THE MAKING OF THE MODERN REFUGEE

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The Making of the
Modern Refugee
P E T E R G AT R E L L

1
 1
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 For Martha Katz,
Erika Drucker,
And in loving memory of David Drucker
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 Preface
At the entrance to my local health club is a notice reminding guests not to leave
their belongings in their car, ‘to be on the safe side’. I have thought quite a lot
about this phrase, which is something of a cliché in the English language. My book
concerns people who were compelled to negotiate difficult journeys to a place of
relative safety. It is primarily a work of history. What distinctive contribution can
a historian make to refugee studies? My answer is that history as well as satisfying
our curiosity about the past provides a fresh and unsettling perspective on issues of
contemporary concern. Refugee crises are not a recent phenomenon. An historical
approach enables us to track multiple crises from beginning to end, so to speak,
analysing how they originated and what outcomes emerged and on whose terms.
Looking back in time shows that current practices often uncannily echo earlier
formulations, whether in relation to ideas around security or to problem-solving.
History gives us insights into these complex genealogies. I draw on later nineteenth-
and twentieth-century evidence to argue that states make refugees, but that refugees
also make states; that the refugee regime broadly understood to include programmes
of humanitarian assistance and the framework of international refugee law makes
refugees into a category of concern; and that these processes are informed by cul-
tural representation. This is not all. Refugees have called upon history to explain
their displacement and to help negotiate a way out of their predicament. Refugees
were created by violence and governed by regimes of intervention, but they gave
meaning to their experiences through engaging with the past. History is a refugee
resource.
There is nothing in my book of what the Canadian economic historian Harold
Innes once described as an author’s ‘dirt experience’. Rather than conduct ethno-
graphic fieldwork, I have consulted a large body of secondary literature and primary
sources including oral testimony and other accounts by eye-witnesses, refugees
included, and documents emanating from governments, international organiza-
tions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I could not have written this
book without the research undertaken by other scholars, most of whom I have
never met, and who are knowledgeable about places I have never visited and fluent
in languages I do not command. The footnotes give some indication of my debt to
them. Any omissions or errors in understanding and interpreting their work are
solely my responsibility.
I should like to thank all those students at the University of Manchester who
enrolled on my final-year course, ‘Refugees in Modern World History’, and who
helped me clarify my ideas. I have learned a lot from my doctoral students past and
present, in particular Pete Borklund, Jenny Carson, Mateja Celestina, Rosaria
Franco, Luke Kelly, Chris Lash, Joanne Laycock, Rosy Rickett, Laura Rubio, Junya
Takiguchi, and Alice Tligui. Friends and colleagues in the UK and further afield
viii Preface

have given plenty of support, including allowing me to read their unpublished

work. I hope they will accept this general expression of thanks. The maps were
drawn by Nick Scarle. Christopher Wheeler at Oxford University Press agreed to
take this book on and offered the kind of encouragement that any author craves;
I am also grateful to Cathryn Steele and Emma Barber, and to my copy-editor
Elissa Connor. Three anonymous readers of the manuscript offered useful advice.
I want to make special mention of Pam Ballinger, Anna Holian, and Laura Madokoro,
generous and thoughtful interlocutors, Jérôme Elie and Francesca Piana who alerted
me to relevant archival material in Geneva, Steven Lee and Janice Kim for advice on
Korea, Laurence Brown who made valuable comments at an early stage, Jean-Marc
Dreyfus, Urvashi Butalia, and Rubina Jasani, who commented on a draft chapter
apiece, and above all Bertrand Taithe, who read a first draft in its entirety, and who
has been a constant source of ideas as well as being a staunch friend. None of these
kind people should be held responsible for the book’s shortcomings.
My work on these topics has been supported over the past decade by the British
Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and
the University of Manchester. I am indebted to them all. I would also like to thank
the many librarians and archivists who have helped me, including Patricia Flückiger-
Livingstone, Montserrat Canela Garayoa, and Hilde Haaland at UNHCR, Don
Davis at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, and Joel Thoreson
at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in Chicago.
In the light of its often sombre subject matter it is fitting that I should acknow-
ledge the secure and privileged circumstances that made it possible for me to write
this book. This is partly a matter of institutional support, but even more about the
friendships that enrich my life. I take none of this for granted. I appreciate the kind-
ness and hospitality of Peter and Zhenia Shoenberg in London and Cambridge,
Lizzy Gatrell and Andrew Winstone in London, Dave Gatrell and Chloé Goudvis
in Hong Kong, and Erika and David Drucker in Geneva, and the interest they
have shown in my work. Jane, Dave, and Lizzy Gatrell fill me with pride and make
everything worthwhile.
 Contents

List of Maps and Tables x

Abbreviations xi

Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 1

PA RT I : E M P I R E S O F R E F U G E E S
Introduction 19
1. Crucibles of Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 21
2. Nation-states and the Birth of a ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 52

PA RT I I : M I D  C E N T U RY M A E L S T RO M
Introduction 85
3. Europe Uprooted: Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 89
4. ‘Nothing Except Commas’: Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment
of Displacement 118
5. Midnight’s Refugees?: Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 148
6. War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 178

PA RT I I I : R E F U G E E S I N T H E G L O B A L C O L D WA R
A N D I T S A F T E R M AT H
Introduction 199
7. ‘Villages of Discipline’: Revolutionary Change and Refugees in
South-East Asia 203
8. ‘Long Road’: Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 223
9. ‘Some Kind of Freedom’: Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices
in Contemporary History 253

Conclusion: Refugees and their History 283

Further Reading 297

Index 301
 List of Maps and Tables
MAPS

1. Map of the Eastern Front in the First World War 28

2. Map of Armenia and the Near East, 1914–23 31
3. Map of the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, 1923 65
4. Map of Population Movements in Central Europe, 1944–48 93
5. Map of Palestinian Refugee Movements, 1948 126
6. Map of Partition and Population Movements, 1947 152
7. Map of Refugee Flows in/from South-East Asia 209
8. Map of Refugee Movements in the Great Lakes Region 236
9. Map of Refugee Movements in Former Yugoslavia 263

TA B L E S

1. Twentieth-Century Displaced/Refugee Population 3

2. DPs from Central/Eastern Europe in West Germany, 1945–46 97
 Abbreviations

A B B R E V I AT E D T I T L E S O F J O U R N A L S

AAAPSS Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

AHR American Historical Review
CEH Contemporary European History
CSH Cultural and Social History
CSSH Comparative Studies in Society and History
HRQ Human Rights Quarterly
IJRL International Journal of Refugee Law
IMR International Migration Review
JCH Journal of Contemporary History
JEMS Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
JMAS Journal of Modern African Studies
JMGS Journal of Modern Greek Studies
JMH Journal of Modern History
JPS Journal of Palestine Studies
JRS Journal of Refugee Studies
MAS Modern Asian Studies
MES Middle Eastern Studies
RSQ Refugee Survey Quarterly

OT H E R A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AFSC American Friends Service Committee

ARA American Relief Administration
CARE Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (originally Cooperative for
American Remittances to Europe)
CO Colonial Office, UK
DP Displaced Person
EVW European Volunteer Workers
FEWVRC Friends’ Emergency and War Victims’ Relief Committee
FO Foreign Office, UK
ICEM Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva
IDP Internally Displaced Person
IOL India Office Library, British Library, London
IOM International Organisation for Migration, Geneva
IRO International Refugee Organisation
IWM Imperial War Museum, London
JAI Jami’at al Islam
JDC American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
LAC Library and Archives Canada
xii Abbreviations
LRCS League of Red Cross Societies
LWF Lutheran World Federation
MSF Médecins sans Frontières
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland
NCWC National Catholic Welfare Conference
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
OAU Organisation of African Unity
ODP Orderly Departure Programme
PRC People’s Republic of China
RSC Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
TNA UK National Archives, Kew
UNCACK United Nations Civil Assistance Command in Korea
UNHCR Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
UNKRA United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency
UNOG United Nations Library, Geneva
UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency
USEP United States Escapee Program
WCC World Council of Churches
WRY World Refugee Year
 Introduction: The Making of
the Modern Refugee

Ours [the twentieth century] has been the century of departure, of migration,
of exodus—of disappearance, the century of people helplessly seeing others,
who were close to them, disappear over the horizon
(John Berger)

Today’s information media are filled with reports of disasters that result in people
being forced to flee. Sometimes they die before reaching a place of safety. The recent
past provides abundant evidence of huge involuntary population movements in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes Region, and
elsewhere. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and its violent aftermath in the early 1990s
provided a salutary reminder that Europe was not immune from refugee crises; even
today, by far the largest concentration of refugees per head of population anywhere
in the world is in Armenia. Many of these conflicts persist. At the end of 2012, close
on nine million refugees had been living in refugee camps and other settlements for
more than a decade. The ordeal of 2.5 million Palestinians in the Middle East
stretches back to 1948. Many of these instances are reasonably well known, at least
in outline, but the circumstances of other refugees, such as Bhutanese in Nepal,
Rohingya in Bangladesh, and Sahrawi refugees in West Africa rarely figure in the
news. Western broadcasters occasionally touch on catastrophe, as when boats over-
loaded with refugees capsize at sea, but these accounts rarely illuminate the circum-
stances that compel them to flee. Instead public opinion is fed uninformative scraps
about asylum seekers that disregard the fact that most of the world’s refugees eke out
an existence far from the borders of First World countries.
Something of the same applies to our grasp of more distant events. It is widely
recognized that the great wars of the twentieth century, like those in previous eras,
caused vast numbers of people to leave their homes. This reinforces the view that
the link between war and population displacement is self-evident. But is it? Why
has involuntary displacement been such a prominent feature of the modern era?
Has it been episodic or systematic? Is there something peculiar about recent up-
heavals or do they form part of a twentieth-century continuum? What attempts
were made to tackle crises in different parts of the world and at different junctures,
and did these efforts have common aims and features? Under what circumstances
did refugees return to their homes, and with what results? These questions suggest
2 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

the need for a global history of displacement and relief programmes over time.
They invite us to consider how refugees understood the myriad ramifications of
flight and how they engaged with those who were left behind and with whom they
might hope at some stage to reconnect. This process extends to exploring the
meanings that they attached to the places of their departure, to their journeys, and
to their destinations. This invites a history of, and in, displacement.
One aim of The Making of the Modern Refugee is to come to a better appreciation
of what is distinctive about refugee crises in the new millennium, and what is not.
My focus is predominantly on the twentieth century. To be sure, the historical
record discloses numerous attempts to expel individuals and entire populations on
grounds of political opinion or religious belief. Long before 1900, political disor-
der and war compelled vanquished or politically obdurate groups and religious
minorities to seek refuge elsewhere. In 1492, Spain brought centuries of Moorish
rule to an end and enforced Catholic conformity, causing 200,000 Muslims and
Jews to flee. German Protestants who were expelled from the Palatinate in the
seventeenth century made their way to Kent where they languished in vast tented
settlements before proceeding to Pennsylvania. One million Huguenots left France
rather than convert to Catholicism following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
in 1685. Revolution in Haiti in 1791 caused white plantation owners to flee; some
of them ended up in an isolated part of Cuba called Guantánamo Bay. These in-
stances can be multiplied. They point to persecution and discrimination, but they
belong to a more remote geopolitical universe and generated nothing like the in-
stitutional response that became familiar in the modern era. Twentieth-century
displacement was unprecedented by virtue of being linked to the collapse of multi-
national empires, the emergence of the modern state with a bounded citizenship,
the spread of totalizing ideologies that hounded internal enemies, and the interna-
tionalization of responses to refugee crises.1
Was the magnitude of population displacement in the late twentieth century of
a different order compared to crises earlier in the century? The answer, which may
come as something of a surprise, is that the size of the refugee population as re-
corded in official statistics and including data on internally displaced persons was
highest in the middle years of the twentieth century. Given the rapid growth in
world population the proportion of refugees was therefore smaller in relative terms
in the late twentieth century (see the snapshot in Table 1). It is hard to avoid
the conclusion that the most dramatic period of mass population displacement
occurred in the 1940s as a result of war and political upheaval around the world.
What explains these dynamics and this magnitude? In the first phase, wartime
mobilization raised the stakes by drawing attention to people whose mere pres-
ence was deemed to threaten the security of the state and the war effort. Entire
communities in the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires were deported

1
Howard Adelman, ‘Modernity, Globalisation, Refugees and Displacement’, in Alistair Ager (ed.),
Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration (Continuum, 1999), 83–110.
The publisher location for all references in this book is London, unless otherwise stated.
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 3
Table 1: Twentieth-Century Displaced/Refugee Population (millions, estimated)
First World War Second World War Cold War aftermath
aftermath aftermath
Continental Europe 10 [Eastern Europe] 60 <7
2 [Balkans]
Non-European n/a 90 [China] 6 [South-East Asia and
continents 20 [South Asia] Middle East]
1 [Middle East] 6 [Sub-Saharan Africa]
4 [other, incl. Hong 4 [other]
Kong] 24 [IDPs]
Global total >12 175 47
Total world population 1,800 2,300 5,300
Percentage displaced <1.0% 7.6% 0.9%

Notes and sources: see chapters 1–6. For the Cold War aftermath (1992–96 average), see UNHCR data <http://
www.unhcr.org/3bfa33154.html> supplemented by <http://www.internal-displacement.org/>.

before and during the First World War on grounds of their perceived disloyalty.
These deliberate actions by imperial rulers multiplied the chaos brought about
by the mass flight of civilians who sought to escape the wrath of enemy troops
(chapter 1). In the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks turned on Armenian and
Kurdish minorities; those who escaped deportation and mass murder became
refugees. Subsequently, revolution and civil war in Russia set class against class
and offered another foretaste of what was to come, by linking social and political
transformation to a further round of population politics.2
Targeting imperial subjects had unforeseen and ironic consequences, because
patriotic leaders in each group appealed to refugees’ sense of belonging to a belea-
guered nation that could only be properly secured by detaching itself from the
imperial core and being constituted as a sovereign entity. The end of the war led to
the replacement of old imperial polities by new nation-states. But this created even
more favourable conditions for the persecution of minorities who did not meet the
criteria for political membership. Discriminatory practices reached their apogee in
Germany where the Nazi state excluded Jews from political citizenship and then
proceeded to exterminate them on occupied territory during the Second World
War. Fascist terror was not, however, confined to Nazi Germany. Defeat in the
Spanish Civil War forced Franco’s opponents to flee to France. The cultural record
created by Spanish refugees in designated camps or in transit to new destinations,
spoke of loss and humiliation, tempered by a determination to transcend their
displacement (chapter 2).
Nor was demographic engineering the sole preserve of totalitarian states. The
rearrangement of population and territory in Greece and Turkey under the terms

2
On population politics, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press,
1989); Amir Weiner (ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management
in a Comparative Framework (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
4 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

of the Treaty of Lausanne signed in 1923 was conceived as a means to prevent

ethnic and social conflict by compelling the Muslim inhabitants of Greece to move
to Turkey and insisting that residents of Turkey who professed the Orthodox reli-
gion depart for Greece. It created a substantial refugee population in both states.
The growing acceptance of the argument that the modern state should be ethnic-
ally homogeneous had profound consequences: liberal politicians and diplomats
embraced the ‘unmixing of peoples’ (in Lord Curzon’s phrase) as a means of separ-
ating ethnic groups to reduce the possibility of conflict.3
This approach also characterized peace-making after the Second World War. The
war uprooted civilians as well as soldiers. Invasion and deportation killed millions
and left survivors stranded. In China the Japanese invasion led to a massive crisis
of internal population displacement that destabilised the country politically and
socially and contributed to the epoch-making communist revolution in 1949
(chapter 6). In Europe the victorious Allies embarked on a series of punitive expul-
sions as well as organized population transfers in Central Europe, forcing ethnic
Germans out of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Given the widespread antipathy to-
wards former enemies, the Allied powers focused not on their plight but on that of
the so-called ‘Displaced Persons’ (DPs) who had been taken to Germany during
the war as forced labourers. This was a polyglot group—the irony of Hitler be-
queathing Germany a multinational population was not lost on contemporaries—
held in camps so that arrangements could be made for their repatriation. The camp
provided another opportunity for patriotic elites in historic émigré communities as
well as Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian and other DPs inside Germany and Austria
to engage with their co-nationals. Nationality was again reaffirmed. At the same
time, a new crisis came about as people fled communist states in Eastern Europe.
In a foretaste of things to come, Western governments pondered whether they
might be more accurately described as ‘economic migrants’ rather than as perse-
cuted individuals (chapter 3).
Turning ‘insiders’ into ‘outsiders’ became a familiar practice elsewhere in the twen-
tieth century as colonial empires gave way to independent countries whose claims to
legitimacy rested on the affirmation of popular sovereignty. The peace settlement after
the First World War replaced Ottoman domination of the Middle East with a series
of British and French mandates. British, French and Belgian rule in sub-Saharan
Africa supported certain ethnic groups at the expense of others, stoking rivalries that
had the potential to erupt into civil war when colonial rule came to an end. The map
of the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent was redrawn yet again following the
Second World War, culminating in the creation of new states whose history was bound
up with large-scale refugee crises (chapters 4 and 5). Emerging nation-states estab-
lished and defended their borders; governments defined the boundaries of citizenship

3
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (New York: Meridian Books, 1958),
267, 294; Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the
Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chapter 1; Norman
Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2001).
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 5

and engaged with ethnic minority and migrant populations: ‘distinguishing migrants
from locals, identifying and resettling refugees and displaced peoples—these endeav-
ours became central to the new states’ assertion of authority, and their definitions of
citizenship’.4 The conflict in Sri Lanka, which achieved independence from Britain in
1948, is a case in point. Here the new government discriminated against the predomin-
antly Hindu Tamil minority in favour of the Buddhist Sinhalese majority. The result
was a protracted civil war which by the 1980s displaced ten per cent of the total
population.
In sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia the dissolution of colonial admin-
istration caused many white settlers to flee, although these ‘returnees’ struggled
to find a place that they could call home.5 But the mainsprings of population
displacement lay elsewhere. Rival ethnic and social groups advanced claims to
power in newly independent states. Revolutionary turmoil frequently accom-
panied the retreat from empire. As in Russia, radical leaders in China, Vietnam,
Cambodia and Ethiopia defined membership of the political community in
terms of class. Each of them added population resettlement to their repertoire.
Revolution in Cambodia was followed by a prolonged refugee crisis when Viet-
namese troops dislodged the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in 1979. Fledgling
states targeted real or imagined opponents and enlisted supporters in the process
of political transformation. Civil wars fuelled by external intervention created
perfect conditions for manufacturing refugees. In Rwanda the refugee crisis had
complex origins that can be traced back at least a generation prior to the geno-
cide in 1994 (chapters 7 and 8).6
Seeking to understand the origins of population displacement is only one ele-
ment in The Making of the Modern Refugee. We also need to consider how the
modern refugee came to be construed as a ‘problem’ amenable to a ‘solution’. Part
of the answer is to be found in ideas of international action. The history of popula-
tion displacement was closely linked to the creation and operation of an interna-
tional refugee regime, meaning in the first instance a set of legal rules, norms and
agreements between sovereign states about refugees and states’ responsibilities
towards them. But this regime was never a singular and unchanging entity. Its first
incarnation followed the First World War when European states responded to the
arrival of Russian and Armenian refugees with measures that were widely seen as
ad hoc arrangements.7
After the Second World War, the new United Nations (UN) refashioned the refu-
gee regime. This framework remains largely intact. For more than six decades the

4
Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 116.
5
Andrea Smith (ed.), Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2003).
6
Aristide Zolberg, ‘The Formation of New States as a Refugee-generating Process’ AAAPSS, 467
(1983), 282–96.
7
Claudena Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: the Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995); Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society: between
Sovereigns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 99–127.
6 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

main inter-governmental agency that supports refugees has been the Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), formed in December
1950. UNHCR is responsible for supervising the application of the 1951 Conven-
tion Relating to the Status of Refugees, which safeguards the rights and welfare of
persons ‘outside the country of their nationality’, provided they could establish a
‘well-founded fear of being persecuted on grounds of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. This definition repre-
sented a departure from the pre-war doctrine whereby protection was offered to
specified groups rather than an individual who could demonstrate persecution. It
made implicit reference to Nazism but had Soviet totalitarianism even more in its
sights (chapter 3). Signatories to the 1951 Convention agreed to the principle of
non-refoulement, whereby no refugee could be returned to any country where he or
she faced the threat of persecution or torture.8 Like the pre-war League of Nations,
UNHCR had no powers to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign states who
paid its bills and who ultimately decided asylum claims. Many states refused to en-
dorse the Convention—even today only three-quarters of UN states have signed—
and it took at least a decade for the UNHCR to gain international acceptance and to
assist refugees in situations that its originators never envisaged (chapters 7 and 8).
The Convention left other forced migrants in the cold, including the person
who left ‘solely because political events were not to his liking’, as well as inter-
nally displaced persons (IDPs) who did not cross an external frontier. Greater
attention is now paid to people displaced by environmental change and natural
disasters as well as development projects.9 An important hallmark of change was
the decision by the Organisation of African Unity in 1969 to adopt a Conven-
tion on Refugee Problems in Africa, according to which a refugee was any
‘person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or
events seriously disturbing public order in either part of the whole of his coun-
try of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence
in order to seek refuge’ (chapter 8). These decisions raised the visibility of inter-
nally-displaced persons who accounted for a significant proportion of the global
total.10
UNHCR is not a fossilized entity: it too has a history.11 Governments and inter-
governmental agencies articulated a series of ‘durable solutions’ to displacement,

8
A convention ratified by nine states including France and Britain in October 1933 introduced
the principle of non-refoulement into international law. The 1951 Convention made an exception in
the case of those deemed to be a threat to national security.
9
Richard Black, Refugees, Environment and Development (Longman, 1998); Jennifer Hyndman and
James Mclean, ‘Settling like a State: Acehnese Refugees in Vancouver’ JRS, 19, no.3 (2006), 345–60.
10
Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (Allen and Unwin, 1953), 6; Andrew
Shacknove, ‘Who is a Refugee?’ Ethics, 95 (1985), 274–84; Oliver Bakewell, ‘Conceptualising
Displacement and Migration’, in Khalid Koser and Susan Martin (eds), The Migration-Displacement
Nexus: Patterns, Processes, and Policies (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 14–28; Susan Coutin, ‘The Op-
pressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen: Subjectivity in Competing Accounts of Political Violence’ Law
& Social Inquiry, 26, no.1 (2001), 63–94.
11
The key text is Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: a Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 7

namely repatriation, resettlement or ‘local integration’. To simplify a complex

story, resettlement became the chief means (along with the deterrent effects of
restrictive immigration policies) of resolving the situation of refugees who sought
asylum between the wars. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies
anticipated that DPs would wish to return to their country of origin. As the Cold
War intensified, however, policy-makers and officials devoted much of their efforts
to resettling refugees from communism. Repatriation became a dirty word. The
international response to other crises varied according to geopolitical considera-
tions: the UN entrusted the care of Palestinian refugees to a specialized ‘relief and
works’ agency as a kind of holding operation (chapter 4), but member states showed
scant interest in the refugee crisis following the partition of India which they re-
garded as a largely internal affair (chapter 5). The end of the Cold War took repatria-
tion back to the top of the agenda—although repatriation had already been adopted
in Cambodia and to a lesser extent in Vietnam during the 1980s (chapter 7).12 This
stance was accompanied by an emphasis among many wealthy countries on the need
to deter mass displacement by focusing on conditions in ‘refugee-generating’
states.
Thus the twentieth-century refugee, as a person and as a category, was shaped by
changing legal doctrine. We should not assume, however, that refugees were always
defined according to a single formula. Those displaced as a result of the partition of
India were excluded from the discussions leading to the 1951 Refugee Convention,
because they were ‘national refugees’. During the 1950s the British and the French
resolved to keep the UNHCR out of refugee crises in Hong Kong and Algeria, on
the grounds that they were a purely metropolitan responsibility. There has never
been a ‘one size fits all’ definition of refugees in the Western and non-Western
worlds.13 It is more appropriate to think of multiple and overlapping regimes. Better
still, we require a term that allows for different and contested doctrines and policies
at a governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental level. These practices
are one of the constituent components of what I shall call refugeedom.14
The concept of a refugee regime can be probed more closely to take account of
organized programmes of humanitarian assistance devised by non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). These programmes did not begin in the twentieth century,
but they became more ubiquitous and intrusive over time. The implications were

12
Gervase Coles, ‘Approaching the Refugee Problem Today’, in Gil Loescher and Laila Monahan
(eds), Refugees and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 373–410;
Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
13
Liisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: the Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National
Identity among Scholars and Refugees’ Cultural Anthropology, 7, no.1 (1992), 24–44; B.S. Chimni,
‘The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: a View from the South’ JRS, 11, no.4 (1998), 350–74; Pamela
Ballinger, ‘ “Entangled” or “Extruded” Histories? Displacement, National Refugees, and Repatriation
after the Second World War’ JRS, 25, no.3 (2012), 366–86.
14
This is my translation of the Russian term bezhenstvo that gained currency during the First
World War. ‘Refugeedom’ appears in Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World: Displacement and
Integration (New York: Barnes and Co., 1963). Schechtman lived in Russia until 1920, so he would
have been familiar with the Russian usage.
8 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

enormous. Charitable organizations established, trained and supported teams of

relief workers in the ‘field’ alongside a central administration charged with the task
of disseminating publicity and fundraising. These institutions act in ways that are
frequently taken for granted by public opinion in donor countries, but their opera-
tions need to be explained and contextualized historically. Most NGOs developed
close links with governments and international organizations that commissioned
programmes of assistance, thereby contributing to their budgets as well as raising
their profile.15
NGOs trade upon their longevity and ‘tradition’ of humanitarian relief, but they
rarely show anything other than superficial interest in their history. Nor, on the
whole, do they seek to grasp the underlying causes of population displacement.16
Part of my argument is that the humanitarianism they embody was an essential
component in fashioning the modern refugee as a passive and ‘traumatized’ object
of intervention as compared to the active, purposeful and much-travelled relief
worker, a distinction that was not altered by the so-called shift from relief-based to
rights-based humanitarianism. But the distinction is not just between the institu-
tions of relief and the object of their concern. NGOs themselves might differ in
approach, for example between faith-based and secular organizations. What was
their relationship to intergovernmental bodies, to governments, to one another, and
to refugees? What were their chosen instruments of action? What assumptions did
staff workers take with them as they moved from one site of displacement to
another?17
Critics point to a lack of accountability and transparency in the ‘humanitarian
international’, reflecting the asymmetrical relations between donors and recipi-
ents.18 Historical evidence suggests that good intentions derived from outrage at
the treatment meted out to refugees. Cultural constructions of humanitarian pur-
posefulness were an understandable response to human desperation and a tactic to
stimulate public sympathy and generosity. Relief efforts were at times infused with

15
Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (Tauris, 1993); Elizabeth G. Ferris, Beyond
Borders: Refugees, Migrants and Human Rights in the Post-Cold War Era (Geneva: World Council of
Churches, 1993), 35–65; Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (eds), Contemporary States of Emergency:
the Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010); Michael Barnett,
Empire of Humanity: a History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
16
William F. Fisher, ‘Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices’ Annual
Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 439–64; Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Hu-
manitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 220–3, 236–7; Michael Barnett and
Thomas Weiss (eds), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
17
David Chandler, ‘The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How Human Rights NGOs Shaped
a New Humanitarian Agenda’ HRQ, 23, no.3 (2001), 678–700; Nida Kirmani and Ajaz Ahmed
Khan, ‘Does Faith Matter? An Examination of Islamic Relief ’s Work with Refugees and Internally
Displaced Persons’ RSQ, 27, no.2 (2008), 41–50; Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein (eds), Sacred
Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
18
Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (Oxford: James
Currey, 1997); Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Barbara Harrell-Bond and Eftihia Voutira, ‘In Search of “Invisible” Actors:
Barriers to Access in Refugee Research’ JRS, 20, no. 2 (2007), 281–98.
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 9

a sense of displacement as a gendered calamity, persuading humanitarians of the

need to provide for female refugees and orphaned children who had been ab-
ducted. Long-term plans also appealed to governments and relief workers, as in the
doctrine of ‘rehabilitating’ refugees in order to prepare them for life as prospective
citizens when they resettled. Aid agencies and politicians embraced the idea of
‘development’ as a means to support refugees and forestall future refugee crises.
The antecedents of this idea stretch further back in time than is realized.
For many of the world’s refugees the characteristic experience has been incar-
ceration. This is not to discount those who managed to survive as ‘self-settled’ refu-
gees: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, UNHCR estimated that around
four in 10 registered refugees lived in a camp (the figure is higher in sub-Saharan
Africa). The refugee camp too has a history, as a modern site of enumeration, cat-
egorization and assessment by officials and relief workers. When and for what
reasons did this become an acceptable practice, and why did refugee camps emerge
in some situations and not in others? What were the implications for the security
and well-being of refugees? These questions have been addressed by human geog-
raphers, political scientists and social anthropologists, but historians have scarcely
touched upon them. The refugee camp is something of a double-edged sword: a
device for managing refugees, and a means of mobilizing refugees ideologically and
militarily. History puts administrative practice and refugee experience alike into
proper perspective.19
A focus on legal formulations, bureaucratic practices and material deprivation
nevertheless supplies only a partial picture.20 Refugees were (and are) regularly
forced to live in extreme conditions, without necessarily being deprived of the
capacity to exercise a degree of control over their own lives. As Aihwa Ong indi-
cates, ‘in official and public domains refugees become subjects of norms, rules,
and systems, but they also modify practices and agendas while nimbly deflecting
control and interjecting critique’.21 Yet they are habitually portrayed as if they are
without agency, like corks bobbing along on the surface of an unstoppable wave
of displacement. In a banal manifestation of the extent to which speechlessness
and passivity have become the norm, it is now possible to purchase a plastic
‘model refugee family’, whose miniatures can be assembled as part of a war-gaming
scenario in order to lend it greater ‘authenticity’. It consists of a small group of
women and children, their headscarves giving them the appearance of ‘Balkan
refugees’, disconsolately surveying an imaginary landscape. They are meant to

19
Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 5–10; Sarah Kenyon
Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps
and Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).
20
David Turton, ‘Conceptualising Forced Migration’ RSC Working Paper, no.12 (Oxford: RSC,
2003); Oliver Bakewell, ‘Research beyond the Categories: the Importance of Policy Irrelevant Research
into Forced Migration’ JRS, 21, no.4 (2008), 432–53.
21
Aihwa Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), xvii; Peter Loizos, ‘Misconceiving Refugees?’, in Renos Papadopoulos (ed.),
Therapeutic Care for Refugees: No Place Like Home (Karnac Books, 2002), 41–56.
10 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

convey a helpless inability to contain or comprehend what is happening to them.

As we shall see, portraying refugees as bewildered and bereft victims has a long
genealogy.
Anonymity too is a central conceit of modern representation. Mass displace-
ment is taken to render refugees indistinguishable. The unnamed individual em-
bodies the condition of refugees everywhere who cannot avoid their amalgamation
into a collective category of concern. One major NGO issued a glossy booklet in
1970 to appeal for funds, making the point that ‘this booklet bears no title, only a
picture of an unnamed refugee. That is not an oversight. It is untitled as a token of
respect for the vast number of nameless refugees whose tenuous claim to identity
is constantly threatened; lost in the meaningless anonymity of the dismal statistics
on human tragedy’.22 No-one captured this better than the French critic Roland
Barthes in his blistering attack on ‘exotic’ travel films of the 1950s that displayed ‘a
romantic essence of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his
technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal
condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and
woman weeping and praying at home’. He added that the same applied to refu-
gees, ‘a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a moun-
tain: to identify them is of course unnecessary; they are eternal essences of refugees,
which it is the nature of the East to produce’. This made it unnecessary to supply
historical context. The image, so to say, speaks for itself.23
This ‘eternal essence’ informs much of the photographic record of displacement,
which is largely how the twentieth century came to know refugees. A cluster of
renowned mid-twentieth century photographers ensured that a visual record sur-
vived of civil wars in Spain and China (in the work of Robert Capa), the Partition
of India (Margaret Bourke-White) and the Korean War (Bert Hardy). In recent
times photographers such as Simon Norfolk and Alixandra Fazzina have added to
the archive.24 Sometimes the image serves as an aesthetic statement, as in the
famous photograph taken in Nasir Bagh refugee camp by Steve McCurry of an
‘Afghan girl’, beautiful and exotic, but unidentified and de-contextualized.25 Major
international organizations and NGOs have employed staff photographers to
record conflict as well as life in refugee camps. Only on rare occasions are people
identified, and often (as in UNHCR photographs of successive High Commis-
sioners) this is to highlight the stature of important officials, whose serious gaze
implies authority and determination, or the compassion shown by humanitarian
celebrities. The British fashion photographer Rankin took a series of photographs
of Congolese refugees who settled in Mugunga camp, Goma, and created a small

22
UNHCR Records of the Central Registry 1951–1970, Fonds 11, Series 1, 4/14, LWF,
1967–71.
23
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Vintage, 1993), 95–6, emphasis added; Anna Szörény, ‘The Images
Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee-table Books’ Visual Studies, 21, no.1 (2006), 24–41.
24
See <http://www.simonnorfolk.com/>. Fazzina was awarded the UNHCR’s Nansen Medal in
2010 for ‘her striking coverage of the devastating human consequences of war’.
25
McCurry announced in April 2001 that he had ‘found’ her again, and that her name is Sharbat
Gula.
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 11

exhibition for Oxfam, ‘to put faces to the statistics’. He added, without a trace of
irony, ‘I’d love to go back’.26 These images are not straightforward snapshots of real-
ity but rather constitute an ‘iconography of predicament’, which are framed in
such a way as to stimulate compassion and loosen wallets.27 Their timelessness
neither explains displacement nor illuminates refugees’ strategies for survival.
I have dwelt at some length on the question of anonymity because it is part of a
larger issue, namely the general absence of refugees in historical scholarship. It may
be that this invisibility reflects a belief—difficult to sustain in the new millen-
nium—that refugees emerged only fleetingly on the stage of history before being
restored to a more settled existence. There is still a tendency to regard refugee crises
as temporary and unique, rather than as ‘recurring phenomena’.28 Their suppos-
edly episodic appearance and tangential life renders refugees less prominent than
other social groups that have left a clear footprint in the documentary record. It
might be thought that refugees themselves contributed to this state of affairs by
preferring to forget their ordeal, but as we shall see the evidence does not sustain
such a blanket explanation. In respect of refugees we therefore need to explain the
‘production of neglect’.29
Finally, to bring refugees closer to the centre of this story is to explore and go
beyond their responses to displacement. The testimony of refugees speaks to a funda-
mental alteration in their lives. Tesfay, an Eritrean refugee told Caroline Moorehead
that ‘at home I always felt safe. I was respected, popular, I had friends. Here I knew
no one. I dreaded having to tell my story again and again, to lawyers, to the doctor, to
the Home Office. The only place I could find to live was the past’.30 This disconsolate
statement underscores the importance of human relationships and connections.
They may, as in Tesfay’s case, connect to officials who required him to list his creden-
tials. But this hardly exhausts the significance of the networks in which refugees are
enmeshed. Refugees have been linked to one another across time and space as well as
being connected to host populations and to former friends and neighbours who
stayed put. These relationships and networks are multi-faceted. To quote Joan Scott,
‘How are those who cross the thresholds received? If they belong to a group different
from one already “inside”, what are the terms of their incorporation? How do the
new arrivals understand their relationship to the place they have entered?’31 These
issues are threaded throughout The Making of the Modern Refugee.

26
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7680597.stm>, and his website at <http://www.
rankin.co.uk/bio.aspx>.
27
Terence Wright, ‘Moving Images: the Media Representation of Refugees’ Visual Studies, 17, no.1
(2002), 53–66.
28
Barry Stein, ‘The Refugee Experience: Defining the Parameters of a Field of Study’ IMR, 15,
nos.1–2 (1981), 320–30, at 321. For a pioneering attempt to survey the European dimension, see
Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
29
Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 84.
30
Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: a Journey among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005), 233.
31
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 178; Emanuel Marx, ‘The Social World of Refugees: a
Conceptual Framework’ JRS, 3, no.3 (1990), 189–203; E. Valentine Daniel and John Knudsen (eds),
Mistrusting Refugees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
12 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee

I argue that refugees have helped to fashion themselves by recourse to history. In

other words, the past has been a means to express their predicament and a channel
for articulating and validating the possibilities of collective action. Whether en-
gaged in politics, cultural activities or military campaigns, and whether retaliating,
seeking restitution, or simply looking for a quiet life, a sense of history was often
close to the surface of refugees’ self-expression. To take this seriously is to think
about the resources that refugees could call upon or create, such as memorial books
commemorating the towns and villages that Jewish Holocaust survivors left behind
in Central Europe after the Second World War and that Palestinians were forced to
abandon in 1948. Financial and other tangible support from groups overseas also
points to the presence of the past, because diaspora presupposes a history of migra-
tion, including forced displacement.32
Politics matters in affording refugees and their descendants the opportunity to
engage with past episodes and sites of displacement and ‘re-placement’. The end of
communism in Europe altered the terrain by creating conditions for the public
commemoration of Soviet-era deportations, for example among Crimean Tatars,
and of other displacements, such as those in the Italian-Yugoslav borderlands
(chapter 9). But it is not always easy to establish a clear-cut link between political
change and refugees’ ability or willingness to confront the past. Those who were
forced to flee as young adults following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974
have now reached middle age. A new generation has grown up knowing this his-
tory through the tales told by their parents and grandparents. What of other sites
of displacement? How far have the children and grandchildren of Chinese refugees
who fled to Hong Kong after 1949 begun to engage with the history of displace-
ment? What role did ‘refugee historians’ play in tracing and commemorating
refugeedom in Rwanda and Burundi during the 1960s–70s and in 1994, and for
what audience did they write?
I draw things together by reflecting on the uses to which refugees have put his-
tory and how history has given them a voice, even where the consequences may be
disquieting. Refugees appropriated and interpreted history as a key resource that
helped them to make sense of their displacement. This is invariably a contested
process, exposing multiple and divisive viewpoints.33 Stories can become histories
capable of perpetuating conflict and sustaining further episodes of displacement.
Here we come full circle: displacement exposed refugees to the apparatus of the
state and the power exercised by non-state actors. Refugees might consequently
aspire to exercise power on their own behalf, perhaps to turn the tables on those
who had persecuted them in the first place. The resolution of refugeedom might
culminate in reconciliation with one’s erstwhile enemies, but it could also summon
retribution and a call to arms. Although one would still be left with the insistent

32
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 1997); Nicholas Van Hear, New Diasporas:
the Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities (London: UCL Press, 1998).
33
John C. Knudsen, Capricious Worlds: Vietnamese Life Journeys (New Brunswick: Transaction Pub-
lishers, 2005); Loring Danforth and Riki van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and
the Politics of Memory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
 Introduction: The Making of the Modern Refugee 13

claims asserted by sovereign states, the most hopeful outcome (dare one say?) is to
build cosmopolitan coalitions between refugees and non-refugees, promoting
political debate, transparent justice, economic growth and social equality.
These considerations explain my decision to organize the material geograph-
ically and chronologically. Some episodes and sites necessarily get short shrift.
I have said virtually nothing about refugees in countries such as Colombia, El
Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, partly because I did not want my discussion
to be dominated by the history of US intervention, but I hope my approach will
prove useful to students of protracted refugee situations in Central and Latin
America. Notwithstanding this omission, my global history shows how the prac-
tices and legacies of population displacement were not limited to one particular
time or place but extended far and wide.34 The consequences are also better under-
stood by stretching the canvas as wide as possible. Refugees frequently demon-
strated an awareness of displacement elsewhere, and it would be strange indeed if
historians overlooked these connections.
The Making of the Modern Refugee thus proposes a distinctive approach to the
subject by bringing the causes and consequences of global population displace-
ment within a single frame. It seeks to explain the circumstances, practices and
possibilities of population displacement. It examines structures and networks of
power, social experience and human agency in various situations. It asks how the
lives that were dismantled by involuntary displacement might at the same time be
re-assembled. Whose lives took on a more positive meaning, why and in what
circumstances? Beyond this, it explores how a particular means of thinking about
refugees was deployed—how refugees came to be recognized by and beyond the
realm of law, including by those who never came face to face with refugees. Under
what conditions did refugees break free of the designation? In what ways did they
seek to transcend or, conversely, to embrace their displacement: might this be not
only a condition of being in the world but also a means of self-realization?35 What
does history have to say about refugees, and to refugees? History can help answer
questions as to how refugees became an omnipresent part of the twentieth-century
world, and how they negotiated the turbulent currents of displacement and the
conditions imposed by the refugee regime; how, in short, there were many ways to
be a refugee.

34
Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002).
35
E. Valentine Daniel, ‘The Refugee: a Discourse on Displacement’, in Jeremy MacClancy (ed.),
Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
270–86.
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 PA RT I
EMPIRES OF REFUGEES
This page intentionally left blank
 There were refugees everywhere. It was as if the entire world had to move or
was waiting to move
(Homer Folks, 1920)

Most nineteenth-century Europeans did not encounter refugees, but the conflagra-
tion that consumed Europe during the First World War (1914–18) ensured that
the word soon tripped incessantly and miserably off the tongue. Public opinion in
belligerent and neutral states alike became accustomed to stories of the torment
endured by civilian victims at the hands of invading troops, although in fact this
offered a partial reading of events, which overlooked the domestic origins of popu-
lation displacement. Relief efforts concentrated on alleviating civilian suffering
until such time as the war ended and refugees could return to their homes. But
‘home’ itself changed as a result of war, revolution and the formation of new states.
In post-war Europe, too, refugees emerged as a ‘problem’ requiring international
action. How did all this come about?
In 1914 the territorial contours of Europe largely reflected the diplomatic settle-
ment that ended the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier. The great continental
empires—German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman—incorporated a di-
verse multinational population. Nineteenth-century revolts against dynastic rule had
been suppressed and their leaders forced into exile where they carried the torch for
liberalism and national self-expression. By 1918 these imperial polities vanished from
the scene. The altered political cartography profoundly affected ordinary people who
belonged to nation-states that claimed sovereignty in their name. Now the emphasis
was on cultural and ethnic homogeneity, rather than the heterogeneity and pluralism
that characterized imperial administration. There would be losers as well as winners
in the fundamental transformation wrought by war and peace-making.1
Nothing prepared Europe for the terrible conflagration that consumed millions
of lives during the Great War, or for the vast movements of refugees and prisoners
of war that were a prominent feature of the continental conflict. Yet to imply that

1
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 331–68; Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall
of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (Routledge, 2001). In The Dark Side
of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Michael
Mann argues that democratization opened the way for majority ethnic groups to persecute minorities.
Compare Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’ American Historical
Review, 107, no.4 (2002), 1158–78.
18 Empires of Refugees

the period before the outbreak of war in 1914 was an era of uninterrupted peace
would be to give a very one-dimensional reading of European history. Wars such
as those between Russia and Turkey in 1877 and in the Balkan States in 1912–13
had momentous implications for domestic politics. Each big imperial polity ex-
tended its administrative and military capability. This process was contested, its
outcome uncertain. State-building meant developing closer controls over ethnic
minorities, some of whom had only relatively recently been absorbed into the
state, as in Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and the Caucasus. The same applied
to Ottoman-ruled Eastern Anatolia, whose ethnically heterogeneous landscape was
irrevocably altered by the settlement of Muslim refugees during the late nineteenth
century. Population resettlement including forced migration and expulsion was a
key instrument of state-building in this ‘shatter zone’ of empires.2
The First World War unleashed an unprecedented continental refugee crisis.
Civilians no less than military personnel experienced war as a time of protracted
displacement. In part this was because the eruption of fighting across large swathes
of territory on the European mainland caused non-combatants to avoid the risk of
enemy occupation by moving to the interior. But invasion-induced panic was not
the only motor of displacement. Mobilization for ‘total war’ expressed itself with
particular vehemence in imperial polities whose rulers knew that a challenge to
their authority could come from any quarter, including minority populations.
Although the strength and depth of nationalist sentiment should not be exagger-
ated, many minorities nevertheless had a counterpart amongst the inhabitants of
adjacent empires. This made for an unsettling situation. Armenians lived under
Ottoman jurisdiction but others were to be found among the subjects of the Tsar;
Poles and Jews were scattered between the empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary and
Germany; Ukrainians were not confined to the Russian Empire but lived under
Austro-Hungarian rule as well. Might they not seize the chance to link up with
co-ethnics, wrecking central authority and increasing the prospect of autonomy or
even independence? We should be cautious about assuming that the outcome was
preordained: as one historian writes, ‘the road from the Ottoman imperial kaleido-
scope to the rigidly defined world of the successor nation-states was full of false
starts, reversals and uncharted alternatives’. The same was true elsewhere. But
nervous imperial administrators took pre-emptive action by targeting and relocat-
ing ‘suspect’ national minorities.3

2
Donald Bloxham, ‘The Great Unweaving: Forced Population Movement in Europe, 1875–1949’,
in Richard Bessel and Claudia Haake (eds), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 167–218; Eric Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris
System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations,
and Civilizing Missions’ AHR, 113, no.5 (2008), 1313–43; Mark Levene, ‘The Tragedy of the
Rimlands: Nation-state Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–1948’, in Panikos
Panayi and Pippa Virdee (eds), Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration
in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 51–78; Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (eds),
Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman
Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
3
Reşat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants and Refugees (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2009), 136.
 Introduction to Part I 19

To advance these arguments is to bring population displacement, humanitarian-

ism and politics into closer alignment. The creation of refugees opened up political
possibilities. We enter a realm of political discourse in which refugees identified the
source of their misery in actions taken by government officials. Displacement was
framed as persecution. One ironic outcome was that minorities who were dis-
placed on account of their nationality mobilized around the figure of the refugee.
In the disintegrating Russian and Ottoman empires refugees helped to dig the
foundations for new nation-states, thereby bringing about the very outcome that
imperial administrators hoped to avoid.
International and transnational groups also entered the field of refugee relief.
Diasporic organizations that emerged as a result of emigration to Western Europe
and North America helped keep the suffering of minorities in the public eye. Dis-
interested humanitarians—those without direct ties to persecuted minorities in
Eastern Europe and the Balkans—drew upon a prior history of compassionate
action and a rhetoric that dwelled upon the behaviour of ‘uncivilized’ states. Cul-
tural representations of enemy barbarity were not new: in Britain and France, for
example, they reproduced stereotypes about Turkish brutality towards Armenian
Christians. Sometimes these attitudes required adjustment, as when the publicity
given to Belgian colonial rapaciousness in the Congo gave way to stories of German
atrocity in occupied Belgium and the suffering endured by Belgian refugees in
1914. Late nineteenth-century conflicts, the Balkan Wars and above all the First
World War enlarged the scope of humanitarian efforts and sometimes substituted
for government intervention.4
When the war ended and the map of Europe was redrawn, refugees became a
crucial element of efforts to rethink domestic and international politics. Empires
were ‘unmixed’, and nation-states became a powerful instrument for the manufac-
ture of new refugees.5 The new League of Nations imposed minority treaties on the
successor states of Central-Eastern Europe, in the hope that national minorities
would live more securely in a state that bore the name of a titular majority. These
expectations were often confounded. Elsewhere, Greece and Turkey fought over
the carcass of the old Ottoman Empire, the outcome of which was an imposed
exchange of population in order to realize the principle of national homogeneity.
Revolution in Russia and the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War landed the League
with a headache in the shape of a mass exodus of refugees from Russia who (it was
said at the time) threatened to overwhelm neighbouring states.
In the longer term the battle lines were drawn in Spain, Italy and Germany,
where Fascism demonstrated that political extremism retained its capacity to gener-
ate fresh displacement. Partly as a result of the immediate post-war crisis and the
association between refugees and state security, European governments imposed
tough border controls. Jews in particular suffered persecution and discrimination.

4
Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire,
1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
5
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples’, in Karen Barkey and
Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: the Soviet Union and
the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 155–80.
20 Empires of Refugees

A prominent American journalist spoke of ‘a whole nation of people [that] although

they come from many nations, wanders the world [and] batters at every conceivable
door’.6 In Southern Europe the bitter Spanish Civil War led to widespread internal
population displacement before culminating in victory for the Nationalists and the
flight of vanquished Republicans, men, women and children, to France and later to
South America. Foreigners routinely regarded Spanish refugees not as heroic exiles
from Fascism, but as a ‘problem’.
Government budgetary constraints and the scale of the refugee crisis allowed
NGOs to raise their profile. Officials from the German Red Cross assisted refugees
from Poland. The Russian diaspora looked after refugees in Western Europe; Jewish
and Armenian diasporic agencies did likewise. New transnational organizations
appeared on the scene. Some were driven by religious beliefs that made Armenian
Christians especially deserving clients. Save the Children Fund (established in
1919) on the other hand quickly established a reputation for impartial relief work,
as did the Quakers. Humanitarianism thrived on notions of ‘rescue’, never more so
than when it came to assisting women and children. It was infused too with ideas
of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘development’, doctrines that became widely disseminated
in later decades but whose gestation can be traced back to the 1920s.
Where did this leave refugees? They were enlisted in fund-raising campaigns.
They became the object of attention by patriotic leaders who mobilized them for
political purposes and by professional experts for whom the presence of refugees
validated their claim to intervene in society more broadly. Refugees were expected
to be seen and not heard. They struggled to find a space in which to articulate their
own aspirations. As we shall see, Spanish Civil War refugees constituted the clear-
est exception, refusing to see themselves as pure victims and instead being vocal
custodians of a political alternative to Fascism. But to dismiss others is to overlook
the ways in which ordinary refugees, whether from Armenia, Russia, Greece or
Turkey made their presence felt as much through their deeds as their words. Their
encounter with host societies could be compelling and transformative.

6
Dorothy Thompson, Refugees: Anarchy or Organisation? (New York: Random House, 1938), 11;
Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2010), 121–37.
 1
Crucibles of Population Displacement
Before and During the Great War

Nous n’étions plus personne

(an unnamed Belgian refugee)

P R E LU D E : C O N F L I C T A N D D I S P L A C E M E N T
O N T H E E U RO P E A N P E R I P H E RY

If asked to identify refugees at the turn of the century, contemporaries would have
mentioned Jews who migrated to North America and Western Europe in order to
escape poverty and discrimination in Eastern Europe. Tsarist Russia institutional-
ized discrimination and afforded no protection against the charge that they
exploited peasants and workers. The large annual outflow of impoverished Jews
created a diaspora that advertised the suffering of those who were left behind. But
we need to cast the net more widely to grasp the more fundamental political and
social processes that turned refugees into a ‘problem’ in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. In South-Eastern Europe, at the edge of the three largest
continental empires, economic competition compounded religious and ethnic
differences. Christians, Muslims and Jews all felt the cold blast of persecution.
Territorial expansion, particularly on the part of the Russian Empire, raised the
stakes much earlier. The Crimean War witnessed the mass flight of Orthodox Chris-
tian Bulgarian peasants in 1854 following reprisals by Ottoman troops. Bulgarian
refugees also settled in Greece and Romania from where they campaigned against
Turkish ‘misrule’ in Bulgaria. Another consequence of the conflict was the orches-
trated departure of 300,000 Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire. Notwithstand-
ing evidence of these and other deportations, including Circassian and other Muslim
groups expelled from the Caucasus during the 1860s, unsupported generalizations
about ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the nineteenth century are unhelpful, because official
policy was much less clear-cut. Nevertheless, these population movements contrib-
uted to land and religious disputes and further destabilized the region.1

1
Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922
(Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1995), 17, 29, 47–8; Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 108–22; Hakan
Kirimli, ‘Emigrations from the Crimea to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War’ MES, 44,
no.5 (2008), 751–73; Mara Kozelsky, ‘Casualties of Conflict: Crimean Tatars during the Crimean
War’ Slavic Review, 67, no.4 (2008), 866–91.
22 Empires of Refugees

Rivalry between empires made for an unsettling picture. The contest between the
Habsburg and Ottoman Empires for supremacy stretched back for decades, but it
acquired particular significance in the last quarter of the century when imperial rulers
began to exert closer control over their borders and subjects of different faiths and
ethnicity. In a sign of things to come, in 1873 a small group of Orthodox Christian
merchants and peasants living in Bosnia and fearing for their safety and complaining
of economic discrimination and hardship sought refuge in Habsburg-ruled Croatia
where they demanded protection. The authorities in Vienna found themselves in a
quandary, because they did not wish to pick a quarrel with the Sublime Porte. When
Croatian activists agitated on behalf of refugees who arrived in 1875 following an
uprising against Ottoman rule, Habsburg officials again disavowed their support for
refugees whom they portrayed as insurgents to be repatriated, not as political inno-
cents to be offered sanctuary. The numbers were substantial: at least 100,000 Otto-
man subjects fled to Austria-Hungary from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The refugee crisis
was quickly internationalized, because their claims to have been persecuted by Otto-
man irregulars (‘bashi-bazouks’) were taken up by foreign sympathizers including in
Serbia and Croatia. Vienna changed its stance in 1876, no longer opting to placate
Constantinople but instead keen to exploit its weakness.2
War between Russia and Turkey, brought about by Ottoman suppression of the
revolts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria, and by Russia’s counter-attack, infused
by ideas of Pan-Slavism, caused upwards of two million civilians to flee. Refugees
spoke of the ‘great unweaving of ’93’ (93 sökümü), the year 1293 in the Ottoman
Rumi calendar equating to 1877. Bulgarian extremists were accused of massacring
Muslim neighbours as well as Ottoman soldiers, and this behaviour in turn led to
reprisals. Organized expulsions characterized the conflict: an Orthodox refugee de-
scribed a ‘complete clearing out of the Serbs of Bosnia’.3 Muslims fled from Serbia
and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Anatolia, where they were joined by Circassians and
Kurds from the Russian Empire. The Treaty of Berlin made provision for Christian
Orthodox refugees to return to their homes. Nevertheless Macedonia, having been
absorbed by Bulgaria, was returned to Ottoman jurisdiction, with the result that
Orthodox Christians now fled in large numbers to Bulgaria where they formed the
backbone of revolutionary organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Turkish
rule, and whose members attempted to recruit ethnic Bulgarians who remained in
Macedonia. In Eastern Anatolia, the mass migration of Circassian and Chechen
refugees triggered pogroms and the forced conversion of Armenians in 1895–96.
Flows of refugees and returnees exacerbated land and religious disputes, making for
an unstable situation throughout this economically underdeveloped region.4

2
I draw, with the author’s permission, on an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Jared Manasek,
Columbia University.
3
Quoted in Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: a Short History (Macmillan, 1994), 133. On Bulgaria, see
McCarthy, Death and Exile, 71–6; Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 117.
4
Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), 99–107; McCarthy, Death and Exile, 77–81, 113; Uğur Ümit
Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–50 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 19.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 23

Regional instability resurfaced a generation later. The victory of the self-styled

‘Young Turks’ in 1908 alarmed Vienna by appearing to stimulate resurgent Otto-
man claims to Bosnia, where a substantial Muslim population still remained.
Austria’s hasty annexation of Bosnia inflamed Serbia in turn. In 1912, Serbia, Mon-
tenegro, Bulgaria and Greece joined forces in an attempt to rid Europe of the
vestiges of Ottoman administration. Ethnic Turks fled from Western Thrace when
it became clear that Greece had in mind a programme of Hellenization. The vio-
lence inflicted on Muslim landlords and merchants in Macedonia by anti-Ottoman
partisans caused a sudden influx of refugees of 180,000 Muslims to Constantinople
and other towns in the first half of 1913. Greek merchants were attacked in turn.
When the anti-Ottoman coalition broke apart later that year, Greece and Serbia
sided with Turkey against Bulgaria. Thousands of ethnic Bulgarian refugees fled
from Thrace, Macedonia, Dobrudja and Anatolia to the relative safety of Bulgaria.
The short but bloody war between Turkey and Bulgaria ended with the Convention
of Adrianople that sanctioned the ‘voluntary’ transfer of around 47,000 Christians
from Eastern Thrace to Bulgaria and 49,000 Muslims from Western Thrace to
Turkey if they lived within 15 kilometres from the frontier. Within a few months
Greece and Turkey planned a similar population exchange. Displacement prior to
and during the Balkan Wars thus carried echoes of previous conflicts and prefigured
later upheavals.5
Relief measures also took place first and foremost within a local context. In the
wake of the Crimean War, the Ottoman state built a new town in central Dobrudja
(Megdidia, in present-day Romania) to accommodate refugees. In the 1870s
bourgeois activists mobilized in Dubrovnik and Zagreb and further afield on
behalf of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, feeding the public a diet of graphic
stories of Ottoman misrule. Later on, in what remained in Europe of the crum-
bling empire, traditional millets or communities organized on religious lines to
support the newcomers, particularly those of non-Muslim faith. Muslim refugees
including Circassians expelled from the Russian-administered Caucasus settled
on the Ottoman periphery, in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. A series of central gov-
ernment commissions dealt with those who moved to Eastern Anatolia. Refugees
were housed in camps outside Constantinople, accommodated in over-burdened
villages or assigned plots of land by the government. New settlements were named
Muhacirköy (‘Refugees’ Village’) or Bosnaköy (‘The Bosnians’ Village’).6
Before long, humanitarian relief efforts acquired an international aspect. Two
inveterate British travellers, Georgina Mackenzie and Pauline Irby, published a
sympathetic account in 1865 of the Christian population in Serbia and Bosnia; it
went through several editions in 1877, with the enthusiastic endorsement of

5
McCarthy, Death and Exile, 150, 156–61; Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, 122–4, 132.
6
Kemal Karpat, ‘Ottoman Urbanism: the Crimean Emigration to Dobruca and the Founding of
Mediciye, 1856–1878’, in Karpat, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History (Leiden: Brill,
2002), 202–34; McCarthy, Death and Exile, 157; Alexandre Toumarkine, Les migrations des popula-
tions musulmanes balkaniques en Anatolie, 1876–1913 (Istanbul: Isis, 1995), 79–103, at 89; Dawn
Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 42–3, 89–91, 97–9, 110–20; Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 110, 114.
24 Empires of Refugees

Gladstone during his campaign for the ‘emancipation of the Christians from the
Turkish yoke’. Journalists such as W.T. Stead and scholars including E.A. Free-
man and James Bryce also lent their support, helping to establish refugees as
exemplars of a submerged Bulgarian ‘nation’.7 On the opposing side, the Tory
millionaire Angela Burdett-Coutts established a ‘Turkish Compassionate Fund’,
which denounced Russian interference and assisted Muslim peasants who were
forced out of Bulgaria and Rumelia during the war of 1877–78. In what was to
become a familiar scenario, first-hand testimony of refugees was conspicuous by
its absence, the emphasis being instead on the atrocities perpetrated by one party
or another, and the expertise deployed by sensitive foreign relief workers who
flocked to the scene.8
Relief work continued with the formation by Noel and Charles Roden Buxton
of the Macedonian Relief Committee (MRF) in 1903, which collected funds on
behalf of those caught up in the revolt against Ottoman rule in Macedonia and
Thrace. During the First Balkan War Charles Buxton invited his sister-in-law,
Eglantyne Jebb to visit Macedonia to report on the hospitals that the MRF had
established. She concluded that refugees might best create a ‘self-supporting life’ by
being enabled to return to their villages: ‘repatriation should appeal to all lovers of
sound charity’.9 Jebb combined her speaking engagements on behalf of Macedo-
nian refugees with a new-found interest in agricultural cooperation, a connection
that anticipated later developments. Later, in 1913, fresh fighting during the
Second Balkan War exposed the suffering of more refugees who crowded into
Bulgaria. The government struggled to cope. Politicians decided to settle Bulgarian
peasants in the villages that Muslim farmers had abandoned. Alongside these meas-
ures, international networks of activists once again raised the standard of humani-
tarianism. The Anglo-Hellenic League was one such instrument of external relief,
the International Committee for the Relief of Turkish Refugees another.10
The intensification of antagonism was nowhere more apparent than in the
Ottoman Empire, where Armenians did not escape this disturbing combination of
ethnic, religious and economic rivalry. Relations between Muslims and Christians
had deteriorated in the late 1890s, culminating in forced conversions and massa-
cres of Armenians in 1896, widely publicized in Western Europe by journalists
such as E.J. Dillon. The situation was complicated by Tsarist Russia’s ambitions in
the region. The Sultan’s concession to Armenians of some autonomy in Eastern
Anatolia antagonized local Muslims, who found a ready ally among the Young
Turks, one of whose leaders insisted that there should be ‘no nationalities in Turkey.

