while the aim of rape may have been social destruction, people’s responses could undermine that intent.

Refugee women’s survival strategies: Informal networks of assistance Upon arrival in Aleppo, Armenian refugees were faced with the problem of how to survive and rebuild lives and communities in a foreign country with an unfamiliar language at a time when the city of Aleppo was recovering from the devastating effects of the First World War and the famine that had occurred during wartime. Coudou Bop notes in her study of post-conflict reconstruction that it is common for refugees and others emerging from conflict to lack the proper education and training needed to find employment in the aftermath of conflict.51 Armenian refugees in the first half of the twentieth century were no different than those in the late twentieth century in that respect, as many of the refugees expressed regret and anger over interrupted education and the resulting hardships this engendered when trying to rebuild

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lives in Syria.52 In the case of women, societal and cultural attitudes about proper female behaviour also restricted what women were able to achieve. For example, as a young woman in Aleppo, Dirouhi Kouymjian Highgas wanted to help her family and dreamt of becoming a fashion designer after she graduated from dressmaking school. However, she comments that she knew this was impossible because ‘Armenian girls – at least in our economic and social strata – simply did not go to college or have “careers.” ’53 Her mother suggested that the only route open to her to help the family and live comfortably was to marry an ArmenianAmerican and go to the United States, which she eventually did.54 The policies of humanitarian agencies in cooperation with the Mandate state advocated skills training programmes or encouraged agricultural development as a way through which refugees could support and feed themselves, but in addition to such policies, Armenian refugees drew on the survival strategies they had developed during the Armenian Genocide. Recognition of the ways in which women’s survival techniques were able to surmount the restrictions refugees encountered enables historians to see women as more than victims and acknowledges what Pillay has termed the ‘specific competencies’ women used in order to survive.55 Upon consideration of the stories of refugee women, it is evident that they employed a variety of strategies in order to keep themselves, and in many cases other family members, alive. An example of the latter is the three women of Dirouhi Kouymjian Highgas’s family who supported, in addition to themselves, an elderly grandfather, two adult men, and a young girl on their sewing work as refugees in Aleppo.56 At the same time, Highgas’s account reveals the sense of purpose and accomplishment she experienced working with other young women and helping to care for her family: The American Red Cross had opened a work project centre for refugees in the same building where bread was issued. My mother and grandmother went to register and were hired immediately. In two weeks’ time, my mother was promoted to the level of ‘supervisor’, overseeing a group of women who were sewing nurses uniforms. This meant more money. The Red Cross organized a section called Junior Work Project Centre for young girls in my age group. We did needle lace and ‘cut work’ embroidery.57 Highgas continues by saying that she found the job at the Red Cross pleasant, as the girls sang and told stories as they worked, suggesting that socialization and camaraderie also helped her cope in what were

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very difficult circumstances, as the city of Aleppo is described in this period as full of starving people, homeless refugees, raging epidemics and desperate poverty. For example, Aliza Harb describes starving refugees drinking the blood of slaughtered lambs in the butcher shops of Aleppo in 1918 and Vergeen Kalendarian recounts that so many Armenian refugees entered Aleppo that the city’s small Armenian Church was overwhelmed by requests to help locate relatives and find housing and employment.58 After the war, not only did refugees face formidable material demands, they were also confronted with devastating psychological realities, as most had lost close family members, tens of thousands of children were living in orphanages and the majority of refugees were unable to return to their homes in towns from which they had been deported in 1915.59 Consequently, refugees looked for ways to earn money, find shelter, locate family members, educate children and rebuild communal life. In meeting basic needs, the survival strategies refugees employed included wise use of bribes, judicious management of family resources, bartering or offering to work in exchange for shelter. An example of the latter is found in Highgas’s account of how in 1919 her mother sold the excess bread they received from the Red Cross in order to buy material with which to make desperately needed clothes for Dirouhi and her sister, who were dressed in rags.60 Very often, survival strategies during deportation called upon women to behave or make decisions in unaccustomed ways. For example, Kerop Bedoukian describes how his mother, Serpouhi, acted as leader for 42 people during the deportation. With other adult women, her daughter and aunts, she managed the group’s financial resources, distributed scarce food, and organized care for small children and an elderly paralyzed mother-in-law. Other women came to Serpouhi for advice, including ways to avoid rape.61 Bedoukian remarks, ‘I felt proud of my mother. Every time in an extreme emergency when I expected her to buckle under, she would come through.’62 Bedoukian’s statement is typical of children who lived through this period with their mothers, who frequently acknowledge the paramount role that a mother played in maintaining the family’s survival, which continued when rebuilding lives as refugees. The following dedication of her memoir by Alice Muggerditchian Shipley to her mother is illustrative of the respect children felt for such women: ‘To Mother who, through her indomitable character and unfaltering trust in the word of God, led her six children through the stormy years of war and revolution.’63 Elise Hagopian Taft, another young refugee, witnessed the process of the breakdown of

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traditional gender roles during deportation and later noted: ‘The men seemed helpless. Used to the outdoors, this cramped cattle car with their suffering wives, children and kin was not their world. They were confused, unnerved, pathetic to watch in their inability to take charge or to comfort their families as they had taken pride in doing all their lives. The women proved more resourceful and adaptable, and made do with the situation at hand. They put together what there was of bread and food and fed the children and husbands. And it was the women who kept up the morale by singing ‘Lord be Merciful’, a religious chant.’64 In addition to maintaining families and keeping up morale during deportation, it is clear in many accounts by Armenian refugee survivors and the documentation amassed under the League of Nations’s reclamation programme that Armenian refugees created networks of assistance to other refugees. For instance, Armenian women informed other Armenians, women, young men and children, that there were Armenians left alive in Aleppo and, in some cases, helped other Armenians to flee to the Reception House. Although it was more common for adult Armenian men, particularly chauffeurs, to inform Armenians living in remote towns and villages and with nomadic tribes of the possibility of rejoining the Armenian community in Aleppo, the records of the Reception House identify several cases of Armenian women providing information and assistance to other women, for example, 18-year- old Khoumar, who fled after being informed by an Armenian woman that there was an Armenian orphanage where she could go, or Margaret, who was helped in fleeing by another Armenian woman living in the same village.65 The survival strategies and informal networks of assistance created during the Armenian Genocide also continued to function in the aftermath when women refugees were living in Aleppo. This is most clear in the area of employment. Although the convention prior to displacement was for Armenian men to work for wages and women to engage in housework, as refugees women often worked for wages. Memoir accounts make it clear that most women refugees worked in Aleppo to support themselves and family members, too. Memoirs by Armenian women refugees often portray women working in professions; the two most common are nursing and teaching, although the most typical employment in the Reception House files was the placement of women as domestic servants upon their departure from the shelter. Vergeen Kalendarian testifies that when she was a young refugee in Aleppo, there was a great demand for nurses and that she got a job in nursing with the assistance of another refugee woman, who was working at the

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Ramanazania Military Hospital. Nursing was a desirable job because nurses were paid in food and cash at a time when food shortages beset the entire region.66 Vergeen learned much more than basic nursing and moved to more complex work at the hospital due to her intelligence and hard work, but also due to the encouragement of trained Armenian nurses in the hospital.67 In Vergeen Kalendarian’s situation, it is evident that Armenian women’s networks continued to flourish during settlement in Aleppo, as she was helped by numerous Armenian women to find jobs and gain additional skills. At the end of the war, the Armenian nurse who was her mentor encouraged her to teach school to the newly arrived orphans who were flooding into Aleppo. When Vergeen confided that she did not feel confident enough to teach, her mentor arranged for her to meet another young woman who was a teacher and who could help train Vergeen for a teaching position.68 Anu Pillay states that focusing solely on women’s victimization has a negative effect on women in the post-conflict reconstruction phase and distances them from the realm of power and from the rebuilding process.69 It is clear in the Armenian case that as refugees, although women continued to use their networks in order to get jobs, find housing, and reconnect with family members, they were largely excluded from the formal institutions of community building. For example, the Reception House records do not acknowledge married women’s contribution to family welfare and when the League of Nations dealt with the Armenian leadership, that leadership was exclusively male. Both Blagojevic and Korac observe the continuities between women refugees’ experiences of limited access to mechanisms of political power and women’s focus on providing care for family during peacetime and in exile.70 Armenian women refugees, likewise, focused primarily on caregiving roles; however, as Korac reminds us, caregiving roles also provide women with ‘the main source of their strength in developing successful survival strategies.’71 Despite being largely excluded from formal power networks, Armenian women developed informal assistance networks to care for themselves and family members but also, in some cases, for other young Armenian women struggling to rebuild lives as refugees, and it was in these relationships that the only psychological care for refugee women’s needs seem to have occurred, as none of the humanitarian agencies offered any sort of recognition of the psychological trauma experienced by refugees. However, in a poignant description of the close friendship between Vergeen Kalendarian (who lost her entire family and whose mother was murdered by the man who

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abducted and later raped Vergeen) and another young refugee called Serpouhi and her mother, whom Vergeen later called mayrig(mother), the enormous psychological benefit and the great significance of women’s caregiving roles is evident. Serpouhi and her mother became a type of surrogate family for Vergeen. She lived with them in Aleppo, and later she and Serpouhi married Armenian men in the United States and lived in the same town as immigrants. Their children grew up together and these women maintained a friendship which lasted their entire lives.72 Nor is such an experience uncommon. Many of the refugee memoir accounts describe intimate bonds with other refugees based on informal networks of help and love, demonstrating the power and value of such networks.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to tease out alternative readings of refugee women’s testimonies in order to highlight the largely neglected experiences of Armenian women at the end of the Ottoman Empire. It has endeavoured to explore how women acted in proactive ways to protect and care for themselves and others as refugees in the belief that not only does focusing solely on women’s victimization reinforce women’s sense of powerlessness but that it does not accurately represent women’s lived realities or the historical record. Furthermore, this research suggests that when focusing on women’s refugee experience, it is not enough to concentrate only on institutional mediation – represented by humanitarian organizations or communal leadership – because individual attitudes and informal networks can offer types of support of immediate personal consequence, which must be taken into account when trying to understand traumatic events in the individual lives of Armenian women refugees in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide.

Notes 1. Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples’, in Karen Barkey and Mark Von Hagen, eds, After Empire (Boulder, CO, 1997), pp. 167–8. 2. Maja Korac, ‘War, Flight, and Exile: Gendered Violence Amongst Refugee Women from Post-Yugoslav States’, in Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, eds, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (Berkeley, CA, 2004), p. 252. 3. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, ‘Introduction: Gender and Conflict in Global Context’, in Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, eds, Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (Berkeley, CA, 2004), p. 14.

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170 Victoria Rowe 4. Eliz Sanasarian, ‘Gender Distinction in the Genocidal Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 4 (1989); Ara Sarafian, ‘The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children in Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds, In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the 20th Century (New York, 1991); Katharine Derderian, ‘Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915– 1917’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 19 (2005); Vahé Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 15 (2009). 5. See for instance James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (London, 1916). 6. Ibid. 7. Marina Blagojevic, ‘Preface’, in Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, ed., Women, Violence and War (Budapest, 2000), p. ix. 8. For a treatment of the ways in which Armenian women’s memoirs can be read, see Victoria Rowe, ‘Resentment Against All Places Where Girls are Barred: Femininity and Ethnicity in Armenian-American Memoirs’, Armenian Forum, vol. 3 (2003). 9. Tina Sideris, citing Ignacio Martín-Baró, ‘Problems of Identity, Solidarity and Reconciliation’, in Sheila Meintjes et al., eds, The Aftermath: Women in Post- Conflict Transformation (London, 2001), p. 47. 10. Raymond Kévorkian and Vahé Tachjian, The Armenian General Benevolent Union, Vol. 1, 1906–1940 (Cairo, 2006), p. 58. 11. Vahram L. Shemmassian, ‘The League of Nations and the Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors’, in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), p. 85. 12. United Nations Library, Archives of the League of Nations, Geneva (henceforth, UNL/ALG/G), Karen Jeppe, ‘Report on the Work of the Aleppo Section of the Commission of Inquiry’ (1922). 13. Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in TwentiethCentury France (London, 2003), p. 22. 14. Ibid., p. 32. 15. Kévorkian and Tachjian, Armenian General Benevolent Union, p. 50. 16. Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death (London, 2003), pp. 264–7; Mae M. Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide (Los Angeles, CA, 1996), p. 213. 17. Kévorkian and Tachjian, Armenian General Benevolent Union, pp. 55–6. 18. Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion’, p. 65. 19. Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 123. 20. Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion’, pp. 74–5. 21. Ibid. 22. Lisa Plummer Crafton, ‘ “We Are Going to Carve Revenge on Your Back”: Language, Culture, and the Female Body in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior’, in Susan Shifrin, ed., Women as Sites of Culture (Aldershot, 2002), p. 53. 23. Miller, Survivors, pp. 101–2. 24. Reception House Admission File, No. 353.

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25. Kévorkian and Tachjian, Armenian General Benevolent Union, pp. 75–6. 26. Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion’, pp. 73–4. 27. Kévorkian and Tachjian, Armenian General Benevolent Union, pp. 75, 85; UNL/ ALG/G, Jeppe, ‘Report on the Work of Aleppo Section’. 28. Cited in Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘ “A Fate Worse than Dying”: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide’, in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 24. 29. Cynthia Cockburn, ‘The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on Peace and War’, in Giles and Hyndman, Sites of Violence, pp. 35–6. 30. Ibid., p. 36. 31. Bryce and Toynbee, Treatment of Armenians, p. 161. 32. Anu Pillay, ‘Violence Against Women in the Aftermath,’ in Meintjes, The Aftermath, p. 37. 33. Nora Şeni, ‘Ville Ottomaneet Representation du Corps Feminin’, Temps Modernes, vol. 41 (1984), p. 72. 34. Zabel Yesayian, Silihdari Bardeznere [Gardens of Silihdar] in Yerker [Works] (Yerevan, 1959), p. 399. 35. Robert Finn, The Early Turkish Novel, 1872–1900 (Istanbul, 1984), p. 18. 36. Derdarian, Vergeen, p. 5. 37. See Sideris, ‘Problems of Identity’, p. 147. 38. Ibid. 39. Claudia Card, ‘Genocide and Social Death’, Hypatia, vol. 18 (2003), p. 63. 40. Derdarian, ‘Common Fate’, p. 47; Dirouhi Kouymjian Highgas, Refugee Girl (Watertown, MA), p. 51. 41. Reception House Admission File, No. 691. 42. Cited in Cockburn, ‘Continuum of Violence’, p. 36. 43. Bjørnlund, ‘ “A Fate Worse than Dying” ’, p. 23. 44. Reception House Admission File, No. 1336. 45. Yervant Odian, Accursed Years (London, 2009), p. 301. 46. Tachjian, ‘‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion’, p. 70; Hervé Georgelin, ‘An Armenian Male Deportee’s Vision of Women: Yervant Odian’s Memoirs’, unpublished paper. 47. Elise Hagopian Taft, Rebirth (Plandome, 1981), p. 49. 48. Alice Muggerditchian Shipley, We Walked Then Ran (Phoenix, AZ, 1983), p. 65. 49. Derdarian, Vergeen, pp. 108–9. 50. Ibid, p.154. 51. Codou Bop, ‘Women in Conflicts, Their Gains and Their Losses’, in Meintjes, The Aftermath, p. 32. 52. Derdarian, Vergeen, p. 214. 53. Highgas, Refugee Girl, p. 158. 54. Ibid., pp. 165–6. 55. Pillay, ‘Violence Against Women’, p. 39. 56. Highgas, Refugee Girl, p. 101. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., p. 213; Aliza Harb with Florence Gillmore, Aliza (Belmont, MA, 2003), p. 68; Derdarian, Vergeen, p. 213. 59. For a discussion of state-sponsored seizures of minority property and population expulsions between 1920 and 1923, see Levon Marashlian, ‘Finishing the

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60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Genocide: Cleansing Turkey of Armenian Survivors, 1920–1923’, in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial (Detroit, 1991), pp. 113–45. Highgas, Refugee Girl, p. 100. Kerop Bedoukian, The Urchin (London, 1978), p. 16. Ibid., p. 22. Shipley, We Walked Then Ran. Taft, Rebirth, p. 40. Reception House Admission Files, Nos. 138 and 200. Derdarian, Vergeen, p. 165. Ibid, p. 171. Ibid, pp. 215–16. Pillay, ‘Violence Against Women’, p. 39. Blagojevic, ‘Preface’, p. xiii; Korac, ‘War, Flight, and Exile’, pp. 261, 267. Ibid., p. 267. Derdarian, Vergeen.

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Part III The Consequences and Legacies of British Imperial Collapse

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8 ‘No Home but in Memory’: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab Pippa Virdee

When the independence celebrations were taking place in August 1947 in New Delhi and Karachi, the regions of Punjab and Bengal were the scenes of massive murder and uprooting: The Punjab was peaceful and prosperous only a short while ago. It is now witnessing scenes of horror and destruction and men have become worse than beasts. They have murdered their fellow beings with savage brutality and have spared neither women nor children. They have burnt houses and looted property. Even people fleeing in terror have been butchered.1 What followed the departure of the British in India was one of the biggest migrations in the twentieth century. An estimated 15 million people crossed the borders between India and Pakistan. This was the result of unprecedented levels of communal violence, which contained elements both of spontaneity and planned ethnic cleansing.2 The dislocation was at its peak in the Punjab between August and December 1947. It was estimated by the Indian Government that, by June 1948, 5.5 million non-Muslims and 5.8 million Muslims crossed the border in Punjab.3 The longer-term repercussions of this violent beginning for India and Pakistan have overshadowed the trauma and dislocation felt by millions of innocent people who were forced to flee their homes. While the process of carving up India was pre-planned, the exchange of population was not; though disruption and violence was expected, the ability to deal with this was inadequate and while New Delhi and Karachi celebrated 175

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their new existence, neither thought this would be the source of such hostility between the two countries. The legacy of decolonization in India has, therefore, had ramifications far beyond merely transferring power. While the people were divided up, no one thought through the impact of their decisions on the people. As Mushirul Hasan states: ‘never before in South Asian history did so few decide the fate of so many and rarely did so few ignore the sentiments of so many in the subcontinent ... never before in South Asian history did so few divide so many, so needlessly.’4 This essay will focus first on the process of that division, examining the collapse of law and order in Punjab during the final days of British rule in India. Second, it attempts to examine the longer-term consequences of the colonialism in India and its impact on the lives of people, many of whom have been through multiple movements in order to reconcile the loss of family and home. It is hoped that this will reveal how uprooting has impacted on Punjabi collective and personal memory of Partition.

Handing over the reigns The demise of the British Empire in India is a turning point not just in British colonial history but also in understanding the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan. The lingering legacy of partition had enormous repercussions for these fragile nascent nations; the long nationalist struggle gave way to divided, fragmented but, nevertheless, jubilant nations. The joy of independence for many was overshadowed by the Partition of India to create the new state of Pakistan. The process of dividing and partitioning territories was much easier for Sir Cyril Radcliff on paper than it was in practice. This was not just a physical separation but a division of people, emotions, ancestral lands and properties; it was a partitioning of people whose primary identifier now was their religious identity, while their caste, class, linguistic or ethnic identity had receded, albeit temporarily. As independence drew closer and the idea of a separate homeland for India’s Muslims became a reality, the Punjab, which Jinnah termed the ‘cornerstone’ of Pakistan, effectively became the battleground. The Unionist Party, which had dominated Punjabi politics for the previous 20 years, was able to block the Muslim League’s attempts to form a ministry, due to the fragile balance of votes. But tensions were mounting outside the legislature as communal organizations in the region all laid claim to the historic land. The question of dividing the country was itself a consideration that only surfaced in 1940 with the Lahore Resolution.

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A number of mistakes by the Indian National Congress led to the rise of the Muslim League during this period. Its refusal to share power with the Muslim League in the United Provinces following the 1937 provincial elections is regarded as a major turning point. Furthermore, during the Second World War, the Muslim League shrewdly supported the colonial power, while the Indian National Congress leadership was in jail for opposing the decision by Britain to declare war on India’s behalf. During the war years, Jinnah’s position grew in stature and was elevated to the point that he was now able to begin bargaining for a separate homeland.5 It was in the wake of the Unionist Ministry’s resignation on 2 March 1947,6 that the Punjab slid into communal violence. Until this time, the province had escaped the communal violence that had earlier engulfed Calcutta, Noakhali in East Bengal and then spread to Bihar.7 The disturbances of March 1947, in Rawalpindi division, in the wake of Khizr’s resignation marked an alarming trend towards an increased use of violent means to achieve political goals and, thus, legitimatized violence as a political tool. The demarcation of territory in response to the impending British departure, combined with the highly militarized nature of Punjabi society, made the situation qualitatively different from previous ‘communal riots’.8 Crucially, the March violence9 set the benchmark for further and more gruesome reprisal hostility, or as Paul Brass has termed ‘retributive genocide’,10 in August 1947. The Punjab violence was a factor in the decision of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, to bring forward the date of departure from India. Initially planned for June 1948, the date changed to August 1947, which effectively left no time to prepare a smooth transfer of power and even less time to consider how the country would be divided. The violence in Punjab and elsewhere in India had ended the hopes of restoring the May 1946 Cabinet Mission’s proposals for a united India. Partition was now seen as the only way forward. The Mountbatten Plan was announced on 3 June 1947 and accepted by the main leaders, Nehru, Jinnah and the Sikh leader Sardar Baldev Singh. According to the Plan, the areas of Bengal and the Punjab would be divided between Muslim and non-Muslim districts. All the concerned parties and communities were able to put forward their cases to the Boundary Commission in determining how the line would be drawn. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was given the unenviable task of chairing the Boundary Commission. One of Radcliffe’s virtues was apparently his ignorance of India and any previous knowledge of the region that he was going to divide.11 This was supposed to ensure that he appeared as a neutral

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figure and dealt even-handedly with the conflicting territorial claims. However, Lucy Chester has argued that this ignorance did not necessarily translate into objectivity because Radcliffe’s loyalty was to the British Government.12 Based on out- of- date 1941 census material, the Partition line, known as the Radcliffe Line, was eventually drawn in six weeks and the fate of millions of people was decided. What is more astonishing is that while Pakistan came into being on 14 August and India gained independence on 15 August, the actual boundary between the two countries was announced on 17 August. No prior notice was provided to the people who were still uncertain about which side of the border they would be on. The colonial government was clearly focused on leaving India at this point and had not anticipated the mass transfer of population as a result of its policies. During the months of August to December, almost all the Sikhs and Hindus of West Punjab left Pakistan and similarly nearly all the Muslims of East Punjab and many from adjoining areas left India to create new homes in the Dominion of Pakistan. Despite the warning signs of violence-related migration in Noakhali (October 1946) and Bihar (November 1947) that contained elements of ethnic cleansing, and the fact that some non-Muslims started to migrate in the wake of riots and violence in Rawalpindi in March 1947, neither the Indian nor Pakistan governments really anticipated the mass migration. In reality, little attention was paid to any form of a planned exchange of population as the Government of India felt it was inconceivable that people would just leave their ancestral lands and property and migrate.13 Jinnah has also envisaged a Pakistan that had non-Muslims; indeed the Muslim League leadership vowed to protect the minorities in Pakistan and, thus, prevent a mass exodus.14 Yet the idea was not completely inconceivable because Jinnah had also suggested an exchange of population as early as 10 December 1945 and Ghazanfar Ali Khan, who was one of Jinnah’s close aides, considered an ‘exchange of population a necessary corollary’ to the establishment of a Muslim state.15 While the secular- orientated Indian National Congress could accept a territorial division, a division of peoples would totally negate its ideology and force it to accept that India was indeed made up of ‘two nations’ with irreconcilable differences.16

Violence, migration and the making of the refugee At the end of August, two weeks after Partition had taken place, there was still some hope that the law and order situation would improve.

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Indeed, ‘The Prime Minister of Pakistan expressed the hope that, as the general situation improved, those gathered in refugee camps would return to their homes.’17 However, it was also beginning to dawn on the authorities that some movement of peoples was inevitable, due to the uncontrollable levels of violence. One of the bloodiest massacres was in Sheikhupura. G. D. Khosla terms the district as a ‘by-word’18 for murder, loot, arson and rape that took place between 17–31 August.19 In a statement sent to Rameshwari Nehru, a social worker and head of the Women’s Section in the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, the extent of the partition-related violence becomes clear. The statement notes that in the space of 24 hours, 10,000 people were killed in Sheikhupura by the ‘Muslim military and police or were burnt alive in the houses’. In this case, it appears that the Baloch soldiers and the local leadership were culpable for the massacre but the statement also notes how some people, regardless of the dangers, were compelled to save and protect the lives of the ‘other’ community. For example, ‘the local president of the League, Mr. Anwar had given shelter to about 65 members of the families of his friends. One Mrs. Rafi, a wife of a police inspector saved about 70 lives’,20 highlighting that even in this extreme situation not all humanity had vanished. Sheikhupura was the spiritual homeland of the Sikh community; it is the birthplace of the founder of Sikhism and, for this reason alone, many Sikhs found it difficult to believe that it would now be in Pakistan. But like the rest of central Punjab, the district was an amalgam of different religious communities who came to coexist over generations. 21 Yet now, nearly 150,000 Sikhs were gathered for the mass exodus. 22 The creation of refugees by these acts of violence left people helpless in their loss of family members and property. Some wrote to religious organizations such as the Hindu Mahasabha in desperate pleas of help: I am refugee from Sheikhupura proper which has been a scene of total mascure [sic] and I have lost six members of my own family including brother, his wife two daughters one son and my own wife. Now I have to look after two families myself alone. I, therefore request that a suitable quarter for ten members may kindly be allotted to me to live in ... At present, I am staying in a refugee camp in New Delhi. I beg to point out that we had at Sheikhupura three houses and 50 bighas [1 bigha is roughly equivalent to 1/3 of an acre] of cultivated land and all our houses and property has been looted by the rioters. Now I am absolutely penyless [sic].23

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Once the violence reached uncontrollable levels and chaos engulfed the Punjab region, the two new dominions had to accept that the exchange of populations was an inevitable outcome of Partition. There were fears that the ‘holocaust at Sheikhupura will probably be repeated in many other mofussil areas in West Punjab and that 40,000 lives are in danger during next 48 hours.’ It was, therefore, recommended that a ‘transfer of population should take place’. 24 But the nature of that exchange was not clear. Would the exchange involve repatriation or resettlement? Mahatma Gandhi’s view on this was that ‘the migrants must eventually return to their homes and lands that the two Dominion Governments must extend the fullest protection of their minorities’. 25 In many ways, the refugees themselves were of the same opinion. The interview below with a migrant from Sialkot, which resonates in many other oral accounts of refugee’s experiences, illustrates the hope that uprooting would only be temporary. Sarwan recollects: People just tied locks to their houses in our village. We told our neighbours that we would be back soon. Some people who were our sympathisers said not to go. People lost a lot, most left everything there. We had one horse and brought along as much as we could. We didn’t know that we would not return. We just went until things calmed down.26 These views were reiterated in an interview with Rana, who migrated from Ludhiana. Like many others, he thought that eventually there would be an opportunity to go back to their ancestral lands, but even with this hope in mind, it was still an emotional and painful process. When we migrated from India, many Muslims thought that they would come back after two to three months. It was stupidity, I think. Even feeling all this, we were not sure about migration ... The riots kept on gaining strength and ferocity and only two options were left with us, to die or to migrate. Some Muslims wanted to stay in their homeland and die there while the rest thought about the other option because the army of the [Sikh] States had surrounded them and they didn’t have weapons to defend themselves. Some of our Sikh friends waited for us on the way. At the sight of my maternal uncle, they started crying and embraced him. They gave us some bread and few other items of necessity. They loaded those items on a horse and handed the reins to us.27

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It was first noted on 7 September 1947 at the Emergency Committee meeting between India and Pakistan, that the movement of people was their first priority.28 Both governments had vowed to cooperate and to use all resources available to them to provide safety for migrants.29 The Punjab Governments set up the Liaison Agency to oversee the evacuation of refugees along with the Military Evacuation Organization, which was responsible for the movement of people across the borders of Punjab. The vast majority of people crossed the newly created border on foot, forming snake-like khalifas which, though protected by the army, were still attacked by the opposing communities who were themselves going in the opposite direction. For others, the exhaustion of travelling was too much; the weak were simply left to perish, while the dead were abandoned without any burial rites. Foot convoys, regardless of these problems, remained the most practical method of transport for the largely agricultural Punjabi community, who could at least take some essential foodstuff, equipment and cattle with them. The trains were the second most popular form for transporting the refugees, yet the history of Partition is replete with horrific stories of pre-planned attacks on trains, trains filled with corpses denuded of all identity, and of burning trains arriving at platforms and motivating further reprisal killings. Some were lucky enough to survive: They [Sikhs] blocked the way of our train – halting our journey for three days. It seemed that the Sikhs were preparing for a big attack. There were four to five military men of Baloch regiment with us. With great effort of these soldiers our train set off again. On going a little ahead, we found scores of Sikhs lying on the ground, who were ready to attack our train. Our military men opened fire on them and the entrenchments of Sikhs became their graves.30 Khushwant Singh’s31 fictional account is perhaps the most widely quoted reference which captures all the absurdities of Partition with its portrayal of Mano Majro, once a sleepy village but now on the newly created border between India and Pakistan. The book poignantly ends with the dilemma facing the main protagonist over what action they, as individuals, should take regarding a planned attack on a train headed for Pakistan with Muslim refugees. Train to Pakistan, written in 1956, was an important piece of fictional writing because it brought out the human dimension of Partition, rather than focusing on the decisionmakers. Singh was telling the story of how those decisions affected ordinary villages like Mano Majro and how their lives are thrown into turmoil by these decisions made faraway.

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The journey across the new border marked a sense of relief for many refugees; Stephen Keller makes the analogy with the feeling of having reached the ‘promised land.’32 In an interview with Kabir, he also recalled the sense of relief felt by everyone upon reaching Atari, comparing it to a religious shrine which they had finally reached.33 But this jubilation was short-lived. Makeshift refugee camps accommodated the millions who were uprooted, homeless and destitute. By the end of December 1947, there were more than 160 refugee camps all over India and 85 of those were in East Punjab.34 August and September were still part of the monsoon season and this further hampered the logistics of the evacuation process. It was noted that ‘floods washed away roads and railway tracks and bridges, broke up transport and communications ... mercilessly washed away the evacuees who were encamping in low-lying areas between Amritsar and Jullundur.’35 Refugees themselves vividly recount stories of the floods sweeping in swollen bodies and blood-flowing rivers; images they are unable to confine to the past. Khurshid recounts her experiences: We witnessed atrocities of Hindus and Sikhs towards Muslims. They murdered Muslims brutally and shattered their bodies to pieces with spears. Displayed the corpses in the air on their blades and threw them on the earth afterwards. Those were the rainy days and water became red with blood of the corpses lying unattended on the ground. When we started from there our feet got red with the bloody water.36 Khaira’s account in Talbot and Tatla’s Epicentre of Violence highlights the extent to which people became quite immune to otherwise disturbing and horrific accounts, which was for many the only way to survive the experience. During the movement of the convoy we used to drink water from a small stream which ran parallel to the passage. I remember, many times when we drank water from the stream, there were dead bodies flowing through it, one bloated body passing, then another one coming from the distance. This chain of dead bodies hardly stopped. People would just wait to let the body pass before filling their glasses of water.37 The impending winter presented further problems, with provision of warm clothing and blankets becoming a priority for the governments of

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India and Pakistan. While the provision of clothing, food and housing was at least something which could be calculated and catered for, the psychological impact of this trauma is something which has received little attention. One of the earliest studies was by Keller, who spent time with Sikh and Hindu Punjabi refugees and tried to examine the social impact of this displacement. In his study, Keller identifies three stages in the refugee experience. The first one, which is relatively short, is the point of arrival, in which the refugee is numbed by the experience and often overcome by grief. The second stage is survivor’s guilt. Keller recounts a story of a man who became separated from his mother and came to Amritsar. There was a sense of guilt because his mother had been left behind, while he had survived. As a result of these feelings, he became restless, anxious and incapable of settling down. The continued inability to reconcile to this separation and the associated guilt eventually led him to Pakistan, to search for his mother, and although he was not able to locate her, there was at last some sort of closure for him.38 This sense of restlessness felt by refugees and the inability to settle down resonates in many accounts provided by refugees. The final stage, according to Keller, is marked by aggression, not necessarily physical aggression but a stage in which the refugee feels invincible enough to take risks; this could be risks in business or even in the political sphere. As one of the refugees says, ‘we have gone through so much; what more can happen to us? No one can do anything to us that can be more terrible than has already occurred. Why should we be afraid?’39 Other studies have also shown the highly motivated tendencies amongst those who are uprooted or even amongst the diaspora and migrant communities.40

Multiple migrations, severance and collective amnesia The second part of this chapter deals with some of the longer-term repercussions of colonial policy in India. This is explored through the accounts of Partition migrants connected with the canal colonies and the Punjabi diaspora living in Britain. Both illustrate the long tradition of migration in the region but are also important in understanding the ‘side effects’ of colonial rule. The consequences of Partition for the canal colonies were clearly unforeseen because they were developed in the nineteenth century when the idea of independence, let alone Partition, was a remote possibility. Yet without these earlier migrations and the linkages with the ‘motherland’, the later population displacement of 1947 would have undoubtedly taken a different form. The personal

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narratives used here reveal the lack of closure and self-inflicted amnesia about their personal loss, leading to constant shifts and movement in order to reconcile that sudden fracture. From the mid-1880s, the Punjab province experienced rapid growth and major social engineering based on irrigation projects.41 Vast wastelands in western Punjab (located in contemporary Pakistan) were cultivated to create some of the most successful agricultural land in the world at the time. In this complex system the colonial power was engaged in maintaining its hold over the frontier Punjab province. Recruitment and retention in the army was a crucial ingredient in colonial policy, in which army personnel were rewarded land in the canal colonies. Agriculturalists from the overpopulated areas of central Punjab migrated westwards to turn this sparsely populated land into what became the ‘bread basket’ of colonial India. Although migrants to the canal colonies42 also included Muslims, it was ultimately the Hindus and Sikhs who would be compelled to leave this land in 1947. As Randhawa, in his account of resettlement in India, notes: ‘Many of these who came from the canal colonies had their original home in the districts of East Punjab, more especially in the Jullundur Division. These were the colonists who had gone a generation or so ago into the canal colonies and there, with labour and skill, raised one of the most flourishing systems of agriculture in the world.’43 While the initial migration to the canal colonies was voluntary and organized, the latter was forced migration, often leading to complete abandonment of personal properties. This was obviously the unintended outcome of earlier British colonial polices; mixing-up of populations in the nineteenth century was giving way to ‘unmixing’ of communities in 1947. Gurdev is now a resident of Leicester: her case illustrates the longevity of resettlement of the constant migration of Punjabi people. Many Punjabis encountered travel through joining the colonial army; Gurdev’s father and grandfather had both joined the army and contributed to the British war efforts. It was Gurdev’s grandfather who was rewarded with land in Sheikhupura and, thus, migrated to the canal colonies, as she explains: [M]y granddad moved from Indian part of Punjab to Pakistan part ... it was a forest of barren land and it was given to people who will cultivate it and they will get a share of it and the Government will get the other share ... it was irrigated by the canals ... it was very fertile land ... my granddad built a very nice house, a big house.44

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Although it is difficult to estimate the exact numbers, many of those who had originally left central Punjab for the canal colonies used their previous family links to return in 1947 in order to re- establish themselves. Pritam Singh’s family originally belonged to Dhandhra in Ludhiana district; his grandfather had gone to the Sandal Bar (Lyallpur area) area in 1892–3, and Pritam was born in the new colonies. His family, however, still kept links with their ancestral village: We still had land in Dhandhra. So we used to return to Dhandhra periodically. We had leased our land to Khem Singh – one of our relatives who, used to pay us a bit, you see ... Our land amounted to 50 bighas at Dhandhra (10 acres), so we did expect much income from back home. In any case, we visited old village every six months but definitely once a year.45 But as he goes on to explain, once rumours started about the creation of Pakistan, the situation became uncertain and they were informed that movement would be necessary. Sir Francis Mudie, who was the Governor of West Punjab, had written to Jinnah at the time, urging him that the Sikhs had to be evacuated, including the 300,000 Sikhs in Lyallpur who had been unwilling to leave.46 Pritam Singh, in his account, clearly sees the escalating violence as the primary factor in pushing the reluctant Sikhs and Hindus out of the prosperous canal colonies: But many people still thought that it is all nonsense. We should not move ... Then suddenly everything changed when murders came along. Some Sikh leaders ran through our villages, including Giani Kartar Singh and Udham Singh Nagoke. They told us to get ready for permanent movement back to native lands ... As we crossed the border, expressions of happiness, confusion, mixed along with keen discussion about the new border. Where was Hindustan and how did Pakistan begin from this border? We stayed the night just near the new border ... Death smelt all around the camps.47 In the end, they were all forced to flee; Gurdev’s family was lucky because personal connections with the army ensured safe passage but, as she recalls, her family used their previous links and went back to their original ancestral lands: We went to a village where my mother’s family used to live ... my other family ... my father’s family, they were there before we came ... about a

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month before us. That caravan was escorted by army because in our village there was a retired captain or major. He went to Delhi and he arranged some army escort. So our family was safe ... and they reached the destination before us. My dad’s family, we settled in one place. One of my dad’s sisters, they went to their village ... where they came from ... we settled in different villages, not far from each one.48 Similarly, Ratten’s history is another example of someone whose family originally migrated to Lyallpur around 1910 and then returned to their ancestral home in 1947.49 His family decided to try their fortunes in Lyallpur following the death of many family members due to a plague epidemic. His father decided to go to Lyallpur, as they had heard of the new canal colony. He had anticipated the need for a karyana (general grocers) shop, as there were many farmers and families settled there. Once settled, other family members joined them. Fewer than 40 years later, Partition violence forced them to make a return journey to Ludhiana. On the other hand, an interview with Malik suggests that Muslims in Ludhiana had also been influenced by stories from Hindu and Sikh migrants to the canal colonies. Those who had ventured into the canal colonies often maintained links with their ancestral lands (as illustrated by the accounts above) and they often recounted stories to their friends and families of the opportunities in the colonies. These accounts are important because they plant tales of otherwise remote and distant places, thereby making them familiar neighbourhoods that people know of, providing a more personalized connection. It was undoubtedly these stories which in turn influenced Muslims fleeing from the Partition violence in places like Ludhiana to seek refuge in Lyallpur, which appeared an attractive destination. Malik recalls that there was a rumour, ‘that Lyallpur had been allotted to Ludhiana.’ He continues: Some people wanted to go to Gujranwala but the majority wanted to go to Lyallpur. Because of this we and most of the migrants from Ludhiana reached Lyallpur and started handlooms business. There was a rumour that Lyallpur would be given to Ludhiana, this also played its part to attract migrants from Ludhiana. We heard it in the camps and on our way as well. We liked Lyallpur because my father had worked as a driver in Jhang, near Lyallpur. He had seen Lyallpur city and he liked its geographical features and atmosphere very much. It was a new city then. It was famous in Ludhiana that most of the people were migrating from Ludhiana to Lyallpur and Lahore.50

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Whether people had used their previous connections or whether they just arrived in a new destination, resettlement for refugees was more than just a matter of finding suitable accommodation and employment. For many, it was a long and arduous process involving a number of relocations and taking a number of years before they felt they were ‘resettled’. An interview with Puran reveals this problem. When I interviewed Puran, he had his own tailoring business in Ludhiana, which he had named after his pre-partition home, Lyallpur Tailors. He left Lyallpur like many others in the kaflas and arrived initially in Amritsar but, after a few weeks, he decided to go to Gurdaspur. After a few months there, he left for Ropar, near Chandigarh, because he knew some people there. Puran then stayed in Ropar for two years, where he commenced his work in tailoring. He eventually moved to Ludhiana because his in-laws lived there.51 For Puran and many others like him, it took many years to re- establish everything from scratch and often without state support. For those who lost their businesses in 1947, it took many years to recreate and re- establish new customers and markets. This was the same for some refugees, whether they were in India or Pakistan. Mehr reminisces about his father’s reluctance to settle down and start a business because he kept thinking about his former home, even though relations between Muslims and non-Muslims became hostile: My father lived for 10 years after migration. During that time he kept on thinking about going back to Jullundur. When it came to purchasing a shop, he hesitated because he thought that we would go back someday. It was God’s will, that’s what I say; but, no doubt, there was an atmosphere of brotherhood and peace amongst Muslims and other communities before that. Our shop was in the bazaar near the city courts. Our customers, who were very courteous to us and greeted us as ‘Mian Ji salam’, had swords in their hands during riots.52 Similarly, Abdul hesitated before eventually settling down in Lyallpur; while for Jaswant and his family, who resettled in Ludhiana, it was more than a decade before they could establish their businesses: It was a struggle of ten to fifteen years before we settled our lives in 1960 or 1965. During the initial two or three years of migration, we thought that we would go back eventually to our homeland; many other people thought likewise, so we didn’t show proper interest in setting up businesses. This way some of our time was wasted. Some more of the time was wasted in setting up new businesses.53

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It took many years to settle. We started our business in 1957. That was 10 years [after Partition]. Before that we did many small jobs, then my elder brothers started a factory. But the status we had there, we could never reproduce here. We had to stand in queues to get rations, flour, sugar etc. We first had to get a ration card and then queue to get our rations. This was at Jawahar Nagar camp [one of the largest camps and located in Ludhiana]. Most of the refugees stayed there but we had a house so we didn’t stay there. Our standard of living declined sharply. But once we started working and started our business in 1957, things got better.54 Displacement and resettlement was clearly a lengthy process, which tested people’s resilience to overcome such trauma and rebuild their lives again. And so it seems inconceivable that people should experience further hostility amongst their own community once they had migrated. The label of ‘refugee’ was etched upon them permanently, a term associated with the destitute, helpless and homeless.55 Yes, we were taunted by the term, sometimes called panahgir [refugee], more often, refugees. Someone will say, look, ‘a refugee is here’. We would try to divert the conversation by saying, ‘we are your brothers’ and sometimes argue ‘we are not refugees, and we have come back to our native lands’, did not we have everything here? [sic] Some did help us, others were hostile. ‘Refugee’ was a shameful term, a tag we carried for year, [sic] whenever the term was mentioned, we felt ashamed. It still does.56 It is no wonder that some of the refugees wanted to completely sever the links with their ancestral lands. Although the majority of people resettled in India and Pakistan, some of the displaced people chose to come to Britain. The Nationality Act (1948) technically gave every Commonwealth citizen the right to settle down in Britain if they wanted to do so. Migration by now was also embedded in the Punjabi psyche, often an option for those seeking better opportunities elsewhere. During the British colonial period, the Punjab was an area of high army recruitment and, subsequently, many Punjabis had served abroad. A large number of Punjabis also migrated to East Africa from 1895 onwards to work on the construction of the East African Railway. The people of Punjab had, therefore, experienced and taken advantage of early colonial policies creating a community which had been exposed to migration. However, that early exposure to migration could not compare with the events of 1947, which was a forced migration and

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unsettled people to the core. The anxiety for some refugees led them to seek a new life away from India or Pakistan. Harbins Thiarary migrated to Leicester with her family, but here she describes how her father could not bear to live in the house they were allotted after migrating: When he came to India [after Partition] ... the first 2 or 3 years he was struggling, he was broken ... then he was made lord mayor of that [village] because of his quality of understanding ... but he gave that up because his pain inside was too much ... he said it was like a big castle ... when he was given the keys ... there was blood on the walls, there was dead horses inside because they were rich people. He couldn’t stand that. He said ‘I don’t want to be the lord mayor of dead bodies’ ... I want to make a different life.57 Yet it seems that her father, though he had escaped the trauma and memories of Partition, still struggled with life in England. As Harbins explains, ‘My father used to say ... “What was the point of all this? I have left Punjab in Pakistan, I have left Punjab in India, now I’m in England, amongst the British, happy and working in a factory, making my living and what was the point of all this?” ’58 For Daman Lal, a refugee originally from Sialkot but now settled in Coventry, the forcible displacement ignited fear and anger, as he explains: ‘we did not leave with our own accord. It was very difficult to live there. We were thrown out of the Pakistan. We were totally refugees. We used to live in a Refugee Camp ... We had to leave everything behind.’ Almost as a cathartic process, Daman in December 1947 started working in a refugee camp. There were plenty of doctors there but he was the only dentist, dealing with a camp population of 350,000.59 However, he still struggled in independent India: ‘After 1947 life became very hard, there was a lot of discrimination in India. I did two jobs there. They were not bad jobs but I could not carry on there.’60 In the end Daman, like many other refugees, decided to migrate once again. This time he moved to the United Kingdom because there was a demand for professionals and he started practising dentistry in Coventry. Similarly Afzal, who lost many members of her family in the Partition violence, has been unable to reconcile to the realities of contemporary Pakistan. Her father, bitter from the experiences of Partition and forced to flee, chose to remove himself completely from the Punjab he had known; instead he went to Balochistan in Pakistan. I did not live here [Lahore] for too long because my father was so bitter about it. He opted for Balochistan and left Punjab forever. I came back to Lahore at the age of 25–26 ... So for me, my Punjab was

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my village, which then became a part of India. Living in Balochistan made me to forget Punjab and Punjabi language. But then I started rediscovering the Punjab. I was only 9 years old and was too young to develop any personal opinion about such circumstances. I was just like a scared child simply following the instructions. My father was so dishearten and disappointed. He left a lot of land from three villages. He left it straightaway saying that: ‘I don’t want to live here’.61 The need to forget and move away from the place of trauma is a useful tool to erase those painful memories. Meena Alexander, a poet and a novelist, in her autobiographical novel, Fault Lines, captures these emotions beautifully: ‘I am, a woman cracked by multiple migrations. Uprooted so many times she can connect nothing with nothing.’62 Furthermore, the account below of a migrant who came to England in 1965 ‘attests to the power of the decision to forget, to erase history or memory as a basis for identity’. Samuel and Thompson, referring to Freud, assert that ‘memory is inherently revisionist, an exercise in selective amnesia. What is forgotten may be as important as what is remembered’:63 Yes, our family was first in Punjab, then we went to Bihar, then we came here ... We were in West Pakistan, in Rawalpindi. Then we were in East Ham, now we are in Leyton so how many places you want to remember? For what? ... So I am from nowhere, because connections are just like footsteps, you move your foot and erasing the previous mark. The step is gone.64 Thus, erasing those former memories alleviates the fractures, though the problem for many of the Partition refugees is that there has been no closure. The forced displacement, which meant many of them were uprooted overnight, created uncertainty; as has been shown, many of the refugees felt that the disruption would be a temporary aberration and once the process of the transferring power was completed, some normality would return. However, this rupture was permanent and many were left with ‘no home but in memory’.65 Indeed the strained relations between India and Pakistan since 1947 have further imbedded this trauma: Many people thought about going back to Ludhiana in few years; but the stories we had heard blocked all the ways of such a thought. We

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knew Partition occurred on a national level and not on provincial levels. We were right because nobody could go back and Partition was not undone. This discussion has refreshed my memories and a stream has taken me back to my city, my street, bazaars and the mosque.66 Although there is much nostalgia about ‘my city, my street’, the international constraints have made it impossible for these refugees to revisit their homeland; a border that was relatively close. Instead, memories of that lost youth and place have ‘served to reinforce displacement, loss, and anger’,67 even though some people delayed this process for as long as possible. However, it is Sarwan who captures the essence of the issues that have really torn the people who were dislocated. Poignantly, he talks about his village in Pakistan and his yearning to visit his ‘home’ again, which will remain unfulfilled: The thing that has affected me the most, which I still yearn for, is the need to go back to my village and have a look but I am unable to do this. The law does not allow me to go back there to see my ancestral village and meet my friends and others there. This thing I feel I will be unable to complete in my life ... Work is good but what happened at that time, the things we saw and experienced, and now when I see trouble taking place then it upsets me. We are settled now everything is fine but like I said it can never compensate for that time and what is in my heart. The thing that I yearn for, to see my house and my friends.68

Conclusion The transfer of power in India was essentially planned. However, in the closing days of the British Empire in India there was a collapse of law and order, especially in the province of Punjab. This highly militarized area responded with some of the worst violence seen in the history of the subcontinent. And so, the smooth transfer of power and the creation of two states was forever tainted with the blood of civilians. Tracing this extraordinary period through personal experiences of violence, forced migration and, finally, resettlement presents an opportunity to examine Partition as a long-term event. We can see from these first-hand accounts how people were forced to abandon their homes due to the violence that engulfed their mohallas. These accounts also reveal the uncertainty surrounding the nature of the new international borders

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and so, for many refugees, the temporary dislocation they hoped for assumed permanence. Although lives were rebuilt, the memory of ancestral homelands and childhood memories remained confined to the pre-Partition period. The uprooting of millions of people has itself impacted on the collective loss experienced by Punjab, which has left an indelible impression on the Punjabi identity. The enduring fractures caused by imperial collapse and the Partition meant that, for many refugees, their former homes remained with them in memory.

Notes 1. Kirpal Singh, ed., Select Documents on Partition of Punjab – 1947 (Delhi, 2006), Joint Statement of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and Liaqat Ali Khan to the people of East and West Punjab, p. 508. 2. The death toll associated with the Partition violence is still a contentious issue and remains disputed; the figures vary from 200,000 to 2 million. More recently, feminist writers have been unearthing the gender dimension of Partition violence. It is estimated that 75,000 women were raped and abducted during this time on both sides of the border. See Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); Ritu Menon and Kamal Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries. Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998); and Pippa Virdee, ‘Negotiating the Past: Journeys through Muslim Women’s Experience of Partition and Resettlement’, Cultural and Social History, vol. 6 (2009), pp. 467–84. 3. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, After Partition (Delhi, 1948), p. 50. 4. Mushirul Hasan, ed., India’s Partition: Process, Strategy, Mobilisation (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 42–3. 5. For further information see Ian Talbot, ‘The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab, 1937–46’, in Hasan, India’s Partition; Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims (London, 1974); and Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge, 1985). 6. See Ian Talbot’s chapter, ‘General without an Army’ to understand the collapse of Khizr’s Unionist Government in Punjab in his Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Richmond, 1996). 7. J. Nanda, Punjab Uprooted: A Survey of the Punjab Riots and Rehabilitation Problems (Bombay, 1948), p. 16. 8. Swarna Aiyar, ‘ “August Anarchy”: The Partition Massacre in Punjab 1947’, South Asia, vol. 18 (1995), pp. 13–36. 9. In the lead up to the violence in March 1947, the Muslim League had been pursuing a campaign, ‘Direct Action Day’, against the incumbent Khizr Ministry in the Punjab. When the Ministry resigned on 2 March, it was amid growing unrest in the district. In Rawapindi and Lahore, there were some serious disturbances, which resulted in the estimated death of 3,000 people. Swarna Aiyar suggests that the March violence showed signs of a move towards organized violence and the emergence of ‘private armies’ in

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

193

carrying out formulated plans. See: ibid.; and Anders Bjørn Hanson, ‘The Punjab 1937–47: A Case of Genocide?’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 9 (2002), pp. 9–12. Paul Brass, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab 1946–7: Means, Methods and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 5 (2003). T. T. Yong, ‘ “Sir Cyril Goes to India”: Partition Boundary-Making and Disruptions in the Punjab’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 4 (1997), p. 7. Lucy Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia (Manchester, 2009), p. 178. Satya Rai, Partition of the Punjab: A Study of its Effects on the Politics and Administration of the Punjab 1947–56 (Bombay, 1965), p. 72. Rajendra Singh, The Military Evacuation Organisation 1947–48 (New Delhi, 1962), p. 9. At his Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, it is clear that Jinnah envisaged a Pakistan which included other religious communities. Quote from Dawn in Rai, Partition of the Punjab, p. 72. Address by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah at Lahore Session of Muslim League, March, 1940 (Islamabad, 1983), pp. 5–23. This may have been motivated by the fact that non-Muslims contributed significantly to the economic vitality of the regions that became Pakistan. Minutes of the sixth meeting of the Joint Defence Council held at Government House, Lahore, 29 August 1947, in Singh, Select Documents, p. 505. G. D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading Up to and Following the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1989), pp. 126–40. Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries recount the story of Dr Virsa Singh, who says that he personally killed 50 women in Sheikhupuru to save their honour. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [NMML], Rameshwari Nehru Papers, No. 25, four-page statement about Sheikhupuru sent from Lahore, 28 August 1947. Meeto (Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik), In the Making: Identity Formation in South Asia (Gurgaon, 2007). See the chapter on ‘Composite Culture in Pre-Partition Punjab’. Sir Francis Mudie to Mr Jinnah, 5 September 1947, in Singh, Select Documents, p. 511. NMML, File C-168, Letter sent to the Magistrate, 17 September 1947 by Prem Nath. Hindu Mahasabha. Letter to Nehru from High Commissioner for India Camp, Lahore, 27 August 1947, in Singh, Select Documents, p. 502. After Partition (Delhi, 1948), p. 59. Interview with Sarwan, Lal Bazaar, Malerkotla, August 2001. Interview with Rana, Chiniot Bazaar, Faisalabad, February 2003. Singh, The Military Evacuation Organisation, pp. 11–12. Pippa Virdee, ‘Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana and Lyallpur’, in Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia, eds, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Re-Settlement(New Delhi, 2007). Interview with Saleem, who migrated from Ludhiana, December 2002.

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31. Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (London, 1956). 32. Stephen Keller, Uprooting and Social Change: The Role of Refugees in Development (Delhi, 1975), p. 59. 33. Interview with Kabir, Jhang Bazaar, Faisalabad, February 2003. 34. Department of Relief and Rehabilitation, Punjab, Millions Live Again: A Survey of Refugee Relief in East Punjab (not dated). 35. Ibid., p. 4. 36. Interview with Khurshid, Raza Abad, Faisalabad, February 2002. 37. Interview with Sardar Bhaqwant Singh Khaira in Ian Talbot and Darshan Singh Tatla, eds, Epicentre of Violence (Delhi, 2006), p. 53. 38. Keller, Uprooting, pp. 62–3. 39. Ibid., p. 116. 40. See Pippa Virdee, ‘Migration and Post-Partition Resettlement in Lyallpur: The Impact of Refugee Labour’, in Sustainable Development Policy Institute, ed., Troubled Times: Sustainable Development and Governance in the Age of Extremes (Karachi, 2006). 41. Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism 1885–1947 (Princeton, NJ, 1988). 42. See ibid. and David Gilmartin, ‘Migration and Modernity: The State, the Punjabi Village and the Settling of the Canal Colonies’, in Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi, eds, People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post- Colonial Migration (Karachi, 2004), pp. 3–20. 43. M. S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh, 1954), p. 11. 44. www.leics.gov.uk/print/record_office_gurdev_kaur_saini, Leicestershire County Council, interview with Gurdev Kaur Saini, born in 1933 in a village near Nankana Sahib, Shekhupura District. 45. Darshan Singh Tatla, ‘Sandal Bar Memoirs of a Punjabi Farmer’, Punjab Past and Present, vol. 29 (1995), p. 168. 46. Sir Francis Mudie to Mr Jinnah, 5 September 1947, in Singh, Select Documents, pp. 511–12. 47. Tatla, ‘Sandal Bar Memoirs of a Punjabi Farmer’, pp. 170–2. 48. Interview with Gurdev Kaur Saini. 49. Interview with Ratten, Model Gram, Ludhiana, February 2003. 50. Interview with Malik, January 2003. 51. Interview with Puran, Model Town, Ludhiana, February 2003. 52. Interview with Mehr who migrated from Jullundar and was a small vendor at the time of Partition, Harcharn Pura, Faisalabad, December 2002. 53. Interview with Abdul, Lyallpur Cotton Mills, Faisalabad, February 2003. 54. Interview with Jaswant, Industrial Area B, Ludhiana, March 2002. 55. The term for refugees in Pakistan was mohajir and is mostly associated with the Urdu-speaking people, rather than the Punjabi migrants. The word, however, had very different connotations because mohajir is an Arabic word meaning immigrant or emigrant, and is associated with the migration of the prophet Muhammad and his companions when they left Mecca for Medina. 56. Tatla, ‘Sandal Bar Memoirs of a Punjabi Farmer’, p. 173. 57. www.leics.gov.uk/print/record_office_harbins_kaur_thiaray, Leicestershire County Council, interview with Harbins Kaur Thiaray, born ca. 1950 in Sarhali, Punjab.

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58. www.leics.gov.uk/print/record_office_harbins_kaur_thiaray, Leicestershire County Council, interview with Harbins Kaur Thiaray, born ca. 1950 in Sarhali, Punjab. 59. Daman La Sarin, Rotary Club of Coventry Newsletter, issue 1 (2009). 60. Interview with Daman Lal Sarin, Coventry, September 2005. 61. Interview with Afzal, Lahore, April 2007. 62. Jaspal Kaur Singh, ‘Memory of Trauma in Meena Alexander’s Texts’, in Parvati Raghuram, Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Brij Maharaj and Dave Sangha, eds, Tracing an Indian Diaspora: Contexts, Memories, Representations (London, 2008), p. 392. 63. Dhooleka Sarhadi Raj, ‘Partition and Diaspora: Memories and Identities of Punjabi Hindus in London’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 4 (1997), p. 108. 64. Raj, ‘Partition and Diaspora’, p. 107. 65. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Boston, CO, 2005), p. 190. 66. Interview with Abdul, Montgomery Bazaar, Faisalabad, January 2003. 67. Jeffrey Diamond, ‘Narratives of Reform and Displacement in Colonial Lahore: The Intikaal of Muhammad Hussain Azad’, Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 16 (2009). 68. Interview with Sarwan, Lal Bazaar, Malerkotla, August 2001.

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9 Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees Ilyas Chattha

Introduction At times in the twentieth century, the state has been the main organ of violence, though which gross use of power has been exercised. Genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing and the mass killing of unprecedented numbers of civilians both in wartime and through acts of massive political repression were one of the most negative legacies of the last century. ‘More human beings had been killed or allowed to die by human decision than ever before in human history’, Eric Hobsbawm has written.1 Both the role and place of state is complex in understanding mass violence.2 Leo Kuper argues that colonization constructed ‘plural societies’, and many genocides occurred ‘in the process of decolonization or as an early aftermath of decolonization’.3 For some critics, the emergence of successor nation-states and new forms of national ideologies in the aftermaths of imperial collapse led to mass population displacements and expulsions. They argue that violence may be required to break up populations which did not hold the right ethnic or religious credentials that have long been living in some degree of harmony.4 Critics argue that the leading twentieth- century ethnic population transfers and the partitions that often accompany them generally increase suffering and death. The most important empirical evidence marshalled against demographic separation rests on the outcomes of four famous twentieth- century partitions – Ireland, India, Palestine and Cyprus – all of which were accompanied by large-scale population transfers and by 196

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substantial violence.5 Some theorists, such as Donald Horowitz, have suggested ‘partition’ as a conflict resolution,6 while others, such as Susan Woodward, see genocide and partition as two faces of the same coin.7 Following the British departure, the Partition of India in August 1947 was the most important event in the subcontinent’s modern history. The event was marked by one of the largest migrations of the twentieth century, and some 20 million people were displaced by the division of the Indian subcontinent. Estimates of the death toll vary, from between 200,000 up to 1,000,000.8 An estimated one million Kashmiris were uprooted and 2,500,00–300,000 were massacred in Jammu and Kashmir princely state alone at the time of division in September–October 1947.9 While the violence had elements of spontaneity, there were clear signs of ‘genocidal’ elements, as well. Often though, the debate has been dominated by the histories of the Holocaust and the studies of other some examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’.10 Until recently, little has been written on the Indian subcontinent’s experience of manifestation of genocide and of the making of the refugee population at the time of the 1947 division of India. This academic neglect was not only because the Eurocentric character of the post-war debate on mass violence overshadowed the Indian partition-related displacements but also because the region’s nation-bound historiographies downplayed the darker side in order to trumpet the achievement of freedom. Partition-related violence has only recently been considered in terms of general theories.11 For a long time, standard accounts of the 1947 communal violence observed this violence as ‘summer madness’. Contemporary explanations of the violence both in India and Pakistan always portrayed the killing as erratic and spontaneous, many with the aim of ‘blame displacement’. Each country floated the subsequent course of violence as a ‘reaction’ to the action and in many cases as ‘selfdefence’. Both sides, immediately after the Partition, made available a few accounts of the horrors of 1947, blaming ‘other’ conspirers of mass killings and migration.12 Recently, in a different way, historians of the Partition of India are questioning the relationship between the state and violence. Certainly, the account of Shail Mayaram on the princely states of Bharatpur and Alwar makes clear the involvement of state machinery and administration in the production of violence and the break-up populations, usually in order to further political interests.13 Despite the growing concerns of the ‘new history’ of the Partition of India, the 1947 experience of Jammu’s Muslims has largely been overlooked because of the tendency of Partition historians to concentrate

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on the longer-term legacies of Partition with respect to the unfinished business of Partition in the Kashmir conflict. A study of Jammu’s experience in 1947 is long overdue. This analysis rectifies this imbalance in scholarship and draws some insights on the relationship between violence and the state, examining the complicity of Jammu and Kashmir authorities in the violence. This chapter reflects on the circumstances which led to the mass killings and the emptying of Jammu’s Muslims in the area at Partition of the Indian subcontinent. It draws on original sources to explain the scope, motivation and purpose of the localized acts of violence. Use is also made of oral source material to shed light on the patterns of violence, the processes of migration and the experiences of refugees. The essay’s overall aim is to move beyond high politics of ‘unfinished business’ of the Kashmir conflict to uncover the ‘human dimension’ of the British exit from the Indian subcontinent. It highlights the level of organization and chief characteristics of violence and draws attention to, and analyses, the prime perpetrators of violence that arose in the Jammu region in 1947. The focus of the analysis will not be the violence per se, but the relationship between the violence and the state. Rather than asking why the violence arose at all, attention will focus upon the relationship of the state to the development of violence and the production and expulsion of refugees. Jammu and Kashmir was one of the largest princely states ruled by Hindu Dogras in a largely Muslim populace. Following the decision to partition the Punjab, Jammu region experienced the kind of horrific violence that had already engulfed large parts of British-administered Punjab province. The attacks on Jammu’s Muslims in September– October 1947 were motivated not merely by the desire to revenge the earlier West Punjab massacres, but by the aspiration to ease a Hindu majority in the Jammu region by driving out the Muslims. The violence in the Punjab was largely the result of administrative collapse and state inaction, while the princely state rulers, who maintained law and order in their areas, abetted attacks on the Muslim minority. Ian Copland worked extensively on princely states and recognized that there was considerable violence in the Punjabi princely states in 1947, some of which was instigated the rulers themselves.14 As this account of Jammu unfolds, it will relate Partition-related violence that swept through the Punjab’s towns and cities from March 1947 onwards to the subsequent development of Jammu violence in September–October that year. This resulted in mass migration. By the end of 1947, more than 300,000 ‘Kashmiri refugees’ [muhajirin-e-Jammu- o-Kashmir in Urdu language] from Jammu and Kashmir region had arrived in Pakistan ‘border towns’

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Figure 9.1 Map of the Punjab and neighbouring Jammu and Kashmir in 1947

of Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Jhelum and Sialkot. The Muslims of Jammu were geographically, economically and ethnically linked with West Punjab’s cities and towns (Figure 9.1) and this proximity proved significant, as it enabled displaced persons to flow easily into and out of Jammu province at the outbreaks. Jammu’s experience of violence in 1947 is worthy of detailed consideration not only because it represents an important contribution to the literature of Partition-related violence, but because it sheds light on wider theories of violence. A brief discussion of the conceptual dimension of genocide, ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust is necessary here before any attempt is made to examine the processes and patterns of violence in the Jammu province. Can the parallels between the 1947 Jammu violence and wider accounts of ethnic cleansing and genocide be identified? There are a number of inherited problems associated with the study of violence. These concern the extent to which this was spontaneous or calculated, the degree to which a focus on localized violence can form part of a broader historical narrative, and the extent to which it differs from ‘traditional’ communal violence and conflict. This raises the clarity and question of

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the applicability of the concepts of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the events in the Jammu region in 1947. The U.N. Convention of 1948 defines genocide as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ seems to have originated with the wars in the former Yugoslavia. For many writers, ‘ethnic cleansing’ has become conterminous with ‘genocide’ and the two terms are used almost interchangeably. The U.N. Commission of Experts itself defined ‘ethnic cleansing’ quite specifically, as ‘rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group’.15 Genocide gains its moral force, and conceptual horror, precisely because of the exterminated nature of the Holocaust. Hitler wanted the Jews utterly exterminated, not simply driven from particular places. At the outset, the dictator’s aim is seen to be the ‘Final Solution’ of his political policy.16 Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, involves removals rather than extermination and is not exceptional but rather common in particular circumstances. Further, ethnic cleansing may be sponsored by the very powers that profess horror at genocide. The Holocaust remains a special case because of the utter extermination of a particular group.

Background of the 1947 Jammu violence Before proceeding to examine the state’s role in patronizing violence against Jammu’s Muslim population and the applicability of the concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in any details, first it is important to discuss briefly the background of the violence and mass migration. Migration started from the state of Jammu and Kashmir against the backdrop of Partition of India and its aftermath in September–October 1947. It was believed that the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, a Hindu ruling a largely Muslim populace, signed up with India, not only ignoring Pakistan’s argument based on religion, cultural affinity, geographical setting and commercial importance, but also hardly consulting with his subjects. Thus, within weeks of the British pull- out, the violence sparked off a mass migration.17 In reality, a rounded understating of the violence requires an analysis of events in both Jammu and Kashmir in September–October 1947 and of the first outbreaks in March that saw the Rawalpindi Division massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab. The March 1947 violence in West Punjab followed on from growing tensions that had accompanied the previous year’s provincial elections. On 2 March 1947, the ‘precipitating event’ for the outbreak of

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widespread violence in the Punjab was the fall of the Khizr Tiwana-led Coalition Unionist Government which was formed without the Muslim League’s participation. This was accompanied by mass agitations that turned violent in the leading cities of the Punjab. The disturbances began in Lahore but spread rapidly to Rawalpindi, Attock and Multan.18 The worst violence occurred in Rawalpindi Division, where serious rioting began during the first week of March. The raiders, some of whom were from the North-West Frontier Province, but also included local Punjabis, not only burned and looted many non-Muslim villages in the region but also looted and gutted ‘Murree hill stations’ which were used by British troops during the hot weather.19 A particular feature of the March violence was ‘the genocidal aspect’ of violence. There was a general agreement that these attacks on Hindus and Sikhs were ‘carefully planned and carried out’ and reportedly led by some retired Muslim army officers.20 According to an official estimate, by mid-March more than 5,000 Hindus and Sikhs had been killed in these raids, and more than 50,000 had taken shelter in the hurriedly established camps of Wah-Attock and Kala-Rawalpindi. The gravity of growing tension can be gauged by the fact that special armoured trucks and tanks were sent to Rawalpindi and Attock to defuse the situation. In the aftermath of the Rawalpindi killings, Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab demanded the division of the province along with the Partition of India. In such a climate of fear and uncertainty, by April 1947, non-Muslims from the violence in the Rawalpindi Division were arriving in other parts of the Punjab and the neighbouring Kashmir region, expecting to return after the violence ceased. ‘A large flock’ of the Hindus and Sikhs from Rawalpindi, within a week of the killings, started migrating to neighbouring Jammu and Kashmir.21 The embittered Sikh and Hindu refugees’ tales of violence raised animosities wherever they settled. They planned revenge and produced and circulated wildly inflammatory pamphlets and brochures. Their horrified tales of the Muslim perpetration circulated widely and served as an occasion to launch a reign of terror on Jammu’s Muslim population. Shortly, flight and violence went hand in hand. Violence in Jammu was increasingly locked into an all-India pattern, as killings in one part of the country were justified as retribution for violence in another part. Jammu’s Muslims were to pay a heavy price in September–October 1947 for the early disturbances in West Punjab. At the time also, the Dogra Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh’s own preference was that the state should remain independent or accede to India, knowing that the majority of the state’s populace was inclined to link

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its future with Pakistan. In order to maintain his stranglehold, the Maharaja had initiated a systematic tyrannical campaign against the ‘dissenters’ as early as the outset of May 1947.22 By mid-August, the state administration had not only demobilized a large number of Muslim soldiers serving in the state army but also the Muslim police officers, whose loyalty was suspect, had also been sent home. The state’s Muslim majority contiguous to the West Punjab, particularly in Poonch area, started organizing resistance forces in the border districts. There were regular reports of ‘persecutions’ and ‘mass murders’ of Muslims in Poonch.23 Violence sparked off an exodus and Muslim refugees flowed in the opposite direction. A large number of Kashmiri Muslim families from Poonch started pouring into the border districts of Punjab, namely Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Gujrat and Sialkot. The refugees related harrowing tales of massacres by the state Dogra troopers. This image of Kashmir inflamed some Punjabi Muslims and, in particular, stirred up the movement of tribes of North-West Frontier Areas. A large number of Muslim ‘tribesmen’ attracted by opportunities of ‘love of fighting and desire for loot’, declared a ‘jihad’. The raiders, who numbered about 20,000, crossed the border and smuggled arms into Kashmir. They, along with the Muslim army deserters from the state forces and retired army men, came to help the Muslims of Poonch. Indeed, some 60,000 Poonchis and other neighbouring ‘hill men’ had served in the British Indian Army during the Second World War. There were also rumours of the Pakistan Army’s assisting the ‘Provisional Government’ of North-West Frontier Province in such raids.24 Their activities grew into a full-scale revolt against the Hindu Dogra rule and culminated in the form of a ‘liberation’ of an area in western Jammu and Kashmir and proclaimed the independent ‘Azad’ Kashmir on 24 October 1947. Two days later, on 26 October, the Maharaja fled from Srinagar to Jammu as the threat of ‘liberation’ armed activists poised to capture the city. In the backdrop of the revolt, the ‘hill men’ (raiders) besieged the town of Kotli for nearly a month and Poonch for half a month, ruthlessly killing hundreds of Hindus and Sikhs. They particularly made a practice of killing the leading banias (shopkeepers) and then inviting local villagers to join in looting their properties.25 They also specifically targeted the state officials to drive them out of the areas. Krishna Metha provides a rambling account of her days in and around Muzaffarabad, where her husband was a member of the Kashmir civil service at the time of tribes’ raids in the Kashmir province. She writes her husband was escorted by the tribesmen who ‘drew their guns at him and shouted, You kafir [infidel], go on your knees and prostrate before

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us, we represent Pakistan. He stood motionless. Tell us if you are a Hindu or a Musalman? they demanded. When he said he was a Hindu, they all fired at him one after the other’.26 The killings and dispersal of the Hindu and Sikh population were a clear example of the ethnic cleansing of a locality. In less than two months, a large stream of Hindus and Sikhs was forced to migrate to the ‘other’ part of Kashmir. Many thousands took refuge in the state garrisons, which had not received food from outside since the attacks began. Because of the difficult terrain, worse than in the North-West Frontier, and the poor conditions of the roads, the movement of refugees was very slow. Many who struggled in the mountains were killed and the fortunate ones took shelter in the army-run camps, notably the Yol Camp, where they had to wait years for their departure to India. The last batch of more than 900 Hindu and Sikh Kashmiri refugees and more than 250 former employees of the Dogra state administration were ‘repatriated’ to the East Punjab city of Amritsar as late as in January 1951.27 A survivor, Sardar Inderjit Singh, recalls his family’s migration from Kashmir to Amritsar: ‘Father had put me on his shoulders while crossing the river. He dropped me, saying now you run up the mountain and I will come after you. There was gunfire ... my father could not be found’.28 At the same time, the Muslim raiders also targeted a small number of Europeans, notably Colonel D. Dykes and his wife at Saint Joseph’s College.