7
Their book was translated into Serbian at the time and regularly reprinted in the 1980s and
1990s. On Stead, Freeman and Irby and their links to Gladstone, see Rebecca Gill, ‘Calculating
Compassion in War: the “New Humanitarian” Ethos in Britain, 1870–1918’ (unpublished PhD,
University of Manchester, 2005), chapter 2.
8
Gill, ‘Calculating Compassion’, 73–8, emphasizes that ‘foreign relief work was used as a cover for
covert diplomacy’.
9
Linda Mahood, Feminism and Voluntary Action: Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children, 1876–1928
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 149.
10
McCarthy, Death and Exile, 119–20.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 25

[We] do not want Turkey to become a new Austria-Hungary’. The outbreak of war
in 1914 prevented the Sultan’s measure from being implemented, but it unleashed
an even more tragic series of events.11
Faced with an unending refugee crisis, Turkey established a new ‘Directorate for
the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants’ in 1913, charged with responsibility for
finding refugees somewhere to live and, more ominously conducting ethnographic
investigations of Ottoman society to map political affiliations and discover the
extent of ‘Turkishness’. Prominent victims of this pre-war downward social mobil-
ity, such as Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Dr Mehmed Nâzım, Dr Mehmed Reshid and
Mustafa Kemal, expressed a desire for retribution:
How [wrote Talaat Pasha] could a person forget the plains, the meadows, watered with
the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had stalled
their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs . . . to leave
them to our slaves. This was beyond a person’s endurance. I am prepared to sacrifice
gladly the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks and
the Montenegrins.12
How far his uncompromising response was representative of Muslim refugees who
settled in Anatolia is impossible to say. These turbulent and violent episodes reveal
little of the perceptions that ordinary refugees held of their displacement. But the
actions of Turkish officials and soldiers during the Great War indicate that they
were prepared in the name of Muslim refugees to take revenge for their pre-war
humiliation.

P O P U L AT I O N D I S P L A C E M E N T
D U R I N G T H E G R E AT WA R

The outbreak of war in July 1914 appeared to confirm the widely-held view that the
conflict would be a largely military affair. European armies were expected to engage
in military manoeuvres without significant costs for non-combatants. German
troops invaded Belgium and France. Russia, which belonged to an Entente with
Britain and France, mobilized its forces to attack Germany and Austria-Hungary.
The German army pushed back Russian forces at the battle of Tannenberg, but
Austria was unable to prevent Russia’s invasion and occupation of Galicia. Although
most informed observers anticipated a short and conclusive war, the Great War
dragged on for more than four years. Each empire mobilized massive resources that
fed the war machine, helping to prolong the conflict. This war effort required the
recruitment of civilians to replenish the army but also entailed their contribution as
producers and suppliers of munitions, equipment, food and fodder. The conflict

11
Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, 33, 44–5; Nesim Şeker, ‘Demographic Engineering in the
Late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians’ MES, 43, no.3 (2007), 461–74.
12
Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, 45.
26 Empires of Refugees

dissolved the boundaries between battlefield and home front, making this (in a
phrase first popularized by the French authorities) a ‘total war’.
The wartime refugee crisis reflected the huge numbers of civilians who were di-
rectly affected, but the war also posed challenging questions about the forms and
extent of assistance. Questions arose such as how to classify and understand those
who were displaced. Who counted as ‘refugees’ and how did they come to be dis-
placed to begin with? Who determined their eligibility for assistance? How far
should central government be responsible for managing emergency relief or should
responsibility be devolved on to local and voluntary agencies and what would be
the political implications of such a decision? What impact would the presence of
large numbers of refugees have on the host community, and how might relations
between refugees and non-refugees be managed in order to maintain wartime
morale? To what extent would overseas communities become involved in assisting
distant kin affected by displacement? How would the crisis be resolved—would
refugees wish to return to their homes and if so how would repatriation be managed?
These interrelated questions have continued to dominate discussions of refugee
crises ever since.
‘Belgium was invaded by an army; Holland was invaded by a people’, wrote
Ruth Fry in her account of Quaker relief work in wartime Europe.13 Refugees fled
from Antwerp and other towns and cities during September and October 1914.
Stories of German military brutality gripped the public imagination. Entire vil-
lages were emptied of their inhabitants. Anyone caught helping Belgian men of
military age to flee the country and fight the German army faced severe retribu-
tion. German occupation authorities invited refugees to return to their homes, and
thousands did so before the first year of war was out. But the respite was only brief.
The first destination was Holland, whose population of 6.3 million was swollen by
one million Belgian refugees. Around 200,000 Belgians fled to France where they
were put to work in agriculture or producing munitions. A similar number crossed
the English Channel. By July 1918 the total number of refugees stood at 1.5 million.
In France itself the German invasion in 1914 led to the flight or expulsion of French
civilians to unoccupied parts of the country. By the beginning of 1915 the total
number of internally displaced French stood at 450,000, rising to 735,000 in July.
Refugees were quick to disseminate stories of robbery, pillage and burning, prompt-
ing government officials to accuse them of panic-mongering.14
Events elsewhere generated large movements of population. In Southern Europe,
the entry of Italy into the war in May 1915 on behalf of the Entente powers caused
87,000 ethnic Italian residents of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, primarily work-
ers from Trieste, Trento and Dalmatia, to flee to Italy and lend their support to the
Italian war effort. The Habsburg officials sent 42,000 civilians, mostly women, chil-
dren and the elderly, to internment camps where an emerging patriotic leadership

13
Ruth Fry, A Quaker Adventure: the Story of Nine Years’ Relief and Reconstruction (London: Nisbet
& Co., 1926), 100.
14
Philippe Nivet, Les réfugiés français de la Grande Guerre (1914–1920): les ‘boches du nord’ (Paris:
Economica, 2004).
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 27

took every opportunity to foster Italian nationalist sentiment. By far the greatest
impulse to population displacement came in October 1917, when the defeat of
Italian forces at Caporetto brought about the flight of half a million civilians and
one million bedraggled soldiers to cities such as Milan and Florence. Others were
urged to stay behind in the northern rural borderlands, partly to alleviate the urban
crisis and partly to make life difficult for the occupying Habsburg army; the gov-
ernment also hoped that their presence would strengthen Italy’s territorial claims
to Friuli and the Veneto.15
On the eastern front 870,000 civilians fled westwards when the Russian army in-
vaded East Prussia (see Map 1), instilling in German public opinion a fear of ‘Slav’
and Cossack brutality and placing a huge burden on the economy. In Austria the
number of refugees reached 500,000 by summer 1915, most of them from Russian-
occupied Galicia and Bukovina where the newly-installed governor resolved to
‘cleanse’ his fiefdom prior to integrating it fully into the Tsarist Empire. Russian
military commanders deported local notables and Galician Jews to the Russian inte-
rior. Ukrainian activists, who enjoyed the comparatively tolerant rule of the Habsburgs
before the war, wisely decided to flee lest they feel the wrath of the new Russian ad-
ministration. Vienna became home to around 140,000 refugees, half of them Jews.
Others hid in towns in schools or barns in Bohemia and Moravia and in Hungarian
towns. Some went back to their homes after the Austrian counter-attack in mid-
1915, but the number of refugees grew again in 1916 in the wake of Russia’s success-
ful offensive and the second Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovina.16
Following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb, Austria
invaded Serbia in autumn 1914. Although the invasion was initially repelled,
Serbian forces were defeated in November 1914 and thousands of civilians fled to
the interior. The Habsburg army targeted Serbian guerrillas, in order to forestall
what they most feared, a levée en masse, that is an uprising of the entire population.
Worse was to come a year later, when a combined Austrian and Bulgarian invasion,
backed by Germany, forced the remnants of Serbian forces to retreat across Kosovo
towards the Adriatic. En route they were attacked by Albanian guerrillas. Half a
million civilians followed suit to avoid the anticipated consequences of Bulgarian
and Habsburg occupation. They found scant sympathy from Serbian officers who
blamed them for obstructing the passage of military convoys and disrupting agri-
cultural production. The population of the provincial town of Prizren swelled from
20,000 to 150,000 in a matter of days. All told, this catastrophic displacement of
soldiers and civilians directly affected one-third of Serbia’s population.17

15
Matteo Ermacora, ‘Assistance and Surveillance: War Refugees in Italy, 1914–1918’ CEH, 16,
no.4 (2007), 445–60; Julie Thorpe, ‘Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State
Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War’, in Panayi and Virdee (eds), Refugees and the
End of Empire, 102–26.
16
Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 23; David Rechter, ‘Galicia in Vienna: Jewish Refugees in the First
World War’ Austrian History Yearbook, 28 (1997), 113–30.
17
Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
28 Empires of Refugees

Pskov

Ba l ti c
Rzhezitsa
Se a Libau Riga
Mitau
Dvinsk
Vitebsk
Smolensk
Kovno
Orsha
Königsberg Vilna
Mogilev
Danzig
Minsk
Grodno

Baranovichi Slutsk
Bialystok
Plotsk
Kobrin
Warsaw
Lodz Brest- Pinsk
Novo- Litovsk
Ivangorod Aleksandriia
Lublin Kiev

Rovno Zhitomir
Cracow L’vov
Gorlice Przemysl’ Berdichev

0 250 km

Front line, December 1914

Front line, December 1915
Front line, August-September 1916
Armistice Line, December 1917
Odessa
German occupied Russia,
December 1914
Russian occupied Austria,
December 1914
International frontier
Main railway line

Map 1: Map of the Eastern Front in the First World War

 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 29

A Scottish nurse described the retreat as ‘the first stage of a Calvary which was
to endure for several weeks. The stream of the refugees grew daily greater, mothers,
children, bedding, pots and pans, food and fodder, all packed into the jolting
wagons’. When the Bulgarian army continued its advance the party had no choice
but to cross the mountains to seek sanctuary in Albania. Others headed for Mon-
tenegro where ‘many died on those pitiless mountains, and the snow fell and
covered up their misery for ever’. Displacement was characterized by class distinc-
tion. A British officer commented that ‘the majority of the refugees were well to do
people from comfortable homes; many of the poorer people, peasants, were cling-
ing to their miserable homes towards the centre of the country’.18 Those who could
not escape faced incarceration in Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian camps. Small
numbers of guerrillas (chetniks) took to the mountainous regions of Serbia and
Montenegro and harassed the occupation regime. Refugees made their way to
Salonika, Corfu and Brindisi. Serbian schools and orphanages were established in
Nice, Tours, Grenoble, and in France’s colonies in North Africa. A few even ended
up as farm labourers in East Anglia. At least 140,000 Serbian refugees are thought
to have died during the flight to Albania or in exile. These losses and struggles
reinforced a sense of Serbian victimhood.
In the Russian Empire, the displacement of civilians reached three million in
1915 and may have climbed to seven million by the time Russia left the war in
1917. What gave rise to displacement on this scale? According to one explana-
tion, ‘as soon as our troops withdraw, the entire population becomes confused
and runs away’. Sometimes they fled, lest they lose contact with fathers and sons
who were currently serving in the Tsarist army. This did not necessarily imply a
move to distant locations. During the initial phase of retreat refugees would
often stay close to Russian troops, in the hope that the army would quickly
recapture land from the enemy, allowing them to go home. Civilians also left
their homes for fear of being terrorized by enemy troops. Nor were these fears
misplaced: ‘rumours are rife that the Germans have behaved abominably to-
wards the local population’. These verdicts generally supported the view that
population displacement was the product of mass panic. Politicians complained
that the army should do more to encourage civilians to stay put, on the grounds
that they could then disrupt the enemy’s advance. Some patriotic provincial
journalists argued that refugees ‘quit their birthplace in order to give greater
scope to our valiant army to spread its eagle wings’.19
Yet displacement was by no means solely dictated by a fearful civilian response
to punitive action by the enemy. The Russian general staff disposed of sweeping
powers to enforce the resettlement of civilians, and deemed this an appropriate
strategy in the western borderlands where the loyalties of the local population
were held to be doubtful. Within the extensive theatre of operations the Russian

18
Charles Fryer, The Destruction of Serbia in 1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),
70; M. I. Tatham, ‘The great retreat in Serbia in 1915’, in C. Purdom (ed.), Everyman at War: Sixty
Personal Narratives of the War (Dent, 1930), 374–9.
19
Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 15.
30 Empires of Refugees

high command was accused of pursuing a scorched earth policy and driving ci-
vilians from their homes. Jews bore the brunt of this policy, but it affected Poles,
Baltic farmers and others, including German colonists who had farmed in Russia
for generations. Jews and German colonists found themselves put on the same
train heading east. Tsarist officials deported Muslims on the Russian-Ottoman
border and assigned their land to Russian settlers, an ominous foretaste of the
Stalin-era deportations and expropriations. The Tsarist minister of the interior
maintained that military behaviour had no bearing on refugeedom (bezhenstvo),
which was ‘caused by a desire for self-preservation’. Other commentators took a
less coy line, openly acknowledging the routine use of compulsion. So wide-
spread were the army’s tactics that a leading Tsarist dignitary observed that
‘refugees’ constituted a minority of the displaced population, compared to the
hundreds of thousands of those who had been forcibly displaced. For a while
contemporaries distinguished between forced migrants and refugees: ‘refugee-
dom is something spontaneous, whereas administrative resettlement [vyselenie]
amounts to arbitrariness [ proizvol ]’, wrote a Russian doctor. But the distinction
soon ceased to mean anything.20
A similar distinction was drawn in Austria-Hungary, where the term ‘evacu-
ees’ was reserved for those who were ordered to leave their homes, and ‘refugees’
who had left ‘voluntarily’, including for unpatriotic reasons. A citizens’ com-
mittee in Prague contributed funds in the belief that charitable activities should
reflect refugees’ patriotic commitment to the Austrian cause—‘these refugees
are Austrian citizens, victims of Austria’s war with Russia’. Jews from Galicia
and Bukovina who fled to the interior in order to escape Russian rule confirmed
their patriotism: ‘better and truer Austrians [wrote one journalist] simply do
not exist’; another commentator lauded the refugees as ‘Austrians who have
sacrificed everything for this state and can therefore claim their rights’.21 A link
was forged elsewhere between war, patriotic necessity and population displace-
ment. Nevertheless, the presence of Jewish refugees from the shtetl inflamed
existing anti-Semitic sentiment among the non-Jewish residents of Vienna, who
all too easily fell into the habit of berating the refugees for their bad manners
and profiteering.
By far the harshest impact of the war was to be found in the Ottoman Empire
(see Map 2). Young Turk officers blamed Armenians for the successful incursion of
the Russian army in Eastern Anatolia in the winter of 1914 and charged them with
having instigated rebellion. Those who remained behind after the retreat of the
Tsarist army in July 1915 suffered a terrible fate. Hundreds of thousands of Arme-
nians were either murdered in their homes or driven out and forced to endure long

20
Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 22, 33–48; Eric Lohr, ‘The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass
Deportations, Hostages, and Violence during World War I’ Russian Review, 60, no. 3 (2001), 404–19;
Joshua Sanborn, ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during
World War 1’ JMH, 77, no.2 (2005), 290–324.
21
Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: the Jews of Habsburg Austria during World
War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 74; Thorpe, ‘Displacing Empire’, 109.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 31
0 250 km

N
RUSSIAN
Sevastopol S.F.S.R.
Bucharest

Black Sea Vladikavkaz

GEORGIAN Caspian
Batum S.S.R. Tbilisi Sea
Constantinople Trebizond ArdahanAleksandropol
Kars Lake Sevan
Erevan
AZERBAIJAN
Erzerum Sardarabad Baku
ARMENIAN S.S.R.
TURKEY S.S.R.
Lake Van
Smyrna Van
Bitlis Tabriz
Lake Urmia

Mosul
Aleppo
PERSIA
Tehran
SYRIA
Russian–Ottoman border, 1914
Baqubah Front line, December 1915
Beirut
Damascus Turkish border after
Mediterranean Sea Treaty of Sevres, 1920
IRAQ
International border, 1922
Amman Soviet republican border, 1923

Map 2: Map of Armenia and the Near East, 1914–23

and degrading marches towards Syria in what Manchester Guardian correspondent

Morgan Philips Price described as ‘a condensation of agony that almost defies
the human imagination’. Up to 250,000 Armenians evaded the deportations by
crossing the Russian border in August 1915, although one in five died en route.
More than 105,000 ex-Ottoman Armenians sought refuge in Erevan, quadrupling
its size. Of those left behind in the Ottoman Empire, few survived the forced trek
in the searing heat. Christian Assyrians along with many Kurdish inhabitants of
the empire suffered terribly as well. The intended beneficiaries of these measures
were Muslim refugees who had arrived in Turkey before and during the Balkan
Wars, and who now wanted to ensure that surviving Armenians would be unable
to reclaim their property. Turkish nationalists including many Muslim refugees
had captured the state and wanted to make Armenians pay.22
Wherever the spotlight shone, it was clear that these civilians were deprived of
the chance to decide whether to stay or to leave. No-one consulted them. They
sometimes had only a few hours to pack. Most refugees had no itinerary, no maps,
and normally no precise destination. There were few opportunities to confer with
those who had gone on ahead. Whereas the motives for pre-war migration were
clear and explicable, displacement seemed to be a meaningless momentum. Relief
workers and refugees soon invested it with significance.

22
Fatma Müge Göçek, Norman Naimark and Ronald Suny (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armeni-
ans and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Üngör,
The Making of Modern Turkey, 55–106, 108–14; Gatrell, Whole Empire Walking, 26.
32 Empires of Refugees

R E P E RTO I R E S O F A S S I S TA N C E

Against this complex background, involving large numbers of displaced persons,

their abrupt departure, and the multiple interpretations given to their displace-
ment, we can begin to trace the efforts made to deal with the consequences of
wartime movements. Children urgently sought to establish whether their parents
were alive or dead. Adults wished to be reunited with offspring with whom they
had lost contact. Refugees needed legal advice about their status and entitle-
ments to relief. Many wanted the opportunity to work or continue their educa-
tion. Refugees took part in the relief programmes, but the war also provided an
unprecedented opportunity for the demonstration of professional expertise by
trained doctors, lawyers, teachers, psychologists, social workers and statisticians,
who worked in government offices or in non-governmental organizations. In
Vienna, for example, the Zionist activist Anita Müller created the Verein soziale
Hilfsgemeinschaft that assisted pregnant refugees and young mothers and created
day-care centres, employing hundreds of middle-class women and Jewish refu-
gees and becoming ‘instrumental in the professionalisation of Jewish social work
in Austria’.23
The arrival of Belgian refugees in England unleashed a flurry of private chari-
table activity, supported by the notion that Britain owed the refugees a debt of
gratitude for the suffering they had endured on behalf of the Allied cause. A War
Refugees Committee (WRC), launched by Dame Flora Lugard made use of the
‘hospitality lists’ drawn up before the outbreak of war on behalf of the Ulster
Unionist Council, whose leaders expected civil war in Ireland: what originated as
a plan to rescue likely Protestant refugees thus became instead a programme to
assist Belgian Catholics. Around 2,500 local refugee committees were estab-
lished, along with a ‘National Vigilance Association’ whose local branches kept a
watchful eye on young women. The Rothschilds contributed a large sum of
money to support Belgian Jews who reached British shores and the Poor Jews’
Temporary Shelter, in existence since 1885 to support immigrants from Eastern
Europe, was given over to accommodate refugees in London’s East End.24 The
WRC became a site of frantic activity. Lugard and her team of volunteers took
pains to separate lower-class Belgian refugees from the better-off. The latter
received a pink card entitling them to better transport and accommodation,
whilst refugees with a blue card were housed in temporary camps such as those
in Earl’s Court and Alexandra Palace, where ‘one does not want to take good
class people’, observed a British relief worker. The London Metropolitan Asy-
lums board took charge of those who were unassigned and who ended up in the
workhouse, an indication that officials increasingly played an important part in

23
Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 65–81.
24
Peter Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief in England during the Great War (New York: Garland,
1982), 357–68; Jean Stengers, ‘Pre-war Belgian Attitudes to Britain: Anglophilia and Anglophobia’,
in Martin Conway and José Gotovitch (eds), Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain
1940–1945 (Leamington Spa: Berghahn Books, 2001), 35–52.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 33

supporting indigent refugees. By the end of 1915 the WRC was the main chan-
nel for distributing state benefits to refugees.25
Although humanitarianism was buttressed by a belief that the devout Catholic
inhabitants of Belgium deserved protection from ‘pagan’ Germany, this did not
translate into unqualified admiration. One diarist wrote that: ‘Everyone was Bel-
gian mad for a time’, but that ‘the Belgians are not grateful. They won’t do a stroke
of work and grumble at everything and their morals! It may be true enough that
Belgium saved Europe, but save us from the Belgians! As far as I am concerned,
Belgianitis has quite abated’.26 Other voices spoke out in support of refugees,
noting their direct contribution to the British war effort by working in munitions
factories. There was even a special settlement, ‘Elisabethville’, now part of Birtley
in North-East England, named after the Belgian Queen and providing accom-
modation for 6,000 Belgian workers including disabled soldiers and refugees; the
village had its own school, church and cemetery, and issued its own newspaper.
In the Russian Empire, refugees who had survived the journey from the vicinity
of the front faced all manner of difficulties. The backward economy faced unprec-
edented demographic and social upheaval. Provincial and local zemstvos (rural local
authorities), diocesan committees and private charitable societies provided under-
wear, shoes, linen, soap and other items for refugees. Railway stations, schools,
empty factories, breweries, hotels, bathhouses, army barracks, monasteries, syna-
gogues, theatres, cinemas, cafes and even prisons were converted into temporary
accommodation. Towns and cities were transformed. One small town in the west-
ern province of Smolensk with a population of 28,000 before the war found itself
home to 80,000 refugees by the late summer of 1915. Provincial governors filed
reports complaining that they were ‘crowded to the limit’. A year later refugees
made up more than 10 per cent of the inhabitants of Russia’s largest towns. Appeals
for help made much of the expectation that refugees ‘will not be staying long in
our midst. The enemy will leave and the refugees will once more return to their
own homes’. But probably few people believed this optimistic assessment: as the
Union of Zemstvos argued in the autumn of 1915, ‘we must not lose sight of
the fact that refugees are our guests and not for a brief period either’. Municipal
authorities lost no time in trying to ‘evacuate’ refugees to other parts of the empire.
Initial hospitality rapidly evaporated as it became apparent that refugees had no
money to pay for accommodation or food.27
The needs of refugees posed a particular challenge in economically less devel-
oped societies, not just in Russia and Serbia but also in Italy. Here the Ministry of
the Interior took charge of the administration of relief and the settlement of refu-
gees. Local authorities complained that they had insufficient means to support

25
Anon., The Condition of the Belgian Workmen now Refugees in Britain (T. Fisher Unwin, 1917);
Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief, 323–4; Kevin Meyer, ‘The Hidden History of Refugee Schooling in
Britain: the Case of the Belgians, 1914–1918’ History of Education, 30, no.2 (2001), 153–62.
26
Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief, 4; Pierre Purseigle, ‘A Wave on to our Shores: the Exile and
Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918’ CEH, 16, no.4 (2007), 427–44.
27
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 63; John Pollock, ‘The Refugees at Kiev’, Fortnightly Review,
585 (September 1915), 476–9.
34 Empires of Refugees

displaced persons. As the size of the refugee population increased, the government
created a central committee for refugee relief that worked in tandem with Catholic
and socialist organizations such as the Opera Bonomelli and Umanitaria, as well as
with the Red Cross, an indication that the scale of the task exceeded the capacity
of central government.28 The American Red Cross also supplied food, medicine
and clothing from its warehouses in France. In Austria, where the authorities man-
aged to impose some kind of control over the movement of refugees, the preferred
option was to place them in refugee camps in order to facilitate their eventual
repatriation. This happened to Poles, Ukrainians, Italians and Jews. Inmates de-
scribed the conditions as primitive and ‘unacceptable’. Groups deemed by the
government to be more ‘reliable’ had to fend for themselves.
Wherever possible, refugees played an active part in making a tolerable life for
themselves. In Holland they improvised accommodation by sheltering in make-
shift structures such as greenhouses or finding emergency billets on barges and in
apartments, hotels and warehouses. Later on, local authorities erected cheap bun-
galows, capable of being quickly dismantled and reassembled elsewhere. In order
to appease the resident burghers in overstretched localities, the Dutch government
housed the refugees in camps on the outskirts of towns such as Gouda, Ede and
Nunspeet. This limited their room for manoeuvre. The authorities designated these
camps as ‘Belgian villages’, in order to avoid the negative association with erstwhile
‘concentration camps’ during the South African War. Distinctions were drawn be-
tween ‘dangerous elements’ (gevaarlijke elementen), ‘less desirable elements’ and
‘respectable refugees’. People in the first two categories, including suspected spies,
prostitutes and juvenile delinquents, were sent to Nunspeet, which gained a terri-
ble reputation. By contrast, the camp at Ede boasted canteens, schools, a church
and a hospital, as well as an orchestra and sports clubs. The emphasis was on
health, hygiene and hard work making toys and household goods. Refugees here
could come and go.29
In France, government programmes of assistance were linked to the supervision
of refugees’ ‘character’, partly to spot security ‘suspects’ and also to identify potential
workers for the war economy. This kind of surveillance was repeated time and again
in relief programmes. In their anxiety about ‘undesirable aliens’, British government
officials followed their French and Dutch counterparts by keeping a close track of
the refugee population and establishing a register of the refugee population. Bel-
gians complained that the restrictions on movement under the Aliens Restriction
Act (4 August 1914), which required them to notify the police of any journey they
made of more than five miles and confined them to specific areas of the country,
amounted to being placed in a ‘concentration camp’.30 Their protest was to no avail.

28
Ermacora, ‘Assistance and Surveillance’.
29
Fry, A Quaker Adventure, 103–15; Evelyn de Roodt, Oorlogsgasten: Vluchtelingen en krijgsgevan-
genen in Nederland tidjens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 2000), 159,
173–81, 192–4; Michaël Amara, Des Belges à l’épreuve de l’Exil. Les réfugiés de la Première Guerre
mondiale (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université De Bruxelles, 2008), 250–60.
30
Cahalan, Belgian Refugee Relief, 357–68.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 35

Elsewhere, the sheer numbers made it far more difficult to maintain a close watch
on refugees. As we shall see, having displaced so many non-Russians from the west-
ern borderlands for reasons of national security, the Tsarist Empire found that the
refugee population became the instrument of its eventual dismemberment.

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F R E F U G E E D O M

Contemporaries struggled to comprehend the circumstances that led millions of

their fellow men and women to leave their homes—or to remain behind. The
result of this heart searching could be painful. Belgian public opinion during the
war was sharply divided. Those who fled at the beginning of the war believed that
people who stayed or returned to occupied Belgium grew fat on the proceeds of the
black market, whereas refugees had no choice but to throw themselves on the
mercy of foreign charities and to suffer in the national cause. On the other hand,
those who stayed behind maintained that the refugees had abandoned their coun-
try at its time of need. There was thus a dialogue of the deaf. Elsewhere too,
misunderstandings were common. Casual commentators blithely assumed that
refugees numbered in their midst opportunists who lacked the stomach to resist.
They portrayed refugees as ‘deserters’ who had failed to demonstrate sufficient for-
titude or prowess in the teeth of the enemy onslaught. A British correspondent
insinuated that young Serbian refugees in Oxford deliberately evaded military
service, but in fact they were too young to enlist. Similar negative comments were
made about Belgian refugees. Hostility towards refugees found expression in
Northern France where local residents described French women as ‘les Boches du
Nord’, because they were thought to have slept with German soldiers. Negative
views were reinforced by the belief that refugees pushed up the price of food and
housing, whilst competing for jobs and driving down wages. Stories surfaced of
desperate refugees, for instance from Russia’s western borderlands who stole or
damaged farmers’ property when they fled to the central provinces of European
Russia. Other anxieties too, particularly about epidemic disease, crime and prosti-
tution, were projected on to refugees.31
The contrary impulse to portray refugees as pure victims and to relieve their suf-
fering rested upon the elaboration of compelling narratives of misery and despair.
British charity workers and sympathetic newspaper columnists were wont (at least
initially) to describe Belgian refugees as frightened, needy and depressed. One cor-
respondent likened them to ‘slow caravans of old women and children trailing
along the high roads like modern Jews in search of new countries and new homes.
Each of them has some sad history to relate, properties burnt, loved ones killed or
lost’.32 The Russian ‘family journal’ Rodina published a drawing of ‘Two Flights’,
in which the plight of the refugee family was juxtaposed with the flight of Mary,

31
Nivet, Les réfugiés français, 377–85; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 29.
32
Amara, Des Belges à l’épreuve de l’Exil, 57, 73–5.
36 Empires of Refugees

Joseph and baby Jesus to Bethlehem. Accompanying verses urged the refugees not
to lose heart. Editors frequently focused upon a single refugee family; some of the
poses were clearly contrived to create a genre photograph of the kind that had
become fashionable at the turn of the century. Flora Scott, a nurse working with
the Serbian Relief Fund, wrote that ‘all the time you are reminded of Bible
pictures’.33 Other images emphasized instead the magnitude of the refugee move-
ment; typical of these was a picture of the throng gathered outside a refugee sanc-
tuary in Petrograd—‘people of the most diverse condition and status, now
united by the single general term, refugee’. Sometimes the photographic record
drew attention not to refugees’ degradation but rather to the impact of private
benevolence. A picture timed for Christmas 1915 portrayed ‘a child who has
lost its refugee parents and who has found lodgings with a stranger’. Other
photographs displayed refugees eating the remains of a soldier’s meal, implying
that the Russian soldier was the refugees’ friend, not the source of their mass
suffering and sorrow.34
Belgian refugees, disproportionately from an urban background, made a signifi-
cant economic contribution in France and Britain to sectors whose workforce had
been depleted by mobilization. The secretary of the Belgian War Refugees Com-
mittee applauded the efforts by local committees and refugees who sought to fill
job vacancies. This helped offset the negative remarks that began to appear in the
British press later in the war, when concerns were raised about the burden on
the British taxpayer, the sacrifices made by British conscripts, and anxieties about
the ‘disreputable’ sexual conduct of Belgian women. In France, too, the small
number of Serb refugees initially found a relatively warm welcome; the municipal-
ity of Lyon, sold ribbons and medallions inscribed to the ‘glorious defenders of
Serb liberty’. Public opinion could quickly turn against refugees who were believed
to have unreasonable expectations as to their living conditions. Refugees could not
get it right: if they turned down work, then they faced accusations of shirking, but
if they did take up the offer of a job they stood accused of causing qualified workers
to be sent to the front.35
In Serbia dozens of foreigners volunteered to assist the country in its time of
need, galvanized by the image of a suffering nation. Contemporaries spoke of
Serbia’s ‘agony’ and ‘martyrdom’. The prominent philanthropist brothers Noel and
Charles Roden Buxton commented about a ‘fine race of peasants mangled and
crippled’.36 ‘Slav committees’ in Russia collected funds to pay for medical units.
The British Red Cross and Scottish Women’s Hospital, founded by Dr Elsie Inglis,
recruited nurses to deal with the emerging health crisis in the first winter of the
war. Medical assistance was extended to civilian refugees as well as soldiers. Lady
Muriel Paget—the American wife of a former British minister to Belgrade, and

33
Flora Scott collection, IWM, 77/15/1.
34
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 74–5.
35
Greg Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and its Refugees from the Revolution to the End
of Asylum 1789–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 137–9.
36
‘Serbia’s Agony: Terrible Scenes among the Refugees and Wounded’ The Observer, 7 February
1915.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 37

a nurse during the First Balkan War—went to Serbia as part of the first unit of the
Serbian Relief Fund (SRF), which promoted the Serbian cause and collected funds
for hospitals and ambulances. Equivalent bodies supported displaced Poles, Arme-
nians and Belgians. The SRF enlisted lawyers, businessmen, archaeologists, eth-
nographers and eminent historians such as R.W. Seton-Watson and G.M. Trevelyan,
although the main driving force was Gertrude Carrington-Wilde. It sponsored
‘Serbian Flag Day’ and arranged exhibitions of Serbian sculpture and handicrafts.
An analogous fund was created in the USA, where visits from eyewitnesses proved
an effective means of persuading American bankers and others to dig deep. Seton-
Watson was sufficiently well-connected to play an important part in British
government discussions about the shape of post-war South-Eastern Europe.37
Volunteer nurses and relief workers described their work in Serbia in terms of
adventure, courage and sheer hard work. Lucia Creighton, daughter of a promi-
nent Church of England bishop, spoke of ‘visiting many queer houses behind the
front line’. In her diary she described a refugee camp, run by the British Red Cross,
with eight marquees and 25 people to a tent, ‘mainly women and children and old
men. Some go out to work but many are too lazy and stay doing nothing as they
are given just enough to live on’. Others lived temporarily in a disused factory.
Later she wrote of being ‘quite sick of the whole thing and [being] much more
interested in the refugees outside’ rather than having to work in ‘practically a refu-
gee workhouse’. She was impressed by the ground that relief workers and refugees
covered together. Flora Scott wrote from Skopje on how ‘everything is very strange,
no looking glasses or anything civilised’. Serbia was both ‘beautiful and sad’.38
One important element in this international humanitarianism concerned the
risks to which female and child refugees were exposed. Certainly displacement
afforded plenty of opportunities to exploit their vulnerability. Young females from
the western borderlands of the Tsarist Empire were believed to be at the mercy of
sexual traffickers or—no less troubling—to seek out possibilities to sell sex in order
to survive. As with Belgian refugees, this formed part of a broader concern about
the collapse of family discipline: as one Russian doctor proclaimed, refugees ‘starve,
run around naked, and live in appalling conditions and in such destitution that
they drive their wives and daughters on to the street to join the ranks of prosti-
tutes’. Some authors spoke in more positive terms of the scope for male siblings to
substitute for parental authority and care, as in a short story that told of the reas-
surance offered a young girl by her brother, who guided her to safety across a river.
A young Armenian farmer described how the Turks had tormented him and sepa-
rated him from his family. He wanted to cry, ‘but I pulled myself together and
refused to cry; I realised that this was the women’s way and that I had to cope dif-
ferently’. He went out and killed a Turkish soldier who was holding women and
children hostage. Melodramatic accounts such as these may have helped to restore
confidence in the integrity of gender boundaries. Only rarely did the image of the

37
Andrej Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War 1914–1918 (Hurst, 2007), 111–13.
38
Diary of Miss L. Creighton, IWM, 92/22/1; Flora Scott papers, IWM, 77/15/1.
38 Empires of Refugees

heroic female refugee find its way into the contemporary media, as in the tale of an
anonymous refugee who had tricked a party of German soldiers into thinking that
she could direct them back to their base camp. But instead of helping them she
took out a bomb concealed in her bag, threw it in their midst and wounded all
eight of them.39
The wartime crisis also drew attention to the versatility of refugees and their
potential contribution to the national economy. Refugees contributed their labour
to privately-owned farms and estates in the Russian interior; by the third year of
the war refugees made up close on 10 per cent of the total labour force in the pri-
vate farm sector. It helped that refugees included able-bodied workers whose skills
were in short supply. A group from Riga that arrived in the Urals after a long jour-
ney soon found work as fitters, joiners and blacksmiths. In Kazan, refugees from
Minsk worked as bakers, tailors, shoemakers and carpenters, as well as in the local
abbatoir. Relief organizations applauded the initiative of craftsmen who settled in
Smolensk and constructed anatomical models for use by medical students. The
Russian rural intelligentsia imbued refugees with the capacity to impart a civilizing
influence on the backward village. A priest in Simbirsk remarked that ‘even in this
lonely backwater the refugee movement has brought something new. Refugees
who have arrived in the village, no matter how poor they may be, have shown the
locals that there are shortcomings in their way of life and daily practices, that it is
possible to work a good deal more productively’. Latvian patriots who settled in
Russia’s impoverished interior boasted that ‘we have long forgotten what it means
to suffer from a harvest failure or to go without bread’. Their displacement served
to reinforce a sense of cultural distance between the virtuous Latvian yeoman and
the backward Russian peasant, but it simultaneously undermined blanket negative
representations of refugees.40
Condescension and genuine concern for human suffering—of men as well as
women—went hand in hand. Claude Debussy composed the words and music to a
song, ‘Noel des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison’. A few lines convey the mawkish
flavour:
Nous n’avons plus de maisons!/Les ennemis ont tout pris, tout pris/
Jusqu’à notre petit lit/Ils ont brûlé l’école et notre maître aussi/Ils ont brûlé l’église et
monsieur Jésus-Christ/Et le vieux pauvre qui n’a pu s’en aller…
In an attempt at international solidarity, Debussy urged his listeners to avenge the
children of France, Belgium and Poland who had suffered at the hands of German
barbarians: ‘If we forget any, forgive us’. ‘Brave little Belgium’ was a term much in
evidence (and not just in the UK but in many parts of the world), a means of
encapsulating the resistance that Belgian civilians offered the German army and
their resolve to seek refuge in Holland, France or England. King Albert’s Book
allowed British dignitaries to pay ‘tribute to the Belgian king and people’. Britain’s

39
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 115–27.
40
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 132.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 39

obligation towards Belgian refugees reflected the Allies’ inability to stem the
German onslaught, and public sympathy for Belgian refugees who reached the UK
stemmed from a belief that they had suffered unspeakable torment at the hands
of German troops.41
Attempts to disseminate appeals for assistance meant thinking imaginatively
about the most suitable way of generating and sustaining public interest in the
plight of refugees. One remarkable attempt to establish the contours of displace-
ment was made at the end of 1916 by the Tatiana committee, a private charity
which brought together members of the Russian aristocratic elite and members of
the professions. It proposed a special exhibition designed to inform the Russian
public about the living conditions and activities of refugees, who were not all
‘beggars, idlers and spongers’. (A similar initiative took place in Vienna under the
auspices of the Austrian Ministry of the Interior.) The aim was to address four
main themes: conditions in Russia’s borderlands before and during the war, includ-
ing ‘the destruction of settlements, property and artistic monuments’; the ‘sorrow-
ful journey’ of refugees, including the background to their displacement, the course
of the refugee movement and the assistance given by government and public or-
ganizations; living conditions in their new homes, including ‘the work undertaken
by refugees and their impact on the local population’; and finally the restoration of
normal life in the regions cleared of enemy occupation. The Tatiana committee
solicited material from refugees, who were encouraged to describe their experi-
ences in their own words or to provide photographs, drawings, reports, memoirs,
stories and belles lettres; ‘the material that is collected will be collated and organized
systematically and form part of a volume of “Collected materials on the history
of the refugee movement during the world war”.’ Unfortunately the project was
overtaken by the February Revolution, although not before Baltic artists contrib-
uted paintings and drawings in the expectation that they would eventually be
brought together to form part of the collection for new national museums in Latvia
and Lithuania. The committee’s initiative retains its relevance nearly a century
after: ‘facts and observations, even if they seem at first to be insignificant and
trivial, may prove to be of great interest. The most important thing is for the
description to be sincere and truthful’.42
Muriel Paget made a point of reminding her audience back home of the senti-
ments that Serbian troops and refugees expressed towards the Serbian Relief Fund:
‘the trust and the gratitude they give back is one of the most touching and beautiful
things I have ever known, not too dearly purchased by any sacrifice’.43 Similar state-
ments emanated from relief workers elsewhere who moved from one country to
the next and emphasized their privileged standpoint: ‘only one who has witnessed
the thousands of refugees can have any conception of the strain that has been put

41
Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local
Perspectives during the Twentieth Century (Frank Cass, 1999), 48; Glenn Watkins, Proof through the
Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 106–7.
42
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 94–5; Thorpe, ‘Displacing Empire’, 112–13.
43
Muriel Paget, With Our Serbian Allies (Serbian Relief Fund, 1915), 39–43.
40 Empires of Refugees

upon the resources of the country’. Relief workers claimed a special kind of privi-
leged insight; women, in particular, regarded themselves as defenders of ‘civilization’
against the ‘tyranny’ inflicted on helpless civilians. In Ruth Fry’s words, ‘to be idly
happy and a refugee is a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, to enable them
to help themselves has been to bring much happiness to many exiles’.44 Kathleen
Royds, who spent several months accompanying Serbian refugees from Albania to
Corsica, described them as having ‘quite a distinct psychology of their own’. She
explained: ‘to begin with their nerves are overstrained; they are flung among a
strange people, frequently of different habits looking upon them with a certain
amount of suspicion at any rate at first’.45 Refrains such as these contributed to sup-
pressing the voice of refugees, whose views and experiences were mediated by those
claiming to have their interests at heart.
Humanitarian relief work could become a career choice. A small number of
examples must suffice. Flora Sandes, a British woman who travelled to Serbia as a
Red Cross volunteer before enlisting in the Serbian army later on devoted herself
to post-war relief. (Later on she married a Russian émigré and achieved a kind of
fame as the driver of Belgrade’s first taxi.) Katharine MacPhail who was sent to
Serbia on behalf of the Scottish Women’s Hospital, stayed on to run a hospital in
Belgrade, funded partly by the Yugoslav government and partly by Save the Chil-
dren, and Evelina Haverfield’s work in the Serbian Relief Fund’s orphanage in Niš
was only cut short by her premature death from typhus in 1920. Muriel Paget
looked after Belgian refugees and then became a relief worker in Russia and the
Baltic States. Like many Quakers, Florence Barrow began her career in Russia
before moving to Poland and later the Middle East and Balkans to work with refu-
gees. Hilda Clark, a qualified physician, worked on behalf of refugees in France
during the First World War, and later with Spanish Civil War refugees and Jewish
refugees from Nazi Germany.46 Percy Alden, who worked for the Belgian Relief
Committee in London and then became a government commissioner on behalf of
Belgian refugees in the Netherlands, later served as chairman of the SCF, under
whose auspices he worked in the Balkans on behalf of refugees. The American
Spurgeon Keeny, having worked with Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Adminis-
tration, subsequently joined the YMCA to assist displaced persons after the Second
World War. The ARA also launched the career of Arthur Ringland, who was in-
strumental in the creation of CARE, and Maurice Pate, who helped found
UNICEF. Sometimes those with direct experience of displacement took up the
challenge of assisting refugees. A notable example was the Dominican priest, Father
Georges Pire, who having been forced to flee from Belgium as an infant, became a
renowned champion of refugee children in Western Europe before and after the
Second World War. This reminds us that refugees’ lives could have astounding
consequences.

44
Fry, A Quaker Adventure, 140.
45
Undated note, Papers of Kathleen Royds, KER6, IWM.
46
Sybil Oldfield, Doers of the World: British Women Humanitarians 1900–1950 (Continuum,
2006).
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 41

Refugees were the subject of critical comment: negative views of unhealthy and
undisciplined refugees circulated alongside positive images. Bold metaphors ex-
pressed the sense of overwhelming threat to social order. The press and the public
used language that was directly reminiscent of disaster, of river banks being
broken—thus ‘flood’, ‘deluge’, ‘wave’, ‘avalanche’, ‘deposit’, ‘lava’—and fertile land
being laid waste by hordes of locusts in Russia. Having first described Belgian refu-
gees as mere ‘sojourners’, British newspapers soon began to describe a refugee
‘stream’ that might yet become a ‘cataract’. As Liisa Malkki puts it, these ‘liquid
names for the uprooted reflect the sedentarist bias in dominant modes of imagin-
ing homes and homelands, identities and nationalities’. This discourse was readily
embraced by an emerging patriotic intelligentsia and by humanitarians. In Russia
displacement was likened to the biblical exodus or to previous catastrophes such as
the invasions of Europe in the early Middle Ages. Some witnesses believed that the
‘boundless ocean’ of refugees could never properly be navigated. The deployment
of this language represented a departure from earlier characterizations of atrocity.
It drew attention to a fundamental uncertainty about borders and belonging, about
‘home’ and the stability of the ‘nation’.47

N AT I O N A L I Z I N G R E F U G E E S

Much of the responsibility for refugee relief fell upon national bodies that identi-
fied with the displaced population. This was true of Belgium. In Serbia, too, the
canny government of Nikola Pašić claimed the mantle on behalf of all South Slavs
and convinced the Allies that the emerging state of Yugoslavia should be led by
Serbia. Polish and Ukrainian refugees from Galicia organized national commit-
tees in Vienna.48 But the most dramatic manifestation of national mobilization
occurred in Russia where the organization of relief along ‘national’ lines and the
appropriation of the refugee for the national cause helped to create the possibility
for a national politics in circumstances that were hitherto unpropitious. In the
first place, as we have seen, the scale of displacement imposed an enormous strain
on existing agencies. Where neither the state nor existing organizations could
cope, national bodies stepped in to fill the gap. Secondly, refugeedom contributed
to the sense of collective national danger and suffering. This allowed them to
depict relief in national terms and to proselytize among a captive audience.
Thirdly, diasporic groups in Western Europe and North America, the result of
previous migrations, could also be harnessed to this cause. Lastly, national con-
sciousness might be enhanced not only by a vision of national humiliation and
danger but also by new social contacts that exposed ethnic particularism.

47
Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees
in Tanzania (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 15–16; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking,
200.
48
Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 2000); Thorpe, ‘Displacing Empire’, 114–17.
42 Empires of Refugees

Non-Russian elites constantly reminded their audience that invading troops had
lately violated their homeland. Members of the Latvian intelligentsia argued that
refugees from the Baltic lands presented a living testimony of German barbarism;
their presence brought home to the inhabitants of Petrograd and Moscow the
consequences of territorial loss. Occupation—the infamous Land Ober Ost—and
despoliation were bad enough, but these calamities did not exhaust the fears ex-
pressed by national leaders. Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish patriots lamented the
prospect of ‘national dispersion’. A spokesman for the Polish national committee
outlined the implications as follows:
Only continuous and close contact with the national group, whether in the distribu-
tion of allowances, the allocation of accommodation, the supply of clothing, the
search for work, the offer of medical treatment, the satisfaction of all material and
spiritual needs—only this can guarantee and secure refugees on behalf of the
motherland.49
Armenian and Jewish spokesmen invoked the memory of torment and displace-
ment, thereby linking past and present in a manner designed to mobilize the refu-
gee population. Similar arguments held sway among the Polish patriotic
intelligentsia who referred to the revolts against Tsarist rule in 1830 and 1863 to
remind their audience of past suffering and heroic endeavour, using this as a justi-
fication for restoring an undivided Poland of the kind that existed prior to partition
in the eighteenth century. This did not always convince prejudiced relief workers,
particularly when they encountered Jewish refugees. Violetta Thurstan, a young
British nurse on the eastern front, maintained that ‘Jewish refugees do not suffer so
acutely from the terrible homesickness that attacks the refugees of other countries;
they are wanderers by nature or sub-conscious instinct, and are not so rooted to
one particular soil as those with a heavier sense of nationality’.50 Her view com-
pletely failed to take account of the dynamic results of displacement (see later in
this chapter).
Lacking an equivalent history of dramatic resistance, Latvian patriots found it
more difficult to make a similar case. Instead they tried a different approach, argu-
ing (as did Jewish leaders) that the close bonds between Latvians would be severed
permanently unless they resisted dispersion. The alarming prospect of an enlarged
Latvian diaspora was articulated by the leading parliamentarian Jānis Goldmanis,
who urged the need to find ‘means of saving and preserving the Latvian people,
who face the lot of the Jews—to be scattered across the entire globe’. Latvian refu-
gees should in his view take the opportunity to convince Latvians who had settled
in (or been exiled to) distant parts of the empire of the need to think of Latvia as
their ultimate destination. For the Belarusian activist Eugene Kancher, writing

49
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 156; Vėjas Liulevičius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,
National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
50
Violetta Thurstan, The People Who Run: Being the Tragedy of the Refugees in Russia (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 150–3.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 43

from a vantage point in Central Asia, the war was one more coffin in the nail of the
nation: ‘I pondered the fact that over hundreds of years Belarusians had likewise
been forced to scatter and had perished, like autumn flies, and with their flesh had
fertilized the soil for other peoples’.51
The enforced displacement of population created an entirely new framework for
belief and behaviour. When they took to the road, refugees were by definition de-
prived of membership in a close-knit local community, but displacement offered
them an opportunity to gain access to an enlarged national community, built on
the foundations of a common sense of loss and the need for collective effort to
regain what had been forfeited in wartime. It might even be possible to re-establish
contact with those who had left the homeland long before the war: as one Latvian
patriot put it, ‘the unity of Latvia demands that we register all such settlers and
ensure that they do not lose their identity’. The chronicler of Latvian displacement,
Kristaps Bachmanis (1867–1942), described how these settlers ‘had been left alone
with their destiny and so became estranged from the life of our people, our common
fate, our grief and our longing for better future’. Fortunately, he went on, ‘at last
our refugees have enabled us to establish contact with Latvian settlers in Russia.
Our purpose should be to do everything to destroy the wall between us and them’.
Displacement provided an opportunity to make amends for previous failures to
assert national solidarity.52
According to Martynas Yčas, the Lithuanian activist who later served as presi-
dent of the new republic, the Lithuanian refugee committee ‘prepared the people
for future action and created the foundations for a future cultural and political
edifice . . . It forced even non-Lithuanians to recognise that we ourselves were the
masters of our country’. Allowing for a degree of retrospective exaggeration, Yčas
neatly encapsulated the sense of political mobilization and the vision of national
emancipation that refugeedom now made possible.53 Patriotic rhetoric was com-
bined with practical efforts in the Russian interior. National spokesmen hastily
improvised schools, orphanages, clubs, workshops, canteens and barracks, with
funds provided by a plethora of national committees. The state tolerated these
efforts, partly as a means of lightening the burden on hard-pressed government
officials and on the public purse. In Tsarist Russia, these national committees
served another purpose so far as the government was concerned: they offered an
alternative to the ‘public organizations’, whose leaders asserted a claim to organ-
ize refugee relief and resettlement. But by the autumn of 1915, contrasts were
being drawn between the speed and efficiency of the national committees and

51
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 159; Valentina Utgof, ‘In Search of National Support: Belaru-
sian Refugees in World War I and the People’s Republic of Belarus’, in Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell
(eds), Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in the Former Russian Empire, 1918–1924 (Anthem
Books, 2004), 53–73, at 59.
52
Kristaps Bachmanis, ‘Musu agrakas kludas’ (Our previous mistakes), Dzimtenes Atbalss, 18–19
(1916); Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 158.
53
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 157–62; Tomas Balkelis, The Making of Modern Lithuania
(Routledge, 2009), 105–14.
44 Empires of Refugees

the hesitant manner in which local authorities handled refugee relief, so the Tsar-
ist government gained little by this stratagem.
Abrupt physical displacement entailed profound social and political conse-
quences for the Jewish population of imperial Russia. In one sense the war liber-
ated Russian Jewry, by forcing the Tsarist government to recognize that it could no
longer continue to sustain the Pale of Settlement—in other words, that it was more
important to defeat the real enemy than to maintain administrative controls over
the Jewish population of the Russian Empire. As the liberal-minded minister of
agriculture put it, ‘one cannot fight a war against Germany and against the Jews’.54
Certainly, Jews continued to suffer all manner of harassment and physical abuse at
the hands of the Russian army. Yet once it became clear that their movement could
no longer be controlled by government agencies, the Pale of Settlement dissolved
itself. In August 1915 the government reluctantly conceded that ‘Jewish war suf-
ferers’—those who fled and those who had been deported—should be allowed to
settle in provincial towns but not in Petrograd or Moscow. Consistent with
pre-war Tsarist policy, Jewish refugees were also forbidden to settle in villages. Nev-
ertheless, the consequences were dramatic enough: two-fifths of all Jewish refugees
moved to areas of the Russian Empire that had previously been closed to them.
Townspeople in the Russian interior who had scarcely set eyes on Jews now rubbed
shoulders with them. The consequences could of course be troubling. The use
of Yiddish in public places led some Russians to think that German was being
spoken, and this compounded the fear of Jewish cultural difference; some munici-
pal authorities made it clear that Jews should not venture out of doors.
The experiences of Jewish refugees in Russia and in the Habsburg Empire were
very varied. Some Russian Jewish writers envisaged that hundreds of thousands of
refugees could establish a ‘Jewish centre’ in Siberia, helping ‘to transform this
region into a powerful developing country’. Others, however, expressed serious
reservations lest the solidarity engendered by confinement to the Pale of Settle-
ment be undermined: ‘we need to consider this from a national, not a narrow
refugee point of view’. It was unwise to promote the dispersion of Jews throughout
the Russian Empire, still less to tolerate their potential assimilation in the Russian
interior.55 More immediately, the war modified the dynamics among Russian Jewry
by encouraging elite members to join with young, talented health professionals
who imparted a more democratic complexion to Jewish relief work. ‘Now [it was
said] one flag has been raised, the Jewish banner. The wave of refugees has united
all shades of Judaism and all languages. Jews who hitherto did not know or under-
stand one another have been brought together. Mutual antagonisms have disap-
peared, to be replaced by excellent fraternal relations’.56 Certainly the cultural and
economic distance between the poor Jew from the shtetl and the relatively small

54
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 146–7.
55
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 146.
56
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 148; Steven Zipperstein, ‘The Politics of Relief: the Transfor-
mation of Russian Jewish Communal Life during the First World War’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry,
4 (1988), 22–40.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 45

and privileged Jewish communities in Moscow and Petrograd remained difficult

to bridge. Where the gap narrowed, government officials interpreted this as a
sign that their own obligations lessened: the governor of Tambov for example
obstructed the distribution of allowances to Jewish refugees, giving as his reason
the support they received from Petrograd’s Jewish committee. Some things did
not change.
In Vienna, too, middle-class Jews overcame their aversion to the Ostjuden and
did what they could to alleviate the suffering of their destitute co-religionists by
establishing soup kitchens and workshops, paying school fees and supporting
rabbis. The philanthropist Sophie Grünfeld spoke optimistically of the contact
between bourgeois Jews and the poor refugees who ‘had other customs. But our
contact with you has brought us closer and the bearing and dignity with which you
bear your tragedy fills us with sincere admiration’.57 Such optimism was overdrawn;
as in Russia, social divisions remained acute. Wealthier Jews made use of their
contacts in Vienna, whereas poorer refugees had to make do with substandard
accommodation in barns or schools or else ended up in miserable refugee camps.
Jewish charities in Austria and in the diaspora looked further ahead. Workshops
were established to encourage young refugee women to learn a suitable trade or to
assist men to become better farmers in anticipation of their return to Galicia or
Bukovina. Schools prided themselves on providing instruction and vocational
training. In this way displacement became linked to economic improvement in
backward parts of the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, not everyone was satisfied:
Zionists complained that too much attention was being devoted to refugees rather
than encouraging emigration to Palestine.
Diaspora communities contributed assistance as well. American-Armenian
immigrants established homeland societies at the turn of the century and kept
them going long after the war came to an end. Poles did likewise, and drew on
Polonophile opinion in the UK.58 Wealthy British Jews collected money to assist
Jewish refugees who arrived from Belgium. The position of Jews, particularly in the
Tsarist Empire, posed a challenge for Anglo-Jewry. To highlight their suffering was
to draw attention to pre-war persecution and pogrom in a state that was now a
wartime ally. Some activists believed that it was insufficient to trumpet philan-
thropic activity and ignore the dreadful consistency of Tsarist conduct in peace
and war. It was also difficult for British Jews to overcome internal social divisions
in support of refugee co-religionists in the Tsarist Empire. Much more successful
in terms of publicity and fundraising were Jewish groups in the USA, above all the
Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War
Sufferers, later renamed the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). Until
America entered the war there were no scruples about publicizing Tsarist brutality
and Jewish suffering. One-third of the total funds at the disposal of the Jewish

57
Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 75.
58
For example, a ‘Chomaklou Society’ was already in existence in the early twentieth century:
<http://www.chomaklou.com/index.php>; Norman Davies, ‘The Poles in Great Britain 1914–1919’
Slavonic and East European Review, 50, no.118 (1972), 63–89.
46 Empires of Refugees

committee in Russia came from a group headed by the leading New York banker
Felix Warburg.59
Refugees came to embody the suffering of an entire ‘people’ or nation. Mention
of ‘brave little Belgium’ indirectly drew attention to ‘great’ Britain but also encour-
aged a powerful and even apocalyptic rhetoric of ‘civilization’ versus the ‘barba-
rism’ embodied in the German perpetration of atrocity. (The entire rhetoric stood
in sharp contrast to the condemnation of the Belgian government just a few years
earlier for its actions in the Congo.) British officials acknowledged an obligation
towards refugees, whose plight was a result of the Allies’ inability to stem the enemy
onslaught that exposed the Catholic population of Belgium to ‘pagan’ and ‘atro-
cious’ Germany. Refugees symbolized suffering that could be made good in part
from reparations that the Allies planned to extract from the defeated foe. Christian
rhetoric was also evoked on behalf of Serbian refugees, who ‘once across [the pass]
made the sign of the Cross. God be praised [they said], we have entered the thresh-
old of Paradise’. Serbian refugees were construed as distraught but also devout, a
trope that spoke to national interests as well as to foreign philanthropy.60
In short, collective action helped to bridge the gap between the educated national
elite, refugee members of the national intelligentsia, and the ordinary refugee. Con-
nections were also forged with diaspora organizations. It was no longer possible to
retain a distinction between members of the educated intelligentsia and the ‘unen-
lightened’ masses, because they had all been exposed to the dehumanizing and debili-
tating consequences of refugeedom. Non-refugee members of national minorities
bound themselves by levying ‘taxes’ on the entire community. The reiteration of a
sense of loss and destruction of ‘national’ assets acted as a unifying device. By virtue
of the disruption caused to other relationships by war, refugeedom created a situation
in which nationality assumed enormous importance. ‘Most of those who hitherto
called themselves “Russian” are now beginning to think of themselves as Poles, Jews,
Ukrainians, Armenians, Latvians, rather than as Russians’, wrote the editor of Sput-
nik bezhentsa (‘Refugee-Traveller’) in September 1915.61 Displacement conferred
respectability upon the rhetoric of national consciousness and imparted vitality to a
crusade couched in a national idiom.

R E PAT R I AT I O N A N D R E M E M B R A N C E

When the Great War finally came to an end the question of repatriation became
urgent. The first priority was to repatriate soldiers including prisoners of war, but

59
Henry Rosenfelt, This Thing of Giving: the Record of a Rare Enterprise of Mercy and Brotherhood
(New York: Plymouth Press, 1923); J. Bruce Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance: Religion, Refugee Work, and
US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33–4; Samantha Johnson, ‘Breaking or
Making the Silence? British Jews and East European Jewish Relief, 1914–1917’ Modern Judaism, 30,
no.1 (2010), 95–119.
60
David Mitrany, The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1936), 243–7.
61
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 141.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 47

attention soon turned to refugees. This took on a different aspect in different con-
texts. Grandiose plans drawn up in the UK to resettle Belgian refugees in Chile and
South Africa came to naught, because Belgium insisted that refugees should con-
tribute to its national reconstruction after the war. Most of the 140,000 Belgian
refugees in the UK at the Armistice returned home by 1919. Ruth Fry described a
visit to Brussels and Antwerp where ‘there was a strange sense of places waking up
after a long bad dream’, but ‘Belgium was thoroughly tired of foreign charity and
was anxious to stand on her own feet’. However, the war had exposed a cleavage
between Francophone and Flemish viewpoints.62
The situation elsewhere was more complicated. Serbian refugees went back home,
partly with the assistance of the Serbian Relief Fund and Quaker relief workers. Social
and economic reconstruction took many years to complete. Jewish refugees endured
frequent harassment when they returned to Western Galicia. Others were prevented
from returning by the vicious conflict in the new Polish-Ukrainian borderland; they
struggled to survive in Vienna. A handful succeeded in enrolling in university and
even obtained citizenship in the new Austrian state. Refugees from the western bor-
derlands who wished to return from the Russian interior when the Bolsheviks sued for
peace faced enormous hurdles: not just the German occupation of the Baltic, but also
how to explain a lack of identity papers. Questions about their health status were
inevitably intrusive. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks tried to discourage able-bodied and
skilled men and women from leaving the struggling Soviet state. How all this worked
out for one individual can be seen in the diary of Alfreds Goba, a young Latvian who
returned from temporary domicile in Baku. He negotiated practical steps and the
psychological difficulties associated with going home. In an entry from August 1918
he writes: ‘Now I am working. I am working towards building a new Latvia’. Goba
hoped that peace would bring freedom from German and Russian tutelage alike:
‘Latvia, Latvia you have lived a hard and slavish orphan life, and still you are like a
child. Will you survive? Will you be able to stand on your own two feet?’ He saw a
close fit between the need to establish his family on more secure material foundations
and Latvia’s search for national liberation. In Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the new
authorities paid close attention to the political opinion and ethnic identity of prospec-
tive returnees, particularly those who (unlike Goba) did not belong to the titular na-
tionality. Jews regularly encountered discrimination and hostility.63
This is not to say that states necessarily embraced the figure of the refugee once the
war came to an end. Refugees were frequently hidden from the officially sanctioned
narrative. Post-war governments mostly drew a veil over the circumstances of mass
displacement, particularly if they showed the state in an unfavourable light. Belgium
and France had little to say about refugees, although popular memories of the crisis in
1914 were revived during the crisis of 1940 which afflicted the same regions and often

62
Fry, A Quaker Adventure, 118.
63
Aija Priedite, ‘Latvian Refugees and the Latvian Nation State during and after World War I’, in
Baron and Gatrell (eds), Homelands, 35–52; Tomas Balkelis, ‘In Search of a Native Realm: the Return
of World War I Refugees to Lithuania, 1918–1924’, in Baron and Gatrell (eds), Homelands, 74–97. I
am grateful to Aldis Purs for his translations from Goba’s diary.
48 Empires of Refugees

affected the same people. Mussolini had no interest in talking about the mass exodus
of Italians following the debacle at Caporetto, preferring instead to associate his regime
with the glories of ancient Rome. In Russia the Bolsheviks derived their legitimacy
from the Russian Revolution and relegated the ‘imperialist war’ and its refugees to the
margins of political significance. The successor states that emerged from the wreckage
of the old continental empires devoted little attention to the history of refugee politics
during the war, being more preoccupied with building the new state than with en-
couraging wartime commemoration. Although the experience of refugees might be
slotted into a narrative of national salvation and deliverance, politicians trod quite
carefully lest they draw attention to the wartime chaos or encourage refugees to claim
compensation.
In Hungary, Armenia and Serbia on the other hand, mass displacement—and in
Armenia’s case, mass murder—contributed to the cultivation in the new state and
among the diaspora of memories of national catastrophe. A Serbian teacher who
taught refugee children in France during the war in France asked his pupils to write
an assignment entitled ‘My departure from the fatherland and arrival in France’.
He published the results in 1923, in a book entitled The Hopes of the Serbian Golgo-
tha. It comes as no surprise that it was re-issued in Serbia eight decades later or to
learn that other stories of suffering were revived in Belgrade in the late 1980s and
1990s, with titles such as ‘Golgotha and Serbian resurrection’, helping to legitimize
independence as communist rule collapsed.64
The post-war disengagement from the experience of the Great War reflected the
fact that a fresh crisis erupted during the 1920s, causing international organizations
(notably the League of Nations) and relief workers to focus on the immediate needs
of new refugees. But political uncertainty in this enormous and contested space
only served to multiply the dilemmas and difficulties associated with repatriation.
The refugee population was swelled by newly displaced persons, the result of German
military occupation of the western borderlands of the former empire. Subsequently,
the prolonged dislocation of the Russian civil war, battles between Polish, Lithua-
nian, and Ukrainian troops, the Soviet-Polish War, and continued turmoil in the
Caucasus prompted additional displacement, as well as sizeable emigration. Some
people stayed where they were, but found that borders had moved instead, bringing
about their political expatriation. Thus the years of war, revolution, and peacemak-
ing between 1917 and 1921 were marked by renewed demographic disturbance on
a pan-European scale. Its implications are explored in the next chapter.

C O N C LU S I O N S

The First World War brought about momentous movements of population, adding
to the legacy of war and displacement in South-Eastern Europe and the Balkans

64
Silvija Curić and Vidoslav Stevanović (eds), Golgota i vaskrs Srbije 1915–1918 (Belgrade: Parti-
zanska knjiga, 1986), with thanks to John Paul Newman for the reference.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 49

during the 1870s and in 1912–13. Millions of civilians fled in order to escape the
threat of invasion. To construe this as panic and ‘spontaneity’ was to direct atten-
tion either to a lack of patriotism—true patriots stood their ground—or to a loss
of self-control by people who would need to be taught how to regain their reason
before they could rebuild their lives. Others fled because their own governments
gave them no choice: they were deported as punishment for perceived disloyalty.
The decision by the Ottoman leadership to target Armenians, and the Russian high
command’s relentless pursuit of Polish, Jewish, Latvian, German and other minori-
ties, reflected a strategic choice to excise entire groups not on grounds of their
conduct (although some were blamed for military defeat), but by virtue of their
unalterable ethnicity. Others stood to benefit materially, such as Muslim inhabit-
ants of the Ottoman Empire, many of them refugees from Bulgaria and Greece,
who were assigned the property of expropriated Armenians and Assyrians.
How far did the displacement of population during the Great War anticipate
subsequent refugee crises? One striking anomaly in relation to what happened
later on is that most countries decided not to establish refugee camps and
instead dispersed refugees to towns and villages. Holland was a notable excep-
tion. Camps were also used to incarcerate refugees from Galicia and Bukovina
as well as Habsburg subjects from the Italian borderlands who were deported to
the interior of Austria where they could be kept under close surveillance. Other
poor states, notably Italy and Russia, overwhelmed by the scale of the refugee
crisis, shifted much of the responsibility for supporting refugees on to public
organizations and private charitable bodies, leaving the central government to
concentrate resources on the direct war effort. Russia despatched its ‘suspect’
minorities to remote locations, far from the centre of power where there was no
need for a labyrinth of camps.
Other aspects of the wartime crisis pointed more clearly to the way ahead. The
speed and size of displacement encouraged emergency improvisation at first.
Subsequently bureaucratic administration did not lessen but rather enhanced the
importance of efforts by private or semi-official organizations. All this went hand
in hand with an energetic attempt to distinguish and to classify refugees as a
precondition of providing assistance. Almost always the refugee was imagined to
be the victim of unstoppable forces, whether a brutal enemy or a state engaged
in national mobilization. The category of the refugee became part of the common
currency of politics and public opinion: ‘the word “refugees” signifies [in Russia]
a numerous body of people, of any age, sex and social status’.65
To be labelled as a refugee had demeaning consequences, stripping away
attributes of social distinction and class to leave oneself exposed to a sense of
pure deprivation. The consequences of this silencing are eerily familiar to the
modern reader. A Belgian refugee spoke from the heart when he summed up his
feelings: ‘One was always a refugee—that’s the name one was given, a sort of
nickname (sobriquet). One was left with nothing, ruined, and that’s how people

65
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 96–7.
50 Empires of Refugees

carried on talking about “the refugee”. We weren’t real people any more’.66 It was
rare to find alternative readings of displacement, such as by the deputy mayor of
the border town of Hazebrouck who expressed that hope that ‘the war will have
permeated the different regions of our country; we in the north have our quali-
ties, they in the Midi have theirs’.67 How refugees reacted to their circumstances
and to the arrangements made on their behalf is difficult to tell. A voice from
Russia rejected the refugee category: ‘we are living people [with] the misfortune
to have been displaced, but we are human beings all the same. We long to become
people once again’.68
Yet if prevailing images tended to homogenize the refugee, creating a single cat-
egory of difference, nationality offered a means of distinguishing between refugees.
Refugeedom contributed to the intensification of a sense of national identity, not
because one ethnic group alone had been singled out but because it created the
prospect that the ‘nation’ might be permanently uprooted and scattered. Tormented
yet valiant Belgian refugees came to stand for the country as a whole. Italian depor-
tees were placed in internment camps by the Austro-Hungarian army, and became
a ready-made audience for patriots to disseminate nationalist propaganda. Serbian
refugees symbolized the travails of an entire nation waiting for deliverance. In Russia
newly-minted national organizations claimed the refugee for themselves, arguing
that they had a responsibility to the nation, which in turn would not shirk its re-
sponsibilities. Refugees whether Poles, Latvians, Armenians or Jews belonged some-
where after all.
The war provided new opportunities for manifestations of humanitarian senti-
ment and relief efforts. Relief workers described their wartime work in terms of
romance and adventure and the exercise of calm judgement in sharp contrast to
their perception of refugees as inert, traumatized and lacking in self-control.
Although relief efforts had an ephemeral purpose, their legacy mattered in ways
that were not always evident at the time. One outcome was that individuals drew
upon their experience of wartime displacement to commit themselves to further
action. Engagement with refugees paved the way for careers in humanitarianism.
External aid too played an important role. Foreign well-wishers manifested a sen-
timental attachment to Serbians, Belgians and above all Armenians. They collected
money and kept the plight of refugees in the public eye. Even more significant was
the growth of diaspora associations where ideas about victims and perpetrators
circulated alongside the message of national endurance. To be sure, diasporic
groups did not necessarily embrace refugees from a different social background
with equal fervour. Generally speaking, however, foreign sympathizers and diaspo-
ras traded on perceived national characteristics, turning refugees into emblems
both of historic suffering and national self-realization.

66
Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
2004), 104–5.
67
Nivet, Les réfugiés français, 555.
68
Editorial, Bezhenets, 18 October 1915.
 Population Displacement Before and During the Great War 51

The war confirmed that cosmopolitanism was not an option. Cosmopolitan

identities had already been weakened in the Ottoman Empire during the latter
part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘new notions of identity and
sentiments of commonality and difference were created’. Nationalists treated this
as a preordained outcome. As the leading Latvian poet and playwright Jānis Rainis
put it in 1917, commenting on the refugees who moved from Tsarist Russia’s
borderlands to the interior: ‘one cannot circumvent the national phase of social
development and pass directly to a non-national cosmopolitanism’. Such types,
he added, ‘if they reject their own people, will not embrace a non-national state
of the future, but will instead be submerged in a different oppressor nation’.
This—the nationalization of the refugee—was the First World War’s disquieting
legacy.69

69
Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, 142; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 141. Rainis himself sup-
ported the rights of national minorities in Latvia.
 2
Nation-states and the Birth of a ‘Refugee
Problem’ in Inter-war Europe

The new refugees were persecuted not because of what they had done or
thought, but because of what they unchangeably were—born into the wrong
kind of race or the wrong kind of class
(Hannah Arendt)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

On 3 November 1918, exhausted by the war effort and unable to count any longer
on the support of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, Germany
agreed to an armistice; the guns fell silent on the Western front eight days later. The
peacemakers who assembled in Paris in January 1919 redrew the map of Europe.
Already in October 1917 the Russian Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power
with a commitment to bread, land and peace, and in this volatile political situation
the non-Russian parts of the empire asserted the right of self-determination.
Germany exploited this weakness in the Allied war effort and its troops occupied
swathes of Russian territory, but the eventual defeat of the Central Powers allowed
the Allies to impose their will on Berlin, Vienna and Istanbul. A series of peace
treaties dismembered Austria-Hungary and trimmed German and Ottoman terri-
tory. Each state faced enormous problems of reconstruction. Serbia, for example,
now part of the new Yugoslavia, had to reknit the entire fabric of society and
economy. Post-war conflicts paved the way for further upheaval. Civil wars gripped
Russia, Finland and Ireland, and a brief but bloody revolution convulsed Hungary.
The Soviet-Polish War (1919–20) and war between Greece and Turkey (1919–22)
led to further bloodshed. The consequences reverberated across the continent.
The aftershock of the First World War had momentous implications for displaced
people—demobilized soldiers, returning prisoners of war and civilian refugees. Rev-
olution, imperial collapse and territorial changes meant that repatriation returned
them to places that were unrecognizable. For others repatriation was not an option.
In Russia, the Bolshevik victory led to the mass exodus of their ‘White’ opponents.
International attention was lavished on these displaced Russians, as well as Arme-
nian refugees who survived the massacres in the Ottoman Empire. Other new states,
diametrically opposed to Bolshevism, appeared on the scene. Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania became sovereign states. Poland emerged as an independent polity, with
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 53

territory ceded from Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. The outcome of the
post-war settlement was far from stable. Europe’s ‘successor states’ aspired to a high
degree of national homogeneity, yet minorities accounted for one-quarter of the
total population. The legacy of wartime movements of population and widespread
poverty and privation compounded the problem: ‘the keen struggle for existence in
these countries has kept alive the chauvinism of the war period’.1
One option was to escape social or political subordination by putting oneself
beyond the reach of unsympathetic states. Ethnic Hungarians who feared for their
future in Romania, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia fled to the truncated state of
Hungary, a defeated country in which most of them had never set foot. Having
forfeited the privileged position they enjoyed as landed gentry or as government
officials in the old Habsburg Empire, they demanded admittance and formed the
backbone of a reactionary and revanchist politics. By contrast, many Hungarians
from a more modest background decided to remain, such as peasants who hoped
to benefit from the redistribution of land that new states embarked upon. In the
medium term they gained relative to their social superiors who fled to Hungary.2
The term refugee acquired a new resonance as large numbers of people were dis-
placed and as states in turn erected barriers to asylum. In the words of Sir John
Hope Simpson, author of a classic study on refugees, ‘the whole system is based on
a scheme of national states, with populations which fit into the scheme of nationali-
ties. [The] person without a nationality does not fit into that system’.3 The League
of Nations that began work in January 1920 made the protection of national
minorities a cornerstone of its programme, but the successor states regarded the
minority treaties as an unwarranted interference. The Soviet Union appeared to re-
solve the issue by providing political and cultural opportunities for non-Russian
minorities, but the presence of ethnic groups in neighbouring, non-communist
states—Poles in ‘bourgeois’ Poland, for example—raised the spectre of cross-border
subversion. Here too, the way ahead pointed to the persistence of wartime practices
of targeting ‘unreliable elements’, which reached a crescendo in 1937 with the de-
portations of Germans, Poles, Koreans, Chinese, Greeks, Bulgarians and others.4
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire had equally pronounced consequences, not
unexpected given its turbulent pre-war history. In 1919 the Greek government de-
cided to exploit what appeared to be Turkey’s weakness by invading Western Anato-
lia on the pretext of assisting its ethnic Greek inhabitants. Greek and Armenian
guerrillas attacked Turkish villagers, turning the region into a ‘wilderness’.5 Three

1
‘Report of David Bressler and Joseph Hyman to the JDC on Present Conditions of the Jews of
Eastern Europe’ (1930), JDC Archives.
2
István Mócsy, The Uprooted: Hungarian Refugees and their Impact on Hungary’s Domestic Politics,
1918–1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
3
John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1939), 230.
4
Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,
1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great
Terror, 1937–1938’, in David Hoffmann (ed.), Stalinism: the Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003), 87–104.
5
McCarthy, Death and Exile, 278.
54 Empires of Refugees

years later, troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) mounted a
counter-offensive. In September 1922 the port city of Smyrna (Izmir) fell to his
troops. Thousands of Greek survivors of the ensuing bloodshed were deported to
Anatolia or else made their escape to Greece. These repercussions were immense.
Allied diplomats meeting in Lausanne agreed to support a permanent exchange of
population between Greece and Turkey in an attempt, as one British official put it,
to ‘de-Balkanise the Balkans’.6 Lausanne legitimized mass displacement as a prophy-
lactic device to promote ethnic homogeneity. Individuals were given no choice but
to submit. Here refugeedom was the product of deliberate international action.
What was to be done to assist these victims of persecution and diplomatic wran-
gling? Russian and Armenian refugees were scattered across Europe, the Middle
East, the Far East and North America. While impressive humanitarian efforts ad-
dressed their material needs, little attempt was made to understand the root causes
of their displacement. Member states insisted that the League of Nations should
keep ‘political’ questions out of refugee relief. This encouraged a sense that refugees
were miserable flotsam and jetsam. Politics nevertheless formed an inescapable part
of the equation. Anxieties surfaced over political and economic security, given the
explosive impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. Not everyone saw things in negative
terms: Italy’s representative in Geneva appeared to welcome ‘a vast nomadic move-
ment, leading to the dawn of a new era in the old world of Europe. New slips are
being grafted on the old tree of Western Europe’. Surveying the continental up-
heavals, one precocious English child imagined a land called ‘Refugia’ that might
become a homeland for the dispossessed, but this generous fantasy likewise under-
scored the magnitude of social upheaval.7
As this vision implied, expressions of humanitarian concern emanated from a
variety of sources. The League relied upon private philanthropic bodies and NGOs
to carry out programmes of relief and reconstruction. The American-based Near
East Relief (originally the Armenian Relief Committee) endorsed ‘the forwarding
of economic rehabilitation [as] probably the most important service that could be
rendered’ in the Balkans and the Middle East. The broad agenda encompassed
improved health care, the education of women, and the dissemination of ‘organ-
ized recreation’, so that in due course ‘the natives [could] help themselves’. External
intervention was vital in the short term, lest the countries that accommodated
them, ‘lying at the very doorstep of modern western civilisation, constitute an even
greater menace to that civilisation today than they have in centuries past’.8
Diasporic groups too mobilized substantial funds, with the specific purpose of
supporting refugees for whom they had a particular affinity. This was most marked
in respect of Armenians and Jews, but the much smaller Russian diaspora also
mobilized on behalf of White émigrés with the support of Tsarist charities that

6
Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in
Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19.
7
Soguk, States and Strangers, 113, 123. The boy in question was nine-year old Chad Varah
(1911–2007), who went on to create the Samaritans.
8
Frank Ross, Luther Fry and Elbridge Sibley, The Near East and American Philanthropy: a Survey
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), 280; Simpson, Refugee Problem, 176–9.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 55

moved abroad after the Bolshevik Revolution. Humanitarian organizations sought

to galvanize public opinion by proclaiming the need to address historic injustices,
but this tactic did not suit each and every case. Russian and Spanish refugees
needed to find an alternative rhetorical strategy. Those affected by the Lausanne
population transfer had a yet harder job to make themselves heard on the interna-
tional stage.

P O P U L AT I O N D I S P L A C E M E N T I N T H E
F O R M E R RU S S I A N E M P I R E

The Russian Revolution set in train a brutal confrontation between those who sup-
ported the Bolsheviks and those who opposed them for a variety of motives. Civil
war produced widespread internal displacement: ‘[W]e have [wrote one academic]
lived through so much these past seven years that it is a rare citizen of the Republic
who has not felt like a refugee at least for a short while’.9 Having failed to overthrow
the new regime, the Bolsheviks’ opponents fled Russia. Most never returned, set-
tling instead in ‘temporary’ refugee camps in Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and
Greece. By 1922, more than a quarter of all Russian refugees had settled in Germany,
360,000 in Berlin alone. One-fifth lived in Poland; the Balkan states, France and
China accounted for most of the remainder. Thousands of refugees were admitted
to Czechoslovakia which expected them to return in due course to a Russia free
from Bolshevism. Mutual disillusionment soon set in; Cossack refugees especially
felt that they were being exploited by local farmers. Other Russians ended up in the
Belgian Congo and Tunisia, where they fantasized about reviving an aristocratic life.
The flow of refugees was not entirely one-way. Korean patriots who opposed the
Japanese occupation of their country fled to the Russian Far East after the brutal
suppression of the independence movement in 1919; they joined other refugees
who had sought sanctuary in 1910 following Japan’s annexation of Korea.10
Governments looked to minimize their responsibilities towards Russian refu-
gees. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) approached the
League of Nations, which appointed the renowned Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen
as High Commissioner for Refugees in September 1921, a post for which he
refused a salary. Nansen was given a temporary mandate to assist ‘any person of
Russian origin who does not enjoy or who no longer enjoys the protection of the
Government of the USSR, and who has not acquired another nationality’. The
ICRC in particular emphasized that this assistance should be understood as politi-
cally neutral humanitarianism.11

9
Donald Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in
Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 187.
10
Samantha Johnson, ‘Communism in Russia Only Exists on Paper: Czechoslovakia and the
Russian Refugee Crisis, 1919–1924’ CEH, 16, no.3 (2007), 371–94.
11
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 227; Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs
européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,
2003), 388–91.
56 Empires of Refugees

The League invited Nansen to organize the repatriation of refugees or arrange

for ‘their allocation to the various countries which might be able to receive them
and to find means of work for them’. Initially, he entertained hopes of promoting
the repatriation of Russian refugees from overcrowded places such as Varna and
Constantinople, so that they might contribute to the reconstruction of Russia.
Soviet leaders sought thereby to nip anti-Bolshevik agitation in the bud. Pro-com-
munist organizations in the West encouraged repatriation, but few refugees took
the bait. Nansen eventually abandoned the idea.12
With no funds at his disposal Nansen could not assist refugees directly, although
he made a point of employing refugees as clerical staff in local branches. (They were
also represented in the Geneva office.) His main achievement was to conduct a
census of refugees and provide those who could afford five francs with a ‘Nansen
passport’ to enable them to travel to a third country to find work, the underlying
purpose being to help distribute Russian and Armenian (and subsequently Assyr-
ian) refugees more ‘equitably’ among member countries of the League of Nations.
The passport offered no assurances about the right of abode or the right to work.
European governments were loath to make substantial contributions to the League’s
relief efforts for reasons of financial retrenchment. Their stance also reflected an
element of contempt for refugees which, in the British case, translated into a highly
restrictive immigration policy. The Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Cecil
Harmsworth, derided ‘Cossacks, Kalmucks, priests, generals, judges and ladies’
whom he regarded as ‘an intolerable burden’. But this did nothing to address the
question of their offspring who, in the words of a more insightful observer, were ‘in
danger of becoming useless and harmful elements in the Europe of tomorrow’.13
By no means all refugees came from a privileged background, although this
stereotype tended to predominate, as Harmsworth’s description suggests. Those
with existing contacts found work relatively quickly. French employers recruited
Russian workers in the refugee camps in Constantinople and Bulgaria—Renault
took on refugees at its factory in Billancourt. Others became taxi drivers, account-
ants, clerks, bank guards and prostitutes. Their prospects diminished considerably
as a consequence of the Great Depression at the turn of the decade. Harbin in the
Far East turned into a miniature Russian metropolis, home to some 200,000 refu-
gees. In Shanghai around 8,000 Russian refugees formed an active cultural com-
munity, although they remained an underclass among the privileged foreign
mercantile elite.14
While prominent Russian artists, composers, lawyers, politicians and academ-
ics left behind diaries and correspondence describing their lives in exile, and

12
Katy Long, ‘Early Repatriation Policy: Russian Refugee Return, 1922–1924’ JRS, 22, no.2
(2009), 133–54; Martyn Housden, ‘White Russians Crossing the Black Sea: Fridtjof Nansen, Con-
stantinople, and the First Modern Repatriation of Refugees Displaced by Civil Conflict, 1922–1923’
Slavonic and East European Review, 88, no.3 (2010), 495–524.
13
Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 83–4, 149, 285; Soguk, States and Strangers, 104. On the
complex Assyrian situation see Simpson, Refugee Problem, 47–61.
14
Catherine Gousseff, L’exil russe: la fabrique du réfugié apatride, 1920–1939 (Paris: CNRS,
2008).
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 57

while Russian émigrés maintained a vibrant culture—Harbin was home to a

notable orchestra and opera house—the voices of those who were unable to trade
on artistic talent or social connections were usually concealed. One disquieting
example survives in the form of a letter by one Madame Mouravieff who peti-
tioned the British Commissioner of Police in Bombay, explaining that she landed
in jail, having been charged with prostitution. In her letter, written in hesitant
English, she describes herself as ‘simply nervous and hysterical’ (sic), and that
‘nobody understands me here. I am so tired, I have been suffering too much and
I am overwhelmed with grief, I am living like a “dead body” ’. The Commissioner
decided to keep her in prison rather than send her to the refugee camp in Bel-
gaum, some 400 miles south, on the grounds that she was a ‘nymphomaniac’
who would be a ‘nuisance’ in the camp. She ended her letter with the plaintive
words: ‘I am so lonely here, be interested in me’.15 How she came to be in this
position, and what happened to her, we can only speculate. All we know for
certain is that any romance that attached to the narrative of ‘Russia abroad’
simply passed her by.
With only a small administration under the aegis of the League of Nations, as-
sisting Russian refugees became instead a story of self-help and private philan-
thropy, in which the Russian Red Cross and exiles from Zemgor (the most
important public organization in Tsarist Russia for the relief of civilian victims of
war) took a lead role in providing schooling, vocational training, basic medical
treatment and assistance for children and the elderly in Constantinople and on the
Greek island of Lemnos. A Russian Aid Society supported indigent White Rus-
sians; so too did the Russian Orthodox Church and the American Red Cross.
Notwithstanding their efforts and those of Nansen, Simpson concluded that after
20 years of action, specifically in the Far East, ‘things could scarcely be worse from
the refugee standpoint, and unless steps of some kind are taken the mass of the
emigration will sink into a condition of moral degradation and economic misery
which will disgrace Western civilisation’.16
The attitudes struck by those in influential positions such as Simpson were in-
formed by notions of refugees’ physical and mental affliction. Doubts about their
political opinions added a complicating factor—there was talk of Bolshevik ‘infil-
tration’. This febrile atmosphere also governed policy towards internally displaced
persons who wished to return to their homes that now came under the jurisdiction
of a new state. Following the collapse of the Provisional Government in Russia, the
desperate economic situation in Bolshevik-held territory encouraged these refugees
to make their way west. Not that material considerations were always paramount—
patriotic Poles and Balts wanted to participate in the reconstruction of their ‘home-
land’. Between 1918 and 1924 around 130,000 people returned to Latvia and
215,000 to Lithuania; by 1925 the total number of Polish citizens who had been

15
Letter dated November 1920, IOL, Political and Secret Annual Files, 1912–30, L/PS/11/177.
16
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 513; Dzovinar Kévonian, ‘L’organisation non-gouvernementale
comme acteur émergent du champ humanitaire: le Zemgor et la Société des Nations dans les années
vingt’ Cahiers du monde russe, 46, no.4 (2005), 739–56.
58 Empires of Refugees

repatriated from the Soviet Union stood at 1.26 million. In addition to formal
repatriation agreements between the relevant governments, refugees returned
under their own steam, adding to fears that they would spread infectious disease.
But these successor states operated a discriminatory policy favouring those who
belonged to the titular nationality. Thus ethnic Poles were welcome in Poland,
whereas Lithuanians and Jews found it far more difficult to secure Polish citizen-
ship. There were stories of patrols forcing refugees back across the frontier to Soviet
Russia to an uncertain fate.17
Humanitarian relief efforts faced an uphill struggle. The American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC) sent investigators to Poland and Lithuania, from
where Boris Bogen sent back depressing reports about ‘refugee concentration
camps’.18 Florence Barrow, a Quaker social worker, helped refugees who returned
to Poland, after being forced to leave their homes in 1915. Her single-minded
pursuit of refugee families is touching and remarkable; she tracked Polish refugees
whom she had first encountered during 1916, in the Quaker settlements in the
mid-Volga region. The extant stories mix despair and hope in equal measure, as in
the account of the Harek family, three sisters who had been orphaned in 1915 after
the family had been expelled from a village south of Brest-Litovsk. The elder sister
was adopted by a school teacher in Pinsk, leaving the younger ones to move east-
wards, where they eventually settled in the Quaker home in Buzuluk district,
Samara province. In 1920 the sisters made the long journey home, only to find
their house occupied by another refugee family.19
A labyrinthine bureaucracy vetted the returnees to ensure that only those with
the ‘correct’ political opinions were admitted, that they were physically fit, and
preferably that they had practical skills to offer. Polish returnees from Siberia—
many of whom were the children of Tsarist exiles and had never set foot on Polish
soil—were asked if they ‘felt Polish’. Latvians and Lithuanians too, having been
caught up in the maelstrom of the revolution, faced tough questions about their
political beliefs. While returnees from the titular majority linked their own pros-
pects to the foundation of the state, and were rewarded with land, minorities who
wished to repatriate fared badly. The new states of Eastern Europe did not hesitate
to deter and expel those whose presence was deemed harmful. Discrimination
against Jews was widespread: a conservative newspaper published in Lithuania
complained that Jews ‘are streaming into our country bringing with them many
different dangers and unhappiness to the true citizens of our country [sic] and to
the state itself ’.20 This encouraged a sense that the nation was the exclusive prop-
erty of the dominant ethnic group.

17
Elizaveta Isaakova, ‘A Testimony’ (manuscript c.1962), 236, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia
University; Tomas Balkelis, ‘In Search of a Native Realm: the Return of World War I Refugees to
Lithuania, 1918–1924’, in Baron and Gatrell (eds), Homelands, 74–97.
18
‘Through the Ukraine with Bogen’ (April 1922), JDC Archives. Boris Bogen was the JDC’s
director of East European relief.
19
‘Poland: refugee problems, conditions, and relief work’, FEWVRC, Box 9, Parcel 1, Folder 3;
Florence Barrow, ‘Refugees in Poland’, The Friend, 29 September 1922.
20
Balkelis, ‘In Search of a Native Realm’, 91.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 59

A R M E N I A : R E C O N S T RU C T I O N A N D R E S E T T L E M E N T

In the aftermath of the genocide on the territory of the Ottoman Empire in 1915,
Western Armenian politicians and refugee activists in diaspora organizations such
as the Armenian General Benevolent Union held out hopes that the refugee ques-
tion could be settled by an organized programme of repatriation to a ‘recovered’
Anatolia under Armenian jurisdiction. According to one estimate, around 800,000
Armenians were thought likely to resettle in a ‘national home’, to include Eastern
Anatolia. Armenian dignitaries spoke of ‘taking possession of our homeland, which
has been irrigated by the blood of countless martyrs and heroes’.21 Inevitably,
Turkey opposed any kind of independent Armenian state, let alone one carved out
of its territory.
Although Armenian refugees were scattered far and wide, many of them found
homes in the fledgling Soviet republic of Armenia. An American visitor came face
to face with the effects of famine and typhus on youngsters whom he described as
‘wizened and ancient dwarfs. Those attenuated bodies clad in a shagginess of filthy
rags, seemed centuries removed from civilisation. You felt that you had stumbled
into prehistoric man’s den’.22 American philanthropy would relieve suffering, re-
store sanity to ‘crazed’ refugees and re-establish civilization. Yet this analysis dis-
counted the efforts of Soviet authorities, whose public works were supplemented
by enterprises owned and managed by refugee entrepreneurs. Officials allocated
land and inputs to refugee farmers, and levied a special ‘refugee tax’ on the settled
population. Nansen praised the development of the country ‘under an apparently
stable government’ and pointed to the need for sustained investment to allow
50,000 refugees to settle permanently. Erevan lay at the heart of ‘a wonderful land
which needs only one thing and that is water to become a Garden of Eden’. But his
attempts to raise the necessary funds came to naught.23
The only alternative to irrigation was emigration. A leading Quaker wanted to
‘give the young a chance of developing as far away as possible from the Turks and
from the race hatred of the past. There are, as you know, vast tracts of land in
Australia quite unoccupied—they want a white Australia’. Nansen looked to Latin
America, but in vain. Most refugees preferred to settle in Syria, Cyprus, Palestine
and Lebanon, rather than so far afield.24 Syria became home to around 200,000
refugees. This did not imply an easy passage to a place of safety. The child of one
family, Sarkis (b.1934), recounted what he had been told of his grandfather’s odys-
sey that took in Marash, Aleppo, Rayyak and Damascus:
In the beginning it was very hard . . . My grandfather was privileged. He was given
some space at the cemetery of the Armenians. Eventually some relatives came from

21
Richard Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, 1918–1921, volume 1 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971), 460, 476.
22
Melville Chater, ‘Land of Stalking Death’ National Geographic Magazine, 36 (November 1919),
403–18.
23
Report by Dr Nansen to League of Nations, 28 July 1925, IOL, L/E/7/1315/3774; Skran, Refu-
gees in Inter-War Europe, 170–7, 180.
24
UNOG, Fonds Nansen, Box C1586, doc.17729, Marshall Fox to Nansen, 7 January 1930.
60 Empires of Refugees
Aleppo with more resources and they worked together and established a ‘camp’. This
became the Armenian ‘camp’ near Bab Musalla. After a time, my grandfather moved
us to a very small house with two rooms. We had a small space where we made small
goods for selling in the souq near the Umayyad Mosque. My grandmother used to
cook in a big pot for the whole family.25
Refugee camps were a legacy of the failure to find a durable solution to the plight
of Armenians. Soon these camps were being described as ‘regular settlements’ of
people who ‘have always lived surrounded by hostile elements; their dwellings,
however primitive, constitute a small capital’. Outside observers endorsed the view
that Armenians manifested a ‘free spirit’ that should be given a chance to flourish
outside the camps, which threatened a ‘paralysis of character’.26
The situation in Greece was especially desperate. Armenians jostled with Greek
refugees from Asia Minor, and the Greek government arranged with the USSR for
their repatriation to Soviet Armenia; some 30,000 Armenian refugees and others
took up this offer. In Palestine the long-established Armenian community objected
to the newcomers who attached themselves too willingly to the religious authority
of the Patriarchate, a subordination they resented. Cyprus seemed to offer a more
promising sanctuary, because of its longstanding Armenian community of farmers
and shopkeepers, and others who escaped Ottoman persecution in 1894–96 and
1909. However, as in Palestine, the ‘natives’ (deghatsi) kept their distance from the
refugees (kaghtagan). It took years before the two groups intermarried or spent
time together. The school curriculum stressed the distinctiveness of Armenian lan-
guage and faith, whilst conversations at home reinforced the message about the
history of persecution, escape and survival, and the duty of survivors to preserve
Armenian culture.27
This became a common theme among Armenian patriots. Whether in Syria or
Lebanon, which was home to an established Armenian community (many of
whom were originally from Western Anatolia and spoke Turkish), or elsewhere, the
problem was that life beyond the Armenian homeland or in the confines of the
camp exposed refugees to a dual challenge. One was the troubling possibility of
‘assimilation’ in a different culture. A more immediate issue was the social and re-
ligious division among the Armenian population. Ironically, the attacks launched
by Muslim leaders in Lebanon and Druze rebels in Syria helped bring about unity
between the recently arrived Armenian refugees and the older Armenian commu-
nities. The French mandatory authorities cemented this process. By the late 1920s
refugees had a chance to join other elements of the Armenian diaspora under the
aegis of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks), the leading national-
ist and anti-Soviet political party which dedicated itself to the creation of ‘true

25
Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession, 176.
26
Georges Carle, report dated 1925, IOL, L/E/7/1315/3774. ‘Paralysis of character’ was the term
used by James Barton, Director of Near East Relief.
27
Susan Pattie, Faith in History: Armenians Rebuilding Community (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1997), 50–70; Bedross Der Matossian, ‘The Armenians of Palestine 1918–48’ JPS,
41, no.1 (2011), 24–44.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 61

Armenians’. Refugee camps played a part—but only a part—in this political

project, which sustained Armenian enclaves for decades.28
In France, where the numbers were much greater, 60,000 Armenian refugees
were housed in former POW camps. The best known of these institutions, Camp
Oddo in Marseille, boasted Armenian churches, shops, hospitals and schools ad-
ministered by staff who carefully compiled lists of arrivals and registered the oc-
cupation, status and place of origin of refugees as part of an ongoing project to
ensure that Armenians retained a sense of ‘nation’. The qualities that French au-
thorities professed to admire in Armenians—‘dedication to labour, family spirit,
love of the home, frugality, sobriety, and saving’—coincided with their own sense
of virtue. Nevertheless a collective sense of persecution was reinforced by the deci-
sion of the French authorities to close down Camp Oddo in 1927. With the French
state reluctant to assume the financial costs of maintaining Armenian refugees,
they were expected to find work in the automobile industry, in metalworking and
in textiles. Fortunately the buoyant labour market afforded reasonable opportuni-
ties. The Armenian diaspora also invested in the reconstruction of villages in Soviet
Armenia. Some refugees turned victimization on its head by resorting to acts of
terror against the symbols of Turkish authority—a reminder that the phenomenon
of ‘refugee warriors’ goes back a long way.29
Their depiction as courageous survivors and adherents to a common Christian
‘civilization’ appealed to the values and wallets of foreign philanthropists. Armen-
ophiles such as Arnold Toynbee and James Bryce addressed a British audience.
Dudley Northcote, a British army officer serving in Mesopotamia and familiar
with conditions in the Baqubah refugee camp, described Armenians’ strong work
ethic and willingness to learn. He bemoaned the decision by the British govern-
ment to reward their loyalty to the Allies by incarcerating Armenian and Assyrian
refugees in ‘concentration camps’, yet also feared the consequences of closing these
down. The Arab population of Iraq was unreceptive, so local settlement was not a
feasible option; there was neither demand for unskilled labour nor ‘respectable’
work for women. In Northcote’s words, the proposal ‘certainly means the end of
them as a community and the complete abandonment of them to the Arabs’.30
The League of Nations and NGOs embarked upon the task of ‘reclaiming’
Christian women and children from the spiritual and moral ‘corruption’ of Islam.
As they had done during the 1896 massacres, British parliamentarians expressed
concern about women who were ‘being retained in Turkish harems’.31 Emma
Cushman, an American missionary, got the League to underwrite a ‘neutral house’
in Constantinople, which cared for children who developed a ‘distorted mentality’
as captives, but who could now learn the Armenian language, sing hymns and

28
Ronald Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 219–22.
29
Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 132; Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty, 153.
30
Joanne Laycock, Imagining Armenia: Orientalism, Ambiguity and Intervention (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009), 171.
31
Edmund Harvey MP, 14 July 1924, IOL, L/E/7/1315/3774.
62 Empires of Refugees

learn Armenian craftsmanship. The Danish missionary and social worker Karen
Jeppe established a sanctuary in Aleppo, causing friction between the newcomers
and local Bedouin tribes. Jeppe added a fresh twist: ‘the rescue always required a
special effort on the part of the persons rescued; they had to decide for themselves
whether they would leave the houses where they were detained or not. We only
helped them to carry out their own intentions’. She used her extensive case notes
to record traces of ineradicable ‘Armenianness’.32
The appropriation of refugee experience reached its apogee in the ordeal of
Aurora Mardiganian (1901–94), a young girl who managed to survive and to make
her way to the USA in 1917. She soon came to the attention of a screenwriter who
encouraged her to write a memoir that became the basis of a feature film that sur-
vives only in fragmentary form. In an extraordinary twist, Aurora found herself
starring in a film of her own life. The publicity brochure boasted that ‘the chaste
figure of Aurora is seen not acting, but living again through the horrors of those
two years of captivity’, and the film included graphic scenes of rape and crucifix-
ion. In other words, what appears on one level to be an instance of a female refugee
who claimed the right to tell her own story emerges on closer inspection as her
exploitation by film producers who sought to make a profit through offering an
‘authentic’ representation of slaughter and deportation. Aurora’s nakedness and
powerlessness were clearly of great significance to the film makers, and her ordeal,
her youth and gender turned her into the archetypal Armenian refugee.33

‘UNMIXING’ THE BALKANS

In the Balkans, population displacement came about from a combination of flight

and population transfer. Between 1912 and 1926, a quarter of a million ethnic
Bulgarian refugees fled to Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire, Romania, Greece
(which accounted for nearly half of the total), and the newly created state of Yugo-
slavia. One component resulted from the agreement signed with Greece in 1919 to
implement a population exchange. Refugees accounted for 5 per cent of the total
population of Bulgaria in the 1920s, but a much higher proportion in the coun-
try’s remote Macedonian enclave that Bulgaria retained after the Balkan Wars. The
government in Sofia, dominated by the Agrarian Party led by Aleksandr Stamboli-
iski, devised a series of ad hoc measures to provide refugees with land. Artisans who
settled in urban centres were expected to take over the properties of Greeks, but the
large numbers created a housing shortage. Bulgaria appealed successfully to the
League of Nations for a large loan to help cover the costs of resettlement, astutely

32
Miss E. D. Cushman, report to Secretary-General of League of Nations, 16 July 1921, and
Karen Jeppe, note 28 July 1927, IOL, L/E/7/1230/1585; Simpson, Refugee Problem, 35; Keith Waten-
paugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern
Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’ AHR, 115, no.5 (2010), 1315–39, at 1337.
33
IOL, L/PS/11/159/P7105, my emphasis; Leshu Torchin, ‘Ravished Armenia: Visual Media, Hu-
manitarian Advocacy and the Formation of Witnessing Publics’ American Anthropologist, 108, no.1
(2006), 214–20.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 63

claiming that without international support the refugees’ presence risked foment-
ing communist revolution. Refugees who received financial support from the
League were obliged to renounce their previous citizenship. Additional help came
from Save the Children which built a model village for refugees on reclaimed
swamp land.34
These efforts served to remind Bulgarians of the country’s defeat in the Balkan
Wars and the First World War, and of their generosity in looking after their own.
In other words the crisis said as much about Bulgaria’s ‘national hospitality’ as it
did about the experience of displacement. Refugees took a different view, arguing
that ‘we were expelled from our places of birth because we are Bulgarians, yet here
we are not afforded [recognition] because we are refugees’. The inadequate meas-
ures for accommodating them created a profound sense of disappointment.35 Their
status as refugees marked them out as marginal people. This story has a postscript:
Bulgarian refugees displaced by the Balkan Wars and the First World War returned
to their homes when the Axis powers occupied Greece and Yugoslavia, although
the turn of the military tide in 1944 meant that their triumph was short-lived.
Even more dramatic changes took place to the south. The protracted war be-
tween Greece and Turkey culminated in the destruction of Smyrna in September
1922 and an alarming refugee crisis. People on both sides spoke of widespread
harassment, brutality and the suicide of women who wanted to evade capture.
Around 350,000 Muslim refugees had already moved to Turkish territory in
1921–22. Ottoman Christians were stranded on the coast when Turkey recap-
tured the city. British and American Red Cross officials spoke of ‘a disorganised
flood of refugees’ who urgently required food, shelter and medical assistance. For-
eign governments made hasty arrangements to evacuate hundreds of thousands to
Athens, Salonika and Corfu.36
Although many refugees planned to recover their homes when things calmed
down, these hopes were quickly dashed. The League of Nations agreed to extend
Nansen’s mandate to help resettle refugees in Greece without needing to call on
member states for significant funds. Against the backdrop of continued violence
and depleted resources, diplomats and officials embarked on a radical project that
would transform the social and ethnic composition of both countries. The liberal
Greek political leader Eleftherios Venizelos regarded the transfer of population
from Eastern Thrace as an opportunity to ‘Hellenise’ the land that Greece had
recently acquired from Bulgaria, in other words to settle Greeks in Western Thrace
and in Macedonia: if (as he said) he could not establish ‘Greater Greece’, then he

34
King Boris III named it Atolovo, in honour of the Duke of Atholl, president of SCF. The League
of Nations Reconstruction Schemes in the Inter-War Period (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), 101–8;
Kathleen Freeman, If Any Man Build: the History of the Save the Children Fund (Hodder and Stoughton,
1965), 35.
35
Theodora Dragostinova, ‘Competing Priorities, Ambiguous Loyalties: Challenges of Socio-
economic Adaptation and National Inclusion of the Interwar Bulgarian refugees’ Nationalities Papers,
34, no.5 (2006), 549–74, at 565.
36
Henry Alden Shaw, ‘Greek Refugees from the Caucasus and the Work of the American Red
Cross at Salonique’ Journal of International Relations, 12, no.1 (1921), 44–9, at 45; McCarthy, Death
and Exile, 303; Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 107–8.
64 Empires of Refugees

would settle for a ‘Great Greece’. At the Lausanne conference British Foreign Sec-
retary Lord Curzon welcomed the proposed ‘homogenisation’ of population that
would bring an end to ‘old deep-rooted causes of quarrel’. No-one consulted those
directly affected.37
Both Greece and Turkey were poor and badly damaged by warfare, and unpre-
pared for this mass transfer and the ensuing health crisis. The American Red Cross
and Save the Children deloused refugees and distributed food and clothing in
Greece, although not in Turkey where they were denied access, leaving the field to
the under-funded Turkish Red Crescent. The American diplomat Henry Mor-
genthau, who combined sentimental attachment to Greece with an undisguised
antipathy to Turkey, described how fortunate refugees from Asia Minor found
temporary accommodation in the Athens Opera House and in former mosques.
A refugee camp in Salonika reminded him ‘very much of the concentration camps
for Russians we visited in Lemberg [L’viv] in 1919’. Not content with showing his
disgust, Morgenthau told his readership of his own part in the scene: ‘I at the
moment, above all others, pledged to redeem this throng! What an awful respon-
sibility!’ But refugees had a capacity to respond positively to external assistance, by
virtue of being the descendants of Homer and Philip of Macedon. They needed
‘guidance’ rather than what he termed the ‘government’ that the British exercised
over its colonial subjects in India.38
Strictly speaking, the ‘Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and
Turkish Populations’ did not create ‘refugees’. Instead it stipulated that ‘as from
1 May 1923 there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of
the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory and of Greek nation-
als of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory’. Greeks who moved from
Turkey acquired Greek citizenship and vice versa. But substantial numbers had
been displaced by the war, and the term ‘refugee’ was already in widespread use.
Official terminology recognized this state of affairs by creating a Refugee Relief
Fund, followed soon after by the Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC). Estab-
lished by the League of Nations and ratified by the Greek Parliament in October
1924, the RSC survived until 1930. Nor was this terminology confined to bureau-
cratic documentation: refugee associations published newspapers with titles such
as Prosfygikos Kosmos (‘Refugee World’).39
Bare statistics convey something of the immediate social, economic, political
and cultural consequences of Lausanne for Greek and Turkish refugees (see Map 3).
In all, around 1.22 million Greeks were obliged to leave Asia Minor, while 400,000
Turkish refugees moved from Greece, carried in Turkish vessels at the behest of the
government which refused to entrust the human cargo to any other party.40 Greece
absorbed the equivalent of around 25 per cent of its pre-war population, the num-
bers swollen by refugees arriving from Eastern Thrace and Pontic Greeks from the
Black Sea littoral; there were around half a million of these. In numerical terms
37
Frank, Expelling the Germans, 22–3; Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 158–9.
38
Henry Morgenthau, I Was Sent to Athens (Garden City: Doubleday, 1929), 9, 98–102, 124.
39
Charles Eddy, Greece and the Greek Refugees (George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 7, 71–82.
40
Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 138.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 65

Refugee Movements
Greeks
Turks
Bulgarians
Armenians

0 100 km BULGARIA

MACEDONIA
THRACE Constantinople
Salonika Marmaras
Islands

GREECE

CORFU
TURKEY

Athens
Piraeus

RHODES

CRETE

Map 3: Map of the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey, 1923

Turkey, with a much larger population (13.5 million in 1922) shouldered a rela-
tively smaller burden. Both states became more homogeneous. The Muslim popu-
lation of Greece dropped from 20 per cent to 6 per cent of the total. Before 1923
around one-fifth of the population of Turkey was non-Muslim, but thereafter the
figure fell to just 3 per cent (although it was 10 per cent in Istanbul). Greeks who
remained in Turkey faced an uncertain future, being accused of having ‘collabo-
rated’ with the Greek army during its operations in western Anatolia.41

41
Raoul Blanchard, ‘The Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey’ Geographical
Review, 15, no.3 (1925), 449–56; Alexander Pallis, ‘Racial Migrations in the Balkans during the Years
1913–1924’ Geographical Journal, 66, no.4 (1925), 315–31.
66 Empires of Refugees

Red Cross officials urged Greece to relocate refugees from camps quickly:
You can’t make John Jones self-supporting while he is living in a great camp and being
fed by relief machinery, put to bed at seven o’clock and got out at five. That is not the
way the people make their living. Every day that they stayed in those camps they were
losing their moral grip; they were becoming weaker and pauperising themselves; be-
coming accustomed to being taken care of, and becoming poor citizens of Greece.42
The government agreed. Around half of the refugees from Anatolia were duly set-
tled on land in Macedonia and Western Thrace that had previously been farmed by
Muslims who fled before the war or who sold up before the Convention was en-
forced. Here refugees made up 45 and 35 per cent of the respective population in
1928. The Refugee Settlement Commission, with a mandate ‘to promote the
establishment of refugees in productive work either upon the land or otherwise’
provided loans for the purchase of draft animals and timber. Greece expropriated
properties belonging to Muslim farmers and Italian, French and English landown-
ers. Some 2,000 new villages were created on reclaimed marsh land. Only after
they discharged their debts did refugees receive title deeds, but many of them re-
fused to pay as a matter of principle, arguing that ‘indemnities payable for proper-
ties abandoned in their former homes should be offset against debts payable to the
Commission’. The RSC betrayed little awareness of the experiences of newcomers,
notably in Macedonia, where powerful local elites managed to secure their own
economic and political advantage.43
The Commission believed that it could ‘inspire the refugees as a class with cour-
age and determination, [although] whether the work of settlement was to be a
success or failure depended upon the refugees themselves’.44 Morgenthau told in-
ternational bankers that the credit they extended to Greece would enable refugees
to be self-supporting. The League applauded ‘the capacity for work and receptivity
to new ideas which characterise the mass of refugees’, while another author con-
trasted ‘those miserable Turkish hamlets’ with the new ‘large cheerful villages—
what a miracle!’ Refugees contributed to economic growth by reclaiming land and
improving crop rotation, and the RSC helped by investing in infrastructure such
as roads and schools. Commission members visited experimental agricultural un-
dertakings, irrigation projects and stud farms. Americans welcomed the increased
cultivation of tobacco which was turned into ‘Lucky Strike’ and ‘Camel’ brands of
cigarette. Greeks were employed by the RSC as engineers, agronomists, health
workers, accountants and other technical specialists. Teachers too had a vital role
to play, not least by ensuring that the children of newcomers rapidly learned to
speak and read Greek, making this a ‘truly national enterprise’.45 This looks very
like the development agenda after the Second World War.
42
George Kritikos, ‘The Agricultural Settlement of Refugees: a Source of Productive Work and
Stability in Greece, 1923–1930’ Agricultural History, 79, no.3 (2005), 321–46, at 324–5.
43
League of Nations, Greek Refugee Settlement (Geneva: Greek Resettlement Commission, 1926),
81; Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood, 143–66.
44
Eddy, Greece and the Greek Refugees, 94, 174.
45
Morgenthau, I Was Sent to Athens, 112–13, 190, 274–5; Eliot Mears, Greece Today: the Aftermath
of the Refugee Impact (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1929), 17, 235, 291–2.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 67

The face of Greece changed in other respects too. Refugees settled in Athens and
its environs. The new suburb of Kokkinia soon boasted a population of 33,000
inhabitants. Morgenthau reported that the ‘somnolent streets of Athens’ had
become ‘bustling [and] thronged with new faces’. He was particularly impressed by
the simple but clean houses whose low construction costs appealed to his banker’s
temperament. The port city of Piraeus, where contemporaries complained that
refugees built ‘unauthorised structures in the streets and vacant lots adjoining their
houses’, bore the imprint of refugee settlement at least until the 1970s. The RSC
prided itself on having built dispensaries, kindergartens and schools here too, as
well as installing water supply, although the rate of construction failed to keep pace
with the needs of the new population. Occupational change was also under way.
Female refugees boosted rug and carpet-making and silkworm breeding. Other
trades included spinning, dress-making, carpet weaving, pottery and the manufac-
ture of copper goods. Industrialists hoped to take advantage of the additional
labour supply to keep wages at a minimum. Although Greek union leaders invited
refugees to join, the outcome was disappointing, and refugee labour remained in a
weak bargaining position.46
Economic opportunities could not disguise the negative image of the newcom-
ers whose cultural differences were regularly emphasized. One local made it clear
that ‘there is no way I will accept the Caucasians. Venizelos brought shit to Mace-
donia’. This was an extreme but by no means an isolated view.47 The Greek foreign
minister set the tone by suggesting that ‘Greece is already saturated with refugees’.
Hostile observers spoke of an ‘oglokratia’, a reference to the Turkish surnames that
carried the suffix –oglu. The Populist Party maintained that the newcomers repre-
sented a ‘refugee dictatorship’ and demanded that refugees be excluded from
political participation or confined to non-Greek associations. Likewise anti-Ven-
izelist factions spoke of a ‘refugee menace’. Whether the popularity of Punch and
Judy shows in the villages of Macedonia owed something to the deteriorating rela-
tions between newcomers and their neighbours or betokened its lessening is diffi-
cult to tell. In an ominous foretaste of events in Nazi Europe some refugees were
instructed to wear yellow armbands in order to distinguish them from locals.48
Native Greeks portrayed them as ‘Orientals’, ‘baptised in yoghurt’ (giaourtovaft-
esemeni) and ‘Turkish seeds’ (Turkosporoi), as well as ‘stupid’. Refugees were ac-
cused of having imported low-class and ‘immoral’ music—(rebetika) along with
drugs. But rebetika provided remarkable evidence of the cultural creativity of dis-
placed singers and composers who drew upon a rich musical tradition in the urban
centres of Anatolia. They mischievously appropriated the idea that they disturbed
conventional mores, creating songs that described seductive or promiscuous
women and the pleasures of cannabis; titles such as ‘Hashish Harem’ and ‘Bordello

46
Morgenthau, I Was Sent to Athens, 50, 242; Eddy, Greece and the Greek Refugees, 191–4.
47
Elisabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: the Rural Settlement of Refugees
1922–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 187.
48
George Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic: Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–
1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 194; Mears, Greece Today, 258; Karakasidou,
Fields of Wheat, 157.
68 Empires of Refugees

Blues’ give some idea of the content. These were sung in villages, but they achieved
a greater impact in the townships of Greece. Gramophone companies vied with
each other to bring out new records. One song, Neva hedzaz (‘Like a dry and drift-
ing leaf ’), recorded by Marika Kanaropúlu, asked: ‘How much longer will my fate
condemn me to drag myself through foreign lands like a withered leaf?’ Kanaropúlu
(1914–90), a native of Bursa (Turkey) was nicknamed Turkalítsa or ‘The Turkish
girl’. Her recording career in Greece lasted from 1930 until 1936, when she left for
the USA. In another song, ‘The exile’s grief ’, the prolific composer/singer Andónis
Dalgás spoke of the ‘pain of ksenityá ’, the condition of having to live in a foreign
land called Greece and being separated from his home:
It is for you I weep, oh mother dear/and suffer in this land as one exiled/
I beg you, mother, never shed a tear/but light a candle for your child.
The melody came from a Turkish song, ‘Every place, darkness’ that was often re-
corded in Turkey and Greece. Other lyrics spoke of the impoverished circum-
stances into which refugees from Asia Minor had fallen, an ironic comment on the
fact that it was precisely this low life that attracted a respectable audience seeking
a vicarious thrill.49
Music could do only so much to counter the negative qualities to refugees.
Maria Birbili described the reception she was given when she reached Crete in
October 1923:
Somebody gathered us to pick olives in Paliochora. It took us two days and one night to
reach there. Once we arrived at the village, he wanted to get us to sleep in a hen-coop.
I told him, ‘I do not go inside. Had I wanted to be captured I would have remained in
Asia Minor’. A crowd gathered round us and eyed us with curiosity like being another
race [asking] ‘Do you speak any Greek? Do you have churches in your country?’50
Refugees from Smyrna were described as ‘frivolous, quarrelsome and prone to
gossip’. Of course not all refugees were tarred with the same brush: refugees from
Bulgaria were deemed to be ‘a progressive factor and a rural element of the first
class’. In other words, whereas government propaganda spoke of a universal ‘Greek
idea’, available in principle to all refugees, public opinion deployed a differentiated
lexicon that made life intolerable for many newcomers. It may be that the murder
of two refugees in 1933 inspired Nikos Kazantzakis to begin his famous novel,
Christ Recrucified (1948), which described a village deeply affected by the arrival of
a party of refugees from Asia Minor.51
Refugees from Asia Minor fought back politically and culturally. Pontic Greeks
became firm supporters of Venizelos, saying that ‘if it wasn’t for Venizelos, none of
us would be left, they [the Turks] would have exterminated us, as they did the