The massacres on Jammu’s Muslims and the role of the state In the Jammu province, just as in neighbouring western Kashmir, there was official complicity in the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of minorities. In this case, the Muslims were the victims. The situation was much the same in Jammu as in neighbouring western Kashmir. The danger for Muslims multiplied ‘every hour’ as hordes of Hindu and Sikh refugees started pouring into Jammu from areas that were going to become Pakistan. It was believed that Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from West Punjab were responsible for the violence in the city, in which Muslims became the primary target. As earlier pointed out, in April 1947, the first trickle of refugees had already arrived in Jammu, following the March 1947 violence in the West Punjab areas of Rawalpindi, Attock, Murree, Bannu and Hazara. The daily flood peaked in late 1947 when an estimated 160,000 Hindus and Sikhs migrated from the western districts of Pakistan.29 By that time, the majority of the Hindu and Sikh population of the border town of Sialkot had also fled to Jammu during

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Partition-related disturbances. Both Sialkot and Jammu were nothing less than twin cities. The north- eastern part of Sialkot was principally inhabited by the non-Muslim Dogra inhabitants. They were closely linked culturally and linguistically with the Hindu Dogras of Gurdaspur on the one side and Jammu on the other. As the Punjab Boundary Award concerning the division of the province was announced and the disturbances worsened, more than 100,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from Sialkot district migrated to the Jammu region.30 In Jammu city alone, by mid-September, they numbered 65,000. Their arrival threatened Jammu’s stability and brought the communal tension to ‘breaking point’. Refugees carried with them harrowing stories of Muslim atrocities, which were retold in the press and given official sanction by the state media. The newspapers were totally uncontrolled, calling for sacrifices and revenge. For example, a Jammu-based Hindu paper boasted that ‘a Dogra can kill at least two hundred Muslims’, which illustrated the communal level to which the media and parties had sunk.31 This further intensified the Muslim killings and exodus. The fearful tales and narratives by the refugees of slaughter, rape and looting at the hands of the Muslims in West Punjab further rationalized the expelling of Muslims and increased the violence in Jammu. Almost immediately, the disgruntled Dogra refugees, backed by their relatives from Jammu, started a general clearing of the Muslim population. State officials provided them with arms and ammunition. Some Sikh deserters of the Sialkot Unit, who migrated in Jammu and also had taken away with themselves rifles and ammunition, now utilized them.32 The violent attacks on the Muslims were not just prompted by revenge, but formed part of ethnic cleansing. The political motivation of the violence comes out clearly in the report of the Daily Telegraph on 12 January 1948: ‘Yet another element in the situation is provided by Sikh refugees from the West Punjab who have seized Muslim lands in Jammu ... they originated the massacres there last October [1947] to clear for themselves new Sikh territory to compensate for their losses in Pakistan and to provide part of the nucleus of a future Sikhistan.’33 To make an explicit assessment of Jammu’s Muslim massacres by the state-sponsored bid to change demographics in 1947, it is necessary to look at the composition of the community population in the region at the time. According to the Census of 1941, as Table 9.1 reveals, the eastern half of the Jammu province, cutting across a small strip of the Punjab plain, was inhabited by 619,000 non-Muslims, including 10,000 Sikhs and 305,000 Hindu Dogra Rajputs and Brahmins, and 411,000 Muslims. Forming 40 per cent of the population of this whole area, to

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the north and astride the Chenab River, Muslims were in a majority in the Reasi, Ramban and Kishtwar areas, and nearly attained parity in Bhadrawah. Indeed, it contained elements of a segmented, precarious and plural society, theorized by Leo Kuper, which was likely to explode into ‘genocidal violence’ during a crisis.34 The Muslim population of Jammu province largely consisted of Punjabi speakers. The Muslims of western Jammu had well- established geographic, historic, economic, ethnic and cultural connections with the West Punjab’s cities and towns. They had strongly favoured joining Pakistan in 1947, unlike the Kashmiri speaking Muslims of the Valley, who supported the leadership of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah.35 Within Jammu province, the location of the majority of Muslims and Hindus partly explains their differing aspirations for the future of Jammu and Kashmir. Overall, the Dogra Hindus formed a narrow minority in Jammu province, though they formed a majority in its eastern districts, such as Udhampur, Kathua and the Chenani Jagir. Seventy-five per cent of Jammu’s Hindus lived in these four districts, which were contiguous to Hindu-majority districts of Punjab such as Gurdaspur, which was incorporated into India in 1947. The majority of Muslims in Jammu province lived in the western districts of Mirpur, Reasi and Poonch Jagir and they were contiguous to the towns and cities of West Punjab. Their proximity to Punjab proved significant as they enabled refugees to flow approachably into and out of Jammu province at Partition. Communal division was much stronger in these areas. Both the paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and the Jammu Muslim Conference, with its president of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, dominated here. Almost all the communal violence took place in Jammu province. Hundreds of thousands were killed and fled to the border cities of Pakistan. The level of destruction was worst in Jammu city, where Muslims were in the minority. Their concentration was in Mohalla Dalpatian,

Table 9.1 Composition of religious population in Jammu province36 District 1941 Jammu Kathua Udhampur Reasi Mirpur Pooch Jagir

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Population 431,362 177,672 294,217 257,903 386,655 421,828

Hindu % 57.53 74.31 56.02 67 80.41 90

Muslim % 37 n/a n/a – – –

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Ustad da Mohalla, Pthanan da Mohalla and Khalka Mohalla. The former was entirely Muslim populated and the latter was much larger than the other two combined. These Muslim localities presented a picture of destruction by mid-September 1947. Hundreds of Gujars were massacred in the Ram Nagar locality of the city of Jammu. Village Raipur, within the Jammu cantonment area, was burnt down and its poor communities were to suffer much greater than did the upper- class Muslim communities in such neighbouring localities as Nawakot. Indeed, the patterns of violence were as differentiated as was the Jammu Muslim community itself, comprised of army men, professionals, politicians, businessmen and the milk suppliers (Gujras). Those who suffered badly subsequently blamed those political elites who had made an anticipatory exodus. ‘I hold our Jammu [Muslim] leaders responsible for the massacres of the Muslims and the abduction of our women’, writes Muharram Hashmi, who migrated from Jammu city to Sialkot in late 1947, in his memoir of Jammu city, ‘I refer to those who found safely in Sialkot and much abandoned non-Muslim property’.37 By mid- September 1947, Jammu city’s Muslim population was halved.38 The killings and dispersal of the Muslims from Jammu city were a clear example of the ethnic cleansing of a locality. By November 1947, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri refugees had arrived in the border towns of Sialkot, Gujrat and Jhelum.39 The Hindu Dogra state troops were at the forefront of attacks on Muslims. The state authorities were also reported to be issuing arms not only to local volunteer organizations such as RSSS, but to those in surrounding East Punjab districts such as Gurdaspur. G. K. Reddy, a Hindu editor of the Kashmir Times, said in a statement published in the daily Nawa-i-Waqt, ‘I saw the armed mob with the complicity of Dogra troops was killing the Muslims ruthlessly. The state officials were openly giving out weapons to the mob.’40 Another feature of the heightened anxiety was that in Jammu, the Muslim civil officers and policemen, whose loyalty was suspected, had also been sacked. The state administration had not only demobilized a large number of Muslim police but a large number of the Muslim soldiers serving in the state army were disarmed and had been deserted and humiliated, leaving mainly Hindus and some Sikh officers. In one instance, the Jammu cantonment Brigadier Khoda Bukhush was replaced by a Hindu Dogra officer. There were also reports that the Maharaja of Patiala was not only supplying weapons, but also that a Sikh Brigade of the Patiala princely state troops was operating in Jammu and Kashmir.41 The state authorities were intended to ease a Hindu majority in the

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Jammu region by driving out the Muslims. The Dogra troopers carried out regular attacks on the border areas to expel the sectors of Muslim population. For example, one raid on 28 November ejected the entire population of Muslims of a place called Dulat Chak, claiming it was a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.42 Similarly, the troops of a Sikh Brigade raided the bordering villages and forced the Muslims there to evacuate and go beyond the old Ujhriver bed.43 Politically motivated attacks on the Muslim population were termed by a journalist from The Times as ‘Elimination of Muslims from Jammu’.44 After the closure of the Sialkot-Jammu railway line, the Muslims started concentrating in a camp from isolated pockets to the large enclaves within the Jammu Police Lines. They sought assistance from the Pakistan Government to take immediate steps to ensure their safety.45 In the first week of November 1947, the Pakistan Government despatched many buses to Jammu city to transport the refugees into Sialkot. When the convoy arrived at Jammu-Sialkot road, Dogra troopers, RSS men and many armed Sikhs attacked the caravan and killed most of the passengers and abducted their women. The fortunate ones managed to escape to reach Sialkot, or returned to the Jammu Police Lines camp. Amongst them was Dr Abdul Karim, who gives below a graphic eyewitness account of what happened to the unfortunate members of the convoy. On 6 November 1947, about 25 trucks and lorries were brought into the Police Lines and were at once filled in by anxiously waiting Muslims. Even the roofs were fully packed ... A little ahead of Satwari Cantonment, the convoy was halted along the canal side ... the convoy was halted to complete the arrangements for the pre-planned attack on us ... Simultaneously, all our belongings were looted. Twenty-six members of my family were killed on the spot. My two brothers were killed outright; many members of (my family) were lying in (a) severely wounded condition who died afterwards. My daughter Naeema was abducted. I myself received 11 wounds on my body. The grievous wounds on my head and neck made me unconscious for a considerable time so much so that when I recovered consciousness, it was almost dark.46 According to a statement of another well- educated Muslim refugee who had fled from Jammu to Sialkot, 30 lorries carrying Muslim evacuees out of Kashmir State were attacked by Dogra troops at Satwari in Jammu. Most of the male members were massacred, while the women

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abducted. He concluded that the official proclaimed there that ‘there was no place for Muslims in Kashmir State and that they should all clear out’.47 The first-hand accounts collected from Sialkot provide clear evidence of the complicity of the state troopers and authorities in the ethnic cleansing of Jammu’s Muslims. The use of such oral source material raises a number of methodological issues. The interview was conducted in 2007, 60 years after the events. Memory after a long period of time becomes influenced by other events and interpretations and could be clouded by age. By acknowledging the primacy of traditional sources over oral testimony, Grele argues that ‘an oral history must be used with a critical eye’ and it ‘must be evaluated with care’. He aptly remarks that when oral histories are used with care, they increase our understanding of our past and reveal hidden levels of discourse.48 Oral history has made an immense contribution to the construction of the ‘history from below’ of the 1947 Partition-related events. Urvashi Butalia has adequately brought the experiences of women to the fore, by utilizing oral testimonies, and has exposed the harsh realities of abduction, rape and violence against women in a patriarchal society during the Partition of India. She writes oral history can help individuals and societies remember and make better sense of traumatic pasts. ‘Memories of violence clearly do not go away easily’, she feels.49 It is clear from the first-hand accounts below. Zafar Butt, who reached Sialkot from Jammu in late 1947, stated that his entire family was killed by the Dogra troopers in Nawakot.50 Khalid Ali Gujar’s two brothers and a sister were murdered in Ram Pura mohalla of Jammu city.51 Kawaja Tahir, who now resides in Sialkot’s Askari colony, lost his parents and brother in Jammu.52 A leading Muslim Conference leader Hameed Ullah’s young daughter was abducted in Jammu.53 Sarmad Mahmud, who now resides in the Askari colony of Sialkot, recalls that his family escaped safely from violence in Nawakot with the assistance of a Sikh friend and reached Sialkot, where they spent many years in the camp.54 Similarly, Zarar Hussain, now a central government employee, lives in Sialkot cantonment. He came from Jammu city in late 1947 and recalls the horrors in Jammu at time: The Hindu Dogra state troops were at the forefront killings ruthlessly the Muslims in Jammu city. My father was a well-know lawyer in Jammu city court. He was attempted to kill by the army. We were forced to quit Jammu for Sialkot. My father owned a car so our members of family dove to Sialkot. We left all our possessions in Jammu.55

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One of the most compelling interviews conducted in Sialkot was with Hussein Gujrar, who migrated from Ram Nagar to Sialkot in October 1947. He was 18 at the time and now is a resident of Tarowali mohalla of Sialkot. He still remembers the events of that period vividly when all the members of his family was massacred. He recalls: I was about 18 years old at time. One night, the Dogra troopers attacked our home and killed my parents, sister and two younger brothers. Luckily, I was not at home that night so remained safe. The next morning when I reached home I saw everywhere bodies and blood. They [the army of the Maharajah] looted everything from the home ... I walked from Jammu to Sialkot carrying just one handbag.56 The Hindu Dogra state authorities’ main aim was to change the demographic composition of the region by expelling the Muslim population. They sought to carve out a non-Muslim majority area in Jammu province. The depopulation of the Muslim population in the Jammu region is evidenced clearly in the 1961 Census of India. In Jammu province, for example, about 123 villages were ‘completely depopulated’, while the decrease in the number of Muslims in Jammu district alone was more than 100,000. Here, Muslims numbered 158,630 and comprised 37 per cent of the total population of 428,719 in the year 1941, and in the year 1961, they numbered only 51,690 and comprised only 10 per cent of the total population of 516,932. Kathua district ‘lost’ almost 50 per cent its Muslim population.57 The desire to change the demographics is evidenced clearly by another well-reported incident. The prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehr Chand Mahajan, told a delegation of Hindus who met him in the place when he arrived in Jammu that now, when the power was being transferred to the people, they should better demand parity. One of them associated with the National Conference asked how they could demand parity when there was so much differences in population ratio. Pointing to the Ram Nagar natural reserve below, where some bodies of Muslims were still lying, he said, ‘the population ratio too can change’.58 It is possible here to point out that the interreligious violence that occurred in Jammu included a possible ethnic cleansing of Muslims in September–October 1947. The Maharaja of the Dogra Hindu state was complicit in the targeted violence against Kashmiri Muslims. Out of a total of 1 million who tried to migrate, more than ‘237,000 Muslims

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were systematically exterminated by all the forces of the Dogra State, headed by the Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs’.59 Can such patterns of organized violence be found in other princely states in 1947? Certainly, there is evidence of similar behaviour in other princely states. A police report pointed out that more than 250,000 Muslims alone were missing in the Sikh Princely State of Patiala.60 In Kapurthala State, where Muslims formed 63 per cent of the total population, not a single one was left within a few weeks after the 1947 Partition.61 Ian Copland’s62 and Shail Mayaram’s63 accounts about the 1947 ‘ethnic cleaning’ and ‘Clearing Up campaign’ of the Muslim minority in the princely states of Faridkot, Jind, Rajasthan, Bharatpur and Alwar have similarities with the events in Jammu. Such writers as Christopher Snedden find it ‘impossible to determine if a massacre of Muslims took place in Jammu Province in 1947’. The evidence from Jammu contradicts this assertion. Snedden has also declared that there was no publication in the ‘elusive Times [of London] reports’ (on the issue of 10 October 1948 because of a Sunday), which claimed the ‘widespread murders – up to two hundred thousands people’.64 Snedden’s useful insights aside, the compelling evidence of the 1947 Jammu events was in The Times issue of 10 August 1948 (not in 10 October 1948).65 Both documentary and oral sources not only refute his argument, but allow the 1947 Jammu violence to be conceptualized in broader accounts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.66 There is growing awareness of the use of the concept ‘ethnic cleansing’ with respect to the 1947 Partition violence; the use of the term genocide, nevertheless, remains both controversial and sensitive.67 Until recently, the story of Jammu Muslims’ killings and emptying them out of the region was either overshadowed by the communal killings in neighbouring Punjab around the same time or incorporated with the Kashmir wars between Pakistan and India. Indeed, violence in the Punjab had a parallel with Jammu in terms of a cycle of revenge killings and assaults on the minorities to driving them out of the region and occupying their properties. Refugees in the Punjab received some protection and assistance in migration through the Punjab Boundary Force, under the command of the British General Rees, and the Military Evacuation Organisations under the auspices of both India and Pakistan. No such mechanisms were in place for Jammu’s Muslims. Moreover, the Jammu massacres had a special character from the neighbouring British Punjab districts in the sense that they were mainly undertaken by the Hindu Dogra state of Jammu and Kashmir and involved the political motives to ethnically cleanse the Muslim population into an exodus to Pakistan so

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that the demographic hurdle of the state’s Muslim majority could be removed in Jammu region. The majority had to escape from violence. Indeed, by the Census of 1951, Jammu province had become a Hindumajority province.

Kashmiri refugees, rehabilitation and ‘state subjects’ By late 1947, more than 300,000 Kashmiri refugees had arrived in the border towns of Sialkot, Gujrat and Jhelum. More than 200,000 Jammu refugees had arrived in Sialkot alone, chiefly because of its geographical proximity with Jammu region. The city with a road and railway connection from Jammu was a logical destination for the refugees. Many Kashmiris drew on there because of their pre- existing business and kinship ties. The Kashmiri refugee population not surprisingly became the most visible community in Sialkot city. The refugees who had managed to escape from violence to reach West Punjab cities and towns continued to suffer for many years after their arrival. They languished in the refugee camps in the late 1950s. Even the transitory period for the processing and resettlement of Kashmiri refugees was sharply different from their Muslim counterparts from East Punjab and was more tedious and a lot longer. The delay was rooted in government policy.68 The refugees’ frustrations in trying to find suitable accommodation and livelihood were exploited by radical groups such as the Majalis-iAhrar and the newly established Anjaman-i-Jammu Muhajirian. They used the refugees’ frustration as a fertile recruiting ground for their brand of politics. There were calls for revenge and jihad. The radical Urdu newspaper Zamindar was at the forefront in encouraging such action. The paper’s daily repeated provocations led to its being banned for a fortnight.69 Refugees recounted gruesome tales of brutal massacres by the state’s own troops and the burning of their homes and crops to a party of Englishmen who visited the city on 21 November. The harrowing images and stories of Muslim atrocity were retold in the press as well as in the sermons of Friday Juma prayer. The legacy of violence also contributed in its way to the militarization of Kashmir itself.70 Many Kashmiri refugees, in particular the young, offered their services as razakars (volunteer fighters). The Anjuman-i-Naujawanan-Kashmir Sialkot was at the forefront in supplying thousands of razakars to the so- called Kashmiri Liberation Movement. A Jammu migrant and former trainee writes in his memoir of those days: ‘Some of us in our enthusiasm sought army training and volunteered to guard the border. The day the Quaid-i-Azam [M.A. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan] died, we had

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just returned from the day’s training which involved crawling’.71 There were also reports that around a hundred trucks loaded with ‘tribesmen’ equipped with modern weapons and signalling system had entered the Kashmir.72 In Pakistan, the authorities distinguished the Kashmiri refugees from ‘Partition refugees’ and excluded them from the state resettlement schemes, because the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was not included in the territorial division of India. Despite the central Government of Pakistan’s consideration that the Muslims of Jammu and Kashmir had suffered ‘proportionally violence more than any other class of refugees’ and that they were targets of ‘real genocide’, the country’s claims over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir meant, however, that refugees from there were excluded from the ‘permanent’ resettlement scheme of ‘state refugees’, and were held in abeyance as a sign of the ‘unfinished agenda’ of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan.73 There was a general expectation that they would return to the state as soon as the incomplete resolution of the disputed state ended. In fact, U.N. Security Council Resolutions of 1948 and 1949 established that all refugees who had left the state of Jammu and Kashmir for ‘Azad’ Kashmir or Pakistan since 1947 were, in fact, ‘citizens of the State’ and have ‘the right to return to the State’.74 To represent this fact, they were only allotted properties in Pakistan on a ‘purely temporary basis’ and were not to be assimilated into the refugees-to- citizens-making process. Studies of Partition-related refugees have ignored the variegated treatment of different categories of refugees in rights to rehabilitation and adjudication of their national status from refugees into citizens. The 1947 Kashmiri refugees’ right to resources abandoned by the Hindus and Sikhs, and their uncertain ‘national status’ was by no means unique to Pakistan. In Indian Jammu and Kashmir, until recently, more than 300,000 Hindus and Sikhs, by the name ‘West Pakistan Refugees’ (WPR) – one-third of them from Sialkot – were not granted the Permanent Resident Certificate (PRC). Legally, they were categorized into two sets of migrants: those who migrated from Pakistani Kashmir; and those who came from areas that are now part of Pakistan. The former are called Displaced Persons (DPs) and the latter are ‘Sharnartihis’ (‘West Pakistan Refugees’). While the DPs are state subjects, the Sharnartihis have not yet been granted this right. As the WPR had come from outside Jammu and Kashmir territory, they were not given the PRC. Permanent residence was given to those whose ancestors have been living in Jammu and Kashmir for at least ten years before 14 May 1954. In principle,

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only those with PRC can buy property, get employment in the state, vote in the state’s Legislative Assembly and are entitled to other privileges.75 Sixty-three years later, it is clear that many individuals still bear the physical and psychological scars of the violence. Many others still wait not only the adjudication of their national status but their right to permanent ownership of the properties they were allotted from 1947 onwards. Indeed, for many the end of British Empire and the Partition of Indian subcontinent was a process rather than an event confined to 1947.

Conclusion This chapter represents an important contribution to the existing literature by highlighting the attitude and role of the state in mass violence and the development and expulsion of refugees. It argues that the Jammu massacres bear the characteristics of what would now be termed the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the region of its minority populations. Indeed, it points to the fact that the violence in Jammu had a political purpose and meaning. Like large-scale episodes of mass violence in the twentieth century, the 1947 Jammu violence in terms of making claims for territory displays evidence of the full force of administrative complicity and participation. It is clear from the evidence of survivors and fresh documentary sources that there were cold-blooded killings and dispersal of Jammu’s Muslim population. It is true that the mass killings of Hindus and Sikhs in the West Punjab from March 1947 onwards had created an environment in which, what Paul Brass would term ‘retributive genocide’, following the arrival of refugees, would threaten Jammu’s stability. Nevertheless, the Jammu violence overwhelmingly operated at the state level. State officials and the army largely contributed to the violence, not because of revenge but because they acted with the state ruler’s intension to driving out the Muslims to ease a Hindu majority in the Jammu region. The Jammu experience of violence reveals that episodes of sustained violence required the state’s complicity and involvement. Similar conclusions emerged from Ian Copland’s analysis of the state-led violence in the Sikh Punjabi princely states.76 The experiences of the survivors in Sialkot in the interviews that I collected support the reports of The Times and Civil and Military Gazette with regard to the participation of state troopers and the involvement of the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir in the violence. The fact is that the state authorities instigated and designed violent attacks on Muslims to consolidate a non-Muslim majority area. This case of Jammu in 1947 has revealed the

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politically motivated violence in the Hindu-ruled Dogra state differed from the neighbouring British-administrated Punjab; first, in its purpose and intensity and, second, the blatant role of the state authorities in the ethnic cleansing project. Jammu’s experience of violence in 1947 also reveals that imperial collapse not only led to mass violence and the expulsion of refugee populations, but that the legacies of empire continue to resonate today in the fractured lives of individuals and communities, and the ongoing conflict over contested sites.

Notes 1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London, 1994), p. 12. 2. Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, vol. 107 (2002), pp. 1158–78. 3. Leo Kuper, Genocide (London, 1981), p. 17. 4. Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (New York, 2008). 5. Radha Kumar, ‘The Troubled History of Partitions’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 76 (1997), pp. 22–34; C. Hitches, ‘The Perils of Partition’, Atlantic Monthly (March 2003), pp. 99–107. Brendan O’Leary gives six examples of partitions: Ireland (1920), Hungary (1920), Kurdistan (1920–3), India (1947), Palestine (1948) and Cyprus (1974). For details, see Brendan O’Leary, ‘Analysing Partition: Definition, Classification and Explanation’, Political Geography, vol. 26 (2007), pp. 886–908. 6. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA, 1985), p. 588. 7. Susan Woodward, ‘Genocide or Partition: Two Faces of the Same Coin’, Slavic Review, vol. 55 (1996), pp. 755–61. For a discussion on the leading twentiethcentury partitions, see Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War: An Empirical Critique of the Theoretical Literature’, World Politics, vol. 52 (2000), pp. 437–83. 8. Estimates of the killings arising from the partition violence have varied considerably, from 200,000 to 3 million. Khosla and Moore suggest some 500,000 casualties. Mosley puts forward the figure ‘over 600,000’. Others such as French and Roberts are of the opinion that deaths numbered closer to 1 million. Ziring estimates ‘perhaps as many as three million’. G. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading up to and Following the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1989), p. 299; R. Moore, Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (Oxford, 1982), p. 327; L. Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj (London, 1962), p. 279; P. French, Liberty or Death: Indian’s Journey to Independence and Division (London, 1997); A. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London, 1994), p. 131; L. Ziring, Pakistan in the Twentieth Century: A Political History (Karachi, 1997), p. 69. 9. Jamwal estimates the number of casualties between 200,000 and 300,000. Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, ‘Prejudice in Paradise’, Communalism Combat, vol. 11 (2005). Mathur cites Jamwal’s death numbers. Shubh Mathur, ‘Srinagar – Muzaffarabad – New York: A Kashmiri Family’s Exile’, in Anjali Gera Roy

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11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

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and Nandi Bhatia, eds, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (New Delhi, 2008), pp. 240–54. Khurshid claims that ‘as many as 200,000 Jammu Muslims lost their lives in 1947 and most of them died around the first week of November’ in 1947. Sorayya Khurshid, ‘My Jammu Memories’, in Rehmatullah Rad and Khalid Hasan, eds, Memory Lane to Jammu (Lahore, 2004), pp. 179–80. The Times, London, in its issue of 10 August 1948 put forward the death figure ‘more than 237,000’. Joel E. Dimsdale, ed., Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust (Washington, DC, 1980); Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (College Station, TX, 1995). Paul Brass, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–1947: Means, Methods, and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 5 (2003), pp. 71–101; Anders B. Hansen, Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab 1937–1947 (New Delhi, 2002); Ian Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition of India’, in Stone, ed., Historiography of Genocide, pp. 420–33. S. Gurbachan Singh Talib, Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947 (New Delhi, first published in 1950, reprinted New Delhi, 1991); Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library Francis Mudie, The Sikhs in Action, Mss Eur F164/23. Shail Mayaram, ‘Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat’, Subaltern Studies, vol. 9 (1996), pp. 126–61. Ian Copland, ‘The Integration of the Princely States: A “Bloodless Revolution?” ’ South Asia, vol. 18 (1995), p. 42. In 1947, there were more than 500 ‘Native Princely States of India’, which comprised about 45 per cent of the territory and a quarter of the population of British India. The inhabitants of princely states were ‘state subjects’ who were not technically British colonial subjects. Robert M. Hayden, ‘Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers’, Slavic Review, vol. 55 (1996), pp. 727–48; Geroge. J. Andreopoulos, ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimension (Pennsylvania, PA, 1997); Kuper, Genocide. Ian Kerskaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edition (London, 2000). See especially chapter 5, pp. 93–133. Prem Shankar Jha, The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947 (New Delhi, 2003); Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War (London, 2000); Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute, 1947–8 (Hertingfordbury, 1997); Josel Korbel, Danger in Kashmir (Princeton, NJ, 1954). For the background to both the agitation and to Punjab politics after the formation of the Unionist Party, see Ian Talbot, Khizar Tiwana, The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (London, 1996), pp. 145–56. ‘Wreckage of Punjab’, The Times, 18 March 1947, p. 5. Governor of the Punjab Jenkins to Viceroy Wavell, 17 March 1947, Disturbances in the Punjab 1947: A Complication of Official Documents (Islamabad, 1994), p. 100. ‘Refugees Flock into Kashmir’, The Times, 14 March 1947, p. 3. Inquilab, 2 May 1947, p. 3. The Times, 8 September 1947, p. 4. ‘Kashmir Rebels Attacked by Aircrafts’, The Times, 31 October 1947, p. 4.

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216 Ilyas Chattha 25. ‘Reinforcement for State Troops: City Panic’, The Times, 28 October 1947, p. 4. 26. Her husband, Duni Chand Mehta, was posted as deputy commissioner of western Kashmir district Muzaffarabad in the summer of 1947. For detail, see Krishna Mehta, Kashmir 1947, A Survivor’s Story (New Delhi, 2005). 27. Civil and Military Gazette, 16 January 1951, p. 5. 28. Ian Talbot and Darshan Singh Tatla, Epicentre of Violence: Partition, Voices and Memories from Amritsar (Delhi, 2006), p. 33. 29. ‘Tribal Hazards in the Border Territory’, The Times, 26 January 1948, p. 5. 30. Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation, Government of Pakistan, File No. B132, 169/CF/ 53, NDC. 31. J. K. Rady, ‘Mass Killings of Muslims in Jammu Province’, Nawa-i-Waqt, 29 October 1947, p. 3. 32. The Punjab Police Abstract of Intelligence for the Week Ending of August, 1947, p. 612, NIHCR. 33. Daily Telegraph, 12 January 1948. 34. Leo Kuper, ‘Genocide and the Plural Society’, in J. Hutchison and D. Smith, eds, Ethnicity (Oxford, 2004). 35. Ajit Bhattacharjea, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: Tragic Hero of Kashmir (New Delhi, 2008). 36. ‘Elimination of Muslims from Jammu’, Part II, The Times, 10 August 1948, p. 5. 37. Muharram Hashmi, ‘My Forgotten City’, in Radand Hasan, Memory Lane, pp. 117–8. 38. Pakistan Times, 19 September 1947. 39. Nawa-i-Waqt, 20 November 1947, p. 6. 40. Nawa-i-Waqt, 29 October, 1947, p. 2. 41. M. Yusuf Saraf, ‘The Jammu Massacres’, in Rad and Hasan, Memory Lane, p. 163. 42. Sialkot District Police Record, Police station (thana) Shakargarh, FIR no. 179, 28 November 1947. 43. Ibid. 44. ‘Elimination of Muslims from Jammu’, Part II, The Times, 10 August 1948, p. 5. 45. Pakistan Times, 19 September, 1947. 46. Saraf, ‘The Jammu Massacres’, pp. 179–8. 47. The Journey to Pakistan: Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Lahore, 1993), pp. 298–9. 48. Ronald. J. Grele, ‘On Using Oral History Collections: An Introduction’, Journal of American History, vol. 74 (1987), pp. 570–1, 578. 49. Urvashi Butalia, ‘Partition’s Memory’, Seminar, 497 (2001), p. 93. Also see her work, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998). 50. Interview with Zafar Butt, Sialkot, 16 January 2007. 51. Interview with Khalid Ali Gujar, Sialkot, 16 January 2007. 52. Interview with Kawaja Tahir, Sialkot, 16 January 2007. 53. Interview with Zarar Hussian, Sialkot, 15 January 2007. 54. Interview with Sarmad Mahmud, Sialkot, 15 January 2007. 55. Interview with Zarar Hussian, Sialkot, 15 January 2007. 56. Interview with Hussian Gujar, Sialkot, 17 January 2007.

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57. The Census of India, 1961, Vol. V1, in M. H. Kamili, Census of India (Delhi, 1967), pp. 42, 157, 359–60. 58. Jamwal, ‘Prejudice in Paradise’. 59. ‘Elimination of Muslims from Jammu’, II, The Times, 10 August 1948, p. 5. 60. Mudie Papers, ‘The Sikhs in Action’, Mss Eur; F164/23, pp. 50–1 and 60, (O.I.O.C.). A correspondence from Nehru to Patel also evidenced genocide in Patiala, the largest Sikh State: ‘Story of designs and resistance of Muslims [is] false and fantastic. They died like goats and sheep. About a lakh [100,000] murdered in whole State; about 12,000 in Patiala alone. Whole families wiped out’. See, Nehru to Patel, 5 October 1947, Durga Das (eds), Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945–50 (Ahmadabad, 1971–4), Vol. I, p. 50. 61. Civil and Military Gazette(Lahore) 10 September 1951, pp. 3–4. 62. Copland has suggested that perhaps 30,000 Muslims were killed in these areas and that 100,000 were forced to flee in this case of ‘ethnic cleansing’ project. I. Copland: ‘The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan, 1947’, Past and Present, no. 160 (1998), pp. 203–39; ‘The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36 (2002), pp. 657–704. 63. The violence in Alwar and Bharatpur is analyzed in Mayaram, ‘Speech, Silence’. 64. Christopher Snedden, ‘What happened to Muslims in Jammu? Local Identity, “the Massacres” of 1947 and the Roots of the Kashmir Problems’, South Asia, vol. 24 (2001), pp. 111–34. 65. ‘Elimination of Muslims from Jammu, II’, The Times, 10 August 1948, pp. 5–6. Moreover, that day’s well- circulated newspaper clipping was not only flagged with official records of the United Nations Security Council, Meeting No. 534 of 6 March 1951, but also republished in a Lahore- based paper Civil and Military Gazette, in its issue of 10 September 1951 (pp. 3–4), with a heading: ‘Maharaja verses the People: Genesis of the Kashmiri Dispute’. 66. Definitions of genocide remain ambiguous and assume the role of state imperative to genocide. For the use and definition of genocide, see H. R. Huttenbach, ‘Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Towards a Methodology of Definition and Categorization’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 3 (1988), pp. 289–303. 67. Paul Brass terms the 1947 partition violence in Punjab as ‘retributive genocide’ and considers ‘the genocidal massacres’ in the Punjab were organized and planned, but their ‘special character is that they were not ordered by a state’. Brass, ‘The Partition of India’. Hansen explains the partition violence as ‘reciprocal genocide’. Hansen, Partition and Genocide. Both Copland and Ahmed define the 1947 violence as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Copland, ‘Further Shores of Partition’ and Ishtiaq Ahmed, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts’, in I. Talbot and S. Thandi, eds, People on the Move: Punjab and Colonial and Post- Colonial Migration (Karachi, 2004), pp. 96–142. 68. The Pakistan authorities divided the places of origin of migrants in India into two main categories. The refugees from East Punjab and East Punjab States (defined only in part by the political violence of the territory Radcliff boundary lines) fell into the category of ‘agreed areas’, while all the refugees from elsewhere – including Kashmiri refugees – were placed in the category

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69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

of ‘non-agreed areas’. Resettlement of the latter category initially accommodated chiefly for relief purpose, and, ultimately, rendered a temporary provision. Ilyas Chattha, ‘Differential Treatment: Kashmiri Refugees’ Experiences of Rehabilitation and Punjab- Centre Relations 1947–1961’, paper presented at Workshop ‘From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan’, Royal Holloway College, 12 August 2009. Nawa-i-Waqt, 1 October 1947, p. 1. Cabeiri de Bergh Robinson, ‘Refugees, Political Subjectivity, and the Morality of Violence: From Hijarat to Jiha d ̄ in Azad Kashmir’ (unpublished Cornell University PhD thesis, 2005). Hashmi, ‘My Forgotten City’, in Rad and Hasan, Memory Lane, p. 118. Nawa-i-Waqt, 29 October 1947, p. 2. Maintenance and Resettlement of Jammu and Kashmir Refugees, Government of Pakistan, File No. B132, 169/CF/ 53, p. 3, NDC. Also see Richard Symonds, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in Indian and Pakistan, 1942–49 (Delhi, 2001). K. Sarwar Hosan, Documents on the Foreign Relations of Pakistan: The Kashmir Question (Karachi, 1966), p. 144. For the state definition of Kashmir refugee, see Law and Parliamentary Affairs Department Azad Government of Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Kashmir Refugees Registration and Representation Act 1960: Azad Jammu and Kashmir Laws, vol. III (1957–62), pp. 40–5. Luv Puri, ‘Bill Seeking Citizenship for “West Pakistan Refugees” Rejected’, Hindu (New Delhi), 9 February 2007. Copland, ‘Master and Maharajas’, pp. 657–704.