49
Greek-Oriental Rebetica: Songs and Dances in the Asia Minor Style, 1911–1937 (Folklyric CD
7005, 1991).
50
Kritikos, ‘The Agricultural Settlement of Refugees’, 349.
51
Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic, 182; Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: the
Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (New York: Berghahn, 1998), 24; Dimitri Pentzopoulos,
The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact on Greece (Hurst, 2002), 101–2.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 69

Armenians’. But by the mid-1930s politically active refugees had abandoned liberal
politics in favour of the Communist Party, a consequence in part of their disillu-
sionment with the policies of the Greek state, which sought a rapprochement with
Turkey and renounced any attempt to compensate them for the properties they had
been forced to abandon. Culturally, the refugees from Constantinople regarded
themselves as superior to their hosts, and were in turn held to be ‘stuck up’. They
poked fun at the conservative tastes of the local Greek population. Cultural rivalry
was illustrated by the former residents of the Marmaras islands who settled on
remote Ammouliani, off the coast of Salonika and poured scorn on the outmoded
dress sense of local Greeks and affirmed a kind of cosmopolitanism: ‘[W]e wore the
latest fashions. In our home we had a mania for Russian styles’. Other refugees too
subscribed to an open-mindedness which they contrasted with parochial host soci-
ety.52 Pontic Greek newcomers—Turkish-speaking, but Greek Orthodox by faith,
and including men who had engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Ottoman
state—claimed to be ‘authentic Greeks’ whose ancestors had set out from Greece to
colonize the littoral coast and who now claimed to be returning ‘home’. These char-
acterizations persisted: an elderly Greek refugee woman from Asia Minor whose
family had settled in Piraeus told a visiting scholar in the 1970s that: ‘Before we
came here, what were they? We opened their eyes. They didn’t know how to eat or
dress. They used to eat salt fish and wild vegetables. It was we who taught them
everything’. Like other refugees who expressed their cosmopolitanism in terms of
food, dress and locality, she thought of local Greeks as ‘country bumpkins’.53
The consequences for socio-economic and political life in Turkey were equally
troubling. Interviewed several decades later, Turkish informants described the hard-
ships of travel, and the humiliating circumstances of their departure, when some of
them had been forced to dance naked as they left the villages of Macedonia.54 The
loss to the Ottoman economy of Greek artisans and merchants was keenly felt.
Existing communities were ruptured no less than in Greece, and the refugees had to
work hard to re-establish them. The newcomers, described as muhacir or as mübadil
(literally, ‘exchanged people’), drew a sharp distinction between the standard of life
they enjoyed in Greece and the difficult conditions they found in Turkey. ‘I do miss
it’, said one informant: ‘I want to go back, but I cannot. Those are the lands of the
infidels’. Ironically, local Turks described the settlers in similar terms, demanding
that they speak Turkish and imposing fines on those who refused to do so.55

52
Stephen Salamone, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain: the Genesis of a Rural Greek Community
and its Refugee Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 39, 102, 201.
53
Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe, 25–33; Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, ‘The Political Con-
sequences of Forced Population Transfers: Refugee Incorporation in Greece and West Germany’, in
Rainer Ohliger (ed.), European Encounters: Migrants, Migration and European Societies since 1945
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 99–122.
54
Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, 151–2.
55
Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Granta,
2006), 32; Tolga Köker, ‘Lessons in Refugeehood: the Experience of Forced Migrants in Turkey’, in
Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange
between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 193–208, at 203–4; Aslı Iğsız, ‘Documenting
the Past and Publicizing Personal Stories: Sensescapes and the 1923 Greco-Turkish Population
Exchange in Contemporary Turkey’ JMGS, 26, no.2 (2008), 451–87, at 456.
70 Empires of Refugees

A new Ministry of Exchange, Reconstruction and Resettlement arranged for the

allocation of land to refugees, but its procedures were chaotic and arbitrary. Tobacco
farmers from Thrace and Macedonia converted vineyards, only to find that the
land was unsuitable for its cultivation. Properties that had belonged to Greeks and
Armenians were badly damaged and required years to restore. Turkish police and
army officers frequently appropriated them, forcing refugees to go to the back of
the queue, as they had done before 1914. The government planned to invest in
‘new villages’ to dilute the proportion of refugees in established communities: ‘the
proportion of refugees, settled in a town or village, whose language and traditions
are of a race other than Turkish will not exceed 20 per cent’, but little came of this
either.56
Turkey’s political leaders hoped that the refugees would contribute by their pres-
ence to building the new nation-state. Prime Minister İsmet Paşa wrote in 1924 in
terms that connected Turkish refugees to the broader diaspora and to the new
state:
There is no doubt that the country is in dire need and suffering. Nevertheless, it is our
responsibility to make the newcomers not feel strangers and give them utmost assist-
ance. We encourage the desires of our friends abroad who want to come to their
motherland. The empty building is doomed to perish [unless] it be filled.57
In similar vein, Atatürk’s readiness to ‘gather in’ Turkish populations found expres-
sion in their organized ‘repatriation’ from Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia after
1931. One enthusiast commented that the newcomers possessed ‘vigour and am-
bition so that they are making a genuine contribution to the country’.58 But Turkey
curbed any attempt by refugees to organize on their own behalf; a pro-refugee ‘Free
Republican Party’ triumphed in the municipal elections in 1930 but was quickly
suppressed, turning refugees into ‘a silent crowd to be integrated into the system
according to the terms of the political leadership’.59 Meanwhile harsh measures
were taken against the remaining Greeks and the Kurdish population of Turkey in
1925 and 1934, some of whom evaded internal deportation by fleeing to Iran, Iraq
and Syria. Eighty years later their descendants continue to live a marginal exist-
ence. Deportee families in Eastern Anatolia went on to form the nucleus of the
modern PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party).60
How did displacement become part of commemorative activities? Although
Greek politics were suffused with the refugee question, official efforts to com-
memorate the displacement were conspicuous by their absence, largely because the
Greek government did not want to disturb a diplomatic rapprochement with
Turkey. Only in 1994 did local and national politicians approve the construction

56
Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Popula-
tions, 1922–1934 (Routledge, 2006), 149; Stephen Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece
and Turkey (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 706–7, 714.
57
Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 155.
58
Joseph Schechtman, Population Transfers in Asia (New York: Hallsby, 1949), 102.
59
Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 186–8.
60
Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, 169.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 71

of memorial sites on behalf of the Pontic Greeks who were targeted by the Otto-
man Empire, declaring 19 May a day of remembrance. Impressive cultural and
educational initiatives owed more to refugee initiative than to government. For
example, the intellectual life of Macedonia was boosted by the foundation of the
University of Salonika, to which refugees made a major contribution. The unpro-
pitious political climate did not prevent the formation of an impressive Centre for
Asia Minor Studies, which had its origins in a project during the 1930s by the
musicologist Melpo Logotheti-Merlier to collect popular songs from across Greece.
She collected testimony from 5,000 refugees and fashioned a story of survival
amidst suffering.61
Beyond the realm of formal politics, the legacy of the Greek-Turkish popula-
tion exchange became entrenched in historiography, in family history, in music
and in the geography of settlement. Memories of displacement remained vivid for
survivors and for locals. To establish oneself in Greece was fraught with difficulty.
In Macedonia the divisions between refugees from various backgrounds and the
local population remain acute; their descendants refuse for example to participate
in one another’s saints’ days. Additionally, many refugees who arrived in Greece
thought of Asia Minor as a ‘place of Greek loss, rather than as a place of Turkish
presence’.62
All the same, these divisions overlooked the complex, ‘multicultural’ history of
localities where Slavic-speaking and Greek-speaking inhabitants lived side by side
for generations prior to the commotion of war.63 The 92-year-old George Siama-
nides, who lived most of his life in Salonika, having been forced out of the Turkish
village of Imera, southeast of Trebizond, described a long and difficult journey via
Constantinople, Giresun and Piraeus, before he and his family arrived in the small
town of Naoussa. Decades later he spoke of how, ‘When I close my eyes, I can still
recall the aroma from the blue flowers that wafted down from the meadows above
our house. I can taste the milk from our three cows, and I remember the tang of
the butter’. His vivid memories included the realization that the men of the village
worked on the other side of the Black Sea: ‘Greece itself was remote from our con-
sciousness. The country that loomed in our imaginations was Russia’. These his-
toric ties with Russia led the people who took them in to believe that they were
‘communists’. There were other ‘trials’ as well: ‘We found ourselves in a former
army camp used by French colonial troops during the First World War, where
there were millions of lice. It was a moonscape, with not a tree in sight. We remem-
bered our mountain valleys and cried’.64
Meanwhile in Turkey in 1999 a group of second generation ‘exchanged people’
from Greece set up the Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfı, literally ‘foundation for those
exchanged at Lausanne’, which arranged for the descendants of the population

61
<http://www.helleniccomserve.com/centreasiaminorone.html>; Penelope Papailias, Genres of
Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
62
Elif Babül, ‘Claiming a Place through Memories of Belonging: Politics of Recognition on the
Island of Imbros’ New Perspectives on Turkey, 34 (2006), 47–65, at 54.
63
Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, 125, 159.
64
Clark, Twice a Stranger, 123–9.
72 Empires of Refugees

exchange to make return visits to Greece. The inspiration came from a double
blow, namely the earthquake that devastated Izmit in North-Western Turkey in
August 1999 and a smaller earthquake that affected Athens a month later, leading
to a diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries. Widespread interest in
the consequences of Lausanne was aroused by the publication in 1998 of a novel
by Kemal Yalçın, The Entrusted Trousseau: Peoples of the Exchange [Emanet Çeyiz]
telling of the efforts made by a Turkish ‘resettler’ to visit Greece in order to seek out
the Greek Orthodox family that entrusted its Muslim neighbours with a wedding
trousseau in 1923, in the belief that they would soon be able to go back to their
homes in Asia Minor. Yalçın’s book caused a stir, on the grounds that it ‘offended’
Turkish national pride. Films, TV programmes and cookery books contributed to
a recent explosion of interest in this history, reflecting in part a search for Turkey’s
‘cosmopolitan’ past—not a bad marketing tactic for the tourist industry—but it
also personalized the population exchange, as a means of re-appropriation of his-
tory by ‘ordinary’ people.65
The longer term impact of Lausanne emerged in a classic piece of ethnography
based upon fieldwork conducted during the 1970s by Renée Hirschon, who found
that the families of Greek refugees who settled in Piraeus retained a strong sense of
a distinctive ‘refugee’ identity. A series of ‘pan-refugee’ congresses contributed to
that process. Six decades later their descendants continued to refer to one another
as ‘refugees’ ( prosfiges) and as mikrasiátes (referring to their place of origin in Asia
Minor), affirming a sense of separate identity from ‘locals’ and underpinning
claims for adequate housing and other kinds of compensation from the Greek
government. The older generation of refugees recalled difficult encounters with the
local population and officialdom, and this no doubt contributed to their sense of
disappointment. Their children and grandchildren were not expected to retain any
sense of affiliation with the ‘homeland’; they had, so to speak, become part of
‘modern’ Greece.66

R E F U G E E S A N D T H E S PA N I S H C O C K P I T

The refugee crisis brought about by the Spanish Civil War had equally serious
consequences. Fighting between supporters of the Republic and Franco’s National-
ists displaced around three million so-called ‘evacuees’ within Spain. A pro-
republican Evacuation Committee sent around 400,000 people from Madrid to
places of safety in Valencia, Murcia and Catalonia. The crisis quickly became inter-
nationalized. Refugees were looked after by various organizations including Save
the Children, the Quakers and Mennonites. Francesca Wilson painted a vivid pic-
ture of the arrangements made to process refugees in Barcelona’s 80,000-seater

65
See also the website of the Population Exchange Museum, in Çatalca <http://mubadelemuzesi.
net/museum.aspx>.
66
Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe; Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities,
228–9.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 73

sports stadium, adding that ‘I realised how much easier it is to deal with crowds
now than it was in the last war—because of the wireless and loudspeakers—and
how much better it is to call on refugees to cooperate than to herd them like cattle’.
Basil Wright made a documentary film, ‘Modern Orphans of the Storm’ (1937) to
raise funds for Basque child refugees. Aldous Huxley did the same by endorsing the
publication of children’s drawings.67
As early as June 1936, 60,000 refugees fled Spain, following the routes made
familiar by generations of labour migrants in more peaceful times. By October
1937 five times that number entered France thanks to the relatively benign envi-
ronment created briefly by Léon Blum’s Popular Front government. Their expecta-
tions of a temporary exile were soon confounded. In the wake of Franco’s march
on Barcelona, which fell to Nationalist forces in February 1939, some 300,000
refugees gathered at the French border. French border officials were urged to turn
them back and restrict the issue of entry permits, and upwards of 200,000 refugees
were consequently obliged to return to Spain by the end of that year. The rest were
disarmed and admitted to France. A film by John Wigham showed streams of refu-
gees leaving Barcelona and slowly making their way to the French border, where
they encountered French Senegalese guards who caused them to recall the unfor-
giving treatment they received at the hands of Franco’s African conscripts.68
Whether those who fled to France were more fortunate than opponents of
Franco who stayed in or returned to Spain is a moot point. Women and children
were held in triage centres where officials separated them from adult males who
were sent to refugee camps on the grounds that they were combatants. One refu-
gee, Lluís Ferran de Pol recalled arriving in France:
Our only welcome was the distant sight of an immense beach, darkened by the crowd
of the first arrivals. Suddenly we are in front of a barbed-wire fence. We pass through
a vast entryway where, with bayonets fixed, black soldiers stand sentry nearby. We
can’t believe our eyes, we feel something akin to panic. We are just prisoners and will
have to get used to the idea.69
Conditions in the camps in Roussillon were rudimentary. Black humour was one
response—camps were called ‘Hotel des Mil Una Noches’ and ‘Gran Hotel de
Catalunya’, but understandable bitterness led to others being named after Judas
and French Prime Minister Daladier. At one time 80,000 refugees lived in cramped
and unhygienic conditions on the beach at Argelès; three times as many passed
through the camp between 1939 and 1941. Others were placed in camps at Saint-
Cyprien and Le Barcarès, before being shipped to Algeria. Survivors described mal-
nutrition and exposure to the elements. Refugees improvised by making nails out
of barbed wire and scavenged for driftwood to build shelters that were laid out in

67
Francesca Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars
( John Murray, 1944), 190–7.
68
Helen Norris Nicholson, ‘Shooting in Paradise: Conflict, Compassion and Amateur Filmmaking
during the Spanish Civil War’ Journal of Intercultural Studies, 27, no.3 (2006), 313–30.
69
Francie Cate-Arries, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire: Memory and Representation of the French
Concentration Camps, 1939–1945 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 147.
74 Empires of Refugees

‘streets’ corresponding to the towns they fled. Accounts of guards’ brutality added
to the dismal picture. Josep Bartolí sketched a grotesquely fat and hairy ‘monstrous
gatekeeper of hell’ who guarded the gate; in the background skeletal figures stared
out from the barbed wire. Inmates caustically placed a notice at the entrance, ad-
vertising France as the country of ‘liberté, fraternité, égalité’, and made a point of
celebrating the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution.70
In the ensuing months and years Spanish refugees described how they encoun-
tered local animosity. Businesses complained that ‘the Red invasion has killed tour-
ism’. There was a general concern about immigration and its perceived impact on
the ‘national character’; France had already become ‘the world’s dumping ground’
according to one French official. The prevailing mixture of contempt and fear
proved conducive to a regime of ‘permanent surveillance’ in which Spanish refu-
gees were exposed to intermittent brutality, particularly if they were identified as
communists or anarchists and sent to concentration camps at Collioure and Le
Vernet.71
In a show of solidarity the Soviet Union embarked on so-called rescue expedi-
tions and admitted 5,000 refugee orphans from Spain. Unsurprisingly the Franco
regime denounced this ‘barbaric export’ of children. They were housed in state-run
institutions bearing the names of Bolshevik heroes. Educationalists and psycholo-
gists assessed their background and moral bearing. Their letters home (which never
reached their parents) described how they navigated life in the dangerous shoals of
Stalin’s Russia. Children wrote of everyday experiences but also how a proletarian
brotherhood helped them to feel ‘at home’ and to prepare them, as they hoped, to
return as trained soldiers or skilled workers. Recent research paints a disturbing
picture of tensions between refugee children and adult minders as well as reports
of physical and sexual abuse. This abrupt relocation to the Soviet Union did not
bring an end to their odyssey: many were evacuated to the Urals and Central Asia
during the Second World War. Some niňos returned to Spain when repatriation
became possible in 1956; many of those who married Russians opted to remain in
the USSR.72
Other destinations likewise proved unsettling and exciting in equal measure.
One young refugee brought to the UK recalled later in life that ‘when we arrived,
I’d never seen a tent before in my life, only in films with Indians and cowboys’. The
‘Red Duchess’, Katharine, Countess of Atholl, Eleanor Rathbone and Ellen
Wilkinson were prominent sympathizers; so too was the young communist Chris-
topher Hill who subsequently became the pre-eminent historian of seventeenth-

70
Louis Stein, Beyond Death and Exile: the Spanish Republicans in Exile, 1939–1955 (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979), 58; Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, L’exil des républicains espag-
nols en France: de la Guerre civile à la mort de Franco (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 67; Pierre Marqués,
La Croix-Rouge pendant la guerre d’Espagne 1936–1939: les missionnaires de l’humanitaire (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2000), 359.
71
Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty, 160–2, citing Marcel Paon; Wilson, In the Margins of
Chaos, 225; Stein, Beyond Death and Exile, 72–3.
72
This is explored in the powerful film by Jaime Camino, Los Niňos de Rusia (2002). Glennys
Young, ‘Implications of a Micro-history: Home, Gender and Power in the Casas de los Niňos in the
Leningrad Region’ (unpublished, 2008).
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 75

century England. Labour politician Edith Summerskill organized a National

Women’s Appeal for Food for Spain, and the National Joint Committee for Span-
ish Relief underwrote the travel expenses and care of children in the UK. But the
politics of humanitarianism did not run in just one direction. A strong pro-Franco
sentiment took hold in some circles; the maverick anti-communist and anti-Semite
Charles Sarolea devoted as much time to denouncing Republicans as he did work-
ing on behalf of refugees as the Belgian consul in Edinburgh during the First
World War.73
A Fascist apologist wrote of the ‘Reds’ that they ‘will wither away without glory
in the most remote reaches of the globe. It is, when all is said and done, the history
of all emigrants—the history of all migrants is one of a slow disappearance without
glory’.74 Refugees were determined to prove him wrong. In France, self-appointed
camp leaders organized choirs, football tournaments, classes and workshops. Their
survival became a form of resistance to the Franco regime and a means of self-
affirmation: ‘those who were not leaving were for the enemy’, wrote Dolores Torres,
in uncompromising fashion.75
Stories and songs encapsulated feelings about the passage to France, Mexico,
Argentina or other destinations in which exhaustion and tangible loss were com-
bined with images of a disciplined journey to a place of safety, as well as survival in
unpropitious conditions. The Basque Children’s Committee published a journal
that enabled refugees to keep in touch and to publish their memoirs; it was entitled
Amistad, a reference to the ship seized by slaves who were being taken to Havana
in 1839 and who were eventually allowed to return to Africa. Exile narratives re-
vealed a complex pattern. Certainly refugees encountered hostility and endured
taunts at the hands of French officials and the public, and something of the same
happened in Argentina, where the government was less accommodating than in
Mexico. Testimonies speak of endurance and a belief that exile taught lessons about
managing adversity. ‘Each earned there his or her halo of blessed saintliness, the
martyr’s palm’, wrote one refugee from Mexico in 1945, adding that a clear distinc-
tion should be drawn between political refugees and mere ‘economic migrants’
(gachupines) whose national consciousness was open to question.76
During the German occupation of France, which gave the French something
else to think about, refugees were made to work on the construction of the Atlantic
coastal defences. Their situation remained precarious after the war, when they were
assigned to back-breaking work in agriculture, mining and construction. By the

73
Peter France, ‘Sarolea, Charles Louis-Camille (1870–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-
raphy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/66974>,
accessed 31 May 2012; Kevin Myers, ‘The Ambiguities of Aid and Agency: Representing Refugee
Children in England, 1937’ CSH, 6, no.1 (2009), 29–46; Susan Cohen, Rescue the Perishing: Eleanor
Rathbone and the Refugees (Vallentine Mitchell, 2010).
74
Cate-Arries, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire, 14.
75
Sharif Gemie, Fiona Reid and Laure Humbert, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an
Era of Total War, 1936–48 (Continuum, 2012), 35.
76
Cate-Arries, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire, 51; Patricia Weiss Fagen, Exiles and Citizens:
Spanish Republicans in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). Ironically, the Mexican gov-
ernment hoped to recruit skilled workers from among the refugees.
76 Empires of Refugees

early 1950s around 120,000 refugees in France still held out hopes—soon dashed—
of an Anglo-American campaign to remove Franco and enable them to return to
Spain, rather like the fantasies of an anti-Soviet crusade expressed by refugees from
Eastern Europe after 1945. But this understates the intense politicization of Basque
and other refugees who located their exile in relation to a socialist and republican
tradition.77
Narratives were suffused by ideas connecting personal bereavement to displace-
ment, as in the memoir of Juan Rejano, the editor of an exiles’ journal, Romance,
who wrote in 1959 of ‘dragging my bones from one place to another in the anxi-
ety-ridden sands of the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp’. When he learned of
the death of the poet Machado: ‘it was as if his death gave new life to the beloved
ghosts still so near by, because before my mind’s eye paraded the images of the
frozen fields of Castilla, Andalusian olive groves, provincial little squares with the
bubbling sound of fountains and children’s laughter, the silent orchards of lemon
trees, of blackbirds, the Guadalquivir and the legendary language of the Duero’.
Although Rejano, like others, refused to regard the time spent in refugee camps as
(in his words) a ‘void’, the pain of separation was nevertheless acute. Bartolí drew
a devastating picture of an arm clutching a strand of barbed wire; the rest of the
body is submerged beneath the sand and rock of the beach at Argelès. The caption
read, ‘The others left; you stayed behind’. The poet Celso Amieva published a
poem in 1960 about the torment he experienced together with his sense of pride
in being an exile:
Spaniard/Loaded down with your knapsack/May the gods preserve/Your Spanish
pride and identity’/Amen. I wouldn’t trade/The hunger, the misery and the sorrow/
That this knapsack carries/From the camps to the work crews/For all the bags of gold/
Of the slave masters and assassins.78
Displacement ultimately helped forge a sense of common identity as a refugee
nation-in-exile that symbolized the ‘real Spain’, in contrast to the land that had
been appropriated by Fascists, under whose iron heel millions of ordinary Span-
iards were condemned to suffer and whose propaganda insisted that Franco was
the guardian of Spanish ‘tradition’. The mass exodus (retirada) was construed as
survival against difficult odds and a means of forging solidarity.79

T H E C O M I N G O F WA R

In his mammoth study of ‘the refugee problem’, Sir John Hope Simpson despaired
at the missed opportunity and the need for renewed efforts by private humanitar-
ian agencies: bemoaning ‘the exaggerated nationalism that creates the refugee and
77
Laurence Brown, ‘Pour aider nos frères d’Espagne’: Humanitarian Aid, French Women, and
Popular Mobilisation during the Front Populaire’ French Politics, Culture and Society, 25, no.1 (2007),
30–48.
78
Quotations from Cate-Arries, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire, 47–8, 187.
79
Sharif Gemie, ‘ “The Ballad of Bourg-Madame”: Memory, Exile and the Spanish Republican
Refugees of the Retirada of 1939’ International Review of Social History, 51, no.1 (2006), 1–40.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 77

also creates most of the difficulties which beset him in the country of refuge’, he
nevertheless added that those difficulties have ‘been partly offset by the halting
development of international solidarity’. New methods of communication enabled
private American philanthropic bodies such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Near
East Relief and myriad diaspora associations to get involved. Their officials in
Shanghai and Istanbul cabled Geneva and New York for help, to ‘let the public
know’.80 Nevertheless this provided only a small crumb of comfort. Humanitarian-
ism exposed the failings of political leaders to meet the challenge posed by
fascism.
Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution derived little benefit from ‘international
solidarity’. In the 1920s there were signs of hope. The JDC channelled remittances
to relatives in Poland—the ‘diaspora in the diaspora’—who had suffered during
the war. Programmes of ‘rehabilitation’ gathered momentum as American Jews
funded social work, orphanages and credit cooperatives. The JDC threw its weight
behind plans to relocate Jews from Russian towns to farmland in Soviet Crimea,
the idea being that they would be better protected from pogroms and accusations
of ‘rootlessness’. Joseph Rosen, the plan’s architect, regarded resettlement in
Ukraine as preferable to emigration, describing the Zionist project in Palestine as
a ‘mockery’. The Kremlin’s endorsement of the scheme reflected a wish to counter
the presence of Muslim Tatars. Few Jews took the plunge before collectivization
turned their lives upside down once more.81
Was the record of liberal democracies any better? Hannah Arendt thought
not. She pointed out that receiving states used the same language and adopted the
same discriminating practices as persecuting states: ‘the constitutional inability of
European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally
guaranteed rights made it possible for the persecuting governments to impose their
standard of value even upon their opponents’.82 The Evian Conference called by
US President Franklin Roosevelt in July 1938 was an attempt to get other coun-
tries to accept a greater share of refugees, but participants lined up to demonstrate
their intransigence and the conference was widely regarded as a fiasco. Not only
did it fail to improve the prospects of escaping persecution, it also (as the former
High Commissioner for Refugees, James G. McDonald, pointed out) avoided ad-
dressing the ultimate cause of the crisis, which clearly lay in the policies pursued by
the Nazi state.83
Jews were blamed by the Vichy regime for France’s collapse in 1940, a sorry coda
to the torment that afflicted them throughout the previous decade. Around
200,000 Belgians hastily fled to Paris and its environs—older people recollected

80
Simpson, Refugee Problem, 10, 178.
81
Joseph Van Gelder, ‘Activities of the Refugee Department in Europe, 1921–23’ (1924), JDC
Archives; Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper: a History of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Com-
mittee, 1929–1939 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 64; Jonathan Dekel-
Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
82
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 269, 294–6.
83
Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 230–40.
78 Empires of Refugees

the painful events of 1914. Plans were drawn up for an influx of 800,000 Belgian
refugees, one-quarter of whom were to be sent to Britain. Initially, the French
public were relatively unconcerned by their presence and the first flurry of depar-
tures even took on a holiday character. But this mood soon gave way to alarm.
Germany’s occupation of France led to a sharp increase in the number of Parisians
fleeing the French capital. Some justified their departure not in terms of blind
panic but as a stratagem to deny the enemy French manpower. Within a matter
of weeks, following the armistice, many civilians resolved to go home. Those who
stayed in the unoccupied zone were placed in reception centres.84
The crisis produced contested readings of displacement. Internally displaced
civilians drew on memories of the First World War. Onlookers regarded the farm
wagons rolling along the streets of the capital as a harbinger of desperate times. A
fascist sympathizer spoke of a reversion to a past when France found itself ‘at the
gates of a medieval famine’.85 Such images underplayed the purposefulness of
refugees who portrayed themselves as heroes of a nascent resistance. When they
reached provincial towns further south they met with a frosty response because
they embodied defeat and national disgrace. In due course, most of them re-
turned to their homes. For French Jews, however, war and occupation meant in-
ternment and deportation. The Francophile British historian Richard Cobb
mischievously suggested that the exodus inspired French people to discover their
country anew. Whether or not this was the case, it encouraged a general amnesia
after the war.86

C O N C LU S I O N S

Political upheaval in post-1918 Europe created a huge refugee population that led
the new League of Nations and NGOs to devise programmes of assistance. Russian
refugees found it hard to make a claim on foreign charity by portraying themselves
as a persecuted minority: had they not been the instruments of persecution towards
Jews, Poles and Balts in the old Tsarist Empire? Their best recourse was to draw
attention to Russia’s cultural wealth that faced imminent destruction at the hands
of an atheistic and proletarian dictatorship. By contrast, the Bolsheviks sought to
change the course of history. Their exiled opponents denounced what they took to
be hasty and ill-conceived programmes of economic modernization and social ex-
perimentation. Russian refugees believed in restoration, the Bolsheviks in transfor-
mation. Western governments, contemptuous of both, were happy to let Nansen
pick up the pieces.

84
Gemie, Reid and Humbert, Outcast Europe, 76–102; Vicky Caron, Uneasy Asylum: France and
the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
85
Valerie Holman, ‘Representing Refugees: Migration in France, 1940–44’ Journal of Romance
Studies, 2, no.2 (2002), 53–69, at 56.
86
Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 147–9,
180, 197, 212.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 79

Other aspects of international diplomacy were troubling in ways not always

recognized at the time. This was most apparent in relation to the Greek-Turkish
population exchange. The Lausanne experiment became an important precedent,
demonstrating the potential appeal of programmes to ‘unmix peoples’. Dissident
voices struggled to make themselves heard, as when the international lawyer
Georges Scelle lambasted the transfer, describing the process of ‘transplantation
and uprooting [as] contrary to human freedom’.87 Here too was a straw in the
wind, disclosing the possibility that human rights could be abrogated by govern-
ments that claimed the moral high ground whilst simultaneously deporting
people against their will. The population exchange had equally disquieting conse-
quences at a local level. Surgical metaphors about ‘excision’ and references to an
organized exchange disguised a chaotic and even violent process in which the
pursuit of ethnic harmony foundered on the rock of economic self-interest. Many
of those who were ‘exchanged’ found themselves marginalized from the outset.
The inflated claims made on behalf of population transfer must be evaluated
accordingly.
The sense of loss felt by Greek refugees from Asia Minor translated into political
radicalism: not an irredentist politics (as among Hungarian elites who fled Czecho-
slovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania) but a leftist politics, indicating that their quar-
rel was with successive Greek governments that failed to make adequate provision
for them. The Metaxas dictatorship targeted the left after 1936. During the Axis
occupation of Greece, rivalry between left and right intensified; German forces
supplied arms to ‘refugee villages’ in Macedonia. In the ensuing civil war of
1945–49 the Communist Party was forced underground. At this juncture, Pontic
Greek refugees threw in their lot with right-wing parties because their devout
Orthodoxy was at odds with communism.
By contrast, Armenian refugees kept their heads down and stayed out of politics,
perhaps fearing the consequences of too much exposure. In France, Lebanon and
Cyprus the home, school and church became the chief sites for the articulation of
national identity, and this appealed to philanthropists who valorized Armenians as
hardworking Christians. Exiled Dashnak leaders in the Middle East maintained a
close interest in Soviet Armenian politics, leading Moscow to suspect external
meddling. But Armenian refugee politics was a largely passive affair that appealed
to a tight circle of exiles.
Refugees from the Spanish Civil War were less emasculated and maintained an
intense interest in politics, but their impressive intellectual and cultural achieve-
ments made little impact in Spain, which became a backwater until foreign tourists
helped open the country to closer international scrutiny in the 1960s. Their valori-
zation by foreign governments and relief workers varied according to political per-
suasion: for those on the left, Spanish refugees embodied the anti-fascist struggle,
whereas conservative forces demonized them as a dangerous anticlerical species, to
be neither trusted nor tolerated.

87
Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 259.
80 Empires of Refugees

Class was an important variable. Hungarian peasants resolved to stay on their

farms now under Yugoslav, Czech or Romanian jurisdiction, whereas govern-
ment officials, business leaders and landlords were disproportionately represented
among the refugee population in Hungary. Refugees fleeing the Bolshevik regime
experienced downward social mobility. All the same, social class and conditions
in the job market do not explain everything. Demeaning attributes were ascribed
to refugees in the aftermath of war no less than during the Great War. Ethnic
Greeks who were transferred from Turkey had to endure resentment from the
local populace irrespective of class—although it helped to be ‘respectable’—as
well as having to negotiate corrupt officials. In neither instance did refugees
contribute overtly to cementing nationhood. Refugees in Greece and Turkey re-
mained socially segregated and economically deprived; oftentimes their fate was
to be the whipping-boys of conservative nationalists. Nevertheless, population
displacement indirectly played a part in nation-state formation as it had in
1914–18, since it forced the state to confront the meaning of membership in the
new political community.
Incarceration offered a provisional solution to the Armenian refugee crisis as
well as to the Greek refugee crisis in 1921. These arrangements had a habit of turn-
ing into a lengthy stay, as with refugees from the Spanish Civil War who spent
months in French camps that the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Casals likened to
Dante’s Inferno.88 In Baqubah the British authorities confined Armenians and As-
syrians to camps, which meant hard graft: Dudley Northcote argued that refugees
needed to be put to work, to be self-supporting and maintain morale. But the
issues were complex: if Armenians had ‘a homing instinct’, where precisely was
their ‘home’?89 Most Armenians in the diaspora had no intention of making a
home in the Soviet Union. The vision of an enlarged Armenian state was dashed
on the rocks of geopolitics. Eventually Armenian and Spanish refugees left the
camps behind, but their departure produced mixed emotions. Confinement made
possible an intense politicization: would this be diluted by resettlement?
Refugees’ experiences were frequently appropriated by non-refugees. That is to
say, their experience was not ‘innocent’ or unmediated, but was instead framed by
the views and tactics of politicians, for whom refugees embodied an ideological
viewpoint, by humanitarians and diplomats such as Henry Morgenthau, for
whom Greece’s response to Lausanne amounted to a national epic, and by di-
asporic groups. Some accounts emphasized expert knowledge, as in Salonika
where engineers organized sanitary improvements and recommended the use of
‘sanitary squads for policing the refugee camp’, and where Greek refugee women
proved to be ‘remarkably adaptable’.90 These attitudes and practices were dissemi-
nated further afield, part of a transnational process embracing ideas about exter-
nal intervention and self-help, along with humanitarian norms and concepts of
international law.

88
Stein, Beyond Death and Exile, 157.
89
Laycock, Imagining Armenia, 166; Simpson, The Refugee Problem, 49.
90
Shaw, ‘Greek Refugees’, 47–9.
 Nation-states and the ‘Refugee Problem’ in Inter-war Europe 81

In the larger scheme of things, the fate of Jews rather than ethnic Russians,
Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Catalans and Basques cast the longest shadow, not by
virtue of their displacement but because their failure to be enabled to flee contrib-
uted to their eventual extermination. The consequences of the insipid international
response in the 1930s to the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany only became fully
apparent in 1945. Jews who managed to get out were stripped of everything, in-
cluding occupation, citizenship and the right to an opinion. In vain did French
jurist Noël Vindry assert that ‘the state has no right to say, “this individual no
longer pleases me, keep him on your territory as a doubtful element and do with
him as you please” ’.91 Vindry belonged to a tiny minority: ‘doing as you please’
culminated in the refusal of all but a handful of activists to confront the pernicious
ramifications of Nazi German policies during the 1930s.

91
Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 253–4. Vindry was writing in 1925.
This page intentionally left blank
 PA RT I I
M I D  C E N T U RY M A E L S T RO M
This page intentionally left blank
 There is a kind of grim and tragic monotony to this century’s stereotype of
large-scale relief and reconstruction and refugee aid: Spanish refugees, Jewish
and political refugees, displaced persons, expellees, escapees, Pakistan, Palestine,
Korea, South Vietnam. Where next do the vast governmental and the small
voluntary agencies trek in the wake of these problems?
(Lou Schneider, 1954)

The hazards and challenges discussed in Part I paled into insignificance alongside
the enormity of global population displacement during and immediately after the
Second World War. Hitler’s European empire relied upon invasion, occupation,
terror and forced labour. Its collapse left the victorious Allies with the challenge of
reconstructing war-torn societies and returning combatants and refugees to their
homes. The demise of other empires had equally profound consequences. In the Far
East, Japan’s defeat signalled both the demise of its Korean empire and its occupa-
tion of mainland China, where the number of refugees beggared belief. Communist
victories in North Korea and China generated a fresh refugee crisis in the region. In
1947 Britain brought the curtain down on its empire in South Asia by granting
independence to India and Pakistan, where a combination of uncertainty and wide-
spread ‘communal’ violence uprooted 18 million people. A year later the British
government renounced its mandate in Palestine, where the attempt to curb Jewish
immigration took on extra resonance in the light of the Holocaust. The formation
of the state of Israel went hand in hand with the displacement of Palestinians,
adding a new dimension to the global refugee crisis.
The post-war world was full of people who were ‘out of place’. This was equally
true of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The Allies did not stop at redrawing
international frontiers, but embarked on demographic engineering as well. An
organized transfer of population between Poland and Soviet Ukraine involved
1.3 million people in 1944–46. Germans were unceremoniously expelled from
Poland and Czechoslovakia, largely for punitive reasons, although prophylactic
considerations also came into play. The Quaker internationalist Bertram Pickard
noted wryly that ‘post-war political and psychological conditions will necessitate,
even though some suffering may be involved, certain exchanges and transfers of
population and the migration of many individuals from countries of origin to
countries willing to accept them’.1 Others looked to such exchanges as a means

1
Bertram Pickard, Europe’s Uprooted People: the Relocation of Displaced Population (Washington
D.C.: National Planning Association, 1944), 50.
86 Mid-Century Maelstrom

to eliminate root causes of war. Diplomats conceived of a partition of Palestine

on the grounds that it would do for Arabs and Jews what Lausanne supposedly
did for the Balkans, where ‘the ulcer has been clean cut out and Greco-Turkish
relations, we understand, are friendlier than ever before’.2 The appeal of a popu-
lation exchange extended to the Indian sub-continent, although plans for Parti-
tion in 1947 envisaged that the frontiers for India and Pakistan would be drawn
in such a way as to minimize cross-border flows of people.
Allied preparation for post-war reconstruction came to fruition in the final
stages of the war in Europe. Planners were keen to avoid what they regarded as a
serious gap in post-war preparedness after 1918. The purpose of the new United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was to channel re-
sources to countries shaking off the consequences of wartime occupation. The
UN hoped to ‘put back into running order those segments of a nation’s economy
which were necessary to carry out the relief programme, and give each country
and its people some of the tools to begin to help themselves’. These bold aims
were suffused with the lofty ideal of closer international cooperation. UNRRA’s
responsibilities included assisting those directly affected by the war in Europe to
return to their homes in liberated territories. However, as the Cold War intensi-
fied, in 1947 UNRRA gave way to an International Refugee Organisation whose
primary purpose was not to repatriate European refugees but to enable them to
find new homes beyond Stalin’s reach.3
The preoccupation of politicians and planners with the situation in Europe was
blinkered but understandable. They could point to the sheer scale of population
displacement brought about by the flight of refugees and the deportation of work-
ers from occupied countries to sustain the Nazi war effort. Another consideration
was the connection made between population displacement, on the one hand, and
the legitimacy of the Allied war effort on the other—in other words, how to ensure
that ‘traumatized’ victims of war could become healthy citizens capable of playing
a full part in democratic societies. Development thus went hand in hand with re-
settlement. Here, too, international cooperation was needed. A new Intergovern-
mental Committee on European Migration acknowledged that ‘the problems of
European migration could not be left to the whim of individual initiative or pri-
vate organisations’ or bilateral action. The resettlement of refugees had to extend
beyond European shores.4
In the medium term the Western powers crafted a regime that protected refu-
gees under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), charged with ensuring that signatory states adhered to the 1951

2
Simpson, The Refugee Problem, 433–5.
3
George Woodbridge, UNRRA: the History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Admin-
istration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 3 vols, vol. 1, 29; vol. 2, 425; The Story of
UNRRA (New York, 1948), 5. Refugees of pre-war vintage were the responsibility of the Intergovern-
mental Committee on Refugees (IGCR), established by the Evian Conference in 1938.
4
CUA Archives, NCWC Collection, Series 3, Box 170, General Secretary/Executive Department,
Office of UN Affairs, Folder 11, Migration, Memos.
 Introduction to Part II 87

Refugee Convention that enshrined in international law the concept of protec-

tion from persecution. This in turn raised questions such as how refugee status
would be determined and what the obligation of states should be towards recog-
nized refugees. In addition to pushing ajar the doors of wealthy countries in
North America, Australia and Western Europe, investment in technical assist-
ance and development programmes held out the possibility that less developed
countries would admit refugees. Underlying these programmes was a belief that
the ‘free world’ had to convince refugees that they had made the right choice in
fleeing communism. In South Korea, for example, the refugee crisis afforded an
opportunity to link rehabilitation to a ‘free economy and a democratic way of
life’.5 But resettlement held little attraction to refugees in the Indian sub-conti-
nent or in Hong Kong, let alone German expellees who looked instead to local
integration as a panacea. UNHCR’s mandate in any case did not extend to these
groups. The refugee regime that emerged in 1951 did not encompass refugees in
all parts of the globe. It assumed a partial, not a universal form.
One vital component in the project of post-war relief and rehabilitation was
the part played by voluntary organizations, including those that could point to a
history stretching back to the First World War. Some NGOs earmarked funds for
specific groups of refugees, as the JDC did for Europe’s surviving Jews. Others
developed ambitious programmes of relief, reconstruction and resettlement that
took in China, Korea, India and Palestine as well as Germany and Austria. For
Catholic Relief Services, the focus was on society as a whole, not on a particular
group. NGOs also developed innovative means of fundraising. A newcomer on
the scene, CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe), made it
possible for donors to express ‘direct and personalised concern’ with designated
individuals in war-torn countries by purchasing relief packages, which it guaran-
teed to deliver within three months or else refund the purchase price, ‘a totally
new form of enterprise’ in the relief field. The efflorescence of these NGOs and
the rehabilitation agenda went hand in hand with recruitment of qualified per-
sonnel—social workers, psychologists, engineers, nutritionists and statisticians—
alongside volunteer relief workers.6
Cold War considerations suffused the refugee camp. Europe’s DP camps were
sites for the articulation of anti-communist beliefs that went hand in hand with the
hope that Soviet domination of Eastern Europe would eventually cease. Patriotic
leaders backed impressive efforts among DPs to organize cultural and educational
programmes that had a clear political purpose, including among Jews who looked
to Palestine as a place of safety. Beyond Europe, too, the refugee camp was far more
than an instrument of external management. It provided scope for intense social,
cultural and political activity, particularly on the part of Palestinian refugees in the
Middle East but also among the internally displaced Koreans. But questions re-

5
David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American
World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 9, 139.
6
Report to Board of Directors by Harold Miner, 15 October 1951, CARE Archives, Box 1, Annual
Reports, 1946–49; Reuben Baetz, Service to Refugees, 1947–1952 (Geneva: LWF, 1952).
88 Mid-Century Maelstrom

mained. What of self-settled refugees, such as those in ‘colonies’ in Calcutta or

Lahore? Would refugees be granted a degree of autonomy, by governments, interna-
tional organizations or NGOs? Who spoke for the refugees, and might they be
granted the opportunity to speak on their own behalf? Whose experience counted?
These questions arose most acutely in sites where it was more difficult to specify
the Cold War as the main motor for action. With no powerful Western state to
speak up for them, Palestinian refugees found themselves outside the IRO and
UNHCR regime, and it was left to host governments in the Middle East and NGOs
to justify their relief efforts as a means to keep communism at bay. In other sites,
such as Hong Kong, colonial officials wanted to keep the lid on the refugee crisis,
although they succeeded only up to a point. In South Asia the refugee crisis brought
about by the partition of India was largely an internal affair. Political considerations
of a different kind came into play. Arguments around the ‘rehabilitation’ of refugees
circulated among politicians and officials who sought to determine their responsi-
bilities towards refugees and refugees’ responsibility towards the new state.
Cultural production had a hand to play in these arguments. In South Asia it di-
rected attention to the potential capacity of some (but not all) refugees to become
fully-fledged citizens, and the assumptions that were made about the guidance they
required in order to do so. Ideas around relief, rehabilitation and development were
invested with cultural content, and refugees responded accordingly—and not nec-
essarily in the way that government officials hoped. Among Palestinian refugees the
politics of cultural representation manifested itself in a determination not only to
advertise the magnitude of their loss but also to establish and maintain by various
means a connection to ancestral territory. Like refugees in India and Pakistan, they
began to construct ‘a more self-conscious relationship to place [and] to re-concretise
a connection to the land that had been violently sundered’.7
Would this dislocation resonate further afield? How might ordinary people in
the new states of India and Pakistan be made to sit up and take notice of displaced
persons in their midst? Might Palestinian refugees find a sympathetic audience
among global humanitarians, and who would be the conduit? The general secre-
tary of the World Council of Churches recognized the dilemma when he com-
pared the refugee crisis in the Middle East to the situation in Europe: ‘[T]he needs
of the millions of refugees in Europe are a constant concern, but we recognise that
hopeless and appalling as is the situation of this group, they at least have behind
them the lame economy of Western Europe as a final buffer between them and
actual starvation. Between the refugees from Palestine and starvation there is noth-
ing but the desert in all its arid unfriendliness’.8

7
George Bisharat, ‘Exile to Compatriot: Transformation in the Social Identity of Palestinian Refu-
gees in the West Bank’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations
in Critical Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 203–33, at 217.
8
WCC Archives, File 425.1.032, Palestine folder, W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, draft letter to The Times,
27 September 1948.
 3
Europe Uprooted
Refugee Crises at Mid-century and ‘Durable Solutions’

The massive homelessness of millions of people, which is to say, the war, is

sickening. More than the danger and the risk, it is really the homelessness.
(Emmanuil Kazakevich)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Europe bore much of the brunt of the dramatic political and social transforma-
tions that took place around the globe in the middle years of the twentieth cen-
tury, and that helped shape the post-war refugee regime and the lives of refugees.
The war wrenched civilians as well as soldiers from their homes. At least 40 mil-
lion European non-combatants were displaced during the war, many within the
pre-war borders of their own country. As in the First World War the rapid German
advance into Belgium, France and Poland in 1939, and the Nazi invasion of
Soviet Russia in 1941, brought about mass displacement. German occupation
regimes ruptured social and economic ties. Organized deportations were repeated
on systematic scale under the Nazis. Eastern Europe became a huge site of exploi-
tation and colonization that was limited only by the extent of the Wehrmacht’s
advance. Hitler’s territorial ambition entailed ‘clearing’ the land of Jews, ulti-
mately by transporting them to the death camps in Eastern Poland, Belarus,
Ukraine and the Baltic States. Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic
in 1939–41, followed by Stalinist deportations (discussed in chapter 9) and fi-
nally the Red Army’s re-conquest of Eastern Europe in the later stages of the war
added to the social and demographic turbulence. These continental convulsions
wreaked havoc.1
As the war came to an end the Allies were confronted by millions of survivors
who were ‘out of place’. Jews who survived the Holocaust wished to leave Central
and Eastern Europe at the earliest opportunity, demanding that as refugees they be

1
Malcolm J. Proudfoot, European Refugees: a Study of Forced Population Movements (Faber, 1957),
32–4; Alfred J. Rieber (ed.), Forced Migration in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939–1950 (Frank Cass,
2000); Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe,
1944–1948 (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds), The
Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
90 Mid-Century Maelstrom

allowed to settle in Palestine. As early as 1942 the Allies had begun to think about
reconstruction, including enabling those whom the Nazis had drafted as forced
labour as they conquered territory to return home. But significant numbers of
these Displaced Persons (DPs) were determined to resist being repatriated to coun-
tries that now fell within the Soviet sphere of influence. Hannah Arendt pointedly
remarked that ‘a very large proportion will regard repatriation as deportation’.2
They regarded themselves as fleeing from communism, as well as being victims of
Nazism: Hitler had uprooted them, but Stalin was the chief source of their perse-
cution. The situation in Germany and Austria was complicated by the steady influx
of civilians who fled west when the victorious Red Army swept through Eastern
Europe towards Berlin. Who would provide for them?
Territorial adjustments and political change complicated matters further. The
Allied agreements at Yalta in 1944 and Potsdam in 1945 altered the shape and
ethnic composition of Poland and Ukraine, legitimized the Soviet annexation of
the Baltic States and entrenched Communist power throughout the region. Fur-
thermore, far from bringing an end to organized deportation, the defeat of Nazism
helped to popularize the idea. French officials entertained the idea of uprooting
13 million Germans and transferring them overseas, partly for punitive reasons but
also because they could make way for the influx of refugees who were shortly ex-
pected to arrive from Eastern Europe. Elements of this fantasy were brutally real-
ized when the Allies expelled virtually all ethnic German inhabitants of Poland and
Czechoslovakia. The emerging post-war international refugee regime passed them
by. Nor did it take account of Italians who abandoned the disputed territory of
Venezia Giulia or who fled Italy’s colonial possessions to ‘return’ to ‘homes’ they
had never known. The same was true of the 20,000 Greek and Macedonian chil-
dren who were evacuated by the Greek Communist Party during the civil war in
1947–49 and taken to Eastern Europe, much as their Spanish counterparts had
been ten years earlier.3
International agencies and NGOs focused on Europe’s DPs. The Allies expected
that most would sort themselves out with a modicum of external assistance from
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). The pri-
ority was to assist the surviving victims of war (excluding ex-enemy civilians), and
to provide emergency relief prior to their repatriation. By late 1945, around seven
million men and women had been repatriated, including more than five million
to Soviet territory. But at least 1.5 million Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukraini-
ans and others resisted. As the Cold War intensified and inter-Allied cooperation
dried up, their fortunes were entrusted to a new body, the International Refugee
Organisation (IRO), which the USSR refused to join. IRO officers determined
the eligibility of ‘genuine refugees and Displaced Persons’ for protection and made

2
Quoted in G. Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
3
Pamela Ballinger, ‘Borders of the Nation, Borders of Citizenship: Italian Repatriation and the
Redefinition of National Identity after World War II’ CSSH, 40, no.3 (2007), 713–41; Michael Fleming,
‘Greek “Heroes” in the Polish People’s Republic and the Geopolitics of the Cold War, 1948–1956’
Nationalities Papers, 36, no.3 (2008), 375–97.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 91

plans for their resettlement. By the end of the 1940s Western officials argued that
the outstanding issues in Europe had largely been solved through a mixture of
resettlement and local integration. Any remaining concerns would be dealt with
by a small successor agency with a limited mandate. This paved the way for the
creation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
in December 1950, which thus emerged as a sickly creature with a limited life
expectancy.
Whether repatriated or not, refugees and DPs had to negotiate their incarcera-
tion in ‘assembly centres’ and camps. The refugee camp provided patriotic leaders
amongst the DPs as well as in the diaspora with an opportunity to advertise ideas
of historic suffering and the potential for national deliverance, as they had done
during the First World War. Non-refugees, including government officials and ex-
perts responsible for the care of refugees, construed DPs in more problematic
terms, as impaired and in need of psychological intervention. Their constitution as
a ‘problem’ brought together political, legal, cultural and economic considerations.
Under what circumstances could they be admitted to third countries? What about
new waves of refugees from communism, in Hungary, East Germany and Yugo-
slavia—could they become good citizens in the West or might they be fifth-
columnists? How far did new cohorts of refugees seek economic betterment rather
than sanctuary from persecution? A combination of factors—the Cold War in
Europe, and the revival of the world economy—created favourable conditions for
the resettlement of DPs and refugees in the 1950s, but Western governments ex-
pected this to be on their terms.
Difficult questions were asked about the policies pursued by Western govern-
ments. As the 1950s drew to a close, the contrast between Western affluence and
the degradation of a ‘hard core’ of DPs still in camps amounted to a scandal. Sig-
nificant efforts were made to ‘clear the camps’, either by relocating refugees in third
countries or facilitating their integration locally. World Refugee Year (WRY)
(1959–60) typified international efforts to assist refugees and to publicize the work
of UNHCR. WRY owed much to the dissemination of images of damaged and
distraught refugees. The campaign also made a statement about the responsibilities
of citizens in the ‘free world’ towards refugees. This humanitarian initiative, like
the post-war refugee regime as a whole, sought to define the boundaries of citizen-
ship. But to repeat: the officials who operated this regime looked the other way
when it came to deported and ‘transferred’ persons, whose experiences were ob-
scured from view.

TRANSFERS AND EXPULSIONS

Transfers, expulsions and deportations were pursued with great vigour during and
after the Second World War (see Map 4). German troops ordered the expulsion of
Jews, Roma, communists and others when they occupied Alsace-Lorraine in 1940.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) paved the way for the colonization of Polish
territory by German settlers and ultimately the extermination of East European
92 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Jewry. Nazi officials forced Poles out of their homes in the Warthegau, replacing
them with ethnic Germans from Eastern Poland, which now formed part of the
Soviet sphere. In Poland, huge changes took place under the Soviet occupation.
Jewish refugees arrived in large numbers in the towns of Galicia, seeking to escape
German-occupied territory to the west. In Volhynia, military colonists were arrested
and their land expropriated. Around 40,000 Poles, Jews and Ukrainian nationalists
were deported to Central Asia and Siberia between February 1940 and May 1941.
Polish women faced constant humiliation and sexual violence. Holding on to a
sense of connectedness to the ‘homeland’ assumed critical significance in their
lives.4 In the wake of the Nazi invasion Stalin followed in the footsteps of the last
Tsar by demonizing German farmers, Crimean Tatars, Chechens and others and
deporting them to Central Asia on grounds of ‘treason’ (see chapter 9).
Politicians engaged in a merry-go-round of demographic engineering after the
Second World War. Winston Churchill advocated a ‘clean sweep’ of ethnic Ger-
mans from east of the Curzon Line, describing it (with a nod towards the Greek-
Turkish population exchange) as a means of ‘disentangling’ groups in order to
create friendship between nations. Events on the ground ran ahead of bureaucratic
decision-making. The Czech leader Edvard Beneš spoke of providing a ‘humane
and orderly’ transfer that was consistent with ‘civilised’ norms of conduct; for him,
national minorities were ‘always a real thorn in the side of individual nations’.5 At
Potsdam Stalin claimed that ‘all the Germans had run away’ from Poland; Churchill
agreed. Neither claim was accurate. Instead ordinary Czechs and Poles took mat-
ters into their own hands, forcing Germans from their homes in the summer of
1945. Concerted state intervention led to seven million Germans being driven out
of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1950. Put
in charge of the new Polish Ministry of Recovered Territories, Władysław Gomułka
categorically stated that ‘we must expel all the Germans, because countries are built
on national lines and not on multinational ones’. Poland also rid itself of ethnic
Ukrainians who were given just a few hours’ notice to quit and forced to identify
themselves by means of the letter ‘U’ that appeared on the identity papers issued
by the recently-dislodged Nazi occupation regime. These measures caused enor-
mous bitterness and hardship.6
Another vindictive bit of post-war reckoning took place in Bulgaria, where the
new Communist government expelled 250,000 ethnic Turks. Turkey quickly

4
Aleksander Wat, My Century: the Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (New York: New York Review
Books, 2003); Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World
War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 199–278; Jan T. Gross, Revolution from
Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: from Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heart-
land (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10, 149, 185–91.
5
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 276.
6
Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1948), 285–6; Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 110; Frank, Expelling the Ger-
mans, 74–90; Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 197–8. Czechoslovakia additionally expelled
200,000 Hungarians under the ‘Košicky Programme’.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 93

ESTONIAN
S.S.R.
SWEDEN
RUSSIAN
DENMARK S.F.S.R.
LATVIAN
S.S.R.

LITHUANIAN
S.S.R.

EAST
EAST
PRUSSIA
PRUSSIA BELARUSIAN
S.S.R.