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10 Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands Uditi Sen

The transition from British Empire to nation-states in South Asia was a complex and drawn out process, involving not only bitter political negotiations but also contradictory motifs of change and continuity. Much publicized ruptures from a colonial past ran parallel to more controversial continuities with the erstwhile British Raj.1 The fact that independence took the form of partition into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan has tended to transform histories of this transition into histories of partition, with a capital P.2 In the 1990s, the preoccupation of historical research with assigning political blame for the division of British India, aptly summarized as the ‘high politics of partition’,3 gave way to a new focus on partition’s ‘history from below’, which highlighted how common people experienced, negotiated and remembered it.4 Despite its clear resonances with the contemporary post-war refugee crisis in Europe, the massive displacement of religious minorities from both India and Pakistan, which accompanied partition, has largely been treated as a distinctive and unique feature of South Asian history.5 The Hindu refugees from Pakistan, it has been argued, were India’s ‘internal’ problem, secure in their de-facto citizenship of India and, therefore, not ‘real’ refugees on the European model.6 However, once the focus shifts from international law and political analysis to the lived experience of being a refugee, such distinctions become difficult to sustain. Moreover, the figure of the refugee, whether born of the Second World War or of the partition of South Asia, embodied the disjuncture between the seamless continuity of state-nationterritory-population of the imagined nation, and the messy ground reality.7 Seen ‘from below’ or through the eyes of the refugees, the end 219

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of global colonial empires and the political realization of nation-states in the second half the twentieth century becomes a renegotiation of the relationship between communities and the territories they inhabit, a reformulation of peoples’ sense of belonging and, therefore, their identities. Seen from this perspective, the migration of refugees, whether born of violent displacement or more voluntary choices, emerges as the primary strategy for negotiating this process of transition. This essay approaches the history of partition refugees in India as the history of this renegotiation. Through oral history, it explores how one particular group of refugees, Hindu Bengalis from East Pakistan, negotiated their displacement and eventual resettlement in the marginal Islands of the Andamans. Besides arguing for the need to venture beyond regional divisions to understand the global demographic upheaval that accompanied the demise of empires in the twentieth century, this essay also challenges some of the new orthodoxies of partition studies in South Asia. Within this scholarship, partition as an event in history is seen as a defining moment and much of the post- colonial geopolitics (and policies) of South Asia is understood as its aftermath.8 At a parallel level, the memory of partition or how it is remembered (and forgotten) is seen to play a formative role in structuring not only the collective national identities of Indians and Pakistanis, but also the identity of those who bore the brunt of its consequences – the refugees. The trauma of communal violence, displacement and longing for a lost homeland have emerged as the dominant themes in numerous refugee reminiscences of their pasts, whether published as autobiographical narratives or recorded as oral history.9 It is here that the reminiscences of refugees from East Bengal or the eastern wing of Pakistan resettled in the Andaman Islands strike a discordant note. When interviewed in 2007, these familiar themes of refugee memory were conspicuously absent in their reminiscences. The men and women dispersed from refugee camps in West Bengal to these marginal settlements demonstrate that lived experiences of violent displacement and prolonged dislocation in numerous camps do not necessarily translate into a refugee identity built around the themes of loss and victimhood. Based primarily upon 27 conversational interviews with first-generation refugees in the Andaman Islands, this article explores this uncharacteristic loss of relevance of Partition in the reminiscences of Partition refugees.10 Between 1949 and 1971, the Government of India, with the full cooperation of the rehabilitation ministry of West Bengal, resettled 3,440 families or approximately 17,200 refugees (allowing for an average of

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five in every family) from the various camps of West Bengal to the Andaman Islands.11 This constituted a small fraction of the official estimate of more than 5 million refugees who travelled from East Pakistan to India between 1946 and 1970,12 and is a largely forgotten episode. The scholarship on the rehabilitation of refugees from East Bengal either does not mention it at all, or mentions it in passing as one of the many schemes of dispersal of refugees. The only available historical account of refugee resettlement in the Andaman Islands categorically describes it as ‘exile’ or banishment, thus replicating received wisdom on Bengali refugees, which portrays all those who sought shelter in the various government camps as passive victims of a harsh, ill- conceived and inadequate regime of rehabilitation. The self-perception of the refugees settled in the Andamans runs counter to this consensus on the victimhood of camp refugees. Every single refugee respondent in the Andamans represented their resettlement in the islands as a result of their ‘choice’ to enlist in the Colonization and Development Scheme. None saw themselves as victims of forced dispersal. These dissident voices ‘from below’ not only enable us to recover marginalized experiences and subjectivities amongst refugees from East Bengal, but also call for a more nuanced understanding of agency and victimhood amongst the East Bengali refugees.

Colonizing the Andamans: A brief history The Andaman Islands are located in the Bay of Bengal at a distance of 560 miles from the mouth of the river Hooghly in West Bengal. They are the northernmost islands constituting the Union Territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Out of more than 300 scattered islands which make up this archipelago, the South, Middle and North Andaman Islands, along with the much smaller Baratang Island, are collectively known as the Great Andamans.13 The islands became synonymous with colonial repression following the establishment of a penal settlement around Port Blair in South Andaman in 1858 and the eventual construction of the Benthamite cellular jail. The British Government followed a policy of expanding agrarian settlements in the South Andamans and established a number of villages around Port Blair inhabited by Bhantus,14 Moplahs,15 ex- convicts and ‘Local-borns’, that is, the descendants of convicts who eventually settled in the Andamans. Besides a minority of Burmese settlers who were mostly employed in timbering by the Forest Department, convicts, captive groups and criminalized tribes and communities built the villages of South Andaman. Middle Andaman was

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completely devoid of any settled population, while Karens living in isolated homogenous villages since 1925 constituted the only permanent settlers of North Andaman.16 In 1947, when the Andaman and Nicobar Islands became a part of independent India, the Great Andaman Islands were largely covered in dense tropical forests.17 Primarily due to its low density of population, the independent government easily construed it as an ‘empty’ space that could be ‘colonized’ by settlers. The colonization that followed encroached upon the habitat and well-being of the fiercely independent Jarawas, an autochthonous tribe that lived in the forested regions of South and Middle Andaman. All protests were swept aside by the juggernaut of national development which gripped postcolonial India.18 The colonization of the Andamans by Bengali refugees proficient in the cultivation of paddy fields was seen to take forward the contemporary national campaign to ‘Grow More Food’, designed to make the country self-sufficient in food grains.19 Within this narrative of development, the Bengali refugees were cast as pioneers of agricultural expansion. When the Indian authorities took over from their British predecessors, the Andamans were in a sorry state. Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945 had inflicted summary mass executions and systematic starvation upon the civilian population. It had destroyed the infrastructure of the islands and nearly halved the population. In the villages of South Andaman, previously cultivated land lay fallow and there was a serious shortage of labour. The abolition of the penal settlement in 1945, followed by the repatriation of nearly 4,000 Indian and Burmese convicts, further exacerbated the crisis of manpower.20 It was at this juncture that the Government of India hit upon the unlikely solution of settling refugees from East Bengal in the Andamans to replenish the islands’ population.21 The resettlement of refugees from East Bengal in the Andaman Islands owed its origins to an earlier scheme to settle ex-servicemen in the Andamans. Sanctioned in 1946, it had failed to find any takers. Since then, the Government of India had been looking for voluntary settlers for the South Andamans, with little success and increasing urgency. The willingness of Bengali refugees to travel to the Andamans came as a significant breakthrough, and a scheme to resettle 200 refugee families in the Andaman Islands was sanctioned in 1949. They provided the much-needed agriculturists who could prevent further deterioration of fields that had been lying fallow in South Andaman since 1945. Intent on the reconstruction of civic life in the Andaman Islands, the government of India repeatedly turned to the refugee camps of West

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Bengal to find labourers, administrative staff and above all, agriculturists. Five more schemes led to the resettlement of an additional 150 refugee families between 1949 and 1952.22 Unlike the first batch, the subsequent migrants were put to work clearing dense tropical forests in order to expand the area under cultivation. This ad-hoc phase gave way in 1952 to an integrated policy which combined the development of the Andaman Islands with the resettlement of refugees. The Colonization and Development Scheme, approved in November 1952, constituted the core of the First Five Year Plan for development of the Andamans.23 It promised every family settling in the islands five acres of paddy land and five acres of hilly land, a monthly subsistence allowance to tide over the period before harvest and the cost of passage. Additional loans up to Rs 1730 per family covered the costs of house building, plough animals, utensils, seeds and manure. The number of families settled each year was adjusted to keep pace with the annual clearance of forests.24 This scheme continued till 1962. Though theoretically open to all Indians, in practice, of the vast majority of the settlers between 1952 and 1962, 2,861 out of 3,220 families were Bengali refugees.25 Generally speaking, the colonization of the Andaman Islands proceeded from south to north and can be divided into three distinct phases: in South Andaman between 1949 and 1952, in Middle Andaman between 1953 and 1955 and, finally, in North Andaman from 1956 to 1960. While recording refugee reminiscences from the Andamans, I have attempted to select a cross-section of respondents from each phase or region of settlement. My respondents are drawn from four main regions of refugee resettlement: the villages in the Diglipur region of North Andaman, the settlements around Rangat in Middle Andaman, the refugee villages of Havelock Island in the South Andaman region and the settlement around Billyground in Middle Andaman.

Across the kalapani:26 Journeys remembered and forgotten The interviews conducted in 2007 reveal a diversity of strategies employed by the refugees in negotiating the regime of rehabilitation. However, framing these diverse reminiscences is the shared experience of crossing the kalapani to an unknown land. For the refugees, the journey which terminated in the islands had begun in their native villages in East Bengal. The vast majority of the refugees settled in the Andamans came from the districts of Barisal, Jessore and Khulna in East Bengal. They were predominantly poor peasants belonging to the Namasudra community. The refugees began their journey on foot from

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their ancestral villages. Families travelled by boat down the interconnected canals and rivers to the nearest railhead. Most of the interviewees took the train from Khulna town towards West Bengal, and entered India at the Bongaon border. Some travelled to Sealdah station, while a few entered India on boats, through the extensive network of water transport in deltaic Bengal. In the course of this long crossing, the refugees had to survive routine surveillance and harassment from petty officials in East Pakistan. Ironically, ‘reaching’ India marked the beginning of a new pattern of displacement. Often, refugees were forced to spend days, even weeks, squatting on railway platforms or on the pavements before the authorities removed them to camps. The majority of the respondents recalled an aimless existence of being shifted from one camp to another for several years before they were offered any scheme of permanent rehabilitation. Every single respondent highlighted their ‘choice’ of the Andamans, vehemently denying any suggestion of state coercion. The scholarship which characterizes the resettlement of camp refugees in marginal or remote lands outside West Bengal as coercion or ‘exile’ fails to take into account the impact of this constant and prolonged displacement upon the choices made by refugees. Displacement, as these memories illustrate, could not always be equated to a distinct act of uprooting, or a decision to leave. For these refugees, it became their very existence. Once a family entered a refugee camp, they lost control over their next destination or course of action. The same refugee family could end up in work-site camps, which were mostly tents pitched in open fields, a warehouse converted into a camp or an abandoned jute mill. Moreover, the West Bengal Government followed a policy of frequently shifting the refugees from camp to camp, largely to prevent the politicization of refugees through contact with local politicians. For many refugees, the decision to go to the Andaman Islands offered a way out of this pattern of perpetual dislocation and the dayto- day ignominy of life in camps. The refugees who were finally selected for resettlement in the Andamans were collected from various camps in West Bengal and taken to a transit camp in Calcutta. Here, the government of West Bengal distributed agricultural implements, utensils and even musical instruments amongst the families, thus combining practical aid with an attempt to boost the morale of these pioneers.27 The journey to the Andamans on the Steam Ship Maharaja, the only ship which plied between the mainland and the Andamans until the 1960s, lasted three to four days. Upon reaching the Andaman Islands, the refugees were housed in temporary camps, which had been built in advance. These camps consisted of long

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two-storied barracks built of bamboo, cane and leaves, divided into ten rooms. Here the families waited, often for several months, for the local authorities to disburse the lands promised to them. Years of struggle followed, against the jungle, wild animals and the isolation of the remote villages, to carve out settled agrarian life. Despite this long history of displacement, Bengali refugees settled in the Islands mostly began narrating their past from the sea-crossing. ‘Crossing over’ in these narratives meant crossing the sea, from the ‘mainland’ to the Island. The earlier history of crossing the boundary between India and Pakistan was seldom seen to be a relevant part of narrating their past. Most respondents were unsure about the exact date of their departure from East Pakistan and none were willing to describe the time spent in government camps in any detail. They merely mentioned the names of the successive camps in which they stayed. The conditions in the government camps were mentioned only when they influenced a particular family’s decision to enrol for resettlement in the Andamans. However, once the refugees started speaking of their resettlement in the Andaman Islands, their reminiscences became richly textured with minute details of daily life. Memories of a rough sea- crossing, their shock at the unexpected density of the forests which ringed the new settlements, and strategies adopted to protect crops from wild deer were some of the common themes. Most refugees not only remembered the exact date of their arrival, but also the total number of families settled in particular villages. It was common knowledge in Havelock Island that the 40 families settled in 1955 were followed by another 121 in 1961. Respondents identified themselves and were pointed out to me not as refugees but as challish family-rekjon, that is, one of the 40 families. ‘In our Havelock, total settlers are 161’ said Dasarath Barui repeatedly, though he could not remember the exact date of his departure from East Pakistan.28 In response to a question regarding how many families were settled in Kalsi village, Sukharanjan Mridha launched into a detailed account of settlement during 1955, detailing the total number of refugee families on the ship and the numbers dropped off at various locations, including the 15 families settled in his village.29 Descriptions ranged from the mundane, such as the compulsion to walk miles through muddy tracts to buy provisions, to the perilous, such as encounters of villagers with Jarawas and rampaging elephants. It is possible that the reluctance of the refugees to narrate in any detail their experience of camp life was a reaction to the sheer drudgery of life in government camps. However, this does not explain the marked

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reluctance to dwell on their memories of East Bengal. Selective remembering of past displacements actually indicates a fundamental characteristic of collective memory amongst refugees settled in the Andamans. By privileging the memories of resettlement over those of the long displacement from East Bengal, these refugees were actually firmly locating their relevant pasts, and therefore their own sense of self, within the geography of the Andamans. Even for the first-generation refugees, the shared landscape of memories was constituted by dense forests, virgin agricultural land studded with tree-trunks and isolated villages of colonizers. The familiar image of the prosperous and peaceful villages of East Bengal was strikingly absent from their remembered pasts.30 By marginalizing their long experience of displacement and dislocation, the refugees were also moving away from a narrative of loss and victimhood. By narrating in vivid details their struggle against a wild terrain, they were in effect crafting for themselves a new identity: that of the pioneering settlers of the Andaman Islands. Two broad themes running through the reminiscences of firstgeneration refugees settled in the Andamans indicate this vital shift from a narrative of loss to a narrative of triumph over adversity. First, all the respondents characterize their dispersal to the Andaman Islands as the result of a deliberate choice. They present themselves as agents of their own destiny and not as hapless victims of government policy. Second, most respondents spoke exclusively of the early years of settlement. Both men and women vividly described hardships endured, and the koshto, or toil through which they had built the now-flourishing villages. These deeply personalized narratives petered out into a disinterested and casual cataloguing of more recent developments. There was little interest in narrating the later expansion of roads and public transport and the growth of tourism, which has transformed the texture of life in the Islands. Through these two themes within refugee reminiscences, this essay explores how patterns of remembering play a formative role in the creation and reproduction of identities.

Opting for the Andamans: State ‘selection’ of willing refugees Though India’s federal government based in Delhi was the architect of the Colonization and Development Scheme, the responsibility for its implementation lay with the local administration of the Andaman Islands. By 1952, selection of the ‘right type’ of settlers was seen as crucial to the success of colonization. The question of selecting suitable

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settlers came up in 1949, when ten families from the first batch of refugees returned to Calcutta. Sections of the press promptly reported this as the ‘failure’ of rehabilitation in the Andamans, leading to much consternation and soul-searching within the administration.31 The Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, A. K. Ghosh, argued that since 90 per cent of the refugee families had settled down, any notion of failure was mere media hype. He squarely laid the blame for this debacle upon the officials of the West Bengal Government, whom he criticized first for selecting the ‘wrong type’ of people, and second for misinforming them regarding conditions in the Andamans.32 Learning from this experience, all future chief commissioners insisted that the final selection of settlers had to be made by an officer of the islands’ administration deputed to the mainland. Sadhan Raha, a tehsildar33 with the Andaman Administration in 1949, was given this responsibility. Official records are silent on the process or criteria of selection. But the evidence from refugee reminiscences and a published interview with Raha reveals his aims and modus operandi. He aimed to select families with two able-bodied young men, proficient in agriculture and used to manual labour. He favoured refugees of low caste, especially Namasudras, as he believed that upper- caste and middle- class refugees would not be able to cope with the hard labour required of settlers in the Andamans.34 Thus, in theory, the state had the last word in selecting refugees for resettlement in the Andaman Islands. However, the evidence suggests that in practice, the extent of actual control bureaucrats had over refugee destinies was limited by several factors. First, every single respondent represented his or her journey across the kalapani as the result of a conscious choice. This choice, though limited, was nevertheless influenced by a variety of factors, which were more often than not external to the state’s regime of rehabilitation. Foremost amongst these were the constraints of working within a newly independent state. The government could not afford to publicly be part of a forced relocation of refugees, especially when the destination was the Andamans. The strong association of the islands with the colonial practice of ‘transportation’ and imprisonment of freedom fighters made such an option impolitic. Instead, the state had to rely on propaganda and various tactics of persuasion to enlist settlers. Second, refugee reminiscences suggest that state officials often failed to select the right type of settler even in the limited sense of weeding out unsuitable persons from amongst volunteers. A number of first-generation refugees related how they had forced their way into the colonization scheme in the face of opposition

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from Sadhan Raha. This suggests that the camp refugees had far greater agency in opting for the colonization scheme in the Andamans than the official stress on ‘selection’ suggests. For the vast majority of refugees, the primary attraction of resettlement in the Andamans was the possibility of obtaining ten acres of good land free of cost. Added to this were the other ‘facilities’ promised by the government, such as a plough, cattle, seeds and agricultural implements. The refugees described how their ‘choice’ of the Andamans was born of a careful consideration of these benefits. In their narratives, state officials merely facilitated this choice, either by providing detailed information or through encouragement and persuasion. Jagabandhu Das recounted one such conversation with Rahasaheb: At that time the tehsildar of this region was Rahasaheb. He went (to our camp) and said some of you people will have to go to the Andamans. We said, what will happen if we agree? What will you give us? Oh damn! (Sadhan Raha exclaimed) The facilities that are available in Andamans, the government here will not be able to provide. Whatever may be required for a household, all of it will be given.35 According to Naren Haldar of Havelock Island, the Andamans were one of the many destinations of final settlement offered to refugees, from which they could pick and choose. A similar picture of choices is presented by Sukharanjan Mridha: While we were at that camp, the call (for registration in rehabilitation schemes) arrived. We were asked where we would go for rehabilitation? [Among options] there was the Andamans, Nainital, Coochbehar; then there was Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh. In this manner they called out. People could enrol their names for where they wished to go.36 Far from being exiled to the Andamans, the refugees were cajoled and persuaded by the officials responsible, who were well aware that without their active participation or even enthusiasm the project to colonize the Andamans was bound to fail. The ubiquitous Rahababu appears to be engaged in persuasion rather than selection in the reminiscences of refugees. Naren Haldar remembered how the people in his camp, though initially attracted by Raha’s description of the scheme, baulked at the prospect of the long sea journey. ‘But then they reconsidered. He

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[Raha] persuaded us once more that it was a good place, that we would not face any problems in procuring fish or food, that we would get a lot of land; that we would benefit from it.’37 By far the most ingenious government ploy of recruiting settlers for the Andamans emerges from the accounts of the refugees settled in the Rangat region, between 1953 and 1955. With the piecemeal schemes of earlier years giving way to a sustained policy of colonization in 1952, there was a massive surge in demand for settlers. During this period, a documentary film on the rich agricultural land in the Andamans, described by the refugee settlers of Rangat as ‘cinema’ or ‘bioscope’, was screened at various refugee camps. This played a major role in inducing Sujata Mondal to overcome her fears: People were not willing to come ... So they showed this [the documentary] at Kashipur camp. After watching this I said – no, that’s a land of golden crops; such beautiful crops of paddy, coconut trees, betelnut trees, gigantic pumpkins! Then I said – if we go there, we will be able to live. So then we came to Andamans.38 Shukharanjan Mridha and his wife narrated similar experiences. ‘You know what they would show us? They would show us movies. On the movie screen they would show such things that people would forget all apprehensions.’39 However, as soon as the refugees reached the settlement sites, they realized the gap between government propaganda and ground realities. All three respondents accused the government of misleading them by leaving the dense forests and hills of the Andamans outside the frame on purpose. While Sukharanjan explained that they must have been shown pictures of better lands in South Andaman, his wife accused the government of outright fraud. ‘From where they showed us such sights I do not know – I have not seen anything like it since I have come to Andamans.’40 Amongst the camp refugees, information gathered via word of mouth from friends, family and acquaintances had far greater credibility and reach than government propaganda. A number of later settlers opted for rehabilitation in the Andamans based on positive reports they received from earlier batches. A potent mix of press reports, letters from friends and relatives, hearsay and rumours carried information regarding various rehabilitation schemes from camp to camp. For example, Jagabandhu Das of Rangat encouraged his younger brother to take up settlement in the same area. Lalit Mohan Pal of Madhupur village

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provided a fascinating account of how an informal network of communication drew more refugees to the Andaman Islands: I decided upon the Andamans because the year before several families had been settled in Nabagram [a village in North Andaman]. Amongst them there were two families from our Pal clan – we are Pals. They were our relatives ... They wrote these letters to us. They wrote in these letters that for next year, a new area called Diglipur is being cleared. That is a very big settlement area. The land there is also very good. You get your names enrolled and come ... Hearing all this, our family took a decision. Our relatives were attracted [to the scheme] ... Hearing all this, we enrolled our names.41 By acting in groups, many refugees managed to foil the attempts of the state to select the ‘right type’ of settlers. Having already lost their property and livelihoods, the camp- dwellers sought strength in numbers. The men formed groups consisting of an extended circle of relatives, past acquaintances and new friends born of a shared life in camps. Decisions regarding rehabilitation were often taken jointly and acting as a group gave settlers greater bargaining power against the authorities. Naren Haldar of Nimbutala vividly recalled how he had formed a ‘group’ with Dhiren Boral and Hemanta Ray, fellow refugees he got to know at Bagjola camp. They had decided to travel together to the Andamans. But problems arose when Rahababu refused to include Haldar in the list of settlers. He came from a land- owning background and had no experience of farming. Surprisingly, by persisting as a group of three families, he ultimately managed to enrol his name. All three men were resettled in new villages in the Middle Andamans. Lalit Mohan Pal’s account illustrates with much greater clarity how negotiating in a group allowed the refugees to force their way into lists of settlers in the face of official reluctance. At Supur Ambagan camp in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, there were several members of the extended Pal family. Lalit Mohan Pal banded together with six of his relatives, each ‘heads’ of their respective nuclear families. Working to a plan, they turned down all other offers of rehabilitation and gave their names for resettlement in the Andamans. For their plan to work, they had to pass the screening process. Raha, aided by an office of the rehabilitation ministry of West Bengal, set up a temporary office in a tent. One by one the refugees were called and tested. Five of the seven Pals were turned down for being too old. ‘I could figure out some of what they were saying to each other. “Old man, old man”, they muttered.’42 When Lalit Mohan Pal’s name

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was called, he and Atul Pal refused to go, though they were young and ideal for resettlement in the Andamans. He explained to the officials that the seven families had decided to take rehabilitation together. At this, the earlier cancellations were reversed and all seven families were included for resettlement in Diglipur.43 The above accounts clearly illustrate the problem of characterizing the dispersal of camp refugees to the Andamans as forced dispersal. The Government of West Bengal was insistent on sending the majority of East Bengali refugees outside West Bengal for rehabilitation. While this enforced a second process of displacement upon the more vulnerable refugees, who were completely reliant on government help for rehabilitation, it nevertheless gave them some space to choose between numerous destinations outside West Bengal. The Andamans was only one of the many sites to which the government of West Bengal sought to disperse refugees from camps. For many, opting for resettlement in the Andamans was crucial to their ability to avoid the less popular sites, such as Dandakaranya. The nature of this ‘choice’ and, therefore, the scope of refugee agency remained severely constrained by the circumstances of life in camps. Though all respondents insisted that they had ‘chosen’ resettlement in the Andamans, many also admitted the constrained nature of this choice. Several settlers explained how given their circumstances, the Andamans had emerged as their only viable option for rehabilitation. However, the reasons which informed this perception varied widely from one individual to the other. Lakshmikanta Ray of Sabari village vividly recounted his sense of helplessness. ‘What could I do? All the people who were staying with me were going off (to the Andamans).’44 Manipada Bairagi of Urmilapur also decided to leave Ghusuri camp for the Andamans, for the simple reason that most other people in his camp did so.45 Not all the camp refugees were equally resourceful or even aware of the choices available. Many unthinkingly followed their more capable neighbours. Many more, like Sujata Mondal, were driven to the Andamans by the subhuman conditions in refugee camps. Sujata feared that prolonged stay in a refugee camp would prove fatal for her children: We had two children – they were constantly ill. Then I saw that people were dying daily. They removed a car load [of the dead] every morning and evening ... Seeing all this we thought that we have come away with our children, what if we were to lose them sitting in a refugee camp?46

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The call to enrol for rehabilitation in the Andaman Islands provided the first opportunity to escape this death trap and Sujata’s husband, Kalipada, jumped at it. In the ultimate analysis, their fear of losing their children outstripped their fear of the long sea crossing. The above account by no means exhausts the variety of factors which informed the choice of the Andamans over other sites of rehabilitation. Several respondents cited reasons which range from the unexpected to the purely eccentric. Dasharath Barui opted for the Andamans because his father, while serving in the Indian National Army under Subhash Chandra Bose, had visited the Andamans and had spoken positively of it.47 Amulya Sutar was a survivor of tuberculosis. He had heard that exposure to the ‘salty air’ of the sea cures the last traces of the disease. Therefore, he opted for resettlement in the Andaman Islands.48 Though the refugees’ reasons for travelling to the Andamans do not fit any single pattern, they aptly demonstrate the ahistoricity of accounts which describe this dispersal as exile or banishment. They also challenge the tendency within current historiography to frame the lived experiences of Bengali refugees within a binary of agency and victimhood. The resourcefulness of the middle- class refugees who turned illegal squats into full-fledged refugee colonies are celebrated in numerous accounts. Conversely, all refugees who took shelter in government camps are presented as passive victims of not only Partition, but also the regime of rehabilitation. In the vivid picture of refugee life and rehabilitation that is painted by the reminiscences of refugees settled in the Andamans, this binary opposition breaks down completely. Instead, there are richly textured narratives of rebuilding lives; of complex, albeit limited, choices faced and negotiated within severely restrictive circumstances.

Contours of memory: The wild terrain and hardship of ‘those days’ When encouraged to speak about their past experiences, first-generation refugees spoke anecdotally about ‘how things were’ in their villages or settlement areas. Vivid, perhaps exaggerated, descriptions of the density of the forests which ringed the new settlements constituted by far the most common theme. Having ‘chosen’ to enrol their names in the colonization scheme, the refugees from Bengal were nevertheless ill prepared for the landscape that greeted them. As Sukharanjan Mridha of Kalsi village explained, being told in advance that they were being given lands in forested areas did little to mitigate their initial shock. ‘It was not possible for us to even imagine jungle this dense. We had never

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seen forests like these.’49 Though the jungles which ringed the settlements were unfamiliar, they provoked familiar fears. Kalipada Shikdar of Urmilapur confessed that, ‘Most of us – those who were heads of the families – adults, we thought – it’s not possible to live in this country. There must be tigers.’50 The settlers had to rapidly master such imaginary fears. In Middle and North Andaman, the development of roads and public transport lagged far behind the rapid expansion of settlements. In the absence of roads, muddy jungle tracks originally cleared for dragging timber using trained elephants were the only links between particular refugee settlements and the outside world. These leech-infested paths connected the villages to nearby jetties, the local grocery store, and even to the streams and creeks from which the women collected drinking water. Though the forests were free of predators, the presence of wild boars and elephants and the fear of being attacked by Jarawas made the men travel in groups for safety. All the respondents stressed koshto or the hardships they had endured in order to establish these new settlements. Here, narratives were gendered. While men spoke of years of labour to make their allotted fields fit for cultivation, women emphasized the daily ordeal of trudging miles through knee- deep mud to fetch water. Wide variations in the readiness of the land allotted meant that some refugees had to put in more work than others. Though the refugees were meant to be allotted lands cleared of forests, in practice the forest department merely cleared the areas earmarked for cultivation. The refugees had to clear the land of tree stumps, roots, rocks and, in some cases, smaller trees that escaped the axe. Jagabandhu Das of Dasarathpur village claimed that in the early years of settlement, it was impossible to set foot on the land that had been allotted to him.51 It was a tall order for nuclear families of one or two able-bodied men to clear and cultivate the five acres within the stipulated time of six months. Lakshmikanta Ray of Sabari remembered working on his field well after nightfall, by the light of a kerosene lamp. The men often formed groups of eight to ten and took turns in clearing individual plots.52 Frequently, women had to pitch in. Rajlakshmi Biswas remembered helping her husband in cultivation.53 The exigencies of survival in a semi-wild terrain saw women who had led relatively cloistered lives in East Bengal take on a variety of roles. Besides the traditional women’s jobs of collecting drinking water and threshing paddy in manual mills called dhenki, Saralabala Pal of Madhupur also grew vegetables, collected firewood and fished in the creeks.54 In their reminiscences, refugees interwove details of the strategies they adopted to protect cultivated fields from the surrounding

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wilderness with repeated assertions of the fear that the forests evoked. For refugees settled close to Jarawa territory, this fear was compounded by wild rumours of their ferocity. Government policy of maintaining bush police camps, ostensibly to protect the settlers from the Jarawas, further encouraged this dehumanized image of hostile and murderous jonglis or wild men. Wild pigs, deer and rats from the surrounding forests posed far more real threats to agricultural expansion as they regularly destroyed crops. Added to these pests were the occasional deadly rampages by mast elephants.55 The refugee settlers often lived in close proximity to 20 to 30 trained elephants used by the forest department for timbering. Occasionally, the mahouts would lose control over a mast elephant, which would then run amok in the refugee settlements.56 The Bengali settlers saw the jungle and wild animals as adversaries in rebuilding their lives. Their accounts reveal great ingenuity and often complete ruthlessness in removing these obstacles. In the villages of Middle and North Andaman, wild deer posed the biggest threat to agriculture, where herds could ruin the entire crop of paddy in a single night. The Bengali refugees and the forest labourers hunted deer for food. A number of respondents suggested that they had learnt to hunt using trained dogs from Burmese settlers. The refugees often bought trained dogs from the Burmese and in the early years of settlement the animals fetched a higher price than milk cows.57 However, food was not the main reason for hunting deer. The refugees primarily treated deer as pests which threatened their livelihood, and killed the animals indiscriminately. Second-generation settlers, who were either born in the Andamans or came there as young boys, were far more adept at hunting. ‘Living in jungles habituated us to the wilderness. We had gone wild along with them (the Jarawas)’, admits Manoranjan Khirat, who had come to the Andamans when 5 years old.58 In order to protect their crops from wild animals, the refugees built fences around their fields and makeshift watchtowers within, where they stood guard at night. In order to collect wood and leaves for building these structures, the settlers ventured into the forest, often under the protection of the bush police. This began an unequal competition between the settlers and the Jarawas over forest resources. By 2007, the memory of the fear the Jarawas had once evoked had largely been displaced by excitement regarding their exoticism, largely due to a recent turnaround in their behaviour. In October 1997, a group of the Jarawas, led by a boy named Enmei, who had been treated for a fractured leg and sent back with gifts the previous year, emerged unarmed from the forest and initiated peaceful interactions with the

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villagers of Kadamtala. This effectively ended 150 years of guerrilla warfare against the encroachment of outsiders, making the government policy of containing and policing the ‘hostile’ tribe redundant.59 Most respondents spoke excitedly of how the Jarawa were now ‘civilized’ and had ‘become human.’ A deep-seated racism against the autochthonous tribes of the Andamans was nevertheless discernable, with much of the excitement revolving around the recent ‘discovery’ that the Jarawas were human! Amongst refugees who had lived in close proximity to the tribe in Middle Andaman, signs of entrenched prejudice were still evident. Most described the Jarawas as indiscriminate killers, who ‘killed whatever crossed their path, man or beast’.60 Yet, the actual experience of their ‘hostility’ was more often than not confined to raids during the night, when the raiding party made off with iron implements and fruits, and, at times, killed cows. Despite their depiction as wild and irrational killers, there was a clear pattern to Jarawa violence. The victims of Jarawa attacks were usually those who entered the jungle and could have been seen as intruders or aggressors. They seldom attacked the refugees within their settlements; and most settlers admitted this.61 At least one respondent even attempted to rationalize the ‘hostile’ behaviour of the Jarawa, exhibiting rare empathy. According to Sukharanjan Mridha of Kalsi, the area was frequently raided by Jarawas; so much so that 15 of the 25 families who had been settled in the area had to be relocated to a different region. ‘The fear was real. The Jarawas frequented the area, killed people’. Yet, in Sukharanjan’s account, the Jarawas are represented as human and their ‘hostility’ is rationalized: There were no settlements here ... the entirety, the jungle was theirs ... Now, the settlement was built in their areas, we were brought over and settled. It would automatically cause them inconvenience. They hunt for food – deer, wild pigs ... Now taking their land, the government built settlements. Their area decreased. They had to go around us – they became angry. Then, if they got a chance, they killed.62 This account suggests that the refugees were not entirely unaware of the negative impact their new settlements had on the hunting and foraging habits of the original inhabitants of the forests. Despite his professed empathy, Sukharanjan squarely blamed the government for the marginalization of the Jarawas. He omitted the fact that poaching and encroachment into the Jarawa reserve had become common practice amongst the settlers and forest workers of the Andamans. This naturally

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escalated ‘encounters’ and conflict between the two groups. While mortality amongst poachers was often meticulously recorded, the actual number of Jarawas killed might never be known. The steady increase in population of the Andaman Islands led to increasing encroachment and illegal settlements within the territory ‘reserved’ for the Jarawas. In later years, Jarawas stopped frequenting the area around Kalsi. ‘As the population kept increasing, they gradually moved off,’ says Shukharanjan, in effect acknowledging that the Jarawas ultimately lost out in an unequal competition with the new settlers over forest resources.63 While remembering their pasts, the refugees of the Andamans privileged certain aspects over others. Vivid descriptions of the challenges faced and overcome ‘in those days’ petered out into short, often dismissive and disinterested summaries of more recent developments. Narayan Dutta of Havelock summarized the transformation of the island into a popular and well- connected tourist destination in one sentence. ‘Now many things have developed – houses, vehicles and transport, roads, vote, etc. – so many people ... In those days, there were hardly any people; it was difficult to form an attachment [to the land].’64 Yet, this very period of struggle, when the refugees from East Bengal had found it hard to reconcile themselves to their forested and isolated new homes, is repeatedly narrated as the relevant past in the interviews. This selective remembering and recounting of their pasts was used by the refugees to project a particular self-image or identity. Memories and anecdotes recounted by the respondents not only centred upon the early years of colonization, but also highlighted their interaction with the wild terrain. The jungle, its wild animals and its autochthonous inhabitants, the Jarawas, are all portrayed as part of the landscape which the refugees successfully colonized. In the narratives, the refugees appear repeatedly as solitary pioneers, struggling against and prevailing over obstacles. The role of the government in clearing the forests is minimized, as is the contribution of swathes of forest workers – mahouts, labourers from Ranchi and Burmese workers – who shared the same landscape with the refugees. There is evidence to suggest that the refugees benefited from their presence. Local records speak of mixed groups of refugees and Ranchi labourers entering the jungle to hunt deer and pigs.65 But none of the interviewees mentioned such interactions. This served to enhance the self-image of the refugees as the primary agents who transformed the Andamans from an island of impenetrable jungles to a land of reasonably prosperous rural settlements. Jagabandhu Das of Dasarathpur admitted with great reluctance (and only at the insistence of his wife), that some settlers in Middle

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Andaman had indeed employed ‘Ranchi’ labourers as kisans, or agricultural labourers, to clear their lands. The respondents stressed the hardships they had endured during the first few years of colonization precisely because it bolstered their collective identity as agricultural pioneers and settlers of the Andaman Islands. ‘The hardship that had to be endured ... was endured by us,’ said Saralabala Pal of Madhupur village. ‘Now there is comfort.’66

Displacement, memory and identity The Government of India adopted a programme of ‘accelerated development’ of the Andaman Islands in 1965, which treated population as the main ‘engine’ promoting growth. The programme envisioned doubling the population of the islands by 1970. However, in order to diversify the population, Bengali refugees were excluded from future schemes of state-aided migration to the Andamans from the Indian mainland.67 Though the refugees were not aware of this shift in policy, they nevertheless felt its impact. From the mid-sixties, there was a veritable flood of ‘outsiders’ in the hitherto homogenous refugee villages. According to the refugees, the large-scale immigration of Tamils, Telegus and Ranchiwalas, who came to work as wage labourers in the new projects, severely disrupted the old patterns of life. Ananta Kumar Biswas of Manglutan held these outsiders responsible not only for the environmental degradation of the area, but also for every woe of the settlers of Mangultan village. Excessive encroachment into forest lands, soil erosion, decline in wildlife, proliferation of diseases and even the increasing addiction of Bengali settlers to intoxicants – everything followed from the undesirable influx of ‘outsiders’.68 While the period after 1965 saw the rapid growth of new trade, transport and businesses in the Andamans, the refugee settlers were unable to compete with the new migrants in reaping the benefits of the new developments. The detachment of the refugees from more recent developments is perhaps born of this sense of being progressively marginalized by the rising tide of new migrants. Therefore, while remembering their pasts, all the respondents chose to privilege an earlier period when they had been the only inhabitants of nascent villages. This selective remembering was not merely a reaction against later marginalization. By simultaneously stressing their ‘toil’ and hard work as the main driving force behind the colonization of the Andaman Islands, refugees projected themselves as pioneers. This was a vital strategy which enabled refugee families to hold their own against the local ‘sons- of-the-soil’, that is, the Local-Borns

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who had organized vocal protests against refugee resettlement in the Andamans.69 As pioneering settlers, the Bengali refugees staked a claim upon the land and resources of the Andamans. By 2007, the identity of the Bengali refugees settled in the Andamans had become inextricably linked to the landscape they inhabited since resettlement. Their primary identity was that of agricultural colonizers and they called themselves ‘settlers’ and not refugees or udvatsus. This brings us to a central paradox of refugee memory in the Andamans. The very period that is described in terms of isolation and struggle is also remembered with a sense of nostalgia. Ananta Kumar Biswas, a second-generation refugee, lamented the demise of simple and harmonious village life in Manglutan, which until the influx of ‘outsiders’ had been dominated by folk culture. In the 1960s, non-Bengali wage labourers were brought in to build roads and mine a nearby stone quarry. ‘The golden days of early settlement have totally perished’, he declares.70 This contradiction between hardship and nostalgia remains unresolved in the reminiscences of Sumana Majumdar of Sitanagar. On the one hand, she described how in the early days, she used to ‘cry constantly.’ However, this is followed by a wistful recounting of how inexpensive life used to be. She rattled off the prices at which she used to buy provisions, while her husband compared the easy availability of building materials ‘then’ with the hassles of buying and transporting wood ‘now’.71 The settlers claimed that there were no diseases other than malaria, while the virgin soil ensured larger harvests. Every single respondent remembered heavier monsoons and a milder climate. Amongst the refugee settlers of the Andamans, an earlier narrative of loss of homeland had been displaced by a more recent experience of marginalization. Once handpicked from refugee camps as the driving force behind the colonization of the Andamans Islands, they were judged to be unsuitable to take forward its eventual development. New settlers, uniquely suitable for the development of plantations, industries, trade and tourism, were selected from the southern states of India. The refugees settled in the Andamans lacked the education, capital or know-how to compete effectively in these fields and were progressively marginalized. The resulting socio- economic and cultural marginalization gave birth to the nostalgia for the early years of settlement. By 2007, the collective memory of refugees settled in the Andamans had re-imagined this period as an idyllic time, characterized by cultural unity and social amity within homogenous refugee settlements. Thus, an idyllic past was created through a routine lamentation of its loss, not only in the reminiscences of the first-generation refugees but also in

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the works of popular and local history authored by their descendants. Dhirendranath Sadhak’s essay, published in the local history section of the autumnal festival edition of a local Bengali journal, Dwip-Bangla, vividly describes the first- ever veneration of the goddess Durga organized by the local community of settlers in Diglipur. He compares the determination and cooperation of the impoverished settlers in organizing a simple version of the most lavish of all Hindu festivals in 1958, with the present commercialization of Durga Puja in Diglipur and the lack of involvement of the local Bengali community.72 The Bengali refugees settled in the Andamans do not conform to the received wisdom on the memory and identity of Hindu Bengali refugees. Historians, especially the practitioners of oral history, have repeatedly identified the loss of homeland and the trauma associated with it as the core ingredient structuring refugee memory and, therefore, the selfhood which is constructed through such remembering. Sandip Bandyopadhay’s respondents were scarred and bewildered by the violence and trauma of Partition when interviewed in 1993.73 According to Pradip Kumar Bose, it is through their memories of displacement that ‘the displaced have sought to preserve their separateness and distinctiveness’.74 The yearning for a lost home is privileged as the single unifying feature of refugee memory in his analysis. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of a cluster of refugee reminiscences exposes the conscious agenda and the unconscious prejudices in the refugees’ memories of their chereasha gram, literally, the villages they left behind. It nevertheless reinforces the centrality of the lost desh or foundational homeland in refugee memory.75 In striking contrast, the Bengali refugees settled in the Andamans had little interest in reminiscing about their lost homes in East Bengal. In the reminiscences of the refugee settlers of the Andamans, the familiar themes of refugee memory, such as displacement, violence, trauma and nostalgia, were conspicuous by their absence. Unlike the refugee women interviewed by Anasua Basu Raychaudhury, who live in their past, re- enacting their trauma and dispossession, the refugee women in the Andamans were reluctant to revisit their desh, even in their memories.76 When they did speak of their lost homes, and few did in the Andamans, the first-generation refugees were ambivalent about these memories. Narayan Dutta’s response illustrates this attitude: We had land ... Lots of land. There is no point in talking about these things now – it’s not there now. Now, it exists only in stories. I have seen it with my own eyes – plots, fields, pond, mango trees, betel

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nut trees – so many kinds of trees, various gardens. It’s not like that anymore. Now, it’s almost forgotten. I am still talking about it. The rest, they won’t speak of Pakistan. Where are the people who will reminiscence about it? We were born in that country, therefore we still speak a bit about it. Once we are gone, none will be left to talk. They will forget which country they come from’.77 Though the refugees settled in the Andamans had not forgotten the villages they had come from, amongst them the memories of their homeland had lost relevance and poignancy. Most respondents in the Andamans chose to reminisce about their lived experience of rebuilding a life in the islands. The reminiscences of the refugee settlers of the Andamans illustrate the risks of advocating a typical or representative refugee memory. The act of remembering is informed not only by past experiences, but also by present location. Identities, as reflected in memory are, therefore, seldom static. They are constantly refigured by lived experiences. The reminiscences of refugees settled in the Andamans illustrate one such radical reconfiguration of memory and, along with it, of identity. The refugee settlers of the Andamans were squeezed out of East Bengal, enrolled as refugees in camps in West Bengal and were eventually dispersed for rehabilitation. Some, like Gokul Biswas and Haricharan Haldar, had even marched on the streets of Calcutta demanding rehabilitation, chanting ‘Amrakara? Vastuhara!’ (Who are we? The refugees!).78 Yet, by 2007, they had ceased to call themselves refugees. These memories of displacement had been marginalized by more recent memories of pioneering agricultural expansion in the Andamans, leading the refugees to forge a new collective identity – that of ‘settlers’ or agricultural pioneers.

Notes 1. The inheritance of the colonial administrative system, the so- called ‘steel frame’ of the Raj and the penal code are two prominent examples. The impact and significance of such borrowings from a colonial past are yet to be adequately explored by historians. 2. See, for example, Ranabir Sammadar, ed., Reflections on Partition in the East (New Delhi and Calcutta, 1997). 3. See Asim Roy, ‘The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 24 (1990), pp. 385–408. 4. Some key examples from within this vast field are: Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New

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5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Delhi, 1998); Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal’, in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi, 2001); Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007); and Wilhem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London, 2005). For a similar argument regarding the exclusion of partition refugees from the category of ‘real’ refugees, see Pippa Virdee, ‘Migration and Post-Partition Resettlement in Lyallpur: The Impact of Refugee Labour’, in Sustainable Development Policy Institute, ed., Troubled Times: Sustainable Development and Governance in the Age of Extremes (Karachi, 2006). See: Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (New Haven, CT, 1953); and Horace Gundry Alexander, New Citizens of India (Bombay, 1951). This is the approach of Aristide Zolberg, ‘The Formation of New States as a Refugee- Generating Process’, Annals, no. 467 (1983), pp. 24–38. See Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–67 (Cambridge, 2007); Gyanesh Kudaisya and Tai Yong Tan, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London, 2000); Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi, 2005); and Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (New Delhi, 1999). Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge, 2001). Some examples of scholarship directly addressing the relationship between refugee memory, displacement and identity are: Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 August 1996; and D. S. Tatla, ‘The Sandal Bar: Memoirs of a Jat Sikh Farmer’, Punjab Past and Present, no. 29 (April- October, 1995). Methodologically, these interviews belong to the genre of oral history, which Alessandro Portelli has described as ‘history-telling’. The goal of these interviews was less to elicit new information or facts which had not been recorded and were, therefore, ‘unknown’. The attempt was to prompt respondents to talk about their experience of an already known fact or event, in this case, the refugees’ experience of rehabilitation. Such narratives are inherently multivocal and multiauthored, with the ultimate narrative being a product of a complex dialogue between the historian/interviewer and the subject/interviewee. See Alessandro Portelli, ‘History-Telling and Time: An Example from Kentucky’, Oral History Review, vol. 20 (1992), pp. 51–66. Figures taken from http://andamandt.nic.in/history.htm, Settlement in Andaman Island [Accessed on 5 June 2007]. The exact figure mentioned in Pran Nath Luthra, Rehabilitation (New Delhi, 1972), is 5.82 million. Parmanand Lal, Andaman Islands: A Regional Geography (Calcutta, 1976). The Bhantus were a ‘criminal tribe’ of Central India who were brought over from the mainland for rehabilitation in the Andamans. At the time of independence, about 224 of them lived in relative isolation. They sustained themselves through agriculture, foraging and sea-fishing. For a short account of Bhantu settlers, see Probhat Kumar Sen, Land and People of the Andaman: A Geographical and Socio-Economical Study with a Short Account of the Nicobar Islands (Calcutta, 1962).

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15. About 1,400 Moplahs were brought to the Andamans as prisoners following the Moplah rebellion of 1921 in Malabar. In 1926, some more Moplah prisoners, along with some free settlers, came to the Andamans voluntarily. Though the Moplah population was essentially a part of the convict settlement of the Islands, they did not intermingle socially with other convicts and retained their specific cultural traits. Sen, Land and People, pp. 73–96. 16. Very little is known about the antecedents of the Karens. They were Christians who came over from the Burmese mainland. They were guided by a certain Rev. Thru Luggie in their choice of a site of settlement in Middle Andaman. Sen, Land and People, p. 80. 17. For details, see ibid. For a general history of the Andaman Islands, see L. P. Mathur, Kalapani: History of Andaman and Nicobar Islands with a Study of India’s Freedom Struggle (1985). 18. National Archives of India [NAI], File No. 259/47-AN, Andaman Files, 1947. ‘Aborigines in the Andamans’, The Hindu, 19/12/1947, cited in ‘DevelopmentColonisation, Settlement: Proposal to Settle West Punjab Refugees in Andaman Island’. 19. For details of the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign, see Report of the Grow More Food Enquiry Committee (New Delhi, 1952). 20. Administration Report on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1945–46 (New Delhi, 1946). 21. NAI, File No. 259/47-AN, Andaman Files, 1947, ‘Development, Colonisation, Settlement: Proposal to Settle West Punjab Refugees in Andaman Island’. 22. NAI, File No: 8/3/53-AN, Andamans Files, 1953, ‘Progress Reports on the Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons in the Andamans’. 23. NAI, File No: 8/8/53-AN, Andamans Files, 1953, ‘Plans for Settling Displaced Persons from East Pakistan and People from Travancore- Cochin and Gujarat in the Middle Andamans’. 24. For details of planned colonization, see H. R. Shivdasani, Report on the Possibilities of Colonization and Development of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (New Delhi, 1949). 25. Figures taken from Report by the Inter-Departmental Team on Accelerated Development Programme for Andaman and Nicobar Islands (New Delhi, 1965). 26. ‘Kalapani’ literally means black-waters. It refers to the traditional taboo on sea- crossing amongst the Hindus which could lead to loss of caste. However, in colonial India, the term became associated with the transportation of prisoners to the cellular jail and penal settlement of the Andaman Islands. 27. Hiranmoy Bandypadhyay, Udvastu (Calcutta, 1986), pp 154–5. 28. Interview with Dasarath Barui, Vijaynagar Village, Havelock Island, 28 January 2007. 29. Interview with Sukharanjan Mridha, Kalsi Village, Middle Andaman, 4 February 2007. 30. See Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages’. 31. Hindustan Times, 11 September 1949. 32. NAI, in File No. 53/10/49-AN, Ministry of Home Affairs, Andamans Branch, Government of India, 1949, Letter from A. K. Ghosh, Chief Commissioner, Andaman and Nicobar Islands to H. J. Stooks, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, 24 September 1949.

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Dissident Memories 243 33. A tehsiladar was a revenue department official in charge of a revenue district known as tehsil or taluk in British India. The post is of Mughal origin but continued to be used, with modification in colonial and post- colonial India and Pakistan. 34. ‘Bangalir Dwip’, Ananda Bazar Patrika, 15 January 2005. 35. Interview with Jagabandhu Das, Dasarathpur Village (Rangat), Middle Andaman, 1 February 2007. 36. Interview with Sukharanjan Mridha, Kalsi Village. 37. Interview with B. K. Samaddar, Nimbutala Village, Middle Andaman, 1 February 2007. 38. Interview with Sujata Mondal, Janakpur Village, Middle Andaman, 4 February 2007. 39. Interview with Mrs Sukharanjan Mridha, Kalsi Village, Middle Andamans, 4 February 2007. 40. Ibid. 41. Interview with Lalit Mohan Pal, Madhupur Village, North Andaman, 6 February 2007. 42. Interview with Lalit Mohan Pal, 6 February 2007. 43. Ibid. 44. Interview with Lakshmikanta Ray, Sabari Village, Middle Andaman, 1 February 2007. 45. Interview with Manipada Bairagi, Urmilapur Village, Middle Andaman, 3 February 2007. 46. Interview with Sujata Mondal, Janakpur Village. 47. Interview with Dasarath Barui, Vijaynagar Village. 48. Interview with Amulya Sutar, Harinagar Village, Middle Andaman, 1 February 2007. 49. Interview with Sukharanjan Mridha, Kalsi Village. 50. Interview with Kalipada Sikdar, Urmilapur Village, Middle Andaman, 3 February 2007. 51. Interview with Jagabandhu Das, Dasarathpur Village. 52. Interview with Lakshmikanta Ray, Sabari Village. 53. Interview with Rajlakshmi Biswas, Sabari Village, Middle Andaman, 1 February 2007. 54. Interview with Saralabala Pal, Madhupur Village, North Andaman, 6 February 2006. 55. Mast, alternatively spelt as must or musht is a periodic condition in bull elephants characterized by highly aggressive behaviour linked to sexual arousal or dominance. The word is derived from Persian and literally means intoxicated. 56. In India, a person who trains and drives elephants is called a mahout. 57. Based on interview with Narayan Dutta, Shyamnagar Village, Havelock Island, 28 January 2007. 58. Interview with Manoranjan Khirat, Lakshmanpur Village, Middle Andaman, 3 February 2007. 59. For details of this turnaround in the behaviour of the Jarawas and its impact upon nearby settlers and the local administration, see www.and.nic.in/C_ charter/Dir_tw/ecr/contents.htm, Report on the Expert Committee on Jarawas of Andaman Islands, July 2003, accessed on 4 March 2009.

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60. Interview with Kalipada Shikdar, Urmilapur Village, Middle Andaman, 3 February 2007. 61. See K. Mukhopadhay, P. K. Bhattacharya and B. N. Sarkar, eds, Jarawa Contact: Ours with Them, Theirs With Us (Calcutta, 2002). 62. Interview with Sukharanjan Mridha, Kalsi Village. 63. Ibid. 64. Interview with Narayan Dutta, Shyamnagar Village. 65. See ‘Some Major Incidents of Conflicts, 1946–1998’, in K. Mukhopadhay et al., eds, Jarawa Contact. 66. Interview with Saralabala Pal, Madhupur Village. 67. Report by the Inter-Departmental Team on Accelerated Development Programme for Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Delhi, 1965). 68. Interview with Ananta Kumar Biswas, Manglutan Village, South Andaman, 10 February 2007. 69. NAI, File No. 259/47-AN, Andaman Files, 1947, ‘Development, Colonisation, Settlement: Proposal to settle West Punjab refugees in Andaman Island’. The reminiscences of Ananta Kumar Biswas, ibid., speak of protests by LocalBorns. 70. Ananta Kumar Biswas, ‘Manglutan: Birth and Upbringing of a Refugee Settlement in the Isles’ [sic], unpublished essay. 71. Interview with M. L. Majumdar and Sumana Majumdar, Sitanagar Village, North Andaman, 7 February 2007. 72. Dhirendranath Sadhak, ‘Diglipurer Pratham Durga Pujo-1958’, Dwip-Bangla (Saradiya, 2005). 73. Sandip Bandyopadhay, ‘The Riddles of Partition: Memories of the Bengali Hindus’, in Ranabir Samaddar, ed., Reflections on Partition (Calcutta, 1997), pp. 59–71. 74. Pradip Kumar Bose, ‘Partition: Memory Begins Where History Ends’, in ibid., pp. 72–86. 75. Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages’. 76. Anasua Basu Raychaudhury, ‘Life After Partition: A Study on the Reconstruction of Lives in West Bengal’, paper presented at the European Association of South Asian Studies, 2004. 77. Interview with Narayan Dutta, 28 January 2007. 78. Interview with Gokul Biswas, Havelock Island, 29 January 2007, and Haricharan Haldar, Shibpur Village, North Andaman, 6 February 2007.

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11 ‘Green for Come’: Moving to York as a Ugandan Asian Refugee Emma Robertson

As a popular tourist destination in the twenty-first century, the northern English city of York sells itself through acceptable histories of foreign imperial conquest by Romans and Vikings. Its connection to modern British imperial history is, by contrast, rarely mentioned. York is frozen in pre-industrial time, for the benefit of post-industrial consumers. Yet the local economy was dominated from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century by the railway and chocolate industries, both of which had significant ties to empire. The Rowntree confectionery company, for example, depended on supplies of first West Indian, then West African cocoa to produce chocolates such as Kit Kat and Black Magic. Indeed, the products of the colonies had circulated in the city from the eighteenth century as the gentry spent and consumed the ‘fruits of empire’.1 York took shape in relation to, rather than in isolation from, the imperial world. Just as the interrelationship of the local and the imperial/global economy in York has been remembered, and forgotten, in strategic ways, in recent years it has generally been accepted, at least by white residents, that this is a city untouched by histories of migration. Unlike its neighbours Leeds and Bradford, York does not tend to either acknowledge or celebrate a ‘multicultural’ identity.2 Certainly, the city did not witness large-scale migration from the Commonwealth in the post-war period. According to the 1991 census, the district of York had a population of 98,745, and of this total, 97,638 (over 98 per cent) defined their ethnic group as ‘white’. The second largest ethnic group was Chinese (191 people), then Indian (163), Bangladeshi (105) and Black Caribbean (61).3 Such data is, however, problematic in placing people into reductive categories in order to generate statistics. Moreover, if York has not seen the same levels of migration as some British cities, it has never had a static, 245

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homogenous ‘white’ population. Diverse groups, including Jewish, Irish, Italian, Polish and Maltese women and men, have all lived, worked and settled here.4 Indeed, it is the very absence of numerically large minority ethnic communities, which makes it important to study the experiences of those who did come to live and work in the area. Histories of migration and race relations in Britain will be incomplete without studies which pay attention to local conditions and experiences beyond the so- called ‘centres’. Taking York as a geographical focal point, this chapter will focus on one dramatic moment in the messy aftermath of British imperialism: the expulsion of British Asians from Uganda in the early 1970s. The event stirred up a fierce debate over whether Britain should admit Asians with U.K. passports: a debate which hinged on the extent to which empire ties had been effectively severed, not only at a formal legislative level but also at the level of national consciousness. The contested status of the refugees was not, however, solely a ‘national’ issue. Some local councils, and their residents, were quick to voice their opposition to any supposed ‘influx’, citing existing localized difficulties in, for example, housing and employment. Global, national and local politics thus collided in particular ways in this post-colonial crisis, as I explore in more detail below. Fewer than half of the 60,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin actually came to the United Kingdom.5 However, as Laura Tabili highlights, it is the perception of numbers, of how many is ‘too many’, which really matters, rather than any objectively measured statistics.6 For those who did make it to Britain, the official message was clear: stay away from established Asian communities. On the whole, this advice was ignored by more than 60 per cent of the refugees.8 It is, therefore, not surprising that existing studies have focused on those areas which attracted the greatest number of expellees. Swinerton et al. draw largely on Londonbased examples in their early analysis of the situation; Valerie Marett and Joanna Herbert, meanwhile, both take Leicester as their central study. Although Kushner and Knox offer Hampshire as an alternative focus, their work still concentrates on those who moved away from isolated areas to localities with a more established Asian population. Vaughan Robinson shifts to the north of England but again concentrates on a town (Blackburn) with an existing population of Asian migrants.8 Here, I explore the implications for those refugees who moved to and remained in York, cut off at least initially from larger Asian settlements. It was in the course of my wider research into the experiences of women confectionery workers at the Rowntree firm that I interviewed

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Julie – who arrived in York with her husband and children as a refugee in 1973.9 Her oral testimony, which forms the focus of this piece, demonstrates the need both to reassess the history of York in relation to the end of empire and to consider the experiences of those refugees who lived outside the more established Asian communities. The chapter begins by placing Julie’s individual narrative of migration into the wider historical context, before examining how policies and attitudes at a national and local level impacted upon the movement of refugees to York. Through oral history, contemporary reports and an analysis of local media, I then explore some of the ways in which Ugandan Asian refugees, particularly women, worked and lived in the city.10 The intention is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of apparently unmediated experience but rather to focus on how such experiences have been constructed and understood at the local level, and how Julie presented her individual and collective memories in the particular context of a crosscultural oral history interview with a York-born, white woman.11 Whilst I make no claims for Julie’s story as being representative of Ugandan Asian women’s experiences, it is no less valid for being one individual’s testimony. As Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes affirm, ‘the individual experience is always richer, more contradictory, more paradoxical than that which we represent as the experience of a group’.12

India – Zimbabwe – Uganda – York: Multiple migrations in context Julie’s life history is a product of multiple, complicated migrations. She was born in 1940 in Zimbabwe, then known as Southern Rhodesia, which had been a British colony since the 1890s. One of ten children, her family ran a clothing business. When she was 18, she moved to Uganda, another British colony, to get married. She worked with her husband, a dressmaker, to run a small but successful clothing factory and enjoyed a comfortable life there for more than ten years. Julie’s matter- of-fact autobiography – ‘I was born and bred in Zimbabwe, got married in Uganda’ – can, as Avtar Brah writes of her own life history, ‘also be “read” as the historical entanglement of a multitude of biographies in the crucible of the British Empire’.13 As an Indian Muslim living in British East Africa, Julie was already situated twice over as an imperial subject. Indians had a long history in the region, acting as merchants from at least the thirteenth century.14 However, following the ‘acquisition’ of Uganda by the British in 1894, Indians arrived in the protectorate in greater numbers as

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indentured migrant workers on the East African Railway and as free economic migrants. Some settled and started up their own commercial enterprises, becoming heavily involved in trade and money-lending. Others worked in the colonial civil service and professional positions. Despite important differences between Indian migrants, their social and economic roles in East Africa, coupled with their location in tightknit communities founded on religious and cultural traditions, situated them between ‘white’ and ‘black’. This provided a useful racial hierarchy for the British, suited to their ‘divide and rule’ tactics, but would eventually place the Asians in a vulnerable position.15 Swinerton et al. argue that, ‘No people ... depended more on the maintenance of British prominence in the old empire structure.’16 The visible prosperity of some Asians in East Africa, coupled with their social, political and cultural distance from black Africans – conditions fostered and sustained by the British imperial system – allowed them to become scapegoats for black poverty in the post-independence ‘Africanization’ era. They faced increasing restrictions during the 1960s in relation to business ownership, economic transactions and employment. First in Kenya, then in Uganda, trading bans were imposed, which led to many business owners looking to leave the country. Kushner and Knox record figures of 23,000 Asians leaving Kenya between 1965 and 1967, with Uganda losing more than 24,000 Asians overseas between 1969 and 1971.17 When Idi Amin took power in Uganda in 1971, he continued with such policies but took them to still greater extremes. He deemed the Asian population to be ‘sabotaging’ the economy.18 Thus, in August 1972, he decreed that all those without Ugandan citizenship should leave the country within 90 days. As the deadline approached, the situation for any Asians still resident became increasingly untenable as their possessions were forcefully acquired and they faced violence from officials.19 Even those with Ugandan citizenship had to have their status verified, and there were reports of legal papers being torn up.20 The Ugandan crisis did not occur in a vacuum; it took place in a broader context of post-war, post-colonial displacement. By 1973, it was estimated that there were around one million refugees in Africa, approximately half of whom had lost their homes under newly independent regimes.21 This must be understood, at least in part, as a ‘legacy of empire’. African independence in the 1960s had brought into question the status of former colonial subjects. People of ‘Indian’ descent resident in East Africa did not automatically become citizens of the independent country in which they now lived. They could apply for national citizenship but this was not guaranteed and the process was

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difficult.22 Many had, therefore, taken the option of maintaining their British status, which allowed them to apply for a U.K. passport issued by the British Government, and thereby gave them the right to work and settle in Britain.23 However, as the situation in the former East African colonies (particularly Kenya) became increasingly unstable in the 1960s, and British Asians began migrating to the United Kingdom in greater numbers, the British Government nervously reviewed their legal position. In 1968, a new Commonwealth Immigrants Act was hastily introduced by Labour to limit unrestricted entry to those U.K. passport holders who could claim to ‘belong’ to the U.K. through birth or through a male parent or grandparent with U.K. citizenship. This clearly privileged ‘white’ migrants. As Bhabha and Shutter record, ‘The purpose of this carefully worded Act was to deprive British Asians of their right of entry to the only country of which they were citizens.’24 Settlement was now limited to those families granted one of the 1,500 employment vouchers made available. Whilst the Conservatives increased this allowance in 1971 to 3,000 temporary work permits, their immigration reforms cemented the division between ‘patrials’ (those with a British-born male parent or grandparent) and ‘non-patrials’, in a move intended to forestall all further claims to imperial belonging by anyone other than descendents of white settlers.25 The new legislation compounded the crisis faced by the British Ugandan Asians; Julie and her family held U.K. passports yet they entered Britain defined either as refugees or as ‘immigrants’.26 Even prior to the 1968 laws, there had been a disjuncture between the construction of non-white colonial subjects as ‘our people’ when they were safely contained outside the metropolis, yet as ‘foreign’ once they arrived in the U.K.27 Legal manoeuvrings from the 1960s onwards formalized this discrepancy and attempted to finally disavow Britain’s responsibilities for those once eagerly claimed as imperial subjects. These developments did not, however, constitute a final, lasting break with imperialism. Shompa Lahiri argues that ‘the increasing racial differentiation and exclusion which has characterized the 1960s onwards ... is just another facet of Britain’s complex imperial heritage’. Although Lahiri’s statement tends towards an overly coherent narrative of racism as ‘legacy of empire’, Gilroy is right to see as an ‘illusion’ any assertion that ‘Britain has been or can be disconnected from its imperial past’.28 The legal changes in the early 1970s were an acknowledgement that, even with the loss of colonial territory, the consequences of the empire lived on. In the vehement denunciations of any claims

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the ‘Asians’ could have to ‘Britishness’, colonial skeletons lay only half-buried. A speech by Conservative MP Ronald Bell, for example, was haunted by a subverted narrative of colonization, even as actual empire histories were conveniently forgotten. He asserted that the Asians in Uganda had ‘no connexion with Britain either by blood or residence’ but that their arrival would only ‘accelerate the colonization of Britain’.29 For advocates of the expellees, meanwhile, there was ideological advantage in making direct reference to ‘our colonial heritage’.30 This was not the only discourse mobilized, as some chose to emphasize Amin’s own description of himself as a ‘black Hitler’ to evoke Britain’s wartime stance of compassion towards persecuted peoples.31 Yet such tactics were less successful for non-white British citizens than they had been for white Hungarians in 1956.32 Whilst the changed economic climate played its part here, it was over the bones of the empire that this political, legal and ideological battle was really fought. Turning to focus on the northern English city of York, the following sections examine how the events of 1972 were represented and made sense of in this particular local context. Was the ‘end of empire’ a narrative which informed either the responses of white locals or the testimonies of refugees themselves?

‘Green for come’: The politics of dispersal Upon arrival in the United Kingdom, Ugandan Asians without immediate contacts in the country were directed to one of 16 temporary ‘camps’ established by the Uganda Resettlement Board (URB). For Julie, this meant a long journey to Wales (to the isolated Tonfanau site) and a difficult stay in barrack-style accommodation: ‘I just couldn’t say anything, I would just stand, I just couldn’t talk.’33 Finding a more permanent home was highly politicized. In an attempt to control the settlement of refugees and to direct them away from cities perceived as having ‘too many’ migrants already, a ‘red and green’ zoning policy was implemented by the URB. As Avtar Brah describes: The ‘red’ zones were those where the size of Asian populations was deemed to be already ‘too high’ ... The green zones, on the other hand, were defined as places where the Asian population was nonexistent or so low that a slight rise in their numbers would be ‘tolerated’. Thus, many Asian families found themselves flung to remote parts of Britain, without communal channels of support.34

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This attempted dispersal of refugees was highly cynical, racist and ultimately unsuccessful. Indeed, its failures were recognized at the time in a report produced for the York resettlement committee. Entitled, Green for Come, the document highlighted the city’s designation as a ‘green’ area. Although accepting that such a scheme was ‘obviously a sensible one’, its author highlighted the racism at work in determining which areas were ‘red’: ‘there is reason to suppose that at least some of the[se] areas ... were so listed more because of local protest than because of objectively measured pressure on their services – Leicester being the most obvious example of this’.35 Leicester has been widely criticized for its vociferous protests, both at the time and since. In particular, the advert placed in a Ugandan newspaper to warn refugees not to come to the city became infamous. However, Valerie Marett notes that it was neither the first, nor the only, council to voice concerns to the Home Office.36 In the York context, the apparently welcoming ‘green’ status did not reflect a lack of opposition to Asian migration. The situation facing the Asians in Uganda had been a topic of debate in the local media in York even before the arrival of any refugees. As in Leicester, there were protests about the ‘strain’ on jobs and housing to try to prevent the settlement of what were very small numbers of refugees: ‘action of this nature will unfortunately add to the ever-increasing unemployment and housing situation in this area’.37 Letters in the Yorkshire Evening Press drew on fears about housing shortages to preface outbursts against ‘ungrateful foreigners’, as the following extract demonstrates: The trouble with ... our Church and Government leaders is that they are so out of touch with the housing problem of thousands of our own British families ... It is time our so- called leaders realised that we are now a fifth-rate nation and that other countries regard us merely as a soft touch when they come to us with their begging bowls. It’s about time we stopped playing fairy godmother to ungrateful foreigners. After this explicitly xenophobic comment, the author of the letter shifts his stance slightly to present himself as sympathetic ‘with the plight of these unfortunate people’ but ends by evoking ‘the longsuffering British public who have to bear the brunt of mistakes by incompetent British governments who get us into situations like this’.38 There are two key elements at work in this piece. First, the appeal for ‘our own British families’ denies the Britishness of the refugees (the

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‘ungrateful foreigners’). Second, the rankling at Britain’s loss of world status, and the bitterness expressed towards the government, evokes what Balibar has termed, the ‘resentment ... felt by the citizens of a fallen power’ and what Gilroy has called, ‘imperial melancholia’.39 Even as Britain officially severed any lingering ties to former non-white colonial peoples, the ghost of imperial power was far from exorcized, either at a national or a local level.40 Such letters did not exist unopposed, and further study of the local media illustrates the ideological tug-of-war between opponents and supporters of bringing refugees to the area, with the latter keen to stress the goodness and tolerance of most York people. Indeed, these opposing views exist in tension, physically juxtaposed on the pages of the local press. On the same page as the letter quoted above, for example, is the ‘Weekend Topic’, a regular Christian message which on this occasion focuses on the theme of ‘Good Samaritans’.41 A couple of weeks later, a direct reply to the letter is printed: ‘I wouldn’t know how to begin to change the attitude of Mr. MacDonald or anyone else toward “our Church and Government leaders” or “ungrateful foreigners”. Such collective terms boggle the mind.’42 This letter, from a Mrs M. J. Hardy of Heworth Green, emphasizes individual, personal responses to refugees. Only the day before, the Archbishop had attempted to counter some of the abusive letters he had received, letters which would certainly have been considered unsuitable for publication in the local media: ‘The Archbishop of York ... said yesterday he had learned new ways of spelling bastard and hypocrite since making known his views on Uganda Asian refugees. The suggestion here is that these letters are from ‘ignorant’ members of the public and should, therefore, be dismissed. Addressing a conference of Scout leaders, the archbishop made broad appeals to Christian morality: ‘Why read the parable of the Good Samaritan, if it does not apply to Uganda Asians arriving on these shores?’43 As in the edition of the Yorkshire Evening Press in which McDonald’s letter was printed, the ‘Good Samaritan’ is present as a counter to racism. It is charity which is urged, however, rather than a rethinking or explicit challenging of the reasons behind such prejudice.44 With ‘local’ (white) people in ‘green’ areas encouraged to take in refugees and their families, the housing issue became highly personalized. The author of the ‘ungrateful foreigners’ letter criticized the hypocrisy of those who were urging such actions: ‘I have never yet heard any of the people who have spoken forth about moral obligations make a personal offer to help the Asians’. Ironically, the same edition of the Yorkshire Evening Press had on its front page: ‘Dr Coggan offers to take Asians.’