POLAND
SAXONY SILESIA
Wildflecken
Kielce
GERMANY VOLHYNIA
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
GALICIA
BAVARIA UKRAINIAN
Föhrenwald S.S.R.
Stadl
TR
Paura AN
SC
AUSTRIA AR
PA
TH
IA
HUNGARY
ITALY

ROMANIA

YUGOSLAVIA

Refugee movements
Germans Lithuanians Others (Belarusans/Magyars/Italians/ Poland’s
Serbs/Croats/Macedonians) ‘recovered lands’
Poles Czechs/Slovaks
0 500 km
Russians Rusyns/Ukrainians

Map 4: Map of Population Movements in Central Europe, 1944–48

closed the border in turn, ‘because the Bulgarian government was infiltrating
through the frontier many persons without the required visas or with false visas as
well as a number of gypsies’. Meanwhile, Armenian refugees who settled in Ro-
mania between the wars now lived under a Communist government. A UN official
wrote, ‘prior to the advent of Communism in Romania, all of these Armenians
were highly productive citizens’, but the Romanian authorities decided to expel
94 Mid-Century Maelstrom

them to Turkey, where they were doubly unwelcome as Armenians and as former
residents of a Communist state.7
UNRRA disclaimed any responsibility for these expellees and transferred pop-
ulations. The welfare of German expellees was a matter for the individual German
states (Länder). Beyond Germany, no-one apart from some religious groups paid
much attention to their immediate plight.8 Although ‘treated as self-respecting
individuals and not to be dealt with by bureaucracy as beings belonging to an
inferior category’, they were ‘nonetheless refugees in the wider sociological sense,
because their social and economic integration into the national community
which has accepted them is far from complete’.9 Some expellees spent years in
transit camps. Sir John Hope Simpson worried about their impact on the new
Federal Republic: there is (he wrote) ‘no peace safe while masses of people live in
conditions intolerable in a civilised era. In Central Europe the ground lies ready
prepared for the seed of revolutionary propaganda’.10 Local people spoke unfa-
vourably of the cultural differences between themselves and the newcomers
(‘Pollacks’ and ‘Pimoks’, ‘Poles’ and ‘strangers’). The camps enabled expellees to
sustain a connection to the ‘homeland’ and ‘Homeland societies’ kept alive faint
hopes of territorial restitution. (In East Germany the expellees found it difficult
to vent their experiences in public, because the communist state regarded the
issue as closed.) The situation worsened when around three million new refugees
poured into West Germany from the east; their position was less clear-cut than
that of the expellees.11

DISPLACED PERSONS AND THE ALLIES

Policy-makers had first to determine the conditions under which people had been
displaced. One contemporary drew a distinction between ‘war fugitives’, who fled
from (or were evacuated from) the immediate zone of conflict; ‘refugees’ (‘the
product of ideological policies’), including those forcibly expatriated or deported,
such as Jews; and forced labourers. Others held that ‘refugees [are] civilians not
outside the national boundaries of their country, who desire to return to their

7
AFSC Archives, Folder, DPs Services—Commissions, Organisations, Report of the UNHCR
Refugee Advisory Committee, 4 December 1951; H. Wilbrandt, Refugee Service Committee, Istanbul,
to G. van Goedhart, UNHCR, 25 August 1952, Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, Folder 15/39, Armenian
Refugees 1952–63.
8
Elfan Rees, spokesman for the World Council of Churches urged members to ‘fight against “the
spirit of Potsdam” which divided human beings into “eligible” and “uneligible” categories of merchandise’.
Memo dated February 1947, WCC Archives, File 425.1.033 ERC, Different Countries and Refugee
Groups 1947–48.
9
Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 142.
10
Foreword to Henry Carter, The Refugee Problem in Europe and the Middle East, (Epworth Press,
1949).
11
Rainer Schulze, ‘The Politics of Memory: Flight and Expulsion of German Populations after the
Second World War and German Collective Memory’ National Identities, 8, no.4 (2006), 367–82;
Meryn McLaren, ‘ “Out of the Huts Emerged a Settled People”: Community-building in West
German Refugee Camps’ German History, 28, no.1 (2010), 21–43.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 95

homes, but require assistance to do so, who are: (a) temporarily homeless because
of military operations; (b) at some distance from their homes for reasons related to
the war’.12 The Bermuda Conference (April 1943) agreed that the repatriation of
those displaced by the war would be a priority, describing this as the power of ‘the
homing instinct’.13 The term ‘Displaced Person’ was a deliberate decision to cate-
gorize those who were the unwitting or innocent victims of Germany’s war ma-
chine; they were ‘civilians outside the national boundaries of their country by
reason of the war, who are desirous but are unable to return to their home or find
homes without assistance’.14 Hannah Arendt offered a more dyspeptic analysis,
arguing that the label ‘was invented during the war for the express purpose of li-
quidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence’, since the term
‘stateless person’ (in widespread use before the war) at least implied the loss of the
protection afforded by the state. DPs lived in limbo; they belonged not to any
country, but to the internment camps where they were held prior to repatriation
and the restoration of their nationality.15
The broader context had already been laid down in November 1943 when Presi-
dent Roosevelt addressed representatives of the ‘United Nations’ in the White
House, inviting ‘each nation to provide relief and help in rehabilitation for the
victims of German and Japanese barbarism’, lest they suffer mass starvation and
disease. He proposed an organization that would ‘restore to a normal, healthy and
self-sustaining existence’ the oppressed countries, thereby enabling ‘our own boys
overseas to come home’. The priority was to assist in the ‘resumption of urgently
needed agricultural and industrial production and the restoration of essential serv-
ices’, and at the same time to return ‘prisoners and exiles to their homes’. Accord-
ingly UNRRA began its work the following month. One of its first decisions was
to agree that relief work was ‘not political’, even though Roosevelt spoke of ‘fight-
ing to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills’.16
As the war came to an end UNRRA created ‘spearhead’ teams, more than 300
of which were in the field by June 1945. By the end of the year 6,000 staff had
responsibility for the administration and welfare of DPs in a series of rapidly ar-
ranged assembly centres. Few people had kind words to say about the organization,
whose staff were frequently characterized as incompetent, wasteful and inconsider-
ate. Allied officers moved DPs from one camp to another. In the 12 months fol-
lowing VE Day, more than two million Russians had been repatriated, along with
450,000 Poles. Analysts praised the combined efforts of the Allied military and
UNRRA in preventing a ‘wild stampede’, but since its main purpose was to prepare

12
Proudfoot, European Refugees, 115.
13
Herbert Emerson, ‘Postwar Problems of Refugees’ Foreign Affairs, 21, no.2 (1943), 211–20,
at 213.
14
Proudfoot, European Refugees, 115.
15
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 279, 284. ‘The concept of statelessness is a very difficult one
for the army to grasp’, wrote Joseph Schwartz of the American JDC. Quoted in William I. Hitchcock,
Liberation: the Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945 (Faber and Faber, 2009), 230.
16
Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 1, 3–4, 29; Jessica Reinisch, ‘Internationalism in Relief: the Birth
(and Death) of UNRRA’ Past and Present, Supplement 6 (2011), 258–89.
96 Mid-Century Maelstrom

the ground for them to return home, UNRRA forfeited any vestige of respect from
the DPs.17
UNRRA sought to persuade non-Jewish DPs that it was in their interests to
return to homes where they would ‘find familiar patterns and a way of life more
in keeping with their national culture than if they were to seek resettlement in
strange lands’. DPs were invited to contribute to the task of ‘building a new
home in which everyone will feel happy’.18 Films with titles such as The Road
Home and Home for the Homeless were designed to create a positive impression
of life in Poland and the Baltic States. Soviet repatriation officials operated in
France, Iran, Greece, Egypt and other countries and published newspapers in
support of homecoming: Vesti s rodiny (‘News from Home’), Schastlivyi put’
(‘Happy Journey’), and Rodina zovet (‘The Motherland Calls’). Soviet security
forces maintained ‘verification-filtration points’. Where doubts arose, however,
for example about Ukrainian nationalists, returnees were held in ‘filtration
camps’ and then used as forced labour. The fact that any returnee might spread
information about the West among the Soviet population, in ways calculated to
undermine morale, rendered everyone suspect.19
In a separate but related development the Soviet press made much of the idea of
‘homecoming’, by appealing to Armenians who were living abroad to ‘return’ to
Soviet Armenia. Pro-Soviet diasporic organizations such as the Armenian National
Council of America joined the chorus of approval, and American well-wishers
argued that Russia was the ‘good Samaritan’ who would rescue displaced Armeni-
ans, improve their prospects by lobbying for an increase in Armenian territory at
Turkey’s expense, and preserve Armenian civilization. Unsurprisingly, anti-Soviet
groups bitterly opposed the idea of repatriation, just as they had done during the
1920s. Most of those who took up the Soviet offer had never set foot in Erevan,
and they soon discovered that ‘home’ was less attractive than they had been led to
believe. The more fortunate managed to get out before being caught up in Stalin’s
late purges.20
This left other DPs in Germany or Austria, praying for an Anglo-American vic-
tory over the Soviet Union (see Table 2). A series of polls conducted in spring 1946
established the strength of their anti-communist sentiment, although this did not
stop UNRRA officials from arguing that ‘the political explanation serves merely as

17
UNRRA Archives, S-0520-0252-0010, Welfare Guide, ‘Services to United Nations Nationals
Displaced in Germany’ (marked restricted, 15 March 1945); Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War
World, 30; Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1998), 40; Kathryn Hulme, The Wild Place (Frederick Muller, 1953), 35–7.
18
Laura J. Hilton, ‘Pawns on a Chessboard? Polish DPs and Repatriation from the US Zone of
Occupation of Germany’, in Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps
and Forced Labour (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag, 2005), 90–102, at 96.
19
Nick Baron, ‘Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49’,
in Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (eds), Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the
Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 89–116.
20
Charles Vertanes, Armenia Reborn (New York: Armenian National Council of America, 1947),
35; John Carlson, ‘The Armenian Displaced Persons’ Armenian Affairs, 1, no. 1 (1949–50), 17–34;
Joanne Laycock, ‘The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–49’, in Gatrell and Baron
(eds), Warlands, 140–61.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 97

a convenient justification and cover for underlying motives which are essentially
personal and economic’.21
By 1949, at which point the door closed on repatriation, a further 73,000
DPs had returned home. However, an impressive number refused repatriation:
650,000, including 200,000 Poles, 110,000 Ukrainians and 150,000 Balts.
Others—prisoners as well as DPs—evaded repatriation, either because (like
Ukrainians from Galicia) they were not citizens of the USSR before the cut-off
date, or because they obtained forged documents to pass themselves off as citi-
zens of pre-war Poland. Poles who served in the Allied armies during the war
were not classified as DPs, and many of these former combatants remained in
Britain or France. From a Soviet standpoint, however, they could not qualify as
‘refugees’.22 This stance contributed to a breakdown of trust between Soviet re-
patriation officers and the IRO.
The Cold War came to the rescue of DPs who were reluctant to repatriate, ena-
bling some to be resettled in the USA or other countries while others were permit-
ted (or obliged) to remain in Central Europe. Subsequently their numbers were
swelled by newcomers fleeing the Communist seizure of power in Eastern Europe.
Anti-Communist opinion regarded them as heroic ‘escapees’ from totalitarianism.
The first UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Dutch lawyer and journalist Gerrit
Jan van Heuven Goedhart, did his best to speak the language of apolitical humani-
tarianism, but the broad consensus in the West held that unless DPs found some-
where to live and work they would otherwise be prey to Communist influence.
Thus the post-war refugee crisis rapidly became politicized.23

Table 2: DPs from Central/Eastern Europe in West Germany, 1945–46

Nationality September 1945 December 1945 June 1946 December 1946

Polish 816,012 553,000 419,000 272,712

Latvian 64,979 86,000 97,000 93,357
Lithuanian 47,269 54,000 59,000 57,154
Russian, Ukrainian 33,146 45,000 45,000 45,000
Yugoslav 27,699 40,000 23,000 19,455
Jews 22,580 47,000 107,495 139,613
Estonian 21,453 27,000 32,000 28,936
Czech/Slovak 3,000 3,000 2,000 927
Total 1,036,138 855,000 784,495 657,154

Source: UNRRA data, reported in Proudfoot, European Refugees, 291.

21
‘Why the Displaced Persons Refuse to go Home’ (May 1946), in Yury Boshyk (ed.), Ukraine
during World War II (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 209–22.
22
Iu. N. Arzamaskin, Zalozhniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan v 1944–1953gg.
(Moscow: Focus, 2001).
23
Kim Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War: Toward a New International Refugee Regime in the Early
Postwar Era (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991).
98 Mid-Century Maelstrom

T H E D P C A M P : I N C A RC E R AT I O N A N D N AT I O N A L
SELFEXPRESSION

Whether awaiting repatriation or trying to evade it, Displaced Persons survived as

best they could in the designated assembly centres in the four occupation zones of
Germany and in Austria and later on in numerous camps or as self-settled groups
(‘free-livers’). How were DPs assigned to particular camps? How was the camp
managed, and how did DPs arrange their daily routine? How did they interact
with the local population and with the occupying forces? What was the connection
between incarceration and political self-expression? How did their experience
compare with DPs—up to one-fifth of the total—who made their own arrange-
ments? (For Jewish DPs, see chapter 4).
Few reception centres and DP camps conformed to the bureaucratic ideal of a
well-ordered institution: one Polish DP described living ‘like nomads [in] a huge
gypsy camp’.24 Over time, however, camps became better organized, and DPs were
simultaneously subject to greater constraints. For example, outgoing and incoming
correspondence was restricted and subject to inspection by Allied authorities, and
letters had to be written in English, French, German or Russian, languages that the
Allies could most easily understand without having recourse to translators. This
regime explained why anger quickly surfaced. A young Polish man asked, ‘Is there
really much difference between “now” and “before”? I was a number. I am a number.
I was called “Polish dog”, now I am called “wretched Pole”’. Another DP wrote in
scathing terms about his feelings of betrayal and degradation: ‘When we were drunk,
our greatest pleasure was to picture the day when we in turn would see our “Allies” as
DPs in Siberia and how “they” would feel when they could get the same treatment of
humiliation as the military and so many UNRRA officers do not spare to give us’.25
From an Allied point of view, the camps were a convenient device to prepare for
repatriation, as well as to marshal available resources in a difficult economic cli-
mate, rather than being an instrument of discipline for its own sake. DPs were
hired by UNRRA as teachers, nurses, secretaries and security staff. In due course
they assumed responsibility for much of the day-to-day administration of the
camps. UNRRA argued that ‘in the long run, by practice and persuasion, but not
by order and command, committees could be taught to act fairly and human
beings rehabilitated’.26 Sometimes an oppressive regime was imposed on fellow
inmates, not by the occupation authorities or by UNRRA, but by the camp com-
mittees that controlled the supply of food, cigarettes and clothing. The Allies wel-
comed this practice as a sign that DPs could learn the habits of self-reliance and
‘fairness’ after their prolonged exposure to Nazi brutality.27

24
Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission: the Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Amer-
icans, 1939–1956 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 65.
25
Ben Shephard, The Long Road Home: the Aftermath of the Second World War (Bodley Head, 2010),
269.
26
Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2, 525–32; Wyman, DPs, 113–14, 117–18.
27
Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar
Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 48–50.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 99

The occupation regime nevertheless imposed limits on political agitation,

particularly if it threatened to spread beyond the camp. Organizing camps on
national lines made this a contentious issue. Whereas the US authorities made
deliberate provision for Ukrainians to be housed in Ukrainian camps, the Brit-
ish initially objected that this caused unnecessary difficulties: ‘[T]here is no
objection to DPs organising themselves for their moral and physical welfare,
but “national committees” of nations who have been incorporated, at least de
facto, into the Soviet Union have ensured a great deal of trouble by conducting
anti-Soviet propaganda’.28 By the middle of 1946, as the Cold War intensified,
the Foreign Office came round to the idea. Most relief workers accepted this fait
accompli, but Quakers expressed misgivings, urging ‘vigilance against competi-
tive nationalism’ that hindered reconciliation between former enemies. Given the
mutual suspicion between DPs and their German neighbours, this was easier said
than done.29
Most DPs understood that a more pressing issue was how to pass long hours
in the camp. They supplemented food rations by various methods including black
market transactions with local Germans, who promptly accused DPs of being
wedded to criminal behaviour. Allied officials deplored these and other unorthodox
tactics:
In general they appreciated the efforts made on their behalf, but some of the more ignorant
or prejudiced were unwilling to participate in the health programme. It was forbidden to
keep livestock in the camps, but on one occasion some refugees had managed to keep some
pigs in one of the modern billeting quarters. A search was made without success, and it was
learned afterwards that the pigs had been shut in a lift which had been kept in motion
between floors in order to evade the search team.30
Other voices added to the chorus of complaint. DPs gained a reputation in some
distant quarters for being ‘bums, criminals, black marketeers, subversives, revolu-
tionaries and crackpots of all colours and hues’, in the words of one US Congress-
man whose colourful language evidently reflected his opposition to looser controls
on immigration.31
The maintenance of order and hygiene became a recurrent feature of camp life
in ways that anticipated the management of refugees elsewhere. Refugees regarded
as degrading the intimate physical inspections and X-rays to which they were sub-
jected, typically in order to establish their eligibility for resettlement: these health
checks (for which they had to pay from their own pocket) might identify infectious
diseases and bodily ailments that affected their status—even poor teeth might send

28
Marta Dyczok, The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000),
130.
29
Wyman, DPs, 157; Roger Cowan Wilson, Quaker Relief: an Account of the Relief Work of the
Society of Friends, 1940–1948 (Allen and Unwin, 1952), 234; Jenny Carson, ‘The Quaker Internation-
alist Tradition in DP camps, 1945–48’, in Gatrell and Baron (eds), Warlands, 67–86.
30
Louise W. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization: a Specialized Agency of the United
Nations, its History and Work, 1946–1952 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 250.
31
Matthew J. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refu-
gees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 137.
100 Mid-Century Maelstrom

one to the back of a very long queue. Inmates complained of a complete lack of
privacy in the overcrowded and dilapidated buildings that housed them, and some
outside observers complained of ‘promiscuity’. Allied officials offered a different
perspective, believing that ‘compassion’ helped to restore ‘moral order’, and that
this required a rigorous regime. Bureaucrats wished to keep refugees on their toes.
The British Foreign Office spoke of the need to promote ‘welfare work [among
DPs] in order that they should not go to pieces as a result of forced inactivity’. As
a leading Canadian psychiatrist put it, ‘the autocratic paternalism of the camps is
not only almost a necessity; it is probably beneficial’.32
Tedious routine was leavened by creativity. Exhibitions of their craft work ena-
bled DPs to demonstrate their capacity for useful work and thus to advertise their
potential employability in a third country or, as one Polish exhibition catalogue
put it to show how ‘they worked on themselves, improved their knowledge of old
professions and acquired new ones’. An emphasis on competitive sports had a simi-
lar purpose, cultivating an image of DPs—both for themselves and the resettle-
ment officers—as sturdy and healthy rather than decrepit and diseased. Young,
professional inmates created an active political and cultural life. Theatrical per-
formances had a didactic purpose. Newspapers recounted stories of wartime dis-
placement and enjoined DPs to remember important dates in the national calendar,
such as the adoption of the Polish constitution on 3 May 1791 and Independence
Day on 11 November commemorating the dramatic events in 1918 that estab-
lished the First Republic. It was a sign of the commitment of DPs to the ‘national
order of things’ that they insisted on renaming the camps to reflect national affili-
ation and identity by giving them historically resonant names. Camp Haren in
Lower Saxony was renamed Maczków in honour of a prominent Polish general.
Maczków was akin to a town, earning the title of ‘capital of little Poland’. Else-
where a link between exile and cultural life emerged in a Lithuanian exhibition of
folk art that assembled ‘precious relics for us, exiles. Handfuls of Lithuanian soil,
the dried crumbs of country bread, a little hank of flax’.33
Diasporic connections reinforced the message. Non-Jewish exiles in far-flung
locations disseminated ‘romantic national sagas informed by the traditional vision
of their nations as heroes and martyrs in the struggle for freedom and democracy
against evil forces of oppression’. DPs with connections to anti-Communist Polish
exiles in London were reminded that their schools should ‘save [the youth] for
Poland’ and inculcate a ‘spiritual bond with the entire nation and its new destiny
[sic]’ by being ‘enlightened by a certain sum of knowledge [and becoming] a new
person, internally restructured’. In 1945 the United Ukrainian American Relief
Committee joined forces with its Canadian counterpart to establish a Central
Ukrainian Relief Bureau. There were equivalent organizations in Italy, Belgium

32
Henry B.M. Murphy, Flight and Resettlement (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 58; Dyczok, The Grand
Alliance, 129.
33
Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 66; Dalia Kuizinienė, ‘National Identity and Lithua-
nian Literature in the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany in 1945–1950’, in Kuizinienė (ed.),
Beginnings and Ends of Emigration: Life without Borders in the Contemporary World (Kaunas: Versus
Aureus, 2005), 193–203, 263–7.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 101

and France. In the first instance this meant protecting DPs from involuntary repa-
triation, but a more extensive cultural politics came into play, even though some
DPs regarded the diaspora as a remote and elitist agglomeration of exiles, insuffi-
ciently attuned to the needs of ordinary people.34
Patriotic rhetoric raised the political stakes. The experience of the camps taught
Ukrainian DPs to think in terms of a ‘united’ Ukraine free from Soviet domina-
tion. Ukrainian activists portrayed themselves as the heirs to a political struggle in
the tradition of the eighteenth-century Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa. Heirs to a
proud national past, DPs were the embodiment of the heroic exile who awaited the
liberation of their country. They served the cause of the ‘fatherland’ by dint of
committing themselves to a reluctant exile, ‘until a free and joyful return home’. As
with refugee communities during the First World War, Ukrainians were enjoined
to stick together for spiritual sustenance as well as self-help. Ideas of national loss,
remedial action and duty were encapsulated in an editorial by a prominent Ukrain-
ian DP:
We must face the fact that our people will be scattered in small groups around the
globe. These small Ukrainian islands will be washed by foreign seas until the seas cover
them and swallow them up. But will they really be swallowed up? Will we allow this
to happen? One thing we can have that will preserve our people for our nation and its
cause—the Ukrainian press and book. That is the only weapon which remains in our
hands as we scatter around the globe. The book and press will unite us over countries,
seas and continents.35
From the complex encounters between ordinary DPs, displaced intelligentsia and
the émigré community, there emerged a dominant narrative of the homeland as a
potential paradise on earth that was presently polluted by Communist rule. How-
ever, attempts at creating a single Ukrainian ‘nation abroad’ were undermined by
the bitter political rivalry between OUN-B (anti-Soviet nationalist insurgents in-
spired by Stepan Bandera), and other factions. OUN-B members described the
armed struggle on Soviet territory as ‘invaluable capital without which we are
nothing but a cluster of homeless refugees’.36
Thus the nationality factor continued to be an inescapable part of DPs’ self-
perception. Hannah Arendt observed that ‘the more they were excluded from right

34
Ewa Morawska, ‘Intended and Unintended Consequences of Forced Migrations: a Neglected
Aspect of East Europe’s Twentieth-century History’ IMR, 34, no.4 (2000), 1049–87, at 1064;
Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 86–7; Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Com-
munism, 87–8; Aldis Purs, ‘ “How those Brothers in Foreign Lands are Dividing the Fatherland”:
Latvian National Politics in DP Camps after the Second World War’, in Gatrell and Baron (eds),
Warlands, 48–66.
35
Roman Ilnytzkyj, ‘A Survey of Ukrainian Camp Periodicals, 1945–1950’, in Wsevolod Isajiw,
Yury Boshyk and Roman Senkus (eds), The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons after World
War 2 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992), 271–91, at 287–8.
36
OUN is the acronym for the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh
Natsionalistiv. Volodymyr Kulyk, ‘Political Emigration and Labour Settlement: Construction of an
Émigré Community in the Media Discourse of Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria,
1945–1950’, in Ohliger, European Encounters, 213–37, at 227.
102 Mid-Century Maelstrom

in any form, the more they tended to look for reintegration into a national, into
their own national community’.37 DPs conceived of themselves as erstwhile citi-
zens of a vanished state that might yet be reconstituted. They drew on a ‘conserva-
tive and static notion of an essentialised Latvian identity’.38 This particular historical
consciousness emerged in the DP camps, and it re-emerged when European Vol-
unteer Workers (EVWs) transferred their sense of Latvianness to the textile mills
of Lancashire. Others had more difficulty negotiating their identity. Long after he
left a DP camp, the Lithuanian émigré Jonas Matulionis recalled that:
Emigration ended our nomadic period of life, which was temporary, uncertain and
exhausting. Thank God, the Western world did not leave us alone, but how difficult it
is to live on the mercy of others! Will we be happy in our new countries? I doubt it.
Without our country, without our homeland, whose juices slaked our thirst, we will
always feel like uprooted trees dumped by a storm on strange earth.39
In this context it is worth recalling Louise Holborn’s distinction between Jewish
DPs and DPs from Poland and the Baltic States: ‘[T]he Jewish population directed
their energies towards the future; it was a hope within the realm of possibility. The
non-Jewish group looked back to what had been’.40
Something of these tensions emerged in the camp as well. There were com-
plaints that the Lithuanian camps were run by ‘venerable nationals’ who behaved
like landed gentry towards their ‘serfs’, justifying their action in terms of safeguard-
ing the good name of Lithuania, although a rather different version emerged in the
comment by a Ukrainian historian that the camp encouraged ‘some of the ideas of
western democracy [and] little remained of the stylised symmetry between pan
[lord] and khlop [peasant]’.41 Perhaps this was a sign of anxiety about social disap-
pointment. The association between displacement and downward social mobility
was widely held, including among DPs themselves who had been part of the pro-
fessional intelligentsia: ‘Not long ago we were the avant-garde of democracy, but
now we live like the last of the homeless, stand before the gates of military bar-
racks, hoping to get work in the kitchen—washing dishes or cleaning trash cans,
in order to have food’.42
Amidst the evidence of nationalist sentiment in the DP camps, a contrary ten-
dency can also be detected. As one Lithuanian newspaper put it, ‘we, the DPs are
the great concern of the world. But the world has become a great concern for us too’.43
DPs created the ‘UNRRA University’ in Munich under whose auspices around
2,000 students from 28 different nationalities attended lectures and language

37
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 293; compare Cohen, In War’s Wake, 85.
38
Linda McDowell, Hard Labour: the Hidden Voices of Latvian Migrant ‘Volunteer’ Workers (London:
UCL Press, 2005), 19.
39
Thomas Balkelis, ‘Living in the DP Camp: Lithuanian War Refugees in the West, 1944–54’, in
Gatrell and Baron (eds), Warlands, 25–47, at 43.
40
Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 192.
41
Balkelis, ‘Living in the DP Camp’, 36; Ihor V. Zielyk, ‘The DP Camp as a Social System’, in
Isajiw, Boshyk and Senkus (eds), The Refugee Experience, 461–70, at 465.
42
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 18.
43
Balkelis, ‘Living in the DP Camp’, 32.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 103

courses between 1945 and 1948. Its rector fostered a cosmopolitan outlook.44
A group of concerned American citizens who visited camps in Germany ten years
later was impressed by the political purpose evident in a workshop that employed
‘five people—five different nations. One might think that there would be a new
Babel: quite the contrary. Today we can say that the workshop has become a little
UNO, in the best sense of the word’. The same ethos emerged in the camp at Stadl
Paura in Upper Austria where one visitor anticipated the shape of things to come:
‘here the idea of a United Europe has begun to come true’.45 Nationalist self-
expression did not go unchallenged.
We have already alluded to the fact that Allied treatment of DPs created bitter-
ness. One DP wrote to the Canadian relief worker Mabel Geldard-Brown that
‘your mention that I must hate the name of DP is right. I do not like it [and]
sometimes hate it, because of the many meanings which are attached to it. Usually
a DP here is a trouble maker and whether I like it or not I come under the same
denomination’.46 Sometimes DPs adopted an ironic tone, as in a ditty that went
the rounds of the camps: ‘Would you please excuse me/that I nothing know/I am
only a number/in the IRO long row’. Estonians coined a new word, ‘Dipiistumine’,
to describe the process whereby they lost a sense of being connected to the past,
while Lithuanians referred to DP as Dievo paukšteliai, literally, ‘birds of God’, a
term that entertained the possibility of flight to a better life. Other witty expres-
sions emerged also in a Russian ‘DP alphabet’ according to which the letter E stood
for ‘ekhat’ (‘to go . . . nowhere’), N for ‘no documents’ (net dokumentov), and S
stood for slukhi or ‘rumours’, ‘the most panic-inducing of which travel at 300,000
kilometres per second’. Others likened the DP camp to a Soviet collective farm
that ‘turned us into dull and banal people’. A Lithuanian cartoonist depicted the
overcrowded conditions in one camp with a wealth of ‘types’—the ‘housewives’
and the butcher, the professor and the chess players, the lovers and the peeping
tom.47 This rich material suggests a greater capacity for creativity and humorous
reflection than many relief workers managed.

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F D I S P L A C E M E N T: P S YC H O L O G Y,
C U LT U R E A N D H U M A N I TA R I A N I S M

Generally speaking, whether they lived in camps or not, DPs were characterized as
‘disorderly’, demoralized and uncooperative. One official could scarcely hide his
distaste for East Europeans ‘with their unkempt, unwashed appearance and their
makeshift clothes’. The Allied military authorities condemned their ‘banditry’ and

44
Anna Holian, ‘Displacement and the Postwar Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons
at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945–1948’ CEH, 17, no.2 (2008), 167–95.
45
Peter Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 57, 133.
46
LAC, Mabel Geldard-Brown Fonds, MG30-E497, vol. 3, folder 5, UNRRA, correspondence
with DPs and others, 1944–48, dated 15 May 1948, signature indecipherable.
47
Irina Saburova, Dipilogicheskaia azbuka (Munich: n.p., 1946); Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, 87.
104 Mid-Century Maelstrom

described them as ‘the scum of Europe’; another officer added that ‘when suspected
of wrong-doing they could of course seldom explain their actions in any language
that a military government officer could understand’.48 But these impoverished
attitudes overlook the resourcefulness of refugees who adapted to abnormal eco-
nomic conditions and devised strategies to avoid detection by Soviet commissars,
such as the young Russian schoolteacher who passed herself off as Greek.49
Over time arguments about unorthodox and disruptive behaviour or about the
options for employment gave way to a more durable concept of helplessness and
apathy, a ‘psychosis which expresses itself in reluctance to face the responsibilities
of a normal community life’.50 This diagnosis linked displacement to alienation.
A leading psychologist suggested that: ‘On arrival at some place of safety the indi-
vidual refugee becomes submerged in a sea of his fellows. Personal problems and
personal differences do not count. When conditions get easier he has become
merely one segment of an ever-reforming queue’.51 In this interpretation, the ‘refu-
gee problem’ was about a state of mind, and the question was how to repair psy-
chological damage. Sociologist Edward Shils suggested that DPs were apathetic,
‘cantankerous’ and incapable of ‘rational political thought’ and looked to the DP
camps to become ‘experiments in group therapy’, designed to prepare the displaced
for resettlement in a third country or failing that, to allow them to settle in
Germany. Displaced children caused particular anxieties. ‘I’ve just seen two Eu-
ropes’, wrote an official from CARE in 1949: ‘I visited refugee camps and saw boys
and girls of 10, with eyes that looked ten times ten’. According to Shils, ‘they live
in hordes and live by marauding, they promise to become the new gypsies, undis-
ciplined, untrained, ready for any political disorder and without any sense of com-
munal responsibility’. The children of refugees and DPs needed particular care in
order to help them become good citizens.52
The concept of ‘DP apathy’ was rooted in psychological expertise. (Apathy had
also been a feature of pre-war discussions about the impact of long-term unemploy-
ment.) Murphy attributed this condition to segregation, lack of privacy and ‘a sense
of dependence’ on others. He noted but did not comment on the fact that refugees’
energy was mostly taken up with petitioning the authorities for resettlement.
Murphy dismissed the democratic credentials of DPs, on the grounds that they
originated from countries that ‘voluntarily [sic] relinquished democracy between
the wars’. In a deliberate juxtaposition, Murphy offered his readers two pictures
from the archives of the IRO. On one side was a photograph with the caption:

48
Proudfoot, European Refugees, 177–8; Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak: a Story of East-
ern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of our Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 112, 119.
49
Harvard University Refugee Interview Project, Schedule A, Vol.35, Case 386.
50
UNHCR, Final Report on the Ford Foundation Program for Refugees Primarily in Europe (Geneva:
UNHCR, 1958), 31.
51
Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, photo section III.
52
Edward A. Shils, ‘Social and Psychological Aspects of Displacement and Repatriation’ Journal of
Social Issues, 2, no.3 (1946), 3–18, at 9–10; William J. Cole, Unpublished report, CARE Archives,
Box 4, Subseries 1.1 General/historical, Bloomstein’s research files; Tara Zahra, ‘Lost Children: Dis-
placement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe’ JMH, 81, no.1 (2009), 45–85.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 105
DP Apathy or depression is well illustrated in this picture of a group of Estonians sing-
ing a national song as they see their compatriots set out for settlement. The occasion
is naturally a melancholy one, probably meaning the splitting of families, but the
general impression of sadness is one which was to be found in any Baltic DP camp in
1946 and 1947.53
This was a strange gloss on a photo showing a group of women whose stance
could just as well be described as one of defiance and affirmation rather than
‘melancholy’. The caption overlooked the solidarity that is evident in the picture.
It took a heroic stretch of the imagination to interpret this image as conveying
‘depression’.
The second photograph displayed a group of men (there are no women this time).
The caption read:
Ready for resettlement. The difference from the previous picture lies deeper than the
difference in situation and in nationality although both these factors play a part. There
is nothing in this picture of a very mixed group of DPs in an emigration camp to identify
them as refugees [nor is there in the first picture! PG] unless it be their clothing. They
could be a group of workers or repatriates anywhere in central Europe. They are psycho-
logically ready for resettlement and though they may later lose some of their present
confidence they do not show here any of the stigmata of the typical refugee.54
Murphy clearly made up his mind that these men—he does not give their nation-
ality—were sturdy and strong. Most of them smiled for the camera. They lacked,
in his extraordinary choice of words, the ‘stigmata’ of displacement.
NGOs shared this broad evaluation. In November 1946 the World Council of
Churches noted ‘a growing depression amongst refugees and DPs [at] having to
spend a second winter in the camps or under other abnormal conditions’. This
meant more resources for professional services. Military authorities, voluntary
agencies and UNRRA employed social workers in a new ‘Personal Counselling
Service’. In 1948 the IRO took over this service, managing a case-load of DPs who
required advice prior to resettlement. By July 1949 IRO officials planned to give
each refugee an individual ‘plan for his future’, something that the understaffed
League of Nations could never have contemplated.55
Roberto Rossellini’s neglected classic, Stromboli (1949), presented a psychologic-
al study of displacement and resettlement in fictionalized form. The film addressed
the soul-searching of a young DP (played by Ingrid Bergman) who marries a Sicil-
ian fisherman—revealingly, Rossellini could not make up his mind if she is sup-
posed to be Czech or Lithuanian, as if it is her ‘DP-ness’ in general that drives the
narrative forward. The central highlight of the film is a breathtaking extended shot
of tuna fishing, which embodies the ‘traditional’ way of life that she finds so op-
pressive. In the final shot Bergman is shown climbing towards the threatening
volcano, as if to suggest that her wartime torment at the hands of Nazis and the

53
Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, photo section XII.
54
Murphy, Flight and Resettlement, photo section XIII.
55
Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 265.
106 Mid-Century Maelstrom

stifling oppression of a closed society can only be resolved by succumbing to an

unstoppable force of nature.
Other films too provided a means of personalizing and dramatizing the plight of
DPs and camp life. A notable example was Fred Zinnemann’s film, The Search
(1948). Zinnemann visited DP camps in 1947 and was shocked by what he termed
the ‘remnants of various decimated nationalities’. He filmed among the ruins of
German cities, with Montgomery Clift in an early screen role as an American GI
who befriends a young Czech refugee boy whom he hopes to take back to the USA.
These plans come unstuck when the boy is eventually reunited with his mother,
thanks to the energetic efforts of UNRRA. Mother and son make arrangements for
repatriation, not resettlement. An obscure film, Umanità (Humanity) was shot by
Jack Salvatori in 1946 in the makeshift refugee camp in Cinecittà, with the assist-
ance of UNRRA and the Italian Sub-Ministry for Post-war Assistance. Like The
Search, it had American protagonists and a lost child, a sciuscà or shoeshine boy, as
well as Italian survivors of the brutal German occupation. The film included shots
of the labyrinth of partitioned wooden dormitories on the site of the film studio.
Ironically, refugees appropriated this enclosed space just at the time when Italian
neo-realist film makers were seeking to abandon the studio and take cameras on to
the street. The film critic Antonio Baracco described how ‘one solitary displaced
person used as his bedside table one of those luminous metal signs on which is
written “Alt! Silenzio, si gira!” [Stop! Silence, we’re rolling]’.56
For their part relief workers described an ethos of service that was occasionally
tinged with modesty but more commonly entailed putting themselves at the heart
of the narrative. Tales of sacrifice, particularly of the comforts of home life, were
accompanied by observations of the distressed circumstances of those in DP camps
and their corresponding impact on DPs’ ‘personality’. The novelist Iris Murdoch
was employed by UNRRA in Austria in 1946; DPs figured in her early work, The
Flight from the Enchanter (1956). Kathryn Hulme (1900–81) had even greater suc-
cess with her account of Wildflecken, originally a SS training camp. Polish DPs
renamed it Durzyń, alluding to ancient Slavic tribe of Durzyńcy who lived in Ba-
varia in the fifth and sixth centuries ad. In The Wild Place she described a ‘strange
half world’ and a ‘queer inverted life’, where ‘a tiny band of UN workers brought
new hope to more than 100,000 of [Hitler’s] homeless and helpless victims, small
wandering tribes from Babel’. Hulme did not hesitate to complain about ‘profes-
sional DPs’ whom she described as scroungers. (Absent from her book was any
mention of the German expellees who moved in large numbers to the Wildflecken
area.) The psychological no less than the physical consequences of war appeared
incalculable: ‘[T]he DPs’ prompt obedience to anger and threats seemed almost
the worst discovery I had yet made about them’.57

56
Noa Steimatsky, ‘The Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950)’ October, 128 (2009), 22–50;
Sharif Gemie and Louise Rees, ‘Representing and Reconstructing Identities in the Postwar World:
Refugees, UNRRA, and Fred Zinnemann’s film, The Search (1948)’ International Review of Social
History, 56, no.3 (2011), 441–73.
57
Hulme, The Wild Place, 67–9; see also Adam Seipp, Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans,
and a German Town, 1945–1952 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 107

Other accounts were more probing, both of the circumstances of refugees and
of the motivations of relief workers. Roger Wilson, the General Secretary of the
Friends Relief Service, remarked that some Quakers ‘wanted to find out if our paci-
fism had any link with physical cowardice, and went looking for danger’.58 Quak-
ers worked for the spiritual enrichment both of themselves and of displaced
persons. Here the imperative of a ‘gift of service’ reached its apogee, yet not with-
out soul-searching at having to cooperate with the military authorities—the wear-
ing of khaki uniforms caused particular unease. The Quakers sent workers into the
field hoping that they would ‘live adaptably and imaginatively in unforeseen cir-
cumstances, maintaining inward balance in a world full of tensions and frustra-
tions. To develop and maintain a capacity for purposeful living in the midst of
degradation, a sense of confident daring in human relationships is of supreme
importance’.59 Quakers castigated relief workers who overstepped the line by
adopting a superior attitude towards DPs. Francesca Wilson observed that some
women had ‘begun well [only to] turn overnight into dictators. Obscure women
in their own home towns, they exact obedience from their subjects once they are
the Queens of the Distressed Ruritanias’. This was reminiscent of criticism that
surfaced during the First World War when Belgian refugees arrived on British
shores, a history with which Wilson herself was familiar. Sacrifice and ‘simplicity
of living’ were the qualities she prized. Self-effacement included protestations by
relief workers that should ‘tell a story from the point of view of the refugees them-
selves’. This story was one of torment and escape, and of the possibility that free-
dom might yet be denied by Allied policy. One critic even suggested that the Allies
were guilty of ‘genocide’ because DPs were denied the chance of ‘psychic recovery’.
Quakers did not go this far, but they protested that DPs were ‘softened up’ for re-
patriation by being turned into compliant and dependent objects. DPs were indi-
vidual human beings, not an anonymous mass.60

C O M P O N E N T S O F T H E P O S T  WA R R E F U G E E R E G I M E

The Cold War added a crucial dimension to the post-war refugee crisis by putting
paid to bilateral US-Soviet cooperation. The American administration withdrew
from UNRRA at the end of 1946, regarding it as too willing to accede to Soviet
interests, and advocated a temporary agency to resettle rather than repatriate refu-
gees. The constitution of the new International Refugee Organisation (IRO) was
formally agreed on 15 December 1946. Its remit extended to victims of Nazism
and Fascism, Spanish Republicans and ‘other pre-war exiles’ (there were some

58
Roger Wilson, Authority, Leadership and Concern: a Study in Motive and Administration in Quaker
Relief Work (Allen and Unwin, 1949), 7.
59
Wilson, Quaker Relief, 109; Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Nach Holocaust und Zwangsarbeit: Britische
humanitäre Hilfe in Deutschland (Osnabrück: Secolo Verlag, 2007).
60
Francesca M. Wilson, Advice to Relief Workers (John Murray, 1945), 7; Leo Stole, ‘Why the DPs
Can’t Wait’ Commentary (January 1947); Edgar H.S. Chandler, The High Tower of Refuge: the Inspiring
Story of Refugee Relief throughout the World (Odhams Press, 1959), 11.
108 Mid-Century Maelstrom

550,000 pre-war refugees under IRO aegis), as well as more than one million
people who were ‘unable to return as a result of events subsequent to the outbreak
of war’. The preamble spoke of ‘genuine refugees and displaced persons’ as an
urgent problem. DPs—formally defined as civilians who were ‘outside the national
boundaries of their country by reason of the war’—would continue to be assisted
to return to their country of origin, but if they had ‘valid objections’ were now to
be enabled ‘to find new homes elsewhere’. Communist governments denounced
the West for protecting ‘war criminals’ or regarding DPs as a source of cheap labour
(see later in this chapter). Of greater long-term significance was the IRO’s empha-
sis on refugees as victims of ‘persecution’, a doctrine that gave Western govern-
ments a hefty stick with which to beat the Soviet bloc for years to come. Political
and economic considerations were therefore closely intertwined.61
In 1949 the IRO had a pointed exchange with a group of leading intellectuals
including Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, who suggested
that refugees and DPs could be regarded as harbingers of ‘world citizenship’: ‘by
sheer force of events they have acquired the feeling of belonging to a community
larger than one nation [sic]. History made them citizens of the world, and they
should be treated as such’. This did not go down at all well with the IRO: ‘Here
are people to whom you say, be proud of your statelessness’. Much better, its of-
ficials countered, for them to be rid of that status. Paul Weis, the IRO’s chief legal
adviser, argued that ‘it is through his connection with a particular state by the ties
of nationality that the individual finds his place in international law’.62 Weis was
on the side of the patriotic intelligentsia, whether in the diaspora or in DP camps.
Cosmopolitanism was for him a dirty word.
What would follow the IRO, once post-war resettlement schemes solved the
‘DP problem’? Debates in the UN, as in the pre-war League of Nations, revealed a
range of views. American officials saw no need for a large international bureauc-
racy, particularly if it risked undermining the USA’s freedom of manoeuvre. Some
governments, including the British government, entertained a generous and open-
ended commitment to refugee protection but found themselves in a minority.
Most member states disliked the idea of a ‘blank cheque’ that would have to be
honoured in the future. Eventually the UN’s Economic and Social Council ham-
mered out a compromise in 1950 that created the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide international protection
on their behalf and to seek ‘permanent solutions’ to refugee problems. The relevant
legal instrument, the 1951 Refugee Convention, circumscribed the category of
refugee and imposed a clear time restriction:
For the purposes of the present Convention, the term ‘refugee’ shall apply to any
person who . . . as a result of events occurring [in Europe] before 1 January 1951 and
owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, national-
ity, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country

61
The standard institutional history is Holborn, The International Refugee Organization.
62
Cohen, In War’s Wake, 89–90.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 109
of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of
the protection of that country.
This definition discounted claimants who ‘merely disliked’—as was said at the
time—the political characteristics of the state in which they resided. Crucially,
signatories to the Convention undertook to protect recognized refugees from being
forcibly returned to their countries of origin (‘non-refoulement’).63
UNHCR had a limited geographical and temporal mandate. International ac-
ceptance of the new agency was at best lukewarm. Communist countries refused to
participate, on the grounds that the Convention politicized population displace-
ment. Other governments objected to the possibility that it might poke its nose into
their business. Like the League of Nations, UNHCR faced serious financial short-
comings, and only a one-off grant from the Ford Foundation helped to keep it
afloat in the early years. Many US politicians had reservations about the powers—
albeit limited—vested in any international organization that was not subordinated
to American interests. The likeable first High Commissioner wanted to give indi-
vidual refugees ‘the feeling that they are protected’, but conceded that ‘direct con-
tact’ with individual refugees might be frustrated by national governments.64
There was widespread agreement among signatories to the Convention that
UNHCR should be a ‘non-operational’ body dependent upon voluntary organiza-
tions to assist refugees. To long-established agencies such as Save the Children, the
AFSC and National Catholic Welfare Conference, and organizations that assisted
specific ethnic groups such as the American JDC, were now added Inter-Church
Aid (the forerunner of Christian Aid), CARE, the Lutheran World Federation, and
many others. These NGOs secured lucrative contracts from the Intergovernmental
Committee for European Migration (ICEM) and the US Escapee Program (USEP),
both outside the UN framework, as well as from UNHCR, in order to resettle
refugees. Without exception each agency proclaimed that it abjured politics in
favour of a universal claim to ‘humanitarianism’. Yet one only had to scratch the
surface to find the politics of intervention. As the Cold War gathered momentum,
DPs and refugees were construed as the standard bearers of democracy even if their
previous actions were thought to be dubious or even collaborationist.

REFUGEES, RESETTLEMENT AND CITIZENSHIP

Eugene Kulischer, author of an informative study of population movements in

Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, argued that ‘Germany found
itself submerged by a human flood’ of refugees and expellees. What was to be

63
Kazimierz Bem, ‘The Coming of a “Blank Cheque”: Europe, the 1951 Convention and the 1967
Protocol’ IJRL, 16, no.4 (2004), 609–27; Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, 143–4. The ‘non-re-
foulement’ provision did not apply to refugees who were deemed to threaten state security or who
because of a serious criminal record ‘constituted a danger to the community of the country’ in which
they sought sanctuary.
64
Goedhart to Paul Weis, 4 February 1951, in Weis Papers, Social Sciences Library, University of
Oxford, PW/WR/PUBL/9; Loescher, UNHCR, 42; Cohen, In War’s Wake, 151–4.
110 Mid-Century Maelstrom

done? Land reform was one option, but its effects were limited by the number of
‘claimants’. Italy, economically backward, war-torn and home to a large refugee
population, was in even more dire straits. The preferred solution was to encourage
emigration to Canada, Australia and South America. Without planning—the op-
posite to the ‘elementary forces’ of ‘migratory currents’—Kulischer believed that
there was a risk of war: ‘to admit immigration is better than to be obliged to repel
invasion’. In a phrase evoking the American New Deal he called for a ‘TVA of
human migratory currents’.65 Planned migration gained plenty of adherents by the
late 1940s, and the ICEM, which was dominated by the Americans, promoted
planned migration from ‘over-populated’ countries in Europe that were believed to
be vulnerable to social unrest and political radicalism.
As repatriation lost its appeal for Western officialdom, DPs were despatched to
new destinations. One ‘durable solution’ in 1947 envisaged the creation of a huge
Ukrainian ‘colony’ in Canada or Argentina. Relief workers spoke up for DPs who
wished to move to North America and Australia, formulating their appeals with
a ‘human interest’ angle rather than concentrating on legal formulas. Recruiting
officers subjected DPs to various tests that reminded them of Nazi practice.
Around 400,000 DPs travelled to the USA under the Displaced Persons Act that
came into force in June 1948. Canada took 160,000. Others went to Western
Europe, Latin America and Australia, where they became a point of reference for
those other immigrants known as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ who were admitted under
the assisted places scheme, and who sometimes complained that they were treated
as ‘bleedin’ DPs’.66
Other schemes enabled Poles and Balts to work in Belgian mines and Lanca-
shire’s cotton mills. The British devised two schemes entitled ‘Westward Ho’ (for
DPs in general) and ‘Balt Cygnets’, for women to be employed on domestic duties
in hospitals. Belgium mounted ‘Operation Black Diamond’ and Norway admitted
400 Jewish DPs under the title of ‘Northern Lights’. The new recruits to the UK
economy were labelled ‘European Volunteer Workers’ (EVWs). Some 20,000
young women arrived in Britain between 1946 and 1950 to take jobs in domestic
service and in textiles. These schemes did not go unchallenged. One attack concen-
trated on the qualities of the DPs. An editorial in the Daily Mirror (‘Let them be
displaced’) complained that ‘other countries had taken the cream and left us most
of the scum. They must now be rounded up and sent back’. The New Statesman
called for a ‘rigid selection’ of Ukrainians, in order ‘to exclude the illiterate, the
mentally deficient, the sick, the aged, the politically suspect, and the behaviourally
disruptive. [We should] clear out the rubbish amongst those who have already
come’.67 A very different critique came from Quakers who denounced this ‘slave
market horribly reminiscent of another similar offer made by the Germans not so

65
Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 254, 266, 290, 319–25, referring to the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
66
A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 179–80.
67
Diana Kay and Robert Miles, Refugees or Migrant Workers? European Volunteer Workers in Britain,
1946–1951 (Routledge, 1992), 116–17; Daily Mirror, 20 July 1948.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 111

very long ago’, while Soviet officials condemned the IRO as an ‘employment
agency’ enabling ‘the West to enrich itself by resettling the so-called refugees to the
countries making the highest bid for their labour’.68
Resettlement plans went ahead. Louise Holborn asserted that ‘planned migra-
tion’—the resettlement of more than one million displaced persons between 1947
and 1951—counted as the IRO’s ‘greatest achievement’. Where earlier attempts at
resettlement had been undertaken by refugees themselves, the IRO coordinated
the efforts of 18 member governments. The expansion of the post-war global econ-
omy helped translate these plans into practice, but they required exploratory mis-
sions both to Germany and Austria and to areas of potential resettlement such as
Latin America, and—for DPs—interviews, medical examinations, ‘selection’ and
‘orientation’.69
DPs nevertheless had to show that they merited resettlement. Ostensibly non-
political organizations such as the World Council of Churches (WCC) collected
‘human interest stories’ of refugees who fled Communist rule in Bulgaria, Ro-
mania and Albania. For example, Haki F., born in Albania in 1919 and arriving in
Greece via Yugoslavia in 1953, stated that ‘people in Albania are only waiting for
the moment they will be assisted to start a revolution against the present regime;
war has never been over for them. Misery, terrorism and uncertainty of life have
constituted the daily routine of the average Albanian since 1945’. He planned to
migrate to Australia and resume his life as a farmer. The WCC described him as
‘brave and conscientious’, a fitting candidate for resettlement. Other stories told of
ethnic Greeks who fled from Asia Minor to Romania in 1922, thence to Greece to
escape persecution by the Communist government in 1947. Angela H., who left
for Australia under the auspices of the USEP to join her son, exemplified the pos-
sibility of ‘starting again’, beginning with a formulaic account of starvation, harass-
ment, torture, expropriation and eventual ‘rescue’. This served a Cold War purpose
and established a link with past episodes of displacement.70
The next big challenge came from Hungary, where the outbreak of revolution in
1956 produced the most dramatic refugee-generating crisis in continental Europe
between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.
In the aftermath of the 1956 uprising, nearly 190,000 people crossed the border to
neighbouring Austria by early 1957. Another 20,000 refugees made their way to
Yugoslavia, but the difficult conditions in refugee camps caused them to leave for
Austria as well. The West’s response was governed not only by ideas of rescuing
Hungarians from persecution but also by the fear that social instability in Austria
could encourage political radicalism. Refugees were portrayed as victims of com-
munist tyranny who had escaped ‘carnage and deportations’ in order to find ‘lib-
erty and justice’. UNHCR incorporated Hungarian refugees within its mandate,
even though the Convention referred to events that took place in Europe prior to

68
Margaret McNeill, By the Rivers of Babylon: a Story of Relief Work among the Displaced Persons of
Europe (Bannisdale Press, 1950), 202–16; Proudfoot, European Refugees, 401.
69
Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, 366, 369, 373–4.
70
WCC Archives, File 425.1.043, Human Interest Stories.
112 Mid-Century Maelstrom

1 January 1951. Acting on legal advice UNHCR decided that the Hungarians
were eligible on the grounds that their ‘persecution’ could be traced back to the
Communist revolution in 1947–48. UNHCR now became the primary organiza-
tion for coordinating international assistance to Hungarian refugees and adminis-
tering relief in adjacent countries.
Hungarian refugees were placed in more than 250 makeshift refugee camps
in Austria. The government called upon Austrian citizens to donate money to
support the refugees; much was made of the need for Catholic solidarity. In a
short while, however, complaints were made about the burden that the refu-
gees placed upon the public purse. They were described as economic migrants
rather than political refugees and as a ‘flood’ that threatened to ‘inundate’
Austria. When Hungarians entered the coffee bar or tried to set up a small
business, no longer content to play the prescribed role of poor and helpless
refugees, public opinion turned against them. Other problems arose because
‘some Hungarians also told lies to the authorities, to members of relief organi-
zations; how could they know—trained as they were in dissimulation during
the years of terror—that here evasions and lies were no longer necessary?’71 Psy-
chologists reported that refugees lacked the character to become full citizens of
new Austria. Here too a tension emerged between the valorization of refugees
as heroic escapees and their ‘confused’ psychology.72
Although some refugees were repatriated to Hungary following protracted ne-
gotiations, the Hungarian ‘brain drain’ brought significant economic benefits to
host countries in the West.73 This point surfaced ten years on in a dispute between
UNHCR and the Hungarian authorities concerning refugees who had fallen sick
and wished to return to Hungary. The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs re-
sponded icily to a request for sympathetic consideration: ‘The Hungarians of
1956 who were admitted to Western European and overseas countries were
checked and rechecked by those countries which meant to get important eco-
nomic and even political gains. It seems to be only proper that the receiving coun-
try which benefited from the influx of Hungarians should bear also the burden of
a few cases where their selection was not quite happy’. He added that, ‘seen from
the other angle, it does not seem warranted that Hungary, i.e. the Hungarian people
which remained here and suffered a loss by the mass emigration of 1956, should
take care of those who got into situations like Mrs X. [To admit her] would prove
to be inhuman towards those ill and poor who need subsistence in Hungary.’74

71
Migration News, 7, no. 1 (January–February 1958); Brigitta Zierer, ‘Willkommene Ungarnflüch-
tlinge 1956?’, in Gernot Heiss and Oliver Rathkolb (eds), Asylland wider Willen: Flüchtlinge in Ősterreich
im europäischen Kontext seit 1914 (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1995), 157–71, at 163, 169–70.
72
Susan Carruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2009).
73
The Hungarian diaspora sent over photos of American film stars and cars so that refugees would
learn something of the culture of the country that was admitting them. Carl Bon Tempo, Americans
at the Gate: the United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 66–75.
74
Endfe Ustor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to Francisco Urrutia, UNHCR regional Representa-
tive, New York, 28 August 1965, Fonds UNHCR 11, sub-fonds 1, file 6/1/1 HUN.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 113

From his point of view, those who left the country were ‘economic migrants’, not
refugees, an argument which as we have seen came to be shared by officials in
the West.
The Hungarian refugee crisis is significant for several reasons. It extended
UNHCR’s remit. Officials in Geneva argued that Hungarian refugees fell within
its mandate, since although the Convention excluded events that happened after 1
January 1951, it was not meant to ‘exclude persons who may become refugees at a
later date as a result of events before then or as a result of after-effects which
occurred at a later date’. UNHCR held that the term ‘events’ could relate to the
establishment of the People’s Democratic Republic in Hungary in 1946.75 Second,
UNHCR helped several thousand refugees to go back to Hungary, and its role as
a mediator anticipated other kinds of action. Third, many Hungarian refugees were
regarded as having the capacity to ‘adapt’, having exercised a conscious choice to
flee from tyranny: ‘rather than being treated as persons in need of “welfare”, from
the outset the responsibility for adapting to their new society was placed squarely
on them’.76 They were expected to demonstrate their potential as citizens.
This left the ‘hard core’. This demeaning term was already in circulation by 1946
and referred to those whose claims for resettlement had been turned down on
grounds of physical or mental disability, or for having a criminal record or for
other reasons. Since many families chose to stay together, a ‘black mark’ against
one member had serious consequences. Irrespective of their achievements in reset-
tling refugees and DPs, the IRO and UNHCR failed to address their needs, which
the US regarded as best met through economic growth and ‘integration’ in
Germany and Austria. Personal acts of generosity provided for schemes such as the
‘Homeless European Land Program (HELP)’ which the American actor Don
Murray and his wife Hope Lange established in 1956, buying up land in Sardinia
on behalf of refugees in the hope that ‘as this community grows and becomes self-
supporting, it will stimulate the founding of new communities and that the refu-
gees themselves will return a portion of their earnings to bring in other refugees’.77
Their project was backed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, CARE, and
by Protestant charities who regarded it as an object lesson in resettling refugees and
encouraging migrants from ‘over-populated’ parts of South-eastern Europe to con-
tribute to long-term development.78
A different approach emerged in 1958 when three aspiring young Conservative
British politicians and journalists announced their intention to launch a year-long
campaign to draw public attention to the plight of the world’s refugees. Although
aware of recent events in Hungary, they were particularly concerned about the
legacy of the Second World War which had left tens of thousands of displaced

75
‘Eligibility under the [1951] Convention of Refugees who left Hungary because of the Events of
1956’, 2 September 1959, Fonds UNHCR 11, sub-fonds 1, file 6/1/1 HUN.
76
Barbara Harrell-Bond, ‘The Experience of Refugees as Recipients of Aid’, in Ager (ed.), Refugees,
136–68, at 151.
77
Refugees in Europe, 1957–1958 (New York, 1959), 51.
78
MS Eng. c.4659, Papers of John Alexander Sinclair (1906–88), UN Career Records Project,
Special Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
114 Mid-Century Maelstrom

people in camps in Europe. They convinced the UN to lend its support to a ‘World
Refugee Year’ (WRY), to include refugees in Hong Kong and the Middle East. The
new UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Auguste Lindt, summarized its aim as
seeking to ‘foster a world-wide movement of sympathy for refugees by acquainting
the public at large with all the economic and social aspects of the problem and by
opening up vistas of progress’. WRY was intended to ‘attract public attention to
refugees as a social and humanitarian problem on a strictly non-political basis’. In
addition to promoting ‘personal knowledge’ of the multitude of ‘unknown citi-
zens’, the aims were to swell the coffers of NGOs and to encourage third countries
to overcome their reluctance to admit elderly or sick DPs. This emphasis on gen-
erating public goodwill, loosening purse-strings and, where possible, finding ‘solu-
tions’ set the tone for the campaign. In truth, the campaign was driven by a strong
sense of Western guilt and a willingness to atone for failing to prevent the creation
of the ‘hard core’.79
WRY was conceived as a bold and imaginative campaign, characterized by the
use of specially commissioned documentaries, plays, exhibitions and advertising.
Stamps played an important part in raising money and depicting the ‘refugee
world’. There had been precedents, although they were overprinted rather than
original designs: Norway issued stamps to raise funds for the Nansen Interna-
tional Office for Refugees in 1935, and France did likewise in 1936 and 1937 in
support of refugees from Nazi persecution. China issued stamps in aid of ‘war
refugees’ in 1944 and the PRC followed suit in 1954 on behalf of ‘the flight of
Chinese from Vietnam’. The Dominican Republic issued stamps on behalf of
Hungarian refugees. WRY stamps had an instructive purpose, allowing ‘the refu-
gee story [to be] told, a story always beginning with flight and despair, and
ending, sometimes, in hope and resettlement’. One popular image was the Holy
Family. The Vatican reproduced Fra Angelico’s ‘Flight into Egypt’. Jean Cocteau
designed a first-day cover that echoed the religious theme. France chose a design
of a young girl drawn against the background of a ruined city, reminiscent of
scenes of devastation in Europe at the end of the Second World War. The US
stamp showed a stark wall against which refugees were silhouetted, ‘facing (as the
publicity stated) down a long dark corridor towards a bright exit, symbolizing
escape from the darkness of want and oppression into the brightness of a new
life’. The imagery reinforced the point that WRY enabled refugees to replace
despair with hope, to enjoy a trajectory that would take them from the deplorable
camp to a place of comfort and modernity.
Fake ‘refugee camps’ in London, Geneva, Manchester and other cities high-
lighted the conditions in which refugees were forced to live; the camps were im-
mensely popular with visitors. Photographs added to the drama of displacement
and the ‘iconography of predicament’. Yet refugees were not expected to speak.
Rather they looked out from photographs or figured as part of the background
scenery when visiting celebrities reported on their plight and needs, as when the

79
See Gatrell, Free World?
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 115

president of the Canadian Committee for WRY was despatched to Geneva with
instructions to be photographed ‘in some sort of refugee setting’.80 Occasionally a
more reflective voice was heard above the hubbub. A journalist for the Manchester
Guardian wrote that ‘sharply drawn portraits of men, women and children living
in the refugee camps of Europe bring one face to face with highly individual per-
sons, not all admirable or even likeable, but all intensely alive and full of character,
real people evoking a response of sympathetic interest and concern; whereas to
speak in general terms of “the refugees” may prompt only the image of a faceless
indistinguishable horde, moving pity without hope or help’.81 Drawing attention
to each human being implicitly reaffirmed the importance that the Refugee Con-
vention attached to the individual.