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The Archbishop of York, resident in the nearby village of Bishopthorpe, made a flat in his vast palace available for a young Ugandan Asian couple. This nuclear family of professional husband, professional wife (now full-time mother) and young baby, provided the perfect photo opportunity – unlike the larger, extended families described in the York Committee documentation. The story was even picked up in the national press, with a headline in The Times, ‘Asians Move in with Archbishop of York’. Pains were taken in both the local and national media to stress that this family had not been ‘hand-picked’.45 In December 1972, one of the refugees settled in York made his own contribution to the letters page: ‘I must say how grateful we are to the British Government and the British people as a whole for their timely help. May God bless them.’46 The Yorkshire Evening Press did, however, publish challenges by ‘Asian immigrants’ to the supposedly beneficent institutions of Britain. An article from September 1972, at a time when people were still being airlifted out of Uganda, proclaimed, ‘Asians “don’t want council homes” ’. The location of this story in Bradford, cited as having 30,000 immigrants (10 per cent of its total population), distanced it from the York context to a certain extent. Still, the article offered reassurance that, ‘The immigrant ... has shown he is interested in area improvement and participates in much the same terms as his British neighbours.’ The suggestion of similarities between ‘immigrants’ and ‘British’ simultaneously reinforces this artificial dichotomy. Nevertheless, the rejection of council houses is partly justified in the article as the Public Health Inspector declares the reasons given of ‘too much rent, too far away from work, or too far away from an immigrant’s religious centre or friends’, to be ‘identical with those given by British families when refusing accommodation’.47 It is gratitude which is, overall, the officially represented attitude of Ugandan Asian refugees in York and it is a feeling reflected in the personal testimony of Julie. Such gratitude may have soothed some of the tensions in York, but it also smoothed over the legal sleight of hand which deprived British Asians in Uganda of their right to enter Britain as citizens. Local officials were keen to preserve a feeling of control over any racial minorities coming to the city. The size and demographics of York were used to justify taking only a few families of refugees. Limiting numbers, and allowing only those perceived to be committed to hard work and domestic life, allowed the ‘white’ population of the city to feel safe from ‘floods’ of racial others and yet to feel that they were doing their bit to help, bolstering ideas of the good people of York. The Ugandan Asian refugees were placed in direct opposition to the city’s gypsy population,

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who were seen as transient and a cause of tension. Indeed, prior to the arrival of the first refugees, the Yorkshire Evening Press used the gypsies to highlight the need to only allow families who would stay in the city and work: it would be foolish to ignore the fact that there is a minority of people opposed to their [the refugees] coming here, and we are anxious to avoid in York – where there has been no racial discrimination whatsoever – any drift towards the position such as we have with the gypsy problem.48 Racial tensions were shifted onto gypsies, who were represented as both numerous and transient.49 It was in this context of local debates on race politics and, implicitly, anxieties over the end of empire – of shifting and competing dynamics of tolerance and prejudice – that Julie and her family arrived in York in 1973.

‘Hard work’: The significance of employment Paid employment was a pre- condition for acceptable settlement in York, both officially and unofficially. It was stated in a Local Authority ruling that homes in York would only be made available to Ugandan Asians when the ‘breadwinner’ (usually but not always represented as male) had a job.50 This was not a nationwide policy.51 According to the Green for Come report, ‘Only a few areas (such as York) have required heads of household taking up houses to have pre-arranged jobs to go to.’ This caused problems, in that people had to travel to York from the resettlement camps to arrange jobs, returning for a medical if they were working in the chocolate industry. The process could be expensive and time- consuming, as well as posing problems for the refugees themselves in negotiating trains and buses for their journey.52 It was only when Julie’s husband had secured a job at Rowntrees that her family were finally able to leave the resettlement camp in Wales.53 The small numbers of refugees arriving in York – around 25 families – made possible a high level of surveillance. A front-page article in the Yorkshire Evening Press from 30 October 1972 confirmed, ‘Three members of the first Ugandan Asian family to be found a permanent home in York have found jobs within a week ... Mrudula Joshi, aged 24, a trained infant teacher, and her sister Illa, aged 20, have taken jobs as packers for Rowntree Mackintosh Ltd’. Mrs Archer, a York resettlement officer, was then quoted as saying, ‘I think this shows that these

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people are prepared to work, and Mrudula, especially, is showing that she wants to make her family self-sufficient.’54 The Asian woman is here explicitly constructed as a worker, though with clear familial responsibilities. More ‘traditional’ gender roles could also be propounded by local bodies and by the media. Two months later, an article in the Yorkshire Evening Press from 21 December 1972 reassured readers that, ‘All the men have found jobs and the wives have been shown the shopping facilities available to them.’55 The concern was to reassure readers of the work ethic, respectability and self-reliance of the refugees, who were, thus, unlikely to make claims on local or national benefits. Many refugees, male and female, found work at the Rowntree confectionery factory. The Green for Come report noted a number of possible reasons for this: (a) this is shift work, which frequently often has vacancies because of the inconvenience many people feel about doing the job, (b) it is relatively well-paid work with overtime readily available to anyone willing to work very hard, (c) the Asians themselves want to work and are therefore willing to take any job to get themselves established, (d) Rowntrees themselves as employers are very good to their employees.56 The tendency for migrant workers to take jobs considered unsuitable by the indigenous York population is illustrated by points (a) and (c), although the reference to ‘shift work’ suggests that the report is referring mainly to male workers. Rowntrees did offer part-time work to women (including an early evening ‘housewives’ shift), which was a way for them to combine work in the home with paid employment. Julie herself cited this as a positive factor in her working life with the firm. In their readiness to work hard, the Ugandan Asian population in York was again reassuringly constructed in this report as having a strong work ethic. The particular structure of the York economy, with manufacturing dominated by the railway and confectionery companies, had an impact on the experiences of the refugees. As for many York-born employees, Rowntrees may genuinely have been seen as a ‘good firm’ to work for. Aside from relatively high wages, the firm had in place a number of welfare measures such as medical facilities and welfare supervisors.57 Significantly, in the context of resettlement, the company offered rented accommodation in the local area for its new workers. Julie and her family moved into Rowntree- owned housing just five minutes’ walk

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from the factory. York officials were able to report that refugees were satisfied with their new employers: ‘M’ has nothing but praise for their working conditions and says how considerate Rowntrees are as employers. The girls’ supervisor has visited them at home and seems to take a real interest in their welfare. She has suggested that ‘I’ goes on a day release scheme to learn shorthand and typing after which she could work in the offices.58 This type of support/surveillance of female employees was perhaps reassuring for some refugee families, in the context of women entering paid work outside the home in a new country, possibly for the first time. Rowntrees were also offering a level of social mobility by encouraging girls to enter office work. This offered the potential to regain a little of the social status many families had enjoyed in Uganda. For Julie, paid work has been crucial to achieving a good standard of living in England. She and her family lost everything they had worked for in Uganda. They left behind a business, savings and most of their possessions: ‘We went from riches to rags when we came.’ Work was a matter of necessity but also of pride, and she relates how her husband refused to go to the Department of Health and Social Security for help. Economy in living expenses was crucial; Julie describes how they made their own clothes and did not go ‘out’ or on holiday very often. Working hard was an important element of Julie’s narrative; a means of ‘composing’ her life in terms which emphasize her own agency and lack of dependence on the welfare state.59 She is operating within ideologies of respectability and the work ethic, affirming her worth as a paid worker contributing to the local community.60 As discussed, the question of work was used to legitimize certain groups and de-legitimize others (particularly gypsies). By asserting her hard work, Julie thus asserts her right to belong. But she also positioned herself as an outsider at times. For instance, she challenged western ideals of welfare and the British welfare state by emphasizing familial and community responsibilities above government intervention. Julie told me how her husband would help people in their community in Uganda, where there was no government welfare system. Julie started working part-time at Rowntrees after having lived in York for a year. Working on a conveyor belt packing chocolates placed her in close physical proximity to her co-workers, predominantly women. This facilitated a multitude of questions about her situation and culture: ‘You were sitting so close to one another. And they wouldn’t leave me.

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They telling me everything and, “How you come away?” ’ In the closeness of women’s bodies on the line, it was Julie’s body which became the object of interest. Her skin colour and dress, even her underwear, were the subject of curiosity and comment. Such an obvious discussion of difference, which brings the ‘private’ into the ‘public’ realm of the shop floor, shows these white working- class women ignoring the ‘public etiquette’ Iris Marion Young has described in relation to contemporary social practices in the United States.61 The assembly lines were effectively a female- only space where women could discuss the private and personal. Still, hierarchies based on age, marital status, class and race structured relationships between women and determined who would be the subject of others’ curiosity. Julie situated these discussions within shop floor culture, stating, ‘Time goes quick if you talk’. The monotony of the work itself meant that Julie recognized the importance of talking with her colleagues, even if it was about her personal life. She described how work friends were ‘like a family – it wasn’t picky and choosy ... they welcomed you ... they were so loving’. The closeness of friendships and the good nature of women at the factory were emphasized, echoing feelings expressed by many ‘white’ workers I had interviewed previously. Julie was not simply the passive recipient of the questions and gaze of her co-workers and neighbours. She enjoyed the interest being shown and took pride in it, particularly as it related to her children: ‘And you know everybody noticed them’. Positioned as the exotic other, Julie focused on the ways in which this difference was in one sense desired. She remembered people’s interest in family gatherings such as weddings: ‘they like our colour’. The converse side of colonial desire – fear and abjection – was not recorded in her narrative. Certainly white workers seem to have understood her presence in the factory as a direct consequence of the crisis situation in Uganda, commenting on how terrible it was. This allowed space for expressions of sympathy and interest rather than evoking worries over competition for jobs. Julie affirmed that questions were asked, ‘In a nice way ... They say, “Don’t feel bad.” ’ Whether or not she experienced more overtly negative reactions, she was able to construct a story in which her difference was empowering – she is placed centre stage.

Home and community Julie never moved from her first house in York and was eventually able to buy it from the Rowntree Trust. Creating a ‘home’ was very important

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to her and she stressed that her family were ‘very homely’. This ‘homeliness’ was partly a consequence of the culture in which Julie grew up. However, by staying at home (except when in the workplace), she conformed to the domestic ideologies for migrant women being enunciated at a local and a national level by the media and other institutions. The domestic life of the refugees was key to representations of them in the local press. Images of Ugandan Asian women seated by the firesides of their homes, surrounded by their family, effectively ‘domesticated’ the unfamiliar.62 The ideological work of the home, as propounded by the resettlement services, was to facilitate the ‘integration’, as far as possible, of Ugandan Asian families into white York culture. Volunteers were drafted in as ‘Good Neighbour Labour’ to help with tasks such as fitting carpets, mowing the lawn and so on. This assistance was greatly appreciated by Julie, as in Uganda she had had servants to perform such labour: ‘We didn’t know how to decorate, we didn’t know how to do the gardening ... that was so difficult.’ Whilst not wishing to detract from the good feelings which prompted people to offer such help, it clearly provided ways in which local white men and women could influence the ways in which ‘homes’ were created. Julie’s narrative of ‘homeliness’ must be read in the context of racialized notions of respectability, and domesticity. Yet her emphasis on the home is also in part a rejection of certain lifestyles and morals associated with white British culture. Coming to York involved a break with an existing community, exacerbated by the tactics of dispersal already discussed. The ‘red/green’ policy served to isolate those who lived in ‘green’ areas, such as York, from potentially supportive networks. Although Julie arrived in the city with other refugee families, she clearly felt a sense of isolation and of standing out: ‘There was no Asians, when we came to York’. She did recall meeting two ‘Asian’ families from Pakistan and two from Mauritius whilst out shopping, but stressed that her family were the first Asian family on the street. This isolation, with the resulting lack of any established economic, social or cultural networks, had implications for Julie’s everyday life. There were no shops in York where she could buy halal meat or other staple foods such as rice. Many families decided to leave the city but those who stayed worked together to arrange transport to Bradford for shopping and to worship at the mosque: ‘say about ten stayed. And they started buying cars ... helped one another’. Day-to-day practical issues such as having to freeze meat for the first time and forgetting to defrost it for the family meal were remembered vividly. In narrating how she was able to overcome such difficulties and to ‘cope’, Julie was able to construct a positive life history of survival and hard work.63

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Food was an important medium in re- establishing a sense of home, and in creating community networks, but it could also be a potential source of tension. Julie recalled that her husband had been worried their neighbours would not like the smell of her cooking.64 Such worries were not without foundation, as Joanna Herbert found in her study of Leicester. Cooking smells were one of the ways in which Asian families were defined as an ‘undesirable presence’ and disagreements over this constituted prejudice as experienced at ‘street level’.65 Julie herself disapproved of the proliferation of ‘Asian’ restaurants in York, underlining the heterogeneity and divisions within what has been perceived as a coherent ‘Asian’ community.66 However, she was particularly happy that her non-Asian neighbours in York would enjoy the food she often shared with them. A report from those responsible for Asian settlement in York commented on the ‘deliciousness’ of the food the refugees were cooking and how the offering of this food was important to them as a way of expressing their gratitude. The report did not consider the social complexities of providing and receiving such hospitality, seeing it purely as ‘one way to repay what we have done for them’.67 Dispersed throughout the city, Ugandan Asians were initially only able to find space for religious and cultural activities within their own homes. However, Julie and her family were soon involved in actively seeking out larger, more public community spaces in York. These newly (re)formed communities were largely structured around religion, again highlighting significant differences within what was constructed as a homogenous group of ‘Asians’ at the time. Julie’s husband was a key figure in negotiating the provision of a space for Muslim religious worship, whilst Julie herself was clearly influential in the establishment of support networks for women. Indeed, her ability to speak English meant that she often translated for her husband when they first arrived, placing her in a position of power and influence. The setting up of a mosque, albeit in an existing building, is suggestive of the ways in which the long-term settlement of these migrants had an impact on the urban spaces of this ‘historic’ city. Julie’s relationship to York is, ultimately, somewhat ambiguous. When I asked her what she liked about the city, she replied that her children thought it was, ‘nice and quiet and not a lot of our community and that’. By contrast, Julie fondly remembered her close-knit community in Uganda, in which people would share food and other resources, and found it difficult living so far away from other Asian families.68 Though she still enjoys living in York and has family there, one of her daughters now lives in the once ‘red’ area of Leicester. Julie’s enthusiasm for

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this city is obvious, particularly for Melton Road where, ‘You won’t find an English person walking’. She enjoys visiting the shops in this area, saying, ‘You’ll find the gold shops, you know, you just look and you get happy. And you find the clothes shops, you find everything ... All Asians, all Asians.’ Happiness is thus related to an apparently coherent ethnic population. However, it is not just the prominent Asian community which appeals to her; Bradford also has a large Asian population but it is ‘not pretty’, unlike York and Leicester. Ironically, the construction of this ‘prettiness’ in York’s tourist literature has often relied on a disavowal of the imperial, colonial and industrial histories of the city. Julie took a lot of strength from the formation of an Asian and Muslim community in York. Nevertheless, she also felt very much a part of her local area. ‘Local’ was defined, though not always explicitly, in terms of the street or estate on which she lived. Identified as ‘different’ by her skin, her clothes, her religion, her accent, she felt known within the area and found in this a sense of belonging rather than of exclusion. Friends from work were also an important part of Julie’s ‘local’ community. Common experiences on the shop floor formed a lasting bond between women, irrespective of race. Workmates, even to some extent the firm itself, have provided a continuing support network into retirement and Julie regularly met up with former colleagues at a local community centre.69 Hers was not the supposedly ‘narrow’ sphere of ‘neighbourhood, community and subculture’ predicted by Swinerton et al. to prove typical of women refugees’ lives. Whilst Julie’s story reveals some of the resilience of the Ugandan Asian ‘community’ noted by Marett, Julie was in fact part of a number of different communities in the city.70

Conclusion Julie’s location as an ‘Asian’ in East Africa and, subsequently, as a ‘Ugandan Asian refugee’ in Britain, needs to be understood in the context of British colonialism and its post-war demise. However fraught with division and dependent on racial hierarchies, the empire had allowed, even encouraged, a certain fluidity of movement and the appearance of unity through an inclusive imperial subjecthood. The end of that empire further destabilized already tense relationships between former colonized peoples, delegitimized the presence of those who now failed to fit into newly imagined ‘national’ citizenships, and ultimately allowed for the forceful ejection of those who could no longer ‘belong’. Whilst it would be wrong to see this as a necessary or inevitable fallout from imperial demise, it is, nonetheless, a pattern repeated across time and

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place as new regimes have sought control through ‘sameness’, policed at national borders. For the former ruling power, the arrival of these orphans of the East African empire was, in the ultimate irony, frequently perceived as ‘colonization’ or ‘invasion’. The loss of the colonies, and the global power associated with them, took its toll on the psychology of the colonial masters, who often preferred to ‘turn a blind eye’ to the imperial past.71 So, whilst the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians took place a decade after Ugandan independence, the event and reactions to it in Britain cannot be understood without reference to histories of British imperialism. This chapter would add a cautionary note here, however, one which echoes to a degree the observations of Kenneth Lunn: the ‘legacy of empire’ narrative may obscure as much as it reveals, and we must not ignore the relevance of specific local contexts or of everyday interactions in shaping responses to, and the experiences of, the refugees. Nevertheless, the ‘local’ is not (as Lunn’s argument implies) necessarily divorced from this imperial legacy.72 In the York case, the very availability of employment at the ‘local’ Rowntree factory had been made possible by histories of cheap cocoa imports from the colonies.73 Perceptions of York as ‘white’, in contrast to the ‘multicultural’ environments of Bradford or Leeds, effectively mask the experiences of nonwhite women who either migrated to York or who were born in the city. It is, therefore, crucial to listen to the voices of migrant and ethnic minority women residents. Julie’s story illustrates the ways in which the Rowntree firm and the city of York were indeed implicated in the aftermath of empire. Although working within a national strategy of resettlement, York institutions (including the local press) operated in specific ways related to local conditions of housing and employment, as well as to local ‘race’ politics. By controlling the numbers of refugees to the city and by participating in the surveillance of their domestic and working lives, local officials aimed to limit the ‘problem’ of race from the perspective of white residents. The ‘Green for Come’ policy, presented as welcoming, distanced Ugandan Asian families from existing support networks. In spite of this, Julie’s narrative demonstrates how she found a place in existing local and workplace communities, whilst creating meaningful new religious and ethnic communities in York and the wider region. Metanarratives of ‘imperial legacy’ risk missing these personalized, everyday details. In coming to York and working at Rowntrees, Julie entered into a new configuration of post-colonial relations: as a ‘refugee’/’coloured immigrant’, rather than as a British subject; and as a worker in a food

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manufacturing industry which had once relied on colonial imports for its key ingredients. In the context of imperial demise and post-war migration from the Commonwealth, Julie was (re)situated in relation to the metropole. Moving from the ‘peripheries’ to the ‘centre’ of empire, yet living in the ‘peripheries’ of Britain, her experience suggests the complex, splintered implosion of the British Empire. More local studies are needed if we are to piece together these fragments into a multilayered history of refugee lives in post-colonial context.

Notes This chapter contains material previously published in Emma Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009). 1. On the interrelationship between York and the empire, see Robertson, ibid., chapter 4. See also James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997). 2. A 2008 exhibition on the Chinese in Yorkshire, held at the Castle Museum in York, has been an important step towards recognition of the city’s diverse population. 3. 1991 Census, Ethnic Group and Country of Birth, Great Britain, Volume 2 (London, 1993), pp. 846–7. 4. See, for example: Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982); and Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire, chapter 5. 5. Kushner and Knox give the figure of 28,608. Other nations stepped in to accept (though not unconditionally) some share of the ‘burden’. For instance, Canada took just over 6,000 people, but only those fulfilling its entry criteria. Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), p. 273. For details of the total numbers accepted by each country, see Derek Humphrey and Michael Ward, Passports and Politics (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 42. 6. Laura Tabili, ‘A Homogenous Society? Britain’s Internal “Others”, 1800present’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 53–76. 7. Kushner and Knox, Refugees, p. 275. See also: Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, (London, 1996), p. 34; Valerie Marett, Immigrants Settling in the City, (London, 1989), p. 167; E. Nelson Swinerton, William G. Kuepper and G. Lynne Lackey, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain, (London, 1975), p. 75. 8. Swinerton et al., ibid.; Marett, ibid.; Joanna Herbert, Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender (Aldershot, 2008); Kushner and Knox, Refugees; Vaughan Robinson, Transients, Settlers, and Refugees: Asians in Britain (Oxford, 1986). 9. The oral history recording took place in 2002 in Julie’s home. I adopted a life-history approach, which encourages the oral history narrator to relate

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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their own life stories with a minimum of interruption from the ‘interviewer’. Julie was happy for her real name to be used in the project but I have used only her first name, to preserve a degree of privacy. With the exception of Joanna Herbert’s recent work on refugees and gender, women have all too frequently been neglected in existing studies. Whilst Swinerton et al. find this ‘a distressing and deplorable discovery’, they do little to address it. Where single male migrants had dominated prior to Amin’s expulsion order, the refugees were a diverse group in terms of age, gender, health and status. Herbert, Negotiating Boundaries in the City; Herbert, ‘Masculinity and Migration: Life Stories of East African Asian Men’, in Louise Ryan and Wendy Webster, eds, Gendering Migration: Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in Post-War Britain (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 189–203; Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 113. Julie’s oral history was a product of our particular relationship: dynamics of gender, age, class, ethnicity and religion all had an influence on the way Julie told her story to me. Similarly, Joanna Herbert found cross- cultural interviewing had important implications for how an oral history narrative is constructed, and how it is analysed. Herbert, ‘Negotiating Boundaries and the Cross- Cultural Oral History Interview’, in Richard Rodger and Joanna Herbert, eds, Testimonies of the City: Identity, Community and Change in a Contemporary Urban World, (Aldershot, 2007). Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, ‘Some Reflections on Migration and Identity’, in Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, eds, Migration and Identity, (Oxford, 1994), p. 14. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 1. Robinson, Transients, p. 40; Kushner and Knox, Refugees, p. 266. The historical details in this section are taken largely from Kushner and Knox, Refugees, p. 266 and Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, pp. 30–1. The terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Asian’ are problematic but I will predominantly use ‘Asian’ throughout this piece to reflect both the term used by Julie in her oral history and that used at the time to define the refugees. The phrase ‘Ugandan Asian’, which became commonplace, significantly failed to mention the British status of many refugees. Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 46. Kushner and Knox, Refugees, p. 267; Humphrey and Ward, Passports, p. 17. There is not space here to discuss the arrival of Asians in the U.K. from Kenya in the late 1960s, but this was an important prelude to the Ugandan expulsion. ‘Uganda Says No Room for 40,000 Asians’, The Times, 5 August 1972. ‘Newly Arrived Asians Tell of Murder and Threats by Ugandan Soldiers’, The Times, 26 September 1972. Humphrey and Ward, Passports, p. 40. Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 11. Humphrey and Ward, Passports, p. 16. On the legal complications of citizenship status, see James S. Read, ‘Some Legal Aspects of the Expulsion’, in Michael Twaddle, ed., Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London, 1975), pp. 193–9. Jacqueline Bhabha and Sue Shutter, Women’s Movement: Women under Immigration, Nationality and Refugee Law (Stoke- on-Trent, 1994), p. 40.

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25. Spencer sees the 1971 legislation, which became law in 1973, as ‘abolish[ing] the last vestiges of the old Empire- embracing concept of British subject or citizen’. Ian R. G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain (London, 1997), p. 144. 26. For some idea of the chaos regarding passports and papers at the time, see Mahmood Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee: Ugandan Asians Come to Britain (London, 1973). Also Humphry and Ward, Passports. Kathleen Paul has discussed in detail the ways in which nationality and citizenship have been racialized. Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, 1997). 27. Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945– 64,(London, 1998), p. 26. 28. Shompa Lahiri, ‘South Asians in Post-Imperial Britain: Decolonisation and Imperial Legacy’, in Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), p. 213. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon, 2004), p. 2. 29. ‘Calls to London Show the Desperation of Asians in Uganda’, The Times, 7 August 1972, p. 4. 30. ‘Threat to Asians in Uganda’, The Times, 8 August 1972, p. 13. These debates were played out in the letter pages of The Times: for example, ‘United Kingdom’s Obligation to Admit Uganda Asians’, 4 September 1972, p. 14. 31. Kushner and Knox, Refugees, pp. 270–1. 32. Valerie Marett compares the compassionate responses in Leicester towards the plight of the Hungarian refugees, with the tension surrounding Ugandan Asian arrivals. Marett, Immigrants, p. 63. 33. On the setting up of these camps, see Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, pp. 64–5. 34. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p. 34. 35. Green for Come, A Report on the Re-housing and Settling of British Asians from Uganda in York and District, (York, 1973), p. 3. There is clear evidence that the ‘red’/ ‘green’ designation had little to do with objective measures of the availability of work or housing. Marett gives the example of Nottingham, which was defined as ‘green’ with 7,468 unemployed, compared to ‘red’ Leicester with just 4,495 unemployed. Marett, Immigrants, p. 63. 36. See Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 74; Marett, Immigrants, p. 53 and pp. 62–3. 37. ‘At Whose Expense,’ Letter from R. S. Slaughter, Yorkshire Evening Press [hereafter YEP], 12 October 1972, p. 3. For a more detailed analysis of the politics of race and housing, see Susan J. Smith, The Politics of ‘Race’ and Residence: Citizenship, Segregation and White Supremacy in Britain (Cambridge, 1989). 38. YEP, 9 September 1972, p. 4. 39. Etienne Balibar, ‘Racism and Nationalism,’ in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), p. 42; Gilroy, After Empire, p. 2. 40. Lahiri argues that the legacy of empire has had the effect of ‘sharpening intolerance’ towards migrants, ‘South Asians in Post-Imperial Britain’, p. 210. 41. YEP, 9 September 1972, p. 4. 42. Ibid., 19 September 1972, p. 3.

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43. ‘Asians: Abusive Letters to Dr. Coggan’, ibid., 18 September 1972, p. 5. 44. This charitable spirit could then be shown to be of benefit to ‘British families’ in providing a furniture store for ‘York families in need’. See ibid., 30 September 1973, p. 6. 45. Ibid., 20 October 1972, p. 9; The Times, 20 October 1972, p. 2. Swinerton et al. noted a piece in Punch from 1972, suggesting that it had become ‘de rigueur’ to host an Asian family. Ugandan Asians, pp. 78–9. 46. YEP, 28 December 1972, p. 3. 47. Ibid., 19 September 1972, p. 1. 48. Ibid., 14 October 1972, p. 1. 49. The Ugandan Asians living in York were ‘settling in quietly’, according to Mrs Lesley Archer, a York coordinator for resettlement (YEP, 6 February 1973, p. 5). This emphasized their respectability and created a sense of their unobtrusiveness for white residents. By contrast, the gypsies’ disregard for dominant systems of waged labour, privatized land use and taxation was problematic and unsettling. Judith Okely suggests that, ‘Although in fact the Gypsies’ threat is trivial, their presence exposes profound dissatisfactions in the dominant system.’ Judith Okely, Changing Cultures: The Traveller- Gypsies (Cambridge, 1983), p. 2. Although perceived as transient, the gypsies themselves could also claim a local identity. An article from 25 October 1972 depicted Alf Dear outside his caravan, with the quote, ‘I belong to York’ (p. 1). 50. Green for Come, p. 4. 51. Although initially a priority for the URB, employment came to be viewed as of less importance than housing, despite the depressed economic situation of the 1970s. Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 70. See also Kushner and Knox on the lack of support in finding employment. Refugees, p. 282. 52. Green for Come, pp. 4 and 20. 53. Swinerton et al. found that 49 out of 144 council houses listed at the Tonfanau camp were tied to jobs as of 1 January 1973. Ugandan Asians, pp. 83–4n. 54. YEP, 30 October 1972, p. 1. 55. Ibid., 21 December 1972, p. 7. Webster found that in the 1950s and early 1960s migrant women, particularly from the Caribbean, were constructed as workers rather than as mothers. There are clearly elements of this here but also a seemingly contradictory impulse to contain these women within a domestic setting. Dolly Smith Wilson concludes that migrant women (particularly Asian women arriving in the 1960s) were never explicitly seen as ‘workers’, even where they were indeed engaged in paid employment. Instead, they became demonized as mothers for having too many children. These tensions and ambivalences in the representation of non-white women migrants are evident in the York examples. Wendy Webster, Imagining Home, pp. 146–7; Dolly Smith Wilson, ‘Gender, Race and the Ideal Labour Force’, in Ryan and Webster, eds, Gendering Migration, pp. 98–9. 56. Green for Come, p. 20. 57. The Rowntree company was founded by a York Quaker family in the late nineteenth century and built up a reputation for providing good facilities and benefits for its workers. Joseph Rowntree and his son Benjamin Seebohm also had a reputation for welfare work beyond the chocolate

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58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

industry, which lives on today in the Joseph Rowntree charitable trusts. See Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire; Gillian Wagner, The Chocolate Conscience (London, 1987), pp. 65–72. Green for Come, p. 20. Penny Summerfield has explored the concept of ‘composing’ to explain the ways in which women actively compose narratives whilst using these narratives to achieve ‘composure’. She suggests that oral history interviews may actually result in ‘discomposure’ for women as they struggle to construct identities from contradictory discourses. As will become clear, Julie was able to hold a number of discourses in tension within the scope of her life history. Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/composing the Subject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield, eds, Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London, 2000), pp. 91–106. This tendency was reflected in the oral histories of the two other migrant women interviewed for the Rowntree project. See Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire, chapter 5. Iris Marion Young also discusses the concept of ‘aversive racism’ in her work, as a tactic of ‘avoidance and separation’. This may well have been operating in York but the demands of assembly line production meant that it was almost impossible, at least in a physical sense, within the factory environment. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 1990), pp. 132, 141. In a similar vein, an article in The Times reported that one family had successfully found employment for both mother and father, illustrating this with a photograph of the family around their dining table, apparently seated for a homely meal. ‘How Asian and wife found jobs and home’, The Times, 16 October 1972, p. 2. The ‘Asian’ is male and associated with economic activity, whilst the ‘wife’ stays at home. Herbert also observed how women’s narratives of the hard work entailed in producing food could have positive associations. Joanna Herbert, ‘Migration, Memory and Metaphor: Life Stories of South Asians in Leicester’, in Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi, eds, Histories and Memories: Migrants and their History in Britain (London, 2006), pp. 141–3. The consumption of ‘ethnic’ food in England is often cited as evidence of multiculturalism and acceptance, yet it has become divorced in the imagination of many from the cultures in which it was produced. Curry may now be Britain’s favourite dish, but the people who produce it may still fight to be identified as British; it is easier to accept the food than the people. Interactions in ‘ethnic’ takeaways and restaurants may be shot through with racism (alongside the unequal power relations embodied in the provision of any service), whilst restaurants and corner shops are still the targets of racist vandalism. As Parker observes with regard to Chinese takeaways: ‘money is exchanged for a packaged version of Chinese ethnic difference’. David Parker, ‘Chinese People in Britain: Histories, Futures and Identities’, in George Benton and Frank N. Pieke, eds, The Chinese in Europe (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 92. This ‘packaged’ ethnicity is safely distanced. Herbert, ‘Migration, Memory and Metaphor’, p. 144.

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66. ‘Indian’ restaurants in Britain are mostly run by Bangladeshis. According to one website, this is the case for 90 per cent of Indian restaurants in Britain. See www.bricklanerestaurants.com/historyfood.html (accessed 19 June 2004). Julie also creates distinctions in relation to Pakistani migrants, whom she defines as ‘very strict’ in opposition to the ‘broadmindedness’ of her own community. This is in the context of shifting practices brought about partly by migration, and highlights the ways in which ethnic identities are not static but flexible, even when apparently relying on ‘tradition’. 67. Green for Come, p. 24. Herbert also found positive narratives of food bringing people together in the oral histories she conducted with Ugandan Asian women, although these appear to have centred on the sharing of western food. Herbert, ‘Migration, Memory and Metaphor’, p. 145. 68. Herbert highlights how food can form a ‘sensory map’ which guides people through their own life stories. However, she found food memories of the home country to be more typical of men. Herbert, ‘Migration, Memory and Metaphor’, p. 136. 69. The company itself offers a way of facilitating continuing contact with the firm and with work friends through its Pensioners’ Club. For most of the women I interviewed, however, contact with ex- colleagues is more informal and the Pensioners’ Club has a limited role in their lives. This is often related to issues of mobility but is also a continuation of patterns started early in life when leisure time was likely to be spent away from the firm. 70. Swinerton et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 113; Marett, Immigrants, p. 21. 71. See: Catherine Hall, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Memories of Empire’, in Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson, eds, Memory (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 27–46; and Webster, Imagining Home, p. xxiv. 72. Kenneth Lunn, ‘A Racialized Hierarchy of Labour? Race, Immigration and the British Labour Movement, 1880–1950’, in Peter Alexander and Rick Halpern, eds, Racializing Class and Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 104–21. Lunn posits that the ‘legacy’ argument ‘foregrounds the importance of a national perspective’, whereas ‘Attitudes and cultures were often formulated in a local context’. Although he accepts that the national can have an impact on the local, he seems less ready to see an interrelationship between the local and the ‘global’. Lunn, ‘A Racialized Hierarchy’, p. 110. 73. Kushner and Knox, drawing on the work of Doreen Massey, similarly emphasize that the local and the global are not mutually exclusive categories in refugee studies. Refugees, p. 7.

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Conclusions While it may not have acted as the only factor in the creation of refugees during the course of the twentieth century, the collapse of empire both inside and outside Europe played a major role in defining the last century as the one in which the refugees became an ever-present phenomenon globally. As the Preface and the individual essays, especially in parts one and two, make clear, two key issues fed the link between imperial collapse and the end of empire. In the first place, most of the imperial states which came to an end during the twentieth century (with the obvious exception of the Third Reich) had accepted difference, on the condition that the position of the ruling ethnic elite remained unchallenged.1 This group consisted, for instance, of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire,2 white Britons in the British Empire3 and Communists in the USSR.4 In the first and third of these cases, people with the wrong ethnic credentials could move into the elites, provided they accepted the dominant ideology. Unlike the short-lived Nazi Empire, which simply operated upon a racial hierarchy in which suppression, murder and plunder became central features,5 the long-standing imperial regimes could not operate in such a way. Certainly, the Ottoman,6 British7 and Soviet forms of control8 used violence throughout their histories (especially in their latter years), but this could not remain constant, otherwise the control of their vast territories over a long time period would have caused enough discontent to have overthrown these regimes earlier. Consequently, these long-term empires recognized the existence of ethnic, national and religious groups. This situation operated in periods when the subjects accepted their status as essentially second- class citizens in the absence 271

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of nationalism. It existed particularly during the early modern period in the Ottoman Empire,9 the nineteenth century in the British Empire10 and during the height of the Soviet Union.11 Nevertheless, ethnic, religious and national identities upon which the different empires mentioned above functioned underwent a transformation when the light of nationalism affected them. Rather than accepting this status, they demanded equality, which really meant independence. The nation states that followed would not operate using the type of multiculturalism previously employed in the collapsing empires. Ethnic purity essentially replaced ethnic pluralism, with all its caveats. A key reason for the link between refugee creation and imperial collapse, therefore, lies in the desire of new nation-states to remove those who had no obvious allegiances to these new entities. The process really took off in the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which, during its history, had developed complex settlement patterns, partly due to the distribution of Turks throughout its domains, as well as local conversions, but also because of ethnic concentrations which had predated its control.12 Rising Armenian nationalism meant that even before the expulsions of the First World War, this group suffered massacres. Nevertheless, Justin McCarthy has demonstrated that Muslims and Turks had faced persecution and deportation throughout the nineteenth century.13 A key moment in this process consists of the ‘population exchange’, which occurred between Greece and Turkey at the end of the First World War formalized in the Treaty of Lausanne. This constitutes the second key issue in understanding the link between imperial collapse and refugee creation. While developments before, during and after this event may have resulted in horror and indignation amongst liberal western opinion, Lausanne set a precedent, even a model, which subsequent nation states would follow when they emerged from imperial control, witnessed most clearly in the emergence of India and Pakistan. The birth of nation-states and their initial desire for ethnic purification, therefore, needs appreciation in understanding refugee creation. As Mark Levene’s essay makes clear, the expulsion of undesirable populations almost came to be viewed as part of the move away from medievalism to modernity, no matter what consequences it had for millions of individuals. However, we also need to remember that most of the refugee creation discussed in this volume took place against the background of war, when individual suffering of soldiers and civilians became part of everyday life.