C O N C LU S I O N S

Far from bringing them to an end, peace only multiplied the crises of displace-
ment. These crises cast a long shadow over the lives of millions. The Nazi regime
bequeathed the Allies the problem of repatriating forced labourers to France, Bel-
gium, Poland, Ukraine and other countries. Older vintages of refugees also faced a
dismal prospect. Exiled Spaniards who fled during the Spanish Civil War aban-
doned hopes of returning to Spain; in 1950 more than 110,000 remained on
French territory. Other situations, however, were of the Allies’ making, notably the
expulsion of ethnic Germans. The paradox was that the Western powers simultane-
ously insisted on the right of individual refugees as defined by the 1951 Conven-
tion to be acknowledged as victims of persecution, whilst trampling on the rights
of German expellees. The Convention itself marked an important advance: ‘[I]t is
not [according to a leading Quaker] a very noble or liberal document, but it is a
worthy step forward in human progress or it can be so, if it is made to live and
work, in that it establishes certain vital human rights for a most helpless, forlorn
and unprotected segment of humanity’.82
Western governments took steps to resettle refugees and DPs in third countries
or to integrate them locally. The shift from UNRRA to IRO operations in 1947
marked this new dispensation, a far cry from the situation in 1945 when Allied
governments and military officers envisaged offloading them by means of rapid and
often brutal repatriation. DPs who protested this policy acquired a reputation for
being ‘displeased people’. Tens of thousands remained in camps in Germany, Austria
and Italy until they died. Others were eventually enabled to move to better accom-
modation, but in some cases this took more than a decade. In 1951 the UN spoke
of a ‘final solution’ to the refugee crisis in Europe, before adopting ‘durable solution’
as a less emotive term, less capable of being confused with the Holocaust.

80
Canadian Committee for WRY, Box 4, Folder 1, Bob Torrance to Douglas Deane, World Alli-
ance of YMCAs, 8 June 1959.
81
‘Refugees are People’, The Guardian, 3 May 1960.
82
Colin Bell, ‘Toward Human Rights for Refugees’ AFSC Bulletin (December 1951).
116 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Post-war support for refugees reflected Cold War considerations, although the
meanings attached to displacement were contested and fluid. UNRRA regarded
those who resisted repatriation as a nuisance, but by the late 1940s and early 1950s
refugees were being re-valorized as emblems of resilience in the teeth of Commu-
nist domination in Eastern Europe, as victims of persecution, and as prospective
citizens. At least, this was true up to a point. Insistence on individual persecution
as the chief criterion for recognition represented a significant departure in legal
practice, and an indication that human rights were beginning to make an appear-
ance in international law. Beyond legal corridors, however, the individual contin-
ued to be amalgamated within the broad entity of ‘refugee’. NGOs were really not
interested in the ordinary person except as the embodiment of totalitarian oppres-
sion or as the author of a brief history demonstrating the worthiness of humanitar-
ian intervention. Public fixation with the category lumped refugees together.
Everyone—NGOs, privileged citizens, diasporic organizations—looked on refu-
gees as a single category, ‘regardless of their vast variations in personal background,
motives for leaving, reasons for escape, and plans for the future’.83
Expert knowledge accompanied the crisis of post-war displacement. It created
opportunities for the accumulation of knowledge about refugees. Social workers,
psychologists and others flocked to the scene under the aegis of UNRRA, the IRO
and NGOs. Their findings were sometimes very wide of the mark. Specifically the
diagnosis of ‘DP apathy’ demonstrated an extraordinary myopia in view of the
tactics that refugees devised in order to survive. Such pathologization formed part
of a broader litany of complaint. Refugees and DPs who decided to ‘dig in’ and
resist attempts at repatriation constituted a problem either by virtue of their as-
sertiveness or because they were ‘lazy’. Displaced persons could not get it right: too
much determination, and they were deemed unruly or ungrateful; too little, and
they were regarded as helpless or even ‘norm-less’ people with a ‘low predisposition
to change’. Such assumptions revealed more about professional expertise than they
did about refugees.84
Expert knowledge was one thing. It may have accurately captured the underly-
ing sentiments of those adults for whom incarceration manifested itself in feelings
of loss, estrangement and boredom. But the evidence does not point in a single
direction. Youngsters might have a very different perspective of camp life. One DP
reminisced that ‘we lived there for three years. I was a teenager and there was a lot
going on’. For her the DP camp held exciting prospects. Another Latvian inform-
ant who was placed in a camp in Mannheim told her interviewer, ‘I grew up there’.
A 16-year-old Austrian Jewish boy, when asked how he felt when he had to leave
his home country, replied: ‘I felt curious as to what the rest of the world was like.
I was rather glad that we had to leave, because I thought were it not for Hitler’s

83
Daniel and Knudsen, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel and Knudsen (eds), Mistrusting Refugees, 3.
84
Professor Fricis Gulbis, May 1946, UNRRA Archives, S-0408-0007-02, Germany Mission,
Welfare, DP Study Centre Hamburg, 20 February 1946–23 April 1947; Judith Shuval, ‘Refugees:
Adjustment and Assimilation’, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 373–7;
Shephard, The Long Road Home, 267–8; Salomon, Refugees in the Cold War, 153.
 Refugee Crises at Mid-Century and ‘Durable Solutions’ 117

invasion, I would never have been able to see the world’. As the dust settled, how-
ever, the prevailing view amongst social workers and psychologists was that dis-
placement and the DP camp had been entirely detrimental in weakening family
ties and parental discipline.85
While the UN and many NGOs were committed to ‘rehabilitation’ as the basis
for economic recovery in the short term, Quakers understood this to be a means of
fostering better relations between human beings. From this standpoint, material
welfare and emotional sustenance required an atmosphere of mutual respect. This
admirable reflexivity corresponds to the injunctions of critics of the modern refu-
gee regime. Quakers also pointed to other shortcomings, including the absence of
analysis of the circumstances that created conflict in human society. This made
them harbingers of a critical discourse. But they were only one element in a grow-
ing humanitarian Babel.
The most significant institutional development in the long term was the emer-
gence of UNHCR as a major player on the international stage, with a mandate to
protect refugees who came within the terms of the Convention. This was by no
means evident in its early years during which it struggled to gain funding and rec-
ognition. To be sure, it received an early accolade when it was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1954 (the funds were used to liquidate the refugee camp on the
Greek island of Tinos). Yet only in the aftermath of the Hungarian revolution did
UNHCR begin to gain legitimacy, and only with the crisis in Algeria did it begin
to spread its global wings. By the early 1960s UNHCR spoke of fresh responsibili-
ties, and there was already talk of the need for the Commissioner to free himself
from the constraints of the 1951 Convention and use his ‘good offices’. As one
well-informed insider said, ‘for years nations lulled themselves into the belief that
the unending stream of refugees torn from the fabric of society was a transitory
phenomenon’.86 As it dawned that refugees were a permanent feature of the post-
war scene, UNHCR could justify its rationale and claim greater authority.
Other histories and other trajectories were connected to the geo-politics in the
aftermath of the war. One aspect of this dynamic was the role of East European
exiles in supporting the USA during the Cold War, although their political lever-
age should not be exaggerated. More crucial still were the claims of Jewish DPs to
a place of safety and thus to a ‘homeland’ in Palestine. Zionist leaders expressed
pleasure that thousands of young Jewish men wanted to leave the camps and enlist
in the armed forces. The IRO did not stand in their way. Their confrontation with
the indigenous Arab population with whom their fate became closely interwoven
forms the backdrop to the following chapter.

85
McDowell, Hard Labour, 79; Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, The Exile Mission, 68, 95–7; Tara Zahra,
‘ “The Psychological Marshall Plan”: Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II’
Central European History, 44, no.1 (2011), 37–62, at 54.
86
James M. Read, ‘The UN and Refugees: Changing Concepts’ International Conciliation, 537
(1962), 1–60, at 5–6.
 4
‘Nothing Except Commas’
Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement

I tried to put the displacement between parentheses, to put a last period [full
stop] in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history.
But I see nothing except commas
(Mourid Barghouti)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (b.1944) expresses the forlorn feelings of
someone whose displacement has no end.1 His poignant formulation captures
the acute and overwhelming burden shouldered by refugees. Barghouti alludes
to the events of 1948 that came to be known among Palestinians as the ‘great dis-
aster’ (al-Nakba), as a result of which many of them lost their homes and either fled
to neighbouring states or became internally displaced within the new state of Israel.
The hope for a ‘full stop’ in the sense of being allowed to reclaim their property and
forge a state dominated Palestinian politics through to the present day, inflecting
the entire politics of the Middle East. These politics were embroiled with the
equally strong attachment of Zionists to a state that guaranteed the security of
Jews, a sentiment owing a great deal to the catastrophe that was the Holocaust.
Choosing Palestine for their ultimate destination paved the way for a series of
dramatic confrontations with the majority Arab population.2
In these ways, two seemingly distinct ‘episodes’ in population displacement—the
persecution and elimination of European Jews, on the one hand, and the displace-
ment of Palestinians after the Second World War on the other—were inextricably
linked. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish put it, ‘what brings us together is at the
same time a point of conflict between us’.3 To establish this association between
Palestinian Arab and Jewish history it is necessary to recognize their respective ideas
of a homeland, the shared sense of being victimized, and their dual aspiration to

1
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (Bloomsbury, 2004), 163.
2
James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005); Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession, 180–230; Seteney Shami (ed.) Popu-
lation Displacement and Resettlement: Development and Conflict in the Middle East (New York: Center
for Migration Studies, 1994).
3
Barbara M. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones: Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature (Austin:
Texas University Press, 1994), 3.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 119

seek restitution through ‘return’. The Zionist search for ‘a land without people for a
people without land’ was refined under the British mandate in Palestine. The idea
gained ground among the surviving remnants of European Jewry (She’erit Hapleta)
who had little prospect of a tolerable life in Eastern Europe. Palestinian nationalism
was by contrast a less developed ideology: most Palestinians regarded themselves as
members of a specific village, rarely as part of a broader Arab ‘nation’.
Both currents of nationalist thought gained strength from arguments over ter-
ritory, population, archaeology and history—a ‘struggle between two memories’
in Darwish’s words. Palestinian nationalist doctrine resisted the erosion by others
of the rights of peasant farmers to their land: ‘[T]here is no possibility of the
Arabs accepting as consolation for the loss of their homeland a few more cinemas
and a few more dentists’, as a pro-Palestinian MP remarked in the British House
of Commons in July 1939.4 One strand of Zionism envisaged the relocation of
Palestinian Arabs to facilitate the settlement of more Jewish immigrants in an
independent state. The ensuing refugee crisis affected 750,000 Palestinians who,
it was said, ‘have become refugees on the borders of our own country to make
room for other refugees from many parts of the world’.5
These intertwined histories can also be brought together by focusing on Jewish
and Palestinian diasporas. The worldwide mobilization of Jewish opinion that ex-
tended from continental Europe to North America unleashed a vision of a national
home and profoundly altered the region’s politics, even if this project never gained
the support of all Jews. The displacement of Palestinians in turn created a diaspora
that likewise demonstrated a remarkable political and cultural energy, albeit with-
out surmounting political differences. But no diaspora is an unchanging entity. In
the last 20 years the Palestinian diaspora has been badly affected by the lack of
economic opportunities in Arab states and the need to look for work further afield.
This plebeian experience is a world apart from that of the exiled Palestinian elite.
A striking feature of the commemoration of Palestinian displacement is an in-
sistence upon collective loss. Palestinians initially described their flight as al-
hujayj, meaning an escape from grave danger or as sanat al-hijra, the ‘year of
migration’, referring to the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to
Medina. The term, al-Naqba (or Nakba), which construed the events of 1948 as
a national disaster, was disseminated by Palestinian historian Arif al-Arif in the
late 1950s in a six-volume history published in Beirut. Commemorating dispos-
session and displacement increased following the 1967 Six-Day War and contin-
ued, notwithstanding setbacks such as the Israeli army’s dismantling of the archives
of the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. Palestinians in Israel as well as in the
diaspora commemorate ‘Nakba Day’ on 15 May.6 Nakba helped to legitimize

4
Schechtman, Population Transfers in Asia, 94.
5
Per-Olow Anderson, They Are Human Too: a Photographic Essay on the Palestine Arab Refugees
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), 23.
6
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Granta, 1992), 179;
Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory
(Zed Books, 2012), 241–5.
120 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Palestinian militancy. An obvious point of comparison is the Shoah or Holocaust,

which underpins Israel’s claims to national legitimacy. Here again the two histo-
ries converge.

ANTECEDENTS OF THE REFUGEE CRISIS

To make sense of these upheavals we have to retrace our steps. Attempts to

resettle Jewish refugees in Western Europe and North America were hindered
by racial prejudice and bureaucratic indifference. In the Dominican Republic
the dictator Rafael Trujillo hoped simultaneously to improve his international
image, to introduce more advanced farming methods and to dilute the coun-
try’s Afro-Caribbean profile by relocating 100,000 Jews. The scheme failed.7
Shanghai held out more promising prospects. By 1939 2,600 Jewish refugees
were living there; several thousand Jews from Poland and elsewhere added to
their number in 1940–41. Refugee camps soon became overcrowded. One refu-
gee welcomed ‘their deep sense of human dignity and refusal to accept the
standards of the German concentration camp as the model by which to measure
human living conditions’. Enterprising men and women set up small businesses
repairing bicycles or providing other services. Other developments were less
positive; there were complaints of petty crime and family breakdown. Condi-
tions deteriorated during the Japanese occupation, although some businesses
carried on. The Allied victory in 1945 enabled refugees to recover a semblance
of normality and to prepare for a new life in the USA, Australia, Palestine and
even Germany.8
The most serious initiative to improve the fortunes of European Jewry took
place elsewhere. During the First World War the British Foreign Secretary Arthur
Balfour announced that the government ‘viewed with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, provided that it did not ‘preju-
dice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
Zionists made a direct link between Jewish settlement and what they regarded as
the cultural and economic retardation of the indigenous Arab population. Dor-
othy Thompson wrote that Jewish settlement in Palestine offered ‘a really grandiose
scheme for developing backward territories with displaced Europeans’. Visiting
Palestine in 1934, the liberal British parliamentarian Eleanor Rathbone, later to
become a resolute critic of government policy towards persecuted Jews in Nazi
Europe, was so incensed by what she took to be the demeaning treatment of
women in Palestine that she asked rhetorically: ‘[W]ould it matter to the progress
of civilisation if all the Arabs were drowned in the Mediterranean?’, in order to

7
Simone Gigliotti, ‘ “Acapulco in the Atlantic”: Revisiting Sosúa, a Jewish Refugee Colony in the
Caribbean’ Immigrants and Minorities, 24, no.1 (2006), 22–50; Marion A. Kaplan, Dominican Haven:
the Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940–1945 (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008).
8
Felix Gruenberger, ‘The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai’ Jewish Social Studies, 12, no.4 (1950),
329–48, at 330; Marcia R. Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: the Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 121

leave the field clear for ‘progressive Zionism’.9 Economic backwardness—deeply

disturbing when given the Rathbone treatment—figured in the depiction of Pales-
tine’s mosquito-infested swamps, which became a site for drainage schemes that
promised to eradicate malaria and also sustained an idea of progressive Zionism
and contributed to a discourse of the ‘strong and healthy Jew’. Hannah Arendt
offered a different perspective when she bemoaned the consequences of separate
economic spheres: ‘[W]hat had been the pride of the Jewish homeland, that it had
not been based upon exploitation, turned into a curse when the final test came.
The flight of the Arabs would not have been possible and not have been welcomed
by the Jews if they had lived in a common economy’.10
British civil servants, missionaries and others, including Zionists, discussed at
length the implications of organized immigration and the ‘absorptive capacity’ of
Palestine. These debates took place against the background of a revolt by Palestin-
ian labourers in Haifa in 1936 that lasted until 1939 and embittered relations be-
tween Jews and Arabs. The British, alarmed at the ensuing political and social
instability, began to contemplate renouncing the Mandate. In 1937 a commission
of enquiry under William Peel recommended the territorial division of Palestine
between Jews and Palestinians. Its members cited the consequences of the Lausanne
Convention: ‘[T]he ulcer has been clean cut out and Greco-Turkish relations, we
understand, are friendlier than ever before’. Given that Peel believed Palestine to be
‘diseased’, he advocated surgery in the form of an organized transfer of popula-
tion.11 Under the proposed partition a Jewish state would be assigned approxi-
mately one-fifth of Palestine. Peel’s recommendations were hotly contested by Arab
public opinion, and overturned by a government White Paper in 1939 that pro-
posed strict limits on Jewish immigration in order to prevent the creation of an
Arab landless proletariat, and advocated the creation of a unitary Palestinian state
within a decade. Unsurprisingly this encountered strong opposition in turn from
Jewish leaders.12
Analogous debates about displacement had already taken place among Zionists
whose ultimate goal was a separate Jewish state, with a clear majority Jewish popu-
lation. Israel Zangwill stated in the early 1920s:
We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction. And
therefore we must generally persuade them to ‘trek’. After all, they have all Arabia with
its million square miles. There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these

9
Susan Pederson, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2004), 262; Dorothy Thompson, Refugees: Anarchy or Organisation? (New York: Random
House, 1938), 102–3.
10
Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 444; Sandra Sufian,
Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920–1947 (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2007).
11
Palestine Royal Commission, Cmd. 5479 (HMSO, 1937), 390–1; Ted Swedenburg, Memories
of Revolt: the 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995).
12
Anglican leaders agreed. Gardiner H. Shattuck, ‘Weeping over Jerusalem: Anglicans and Refu-
gee Relief in the Middle East, 1895–1950’ Anglican and Episcopal History, 80, no.2 (2011),
117–41.
122 Mid-Century Maelstrom
few kilometres. ‘To fold their tents and silently steal away’ is their proverbial habit: let
them exemplify it now.13
This view commanded some support elsewhere. A British MP suggested transfer-
ring Palestinian Arabs to Iraq, and Sir John Hope Simpson envisaged that the
Palestinian peasant would ‘always migrate to any spot where he thinks he can find
work’.14 David Ben-Gurion, the future Prime Minister of Israel, maintained in
1944 that ‘[the] transfer of Arabs is easier than any other type of transfer. There are
Arab states in the area and it is clear that if the [Palestinian] Arabs are sent [to Arab
countries] this will better their situation and not the contrary’.15 Such ‘transfer
thinking’ gained ground among a younger generation of Jewish settlers. Maps and
statistics formed part of this strategy to redesign Palestine, its Arab population al-
ready being written out of the picture.
Jews in Europe were of course literally being erased—persecuted by the Nazis
after 1933 and exterminated in the course of the Second World War. Only a small
proportion survived. The victorious Allies deliberated over their future. Jewish
Displaced Persons were initially not recognized as a separate category but instead
assigned to camps according to their official nationality as Poles, Ukrainians and so
on, a tactic meant to encourage them to repatriate but also (as was said) to ‘avoid
creating the impression that the Jews are to be singled out for special treatment, as
such action will tend to perpetuate the distinctions of Nazi racial theory’.16 The
American authorities relented and established separate camps for Jews, but the
British stood their ground. Few Jewish survivors wished to leave the camps and
return to their homes in Eastern Europe. This had nothing to do with the prospect
of a communist takeover and everything to do with a persistent sense of vulnerabil-
ity. Emigration to Palestine or to North or South America held attraction because
these paths were well-trodden.17
Surviving Jewish DPs were incarcerated in a variety of accommodation: former
military barracks, converted hotels, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals and
monasteries. They regarded the camps as an indictment of Allied foot-dragging
and a mark of the failure of American Jewish organizations to make strongly
enough the case for their resettlement. A minority demanded that Germans be
forced to give up their homes, but American officers insisted that ‘two wrongs
don’t make a right [and] they must help rehabilitate themselves’.18 Some DPs
found themselves behind barbed wire—‘liberated, but not free’ was a common
refrain. In a famous report for President Truman, Earl G. Harrison, former US
Commissioner of Immigration, described the dreadful conditions in which they

13
Karl Sabbagh, Palestine: A Personal History (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 212.
14
Schechtman, Population Transfers, 91, 100.
15
Benny Morris, ‘Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948’, in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim
(eds), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 37–59, at 47.
16
Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World
War II Germany (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 18.
17
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 153–85.
18
Hitchcock, Liberation, 332; Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 95–7.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 123

were living in Germany, and concluded that ‘we appear to be treating the Jews as
the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them’.19 Irving Hey-
mont, the American commandant of the Bavarian camp at Landsberg, recognized
that what they most wanted was a degree of autonomy (‘the word they use over
and over’), adding that ‘after their sacrifices and sufferings, they undoubtedly find
it galling to be objects of charity. They must surely find it rankling to have their
private lives regulated and subjected to constant inspection while the Germans
live a relatively free life’.20 Yet it is worth remembering, in Atina Grossmann’s
words, that ‘registrations which only days, certainly weeks, before would have
meant deportation and death now had concrete benefits in terms of housing and
increased rations’.21
Jewish DPs practised a sophisticated collective politics and cultural life in the
camps. The camp became a site for the affirmation of solidarity. Föhrenwald in
Bavaria, with a population of more than 4,000 at its peak in early 1947, boasted a
synagogue, police force and courts, clinics, schools, kindergartens, newspaper
press, library, orchestra and sports clubs. Physical exercise cultivated tough and
virile men and women, willing and able to help build a new Jewish state. One
drama society went by the name of Bar Kokhba, after the heroic but abortive revolt
against Roman rule in Palestine in the second century ce. The motto of the camp
newspaper, Bamidbar (‘The Desert’) was as follows: ‘In the desert/In the wilder-
ness/On the way/We will remain/In the desert/In the wilderness/On the way/We
will not return/One goal: Erets Yisrael’. Other newspapers boasted titles such as
‘Liberation’, ‘Our Hope’, ‘A Home’, and ‘The Free Word’. In a symbolic gesture
both of defiance and anticipation, Jews constructed a kibbutz on land that had
belonged to Julius Streicher, editor of the notorious newspaper Der Stürmer. In
July 1945, delegates to a Conference of Liberated Jews in Germany demanded the
immediate creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Jewish underground organiza-
tions in the British zone provided military training to DPs and recruited them for
the fledgling Israeli army.22
The number of DPs was swollen by Jews who left Eastern Europe to escape
continued anti-Semitism and a resurgence of pogroms, the most terrifying of
which took place in the Polish town of Kielce in July 1946. Between 1945 and
1947 around a quarter of a million Jews trekked westward; they included an un-
known number who had repatriated soon after the war but who decided to leave
of their own accord.23 Frederick Morgan, the head of UNRRA in Germany, argued

19
Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Post War Germany (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 11; Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 31–41; Jay Howard
Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
23–8.
20
Hitchcock, Liberation, 327.
21
Atina Grossmann, ‘Versions of Home: German Jewish Refugee Papers out of the Closet and into
the Archives’ New German Critique, 90 (Fall 2003), 95–122, at 109.
22
Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 121–3, 142; Brenner, After the Holocaust, 19–22, 30;
Margarete Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 107–22, 153–7.
23
Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 43–53.
124 Mid-Century Maelstrom

that the exodus of Jews from Poland (labelled as ‘infiltrees’) was part of a broader
Zionist ‘racket’ to settle them in Palestine. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee
dismissed an ‘artificial movement engineered largely with a view to forcing our
hands over Palestine’, not an unreasonable assessment of the tactics adopted by
Brichah, the clandestine network that helped Jews to leave Europe. The stakes were
raised when Jews who left Europe on unseaworthy vessels were interned in Cyprus
by the British-led ‘Operation Igloo’, generating a storm of bad publicity.24
Amidst all this uncertainty, many Jewish DPs simultaneously looked back to a
history of oppression and terror, and forwards to a life in a sovereign Jewish state.
The stage was set for a resolute emphasis on suffering during the war, which their
leaders located in a lengthy history of destruction (khurbn) and catastrophe. The
enormity of wartime suffering seemed to Jewish and non-Jewish observers to have
ushered in a new era. Nazi policy was documented by a Historical Commission
that collected testimony from Holocaust survivors and formed the basis for the
renowned Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.25 Not everyone applauded the attention de-
voted to history. The educational director of the American Jewish Joint Distribu-
tion Committee (JDC) maintained that each one ‘is preoccupied almost to the
point of morbidity with the past. He is always ready to recount in minutest detail
the events of his past or the past of his relatives’.26 This verdict minimized the vig-
orous and often divisive political debates that took place following Hitler’s defeat.
In particular (as one spokesman put it), DPs ‘decided to renounce our former na-
tionalities, and to declare our Jewish Nationality. We were willing to be stateless
until a Jewish homeland was created in Palestine’. The DP camps contributed
13,000 troops to the Zionist cause.27 Their vision was finally realized in May 1948,
but not without further bloodshed and suffering.

WA R A N D P O P U L AT I O N D I S P L A C E M E N T
I N PA L E S T I N E

By 1947 Jewish paramilitaries such as the implacable Irgun were at war against the
embattled British administration, leaving the British to try to protect their own
forces rather than to intervene on behalf of Palestinians. In November 1947 the
United Nations voted to create a Jewish state with a population of 538,000 Jews
and a substantial minority of 397,000 Palestinian Arabs, while the corresponding
Palestinian state would accommodate 804,000 Arabs and just 10,000 Jews. The

24
UNRRA Archives, S-0402-0002-05, Subject Files of Repatriation Section Central HQ 1945–47,
Infiltrees, 28 December 1945–6 August 1946; Cohen, In War’s Wake, 126–7; Arieh Kochavi, Post-
Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001), 163, 178.
25
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 162–9.
26
Irving Heymont maintained that ‘you can’t live in the shadow of the past forever’. Hitchcock,
Liberation, 324, 327.
27
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 157; Feinstein, Holocaust Survi-
vors, 292.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 125

UN proposal accelerated the decision of the Yishuv (Jewish settlers) to confront the
Palestinian population in such a way as to minimize their presence in a Jewish
state. Violent clashes lasted from December 1947 until 14 May 1948, when Brit-
ish troops finally left and Israel became independent. However, peace did not ma-
terialize. Instead war broke out between Israel and neighbouring Arab states. The
conflict lasted a further 12 months, but divided views and military weakness
deprived them of influence over the final settlement that determined the frontiers
of Israel. Egypt appropriated the Gaza strip, while King Abdullah claimed the West
Bank on behalf of Jordan, expelling several thousand Jews in the process. Most
Palestinians were left high and dry.
Early in 1948 well-off Palestinians moved to places of safety in Lebanon or
Jordan where they had property and relatives and where they expected to shelter
until it was safe to return. The situation took a dramatic turn for the worse during
the spring. Protracted battles in 1948 displaced at least 750,000 Palestinians,
equivalent to half the estimated Arab population of Palestine (another 156,000
Palestinians stayed put) (see Map 5). More than 400 villages and several urban
neighbourhoods were destroyed. Zionists claim that Israel was not responsible for
the Palestinian refugee problem because the war was forced on Israel; refugees were
also described as ‘victims of their own aggression’.28 A more temperate Israeli argu-
ment is that Arab states encouraged the indigenous population of Palestine to leave
in order to ease the passage of their troops in fighting Jewish soldiers. This too is
hotly contested. The historian Benny Morris famously laid bare the archival
evidence of violence against Palestinian Arabs on the part of the Israeli Defence
Force with the active connivance of Zionist leaders. Morris now dismisses claims
of a clearly formulated plan prior to the outbreak of war, but his original research
provided abundant evidence of concerted expulsions rather than ‘spontaneous’
flight. Plan D (Dalet) in March 1948 gave the green light to expel Palestinians
from their villages lest they become a base for Arab attacks on Jewish militias. How
many privileged Palestinians expected to be gone for just a few weeks is not certain,
but their flight convinced those of more humble background to follow suit.29
For their part, Palestinians maintained that they were the victims of Zionist
aggression, to which Arab states, hopelessly at odds with one another, made a
feeble response. They also pointed to the direct pressure exerted on local people
by Israeli troops. Rumours of massacres certainly played a part. There was clear
evidence of atrocities committed by Jewish forces, notably in the village of Deir
Yassin on 9 April 1948, where the Irgun and Stern Gang massacred at least a
hundred unarmed men and perpetrated rape in what the Israeli government con-
tinues to describe as an ‘incident’. Another massacre took place at Ayn al-Zaytun
in May. War between the forces of a fledgling Israeli state and the indigenous
Arab population became a licence for the Haganah (Jewish militia) and Israeli
Defence Force (IDF) to target Palestinian villages and expel their inhabitants.

28
Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (André Deutsch, 1990), 46.
29
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
126 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Refugee routes to
Beirut LEBANON
Damascus
0 50 km

Tyre

N
LA
Ayn SYRIA

GO
al-Zaytun
Lake
Haifa Lubya Tiberias
Ein Houd
Saffuriyya
Nazareth

MEDITERRANEAN ISRAEL
SEA

Tel Aviv
WEST
Jaffa
BANK Amman
Lydda Ramallah

Jerusalem
Deir
Yassin

Dead Sea
JORDAN
A
AZ
G

Beersheba

EGYPT

Map 5: Map of Palestinian Refugee Movements, 1948

 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 127

Zionist forces consistently prevented refugees from returning to their homes,

and Jewish immigrants took their place in towns such as Haifa and Acre.30 This
turned displacement into a fait accompli.
Palestinians went from one village to the next in search of sanctuary and in the
hope that circumstances would soon improve and enable them to return. One
refugee described his odyssey as follows:
I was the last to leave our village, Saffouriyeh [Saffuriyya]. I stayed in Nasra until the
Jews took it, then I took refuge in Hmeimeh. I didn’t want to go to Lebanon,
because I knew Lebanon and Syria from 1936 when I used to go to buy guns there.
From Hmeimeh I went back to Acre, from Acre to Saffouriyeh, I and my wife, then
from Saffouriyeh to Aloot. My brother advised me to go to Bint Jbeil but I said
‘I don’t want to see Lebanon’. The Jews began to search all the houses looking for
men who had fought in ’36 and ’48. I began to fear for my life. It was only then that
I decided to leave’.31
Others told similar stories of multiple journeys and of Jewish soldiers who pre-
vented them from returning to their villages: ‘your village is deserted from now on’,
a Palestinian recalled being told when he was forced to leave Galilee at the age of
fifteen. He returned clandestinely to recover flour, blankets and livestock that had
been left behind in the rush.32
Refugees were embroiled in further violence. Some ended up in villages that fell
within the jurisdiction of the new state of Israel which declared their original
homes to be military zones, making it impossible to access familiar places that they
could see from their window.33 Their children and grandchildren try to understand
the specific circumstances that led to this disaster. Randa, who was born in Israel
in 1958 to a refugee family that lived in Haifa, learned how her grandfather had
been tricked by a Jewish partner into signing away his land in 1948. She felt that
his lack of education played an important part in his undoing:
I can say that I am angry with my family, with my grandfather, yet I look at it histori-
cally, at what the Turks and British have done, and people’s ignorance. They did not
study. The Jews came from Europe, with their education and class. They had seen the
large world while people here were sitting under trees.
Others too believed that ‘being simple’ had blighted their parents’ capacity to
respond.34
The Palestinian refugee crisis thus followed 18 months of uninterrupted vio-
lence. Diplomatic action came to naught. The British government formulated a

30
Cohen, In War’s Wake, 144.
31
Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: from Peasants to Revolutionaries (Zed Books, 1977), 87.
32
‘Refugee Interviews’ JPS, 18, no.1 (1988), 158–71, at 160–1.
33
Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History’ JPS, 27, no.2 (1998), 45–6;
Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 195–8.
34
Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, ‘Transmission and Transformation: the Palestinian Second Generation and the
Commemoration of the Homeland’, in André Levy and Alex Weingrod (eds), Homelands and Dias-
poras: Holy Lands and Other Places (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 123–39, at 125–6.
128 Mid-Century Maelstrom

plan in July 1949 whereby 100,000 Palestinian refugees would be settled in Iraq
(partly, as was said, to ‘transform its economy’), in exchange for the transfer and
settlement of Iraqi Jews in Israel whom Iraq regarded as ‘communists’. But Israel
regarded this as extortion, and wished to avoid any obligation to repatriate ‘sur-
plus’ Palestinian refugees in order to equalize the transfer arrangements. The pro-
posal never got off the ground.
The prospect of a Jewish state led to other kinds of aggression. Long-standing
Christian communities in the region suffered at the hands of Jewish extremists
who suspected them of being in league with Arab countries. Jews who had lived
for generations in the Middle East were now exposed to violent action when
Arab states expelled Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews following the 1948 war. Taking
into account other displacements, including those during the Suez debacle in
1956–57, at least 400,000 Jews fled Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere. Iraqi
Jews were harassed by officials who pictured them as fifth-columnists, de-natu-
ralized them and froze their assets (Jewish community leaders in Baghdad
blamed Zionist extremists for putting them in an impossible position). Thus
radical changes to the map of the Middle East exposed Jews and Christians as
well as the Arab population of Palestine to the uncertainties of forced
migration.35
Subsequent episodes magnified the scale of displacement. Following the Six-
Day War in June 1967, between 300,000 and 400,000 Palestinians fled from
Gaza and the West Bank when these lands were occupied by Israel; more than
a third of these were ‘1948 refugees’ who had lived for two decades under
Egyptian or Jordanian administration respectively. Israeli officials contem-
plated moving Palestinians from Gaza to the West Bank in order to forestall
the creation of what they termed a ‘refugeestan’, but the preferred solution was
to encourage them to go to Jordan. Many did so, and others fled to Lebanon,
but a million people stayed where they were and found their lives transformed
for the worse; they joined the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ (or ‘non-Jewish minor-
ity’) who lived within the state of Israel. Over time, partly because of the strain
on local resources, relations between the two groups of Palestinians deterio-
rated. Arab villagers described the newcomers as ‘refugees’, a term that carried
connotations of helplessness and burden. Arab Israelis in turn felt doubly
rejected, both by the state and by Palestinian organizations that claimed to
speak on their behalf.36

35
WCC Archives, File 425.1.032, Palestine folder, Svenska Israelsmissionen to Elfan Rees,
22 March 1948; Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951 (Frank Cass, 1997); Yehouda
Shenhav, ‘The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology and the Property of the Palestinian Refugees of 1948: an
Anomaly of National Accounting’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31, no.4 (1999),
605–30.
36
Janet Abu-Lughod, ‘Palestinians: Exiles at Home and Abroad’ Current Sociology, 36, no.2 (1988),
61–9, at 63; Nur Masalha (ed.), Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees
(Zed Books, 2005); Fatma Kassem, Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory (Zed
Books, 2011).
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 129

THE POLITICS OF RELIEF AND ‘DEVELOPMENT ’

The process of resettling Holocaust survivors attracted plaudits for its relative
speed and effectiveness. A psychiatrist praised ‘the transformation of [Jewish]
orphans from the savage, half-animal, conditions in which they were found
after the war to the balanced, sociable, hard-working conditions in which one
finds them in the kibbutzim’.37 By contrast, the plight of Palestinian refugees
was portrayed from the outset in terms of humanitarian disaster. One journalist
described ‘scores of trucks jammed with women, children and old men, and
piled skyward with household belongings’ on the road from Jaffa, a major com-
mercial centre, to the township of Lydda, whose population increased from
16,000 to 70,000 virtually overnight. The winter of 1948 was cold and damp,
and refugees without sufficient means suffered great hardship, the memory of
which remained with them forever.38
With the conflict in full swing, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the
League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) and Quakers (the British Society of Friends
and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)) flocked to the scene, joining
long-established organizations such as the Church Missionary Society. Near East
Relief, the US organization with 30 years’ experience of assisting Armenian refugees
in the Middle East, chipped in. The LRCS paid tribute to ‘those men and women
who came from far away to a part of the world unknown to most of them to do a job
in the field’, and made much of the need to ‘explain its task to the refugees’. Both are
interesting statements of how officials understood their relationship with displaced
persons.39 Photographs recorded the names of dedicated Red Cross doctors and
nurses who worked alongside unnamed refugees, patronizingly described as ‘admir-
ing [the] gifts’ and ‘eager to learn’. A very different account by the Swedish photog-
rapher Per-Olow Anderson (see earlier in this chapter) portrayed Palestinian refugees
as individual human beings, albeit trapped in a terrible situation.
At the request of the UN, the AFSC assumed a prominent role in Gaza where
its Quaker Palestine Unit (QPU)—the ‘kewpies’—compromised on core
Quaker principles by working alongside the Egyptian military in Gaza, as they
did with the Allied forces in Europe and in India. Their mission to promote
peace and justice took second place to the provision of emergency assistance.40
The AFSC distributed food packages and set up temporary shelters, latrines and
schools. Quaker relief efforts were supplemented by more substantial Egyptian
aid in Gaza following the 1952 revolution that brought Gamel Abdul Nasser to
power. Nasser’s government organized ‘mercy trains’ carrying goods donated by

37
Shephard, The Long Road Home, 395–6.
38
Schechtman, Population Transfers, 121.
39
LRCS, Report of the Relief Operation in Behalf of the Palestine Refugees, 1949–1950 (Geneva: Red
Cross, 1950), 5, 11; Winifred Coate correspondence, Jerusalem and East Mission Collection, St Antony’s
College, Oxford, Box 73, file 2.
40
Ilana Feldman, ‘The Quaker Way: Ethical Labor and Humanitarian Relief ’ American Ethnologist,
34, no. 4 (2007), 689–70.
130 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Egyptians. Later on Egypt developed a range of welfare services for the entire
population of Gaza.41 The World Council of Churches sought to keep Palestin-
ian refugees in the limelight on the grounds ‘that the problem of displaced
persons in the Holy Land [should] be given the same international aid which
has been given to displaced persons in Europe’.42
Geopolitics, including the politics of international aid, further complicated the
picture. From the outset Israel relied heavily on foreign aid particularly from the
USA and the Federal Republic of Germany. Arab countries did not enjoy anything
remotely comparable, although they were not completely overlooked. UNICEF
contributed food, blankets and medical equipment. In November 1948 the UN
created a specialist agency (UN Relief for Palestine Refugees) with a temporary
mandate to provide emergency relief for Palestinian refugees. Lawyers acting for
the IRO argued that Arab refugees were the result of war operations and did not
fall within the wording ‘persecution or fear based on reasonable ground of persecu-
tion’ (the formulation used to determine the status of DPs in Europe). However,
given that they were ‘willing but unable’ to return to their homes, and that this was
tantamount to having a ‘fear of persecution’, Palestinian refugees had, according to
IRO legal opinion, a valid claim to be regarded as political refugees. These debates
did not see the light of day, and the IRO and the UN resolved instead to concen-
trate on material assistance.43
In 1949 the UN Security Council established the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA). The choice of
title reflected a view that temporary relief provided by the AFSC and other bodies
should be replaced by longer-term economic and social assistance in order ‘to pre-
vent conditions of starvation and distress and to further conditions of peace and
stability’. One priority was to register those ‘whose normal residence was Palestine
for a minimum period of two years immediately preceding the outbreak of the
conflict in 1948 and who, as a result, has lost both home and means of livelihood’.
The agency concentrated on male heads of household; women were not entitled to
their own ration cards unless they were widows. Counting heads proved extremely
contentious. Better-off refugees regarded registration and inclusion on the ration
rolls as humiliating; other refugees believed that it was a prelude to curtailing UN
aid. There were numerous stories of ‘abuse’ of the system for administering rations,
and Quakers in particular had grave misgivings about being made to trim the
numbers entitled to relief. When the census was completed, UNRWA found that
it had 910,000 refugees on its books. (There are now around four million.)44
Much of UNRWA’s funding came from the US State Department, whose solici-
tude (as one official put it) ‘partly based on humanitarian considerations, has

41
Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 57–61.
42
WCC Archives, File 425.1.032, Palestine folder, A.C. MacInnes to Norman Goodall, 7 August
1948.
43
Cohen, In War’s Wake, 146.
44
WCC Archives File 425.1.047 Refugees Near East 1949/50. In 1982 UNRWA decided to
restrict entitlement to rations to ‘hardship cases’.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 131

additional justification [because] the refugees serve as a natural focal point for
exploitation by Communist and disruptive elements’. Certainly the United States,
by a considerable margin the biggest contributor to UNRWA, found it a useful
instrument of leverage in the Middle East. A proposal in 1961 to cut America’s
payment led the State Department to point out that UNRWA supported refugees
at a cost of just nine cents per day, not a bad investment (he said) for an agency that
‘has been remarkably successful in keeping the potentially explosive refugee prob-
lem under control’. UNRWA also contributed to economic and political stability
in Jordan, an important American ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union.
International aid was crucial in other respects as well: throughout the 1950s and
1960s US experts believed it unlikely that Gaza, for instance, could sustain the
current level of refugee settlement without massive external assistance.45
NGOs were supposed to adopt a politically neutral stance on the question of
Palestinian refugees, but the dreadful conditions they encountered led some of
them to criticize the countries most closely involved. The Church Missionary
Society alienated Israel, Jordan and Syria by suggesting that Palestinian refugees
should be consulted about their wishes. Writing in 1952, Samuel Morrison from
the WCC suggested that Jordan’s policy confirmed ‘the convictions of the refu-
gees that the Arab states in general are looking at the refugee problem not so
much from the angle of the interests of the refugees themselves but from that of
their own selfish interests’. He recommended an urgent programme to train refu-
gee ‘teachers and social workers [who] are in key positions to direct the thinking
of the refugees into constructive channels, to expose the fallacies of communism’.
Of emigration he wrote that ‘it would be a curious irony of history if the ingather-
ing of the Jews from their dispersion among the nations were only to be achieved
at the price of the dispersion of the Arabs of Palestine over the face of the globe’.
The best hope was for an Arab Palestine, linked economically to Israel for mutual
prosperity. Both sides must ‘bury the hatchet. [It is] for the Arabs to realise that
Israel has come to stay and for the Jews to understand that without the coopera-
tion of the Arab states their country cannot be economically viable’. No such so-
lution materialized.46
Palestinian refugees reacted ambivalently to UNRWA. They tore up registration
cards—as the head of one well-to-do household exclaimed, ‘I remained in Haifa
until the last day for the sake of Arab Palestine; is the result to learn how to beg or
how to get a card for flour and food? Even if my children starve to death, I won’t
register any of them’.47 Good intentions notwithstanding, the UN had no means
of addressing property issues. Class, generational and gender differences compli-
cated matters. One elderly Palestinian lamented that he could not take his land
with him whereas his daughter’s husband was able to take his degree certificate

45
Phillips Talbot to Stuart Symington, 13 September 1961, NARA, RG 59, General Records of
the State Department, Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Office of the Country Direc-
tor for Israel and Arab Affairs, Box 1, Folder UNRWA 1961; UNRWA, From Camps to Homes: Progress
and Aims of UNRWA in the Middle East (Beirut: UNRWA, 1951).
46
WCC Archives, File 425.1.047 Refugees Near East 1949/50, Samuel Morrison (Near East
47
Christian Council). ‘Refugee interviews’, 171.
132 Mid-Century Maelstrom

when he left. The older man continued to wait in the hope that his land would be
restored to him one day. Meanwhile his son-in-law managed to get ahead by
making use of his portable qualifications.48 The complexity of these negotiations
left UNRWA bemused and ultimately impotent.
UNRWA ration cards became a vital element in securing food, decent medical
care and rent-free housing, and even a form of collateral against which money
could be borrowed. It served as ‘a badge of identity [whereas] the identity card
(hawiyyeh) was derided by Palestinians. It was the host state telling you, “you
don’t belong here, you are an alien”’. The ration card meant international recog-
nition. But rations also meant having to accept the arrangements made by exter-
nal agencies, which operated with tables of calorific requirements rather than
culturally acceptable foodstuffs. As Julie Peteet points out, ‘a multitude of new
items appeared in the Palestinian lexicon’ including latrines, delousing, pow-
dered milk and distribution centres. More was at stake than the administration
of relief. Palestinian men sent women or children to collect the rations in order
to avoid the shame of being made to queue for food.49
Not being able to grow one’s own food had cultural and psychological conse-
quences. Mourid Barghouti described his shame at having to buy olive oil rather
than being able to press it from his own olive groves. Refugees in Lebanon added
that, ‘unless you grow it yourself you can’t be sure where it came from’. Others
spoke of struggling to find fresh herbs and vegetables to add to burghul wheat:
‘[O]nce our father went to Damascus and brought back a fish. The people of the
village said, “Come and see these Palestinians eating snakes!” They’d never seen a
fish before’.50 Later on they traded the rations for items they preferred to eat, and
in time new sources of income enabled refugees to exercise greater choice. None of
this altered Palestinians’ sense of basic injustice. Relations between the agency and
refugees left much to be desired. UNRWA employed Palestinian refugees, but the
top posts in UNRWA went to non-Palestinians, so there was always asymmetry.
Complaints fell on deaf ears.51

RESETTLEMENT IN PRACTICE

Repatriation foundered on the rock of Israeli intransigence. A UN Conciliation

Commission for Palestine worked fitfully in 1948–49, and Israel reportedly offered
to repatriate 100,000 refugees in 1951, but nothing came of these initiatives.

48
Lena Jayyusi, ‘Iterability, Cumulativity, and Presence: the Relational Figures of Palestinian
Memory’, in Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of
Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 107–33.
49
UNHCR Records and Archives, Fonds 11, Series 1, Folder 13/31/1 GEN, Algerian Refugees;
Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 74, 76.
50
Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 76–80; Sayigh, Palestinians, 125; Barghouti, I Saw
Ramallah, 61–2.
51
Benjamin Schiff, Refugees unto the Third Generation: UN Aid to Palestinians (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 141–2. UNRWA currently employs 29,000 Palestinian refugees on its programmes.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 133

Palestinian refugees had no choice but to make the best of things in the West Bank,
Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Bitter disputes arose between the Arab
governments and the United Nations. Host governments insisted that the refugee
problem was the responsibility of the UN which had (they argued) approved the
creation of the state of Israel and should therefore assume the cost of maintaining
the refugees. Since host countries argued that the refugees had a right to return,
they could claim that the modest provision they made was consistent with that
stance. This is not to say that the reception accorded to Palestinian refugees was
either uniform or unchanging. Generally speaking Syria (whose government placed
arable land at the disposal of 100,000 refugees) and Jordan offered a more hospi-
table environment than Lebanon whose government feared that their presence
would undermine the fragile foundations of the Lebanese state.
First-generation refugees responded to relief and rehabilitation efforts by insist-
ing that refugee camps provided temporary accommodation rather than perma-
nent homes. Mahmoud Issa remembers that as a young boy he pestered his father
to buy a refrigerator, a washing machine and a television, only to be told that ‘it
will be easier, when the time comes, to return home without these cumbersome
belongings’. Other sources confirm the unwillingness of refugees to install ovens
and other accoutrements that implied ‘resettlement’; the unmistakable refusal to
entertain a permanent relocation was coupled to the affirmation of a right of
return.52 Refugees in the Dayr ‘Ammar camp in the West Bank regarded the
UNRWA-built nursery as a manifestation of potential ‘rootedness’; in 1955 they
promptly destroyed it. Five years later the Muslim NGO Jami’at al Islam (JAI)
complained that UNRWA was cooperating with voluntary agencies such as the
YMCA to persuade young refugees to settle in host countries. JAI accused it of
‘using the tools of vocational, recreational, and athletic activity to persuade impres-
sionable young people that the road to normality lies in a direction away from the
ideals of their fathers. Arab youth are being told that they must foreswear all hope
of regaining what was unjustly taken from them and seek instead new homes in
other lands.’53
From the early 1950s, as it got down to the business of ‘works’ rather than
‘relief ’, UNRWA provided an impressive programme of social, medical and edu-
cational services in the West Bank. Free schooling helped sustain Palestinian
identity and provided young men with qualifications (including instruction in
the English language) that enabled them to find employment further afield. Girls
too received primary and in some cases secondary and even tertiary education,
albeit with an overriding emphasis on clerical and secretarial qualifications, as
well as qualifications in childcare, hairdressing and dressmaking. A residential
training centre was opened in Ramallah in 1962, providing more than 600 girls
at a time with ‘the opportunity of building a productive life away from the misery

52
Mahmoud Issa, ‘Resisting Oblivion: Historiography of the Destroyed Palestinian Village of
Lubya’ Refuge, 21, no.2 (2003), 14–22, at 15; Bisharat, ‘Exile to Compatriot’, 212.
53
UNHCR Records and Archives, Fonds 11, Series 1, Folder 13/31/1 GEN, Algerian Refugees.
The complaint went unanswered.
134 Mid-Century Maelstrom

and despair of the refugee camps which have been their homes ever since they
can remember’. With knowledge of infant care and cleanliness, girls were ex-
pected to return to their homes and have a ‘constructive’ effect on other mem-
bers of the refugee community. UNRWA sponsored a huge educational effort,
complete with films and prizes for the cleanest baby and the best kept road.54
This formed part of a broader project by UNRWA to ‘civilize’ the Palestinian
peasantry. Demoralization would be overcome by modernization.
A study in the mid-1960s of refugees originally from the Bayt Naballah-Lydda
region and who were now living in a refugee camp at Jalazun close to Ramallah
found that they derived a modest but perceptible improvement in their living con-
ditions by entering the labour market. However, they were not allowed to own
land in the West Bank and depended on local people for credit and other forms of
assistance. They suffered a catastrophic loss of status. Jalazun’s refugees also de-
scribed a difficult relationship with the local population, many of whom called
them ‘trespassers’, ‘gypsies’, and ‘fruit thieves’. Locals accused them of having ‘sold
land to the Jews, and now you come to squat on our land’, an unfair charge given
that they had little choice. They had, it was said, lost the right to call themselves
‘Palestinian’, because their action in fleeing the violence in 1948 had demeaned the
very name. Their children did not escape being told they lived in ‘borrowed homes’.
Countering that sense of dislocation and dishonour, one refugee asserted that
‘there is no such thing as the West Bank; it is part of Palestine’, affirming a link
between displacement and collective national identity.55
Something similar took place in Gaza where the outbreak of war saw 250,000
refugees flee to this small strip of territory that had been home to around 80,000
native inhabitants. Refugees were obliged to make do with temporary accommo-
dation in schools, mosques and makeshift shelters in caves or deserted military
barracks. Some slept on the beach. They complained of being reduced to begging.
Dysentery and cholera took their toll. Relations between Palestinian refugees and
locals were tense, because farmers lost access to lands that came under Israeli juris-
diction in 1948 and the influx of refugees drove down wage rates. Locals claimed
that refugees had abandoned their homes and thereby ‘betrayed’ the Palestinian
cause. As one refugee recalled, ‘they made us sleep under the olive trees. In the
morning we told them that we want water to wash and drink, but they told us that
we had to leave—that we were the Palestinians who had left our villages and come
here’. They recollected this as a time of profound humiliation.56
The emerging distinction between ‘recognized’ refugees and the impoverished
local population, who were not entitled to ration cards, magnified mutual hostility.
As Ilana Feldman puts it, ‘Gaza’s population categories have been derived from

54
Kjersti Berg, ‘Gendering Refugees: UNRWA and the Politics of Relief ’, in Nefissa Naguib and
Inger Marie Okkenhaug (eds), Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2008),
149–73.
55
Shimon Shamir, ‘West Bank Refugees: Between Camp and Society’, in Joel S. Migdal (ed.),
Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 146–65, at 156.
56
Ilana Feldman, ‘Home as a Refrain: Remembering and Living Displacement in Gaza’ History and
Memory, 18, no.2 (2006), 10–48, at 27.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 135

legal definitions that do not quite apply in this territory (international refugee
conventions), shaped by institutions that do not have jurisdiction over it (UNHCR)
and influenced by long absent political forms (the sovereign state).’ Over time,
humanitarian relief efforts orchestrated first by the Quakers and then by UNRWA,
with their emphasis upon systematic registration and monitoring became a kind of
substitute government. This posed particular difficulties for Quakers, who were
accustomed to think not in impersonal bureaucratic terms but as caring individu-
als who sought to forge a close relationship with each refugee.57
Jordan’s population doubled in size in the space of just 12 months. Municipal
authorities were quickly overwhelmed, and the urban infrastructure all but col-
lapsed. Around 140,000 refugees, most of them from rural origins ended up in
camps, while the rest found shelter in villages. The Jordanian military insisted that
refugees be kept well away from border areas, creating resentment among Palestin-
ians who interpreted this as a sign that the regime had no interest in enabling them
to regain their property. The police and army closely monitored political activity
in the camps (George Habash, the founder in 1967 of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), worked as a doctor in one of UNRWA’s camps in
Jordan during the 1950s.) Economically, Jordan afforded little scope for agricul-
tural development, although it capitalized on UNRWA development project aid
for various irrigation and highway projects and funding for a Jordan Development
Bank. One important concession came in December 1949 when most refugees
were granted full citizenship and the right to a Jordanian passport, until such time
as they could return to Palestine. Some refugees enrolled in the Jordanian army.
But job opportunities were hard to come by. UNRWA’s ration cards mattered (as
was said) ‘as much as God’. Even with sustained development assistance there
would remain significant unemployment.58
Israeli diplomats hoped that Jordan would cooperate with Germany in sending
‘surplus’ refugees to work in the Federal Republic. Many seized this opportunity,
and others went in search of work in Kuwait. Their remittances helped ensure the
survival of family members who stayed in the refugee camps.59 During the Six-Day
War around 200,000 refugees from the occupied West Bank (some of them ‘vin-
tage’ refugees from the war 20 years earlier) fled to neighbouring Jordan where, in
makeshift camps, they became the target of Israel’s attacks on the Jordanian army.
Two-thirds moved to squalid settlements in Amman, Irbid and elsewhere.60 Men
who left the West Bank for Jordan nearly 20 years earlier in order to seek work in
the Gulf States quickly returned to their villages on Jordanian passports to collect
their families and take them to Amman. Most refugees expressed a wish to return

57
Ilana Feldman, ‘Difficult Distinctions: Refugee Law, Humanitarian Practice and Political Iden-
tification in Gaza’ Cultural Anthropology, 22, no.1 (2007), 129–69, at 135.
58
F. Witkamp, ‘The Refugee Problem in the Middle East’ REMP Bulletin, 5, no. 1 (1957), 3–51;
Avi Plascov, The Palestinian Refugees in Jordan 1948–1957 (Frank Cass, 1981), 16, 44–8, 92–103.
59
Falestin Naïla, ‘Memories of Home and Stories of Displacement: the Women of Artas and the
‘Peasant Past’ JPS, 38, no.4 (2009), 63–74.
60
Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, River without Bridges: a Study of the Exodus of the 1967 Palestinian
Arab Refugees (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968).
136 Mid-Century Maelstrom

to their original homes, resume their normal routine and re-establish community
ties. However, the disclosure in 2012 of the negotiating position of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) shows that the Palestinian leadership has aban-
doned any hope of return, while the Bush administration in 2008 contemplated
the movement of refugees to distant locations such as Chile.61
By contrast, 100,000 refugees in Lebanon were stateless ‘foreigners’ (al-ajanib),
although Palestinian Christians received Lebanese citizenship on arrival. Palestin-
ians were subject to tight restrictions on employment and on owning land and
other property. Nor were they entitled to social security. Instead their welfare was
mostly entrusted to UNRWA which managed 17 official refugee camps, some of
which had been occupied by Armenian refugees before the war, a reminder of
Lebanon’s previous history as a refugee-receiving state. Administrative convenience
was the main justification for UNRWA’s arrangements, namely to ensure that refu-
gees could be counted and given identity papers by the authorities in Beirut. Other
refugees settled on the outskirts of towns such as Tyre and Sidon until they were
detected and moved on by local police. Countless unofficial settlements were also
scattered across the country. From the outset refugees spoke of unsympathetic
villagers who exploited their vulnerability and held them in contempt, and of ob-
stacles to getting anything other than unskilled and casual jobs.62
Overcrowding and deprivation in Lebanese camps did not curtail refugees’
creativity. Rows of tents gradually gave way to cement structures. Camps came to
resemble a labyrinthine maze. UNRWA officials reported in 1967 that ‘progress
was being made towards the economic rehabilitation of the camp inhabitants’ and
that some of the refugee camps had developed into thriving communities.63 New
arrivals were crammed into any available space and, because the Lebanese authori-
ties refused to extend the surface area to accommodate the growth in numbers,
refugees had no option but to add new storeys to the makeshift structures. They
retained the original names of the villages they left in 1948, reinforcing an affili-
ation to ancestral lands and symbolizing a kind of resistance both to integration
(towteen) and to emigration. Shops bore the names of villages or broader designa-
tions such as ‘Return’ and ‘Palestine’. Refugee camps also produced or reinforced
local stereotypes, for example that refugees from Nablus were cunning and even
ruthless in business affairs. As in Jordan, camp organizers also set great store by
sporting prowess, particularly boxing and gymnastics, as a means of asserting
physical strength in the midst of evident ‘national weakness’, as happened among
Jews in German DP camps in 1945.64
Boxing gloves soon ceased to be the weapon of choice. Camps such as Shatila
made a perfect environment for the growth of armed resistance by Fatah militants

61
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/25/palestine-papers-refugees-south-america>.
62
D.B.H. Vickers, ‘The Refugee Problem in the Lebanon’ (1951), typescript in Bodleian Library
Special Collections, MS. Eng. c. 4706; Jihane Sfeir, L’exil palestinien au Liban: le temps des origines,
1947–1952 (Paris: Karthala, 2008).
63
Edward Buehrig, The UN and the Palestinian Refugees: a Study in Non-Territorial Administration
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 124.
64
Sayigh, Palestinians, 109; Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 110–24.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 137

who mounted dozens of operations inside Israel from bases in Lebanon, leading to
massive retaliation from the Israeli air force. The disparity between UNRWA edu-
cational provision and the underdeveloped Lebanese school system gave rise to
acute tension. Even more disconcerting was the presence of predominantly Sunni
Muslim refugees who posed a challenge to Lebanon’s multi-confessional state.
Lebanese workers and the middle-class resented the competition from Palestinian
labourers and entrepreneurs. An ominous sign of trouble to come was the rise of
Christian Phalange militias in Beirut who targeted refugees in the run-down dis-
trict of Karantina in January 1976. Equally alarming was the accusation levelled at
UNRWA by Israeli government officials that it was ‘inadvertently preparing a gen-
eration of educated youth for secular, militant nationalist activities’.65
By the late 1970s Palestinian refugees had become embroiled in Lebanon’s mur-
derous civil war, partly sustained by Israel whose leaders wished to undermine the
PLO, which was responsible for attacks on Israel.66 This conflict led to the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, culminating in destruction of
camps in Southern Lebanon in June and bloody massacres in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps in September at the hands of the Phalange and with the backing of
the IDF. Shatila was transformed from a dynamic site of ‘embryonic state-building’
to a site that embodied a complex mixture of ‘hope and despair’.67 In other inter-
views, a young fighter spoke hopefully of living not in a refugee camp but a ‘training
camp’. But despair was etched on the face of a Palestinian woman who could not
bury her husband and sons who were killed by the Phalange: ‘[W]hen I go to the
graveyard I just throw the flowers and hope they land on the right places’.68 Her
lament corresponded to the bitter experience of those who survived the Holocaust
in East-Central Europe but whose loved ones disappeared without trace.