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Furthermore, when dealing especially with the end of the Second World War, we should not forget that, while many of the refugees created at the end of this conflict found themselves homeless because of the acceptance by the ‘Big Four’ at Potsdam, that boundary changes meant that millions of people with the wrong ethnicity would have to move, other factors also played a role. Nazi policy had uprooted millions of people. Some of those who survived returned home, while others who had no desire to do so found themselves as displaced persons. Partitions (and consequently, migration) and territorial conflicts are some of the less desirable consequences of imperial rule and its collapse. Many of today’s conflicts can be traced back to former colonies where decolonization has left a legacy of fragile institutions and divided people. Making a tangible connection between the two is not always easy, but denying a link is also not possible. And so, even though most of the world today has lived in a period of post-colonialism, the controversies of empire continue to evoke emotions because the legacies of imperial conquests and their lingering memories continue to resurface. The Middle East, Australia, North America, Africa and South Asia all share a common colonial connection, whether it is with Britain, France or another European nation-state; they are also all a product of empire, whether it is the territorial boundaries they have or the people inhabiting the lands. The ‘mixing-up’ and the ‘un-mixing’ of people is, therefore, an inevitable corollary of imperialism. While the essays in this volume have dealt with what may seem two different case studies in the case of Europe in the era of the two World Wars and the independence and Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the two processes have close similarities in a range of ways. Clearly, we need to remember the underlying rationale of this volume in the form of imperial collapse for the creation of refugees. While other factors usually operate, above all the background of war, as well as intolerant ideologies, the essays have demonstrated that the end of empire in Europe between 1914 and 1945 and India and Pakistan in 1947 led to the biggest refugee crises of the twentieth century. As the essays have demonstrated, the key process consisted of the move away from relatively loose imperial control to the more tightly controlled and ideologically motivated nationalism, which was usually aimed at ethnic purity. These nationalisms had their origins in the imperial states, particularly in the recognition of religious identity, whether in the varying Christian religions of the Ottoman Empire or the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of British India. The rise of nationalism transformed these religious identities into political movements. When new states came into

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existence, whether Turkey or Greece, Czechoslovakia or Poland, India or Pakistan, they desired ethnic purity, which meant the expulsion of millions of people with the wrong ethnic credentials. Clearly, the Great Powers helped to decide the fate of millions of people, whether as a result of the treaties of Lausanne or Potsdam or the Mountbatten Plan. Lausanne set the template. Similarly, the personal experiences of loss, trauma and readjustment remain the same. Refugees who became victims as a result of imperial collapse had to start from scratch in the vast majority of cases because of the impossibility of returning to their homes. This applied equally to Armenians and Greeks fleeing Turkish nationalism, Germans fleeing intolerant Soviet and East European regimes in the middle of the 1940s, or Hindus and Muslims crossing the Radcliffe Line in 1947. This rootlessness and lack of knowledge of the new surroundings has meant that newcomers have usually remained social and economic outsiders, certainly in the short term, and sometimes find themselves descending into lives of poverty and crime, as the example of the exiles from Smyrna in the 1920s and 1930s would illustrate.14 At the same time refugees faced short-term hostility from the natives in the areas to which they moved, partly focusing upon their differences and sometimes leading to the development of a type of refugee ‘ethnicity’. Nevertheless, as many of the refugees who become victims of post-imperial ethnic cleansing moved to states to which they purportedly belonged because of an ethnic link, the governments which received them have placed much effort into attempting to integrate them, although this remains a long process, as the essay by Uditi Sen illustrates. The same long-term processes also operated, for instance, in Greece after the First World War15 and Germany after the Second.16

European legacies The essays in this volume have largely focused upon the immediate consequences of the end of empire for refugee creation. However, any examination of the refugee problem in the second half of the twentieth century would indicate that many of those who found themselves homeless and stateless did so because of the legacies of imperial collapse earlier in the century. Louise Holborn’s list of conflicts from the 1950s to the early 1970s helps to illustrate this process. Her two-volume account of refugees in this period gives numerous examples of the fallout from the dying British and French empires, in particular in the Middle East, South East Asia and, above all, Africa. The newly created

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states behaved in a similar manner to those which followed the end of the Ottoman Empire in the era of the First World War, by carrying out acts of ethnic cleansing, meaning people from excluded ethnic minorities moved to neighbouring states.17 Similarly, the refugee populations outlined by the 2008 UNHCR document on ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’ also lead us to the conclusion that many of the refugee crises which have emerged in recent decades represent the unravelling of conflicts which have their origins in imperial collapse, especially in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.18 Rather than outlining all of these conflicts, we can briefly examine two long-term European legacies resulting from the collapsing Ottoman Empire, in the form of Cyprus and Yugoslavia. In both of these cases, ethnic cleansing had not taken place immediately after the retreat of the imperial power (Ottoman in both examples, but also British in the case of Cyprus and Habsburg in Yugoslavia), because of an attempt at a federal system of government which tried to unify diverse ethnic groups, which failed in both cases because of the power of ethnic nationalism. Cyprus has a history of ethnic plurality partly because it became victim to numerous invasions,19 but the most important turning point in this process consisted of the Ottoman conquest of the island, completed in 1571. Almost immediately, about 20,000 Turkish soldiers settled in Cyprus. In addition, some immigration of Turks subsequently took place from Anatolia and the Balkans. More importantly, a large number of conversions took place in the early centuries of Muslim rule in order to gain the benefits from full Ottoman citizenship.20 In the age before nationalism, the Greek and Turkish communities managed to coexist, indicated most clearly by the existence of numerous mixed Turkish and Greek villages. In 1891, 13 years after the British took over the island, 346 out of the 702 ‘population centres’ consisted of mixed communities, a figure which had fallen to just 48 by 1970.21 The dualism which developed from the late nineteenth century had at least three fundamental causes. First, the origins of the division essentially lay in the Ottoman millet system. Although the Greek Orthodox Church had a privileged position within this structure, it remained in a secondary position to Muslims.22 British imperial control ‘maintained and reinforced the ethnic, administrative, and political separation inherited from the Ottoman period’.23 Even more important than British policy was the growth of nationalism, both Greek and, subsequently, Turkish. From the late nineteenth century, Greek nationalism began to take root within the country, eventually flowering into the Enosis

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movement of the post-war period, fuelled by the ideology of the ‘Megali Idea’, which wanted Greece to take over the Greek-speaking parts of the Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Pan- Greeks, Cyprus came too late and was faced, simultaneously, by Pan-Turanism, which just as strongly desired Cyprus as part of Turkey. The situation reached its crisis point during the 1950s and its almost inevitable conclusion of partition in 1974.24 When the struggle for Enosis reached its height during the 1950s, communal violence broke out between Greeks and Turks on a number of occasions. This continued into the 1960s and early 1970s, as the constitutional settlement of 1960, under which Cyprus left British rule, which tried to accommodate both sides, left neither satisfied. Bouts of ethnic violence during this period had created small numbers of refugees.25 The final solution to the problem of Greek–Turkish relations in Cyprus came with the Turkish invasion of 1974, following a failed coup, which overthrew the elected government of Archbishop Makarios. The Turkish Army invaded the island under the pretext of protecting the Turkish minority as agreed by the 1960 constitution, but implemented a plan which involved annexing the northern half of the island. While Turkey faced opposition in the U.N. (but not from the U.S. State Department),26 the 1974 solution to the Cyprus problem simply represented the accepted method of dealing with Greek/Turkish minority problems first authorized following the Lausanne Treaty. Consequently, around 190,000 of the country’s 574,000 Greeks moved southwards, largely out of fear of the Turkish army, while 10,000 Turks moved north.27 Refugee creation in Cyprus almost seems inevitable following the rise of Greek and Turkish nationalism during the nineteenth century, as it was the Greek island with the largest Turkish minority. British imperial rule represented an anomaly in this process, as it reinforced the existing dichotomy but, equally, kept it under control. Hostility increased during the 1950s. When the British left in 1960, full-scale ethnic conflict erupted, as the Greek and Turkish communities in the island re- enacted what had occurred in mainland Greece and Turkey from the nineteenth century and which continued into the second half of the twentieth century in Istanbul,28 where the Greek minority faced large-scale communal violence, and Western Thrace, where the Turkish minority faced persecution.29 The rise of nationalism and the acceptance of ethnic cleansing as a solution to Greek–Turkish communal relations meant that Cyprus found itself hurtling towards the solution of 1974. The people of the island became victims of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire.

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The events in Yugoslavia during the 1990s also have their origins in the Ottoman Empire. The roots of the ethnic cleansing of the late twentieth century lie in Ottoman colonization of the Balkans in the Middle Ages, which created Muslim populations in specific locations including Bosnia and Kosovo. However, to complicate matters even further, both Orthodox and Catholic communities also emerged.30 These relationships functioned under the millet system, but would come under threat as a result of the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism. Yugoslavia resembles Cyprus in several ways. In the first place, it brought together diverse and conflicting ethnic groups into a nationstate. Yugoslav nationalism like Cypriot nationalism (to the extent that either existed) represented compromise nationalisms. In the case of the former, the Yugoslav state born in 1918 had emerged from a national movement, which tried to unify not only the two major ethnic groups of Serbs and Croats, but also numerous other minorities, some of whom had their own administrative regions. As in the case of Cyprus, ethnic conflict characterized Yugoslavia during the twentieth century, whatever the system of government in operation. Ethnic cleansing and genocide surfaced during the Second World War against the background of the Nazi invasion involving Serbs and Croats, as the latter sided with the Germans. ‘It has been estimated that 1,750,000 Yugoslavs – almost 11 per cent of the population – died during the war, and that more than half of those were killed by other Yugoslavs.’ Serbs made up about 350,000 of those murdered.31 Yugoslavia underwent something of a revitalization in the early postwar decades under the leadership of Tito, although ethnic conflict did not disappear. This conflict became most obvious from the constantly changing constitutions, culminating in the one written in 1974, with 405 clauses.32 Perhaps we can see Socialist Yugoslavia in the same way as British imperial control in Cyprus, in the sense that neither could effectively deal with competing ethnic nationalisms. Nevertheless, both British imperial control and, in particular, the rule of Tito, managed to prevent conflict between the different ethnic groups from breaking out into full-scale violence. The death of Tito in 1980 and the break-up of the Soviet system had the same effect on Yugoslavia as the retreat of Britain upon Cyprus, allowing competing nationalisms to reach a violent peak. One difference consists of the fact that no external powers remained to interfere, as in the case of Greece and Turkey. Except for the fact that once the different Yugoslav republics (with the exception of the ethnically homogenous Slovenia) began to secede, members of their ethnic populations

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remained in the other new nations-states. This becomes especially clear in the case of Croatia, as pockets of this group found themselves in Serbia, as was the case in reverse. The settlement patterns in Bosnia remained even more complicated, because of the local concentrations of Serbs, Croats and Muslims, which had emerged under Ottoman and Habsburg rule. While Ottomans, Habsburgs and Communists accepted the inevitability of ethnic homogeneity, the virulent nationalistic governments which emerged in the fallout from the collapse of Yugoslavia behaved in the same way as previous newly emerging nation-states had done in the Balkans from the nineteenth century and especially earlier in the twentieth, by accepting the inevitability of ethnic cleansing as a way to ethnic homogeneity. In this sense, the solutions found in Serbia and Croatia remained relatively straightforward because they simply eliminated each other’s minorities. Bosnia, on the other hand, remained more complex, meaning that local cleansing took place, but as no dominant ethnic group existed here, refugee creation took place on a local basis.33 Both Cyprus and Yugoslavia illustrate the legacy of empire. In both cases, intervening regimes had prevented ethnic cleansing and the consequent creation of refugees. Yugoslav Communism, in particular, and British imperialism cooled the ethnic tensions which existed and prevented them from surfacing into violence. However, once these systems of control ended, the different ethnic communities behaved like the rest of their Balkan neighbours, whose complex settlement patterns had emerged during the Ottoman Empire. Ethnic cleansing and refugee creation was simply postponed in Yugoslavia and Cyprus. The legacies of imperial collapse in these two cases, demonstrate its delayed consequences. In addition, we also need to remember the more short-term affects of the emergence of refugees. The example of Germany after the end the Second World War demonstrates both individual experiences and the consequences for the defeated rump German state. In May 1946, a total of 9 million refugees lived in the four zones of Germany occupied by the Allied occupying power of France, Britain, the USA and the USSR.34 By the start of 1949, the largest proportion, 37.2 per cent, lived in the Soviet zone because of its proximity to the regions which had lost population. The British zone held 32.8 per cent, while the American one contained 28.2 per cent and the French 1.8 per cent.35 These bare, but shocking statistics, hide millions of tales of personal hardship. The harrowing stories behind the figures began in the homes of those who would eventually find themselves in western locations.

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The central image in early post-war Germany consists of people moving westward with a cart carrying whatever possessions they could load on to it. These carts sometimes travelled hundreds of miles westwards with their owners who would never again see the homes which they had left. In other cases, Germans fled with virtually nothing, ending up in a location devastated by bombing, where they had to try and begin their lives anew. Many refugees became ‘hut people’ for years to come, living in temporary accommodation in the form of prefabricated barracks. Others faced billeting upon those families which still had a home standing. Although much resettlement occurred in smaller locations which had not suffered massive bomb damage, medium sized towns such as Osnabrück found themselves having to take thousands of newcomers, in addition to the natives who returned when the war ended. This exacerbated the housing crisis caused by bombing. As well as the problems with accommodation, the new German residents found themselves facing the other hardships endured by natives, often on a magnified scale because they were foreign to their new locations and, therefore, did not have the same networks as people who knew their surroundings. Refugees generally took longer to find work and had a higher unemployment rate than natives well into the history of the Federal Republic. Similarly, they had greater difficulty in solving their dietary needs in the hunger years, as they could not generally grow food in their back gardens (which they did not possess, unless they lived in the home of another family) and had no relatives in the surrounding countryside to bring them produce grown on farms. The refugees from Eastern Europe endured some of the most difficult psychological problems precisely because they were refugees who had left all their possessions and surroundings behind and now found themselves in a devastated and unwelcoming landscape, at least in its appearance. Ultimately, the refugees would rebuild their lives, but they would often take longer than natives and would, in some cases, never regain the social status which they had enjoyed in the East.36 Nevertheless, the labour shortages of the new Federal Republic of Germany and the state efforts at integration meant that the newcomers gradually accepted their new surroundings. However, only with the passage of time could they put the tragedy which they had experienced to the back of their minds, as they became increasingly integrated into West German society, helped by the economic miracle which began to improve everyone’s life. Increasingly, they came to accept that the desire to return home became more and more of a dream as a result of the Cold War freeze and West Germany’s

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acceptance of Potsdam. Refugee organizations in Germany reached their zenith during the course of the 1950s, but subsequently declined in importance, due to a combination of increasing integration and consequent forgetting.37

South Asian legacies: Partition, refugees and the making of India and Pakistan British India hardly comprised of one unit; it was more akin to Europe with its highly diverse landscape and heterogeneous people. Regional, linguistic, caste and religious boundaries were often intermixed and the lines between them blurred as they all competed with each other but importantly maintained a sense of equilibrium.38 However, colonial rule in many ways shifted this fragile balance in order to strengthen its territorial grip over this vast land. One of the most important was the introduction of the census in 1870, which crucially included the question of religious identity. The census collection was driven by needs of empire to collect more information about its colonial subjects and for ethnographic classifications. The impact of this quest for greater understanding was that it now introduced the notion of political and religious awareness amongst people, which previously had existed in an amorphous form. The construction of these more clearly defined ‘religious boundaries’ benefited from the technological and communications advances under colonial rule and gave rise to highly communalized identities. These ‘imagined communities’39 begin to flourish during colonial rule in India, each espousing, promoting and ultimately competing with each other for colonial patronage and legitimacy.40 These communalized identities are further entrenched by first, the establishment of the Muslim League in 1906 and then by the introduction of ‘separate electorates’ in 1909,41 which recognized and promoted the idea that Muslims and Hindus were both communally and politically different; the more cynical see this as a deliberate colonial strategy designed to ensure that the communities remained divided in the face of a nationalist struggle. When the imperial machine does finally collapse in India, the only solution agreeable to all the parties is a territorial division, yet few predicted that this would also entail the involuntary migration of millions of peoples. The forced migration of people during the 1947 Partition of India was one of the largest migrations of the twentieth century. The situation in the Punjab province was further exasperated by the fact that the majority of the movement took place from August to December 1947,

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although the process of resettlement and rehabilitation was protracted over many years. In the Bengal42 province, however, the whole process was more prolonged but flows of migration were less concentrated, although there was a flashpoint in March 1950, which led to 1.1 million people fleeing to East Pakistan.43 Comparatively also, the Punjab migration was prompted and fuelled by forms of ethnic violence and genocidal tendencies, leading to the involuntary migration of millions. Evidence has shown that one of the reasons behind this more violent response in the Punjab compared to Bengal is the highly militarized nature of the province under colonial rule.44 The province lay at the heart of military recruitment; the martial races of Punjab were selected and constituted more than 50 per cent of the colonial army,45 many of the soldiers found themselves unemployed once the Second World War ended and easy prey for the communalized politics that was beginning to encroach its way into the region. One of the longer-term legacies of this highly militarized region has been the dominance of the Punjabi military in Pakistani politics.46 Indeed, the movement and the sheer scale of the refugees moving between the two countries had a draining effect on the young nations who had just emerged out of a difficult, long and tiring nationalist struggle. At a time when Europe was pre- occupied with its own postwar refugee crisis, India and Pakistan figured low on the agenda, and so the two new governments had to resolve this crisis almost entirely alone. The departing colonial power was also in no position to extend assistance. The International Committee of the Red Cross stood on the brink of insolvency and had closed its delegation in India in February 1947.47 Other volunteer organizations existed but the refugee crisis was too great and required a more organized approach. The United Nations was newly established and unable to deal with this global crisis. Yet, even if assistance were available, there was also a political desire by the countries themselves to assert their independent status and to sever the colonial links and so the crisis had to be managed internally. The refugee crisis itself also had huge demographic, economic and political repercussions for India and Pakistan. This was an enormous undertaking for the governments, both of which were totally unprepared for this complex challenge that involved the movement of approximately 15 million people following independence. Pre-Partition Punjab was a pluralistic and religiously diverse society, whilst there were pockets of concentrations in the province, central Punjab was a mix of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. The mass migration of people significantly altered the demographic profile of the territories affected.48

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Following Partition, East Punjab was now overwhelmingly Hindu/Sikh and West Punjab was Muslim.49 The urban landscapes of both India and Pakistan were completely transformed; great historic cities like Lahore, which was the cultural heartland of north India, was now devoid of any Sikhs and Hindus that contributed to its rich cosmopolitan status. Similarly, Delhi, once the great Mughal capital, was now shedding its Islamic past and embracing Hindu and Sikh refugees. Although Sindh was a Muslim majority province prior to Partition, the mass migration of refugees significantly altered the composition and character of the port city of Karachi, which had been elevated to the capital of Pakistan in 1948. In 1941, Karachi’s population was 435,000; by the time the 1951 census was conducted, the Mohajirs (refugees) came to represent 55 per cent of the population, which now stood at 1.12 million.50 Comparatively, Pakistan suffered much more than India because it had a greater task of rehabilitation. The country was deprived of the infrastructure and the personnel to run the government machinery; it was effectively starting from scratch.51 Moreover, the number of refugees compared to the overall population of the country was much greater in Pakistan than in India. The 1951 census shows that nearly 40 per cent of the urban population in Pakistan was made up of refugees from India. Conversely, India could absorb the refugee crisis, as it was confined geographically to a small proportion of the country, but, for Pakistan, this was not possible, as it had a huge impact on West Punjab, Sindh and East Pakistan.52 In the leading business centres of Karachi and Lahore, the exodus of Hindus and Sikhs who dominated the commercial cities left a vacuum which was not easily filled by the incoming Muslim refugees from India. Of the 5.5 million refugees from West Pakistan who flooded into India, 3.5 million were from rural areas and 2 million were urban refugees, who had to be accommodated in the existing towns.53 The urban migrants leaving West Pakistan were, on the whole, better qualified and possessed higher living standards than the displaced Muslims from East Punjab.54 This created a hugely skewed workforce for the postPartition Punjabs. Research by Virdee on two industrial cities, Ludhiana and Lyallpur, in India and Pakistan highlights the way these cities were completely transformed by mass migration and, conversely, how these cities tapped into the skills and entrepreneurial activities of the refugees to emerge as the industrial capitals.55 Individual accounts and localized case studies56 highlight the ways in which migrant communities were transformed by the dislocation, and how some re- emerged bearing a more communalized and nationalistic

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outlook. Talbot and Singh show how many of the refugees in both India and Pakistan became stalwart and ardent supporters of the new states, often displaying more extremist views.57 In East Punjab, this was most visible in the demands for a separate Sikh state to safeguard the community.58 In Sindh, the clash between indigenous Sindhis and the Urduspeaking refugees, mohajirs, from the United Provinces started soon after 1947 but in the 1980s this tension was re-ignited and was the basis of violent tension and conflict, turning Karachi into one of the most violent cities in South Asia. Politically, India and Pakistan were, almost immediately after independence, embroiled in two competing ideological visions. The enduring colonial legacy left a Pakistan which was founded as a separate nation for Muslims, while the Congress contested this with its secular vision. The conflicting ideology was most palpable with respect to the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which undoubtedly is one of most painful and lingering legacies of an ill- conceived division plan. Jammu and Kashmir was symbolically significant for both India and Pakistan; for Pakistan it had a Muslim-majority population, it was adjacent to the new state and, therefore, rightfully should have constituted part of what became Pakistan; for India there was an emotional attachment via Nehru and it was prized for its ability to refute the two-nation theory in favour of a secular vision, but, moreover, the Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, had opted to join India. Both countries lay claim to it, both have fought bitterly over what is dubbed as the ‘valley of death’ and it remains the longest unresolved issue in the U.N.59 Another enduring legacy of Partition was the emergence of Bhasha Andolon, the Bengali language movement, soon after Urdu was declared the national language of Pakistan in 1948, highlighting the fragility of the new state.60 Both wings were supposed to represent the disaffected Muslims of British India, but soon the 1,000 miles separating the two wings began to represent a separation of ideas and vision, too, ultimately undermining the national unity of Pakistan.61 The dominance of the Punjabi bureaucracy and military in West Pakistan marginalized the Bengali nation and language, leading to fractures between the two wings. Even in contemporary Pakistan, the Punjabis dominate the powerful bureaucracy and military and usually attract resentment and criticism from the other ethnic groups. Rather than accommodating these different ethnic groups, Pakistan opted for a strong centrist Islamic state and suppressed any secessionist attempts in the hope that ethnic consolidation would lead to a strong national unit. The break-up of Pakistan in 1971 in a sense was a continuation of the unfinished business of

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Partition because it was unable to consolidate the diverging viewpoints of the two wings, with Islam as the only uniting force. Clearly, religious nationalism and Islam were not enough to keep Pakistan together as a nation and, in the end, Bengali oppression and marginalization from the mainstream pushed the two into a violent break-up.62 India’s support for Bangladesh ensured a rapid and decisive conclusion to what could have been a protracted conflict.63 Again, the physical boundaries separating the two wings undoubtedly hindered Pakistan’s ability to fight the war effectively. The other consequence of this conflict was the creation of millions of refugees64 who fled the conflict, but, due to the speedy resolution of the war, the refugees were able to return home from the makeshift camps. Unfortunately, the refugees were an important pawn in the political strategies being pursued by India, which had an open border to ensure the safe passage of refugees into India and also for the insurgents and volunteers to cross the border into East Pakistan.65 Moreover, politically for India, the defeat of Pakistan also marked the end of the two-nation theory upon which Pakistan was founded.

Legacies in Africa: The case of Ugandan Asians The fallout of imperial collapse left many legacies in former colonies but in East Africa, and more specifically in Uganda, the controversy over the Africanization policies produced a completely new problem. In a quest to discard the old colonial cloak, many newly independent ex- colonies were keen to assert their own national identity. Land redistribution and greater economic opportunities for indigenous peoples were just some of the ways that the governments attempted to address the inequalities created by colonial rule.66 There was, in essence, a racial hierarchy which corresponded with their power; Europeans were at the top, Asians in the middle and Africans were at the bottom. Once the Europeans had left, it was inevitable that the small but privileged minority of Asians were going to be targeted. People from British India had made their way to Africa from the nineteenth century and by the time independence came for Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the 1960s, they had gained a dominant position among the professions, the civil service, managerial and retail posts. The leaders of the new African states did not like this state of affairs and adopted a policy of Africanization which discriminated against Asians.67 The expulsion of Asians from Uganda generated international condemnation but the legal and moral responsibility of accommodating the

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fleeing refugees was with the former colonial power.68 More than half of those fleeing Uganda held British passports and, although the British government was reluctant to accept them, it could not deny their legal status of British citizenship.69 In the end though, the whole burden of taking in the refugees was shared – India, Canada, the United States, Kenya and Pakistan amongst others, all took in the displaced people. This, however, did not mitigate the uproar in Britain against accepting a group of ‘immigrants’, a fact most powerfully captured by Enoch Powell, who has become the voice of British immigration policy: Evidently few of those who are shocked, and rightly shocked at the prospect of 50,000 Asians from Uganda being added to our population have any idea that 40,000 a year are still being admitted year in and year out and that in every single succeeding year, about a hundred thousand are added, through immigration and natural increase, to the coloured population of this country.70 The expulsion of the Ugandan Asians was to some extent eased by the presence of an established South Asian community in Britain. The colonial linkages between India and Britain led to the establishment of a long relationship between the two countries, in which migration links flourished. While initially the flow of people was limited to the ‘ayahs, lascars and princes’,71 later twentieth- century migration was on a much larger scale, prompted by the labour shortages following the Second World War. Empire, therefore, played a crucial part in facilitating the needs of war-torn Britain by providing cheap and accessible labour. The presence of this South Asian community enabled many of the Ugandan Asians to settle in established communities in Britain and, thereby, provided a sense of security and familiarity in their transition from refugee to citizen.72

Summary The legacies of empire for populations with the wrong ethnic credentials are, therefore, diverse. Much of this volume has focused upon the mass refugee movements immediately following imperial collapse, whether in Europe during the era of the two World Wars or South Asia after Partition. However, the cases of Cyprus and Yugoslavia demonstrate that postponed ethnic cleansing can occur. Furthermore, the plight of Ugandan Asians illustrates how the migration of people from one part of the world to another during a period of imperial control can have

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consequences for them when new exclusivist nationalisms emerge in local circumstances, which have nothing to do with the more inclusive multinational concepts of imperial control which predated them. As this concluding piece and several of the essays have demonstrated, refugees do not automatically integrate into their new surroundings, a process which can take decades to achieve or, as in the case of Karachi, become a source of new conflict. Whether in the case of Armenian women trying to forget their traumatic experiences of genocide in a situation in which they may find themselves sleeping and producing children with the former enemy, or Bengalis attempting to come to grips with living in completely new geographical surroundings in the Andaman Islands, the process of upheaval and resettlement always remained painful. It included processes of readjustment and gradual forgetting of the original homeland, which most exiles would never see again, as well as economic, social and cultural re-integration in the form of the search for employment and housing. Finally, as the conclusion has demonstrated by focusing upon India and Pakistan, refugee populations influence the evolution of the states, which both carry out ethnic cleansing and receive the displaced. This process is mirrored in many other examples from post-war Germany, which had to take in millions of ethnic Germans fleeing from eastern Europe, to Cyprus in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion of 1974. In both of these cases, while individuals underwent processes of trauma and readjustment,73 the labour power provided actually helped in economic terms in a period of post-War reconstruction,74 although, in the short run, both of these countries were consumed by a feeling of victimhood in view of the large proportion of their population which consisted of refugees.75 Imperial collapse has played a central role in population redistribution in the twentieth century. Tens of millions of people found themselves displaced in the move from empire to nation-state, either immediately after the end of empire or decades later. The refugees created by such processes have found themselves undergoing traumatic processes of readjustment, which can take many years to overcome. These refugees, particularly when they make up a significant proportion of the population of a new nation-state, also have a central role in its development.

Notes 1. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford, 2010).

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Conclusions and Legacies 287 2. See contributions to Vera Constantini and Markus Koller, eds, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden, 2008), which take a variety of views of inter-religious relations and power. 3. See, for instance, Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Phillips and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester, 2003). 4. Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members (Oxford, 2000). 5. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008). 6. Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies: Introduction’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 10 (2008), pp. 7–14. 7. See, for instance, John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (London, 2006). 8. See, for instance, Anne Sheehy, The Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans: Soviet Treatment of Two National Minorities (London, 1971). 9. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2005). 10. See contributions to Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds, Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1830 (London, 1999). 11. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001). 12. A good example of this process is Bosnia, as described especially well by Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1994). 13. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995). See also the contribution by Dawn Chatty to the current volume. 14. Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact on Greece (London, 2002). 15. Ibid. 16. David Rock and Stefan Wolff, eds, Going Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (Oxford, 2002). 17. Louise W. Holborn et al., Refugees: A Problem of Our Time, 2 Volumes (Metuchen, NJ, 1975). 18. www.unhcr.org/4a375c426.html, ‘Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons’, p. 8. 19. Andrekos Varnava, Nicholas Coureas and Marina Elia, eds, The Minorities of Cyprus: Development Patterns and the Identity of Internal-Exclusion (Cambridge, 2009). 20. Kiamran Halil, ‘The Structure of the Turkish- Cypriot Race’, Mankind Quarterly, vol. 15 (1974), pp. 124–34. 21. Robin Oakley, ‘The Turkish Peoples of Cyprus’, in M. Bainbridge, ed., The Turkic Peoples of the World (London, 1993), pp. 88–91; L. W. St John-Jones, The Population of Cyprus: Demographic Trends and Socio-Economic Influences (London, 1983), pp. 50–62. 22. Floya Anthias and Ron Ayres, ‘Ethnicity and Class in Cyprus’, Race and Class, vol. 25 (1983), p. 61.

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23. Joseph S. Joseph, Cyprus: Ethnic Conflict and International Concern (New York, 1985), p. 29. 24. Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London, 2007); Andrew Borowiec, Cypurs: A Troubled Island (London, 2000). 25. Nancy Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the Struggle for Union With Greece (London, 1978), pp. 288–94, 366–70. 26. Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger (London, 1997). 27. Peter Loizos, The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge, 1981); Minority Rights Group, Cyprus: In Search of Peace (London, 1997), p. 19. 28. Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974 (Athens, 1983). 29. Helsinki Watch, Destroying Ethnic Identity: The Turks of Greece (New York, 1990). 30. See, for instance, Malcolm, Bosnia. 31. Fred Singleton, Twentieth Century Yugoslavia (London, 1976), pp. 86, 88. 32. Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia’s Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course and Consequences (London, 1995), p. 74. 33. Useful texts on the collapse of Yugoslavia and consequent refugee creation include: Bennet, ibid.; Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (London, 2002); Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia (College Station, TX, 1995); Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London, 1996); Julie Mertus et al., The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (London, 1996); S. P. Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918–2004 (Indiannapolis, IN, 2006); and Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London, 1996). 34. Siegfried Bethlehem, Heimatvertreibung, DDR-Flucht, Gastarbeiterwanderung: Wanderungsströme und Wanderungspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1982), p. 22. 35. Alexander von Plato and Wolfgang Meinecke, Alte Heimat – Neue Zeit: Flüchtlinge, Umgesiedelte, Vertriebene in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR (Berlin, 1991), pp. 25–6. 36. Paul Lüttinger and Rita Rossmann, Integration der Vertriebenen: Eine Empirische Analyse (Frankfurt, 1989); Paul Erker, Vom Heimatvertriebenen zum Neubürger, 1945–1955 (Wiesbaden, 1988); Rock and Wolff, Going Home to Germany? 37. Hermann Weiß, ‘Die Organisation der Vertriebenen und ihre Presse’, in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten: Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folgen (Frankfurt, 1995), pp. 244–64; Max Hildebert Boehm, ‘Gruppenbildung und Organisationswesen’, in Eugen Lemberg and Friedrich Edding, eds, Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland: Ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluss auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistleben, Vol. 1 (Kiel, 1959), pp. 524–7. 38. Kamaljit Bhasin-Malik, In the Making: Identity formation in South Asia (Gurgaon, 2007). 39. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), explores how the idea of ‘imagined communities’ became possible because of print- capitalism.

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Conclusions and Legacies 289 40. Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge, 1989), demonstrates the importance of religion as an identity marker in nineteenth- century India. 41. Indian Councils Act of 1909, commonly known as the Morley-Minto Reforms. 42. See Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge, 2007); and Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, eds, Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford, 1999). 43. Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009), p. 114. 44. Swarna Aiyar, ‘Violence and the State in the Partition of Punjab 1947–48’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1994). 45. By 1900 Punjabis constituted 50.6 per cent of the army and by 1910 this figure rose to 53.7 per cent. Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi, 2005), p. 71. For a detailed account of recruitment, see chapter 2, ‘Recruiting in the Punjab: “Martial Races” and the Military Districts’, pp. 70–97. 46. Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge, 2008); Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Pluto, 2007). 47. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2008), pp. 168–9. 48. Gyanesh Kudaisya, ‘The Demographic Upheaval of Partition’, South Asia, vol. 18 (1995). 49. According to the 1941 Census, the main religious communities in prePartition Punjab were as follows: Hindus 29 per cent, Muslims 53 per cent, and Sikhs 15 per cent. By 1951, West Punjab had 98 per cent Muslims and East Punjab recorded Hindus 66 per cent, Sikhs 30 per cent, Muslims 2 per cent. 50. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London, 2000), chapter 7, ‘Capital Landscapes: The Imprint of Partition on South Asian Capital Cities’. 51. Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1995). 52. For Sindh, see Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (New York, 2005). 53. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, After Partition (Delhi, 1948) p. 61. 54. See chapter 5 of Tan and Kudaisya, Aftermath of Partition, entitled ‘From Displacement to Development: East Punjab Countryside After Partition, c. 1947–67’. 55. Pippa Virdee, ‘Partition and Locality: Case Studies of the Impact of Partition and Its Aftermath in the Punjab Region, 1947–1961’ (unpublished Coventry University Ph.D thesis, 2005). Mohammad Waseem, ‘Partition Migration and Assimilation: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Punjab’, International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 4 (1997), has provided an immensely useful overview of the role of refugee labour in Lyallpur’s urban and industrial development. Refugees also provided much of the labour for the city’s industrial expansion.