L E G A C I E S : PA S T A N D P L A C E

It is an incontrovertible fact that the Nakba, magnified by the events of 1967, the
consequences of the civil war in Lebanon and the Israeli response to the first and
second Intifada remains the most intractable of all episodes of twentieth-century
population displacement. The Palestinian refugee crisis affects international rela-
tions more than any other situation referred to in this book. It was not always so.
An American Quaker wrote in 1959 that:
We must always remember a regrettable fact about relief and rehabilitation of war suf-
ferers. It represents a healing of wounds which should never have been inflicted. In
Israel the AFSC is playing a reconciling role between two peoples both of whom claim

65
Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 88, 109–10; Sayigh, Palestinians, 127; Rebecca Roberts,
Palestinians in Lebanon: Refugees Living with Long-term Displacement (I.B.Tauris, 2010), 69–91.
66
The PLO was founded in 1964 and incorporated Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation
Movement, formed earlier by Yasser Arafat.
67
Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair, 17.
68
Fisk, Pity the Nation, 400.
138 Mid-Century Maelstrom
the same land as their own. Israeli and Arab social workers, visiting Greek and Italian
community developments under AFSC auspices, have grown together in much more
than professional competence.69
Other observers offered a much less hopeful assessment: there was already talk in
the 1960s of a ‘hard core’ of Palestinian refugees, equivalent to the ‘DP problem’
in Europe.70
Displacement produced a rich cultural legacy. Writers in the Jewish diaspora
have authored poignant accounts of cultural life in Eastern Europe between the
two world wars, although these are inevitably framed by the Holocaust.71 (Russian
Jews who migrated to Israel during the 1970s and 1980s by contrast showed no
evident warmth towards their place of birth.) Among Palestinians such as Samir
Khaled, music and cookery books demonstrated a strong sense of attachment
reflected in recollections of ‘a sweet life [where] our village was a park and our
grapes like gold’. Other authors associated the apparently mundane taste of figs,
melons and pomegranates with childhood memories of the Palestinian village or
with parental evocation of a pastoral landscape. Ellen Kettaneh Khouri, who was
born in May 1948, insists that this is not nostalgia but ‘a mixture of huzn (sadness)
and yearning. It is missing something you don’t have, and maybe never had’.72
Poetry endorsed these sensual images of (in the words of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra) a
‘land of ours where our childhood passed/like dreams in the shade of the orange
grove/among the almond trees in the valleys’. The peasant became the symbol of
Palestinian nationalism, as in Tawfiq Zayyad’s poem, ‘On the trunk of an olive
tree’, which provides the narrator with the only means of expressing his anger at
having been displaced: ‘I shall carve my story and all the seasons of my tragedy/my
sighs/my grove and the tombs of my dead/I shall carve the number of every usurped
plot . . . /I shall carve Dayr Yasin, it has taken root in my memory’.73 Other refugees
constructed ‘a more self-conscious relationship to place [and] to reconcretise a con-
nection to the land that had been violently sundered’. Memories of the 1936 revolt
against British rule were important in making that connection.74
Refugeedom had a marked effect on commemorative activities, although the
dominant myth of the Nakba took some time to establish itself in Palestinian con-
sciousness. Some refugees refused to embrace the term because they associated it
with a permanent uprooting.75 In spite of or perhaps because of the absence of state

69
Editorial by Colin Bell, AFSC Bulletin (Fall 1959), 1.
70
World Refugee Report: Annual Survey Issue, 1966–1967 (New York: USCR, 1967), 17.
71
Ewa Hoffman, Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World (Secker and
Warburg, 1998).
72
Feldman, ‘Home as a Refrain’, 19; Nadia Latif, ‘Making Refugees’ The New Centennial Review,
8, no.2 (2008), 253–72; Dina Matar, What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood
(I.B.Tauris, 2011), 62.
73
Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 43, 75–6.
74
Bisharat, ‘Exile to Compatriot’, 217.
75
Diana Allan, ‘Mythologising Al-Nakba: Narratives, Collective Identity and Cultural Practices
among Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon’ Oral History, 33, no.1 (2005), 47–56; Ahmad H. Sa’di,
‘Catastrophe, Memory and Identity: Al-Nakbah as a Component of Palestinian Identity’ Israel Stud-
ies, 7, no.2 (2002), 175–98.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 139

sponsorship a steady outpouring of literature, film, music and artwork helped es-
tablish the framework of a national culture that has ‘rootedness’ at its core and
displacement as its tragic antithesis. Unfortunately the Palestinian Film Archive,
established in 1976 to provide a ‘people’s cinema’ of the Palestinian struggle, was
wrecked six years later during the terrible siege of Beirut. One documentary that
survived is Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Do Not Exist (1974), about conditions in Leba-
non’s refugee camps and the lives of Palestinian guerrillas. Other films include the
same director’s Scenes from the Occupation in Gaza (n.d.); The Key (director, Ghalib
Sha’ath, 1976) set in Lebanon’s camps; Haifa (director, Rashid al-Mash’harawi,
1995); and My Very Private Map (director, Subhi Zabidi, 1998). Significant figures
from an earlier generation include Sulafa Jadallah, Hani Jawhariya, Khadija Abu
Ali, Rafiq Hijjar, Nabiha Lutfi, Fuad Zentut, Jean Chamoun and Samir Nimr.
A series of books by prominent exiles such as Edward Said, including a text
accompanying the remarkable photographs of Jean Mohr, as well as Ghassan
Kanafani, Mourid Barghouti and Ghada Karmi exemplify a rich body of work
seeking to express myriad aspects of the experience of displacement. Since 2002
the anthropologist and film maker Diana Allan has recorded personal testimony in
the refugee camps in Lebanon, uncovering well-rehearsed performances on the
part of self-appointed spokesmen on the one hand, as well as more informal and
less ‘polished’ accounts on the other.76
A sharply defined sense of estrangement suffuses much of this work. Estrange-
ment was accompanied by a sense of a forsaken homeland. Ghada Karmi (b.1939)
has spoken eloquently and tenderly of the vibrant social and cultural life in cos-
mopolitan Jerusalem where she spent her first nine years surrounded by Muslim,
Jewish and Christian neighbours, before being swept up by her parents and taken
to Damascus and later on to London in a ‘hasty and untidy exit’. Writing of her
friends and acquaintances, she suggests that their ‘stories all had the same
ending’.77 Edward Said’s memoir tells of his Aunt Nabiha, who assisted refugees
in Egypt and considered their enforced alienation:
Much of her time in the awful decrepit slums she visited would be spent convincing the
women left behind with screaming, underfed children that they did not need more medi-
cine. Prescriptions and, preferably, money for patent medicines had the status of a miracle
cure for these poor women, and it was not until a few years ago that an acquaintance who
survived those early days explained to me that what every one of the destitute and power-
less looked for was a drug that might induce forgetfulness, sleep or indifference.
This initial desire to forget yielded to an intense wish to remember, a project to
which Said himself made an immense contribution.78 Other memoirs are written
in a different register. The rupture of social relations had sometimes unexpected
and momentous consequences for women. In her moving autobiography the

76
Diana Allan, ‘The Politics of Witness: Remembering and Forgetting 1948 in Shatila Camp’, in
Sa’di and Abu-Lughod (eds), Nakba, 253–82.
77
Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima: a Palestinian Story (Verso, 2002), 123, 145.
78
Edward Said with Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (Faber, 1986), 116–19.
140 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) described how refugees crowded in to

her home town of Nablus where the disruption of household structures enabled
women—‘faceless victims with no independent life’—to play a public role in Pal-
estinian society, such that ‘when the roof fell in on Palestine, the veil fell off the face
of the Nablus woman’.79
Kanafani’s short stories such as ‘Letter from Gaza’ (1956) engaged with the
bitter meanings imparted to displacement, particularly by older Palestinians who
had to confront their children with the realities of refugeedom. Kanafani (1936–
72) was 12 when his family was forced to leave Palestine. (He was killed along
with his niece in his booby-trapped car in Beirut, where he was working as a jour-
nalist on behalf of the PFLP.) The protagonist in ‘The Land of Sad Oranges’
(1958) describes how, ‘as I left the house behind, I left my childhood behind too’.
Elsewhere Kanafani dwelt on journeys in search of work, as in his novella, Men in
the Sun (1962) which recounts a desperate attempt by three Palestinian men to
get to Kuwait to look for work. The driver of a water tanker agrees to smuggle
them across the desert from Basra to Kuwait, but before they reach their destina-
tion the men are suffocated when the driver is held up by Israeli guards who taunt
him about his lack of sexual prowess, the result of injuries he sustained during the
war of 1948. When he finally reaches his destination he leaves the bodies of the
three men in a rubbish dump. ‘Returning to Haifa’ (1969) tells of a Palestinian
couple who find that the baby boy they thought had been killed in 1948 was
adopted by Holocaust survivors from Poland and has grown up to be a proud
Israeli soldier. Their tense encounter in 1967 is resolved when the young man’s
birth parents are left with no other option but to pin their hopes on the Palestin-
ian liberation movement.80
Many artists spoke of the centrality of the Nakba in their creative work, as well
as the importance of a continuing sense of attachment to the homeland. The artist
Suleiman Mansour (b.1947) is best known for his painting entitled ‘Carry On’,
depicting an old man who carries Jerusalem on his back, an expression of the refu-
gee’s ordeal and the importance attached to the Dome of the Rock. The dramatic
setting and the colours used in another of his paintings, ‘To the Unknown’, bear a
striking resemblance to the well-known work of Marc Chagall. Other paintings
include ‘Homage to the Martyrs’. Ismail Shammout (1930–2006) who was
expelled as an 18-year old from Lydda by Israeli troops, and who made his way to
Cairo after living briefly in a camp in Gaza, painted one of the most famous pic-
tures of the Palestinian exodus in Where to . . . ? Cast in socialist-realist mode, it
shows a bedraggled father with three small children who have left their town
behind and are heading to an unknown destination. The famous cartoonist Naji

79
Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: the Life of Palestine’s Outstanding Woman Poet (The
Women’s Press, 1990), 106, 113. Compare Isabelle Humphries and Laleh Khalidi, ‘Gender of
Nakba Memory’, in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod (eds), Nakba, 207–27.
80
Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (Heinemann, 1978); Ghassan
Kanafani, Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
2000), 149–96.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 141

al-Ali (1937–87) was born in a village close to Tiberias that was demolished in
1948. He moved to a refugee camp in South Lebanon, before settling in Tripoli
where he trained as an electrician. Naji began by painting ‘disjointed fragments of
broken mirrors glued into old frames . . . screwing metal bars across the mirror so
that viewers would see themselves locked in prison’.81
Place figured in this process no less than time. Artists such as Jumana al-Hus-
seini (b.1932) composed figurative paintings of Jerusalem and Jericho: ‘I found
Palestine again on canvas. I live my youth, my early days there—all the memories,
the birds, the flowers, the butterflies, the greenery, the Dead Sea, the windows, the
doors, the skies of Palestine. This is where I found myself ’. In later life she devel-
oped a strikingly beautiful abstract style. In 2001 the Bethlehem-born artist Emily
Jacir created a ‘refugee tent’ as an embroidered ‘Memorial to 418 Palestinian vil-
lages which were destroyed, depopulated and occupied by Israel in 1948’. Finding
it impossible to contemplate embroidering all the names by herself, she enlisted
volunteers from Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia and elsewhere to complete the
task. In choosing to make a tent rather than a more permanent fixture, Jacir explic-
itly sought to encapsulate a sense of the possibility of ‘return’.82
Mourid Barghouti poses important questions in his account of returning to
Ramallah: ‘A visitor? A refugee? A citizen? A guest? I do not know’. Return is in-
vested with profound emotional turmoil: ‘we had had to bear the clarity of dis-
placement and now we had to bear the uncertainty of return as well’. He speaks of
‘absentee love’ as the condition of being an exile: ‘[T]he long Occupation has suc-
ceeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Pales-
tine’, an idea that is upsetting as much as it is alluring.83 These reflections are about
time, place and belongings: memories of dispossession entail recalling the moment
of displacement as well as the loss of tangible assets. Palestinian memories have
been closely connected to place and place names in Palestinian refugee conscious-
ness and thus also of the keys to their property which were retained because, refu-
gees explained, ‘we locked our door and kept the key, expecting to return’.84 Keys
and maps acquired a complex symbolic significance: they connected refugees with
their property, but they also had the potential to trap refugees in a congealed past.
As Edward Said put it, ‘sometimes these objects, heavy with memory—albums,
rosary beads, shawls, little boxes—seem to me like encumbrances. We carry them
about, hang them up on every new set of walls we shelter in, reflect lovingly on
them’. He added that ‘then we do not notice the bitterness, but it continues and
grows nonetheless. Nor do we acknowledge the frozen immobility of our attitudes.
In the end the past owns us’.85

81
<http://www.shammout.com/>. Shammout inspired other refugees to try their hand. See Kamal
Boullata, ‘Artists Re-member Palestine in Beirut’ JPS, 32, no.4 (2003), 22–38, at 28–9.
82
<http://homepages.gac.edu/~lwren/AmericanIdentititesArt%20folder/AmericanIdentititesArt/
JacirEmily.html>, last accessed on 11 June 2012.
83
Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 11, 61–2, 73.
84
Susan Slyomovics, Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 54.
85
Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 23; Said, After the Last Sky, 14–17.
142 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Mapping the consequences of displacement was closely linked to this intense

historical awareness. More than 400 Palestinian villages were destroyed or badly
damaged during the war of 1948. Deir Yassin was renamed Givat Shaul, ‘a mere
suburb of Jerusalem, its main street a line of petrol stations, garages and high-rise
apartment blocks, more like the Edgware Road or Brooklyn than the scene of a
mass murder’.86 It was repopulated with Jewish refugees from Romania, Poland
and Slovakia. All traces of the Arab inhabitants of the village of Saffuriyya in
Galilee were erased by the Jewish National Fund; the travel brochure makes
much of the Roman archaeological remains but does not mention the original
Arab settlement.87
Another obliterated site was the twelfth-century Arab village of Ein Houd (‘Ayn
Hawd) in the mountains south of Haifa whose inhabitants traced their ancestry
back to one of Saladin’s generals who had been granted land during the Crusades.
The village which according to an official travel guide ‘had partly fallen into ruins’
was appropriated by the new state. It too underwent an official reincarnation. In
1953 the government decided to ‘preserve’ it as an artists’ colony and training
centre. Renamed Ein Hod, it became home to a group led by the Dadaist artist and
architect Marcel Janco (1895–1983), a refugee who narrowly escaped the Holo-
caust in his native Romania. The new owners, who included other refugees from
Central Europe, incorporated scattered stones from the original village in order to
retain elements of the old architectural forms, even preserving these features (as
they put it) ‘like a reservation of the [Native American] Indians’. The village
mosque was turned into a restaurant and bar, unashamedly named ‘Bonanza’,
which became a popular destination with visiting celebrities such as Eleanor
Roosevelt, the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye. What makes this example espe-
cially interesting is that Ein Hod was not the only new element in the Palestinian
landscape. The original villagers of Ein Houd moved to a nearby hill where they
built a settlement that they named Ein Houd Al-Jadīdah. Its status remains uncer-
tain; for years it had no running water, electricity or access roads. The memorial
book to the village of Ein Houd made it possible to recount vivid stories from its
medieval and recent past, and indirectly demonstrated how the arrival of one refu-
gee population was associated with the partial expurgation of the other.88
Like Armenian, Jewish, German, Cypriot and other refugees, Palestinians de-
voted considerable effort to the creation of village books that commemorate
abandoned settlements. This project has gone hand in hand with making a pho-
tographic record of sites in order to ‘breathe life into a name’.89 At Birzeit Uni-
versity Sharif Kanaana directed a team of Palestinian scholars who compiled
several hundred such volumes. These books are a lament for a world that has
been lost—‘all that remains’—not unlike the yizkor bukhn that recall Jewish life

86
Fisk, Pity the Nation, 23.
87
Matar, What It Means to be Palestinian, 42, 53.
88
Slyomovics, Object of Memory, 25.
89
Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
(Washington DC: Institute of Palestinian Studies, 1992), xvii.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 143

in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the Second World War. In the Palestinian
case they have also recreated the physical appearance, the kinship networks and
the trades of the old village as part of a deliberate attempt at what Ghada Karmi
terms ‘surrogate re-population’.90 Intimate knowledge of the village in these gaz-
etteers establishes an ‘authority to know’ and a claim to have the land restored to
Palestinian ownership.91 In a similar enterprise, Raja Shehadeh describes the
unhindered journeys that lasted for days during his youth when he could easily
traverse the hills and valleys around Ramallah, and that are now more or less
impossible. The author contrasts the pastoral landscape of the countryside he
knew as a boy, which was filled with flowers, olive bushes and vines, with today’s
polluted and fenced-in landscape, the consequence of Israel’s pursuit of territo-
rial aggrandizement and control.92
Tactile association with the lost villages went hand in hand with a sense of
having forfeited strong social and cultural ties. Refugees from villages in the West
Bank described a lush landscape that contrasted with the drab neighbourhoods in
the Jordanian capital Amman. Not only was the land fertile, it also conferred a
sense of being ‘blessed’ by one’s surroundings and one’s neighbours, in contrast to
their current situation. It was very different for Jewish refugees who survived the
Holocaust: those who were born in Poland, for example, reflected on their escape
from hostile neighbours. Time has not healed the rifts of displacement. If, to begin
with, Palestinian memories of good neighbourliness extended to Jews—‘many still
speak with appreciation of many of their Jewish friends and how well Jews and
Arabs could have lived together, had it not been for the aspirations of the Jewish
and Arab leadership’, wrote an American Quaker in 1949—six decades of humili-
ation have obliterated such sentiments.93
Something of the intensity of Palestinian memory work emerges in Mahmoud
Issa’s project to explore the history of Lubya, a small village in Galilee that was
home to around 2,700 people in 1945, including his parents who subsequently
moved to Wavel refugee camp in Baalbeck, Lebanon. Israeli officials demolished
the village in 1948 and rebuilt it as a kibbutz to house Jewish immigrants from
Britain. It is now a tourist stop on the road from Haifa to Nazareth. Issa recon-
structed what he could of the intricate social relations in Lubya. His interviews
with former residents suggested that some historical events, such as Salah al Din’s
(Saladin’s) battle of Hittin in 1187 and Napoleon’s march through the village on
his way to besiege Akka (Acre) were ‘enthusiastically recounted’ as if part of their
personal heritage. Refugees retained a keen sense of time and place.94 Likewise,

90
Karmi, In Search of Fatima, 186; Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (eds), From a Ruined
Garden: the Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998).
91
Rochelle Davis, ‘Mapping the Past, Re-creating the Homeland: Memories of Village Places in
Pre-1948 Palestine’, in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod (eds), Nakba, 53–75, at 60.
92
Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile Books, 2007).
93
Salim Tamari and Elia Zureik, Reinterpreting the Historical Record: the Uses of Palestinian Refugee
Archives for Social Science Research and Policy Analysis (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2001),
126; Rochelle Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011), 190–1.
94
Issa, ‘Resisting Oblivion’, 17.
144 Mid-Century Maelstrom

villagers from the West Bank village of Artas located the upheavals in 1948 and
1967 in the context of previous events such as the invasion in the 1830s by
Egyptian forces led by Ibrahim Pasha who expelled them from their homes.95 In
these ways, history is continuously being reinterpreted; a command of factual
knowledge from the distant past helps to underscore and validate claims to the
‘homeland’. Even the momentous significance attached to 1948 has not loos-
ened other rich and extensive webs of meaning. This memory work was no less
pronounced among Jews who commemorate their Central and Eastern Euro-
pean forebears and the terrible destruction of European Jewry. Unhappily the
commemoration of their arrival in Palestine went hand in hand with erasing
traces of the Palestinian past. Mahmoud Darwish spoke of his encounter with a
young Jewish boy who was amazed to learn that the stones on which they stood
were the remnants of a Palestinian Arab village and not, as he had been led to
believe, the ruins of a Roman settlement.96
In time the catastrophe of 1948 took its place among other crucial episodes,
such as the violent invasion of refugee camps and the first and second Intifadas.
Palestinian freedom fighters were often unwilling to commemorate the Nakba
because they construed it as a moment of weakness and shame that needed to be
exorcised. Lament turned into a more politically conscious programme of organi-
zation and militancy, designed to support al-awda or return. But these projects did
not always make headway. A study of refugees in the West Bank found that after
40 years some of them had grown ‘committed to a “return” to Palestine conceived
abstractly’, as if a virtual homeland had become the chief point of reference.97 Yet
more troubling to the nationalist project was that some younger refugees mani-
fested indifference, as did boys in Shatila who were more interested in games of
pinball and the teenager who countered, ‘Shit to the right of return, we want to
live!’, expressing a different kind of estrangement that needs to be taken seriously.
More complex still were the attitudes of Palestinians who were able to return to
Palestine—or more commonly to visit it for the first time—following the Oslo
Accords in 1993. Some of the so-called ‘Aideen’, senior returnees who joined the
Palestinian Authority after having lived in Tunisia, were despised by local Palestin-
ian residents. The children of the Aideen found it confusing to adjust to life in
a land that had often been portrayed in a romanticized fashion, even if they too
affirmed a deep attachment to the ‘homeland’.98
Edward Said wrote that ‘there are many different kinds of Palestinian experi-
ence, which cannot all be assembled into one. One would therefore have to write
parallel histories of the communities in Lebanon, the occupied territories and so
on. It is almost impossible to imagine a single narrative’. He continued, ‘since the
main features of our present existence are dispossession, dispersion, and yet also a
kind of power incommensurate with our stateless exile, I believe that essentially

95 96
Naïla, ‘Memories of Home’, 66. Parmenter, Giving Voice to Stones, 2.
97
Bisharat, ‘Exile to Compatriot’, 234.
98
Juliane Hammer, Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (Austin:
Texas University Press, 2005), 93–8; Allan, ‘Politics of Witness’, 261.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 145

unconventional, hybrid and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to

represent us’. Among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, according to Diana Allan,
‘cultural transmission is occurring less through an oral, performative tradition that
memorialises 1948 than fragmentary moments that make up the idiomatic fabric
of everyday life’. This is a salutary reminder of differences of gender, status and age,
as well as of differences between refugees who fled to the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan
or Lebanon, and the Palestinians who already lived there, and between refugees
and those who were internally displaced. Older women in Shatila adopted the
structures of traditional story-telling to make their accounts memorable, whereas
younger informants preferred the heroic narratives of Palestinian radicalism.
Others manifested a less secure attachment to the national narrative. Women who
belonged to the half-obscured Palestinian minority inside Israel had to come
to terms with the fact that the state recognized only one narrative, and it was
certainly not the Nakba.99

C O N C LU S I O N S

Displacement has marked the history of both Jews and Palestinians alike. The
worldwide population of Jews stands at approximately 14 million, of whom
six million live in Israel and a substantial number in North America. There
are more than 9.5 million Palestinians worldwide. Nearly four million live in
desperate straits in Gaza and in the West Bank, and close on five million in
neighbouring Arab states as well as in other parts of the globe. Around one
million Palestinians live in Israel itself, not all of them as refugees but as so-
cially marginalized and politically powerless. Nowhere in the Middle East can
it be said that Jews and Palestinians lead a secure existence, Jews because they
feel threatened by adjacent states and Palestinians because they lack a state of
their own.
Generally speaking Jews and Palestinians experienced displacement as a pain-
ful and disfiguring process. The contours of displacement were marked before
1948 when Palestinian farmers migrated to towns and cities in search of a better
life. The same applies to Jews who settled in Palestine long before the Holo-
caust. Jewish experience was closely linked to transcontinental migration and to
devastating Nazi resettlement programmes. The Holocaust and the events of
1948 turned the worlds of Jews and Palestinians upside down in a way they
could not have anticipated. Large numbers of Holocaust survivors found a
home in the new state of Israel where memories of pre-war life have been insti-
tutionalized in museums, libraries and archives containing precious items saved
from Nazi Germany. Most Palestinians had to flee. Their objects of memory are

99
Said, After the Last Sky, 6; Allan, ‘Mythologising Al-Nakba’, 49; Kassem, Palestinian Women,
64–81.
146 Mid-Century Maelstrom

equally precious, but they are hidden from view because the lack of a state
means there is nowhere to display them publicly.
Palestinians are acutely aware of the conditions that created their prolonged
displacement, even though most of those alive today had no direct experience of
the Nakba. The same applies to Israelis, who live in a state that rejects any respon-
sibility for the plight of Palestinians. Of far greater significance is the legacy of the
Second World War that ultimately sustains Israel’s legitimacy. David Grossman has
written of how, ‘in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched
out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it. Even if you were very
careful, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the
possibility of existence’. Grossman became aware of life’s fragility. The knowledge
of what happened—or what was vouchsafed—was of fundamental importance as
survivors and their children confronted life choices.100 Israel’s guardianship of
Jewish identity is nevertheless problematic, as we shall see in chapter 8 when dis-
cussing the ‘rescue’ of a group of Jews from an unlikely quarter.
By the middle of the twentieth century it was clear that the fortunes of Jews and
Palestinians were closely entwined in terms of conflict. The battle lines were de-
scribed by Barghouti in his comments on Yitzhak Rabin’s appropriation of the
discourse of suffering: ‘[H]e knew how to demand that the world should respect
Israeli tears, and he was able to present Israel as the victim of a crime perpetrated
by us. He changed facts, he altered the order of things, and he presented us as the
initiators of violence in the Middle East. The Israelis occupy our homes as victims
and present us to the world as killers’.101 The war of words and weapons continues
unabated. One telling example was the furore caused by John Adams’ compelling
opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), based on the hijacking by the Palestine
Liberation Front of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. Adams included a
moving lament entitled ‘Chorus of the exiled Palestinians’, which led amongst
other things to a fatuous charge of anti-Semitism, his critics disregarding the fact
that this passage was immediately followed by a ‘Chorus of Exiled Jews’.
The historian can at least point out common experiences of persecution and
commemoration. Consider Naji al-‘Ali’s description of his famous cartoon
creation:
Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age, I left
my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start
growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become
normal again when the homeland returns. I presented him to the poor and named
him Handala as a symbol of bitterness. At first, he was a Palestinian child, but his
consciousness developed to have a national and then a global and human horizon. He
is a simple yet tough child, and this is why people adopted him and felt that he repre-
sents their consciousness.102

100
‘Confronting the Beast’, The Guardian, 15 September 2007.
101
Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 177–8.
102
<http://www.handala.org/handala.html>.
 Jews, Palestinians, and the Torment of Displacement 147

‘Simplicity and toughness’ will surely be recognizable to Israelis who stop to reflect
on the broader meaning of these attributes. The image of a refugee who ‘never grew
up’ encapsulates the lives that were forfeited prematurely by Jews and Palestinians
alike. It has a universal quality, describing the sense of being suspended in mid-air
or—in Barghouti’s phrase—trapped between commas.
 5
Midnight’s Refugees?
Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan

[In answer to the question, ‘What were you doing on 15 August 1947?’]
What do you think we were doing? Wondering where we’d be the next day,
whether we’d be able to stay on, even in this place. That’s what we were doing
(Atam Singh, Sikh shopkeeper)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

In South Asia, as in the Middle East, the retreat from empire reshaped the relation-
ship between population and territory. Widespread violence accompanied the divi-
sion of India in 1947, unleashing mass displacement as people from different
ethno-religious backgrounds fled either towards Pakistan or India. Broadly speak-
ing the ‘refugee problem’ was contained within South Asia. Whilst this placed
enormous strain on the resources of both countries, the emergence of a regional
refugee regime helped define India and Pakistan as sovereign nation-states. In other
words relief efforts required and enabled India and Pakistan to establish their legiti-
macy by making material provision for refugees and finding them a place in the
new society. The formation of new states went hand in hand with the management
of refugees on behalf of the nation.
Partition constituted the first but not the last territorial reconfiguration of
the Indian sub-continent. Less than a quarter century later Pakistan itself broke
asunder. Bangladesh’s war of independence created a crisis second only in mag-
nitude to that of 1947. The number of refugees shot up from 120,000 to three
and a half million within a matter of weeks in the spring of 1971. Key questions
once again came to the fore: who belonged to the nation and who did not?
What responsibilities did the state have towards refugees, and vice versa? What
role might international organizations and NGOs play in the crisis? What views
did refugees hold of their predicament and what hopes for the future did they
entertain?
The territorial division of India in August 1947 had devastating and largely
unforeseen consequences. The suddenness with which British officials reached a
decision—at the start of the year they spoke vaguely of leaving India ‘no later than
June 1948’—reflected but also provoked an outpouring of hostility between
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 149

Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. As violence intensified so, too, did support for an
accelerated partition as the best prospect for restoring a semblance of normality. Sir
Cyril Radcliffe chaired a commission that drew up the proposed boundary between
the two new states. Radcliffe left India after a few weeks without a hair out of place;
millions of others did not have such a lucky escape.1 The terrible violence that ac-
companied Partition formed the backdrop to a much greater movement of refugees.
Around 850,000 refugees moved from Pakistan to India in just 42 days between
mid-September and late October 1947. Much of this upheaval occurred in Punjab.
In Bengal, by contrast cross-border movement was less rigorously enforced and
migration in both directions assumed a different pace compared to the west.2
Notwithstanding the accumulating evidence of inter-communal tension, the
signatories to the agreement that divided the Raj did not expect the transfer of
power and the partition of India to be accompanied by a mass movement of popu-
lation. Partition was conceived as a means of preventing migration on a large scale,
because the borders would be adjusted instead. Minorities need not be troubled by
the new configuration. As Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, af-
firmed, ‘the division of India into Pakistan and India Dominions was based on the
principle that minorities will stay where they were and that the two states will
afford all protection to them as citizens of the respective states’. This view was
widely shared on both sides. But the arrangement whereby more than two-thirds
of India’s Muslim population were assigned to Pakistan, leaving a sizeable Muslim
minority in India, was not regarded as immutable. Indian Prime Minister Jawaha-
rlal Nehru said that ‘we expected that the partition would be temporary, that Paki-
stan was bound to come back to us’.3 Contrary to his expectations, the separation
of Pakistan and India proved to be not provisional but permanent.
The process of nation-building in India and Pakistan assumed that refugees
would conform to government expectations to be grateful for relief and to become
accustomed to rehabilitation. Such assumptions did not include the expectation
that refugees would speak on their own behalf. What did this imply for refugees’
testimony? In recent years oral historians have begun to pay attention to popular
memories of Partition, including the stories told by female survivors and by those
who came to their assistance. This historiography forms part of a broader argument
about the nature of suffering and ‘victimhood’ that continues to resonate in the
turbulent party politics of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The history of displace-
ment from above and from below has inevitably been politicized.4

1
W.H. Auden’s poem, ‘Partition’ (1966), made this point in blistering fashion.
2
Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: the Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape,
1947–1952’ MAS, 33, no.1 (1999), 185–242; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: the Making of India
and Pakistan (Yale University Press, 2007), 129, 156.
3
Tahir Hasnein Naqvi, ‘The Politics of Commensuration: Violence of Partition and the Making of
the Pakistani State’ Journal of Historical Sociology, 20, nos.1–2 (2007), 44–71, at 59; Alok Bhalla,
Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46.
4
Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009); Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, 136–45.
150 Mid-Century Maelstrom

The drama of Partition was brought to life by novelists, photographers, film

makers and others. British civil servant Penderel Moon compared the violence
to the atrocities committed during the Napoleonic Wars as drawn by Goya.5
Renowned contemporary photo-journalists including Margaret Bourke-White and
Sambhu Saha created images of refugees in different settings. Henri Cartier-Bres-
son took photos in one of the enormous refugee camps in Delhi as well as of
Muslim refugees on crowded trains destined for Lahore. They appeared alongside
his photos of market scenes and princely ceremonies, as if he wanted to set the vio-
lence of Partition against a broader background of more tranquil ‘tradition’. Later
on the UN and NGOs and the government of India reproduced powerful photo-
graphs of suffering in Bangladesh and India to legitimize their intervention. These
representations affected the form and extent of relief efforts and assessments of the
future prospects for refugees.

PA RT I T I O N I N G P U N J A B

The decision to enforce a partition of India was announced on 3 June 1947.

This was not a foregone conclusion. In 1940 leaders of the prominent Muslim
League advocated a ‘Pak Commonwealth of Nations’ with Muslim-majority
populations in delineated territories including ‘Pakistan’, ‘Bangistan’ and ‘Os-
manistan’. Two and a half months after giving notice of partition, and immedi-
ately following formal independence, officials made public the demarcation of
the new borders. Gone was the idea of a patchwork of Muslim polities. Pakistan
now emerged as a bifurcated state divided between West Pakistan, created from
the North-West Frontier Provinces, Baluchistan, Sindh and West Punjab, and
East Pakistan on the other, comprising East Bengal and the Sylhet district of
Assam. Some Hindu politicians and officials affected a relaxed attitude towards
partition, loftily arguing that ‘Hindustan is the elephant and Pakistan the two
ears. The elephant can live without the ears’.6 This peremptory suggestion failed
to take account of the violence and mass migration that preceded and followed
the division of the Raj.
Politicians were overtaken by events. No sooner had the new border commis-
sions began their work but migration occurred on a massive scale. Contemporary
descriptions evoked a sense of panic as news reached remote settlements of the
decisions taken in the corridors of power and of growing mass violence. Outbreaks
of violence between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were already commonplace in the
final months of the Raj. The level of violence was far greater in Punjab than else-
where. Muslims fled from Bihar to Western Punjab at the end of 1946 and during

5
Khan, The Great Partition, 129.
6
K.M. Panikkar, quoted in Khan, The Great Partition, 87. ‘Pakistan’ is a compound term coined
by Rehmat Ali in 1933, referring to Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sindh and Baluchistan. Partition
created sovereign Indian enclaves within Pakistan and vice versa.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 151

the first half of 1947, whilst Sikhs and Hindus moved in the opposite direction. In
March 1947 Rawalpindi was aflame. Around half a million Muslims and an equal
number of Hindus fled their homes before the handover of power in August 1947,
expecting to feel safer in areas where their community was in the majority.7 The
announcement of the British withdrawal precipitated jockeying for position be-
tween rival politico-religious groups and militias in the midst of disintegrating
political authority and uncertainty about the dividing line between the two pro-
posed states. Decisions about state frontiers, particularly in the Punjab, infuriated
those Indians who wanted a very substantial ‘elephant’ and Muslim League leaders
such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his followers who anticipated large ‘ears’.
In all, around 7.5 million Hindus and Sikhs and six million Muslims crossed the
newly created borders of India and Pakistan between 1947 and 1951 (see Map 6).
More than four-fifths of this total crossed the frontier between India and West
Pakistan in Punjab, where Radcliffe’s line placed 27 per cent of Punjab’s Muslim
population under Indian administration and one-third of its Hindu and Sikh pop-
ulation under the authority of Pakistan. In Amritsar, where Muslims made up
nearly half the total population of the city before Partition, only a tiny handful
remained. This is not to say that people moved directly from one country to the
other; Muslim households spent months in temporary camps in India, in the ex-
pectation that they would not need to relocate permanently. Jinnah himself ex-
pressed the hope that ‘officials of the opposite community [in Punjab] would at a
later stage come back’.8
Both governments arranged hundreds of convoys by train and lorry, or by foot.
Railway staff worked overtime to keep the ‘refugee specials’ going. A Military Evac-
uation Organization was established by mutual agreement on 3 September 1947
to arrange for the organized transfer of refugees in Punjab. Eye-witnesses described
never-ending lines of refugees moving in both directions along the Great Trunk
Road. In September a huge fleet of 400,000 people moved from Lyallpur in West
Punjab to India, taking eight days to pass through a given point; officials had an
immense job arranging for rest stops, food and medical aid, as well as keeping the
different convoys apart. People took to the airwaves of All-India Radio to seek in-
formation about family members. Nor did the uncertainty cease once refugees
reached a place of relative safety. Local newspapers reported desperation both on
the faces of the refugee ‘influx’ and of officials and charity workers. In Delhi the
correspondent of The Times (London) wrote of refugees as ‘carriers of infectious
disease and mental derangement’. Graphic accounts helped validate bureaucratic
intervention in order to assist the displaced survivors, who were deemed incapable
of managing their own affairs. A visiting American psychologist described ‘a group
of straggling sufferers trying to pull together the fragments of a life lost, and unable

7
Ravinder Kaur, ‘The Last Journey: Exploring Social Class in the 1947 Partition Migration’ Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly (3 June 2006), 2221–8.
8
Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41.
 Refugee Movements

Hindus and Sikhs

JAMMU AND Muslims

AFGHANISTAN KASHMIR
Rawalpindi 0 500 km

Lahore C H I N A
Lyallpur Amritsar
Chandigarh
T N
S Kurukshetra
E TA
W I S Delhi Nilokheri
K
A Faridabad N E
P PA
L
BHUTAN
Jaipur Kathmandu

SIND BIHAR

Karachi
Dhaka
I N D I A
Ahmedabad
Jirat
Calcutta

YA EAST PAKISTAN BURMA

AN
K AR

Bombay
DA
N
DA

Arabian Sea Hyderabad Bay of Bengal

Map 6: Map of Partition and Population Movements, 1947

 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 153

to do so’, clearly implying that refugees faced an uphill and perhaps impossible
struggle to recover their composure.9 This underestimated their resourcefulness.
The idea of an abrupt migration or raula in Punjab captured official and popular
imagination alike. Most officials in the dying Raj were unprepared for the violence
and the intensity of population displacement. Officials described it as a ‘vivisec-
tion’ and even as a ‘holocaust’.10 The Director-General of the Office of Rehabilita-
tion expressed a widely-held view about the flight of Hindu and Sikh refugees from
West to East Punjab:
The hand that was sowing the seed in the fields in the morning was hurriedly packing
in the afternoon. When at the time of evacuation the farmers yoked their bullocks to
the carts which formed their mile-long caravans they looked wistfully at their houses,
granaries full of wheat, and orchards of oranges which they had planted with so much
care. The only choice before them was to say goodbye to the land of their birth. When
their world turned upside down, the refugees, especially in the villages, were com-
pletely unprepared for the enormous calamity of displacement which had befallen
them.11
Abrupt it may have been, but Partition formed part of a long history of migration
in Punjab. Sikh farmers from around Amritsar settled in the famous canal colonies
on the North-West frontier in the late nineteenth century, until Partition forced
their descendants to return to a ‘home’ they had never known. Hindu farmers who
cultivated the rich cotton and wheat fields in West Punjab likewise ended up re-
turning to their ancestral villages as refugees. Thus the drama of Partition in Punjab
took place on a stage that had already witnessed significant demographic
disturbance.12

PA RT I T I O N I N G B E N G A L

In contrast to Punjab the situation in Bengal was a great deal more fluid—an
Indian social worker who became a government minister described it as ‘a case of
slow poisoning’.13 But we should not underestimate the impact of violence imme-
diately before and after the British withdrawal. In Calcutta, the Muslim League
called for a day of ‘direct action’ on 16 August 1946 in support of a Muslim state.

9
Gardner Murphy, In the Minds of Men: the Study of Human Behavior and Social Tensions in India
(New York: Basic Books, 1953), 167.
10
Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 188; U. Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation (Delhi: Department
of Rehabilitation, 1967), 1; Mohinda S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: an Account of the Rehabilitation
of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh: Public Relations Depart-
ment, 1954), 12–25.
11
Randhawa, Out of the Ashes, 33.
12
Uditi Sen, ‘Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands’,
in Panayi and Virdee (eds), Refugees and the End of Empire, 291–44; Amrith, ‘Reconstructing the
“Plural Society” ’.
13
Ritu Menon (ed.), No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh Write on the
Partition of India (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004), 201.
154 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Impoverished Muslim labourers attacked Hindu shopkeepers, leaving at least

5,000 people dead. Three months later, pogroms in Noakhali, East Bengal, re-
sulted in similar casualties when a small number of Muslim demagogues incited
the crowd to terrorize the population and demanded that Hindu women convert.
Often construed as ‘irrational’, from the point of view of the perpetrators these
attacks on private property were carefully considered tactics to compel owners to
abandon their homes and businesses, which they duly did.
A two-way flow took place as Muslim officials who had been employed by the
Raj now moved to East Pakistan in the hope of maintaining their status, an impor-
tant reminder that some people looked upon Partition as an opportunity and a
blessing rather than as a dead-end or curse. Although on average 12,000 refugees
moved each day from East Pakistan to India in 1948, many more stayed where
they were. Nevertheless, tensions between the Hindus who remained in East Paki-
stan on the one hand, and Muslims who remained in India on the other, ran high:
anti-Hindu riots in East Pakistan in 1950 were for these people the final straw. As
realization dawned that they faced social humiliation and economic marginaliza-
tion, the exodus became unstoppable.14
Although some Hindu families anticipated a difficult time if they stayed in East
Bengal, most expected the plans to be overturned and resolved to stay in their own
homes and await the reunification of the country. Until the early 1950s, individual
Muslims and Hindus, their status uncertain and contested, shuttled back and forth
across the border between India and East Pakistan. Migrants did not require pass-
ports until 1952, although both governments introduced permits in 1948 in an
attempt to regulate cross-border travel. Thereafter those who overstayed, including
Indian Muslims who visited relatives in Pakistan before returning to India, were
liable to be deported. This was a shocking introduction to the realities of post-
imperial state formation. Not for nothing did people lament the immutable and
impermeable line that now demarcated India and Pakistan.15
The government of West Bengal distinguished between ‘victims of communal
violence’ and economic migrants who hoped to improve their prospects by cross-
ing the border. Ministers argued that newly arriving migrants from East Pakistan
were not exposed to communal violence and therefore had no claim on govern-
ment funds; there was a grain of truth in this charge, insofar as many workers
crossed the frontier to take advantage of new employment opportunities. Underly-
ing these tough new responses was the view that West Bengal could not cope with
a large influx of Hindu refugees. Nehru shared this opinion, although his main
motive was not to antagonize Pakistan by implying that East Pakistan was making
life intolerable for the Hindu minority. The government of West Bengal hoped to
deter refugees from leaving East Bengal by making it clear that they could expect

14
Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: an Eye-Witness Account of the Partition of India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1962).
15
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refu-
gees, Boundaries, and Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 205–8.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 155

unfavourable conditions should they opt for India. Tens of thousands of Hindus
who reached the outskirts of Calcutta by steamer or on jungle pathways were held
at a reception centre at Sealdah railway station for months whilst officials decided
their fate. The authorities distinguished between ‘genuine’ and ‘undeserving’ claim-
ants, rejecting the claims to relief payments of those who failed to register with the
authorities before the end of 1948, on the grounds that they had missed their
chance.
These deterrents had little effect. By the middle of 1948 the number of refugees
who entered West Bengal topped the one million mark, and two years later this
figure had trebled. In April 1950 Nehru signed an agreement with Liaquat Ali
Khan, his opposite number in Pakistan, giving migrants on both sides the right to
return to their homes and have their property restored to them. However, the loss
of status and income faced by middle-class Hindu families in East Pakistan meant
that they had little choice but to leave and to make use if possible of the connec-
tions they had built up in the past. In all, some 4.2 million Bengalis left East Paki-
stan between 1947 and 1962.16
Elsewhere a foretaste of things to come emerged in Kashmir about the unresolved
status of refugees who fled to West Pakistan during the war that India and Pakistan
fought in November 1947 over the princely states of Kashmir and Jammu. Border
towns quickly expanded in size. By 1949 the total including in Pakistan-adminis-
tered Azad Kashmir numbered 582,000 refugees, more than half of whom were
living in camps organized by the government in Lahore on the understanding that
‘temporary rehabilitation’ would cease when the war ended and they could go back
to their homes. Others were displaced within what became the Indian-administered
territory of Jammu-and-Kashmir, where they squatted on land that had been vacated
by refugees who fled to Pakistan. Sixty years on, their number has grown through
natural increase, and their ‘temporary’ status has in effect become permanent.17

RELIEF MEASURES AFTER 1947

In Pakistan much of the responsibility for emergency provision fell upon the new
provincial government in West Punjab, but the refugee crisis provided Jinnah with
an opportunity in November 1947 to express his faith in the ‘morale, fortitude and
courage displayed by the refugees’, adding that they should help one another and
insisting that ‘nothing is going to shake Pakistan’. Muslim refugees had made a
‘sacrifice’ that should be recognized by those who had not been uprooted.18 Officials

16
Joya Chatterji, ‘ “Dispersal” and the Failure of Rehabilitation: Refugee Camp-dwellers and
Squatters in West Bengal’ MAS, 41, no.5 (2007), 995–1032; Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal
Men: the Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal (Calcutta: Naya Udyog, 1999), 11–22.
17
Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 766–7; Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, ‘Too Much Na-
tionality: Kashmiri Refugees, the South Asian Refugee Regime, and a Refugee State, 1947–1974’, JRS,
25, no.2 (2012), 344–65.
18
Saleem Ullah Khan, The Journey to Pakistan: a Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad:
National Documentation Centre, 1993), 294–5.
156 Mid-Century Maelstrom

described the newcomers as muhajirs who had incurred enormous losses on behalf
of their fledgling state. One outcome was that the local authorities in Karachi who
complained that the city was ‘overflowing’ and unable to accommodate any more
refugees faced the wrath of newly legitimized muhajir spokesmen who played on
the idea of their ‘sacrifice’ for the nation, a stance that was later institutionalized in
the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, which now complains that the Pakistani state
treated the 1947-vintage refugees as second-class citizens.19
In India, too, rhetoric was accompanied by material assistance. A new Ministry
for Relief and Rehabilitation on 6 September 1947 managed 45 refugee camps in
East Punjab alone, providing temporary accommodation for between 10,000 and
50,000 refugees apiece. At one stage the government administered 160 camps
housing 1.2 million refugees. A huge camp near the holy city of Kurukshetra
north-west of Delhi took on the appearance of a tented city with schools, hospitals,
clinics and shops that at one stage served a quarter of a million refugees. The gov-
ernment made emergency services available including facilities for Hindu and Sikh
women to terminate the pregnancies that resulted from rape at the hands of Muslim
men.20
The crisis provided an opportunity for domestic NGOs to present themselves as
part of the new order. In Pakistan Begum Liaquat Ali Khan (wife of the Prime
Minister) headed the Pakistan Voluntary Service which distributed food, clothing
and medicine. Jami’at al Islam (JAI) administered camps for Muslim refugees,
amongst whom it sought donations for its cause. In India the Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh (National Volunteers’ Union, established in 1925) administered refu-
gee camps, and lost no time in using its position to assert the superiority of Hindu
religion and culture.21 Social workers from the Tata School of Social Sciences in
Bombay and the Indian Boy Scouts helped administer Kurukshetra camp. Exter-
nal organizations such as the YMCA, Catholic Relief Services and the Quakers
provided food and medicine. Richard Symonds, who assisted with famine relief in
Calcutta in 1942–44, returned in 1947 to work with the Friends Service Unit in
Delhi, Punjab and Kashmir, where he praised the work done by Indian and Paki-
stani troops to provide a safe passage to trainloads of refugees.22
By and large international assistance was disappointing. Europe was preoccu-
pied with its own ‘DP problem’. Events in the sub-continent did not directly con-
nect with Cold War concerns, nor did the USA associate the crisis with its ‘strategic
interests’, as it did in Korea and the Middle East. India’s Minister of Relief and
Rehabilitation regretted that ‘the powerful tide of international help flowed past
the vast area of our own tragedy without as much lapping at its fringes’. The 1951

19
Zamindar, The Long Partition, 238; Ian Talbot, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: the Aftermath of Partition
for Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1957’ MAS, 41, no.1 (2007), 151–85.
20
Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, 46–7; testimony of Jogendra Singh, in Menon, No Woman’s
Land, 187–94; testimony of Mrs Kuljeet Kaur, in Ian Talbot and Darshan Singh Tatla (eds), Epicentre
of Violence: Partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), 135–41.
21
Jean A. Curran, ‘The RSS: Militant Hinduism’ Far Eastern Survey, 19, no.10 (1950), 93–8.
22
Richard Symonds, In the Margins of Independence: a Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 43, 70.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 157

Convention made no provision for refugees in the Indian sub-continent. India and
Pakistan refused to sign, complaining about its European focus but also encroach-
ment on state sovereignty. UNHCR therefore had no role to play.23 The two gov-
ernments trod a difficult path, on the one hand resisting external interference but
hoping on the other for a contribution from wealthy Western countries.
In this unfavourable situation, UNICEF, the ICRC and the World Health Or-
ganization (WHO) spoke of being overwhelmed by the scale of the task. The Brit-
ish Red Cross launched hospitals and dispensaries. Individual relief workers
(including the wife of the last Viceroy of India, Edwina, Countess Mountbatten
who chaired the emergency United Council for Relief and Welfare at Nehru’s re-
quest) acted on their own account. Indian women worked tirelessly in Punjab
helping to arrange health care and education. Subsequent accounts of ‘rehabilita-
tion’ construed this in terms of the refined sensibilities of individuals: ‘What one
needed here were virtues alien to bureaucratic routine—sympathy, understanding,
great compassion, the urge to succour and sustain, attributes almost of divinity’.
Women’s groups mobilized to supply food, shelter and medical care to the refugee
camps, frequently drawing on the organizational experience they acquired during
the Bengal famine of 1943.24
India and Pakistan duly made legislative provision for Partition refugees. As
explained earlier, the government of West Bengal limited its obligations by restrict-
ing assistance to those who had been displaced before the end of June 1948. In
Pakistan all citizens, including Hindus, were expected to contribute to the Jinnah
Fund to assist refugees from India. Little information is available about the overall
impact of Partition on the budget of either state, but it must have been consider-
able; according to one source the Indian Treasury spent the equivalent of $67 mil-
lion in 1950 prices (322 million rupees) on refugee camps alone in 1947–50.25
The two governments eventually agreed a complex compensation package for
those who lost property as a result of Partition. India passed the Displaced Persons
(Legal Proceedings) Act in 1949. Pakistan issued a property ordinance in 1950
followed by the Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act in
1958. Under the terms of these acts refugees were deemed to be people who fled
‘civil disturbances or the fear of disturbances’. In practice this meant that India
recognized Hindus and Sikhs as ‘displaced persons’, whereas departing Muslims
were defined as ‘evacuees’, whose flight enabled non-Muslims to be settled on the
vacated property. Attempts to manage the financial consequences were conten-
tious: the Indian government complained of a serious imbalance, because the value
of the property that Hindu and Sikh refugees left behind in Pakistan far exceeded
that of Muslims who fled India. Another key component in the bilateral agreement
was the insistence that ‘non-agreed’ refugees should stay where they were; but those

23
Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, 3; Loescher, UNHCR, 57.
24
Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal,
1947–1950’, in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 74–110,
at 88.
25
Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 746.
158 Mid-Century Maelstrom

who did so found themselves at a disadvantage when it came to redistributing the

assets that the Hindu population left behind following their departure for India.26
In the midst of this violent turmoil, displaced people tried to affirm a sense of
self-worth. Hindus who fled East Pakistan rejected the term ‘refugee’, claiming
instead that they were forced to leave in order to help build the new state of India:
‘[W]e did not (as one organisation put it) fight for independence in order to lead
the lives of beggars’. They demanded compensation, not charity. Appealing to the
history of nineteenth-century migration to the canal colonies a Punjabi farmer
wrote many years later of how he countered the taunts of onlookers by saying ‘we
are not refugees, we are your brothers, and now we have come back to our native
lands’, but that ‘ “refugee” was a tag we carried [and] whenever the term was men-
tioned, we felt ashamed’.27 Only when making an ironic comment on the lack of
official recognition did they speak of themselves as ‘refugees’ in need of protection
(sharanarthi), a term that carried demeaning connotations. Normally they claimed
to be bastuhara, meaning people who had lost their home, hearth or ‘foundations’
(bastu), or pursharthi, believers in self-help.28 Erstwhile government officials who
moved from India to East Pakistan similarly refused to be labelled as refugees—
refugees were those ‘who had to run away for some reason’—and instead described
themselves as ‘optees’ who staked a legitimate claim to citizenship.29
Refugees displayed contrasting modes of petitioning government officials. One
anonymous activist wrote in the following terms in 1948:
I am coming from Frontier Province [Pakistan] where I worked in the Congress for
about 26 years. My work was appreciated by the Provincial Congress as well as by our
great leader, Pandit Jawaharlal [Nehru]. I remained in jail several times in connection
with the civil disobedience movement. I came here with bare head and three clothes
on my body. I am seeking the way to serve my motherland under Congress discipline
but regret to say that still I could not find way to start. Nobody knows me here and
my work done in the Congress fold in my dear Province. Here in UP [Uttar Pradesh]
I want to pass my further life [but] the Congress organisations are ignoring me. Now
I am 56 and forcibly exiled from my home [and] I am wandering disappointed. Will
you kindly advise me what to do and where to do in this critical moment of my life?
I have also extreme heart still to serve my national country.
Another spoke on behalf of a broader community (Panchayat), in a letter submit-
ted in 1948 to the Prime Minister of Bombay: ‘Though all of us have lost every-
thing, we have not lost faith in Providence and endeavour. Though poor we would
hesitate to be a burden on your most benevolent Govt. We have been by nature
most docile and immobile in our trade and traditions. We therefore request that a

26
Tahir Naqvi, ‘Migration, Sacrifice and the Crisis of Muslim Nationalism’ JRS, 25, no.2 (2012),
474–90.
27
Pippa Virdee, ‘ “No Home but in Memory”: the Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab’, in
Panayi and Virdee (eds), Refugees and the End of Empire, 175–95, at 188.
28
Kaur, Since 1947, 183–4; Ram N. Saksena, Refugees: a Study in Changing Attitudes (Bombay:
Asia Publishing House, 1961), 47.
29
N. Mahbubar Rahman and Willem van Schendel, ‘ “I Am Not a Refugee”: Rethinking Partition
History’ MAS, 37, no.3 (2003), 551–84, at 564.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 159

portion of one [of the above named camps] be given to our Panchayat people all in
a Group in one camp, on rental system. This will facilitate us to retain our old
customs, trade and traditions and brotherhood and shall be able to help each other
through thick and thin’.30
These were not isolated instances of collective self-assertiveness. Refugees from
East Bengal organized themselves into camp committees (see later in this chapter).
In West Pakistan, Muslim refugees who reached Karachi complained about the
difficulty of getting compensation for the property they lost, and the corruption
involved in reaching a settlement. Similar stories emerged in India. Sometimes
refugees’ anger culminated in direct action, as in protests against the living condi-
tions that they were expected to tolerate. But this was a dangerous course to pursue.
In Jaipur, for instance, organized protests in 1949 led to the deaths of 15 refugees
at the hands of armed police who were called in by the Ministry of Relief and
Rehabilitation, another indication that the dangers faced by displaced persons
could come from any quarter.31

F RO M ‘ R E H A B I L I TAT I O N ’ TO ‘ D E V E L O P M E N T ’

The political, economic, social and demographic impact of displacement plays an

important part in the story of Partition. How could it be otherwise, when every
tenth person in Pakistan was a refugee (in Karachi and Lahore the proportion rose
to at least half ) and when something close to one-third of Delhi’s inhabitants were
refugees? Delhi lost 330,000 Muslim inhabitants, but by 1955 its population had
increased to 1.7 million, nearly twice as great as its pre-Partition size. The popula-
tion of Bombay rocketed from 1.4 million on the eve of Partition to 2.3 million in
1950, a net increase all the more remarkable for the forced departure of most of its
Muslim inhabitants. The situation in Calcutta was particularly unstable, but it cre-
ated opportunities for refugees to make their mark in more ways than one. It
became a magnet for middle-class refugees and for artisans from East Bengal with
contacts in the city. Other refugees followed in their wake, keen to maintain a
distinction between themselves and plebeian newcomers. Displacement entailed
rapid downward social mobility for some of the bhadralok class (genteel folk or
‘middle-class’ professionals). But others set up ‘welfare associations’ and ‘protection
societies’, trading on their status as displaced people—overtly so, as in the case of
the ‘Refugees Old Motor Parts Dealers’ Association’.32
Squatters who fled from East Bengal established impromptu colonies. In the late
1950s Delhi became the site of the East Pakistan Displaced Persons’ Colony (now
Chittaranjan Park), home to Bengali government officials. Earlier still, refugees in