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56. Some recent work with a city focus include: Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (Oxford, 2006); Pippa Virdee, ‘Partition in Transition: Comparative Analysis of Migration in Ludhiana and Lyallpur’, in A. Gera and N. Bhatia, eds, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (Delhi, 2007); Ilyas Chattha, ‘Partition and Its Aftermath: The Role of Refugees in the Socio-Economic Development of Gujranwala and Sailkot Cities, 1947–1961’ (unpublished University of Southampton, Ph.D thesis, 2009); and Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford, 2007). 57. Talbot and Singh, Partition of India, pp. 129–30. Tahir Kamran, ‘Contextualizing Sectarian Militancy in Pakistan: A Case Study of Jhang’, Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 20 (2009), pp. 55–85, examines the role of Partition migrants in Jhang, where groups like Sipah-i- Sahaba and Lashkar-i Jhangviis were established, and why they moved towards sectarianism. 58. Tan and Kudaisya, Aftermath of Partition, chapter 4, ‘A Community in Crisis: Partition and the Sikhs’, pp. 101–24. 59. Robert Wirsing, India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir Dispute: On Regional Conflict and its Resolution (Basingstoke, 1998). 60. Bengalis represented 55 per cent of the population and Urdu was spoken by an elite group from the United Provinces, the ideological heartland of the Muslim separatism. See Tan and Kudaisya, Aftermath of Partition, chapter 6, ‘Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal Refugees and their Rehabilitation in India, 1947–1979’. 61. Jeffrey Haynes, Democracy in the Developing World: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (Oxford, 2001), p. 111. 62. A. F. M. Kamaluddin, ‘Refugee Problems in Bangladesh’, in Leszek, A. Kosiński and Maudood Elahi, eds, Population Redistribution and Development in South Asia (Lancaster, 1985). See also Sanjoy Hazarika, Rites of Passage, Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands: India’s East and Bangladesh (New Delhi, 2000). 63. Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York, 1989). 64. Papiya Ghosh, ‘Partition’s Biharis’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 17 (1997). 65. Zolberg et al., Escape from Violence, p. 144. 66. Jean-Paul Azametal, Conflict and Growth in Africa: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda (Paris, 1999). See chapter 4: ‘Economic and Social Factors Relevant to Conflict in Kenya and Uganda’. 67. Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London, 1999), p. 266; Hugh Tinker, The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Oxford, 1977). 68. William G. Kuepper, G. Lynne Lackey and, E. Nelson Swinerton, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London, 1975), chapter 3, ‘The British Legacy and Response’, pp. 43–59. See also discussion on immigration policy in Britain in Andrew Geddes, The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe (London, 2003) pp. 31–8. 69. For a further discussion on this, see Kushner and Knox, Refugees, pp. 269–74.

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Conclusions and Legacies 291 70. Kuepper et al., Ugandan Asians, p. 43. For a discussion about the differing political viewpoints on the dispersal policy, see Kushner and Knox, Refugees, pp. 274–81. 71. See further the pioneering work by Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947 (London, 1986). 72. Kuepper et al., Ugandan Asians provide a comparative perspective on refugees in the modern world in their introduction, pp. 9–12. 73. Loizos, Heart Grown Bitter. 74. See, for instance, Hartmut Berghoff, ‘Population Change and Its Repercussions on the Social History of the Federal Republic’, in Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi, eds, The Federal Republic of Germany Since 1949: Politics, Society and Economy Before and After Unification (London, 1996), pp. 35–51. 75. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (London, 2001).

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Select Bibliography of Key Works Aly, Götz, ‘Final Solution’, Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London, 1999). Andreopoulos, Geroge. J. ed., Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions (Philadelphia, 1997). Ansari, Sarah, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947– 1962 (Karachi, 2005). Barkey, Karen and Hagen, Mark von, After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and NationBuilding: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO, 1997). Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew, Ethnic Cleansing (Basingstoke, 1996). Benmayor, Rina and Skotnes, Andor, ‘Some Reflections on Migration and Identity’, in Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes, eds, Migration and Identity (Oxford, 1994). Bessel, Richard and Haake, Claudia B., eds, Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford, 2009). Bloxham, Donald, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London, 2008). Bloxham, Donald, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005). Bose, Sumantra, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA, 2003). Brah, Avtar, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, 1996). Brass, Paul, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–1947: Means, Methods, and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 5 (2003), pp. 71–101. Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 18 (1995), pp. 189–218. Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Oxford, 2010). Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998). Carmichael, Cathie, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (London, 2002). Chatterji, Joya, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–67 (Cambridge, 2007). Cigar, Norman, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (College Station, TX, 1995). Clayton, Anthony, The Wars of French Decolonization (London, 1994). Dadrian, Vahakn, The History of the Armenian Genocide (Oxford, 1995). Darwin, John, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991). Dobkowski, Michael N. eds, Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (New York, 2000). 292

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293

Efendi, M. E., Die Zukunft der Türkei: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der orientalischen Frage (Berlin, 1898). Frank, Matthew, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford, 2008). Gatrell, Peter, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN, 1999). Ghosh, Papiya, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (London, 2007). Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Abingdon, 2004). Hall, Catherine, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Memories of Empire’, in Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson, eds, Memory (Cambridge, 1998). Hansen, Anders Bjorn, Partition and Genocide: Manifestations of Violence in Punjab 1937–1947 (New Delhi, 2002). Hasan, Mushirul, ed., India’s Partition: Process, Strategy, Mobilisation (New Delhi, 1993). Heiss, Gernot and Rathkolb, Oliver, Asylland Wider Willen: Flüchtlinge in Österreich im europäischen Kontext seit 1914 (Vienna, 1995). Herbert, Joanna, Negotiating Boundaries in the City: Migration, Ethnicity and Gender (Aldershot, 2008). Hirschon, Renée, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (Oxford, 2003). Hoffmann-Holter, Beatrix, ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914–1923 (Vienna, 1995). Holborn, Louis W., Refugees: A Problem of Our Time, Two Volumes (Metuchen, NJ, 1975). Holland, R. F., European Decolonization, 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey (London, 1988). Holquist, Peter, ‘ “To Count, to Extract and to Exterminate”: Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia’, in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds, A State of Nations, Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001). Hovannissian, Richard G., ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Policy, Ethics (London, 1992). Hovannissian, Richard G., ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003). Humphrey, Derek and Ward, Michael, Passports and Politics (Harmondsworth, 1974). Jha, Prem Shankar, The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947 (New Delhi, 2003). Karpat, Kemal H., Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, WI, 1985). Kedourie, Elie, ‘Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East’, European Journal of Sociology, vol. 25 (1984), pp. 276–82. Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York, 1997). Khan, Yasmin, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London, 2007). Kiernan, Ben, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (London, 2007). Kuepper, William G. Lackey, G. Lynne and Swinerton, E. Nelson, Ugandan Asians in Great Britain: Forced Migration and Social Absorption (London, 1975).

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294

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Kulischer, Eugene, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948). Kumar, Radha, ‘The Troubled History of Partitions’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 76 (1997), pp. 22–34. Kushner, Tony and Knox, Katherine, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth Century (London, 1999). Lahiri, Shompa, ‘South Asians in Post-Imperial Britain: Decolonisation and Imperial Legacy’, in Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001). Lamb, Alastair, Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute, 1947–48 (Hertingfordbury, 1997). Lemberg, Eugen and Edding, Friedrich, eds, Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland: Ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluss auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistleben, 3 Volumes (Kiel, 1959). Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC, 1944). Levene, Mark, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, Two Volumes (London, 2005–6). Lieberman, Benjamin, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006). Loescher, Gil, Beyond Charity: International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Crisis (New York, 1993). Loizos, Peter, The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge, 1981). McCarthy, Justin, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ, 1995). McCarthy, Justin, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London, 2001). MacQueen, Norrie, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London, 1997). Mamdani, Mahmood, From Citizen to Refugee: Ugandan Asians Come to Britain (London, 1973). Mandel, Maud S., In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in TwentiethCentury France (London, 2003). Mangat, J. S., A History of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886–1945 (Oxford, 1969). Marett, Valerie, Immigrants Settling in the City (London, 1989). Marrus, Michael, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1985). Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (London, 2001). Martin, Terry, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 70 (1998), pp. 813–61. Mazower, Mark, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London, 2008). Mazower, Mark, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, vol. 107 (2002), pp. 1158–78. Mehta, Krishna, Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story (New Delhi, 2005). Melson, Robert, Revolution and Genocide: The Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, IL, 1992). Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamla, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi, 1998).

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Miller, Donald E. and Touryan, Lorna, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, CA, 1993). Montandon, G., Frontières nationales: Détermination objective de la condition primordiale nécessaire a l’obtention d’une paix durable (Lausanne, 1915). Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge, 2003). Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth- Century Europe (London, 2001). Panayi, Panikos, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford, 1993). Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge, 2001). Rechter, David, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford, 2001). Reinisch, Jessica and White, Elizabeth, eds, The Disentanglement of Populations: Integration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9 (Basingstoke, 2011). Robinson, Vaughan, Transients, Settlers, and Refugees: Asians in Britain (Oxford, 1986). Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London, 2001). Roy, Anjali Gera and Bhatia, Nandi, eds, Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Re-settlement (New Delhi, 2007). Schechtman, Jospeh P., European Population Transfers, 1939–1945 (New York, 1946). Schechtman, Jospeh P., Population Transfers in Asia (New York, 1949). Schechtman, Jospeh P., The Refugee in the World (New York, 1963). Schieder, Theodor, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus OstMitteleuropa, 4 Volumes (Bonn, 1954–1961). Schofield, Victoria, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War (London, 2000). Shaw, Stanford and Ezel Kural, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1977). Shekhawat, Seema, Conflict and Displacement in Jammu and Kashmir: The Gender Dimension (Jammu, 2006). Singh Kirpal, ed., Select Documents on Partition of Punjab – 1947 (Delhi, 2006). Smith, Tony, ‘A Comparative Study of French and British Decolonization’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 20 (1968), pp. 70–102. Tabili, Laura, ‘A Homogenous Society? Britain’s Internal “Others”, 1800-Present’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006). Talbot, Ian, ‘The 1947 Partition of India’, in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke, 2008). Talbot, Ian and Singh, Gurharpal, The Partition of India (Cambridge, 2009). Talbot, Ian and Singh, Gurharpal, eds, Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford, 1999). Talbot, Ian and Tatla, Darshan Singh, Epicentre of Violence: Partition, Voices and Memories from Amritsar (Delhi, 2006). Talbot, Ian and Thandi, Shinder, eds, People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post- Colonial Migration (Karachi, 2004).

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Tan, Tai Yong, and Kudaisya, Gyanesh, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London, 2000). Thomas, Martin, Moore, Bob and Butler, Larry J., Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States 1918–1975 (London, 2008). Toynbee, Arnold J., The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (London, 1923). Twaddle, Michael, ed., Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London, 1975). Várdy, Stevan Béla, Tooley, T. Hunt and Habsburg, Otto Von, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (New, York, 2003). Vernant, Jacques, The Refugee in the Post-War World (London, 1953). Weitz, Eric D., ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations and Civilising Missions’, American Historical Review, vol. 113 (2008), pp. 1329–33. Zamindar, Vazira, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York, 2007). Zolberg, Aristide, ‘The Formation of New States as a Refugee- Generating Process’, Annals, no. 467 (1983), pp. 24–38. Zolberg, Aristide R., Suhrke, Astri and Aguayo, Sergio, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York, 1989).

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Index Abazas, 135 Abbas, Chaudhry Ghulam, 205 Abdullah, Sheikh Muhammad, 205 Abkhazia, 8, 135 Albanians, xix, 132, 138 Aleppo, xix, 129, 136, 146, 154–9, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 Alexander, Meena, 190 Fault Lines, 190 Algeria, ix, 29, 30–1, 35, 36–7, 45 National Liberation Front, 36 Secret Army Organisation (OAS), 36 Al-Hasakeh, 141 Alwar, 210 Amin, Idi, 42–3, 246, 250 Amman, 146 Amritsar, 182, 187, 203 Anand, Som, 45 Andaman Islands, xiv, xx, 219–40, 286 Bengalees in, 219–40 Bhantus in, 221 Burmese in, 221, 222, 234, 236 Colonization and Development Scheme, 221, 223, 226 Dwip-Bangla, 239 Jarawas in, 222, 225, 233, 234–6 Karens in, 222 Moplahs in, 221 Ranchiwalas in, 237 Tamils in, 237 Telegus in, 237 Angola, 33, 35, 36 Ankara, 135 Argentina, 35 Armenia, 8, 11, 13, 62, 117, 131, 138, 143, 148, 152–69, 272 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), 154, 157 Armenian Genocide, xvi, xix, 3, 4, 11, 13, 14, 15, 21, 55, 61, 73, 137, 138, 152–69

Armenian National Union, 154 Armenians, xii, xv, xix, 19, 20, 28, 57, 58, 63, 84, 85, 87, 94, 117, 120, 128, 129–31, 132, 133, 136–8, 143, 145, 146, 147, 152–69, 274, 286 in Canada, 138 in Egypt, 138, 146, 147 in France, 11, 138, 156 in Jordan, 138, 146 in Lebanon, 138, 146, 147 in Palestine, 138, 146 in Syria, xix, 3, 11, 58, 138, 146, 147 in the USA, 11, 138, 165, 169 Armeniervennen, 159 Assyrians, xix, 120, 133, 145 Atari, 182 Athens, 59 Attock, 201, 203 Austria, 6, 7, 68, 119, 122 Anschluss, 68 Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, xi, xii, xvii, 4, 5, 16, 17, 20, 54, 62, 64, 68, 91, 102–22, 132, 140, 142, 275, 278 Arbeiter Zeitung, 109, 111, 112, 116 Emperor Karl I, 115 Neue Freie Presse, 109–10, 111, 112, 113, 116 Refugee Committee, 114–15, 116, 117, 118, 120 Welfare Committee for German Refugees from Galicia and Bukowina, 108 Azerbaijan, 8, 62, 138 Baginsberg, 108 Baiersdorf, 84 Baigari, Manipada, 231 Balfour, James, 140 Balfour declaration, 33, 140 Balladore, Giorgio, 71 297

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298 Index Bandyopadhay, Sandip, 239 Bangladesh, 35, 40, 284 Bangladeshis in York, 245 Banias, 129 Bannu, 203 Barui, Dasarath, 225, 232 Basha, Madhat, 134 Battles Algiers (1957), 30, 37 Caporetto (1917), 104 Sarikamish (1915), 15, 19 Bauman, Zygmunt, 66 Beck, Max von, 107 Bedouins, xix, 133, 134 Bedoukian, Kerop, 166, 169 Bedoukian, Serpouhi, 166, 169 Beirut, 129, 130, 131, 137, 146 Radio Orient, 137 Bekaa, 136 Belgium, 4, 15, 33 Bell, Ronald, 250 Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew, 12 Beneš, Eduard, 71, 95, 119 Bengal, 40, 41, 44, 46, 175, 177, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 231, 239, 240, 281, 283 Bhasha Andolon movement, 283 Bengalis, 219–40, 286 Ben-Gurion, David, 67 Benmayor, Rina, 247 Berlin, 70 Bharatour, 210 Bhasin, Kamalia, xiv Bidoons, xix Bilinska, Maria, 108 Biswas, Ananta Kumar, 237, 238 Biswas, Gokul, 240 Biswas, Rajlakshmi, 233 Bitlis, 137 Bjørnlund, Matthias, 162 Blackburn, 246 Blagojevic, Marina, 153, 168 Bloxham, Donald, xvi Bombay, 40 Bop, Coudou, 164 Boral, Dhiren, 230 Bose, Pradip Kumar, 239 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 232

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Bosnia-Herzegovina, 9, 12, 62, 277, 278 Bradford, 245, 253, 258, 260, 261 Brah, Avtar, 247, 250 Brass, Paul, 177, 213 Breslau, 44 Britain, xx, 5, 6, 7, 31, 132, 140, 142, 143, 188, 189, 245–62, 273, 275, 278, 285 Daily Telegraph, 204 Department of Health and Social Security, 256 Empire, viii, x, xi, xii, xvii, xx, 33–4, 38–41, 175, 176, 183, 188, 191, 197, 198, 219, 221, 246, 247, 248, 260–1, 262, 271, 272, 274, 275–6, 280, 285 The Times, 207, 210, 213, 253 Uganda Resettlement Board, 250 Yorkshire Evening Press, 251, 252–3, 254–5 Brno, 64 Brubaker, Rogers, 152 Brusilov, Alexei, 104 Bryce, James, 153, 160 Bukhush, Khoda, 206 Bulgaria, 7, 59, 82, 104, 133, 134, 135, 137, 140 Bulgarians, 133 Burma, 34, 42 Butalia, Urvashi, xiv, 208 Butt, Zafar, 208 Cairo, 146, 157 Calcutta, 39, 41, 44, 177, 224, 227, 240 Canada, 35, 43, 44, 130, 131, 138, 285 Card, Claudia, 161 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 106 Ceauçescu, Nicolae, 7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 239 Chandigarh, 187 Chechnya, 62 Chechnyans, xix, 128, 132, 134–6, 138, 146 Chester, Lucy, 178

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Index Chinese in Indonesia, 43–4 in Malaysia 43–4 in Vietnam, 42, 43 in York, 245 Churchill, Winston, 67 Circassia, 135 Circassians, xix, 61, 128, 133, 134–6, 138, 146 Ćizek, Franz, 113 Cokburn, Cynthia, 160 Cologne, 44 Congo, 33 Mouvement National Congolais, 33 Constantinople, 18, 137, 160, 162 Copland, Ian, 198, 210, 213 Coventry, 189 Cracow, 105, 115 Crafton, Lisa Plummer, 158 Croatia, 12, 70, 278 Cubrilovic, Vasa, 70 Curzon of Kedleston, Lord, xi, 67 Cyprus, ix, 7, 196, 275–6, 278, 285, 286 Czechoslovakia, 5, 20, 63, 64, 65, 95, 118–19, 120, 121, 274 Prague Spring, 7 Czernowitz, 108 Damascus, 129, 131, 134, 139, 146, 159 Das, Jagabandhu, 228, 229, 233, 236–7 decolonization, ix, xii, 28–46 De Gaulle, Charles, 36 Deir-er-Zor, 129, 130, 131, 138 De Montfort University, xvii Refugees and the End of Empire Conference, xvii Dhaka, 40 Dhandra, 185 Dulat Chak, 207 Dutta, Narayan, 236, 239–40 Dykes, Colonel D., 203 East African Railway, 188, 248 Egypt, 6, 128, 138, 141, 146, 147 Eisenbruch, Maurice, 44 Entebbe, 43

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299

Erler, Georg, 81–2, 95 Das Recht der nationalen Minderheiten, 81 ethnic cleansing, viii, ix, xi, xiv, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 62, 67, 136, 175, 196, 200, 203, 209, 210, 275, 277, 278, 286 European Union, 9, 10 exile, 9, 10–11, 29, 30, 37, 71, 145, 168, 224, 232 Faiduti, Luigi, 116 Faridkot, 210 Fiji, 42, 43 Finn, Robert, 161 France, 4, 6, 7, 11, 35, 36, 37, 89, 91, 138, 140, 156, 273 Empire, xvii, 36–7, 38, 142, 143, 274, 278 Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives et Ethnoraciales, 89 l’École d’Anthropologie, 90 Franco, Alfranio de Mello, 66 Freier, Julie, 108 Freud, Sigmund, 190 Gandhi, Mahatma, 180 Gatrell, Peter, 4, 102, 121, 122 genocide, viii, xv, xvi, xix, xx, 3, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 55–60, 61, 69, 71, 85, 136, 137, 138, 152–69, 177, 196, 197, 200, 201, 205, 210, 212, 213, 277, 281 Georgelin, Hervé, 162 Georgia, 8, 62, 138 Germany, xvii, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 19–22, 44, 62, 68–9, 87, 88, 91, 103, 105, 115, 140, 274, 278–80, 286 Democratic Republic, 6 Federal Republic, xvi, 6, 279–80 Nazism (Third Reich), viii, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xvii, 4–5, 6, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19–20, 21, 22, 58–9, 60, 66, 68–9, 70, 71, 90, 271, 272, 273, 277 RSHA, 69

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300 Index Ghana, 32 Ghosh, A. K., 227 Gmünd, 107, 108, 111–12 Görz, 111, 116 Graz, 114 Greece, ix, 4, 10, 11, 18, 21, 59, 61, 62, 73, 82, 87, 93, 132, 137, 144, 272, 274, 276, 277 Refugee Settlement Commission, 93 Greeks, xii, 18, 19, 20, 21, 63, 73, 87, 160, 274 Grele, Ronald J., xiii Gujar, Khalid Ali, 208 Gujranwala, 186, 199 Gujrat, 199, 202, 211 Gurdaspur, 187, 204, 205 gypsies, 253–4, 256 see also Roma Hague, 38 Haldar, Naran, 228, 230, 240 Harb, Aliza, 166 Hardy, M. J., 252 Hartmann, Martin, 87 Hasan, Mishuri, 176 Hashmi, Muharram, 206 Hazara, 203 Herbert, Joanna, 259 Highgas, Dirouhi Kouymjian, 165, 166 Hitler, Adolf, 200, 250 Hobsbawm, Eric, 196 Hoerder, Dirk, 28 Holborn, Louise, xvi, 274 Holland, 35, 37–8 Empire xvii Dutch East Indies, 30, 36, 37–8 Royal Dutch Indian Army, 38 Homs, 139 Hoover Relief Fund, 113 Horowitz, Donald, 197 Hungary, 5, 9, 63, 70, 91, 119 Revolution of 1956, 7, 10, 250 Huntingdon, Samuel, 52, 53 Hussain, Intizar, 44 Hussain, Zarar, 208 Huxley, Elspeth, 42

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India, viii, ix, x, xiv, xix, xx, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33–4, 35, 38–41, 46, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 196–214, 219–40, 272, 273–4, 280–4, 285, 286 Akali Fauj, 39 Anjaman-i-Jammu Muhajirian, 211 Indian National Army, 232 Indian National Congress, 39, 177, 178, 283 Majalis-i-Ahrar, 211 Partition, xiv, xvii, xix, xxi, 31, 38–41, 175, 178, 181, 191, 197, 198, 199, 203–4, 208, 210, 212, 232, 273–4, 280–4 Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), 39, 205, 207 Unionist Party, 176, 177, 201 Zamindar, 211 Indians, 34, 248–9 in Britain, xx, 43, 183, 245–62, 285 in Burma, 34, 42 in Canada, 43, 285 in Fiji, 43 in Kenya, 248, 249, 284, 285 in Uganda, ix, xiv, xx, 42–3, 246, 247–8, 250, 251, 284–5 in the USA, 43, 285 Indonesia, 35, 36, 37, 43, 45, 46 Institut de Droit International, 71 International Refugee Organization, ix internment, xviii Iran, 144 Iraq, 140, 143, 144, 145, 148 Ireland, 196 Irish in York, 246 Israel, ix, 6, 22, 44, 140–1 Italians in York, 246 Italy, 6, 37, 59, 105 Izmir, 135 see also Smyrna

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Index Jammu and Kashmir, xx, 196–214, 283 Kashmiri Liberation Movement, 211 Japan, 222 Jaruselski, Wojciech, 7 Jeppe, Karen, 154–9, 162 Jerusalem, 146 Jews, vii, 4, 6, 11, 14, 22, 28, 33, 34, 56, 57, 58–9, 60, 63, 68, 69, 70, 81, 89, 94, 104, 107, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 133, 138, 139, 156 anti-Semitism, 6, 14, 89, 90, 122, 246 Holocaust, xiii, 11, 33, 55, 58–9, 197, 200 Israelite Cultural Association (IKG), 114 Zionism, 122, 140 Jhang, 186 Jhelum, 199, 202, 211 Jhind, 210 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 176, 177, 178, 185, 211 Jordan, 34, 128, 138, 140, 141, 146 Joshi, Mrudula, 254–5 Jullundur, 182, 184, 187 Kalendarian, Vergeen, 163–4, 166, 167, 168–9 Kampala, 43 Karachi, 44, 175, 282, 283, 286 Karim, Abdul, 207 Kashmir, see Jammu and Kashmir Kashmiris, xiv, xx, 197 Kazakhstan, 5 Keller, Stephen, 182, 183 Kemal, Mustafa, 68, 143 Kenya, 30, 42, 248, 249, 285 Kévorkian, Raymond, 156–7 Khan, Ghazanfar Ali, 178 Khirat, Manoranjan, 234 Kholsa, G. D., 41, 179 Khulna, 224 Kläger, Emil, 111 Konya, 135 Kosovo, 9, 62, 277 Kotli, 202

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301

Kulischer, Eugene, xv, 12 Kuper, Leo, 196, 205 Kurds, xix, 57, 58, 68, 73, 128, 133, 141–4, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 160, 162 Lahiri, Shompa, 249 Lahore, 41, 44, 45, 186, 189, 282 Lal, Darman, 189 Lasocki, Sigismund, 114, 115 Latakiyya, 129 Lausanne, 89, 90 Conference of Nationalities, 90, 96 see also Treaties League of Nations, xix, 33, 59, 66, 70, 81, 93, 117, 140, 143, 144, 145, 153, 154–9, 167, 168 Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East, 155 High Commission for Refugees, 4, 120 Office for Refugees, xv Lebanon, 128, 129, 130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 147, 153 Leeds, 245, 261 Leicester, xx, 184, 189, 251, 259–60 Lemberg, 104 Lemkin, Raphael, 55, 71 Leningrad, 62 Libermann, Benjamin, 13 Libya, 6 Lichtenstädter, Siefried, xviii, 82, 83–9, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96 Die Zukunft der Turkei, 82, 84–8, 95 Kultur und Humanität, 84 Nationalitätsprinzip und Bevölkerungsaustausch, 88, 94 Lisbon, 33, 35 London, 33, 140 Ludhiana, 180, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 282 Lunn, Kenneth, 261 Lyallpur, 185, 186, 187, 282 Macartney, Charles, 66 McCarthy, Justin, 19, 135, 272

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302 Index McMahon, Sir Henry, 140 Madagascar, 59 Mahajan, Mehr Chand, 209 Mahmud, Sarmad, 208 Majumdar, Sumana, 238 Makarios III, Archbishop, 276 Malaysia, 43 Malta, 37 Maltese in York, 246 Mandel, Maud, 156 Marash, 136 Marett, Valerie, 246, 251, 260 Mariahilf, 108 Marrus, Michael, xvi, 5, 117 The Unwanted, xvi Marseilles, 36 Martin, Terry, 62 Masaryk, Tomas, 119 Mauritius, 258 Mayaram, Shail, 197, 210 Mecca, 140 Mehta, Krishna, 202 Mehta, Nanki Kalidas, 42 Melson, Robert F., 13–14, 15, 21 Menon, Ritu, xiv Milosevic, Slobodan, 14 Mondal, Kalipada, 232 Mondal, Sujata, 229, 231–2 Montandon, Georg, xviii, 82, 89–92, 93, 95–6 Comment reconnaître le Juif?, 89 Frontières nationales, 82, 89–90, 93, 96 l’Ethnie française, 89 Montenegro, 133 Mosul, 63, 138, 141 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 177, 274 Mountbatten Plan, 177, 274 Mozambique, 33, 35 Mridha, Sukharanjan, 225, 228, 229, 232–3, 235–6 Mudie, Sir Francis, 185 Mughal Empire, 282 Muir, Ramsay, 83 Multan, 201 Munich, 84 Murree, 203 Muslims, 129, 133, 136, 145, 161, 181, 259, 271, 272

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in British India, 32, 34, 39, 40, 175, 176, 177, 180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 196–214, 273, 280, 281, 282, 283 Muslim League, 39, 176, 177, 178, 201, 280 Muslim League National Guards, 39 in France, 37 Muzaffarabad, 202 Nagoke, Udham Singh, 185 Nansen, Fridtjof, 96, 120 Nawakot, 208 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 177, 283 Nehru, Rameshwari, 179 New Delhi, 40, 45, 175, 179, 186, 282 New Guinea, 35, 37 Nigeria, 32 Nikolsburg, 111, 118 Noakhali, 177, 178 Nordstrum, Nancy, 161 Odian, Yerviant, 162 oral history, xiii–xv, xviii–xxi, 129, 208, 219–40 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention, ix Orwell, George, 92, 94 ‘Politics and the English Language’, 92 Osnabrück, 279 Ottoman Empire, see Turkey Oxford University Refugee studies Centre, xvi Journal of Refugee Studies, xvi Pakistan, ix, x, xiv, xix, xx, 32, 35, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 210, 212, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 240, 258, 272, 273–4, 280–4, 285, 286 Pal, Atul, 231 Pal, Lalit Mohan, 229–31 Pal, Saralabala, 233, 237

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Index Palestine, ix, 6, 33–4, 35, 40, 59, 138–41, 146, 147, 148, 196 Palestinians, ix, xi, xvi, xix, 128, 133, 138–41, 145, 146, 147 Paris, 89, 90, 103 Paris Peace Conference, 65, 66, 81, 95, 143 see also Treaties Passerini, Luisa, xiii Pillay, Anu, 160, 168 Pohrlitz, 111 Poland, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 22, 63, 65, 72, 88, 91, 274 Poles in Britain, 6, 246 in Germany, 7 Poonch, 202 Port Blair, 221 Portelli, Alessandro, xiii Portugal, 35, 38 Empire, xvii, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38 Institute for the Support of the Repatriation of Nationals, 38 Powell, Enoch, 285 Prague, 106 prisoners of war, 6, 110 Pucli, Antonio, 117 Punjab, xix, xx, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41, 44–5, 46, 175–92, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 214, 280–2, 283 Quisling, Vidkun, 120 Radcliffe, Sir Cyril, 176, 177, 178 Radcliffe Line, 178, 274 Raha, Sadhan, 227, 228, 230 Raipur, 206 Rajasthan, 210 Ransome, Arthur, 72 Rawalpindi, 39, 177, 178, 190, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 Ray, Hemanta, 230 Ray, Lakshmikanta, 231, 233 Raychaudhury, Anasua Basu, 239 Red Cross, 89, 113, 141, 154, 165, 281

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303

refugees, vii–xxi, 3–22, 28, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 55, 73, 93, 102–22, 141, 144, 152–69, 178–83, 188, 189, 196–214, 219–40, 248, 252–3, 255, 256, 274, 275, 276, 278–80, 281–5, 286 definition of, vii, 3, 46–7, 141 ‘Displaced Persons’, 6, 118, 199, 212, 275 numbers, vii–viii, ix, x, xi, xiii, 3, 4, 5–6, 8–9, 10, 12, 29, 111, 189, 197, 198, 220, 248, 254, 276, 278, 282, 286 Reizes, Henryk, 115 Renner, Karl, 64 Rhodesia, 35 Robinson, Vaughan, 246 Roma, 58, 70 see also gypsies, 254 Romans, 245 Ropar, 187 Rothschild, Lord Walter, 140 Rowbotham, Sheila, xiv Rowntrees, 245, 247, 254, 255–6, 257, 261 Rumania, 5, 7, 70, 91, 135 Rushdie, Salman, 45 Russia, xvii, 4, 8, 15, 17, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60–1, 62, 63, 88, 89, 91–2, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 117, 120, 121, 122, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 143 Revolution, 4, 13, 16, 140 see also Soviet Union Sadhak, Dhirendranath, 239 Safad, 139 Satwari, 207 Schleiser-Breslauer Nachrichten, 44 Sealdah, 224 Seifert, Ruth, 162 Şeni, Nora, 160 Serbia, 12, 103, 133, 135, 278 Shaw, Stanford, 137 Sheikhupura, 179, 180, 184 Shikdar, Kalipada, 233 Shipley, Alice Muggerditchian, 163

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304 Index Sialkot, xiv, 189, 199, 202, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212 Sikhs, 32, 34, 39, 40, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 273, 281, 282, 283 Sikri, Nihal Chand, 41 Simla, 41 Sindh, 282, 283 Singh, Giani Kartar, 185 Singh, Khem, 185 Singh, Khushwant, 181 Train to Pakistan, 181 Singh, Maharaja Hari, 201, 202, 283 Singh, Pritam, 185 Singh, Sardar Baldev, 177 Singh, Sardar Indijit, 203 Skotnes, Andor, 247 Slovakia, 70, 119 Smith, Andrea, 45 Smith, Anthony, 17 Smyrna, 11, 18, 159, 274 see also Izmir Snedden, Christopher, 210 Society of Friends, 113, 121 Sofia, 59 South Africa, 35 Soviet Union, viii, x, xvi, 4, 5, 6, 7–8, 10, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 17–18, 20, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 133, 135–6, 143, 271, 272, 274, 278 Belorussia, 63 Crimean Tatars, 5 NKVD, 58, 69 Ukraine, 5, 62, 63, 70, 120 Volga Germans, 5, 58 see also Russia Spain, 35, 37 Srinagar, 202 Stalin, Joseph, 5, 58, 62, 69 Sutar, Amulya, 232 Switzerland, 7, 64, 89 Sykes, Sir Mark, 140 Syria, xix, 3, 11, 34, 58, 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 153, 155, 165

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Tabili, Laura, 246 Tachjian, Vahé, 153, 156–7, 159, 162 Taft, Elise Hagopian, 163, 166 Tahir, Kawaja, 208 Tajikistan, 8 Talbot, Ian, 182 Tanzania, 284 Tatars, 18, 135 Tatla, Darshan Singh, 182 Theresienstadt, 84 Thiarary, Harbins, 189 Tito, Josip Broz, 277 Toynbee, Arnold, 52, 53, 153, 160 Treaties Bucharest (1917), 115 Dayton (1995), 22 Lausanne (1923), viii–ix, xiii, 4, 11, 13, 21, 22, 59, 67, 70, 73, 82, 87, 143, 144, 272, 274, 276 Mudros (1918), 143 Neuilly (1919), 59 Potsdam (1945), 5, 20, 273, 274 Saint-Germain (1919), 119 Sèvres (1920), 19, 143 Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), 140 Versailles (1919), 68 Tunisia, 6 Turkey, ix, xvi, 4, 11, 13, 68, 71, 82, 93, 127, 141, 145, 272, 276, 286 Ottoman Empire, viii, xi, xii, xvii, xviii, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17–19, 20, 21, 45, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 73, 82, 84–8, 117, 120, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135–6, 137, 139–40, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 169, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278 Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, 134 Tanzimaat, 149 Young Turks (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP), 14, 19, 21, 58, 68, 69, 73, 153, 162

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Index Turks in Bulgaria, 7 in Cyprus, 275, 276 in Greece, 276 Tyre, 139 Uganda, ix, xvii, 7, 32, 42, 246, 247, 248, 253, 256, 257, 259, 284–5 Ullar, Hameed, 208 Union of Nationalities, 90 United Nations, vii, viii, 12, 34, 140, 146, 212, 276, 281, 283 definition of refugee, vii, 3, 46–7, 117 Genocide Convention, 71, 200 High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), ix, x, 8–9, 117, 275 Refugee Convention, vii, ix, 46–7, 55 Relief and Works agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, 141 USA, ix, 11, 33, 43, 44, 71, 138, 165, 169, 257, 276, 278, 285 USSR, see Soviet Union Uzbekhistan, 5 Van, 137 Venizelos, Eleftherios, 59 Vernant, Jaques, xv, 12 Vienna, 64, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115 Polish Club, 114, 115 Vietnam, ix, 7, 42, 43 Vikings, 245 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 53 Wars Balkan, 3, 14, 57, 60, 61, 90 Cold, ix, x, xv, xvii, 6–7, 9, 10, 62, 279 Crimean, 135 First World (Great), viii, x, xi, xii, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, 3, 7, 9,

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10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 43, 53, 54, 63, 72, 83, 88, 89, 102–22, 127, 132, 142, 143, 145, 157, 164, 272, 274, 275, 285 Greco-Turkish (1897), 85 Greco-Turkish (1919–22), 14, 19, 57–8, 61 Greek Civil, 6 Israeli (1947–8), 140 Kosovo, 9 Nagorno-Karabakh, 8 Russo-Ottoman (1828–9), 135 Russo-Ottoman (1877–8), 135, 136 Second World, vii, viii, ix, xi, xii, xv, 3, 4–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 35, 44, 53, 54, 58, 60, 67, 70, 84, 89, 97, 119, 177, 219, 273, 274, 277, 278, 281, 285 Six Day, 127 South Ossetia (1991–2), 8 Yugoslav, xiv, 8–9, 12, 14, 15 Wassilkó, Nikolai von, 115 Weitz, Eric, 103 Wilhemsburg, 111 Wilson, Francesca, 113 Winkler, Wilhelm, 106 Winter, Max, 111, 112–13 Witowska, Karoline, 108 Woodward, Susan, 197 Yazidis, xix Yesayian, Zabel, 160 York, xiv, xx–xxi, 245–62 Yosghak, 129 Young, Iris Marion, 257 Yugoslavia, x, xv, 6, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17–18, 20, 59, 62, 64, 65, 70, 200, 275, 277–8 Zamindar, Vazira, 40 Zeitun, 136 Zimbabwe, 247 Zurich, 89

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