30
Urvashi Butalia, ‘An Archive with a Difference’, in Kaul (ed.), Partitions of Memory, 74–110, at
219, 224–5; Kaur, Since 1947, 186.
31
Khan, The Great Partition, 173–5.
32
Ravinder Kaur, ‘Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-colonial State in India’s
Partition’ CSH, 6, no.4 (2009), 429–46, at 431.
160 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Calcutta appropriated land around the local airport and on an abandoned US

army base as well as waqf land that formerly belonged to Muslim charitable foun-
dations, declaring it ‘empty space’. A resident of Viveknagar Colony in South Cal-
cutta described chopping down trees and clearing a space, ‘levelling the land and
dividing it into small plots, laying down lanes and roads. I moved there with my
mother, sister and brother. My mother was able to get one plot and we became part
of this colony’. They pointedly named the colony after the Bengali word for ‘con-
science’ (vivek), to remind the host population of their obligation to refugees.
A determined group took over vacant land in a Calcutta suburb and allocated plots
to fellow refugees on a first-come first-served basis, naming the new settlement
Azadgarh, literally ‘bastion of freedom’. Careful preparatory work included making
surveys and taking photographs of the terrain: there was nothing haphazard about
their action. Other colonies were named after heroes of the resistance to British
rule.33
By the late 1950s there were around 400 of these private ‘sponsored’ colonies,
together with a similar number of government colonies. An official inquiry spelt
out the important differences between these self-settled refugees and those who
were housed by the government in designated camps. Refugees in Azadgarh took
pains to defend their homes from government attempts to move them elsewhere.
They elected committees and levied self-imposed taxes to help dig wells, build
roads, schools, clinics, clubhouses and theatre companies. Refugees spoke of the
‘green and peaceful’ surroundings that made a pleasant contrast with overcrowded
Calcutta. They had no wish to renounce these conditions. They mobilized in self-
defence, supported by the United Central Refugee Council and the Refugee Cen-
tral Rehabilitation Council, which agitated for compensation and in due course
for government recognition of rights to jobs, land and housing. Women fought off
attacks, often at great personal risk, from agents employed by absentee landlords
(zamindars) to drive them away.34
Before long these colonies became a fertile recruiting ground for the Commu-
nist Party whose members offered tangible support and helped to maintain the
morale of refugees, including displaced Muslims. They agitated for improvements
to infrastructure and helped to organize cooperatives and schools, filling the gap
left by other political parties, including the Congress Party, in a process not unlike
the politics of inter-war Greece. Joya Chatterji has argued that ‘the construct of
rights which evolved out [of ] the successive refugee campaigns came to be part of
an increasingly broad-based and inclusive political programme in a welfarist and
even socialist mode’. This was linked to an analysis of the failure of political leader-
ship. As one Punjabi refugee wrote in 1947, ‘the entire EVIL lies in the separation
theories (i.e. communal award, vivisection of country on religion basis, exchange
of population, and accepting religion as the basis for Nation etc.). Would those

33
Romola Sanyal, ‘Contesting Refugeehood: Squatting as Survival in Post-Partition Calcutta’
Social Identities, 15, no.1 (2009), 67–84.
34
Gargi Chakravartty, Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay
Books, 2005), 52–63.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 161

talking so high try to fit the Refugees shoe on their own feet for a while and then
express how comfortable they are?’35
At the same time, ideas of spontaneity and chaos provided a pretext for the
construction of organized encampments where officials could temporarily impose
a degree of order before dispersing unruly refugees to more remote regions where
they would exercise a less disruptive influence and begin the process of ‘rehabilita-
tion’. The Indian government expected refugees to build new camps according to
blueprints that were designed by officials who took no account of refugee wishes;
one camp at Jirat in West Bengal, built to accommodate rural refugees who arrived
from the East in 1950, was established on malarial marshland, at a distance from
Calcutta that made it impossible for refugees to travel in search of work. Other
camps were set up to enable refugee labour to be employed on road-building and
canal construction. A contemporary report drew attention to poor physical and
mental health but attributed this to ‘infantilisation’ rather than to government
ineptitude. A government minister regarded the camps as ‘the show window of the
Ministry’s herculean labours’ and a ‘laboratory for the experiments in abiding re-
habilitation that were soon to be undertaken on a large scale’. This social experi-
ment was all the more necessary in the light of ‘psychological disturbance’ and
‘reason overthrown’ that refugees were deemed to have experienced. Rehabilitation
was connected to the prospect of ‘independent living’.36
After the first flurry of emergency relief measures, in March 1948 the government
in Delhi turned its attention to vocational training, education and employment.
Japanese technicians helped train skilled mechanics and metal workers to replace the
Muslim workers who had since gone to Pakistan. As indicated earlier, this was also
conceived as a necessary basis for ‘rehabilitation’, meaning not just the provision of
education and skills but the inculcation of habits of citizenship. The process would
take time: Horace Alexander, author of an informative early study of Indian policy,
wrote that ‘the vast majority of the so-called “hard core” of urban refugees can only
be self-supporting when new towns have been built’. The government looked askance
at refugees who continued to depend on state support; the minister responsible for
their welfare urged that ‘gratuitous relief ’ be discontinued, in order to give ‘the drone’
(sic) a chance to ‘rehabilitate himself ’ outside the camps. By 1955 these efforts were
coupled to a so-called National Discipline Scheme designed to promote physical fit-
ness, self-discipline and self-reliance. Mohanlal Saksena invited India’s social workers
to identify themselves with refugees ‘who have lost their all and who are still probing
in the dark, without any hope of redemption’.37

35
Kaur, Since 1947, 188–9, capitals in the original; Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity?’, 97.
36
Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, 46–7; Biraja Guha, Studies in Social Tensions among the Refugees
from Eastern Pakistan (Delhi: Government of India Press, 1959), 2–14; Chatterji, ‘Dispersal’ 1011–17;
Ian Talbot, ‘Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Disso-
nances’ MAS, 45, no.1 (2011), 109–30.
37
‘The Last of the Noble Lights of Freedom’ (a tribute to M.L. Saksena by his son), Saksena Papers,
Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi; Government of India, Rehabilitation Retrospect (New Delhi: Ananda
Press, 1957), 31; Horace G. Alexander, New Citizens of India (Bombay: Oxford University Press,
1951), 35; Kaur, ‘Distinctive Citizenship’, 435.
162 Mid-Century Maelstrom

The governments of both countries as well as semi-official agencies such as

the Indian Cooperative Union began to link relief to a broader conception of
state intervention and a commitment to ‘development’. One indication was the
appointment of the first Director-General of Rehabilitation to the Indian Planning
Commission.In practice, the resources that the state poured into these programmes
favoured better-off refugees who could take advantage of their contacts and educa-
tional qualifications. Development projects were infused with a patronizing stance
towards lower-class refugees and villagers who lived a life of ‘narrow monotony’.
Government ministers and NGOs complained about a lack of entrepreneurial am-
bition among these refugees and hoped that support for cottage industry would
provide the necessary stimulus, although the production of quilts, soap and shut-
tlecocks was small beer compared to the grandiose vision of state-led development.
As Yasmin Khan argues, ‘Partition could be regarded as an opportunity if refugees
who were part of the old, unmodernised, agricultural order could become indus-
trial workers, working on large public works projects’.38
In Indian-ruled East Punjab the land abandoned by Muslim farmers was as-
signed to refugees, following a laborious statistical procedure, with the result that
landless labourers and artisans were able to establish themselves on smallholdings.
Cooperatives were encouraged, and refugees received loans to buy seed, livestock
and equipment. Similar provision was made in Pakistan where contemporaries
spoke of the ‘splendid response [by refugees] who courageously engaged in occupa-
tions completely strange to them’.39 Wells were dug, and new dams brought elec-
tricity to villages for the first time. Farms were consolidated into larger units.
Accounts of the new Indian township at Nilokheri, where refugees built homes,
shops and factories with government aid, connected its future to a transformation
in the personality of the refugees. Horace Alexander spoke in terms reminiscent of
early Soviet planners when he described the need for young men to become ‘ma-
chine-minded’; ‘the Nilokheri trainee is not considered fully trained until he un-
derstands the whole mechanism, until he can “feel with” the machine he is helping
to make. He must try to impart “soul” into machines’. Nehru agreed, adding that
Nilokheri was a community development project that blazed the trail for refugee
‘rehabilitation’.40
A particular source of pride to the Indian government was the Dandakaranya
Development Authority in Orissa, which was conceived in 1958 as a means to re-
settle 25,000 refugee families from East Pakistan in ‘a sort of backwater that the
tides of modern civilisation passed by’. With the help of overseas agencies such as
Church World Service, trees were felled and new villages were established—as it
was said—‘planned to the last detail’. Lutheran World Relief described how its

38
Khan, The Great Partition, 172–3, 229; Gyanesh Kudaisya, ‘The Demographic Upheaval of Par-
tition: Refugees and Agricultural Resettlement in India, 1947–1967’ South Asia, 18, Special Issue
(1995), 73–94, at 80; Samir Kumar Das, ‘State Response to the Refugee Crisis: Relief and Rehabilita-
tion in the East’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in
India, 1947–2000 (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 106–51.
39
Alexander, New Citizens of India, 22, 29–45; Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 764.
40
Alexander, New Citizens of India, 40; Murphy, In the Minds of Men, 193, 200.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 163

‘Project Daya’ (‘mercy’ in Bengali) would contribute to the ‘rehabilitation of these

uprooted, plundered, profaned and disinherited people—re-establishing them in
responsible social positions’. Dandakaranya, it added, will provide unreclaimed
land ‘inhabited largely by small groups of aborigines’.41 Here as elsewhere, ‘reha-
bilitation’ was defined in relation to refugees’ incapacity, contrasted with the heroic
endeavour of relief workers and government planners: one visitor did not hesitate
to draw attention to the ‘misery’ of refugees that was ‘seen only by the missionary
or the itinerant welfare worker who sacrifices his own personal comfort to visit
these forsaken areas in his deep love for humanity’. Dandakaranya was, however,
only a qualified success. Refugees—prompted by the Communist Party’s tactics of
undermining the ruling Congress Party—rejected it in favour of the Sundarbans,
the reclaimed mangrove swamps of the Bay of Bengal whose environment was
more familiar to them, or opted for the Andaman Islands.42
In Pakistan, too, the arrival of refugees had an unsettling effect on the political
establishment. The authorities in Sindh claimed that the region was already over-
crowded and the local elite locked horns with the newly-arrived refugees (muhajirs)
who accused provincial leaders of failing to perform their ‘patriotic’ duty by making
adequate provision for them. Local elites regarded the vocal newcomers as a Trojan
horse that threatened to shift the gravity of power away from Sindh towards the
newly designated capital of Karachi, which is indeed what happened. Ordinary
residents resented the intrusion of newcomers who betrayed any signs of privilege;
there were complaints that ‘idlers and misfits’ hoped to make an easier life in Paki-
stan by cashing in on the new country’s sense of obligation to fellow-Muslims. To
be sure, the refugee population included wealthy merchants who hoped to prosper
in Pakistan where they no longer faced direct competition from Hindu rivals. Out
of these complex struggles emerged an oligarchy that cultivated close ties with the
Pakistani military and benefited from government subsidies.43
This turbulent politics went hand in hand with economic transformation. Hith-
erto thriving towns in Punjab faced economic ruin. The widespread violence in
1947 devastated the physical infrastructure and created an appalling housing crisis
in cities such as Lahore, which was now assigned to Pakistan and lost much of its
earlier elegance. Prior to independence Amritsar had been a key transit point for
goods that were despatched to Europe and the Middle East; now it belonged to
India. Partition ruptured established commercial links—Amritsar’s textile mills
depended on supplies of dyes from Karachi and cotton from the canal colonies in
West Punjab—and led to a net outflow of population that emptied the town of its
Muslim artisans (tanners, weavers, dyers, blacksmiths and potters) and traders,
leading to a shortage of labour and turning Amritsar into a less important border
town. Pakistan, like India, adopted a Five-Year Plan (1955–60) which financed

41
LWF Archives, Geneva, Box 36, Newspaper Clippings, India.
42
Alok Kumar Ghosh, ‘Bengali Refugees at Dandakarayna: a Tragedy of Rehabilitation’, in Pradip
Kumar Bose (ed.), Refugees in West Bengal: Institutional Processes and Contested Identities (Calcutta:
Calcutta Research Group, 2000), 106–29.
43
Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Naqvi, ‘Migration’.
164 Mid-Century Maelstrom

large-scale urban housing projects that were designed to inculcate a ‘feeling for the
dignity of manual labour’.44
Following the military coup in 1958 that brought General Ayub Khan to power,
the government espoused a ‘back to the land movement’. Planners welcomed the
opportunity to reshape the layout of villages on more ‘rational’ lines. Refugees es-
tablished new factories in the much enlarged city of Lahore, where textiles and
carpet making took off in a big way. Their firms frequently bore the name of the
village that their refugee owners left behind in East Punjab, just as refugees did in
other settings. Elsewhere too, the new arrivals had a positive effect over time. In
Uttar Pradesh, for example, they made and sold optical goods, bicycles, sports
equipment and pens in fast-growing towns such as Agra and Meerut, thereby help-
ing to diversify the urban economy. Meanwhile Muslim refugees who arrived in
East Pakistan from India set up in business as bakers, tailors, barbers and bangle-
makers. They established savings cooperatives. New styles of dress and food—the
kebab is a notable example—were introduced. The rickshaw became a common
sight on the streets of Pakistan’s towns. In short, they made a dynamic contribution
to economic and social life.45
For all its devastating consequences in terms of loss of life and livelihood, Parti-
tion also had the capacity to transform lives in unexpected directions. Some social
and economic levelling took place in rural society as a consequence of Partition,
and changes in land tenure helped launch the ‘Green Revolution’. Research in the
1970s concluded that Punjabi and Sikh refugees were risk-takers. This entrepre-
neurial streak manifested itself in claims to a kind of invulnerability, paradoxical as
it might seem: ‘[W]e have [said one refugee] 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. Once everything was taken from us, and we have come back
from pennilessness to prosperity. If we lose it all again we could do it once more’.
It helped that they also cultivated contacts with local politicians who could assist
them to channel this ‘aggression’ into productive activity.46
Fresh job opportunities became available to Punjabi women. The Ministry of
Relief and Rehabilitation created a women’s section to train prospective teachers,
nurses and clerical workers. Female police officers were recruited from the ranks of
refugees to help trace girls who had been abducted. Women went out to work in
order to replace the income lost when male family members were killed. Female
refugees from East Bengal entered white-collar occupations, and their example
encouraged West Bengali girls to follow suit. Many mothers insisted that their
daughters receive a proper education. In Bihar, widowed Hindu refugees from the
new state of (East) Pakistan were regarded as ‘unrehabilitable’ (sic) by virtue of
having lost the chief breadwinner; they were confined to ‘Permanent Liability
Camps’. Reliant upon state welfare, they nevertheless regarded official assistance as

44
Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 764.
45
Rahman and van Schendel, ‘I Am Not a Refugee’, 568–9.
46
Stephen L. Keller, Uprooting and Social Change: the Role of Refugees in Development (Delhi: Man-
odar Books, 1975), 116, 178; Stein, ‘The Refugee Experience’, 323.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 165

a debt that society owed them and not the other way round. When the state threat-
ened to close the camps, the women mobilized to defend their rights. Something
similar happened in Delhi, where the government instituted a ‘widows’ colony’ for
the exclusive use of women whose husbands had been killed. Its inhabitants de-
scribed a paternalistic regime that reproduced the traditional seclusion of widows
whilst providing them with job opportunities. Elsewhere too, women derived a
greater sense of self-worth. Namita Chowdhury described how the squatter col-
onies in Calcutta sustained a ‘richness of mind. We were like wild flowers scattered
in the forest, growing on our own, without any constraints’. Partition and refugee-
dom delivered emancipation of a sort.47
Another transformation affected the sub-continent’s landscape. Officials in the
Indian Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation entertained hopes of creating model
villages in Punjab on the ruins left behind during the chaotic ‘evacuation’. Plans
included improved irrigation, sanitation and transport access. Surviving drawings
showed a preference for a radial design with the village hall, school, dispensary and
cooperative store at the hub. The Indian government planned the construction of
at least 14 new towns to house at least 400,000 refugees who lost their homes
when they fled from Pakistan. The settlement at Ulhasnagar (‘City of joy’) in
Maharashtra, a former army transit camp built by the British during the Second
World War was expected to accommodate 130,000 refugees, mostly from Sindh.
Other new towns included Faridabad in East Punjab, and Nilokheri and Habra
Baigachi near Calcutta, to accommodate 10,000 and 40,000 refugees respectively.
Horace Alexander described these ventures as ‘the fulfilment of a dream’—the dream
of people such as S.K. Dey who started a training centre in Kurukshetra and, with
Nehru’s backing, settled refugees on reclaimed land in 1948 where they ‘blazed a
trail’. Alexander was especially impressed by the fact that ‘young Brahmins [were] at
work as shoemakers—outcastes’ work’. He waxed lyrical about the ‘great experi-
ment’ at Faridabad with its potential for ‘mental rehabilitation’, particularly of
women and children who were given the opportunity to participate in art and
drama projects. Model towns in his view paved the way for model citizens.48
The most famous new settlement was in Chandigarh in East Punjab, which was
expected to house 60,000 refugees and to provide Punjab with the capital that it
lost when Lahore was assigned to Pakistan. Chandigarh’s fame derived from the
involvement of the eminent foreign architect Le Corbusier who envisaged a
modern city that would symbolize India’s ‘freedom, unfettered by the traditions of
the past [and] an expression of the nation’s faith in the future’. More prosaically,
Nehru hoped that it would provide refugees with jobs in the construction industry
in the short term. Construction began in April 1952. It was a landmark project,
carefully choreographed and given some publicity by the leading member of the
Magnum photographic agency, Ernst Scheidegger, whose images evoked the hectic
construction involving tens of thousands of Indian labourers, male and female. Le

47
Chakravartty, Coming Out of Partition, 101; Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 108–9.
48
Alexander, New Citizens of India, 38–9, 48–9, 114.
166 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Corbusier enthused about Chandigarh, writing to his wife that ‘we’re in the midst
of an eternal landscape. Everything is calm, slow, harmonious, lovable’. He spoke
of Chandigarh as ‘an architectural symphony’. The city was officially inaugurated
in March 1955, on which occasion Nehru suggested that ‘You may squirm at the
impact, but it makes you think and imbibe new ideas, and one thing that India
requires in so many fields is to be hit on the head so that you may think’. Neverthe-
less, amongst the talk of an architectural showpiece it was easy to forget the irony
that the creation of Chandigarh depended upon removing the local peasantry who
had farmed the land for generations. Some 6,000 families were forced to leave their
homes under the terms of the colonial Land Acquisition Act (1894); they were
allowed to remain as ‘government tenants’ only until such time as building work
began. Nor does the story end there. In 2011 Chandigarh’s buildings were being
looted in order to sell valuable Le Corbusier furniture and other items at interna-
tional auction: designer manhole covers commanded particularly high prices.49
Pakistan built new settlements such as Nazimabad, a suburb of Karachi, the
population of which tripled between 1947 and 1952. The settlement consisted of
low-rise blocks laid out on the characteristic grid pattern; refugees were given little
choice but to move to this purpose-built accommodation. Other ‘colonies’ sprang
up in the early 1950s, with names that reflected the places from which the refugees
originated.50 The government enlisted the services of a Greek engineering and
town planning firm that had experience of working on refugee projects in Athens.
Elsewhere too, new settlements took the names of the ancestral village, or com-
memorated freedom fighters and social reformers. Municipal authorities in Cal-
cutta and Delhi have lately drawn up plans to ‘redevelop’ the old refugee dwellings
to make room for new housing projects and shopping malls to cater for the wealthy
Indian diaspora.51 Such are the ironies of population displacement.

R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F D I S P L A C E M E N T

In characterizing Partition as an abrupt rupture, contemporary observers referred

to a collective ‘madness’ that seized all communities: ‘passions once aroused are
hard to quench’. Other cultural meanings were ascribed to population displace-
ments. Indian officials, journalists and others commonly asserted a basic difference
between refugees in the west and the east. Punjabi refugees emerged as stoic fig-
ures, incapable of ‘stoop[ing] to charity’:

49
Nihal Perera, ‘Contesting Visions: Hybridity, Liminality and Authorship of the Chandigarh
Plan’ Planning Perspectives, 19 (2004), 175–99, at 194; Ernst Scheidegger, Chandigarh 1956: Le Cor-
busier and the Promotion of Architectural Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009),
27, 37.
50
Ansari, Life after Partition, 140–2.
51
Pablo Bose, ‘Dilemmas of Diaspora: Partition, Refugees and the Politics of “Home” ’ Refuge, 23,
no.1 (2006), 58–68, at 65–6.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 167
Never would their proud hands be stretched out to receive alms. No work, however
seemingly low, would they despise. They represented the fine core of the Punjabi peas-
antry, to whom honest labour is the flower of human dignity. Rehabilitation in their
case was easy, for they met Government’s efforts more than half-way. They resumed
their old, simple, graceful ways of living as if nothing had ever disturbed the even
tenor of their existence. They were of the breed of heroes, though their stories have not
been told in epic and song.52
These men and women had contributed to the development of the canal colonies
in the nineteenth century and could therefore draw upon a tradition of hard graft,
‘sturdy independence, uprightness, directness of speech and courage’. An official
account of rehabilitation was filled with photographs of refugee ‘types’, distin-
guished-looking men who gaze into the distance as if to demonstrate their deter-
mination. Significantly the only photograph that runs counter to that image,
entitled ‘derelicts’, showed a bedraggled woman and child.53
Bengali refugees on the other hand were represented in a different light, having
become ‘devitalized’. U. Bhaskar Rao, author of an informative study of rehabilita-
tion that allowed refugees no speaking part, expressed this clearly:
Refugees in the East came from a different milieu; the influences that moulded their
lives were different. East Bengal was comparatively poor, with an economy less diversi-
fied than West Punjab’s. The person displaced from East Pakistan had been exposed to
devitalising, demoralising forces much longer than his western counterpart had been.
When he finally escaped to asylum in India he was completely shattered in body and
spirit, all initiatives, all capacity for self-adjustment drained out of him. Here was a
mood most frustrating to the rehabilitation effort.54
Critics saw them as the embodiment of longstanding regional and ethnic stereo-
types. Refugees from East Bengal were taunted as rice eaters, ‘bheto Bangal’, who
gradually learned to eat roti. Calcutta residents made fun of their ‘rustic’ accents,
dismissing them as country cousins. Popular newspapers and periodicals published
cartoons showing West Bengal as a hospital patient suffering from ‘refugee-itis’ and
asking the ‘doctor’ in charge (that is, the Chief Minister) whether the ‘case’ was
hopeless. These modes of representation formed part of a broader notion of the
beleaguered, passive and ‘effeminate’ Bengali. Such distinctions were part of the
common currency of Western discourse. The Lutheran educator Herbert Stroup
painted a tendentious portrait of the Bengali refugee who had once been proud but
was now ‘humbled and embittered. His long presence in refugee camps has para-
lysed his will to succeed. Now he teaches his children the techniques of successful
begging’.55

52
Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, 8, 37–8.
53
Randhawa, Out of the Ashes, 30, 42.
54
Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, 148, 155.
55
LWF, Box WS V.3.b, Service to Refugees, Material Relief, India, 1954–62, ‘Project Daya
(Mercy)’, January 1960. I draw also on an unpublished paper by Nilanjana Chatterjee, ‘Interrogating
Victimhood’ (n.d.), available at <http://www.swadhinata.org.uk/document/chatterjeeEastBengal%20
Refugee.pdf>.
168 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Careful probing by Urvashi Butalia and others affords a glimpse into the rela-
tively unexplored world of Sikh experience. In a dramatic intervention, Sardar
Ganesha Singh, Joint Secretary of the Central Hindu/Sikh Minorities Board, wrote
in 1947 to the Deputy Prime Minister in the following terms:
As you are aware, the minorities of this province have made such heroic sacrifices
which have got no parallels in the history of India. But now, at the time of India’s re-
joicing, we are left in the sinking boat. You have handed us over to the butchers, who
are thirsting for our blood …You people are standing aside and asking us to stay there,
but so far we do not see if you have taken any step to think of us. Our conditions will
be like jews [sic] in the Hitlerite regime.56
Singh pleaded not to be abandoned. His apocalyptic reference to the extermina-
tion of European Jewry suggests that Sikh leaders understood that the security of
an entire population was at stake, although in the light of their actions against
female members of their own community the reference to ‘butchery’ sends shivers
down the spine.
Much of the violence of Partition took the form of sexual exploitation and
humiliation. Young refugee women were thought to be vulnerable to organized sex
trafficking. As one welfare worker recalled, ‘the main aim was to rescue the women
and make sure that they didn’t go astray. All these brothel people would wait at the
platform trying to grab them; we had to make sure that they were not taken away’.
But the issue was not just about the risks from predatory men. The plight of female
refugees was ascribed to the dissolution of paternal control. Now ‘complete stran-
gers huddle together . . . women who used to live behind closed doors are today
moving about freely and mixing with all sorts of people’.57 As in Armenia, officials
were quick to take up the cause of ‘rescuing’ abducted women. The two govern-
ments came to a preliminary agreement in December 1947. India passed an ‘Ab-
ducted Persons Recovery Act’ in 1949, which set up a substantial investigative
apparatus, building upon the work undertaken by organizations such as the Indian
United Council for Relief and Welfare. Officials compiled lists of abducted women,
usually widows who had been ‘appropriated’ by men from their own village in
order to acquire their property. Between 1947 and 1956 some 22,000 Muslim
women were ‘recovered’ from India, while 8,000 Hindu and Sikh women returned
from Pakistan. But many Hindus converted to Islam and married Muslim men, by
all accounts making a reasonable life. Ritu Menon’s aunt settled quite happily in
Karachi even if, as she describes it, her new family disdained her musical aspira-
tions: ‘I brought my sitar but my husband said you’d better hide it, people will say
I’ve married a courtesan’.58

56
Butalia, ‘An Archive with a Difference’, 230–1.
57
Syed Sikander Mehdi, ‘Refugee Memory in India and Pakistan’, in Glasson Deschaumes and
Rada Ivekovic (eds), Divided Countries, Separated Cities: The Modern Legacy of Partition (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 85–95, at 88; Gautam Ghosh, ‘ “God is a Refugee”: Nationality,
Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India’ Social Analysis, 42, no.1 (1998), 33–62, at 50.
58
Ritu Menon, ‘The Dynamics of Division’, in Deschaumes and Ivekovic, Divided Countries,
Separated Cities, 115–29; Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World, 740.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 169

The entire issue was politicized. It symbolized a catastrophic loss of trust between
the two countries, where the restoration of women’s ‘honour’ entailed reclaiming
these ‘unfortunate victims of communal frenzy’ for their respective nation. In
Pakistan a visiting religious scholar from Iran was presented with a group of refu-
gee women who had just arrived in a lorry from East Punjab, although the Indian
representative in Lahore complained that the entire scene had been stage-man-
aged by Pakistani officials in order to give a one-sided picture of ‘Pakistani Mus-
lims having suffered untold horrors at the hands of Hindus and Sikhs’. In more
strident terms the Hindu fundamentalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
denounced ‘Napakistan’ (‘impure Pakistan’) for having behaved in a barbaric
fashion but the RSS also poured scorn on the government of India for having
failed to protect India’s women. The state needed to be ‘virile’ rather than feeble
in its response. Tellingly, the prevailing rhetoric highlighted the image of ‘Mother
India’ in such a way as to downplay the circumstances of individual women,
including ‘resisting cases’, in favour of a generalized depiction of female
victimhood.59
Partition imposed an immense cost on refugee women and turned them into
symbols of national dishonour and patriotic duty. At stake was the idea of the
‘martyrdom’ of women who killed themselves rather than run the risk of being as-
saulted, abducted or killed, or who were killed by family members who took it
upon themselves to prevent the honour of their womenfolk from being sullied.
One Sikh man who put to death dozens of female family members described him-
self as their ‘saviour’.60 But as Butalia points out, the extant accounts were provided
by men who partook of a nationalist discourse. In talking of suicide we are left with
more questions than answers: ‘If the women were aware of the discussions, perhaps
even involved in them, can we then surmise that in taking their own lives they were
acting upon a perceived (or rather, misperceived) notion of the good of their com-
munity? Did their deaths corroborate the ideology—and were they a part of this
ideology?—that the honour of the community lay in “protecting” its women from
the patriarchal violence of an alien community?’61

PA RT I T I O N I N G PA K I S TA N

The settlement in 1947 did not create a stable situation in Pakistan. Relations be-
tween West and East Pakistan had never been smooth. At the outset, Jinnah im-
posed Urdu as the state language (Bengali gained recognition as a second official
language in 1956), and the government in Karachi did little to disguise its contempt

59
Pippa Virdee, ‘Negotiating the Past: Journey through Muslim Women’s Experience of Partition
and Resettlement in Pakistan’ CSH, 6, no.4 (2009), 467–84, at 471–2; Khan, The Great Partition,
179.
60
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (eds), Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 50.
61
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Hurst and Co.,
2000), 168–9.
170 Mid-Century Maelstrom

for East Pakistan. Bengali nationalists claimed that they were the victims of ‘col-
onial’ exploitation that left the East impoverished and marginalized. It did not
help that Muslim refugees from India were immediately offered jobs and land in
East Pakistan, causing resentment among the impoverished Bengali population. In
January 1964 riots in Calcutta compelled Muslims to sell up and flee to East Paki-
stan. Copycat killings took place in Dhaka, provoking an exodus of Bengalis in the
opposite direction. Another destabilizing factor derived from the presence of the
Urdu-speaking Muslim Bihari community, around one million of whom migrated
in 1947 from India to East Pakistan, where they worked for a pittance in the jute
mills of Dhaka. Tension between Bengalis and Biharis increased during the 1960s
when Bengali nationalist politicians demonized Biharis as an enemy within, liable
to lend support to West Pakistan in its determination to bring the East to heel.62
In late 1970 the situation reached a crescendo. Politicians in East Pakistan be-
rated their Western counterparts for failures of leadership during a terrible cyclone
that killed half a million people and left seven times that number homeless. Elec-
tions in that year revealed widespread public support for the breakaway Awami
League, which was swiftly banned by the Pakistan government, whose declaration
of martial law prompted the League to declare an independent People’s Republic
of Bangladesh (‘native land’). In the ensuing civil war, soldiers on both sides com-
mitted atrocities. The intellectual elite of East Pakistan faced severe retribution
from the Pakistani army for supporting independence. Bengali women suffered
brutal and humiliating treatment from the same quarter: many left for West Paki-
stan with their abusers rather than suffer rejection by their families. Bangladeshi
troops likewise systematically mistreated Bihari women whom they regarded as the
embodiment of the enemy within.63
The presence of several million refugees on Indian soil allowed politicians in
Delhi to claim that Pakistan was using refugees as a means of overwhelming India’s
resources, while Pakistan for its part maintained that India permitted the new lib-
eration army of Bangladesh (Mukti Bahini) to use refugee camps as a base from
which to launch attacks on the defenders of the status quo. But Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi whilst recognizing their propaganda value—at one stage she called
them ‘our partners’—had no wish to see a long-term refugee population on Indian
soil. Claiming that as ‘victims of war’ they were Pakistan’s responsibility, she
announced in June 1971: ‘I’m going to send them back’, echoing sentiments
expressed by her father a generation earlier. Her stance was also consistent with
Indian policy in the 1960s which deterred refugees from crossing the border and
resettled those who did in distant locations. Nevertheless, Gandhi’s hopes of stem-
ming the movement of these ‘intruders’ proved in vain, in as much as the govern-
ment in Rawalpindi was happy to see the back of those it called ‘Hindu traitors’.
Faced with overwhelming numbers the government of India reluctantly decided to

62
Sumit Sen, ‘Stateless Refugees and the Right to Return: the Bihari Refugees of South Asia’ IJRL,
11, no.4 (1999), 625–45; 12, no.1 (2000), 41–70.
63
Yasmin Saikia, ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation
War of Bangladesh’ History Workshop Journal, 58 (2004), 275–87.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 171

keep the border open. By July the total number of refugees stood at close to seven
million, excluding internally displaced people.64
India held these refugees in 900 transit camps along the border in Assam, Tripura
and West Bengal where they received ration cards but had no right to look for jobs.
Three million people lodged with host families. Those settling in Calcutta faced a
frosty reception from residents including first-generation refugees from East Bengal
who regarded the newcomers as their social inferiors and as carriers of infectious
diseases. Others were ordered to move to Dandakaranya (see earlier in this chapter)
or shipped as far afield as Sri Lanka, where Muslim villagers in Puttalam extended
a welcome to 60,000 refugees before turning their backs on them, blaming them
for all manner of misfortunes such as the depletion of fish stocks. Clashes erupted
elsewhere. U Thant, the UN Secretary-General, established the East Pakistan Relief
Operation under Robert Jackson who had a background in refugee relief in post-
war Europe. UNHCR mounted a ‘Focal Point operation’ to coordinate assistance,
marking a departure in its remit. Indian trade unions and businesses and the Red
Cross urged the public to give generously, reminding them of the trauma of Parti-
tion. Photos of children living inside sewers added to the sense of catastrophe.
Oxfam, Lutheran World Services and CARE also provided emergency relief. The
combined relief effort masked the determination of Indian officials to return refu-
gees to their homes at the earliest opportunity.65
Full-scale war between Pakistan and India broke out in December 1971. By the
middle of that month the total refugee population stood at an estimated ten mil-
lion. Following a ceasefire in January 1972 they began to return to the new state of
Bangladesh, with ICRC and UNHCR assistance and Indian government funds. In
January the daily average of repatriates was running at 200,000. By March seven
million refugees had been repatriated. Much to the relief of the Indian govern-
ment, which expressed alarm about the impact of the crisis on its development
objectives, the process was largely completed by 1974. The Bangladesh govern-
ment established holding camps and drew upon UN relief funds to help rebuild
the infrastructure.66
The formation of the new state of Bangladesh left the Bihari population state-
less. Half a million Biharis were transferred to detention camps in and around
Dhaka. Pakistan agreed to admit 175,000 of them in the course of the next two
decades. Those who managed to make their way from Bangladesh to India incurred

64
Louise Holborn, Refugees, a Problem of Our Time: the Work of the United Nations High Commis-
sioner for Refugees, 1951–1972 (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1975), vol. 2, 754; K.C. Saha, ‘The Geno-
cide of 1971 and the Refugee Influx in the East’, in Samaddar (ed.), Refugees and the State, 211–48, at
213; Antara Datta, Refugees and Borders in South Asia: the Great Exodus of 1971 (Routledge, 2012),
21–6, 59.
65
Gideon Gottlieb, ‘The UN and Emergency Humanitarian Assistance in India-Pakistan’ Ameri-
can Journal of International Law, 66, no.2 (1972), 362–5; Datta, Refugees and Borders, 131–7,
141–5.
66
Pia Oberoi, Exile and Belonging: Refugees and State Policy in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2006); Thomas W. Oliver, The United Nations in Bangladesh (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1978).
172 Mid-Century Maelstrom

the wrath of extremists in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This became the most
egregious protracted refugee situation in Asia. At the end of the century some
250,000 Bihari refugees were still living in 60 large camps (including the ironi-
cally-named ‘Camp Geneva’) awaiting, so to speak, repatriation to Pakistan, a
country that had no wish to admit them despite their protestations that they were
‘stranded Pakistanis’. The situation only took a turn for the better in 2007 when
Bangladesh began to remove restrictions on the political and economic rights of
Biharis. This does not exhaust the consequences of the Bangladesh war of libera-
tion. Those Hindus who had remained in West Pakistan but moved to Rajasthan
in 1971 became known as ‘Pak oustees’ whom India refused to recognize as refu-
gees because they held Pakistani passports. One further disquieting element was
that India’s Muslim population stood accused by some Hindu politicians of sup-
porting Pakistan in its attempt to forestall the creation of Bangladesh. By these
various means, population displacement was once again linked to questions of citi-
zenship and loyalty.67

PA RT I T I O N R E F U G E E S : L E G A C I E S A N D
C O M M E M O R AT I O N

Officially-sanctioned commemorative activity of this violent displacement took a

muted form. A handful of authorized accounts described government initiatives,
but these belonged to a civil service tradition that celebrated the bureaucratic con-
cern and the power of expertise to overcome obstacles. More tangible expressions
of displacement were less common. A ‘martyrs’ monument’ was erected in Chan-
digarh to draw attention to the suffering of refugees in Punjab, but otherwise India
built no memorial to the victims of Partition until a nondescript edifice went up
in Attari, Punjab, in 1997. In 2005 the president of Pakistan laid the foundation
stone of an expensive monument in Lahore, Bab-e-Pakistan (‘Gateway to Paki-
stan’), built on the site of the Walton refugee camp and including an exhibition
devoted to the suffering of Muslim refugees.68 Some commemorative ceremonies
take place in private: Sikh refugees in Delhi organize an annual event at the Gurd-
wara in Bhogal Market, Jungpura, where they recite the painful experiences of
women in Rawalpindi during 1947.69
Artists, film makers, novelists and others were less reticent about acknowledging
the experiences of Partition refugees. Jogen Chowdhury painted portraits of refu-
gee women in 1947, while Satish Gujral painted swirling images with titles such as
‘Dance of destruction’ and ‘The snare of memory’. No less compelling were the

67
Urvashi Butalia, personal communication; Michael Gillan, ‘Refugees or Infiltrators? The
Bharatiya Janata Party and “Illegal” Migration from Bangladesh’ Asian Studies Review, 26, no.1 (2002),
73–95; Datta, Refugees and Borders, 80–1, 156–9, 174–5.
68
Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 10; Khan, The Great Partition, 200–1.
69
Information courtesy of Urvashi Butalia.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 173

works of novelists such as Khushwant Singh (b.1915) whose Train to Pakistan

(1956) is set in the small village of Mano Majra on the Punjab border with a mixed
Sikh, Muslim and Hindu population. Against a backdrop of mounting ‘commu-
nal’ violence and attempts to derail trains carrying refugees, Singh weaves in stories
of individual male predators: one official hopes to seduce a young Muslim girl
whose words, ‘I want to go home’, take on a fresh meaning as trainloads of refugees
move across the frontier. The book ends with the brutal eviction of Muslim farm-
ers, notwithstanding their lament, ‘What have we to do with Pakistan? We were
born here . . . We have lived amongst you as brothers’.70
A graphic account by Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi, Dilli ki bipta (‘Delhi’s calamity’,
1948), described the forced removal of Muslims from the city and contrasted it
with the Indian ‘Mutiny’: ‘[T]he devastation of 1857 paled before the ravages of
September [1947]’.71 Some authors lamented the life they were forced to abandon,
the abundant harvests in ‘Golden Bengal’, tolerant neighbours and pleasurable
social intercourse. Asked to reflect on his life prior to Partition, the novelist Intizar
Husain mentioned his devout Shia Muslim father who maintained excellent rela-
tions with his Hindu neighbours; like most Muslims he shopped in Hindu-owned
establishments where the shopkeeper commanded their respect. Husain himself
recalled his Hindu teacher with great affection. The family’s decision to leave Uttar
Pradesh for the ‘Pakistan’ city of Lahore was not taken lightly, but—like so many
others—they expected to return shortly.72 A famous short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’
by Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55) imagined an ‘exchange of lunatics’ who asked
‘How could they be in India a short while ago and now suddenly in Pakistan?’.73
Other representations have been equally complex. Partition was construed as a
traumatic rupture, displacement as an event whose enormity was difficult if not
impossible to grasp. In 1950 the Bengali newspaper Jugantar (‘New Era’) serialized
essays submitted by Hindus who arrived in Calcutta. They were replete with nos-
talgia for East Bengal but also infused by a sense of the trauma of displacement,
seeing ‘the event causing the pain as a monstrously irrational aberration’.74 Balwant
Anand, a young Indian man fresh out of Cambridge University and installed in a
college in Lyallpur (Faisalabad), wrote a memoir describing his relationships with
Muslim friends and his attempt to come to terms with refugees in a makeshift
camp where Punjabi ‘individualism’ required the imposition of discipline in the
chaotic ‘refugee city’. He left a gripping account of what would now be called
people trafficking, as unscrupulous travel agents auctioned scarce space on the
planes leaving for Delhi. Anand’s characterization of the emergency as an ‘ava-
lanche’ echoes descriptions of the Russian refugee crisis in 1915. His book ends on
a happier note as he accompanies a convoy of refugees from Lyallpur via Lahore to
Amritsar and ‘home’, a deliberate narrative device to suggest the ultimate validation

70
Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (Delhi: Roli, 2006), 100, 126.
71
Pandey, Remembering Partition, 136.
72
Bhalla, Partition Dialogues, 18, 77–91.
73
<http://www.sacw.net/partition/tobateksingh.html>.
74
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the
Aftermath of Partition’ South Asia, 18, Special Issue (1995), 109–29, at 113.
174 Mid-Century Maelstrom

of Partition.75 A generation later Manas Ray described ‘growing up refugee’ in

Calcutta where his bhadralok family settled in 1947. He recalled a home in which
the Singer sewing machine and the Encyclopedia Britannica took pride of place,
reminders of the fact that his parents managed to retrieve something during their
hasty exodus from East Bengal. He describes encounters with plebeian refugees
who lived cheek by jowl in the squatter colonies. This thriving community subse-
quently gave way to a regulated suburb where local government bureaucrats held
sway and where scant traces of the old refugee colony now survive.76
Anand and Ray were relatively privileged individuals. How less well-off refugees
understood Partition is revealed in oral testimony. An Indian carpenter, Faryad,
recalled that ‘we had thought that once Independence came, the streets of Delhi
would be paved with gold, awash with milk. Instead all we saw was rivers of
blood’.77 Accounts such as this rely for their narrative power on the depiction, on
the one hand, of hazardous journeys to a place of relative safety and, on the other,
of thriving communities rent apart without warning. Hindu refugees recounted
tales of a lush and fertile countryside in East Bengal that contrasted with the pitiful
conditions they experienced in West Bengal, whose ‘stagnant’ canals reminded
them of magnificent rivers in the land of their birth. Their memories of ancestral
villages reserved little or no place for Muslim neighbours. Not all testimony was
registered in a single key, however. Refugees from East Bengal who settled in the
Andaman Islands, the site of British colonial convict settlement during the nine-
teenth century, reminisced not about the homes they left behind or about the refu-
gee camp, but about the challenge and excitement of being pioneers, which
disconcertingly included bemoaning the mass arrival of Tamils and others during
the 1970s.78
Some authors introduced a comparative element, for example portraying Hindu
refugees as ‘the new Jews’ (the title of a 1950 play by Salil Sen), supposedly neglected
by government relief schemes that disproportionately benefited refugees from
Punjab. Punjabi refugees in Delhi described the chaotic drama of displacement
amidst worsening Hindu-Muslim relations which they located in what was now
construed as a long ‘history of oppression’ and inter-ethnic strife. This ‘master nar-
rative’ operates alongside evidence from different informants who spoke of friend-
ship between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, for example in Amritsar where, as a
teacher put it, ‘we used to study together with Muslims, became friends, even eat
sometimes’.79 Nevertheless an overwhelming narrative of antagonism exerts a pow-
erful influence. The staunchly nationalist BJP insists upon a particular reading of

75
Balwant Singh Anand (1961), Cruel Interlude (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961).
76
Manas Ray, ‘Growing up Refugee’ History Workshop Journal, 52 (2002), 49–78.
77
Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 149.
78
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002),
115–37; Uditi Sen, ‘Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman
Islands’, in Panayi and Virdee (eds), Refugees and the End of Empire, 291–44.
79
Sardar Jagdish Singh, ‘The Partition Memories of an Eminent Educationist’, in Talbot and Tatla,
Epicentre of Violence, 106–16.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 175

Partition in which Muslim ‘perfidy’ called for a robust response in defence of

Hindu faith and culture. This has become a one-dimensional history. Much the
same applies to the Bengali nationalist narrative that dominates public discourse in
Bangladesh.
The silver screen afforded the greatest dramatic possibilities. The great film di-
rector Ritwik Ghatak (1925–65) was born in Dhaka and moved to Calcutta with
his family when he was a young boy in order to escape the worst of the Bengal
famine. Ghatak was not the first film maker to bring the experiences of Partition
refugees to life: Nimai Ghosh who worked with the Indian People’s Theatre Asso-
ciation, directed a film called Chinnamul (‘Uprooted’, 1950), which dealt with the
displacement of refugees from East Bengal. Ghosh’s film used documentary foot-
age as well as scenes with non-professional actors, including Ghatak himself in a
minor role.
Much better known was Ghatak’s own remarkable trilogy of films made in the
early 1960s. Like Chinnamul, Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara,
1960) tells of a bhadralok family from East Bengal whose members made their way
to suburban Calcutta where they settled in a claustrophobic refugee colony. The
household relies upon the pay-packet of the daughter Neeta (played by the Bengali
actress Supriya Choudhury whose family were refugees from Japanese-occupied
Burma), even more so when her father injures himself. Partly at her mother’s insist-
ence she renounces any chance of furthering her studies or finding happiness in
order to support her parents, her sister and her self-absorbed musician brother.
Neeta’s suffering intensifies when she contracts tuberculosis. In the bleak final
scene cry she shouts defiantly, ‘I want to live! I want to go home’. Subarnarekha
(1962), another poignant and subtle portrait of displacement, was set on the banks
of the Subarnarekha River and the ‘New Life Colony’ in Calcutta. Iswar and his
younger sister Sita take a young boy Abhiram under their wing. As they grow up,
Sita and Abhiram fall in love, but their relationship is jeopardized by revelations
about Abhiram’s origins. They settle in Calcutta and have a child, Binu. When
Abhiram is murdered, Sita finds work as a prostitute; she kills herself after realizing
that her first customer is Iswar, who has taken a break from his job working as a
cashier at an iron foundry. The film ends with Iswar’s decision to adopt Binu,
having lost not only his job, but his sister and brother-in-law too. Ghatak’s films
raised questions about the impact of displacement on social status and personal
conduct, particularly of women. Ultimately he seems to suggest that Partition was
one dramatic moment in the history of modern rootlessness, and that Bengal is
being torn apart both by Partition and by decadence afflicting the country and its
people.80

80
Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009), 177–85, 200–29.
176 Mid-Century Maelstrom

C O N C LU S I O N S

It is an over-simplification to say that the formation of India and Pakistan created

‘midnight’s refugees’. Partition was the very antithesis of a clean territorial split.
Instead it was a bloody and prolonged process particularly in Bengal where its
wounds took a long time to heal. Mass movements of people were accompanied by
brutality and loss of life, and by representations of displacement as an almost insu-
perable ‘problem’. The difficulties it posed resurfaced during the ‘second partition’
in 1971 that gave birth to the state of Bangladesh.
The legacy of violent state formation rubs shoulders with an alternative reading
of Partition, construed not so much as a necessary step to forestall even greater
bloodshed (which it clearly failed to prevent) but as a phenomenon that helped to
bring about a political, social and economic revolution. Refugeedom allowed gov-
ernment officials to harness the Indian public to ‘the saga of reconstruction’ and
ideas of economic development. But these plans affected refugees unevenly. Camps
such as Kurukshetra housed the least privileged people until such time as they
could be dispersed throughout India. It took determination to resist these state-
driven schemes or bend them to one’s own wishes. Partition also did little to im-
prove the status of displaced Dalits (‘Untouchables’) in East Punjab, whereas
reserves of social capital enabled wealthy Muslim refugees to settle relatively easily
in cities such as Lahore. These examples can be multiplied many times over. Class
mattered.81
Politics added other dimensions too. The purpose of relief and rehabilitation
was to create new citizens with ‘a high sense of moral values and a consciousness of
the tradition and heritage of the country’.82 Refugees were enlisted in the project
of nation state-building, as pliant subjects but also as people who had the potential
to shake host populations out of their ‘slumber’. Partition affords another instance
of the ways in which the category of refugee was made by and in turn helped con-
stitute the state. To be sure, the course of patriotism did not always run smoothly.
Radical politics in the squatter colonies in Calcutta sustained a vibrant cultural life
too. This dynamism resembled the Balkans where refugees from Asia Minor in-
fused Greek politics in the interwar years with a militant edge.
Claims for ‘recognition’ arising from Partition continue to be an important ele-
ment in the politics of modern India and Pakistan. In West Bengal the descendants
of those who fled from East Pakistan in 1947 framed their experience as a ‘sacrifice’
and a ‘debt’ that needed to be repaid. In Pakistan the Muhajir Qaumi Movement
spoke on behalf of muhajir refugees from India who felt themselves disenfran-
chised; it continues to claim that they made an incommensurable sacrifice in the
name of Pakistan, which the government in Islamabad has failed to acknowledge.
In India’s southern states, Muslim migrants who divided their time between India
and the Gulf states have been urged by the BJP to ‘go home’ to Pakistan (a country

81
Gyanendra Pandey, ‘ “Nobody’s People”: the Dalits of Punjab in the Forced Removal of 1947’,
in Bessel and Haake (eds), Removing Peoples, 297–319.
82
Rehabilitation Retrospect, 34.
 Partition and its Aftermath in India and Pakistan 177

of which they have no direct knowledge), in a clear indication of how understand-

ings of Partition can continue to be deployed in a wholly uninformed yet politi-
cally explosive manner.
Partition and population displacement thus came to occupy centre stage in the
making of both India and Pakistan, with the result that other episodes and other
memories have been effaced, including memories of the kindness shown by Mus-
lims to Hindus and vice versa. Refugees’ accounts drew upon a broad repertoire of
calamity, as when Hindu refugees from East Bengal made sense of their expulsion
by locating it within a narrative of the suffering of Bengali Hindus as a whole.
Historians and officials too played a part in rendering Partition as a calamity and
in ascribing qualities to its architects and victims. Sometimes they alluded to events
in Europe. An Indian official likened Muslims in East Pakistan to the Nazi ‘Her-
renvolk’ on the grounds that they dominated their Hindu neighbours and made
their lives intolerable. Another asked readers to ‘imagine what would have hap-
pened if instead of a few hundred thousand people who fled from Europe to Brit-
ain during the dark days between 1934 and 1939, the number of refugees had
included the whole population of Norway or Denmark. [Then] we can get some
idea of the problem which faced this country in 1947’, which in India meant ‘a
transfusion of new blood; the whole body of the country has benefited from it’.83
Likewise the eminent Bengali historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar told an audience of
East Bengal refugees in 1948 that they were welcome in India, because they could
help to revive the local economy. But he did not leave matters there. In a striking
comparison he referred to Jewish farmers in Palestine who would, in his words,
provide ‘a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and
stagnation’. He warned that ‘Eastern Bengal is going the way of Palestine without
the Jews. We must make our West Bengal what Palestine under Jewish rule will be,
a light in the darkness of medieval ignorance and theocratic bigotry’. Deploying
more ancient allusions he praised the impact of Huguenots in Britain and of Puri-
tan settlers in North America. On this basis he urged West Bengalis to ‘graft this
rich racial branch upon its old decaying trunk and rise to a new era of prosperity
and power’.84 Unfortunately he could only extend his appreciation of the newcom-
ers’ potential contribution by dismissing the attributes of an entire population.
Displacement announced the possibility of self-realization, but in a highly selective
manner.

83
Guha, Studies in Social Tensions: viii; Rehabilitation Retrospect, 98.
84
Chakrabarti, Marginal Men, 23–4.
 6
War and Population Displacement in
East Asia, 1937–1950

After weapons of war have been scattered in the countryside,

Flesh and blood were fleeing on the roads
(Du Fu)1

INTRODUCTION

War and invasion, revolution and the formation of new states set the scene for
population movements in the Far East in the middle of the twentieth century.
China felt the full force of Japanese imperialism, as Korea had done at the begin-
ning of the century. Japanese troops invaded China in 1937, causing 300,000
civilians to seek sanctuary in the foreign concessions in Shanghai and millions
more to flee into the interior. The total number of refugees in wartime China may
have reached 95 million. Even allowing for approximation and an unknown ele-
ment of double-counting this extraordinary figure equates to one-quarter of the
country’s population. In some provinces the proportion was closer to one-half.
Nor did other locations escape the consequences of war. The rapid conquest of
British-ruled Burma by the Japanese army in 1942 caused civilians to seek refuge
in India. Overseas Chinese who fled to China when Japan seized Hong Kong,
Macau, Thailand, Burma and other territory found their return blocked when
nationalist regimes asserted their authority after the war.2
Japan’s defeat in 1945 put paid to its empire in South-East Asia. In Korea the
USA and USSR agreed to divide the war-torn country in two as a temporary stop-
gap. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans who had been forcibly removed to the
Japanese mainland and made to work as forced labourers were now able to return
to their homes, whilst Japanese settlers were evicted in turn.3 Korea was described

1
Du Fu (712–70) was a Tang dynasty poet. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during
the Sino-Japanese War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), 171.
2
Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 27, 175–6; Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in
Modern Asia, 96–102; Adam McKeown, ‘Conceptualising Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949’ Journal of
Asian Studies, 58, no.2 (1999), 306–37.
3
Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 179

as ‘one of the blackest spots in the world’.4 The Korean War (1950–53) turned lives
upside down once more, pitting ideological antagonists and their proxies against
each other. Refugees from the fighting in North Korea swelled the population of
South Korea by at least one-fifth in the early 1950s.
An even greater upheaval took place following the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Anticipating defeat in the struggle for control
of the country, 10,000 members of the opposing Nationalist (Guomindang) forces
retreated from Yunnan to Burma, because they believed that Burma offered the
best prospect of eventually returning to China. Armed refugees mounted guerrilla
actions from Burma against the PRC, before moving to Northern Thailand a
decade after the revolution. The military and civilian elite made their way to
Taiwan. Ordinary civilians sought refuge in Hong Kong. Their numbers grew as a
consequence of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolu-
tion in the mid-1960s. What would become of them?
Revolution in China had other repercussions, some well-known and others less
familiar. The PRC launched a military offensive in the remote Tibet Autonomous
Region (TAR). When China intensified its grip in the late 1950s, around 70,000
refugees fled to India and Nepal. Half a century on, around 120,000 Tibetans are
living outside the TAR, although it remains home to 4.6 million Tibetans. The
refugee crisis has been kept in the public eye by a carefully orchestrated campaign.
Other upheavals hardly registered on the international agenda. White Russians
who fled to China 30 years earlier in similar circumstances were admitted to the
Philippines, where they created a theatre, a Russian Orthodox Church and even a
local police force. Others who were stranded in China were eventually permitted
to leave under the auspices of the UN during World Refugee Year in 1959–60.5
Even less talked about was the readiness of the PRC to assist ethnic Chinese who
faced persecution at the hands of right-wing authoritarian regimes. Some 100,000
ethnic Chinese were forced out of their homes and businesses in Indonesia in 1960
by the ultra-nationalist Sukarno regime. Only decisive action by the PRC rescued
them from this predicament by ‘repatriating’ them to China. This shed a very dif-
ferent light on the policies of Communist China.6
Conspicuously missing from humanitarian relief efforts was the International
Refugee Organisation (IRO) and its successor, UNHCR. The IRO confined itself
to refugees in Europe. UNHCR was well aware of the scale of population displace-
ment in Asia, but its hands were tied by the 1951 Convention. Apart from a brief
foray into Hong Kong, UNHCR kept out of these refugee crises, making it neces-
sary to devise a series of regional responses. This did not mean that geopolitical
considerations were absent: on the contrary, Cold War rivalries loomed large in
framing refugee policy.

4
Colin Bell, ‘Thoughts on the Future of the Far East Programs’, May 1947, AFSC Archives, For-
eign Service 1947-India-Policy.
5
Amir A.Khisamutdinov, ‘Russkie emigranty na Filippinakh’ Voprosy istorii, 8 (2003), 141–6.
6
Glen Peterson, ‘The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia:
Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia’ JRS, 25, no.3 (2012), 326–43.
180 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Much of the responsibility for alleviating the suffering of refugees was devolved
upon the military (especially in Korea) and NGOs. Refugees too developed a
range of self-help strategies, relying upon family networks or their own wits. But
there was a broader agenda. In China and Korea the devastation of the country-
side and the mass movement of refugees afforded an opportunity to reconstruct
economy and refashion society—at least, so it appeared to Western politicians
and non-governmental agencies. Millions of dollars poured into the reconstruc-
tion of China until 1949. The Allied army of occupation controlled much of
South Korea’s economic and social life until such time as the UN could rebuild
the country. Although China and North Korea were ultimately ‘lost’, South Korea
became a close ally of the United States. Refugees played a role in this overarching
project as pitiful but also as deserving and potentially responsive candidates for
‘modernisation’.7
NGOs expressed misgivings. In part this was simply about the scale of the prob-
lems in Asia. According to Colin Bell, ‘the chronic nature of much of the distress
in Asia has contrasted with urgent and abnormal need in Europe, which appeared
capable of solution within a reasonable time, and towards the solution of which we
could make a significant contribution’. He stressed that Asia’s refugees ‘are our
brothers’ whose needs could not be ignored.8 Fellow Quakers offered a more
pointed critique: ‘[W]e have backed governments that do not have the sympathy
and support of their peoples. While the peoples themselves are probably anti-com-
munist, we have offered them no acceptable alternatives to communism’. People,
he added, needed ‘food and education’ but also ‘liberal government’ of the kind
that was noticeably absent in Korea and Hong Kong.9 Other faith-based organiza-
tions were less squeamish about throwing in their lot with the struggle against
communism in East Asia and enlisted refugees in this task.

WA R , R E VO LU T I O N A N D P O P U L AT I O N
DISPLACEMENT IN CHINA

To bring China into the story as a refugee-creating state solely after the Second
World War is to overlook the fact that China had itself been a site of internal popu-
lation displacement on a large scale. Prolonged Japanese occupation and civil war
brought about enormous internal movements of people, with upwards of 30 mil-
lion people displaced by 1939. The mass flight began in the summer of 1937,
when officials and other members of the elite escaped towards the centre of China.
Japanese bombs, as well as well-founded fears of the behaviour of enemy troops,
induced ordinary citizens to flee to the countryside, in the hope of being able to
return shortly. A few wealthy individuals managed to reach Hong Kong. Continued

7
Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, 114–52.
8
Bell, ‘Thoughts on the Future of the Far East Programs’.
9
Consultative Committee on Foreign Affairs, Confidential memo on the Korean situation, 13 July
1950, AFSC Archives, Foreign Service 1950 Country—Korea, Inter-office memos.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 181

hostilities meant that most refugees were unable to return to their homes. A year
after the Japanese invasion hundreds of thousands were still living in abandoned
buildings and alleyways.10
Inevitably many Chinese were unable to flee. Japanese officials attempted to al-
leviate food shortages in Shanghai and other cities by forcing migrants to return to
their homes, although many of them preferred the relative security of life in Shang-
hai to the uncertainty of further displacement. The Shanghai International Red
Cross and native place associations (tongxianghui) came to the rescue of those who
were trapped inside the Japanese noose. An important role was played by the Red
Swastika Society, a group of elite and moderately well-off Chinese who collabor-
ated with the occupation regime, but who provided basic relief services to refugees
as well as assisting them to return to their homes. Religious societies also supported
around one million refugees in Zhejiang province, although twice as many re-
ceived no assistance whatsoever, and the relief effort dwindled after 1942.11
In unoccupied China, the mass movement of internally displaced people con-
tinued unabated over the next three years. No sooner had they reached one place
of safety but refugees were moved on again, either because the front came closer (or
there were rumours that it was about to do so), or because local communities made
them unwelcome. As the diarist Jin Xihui put it, ‘ordinarily, in both day and night
travel, people feared ghosts. Now, given the frightening aspects of war, ghosts were
no longer the threat’. The result was an unending odyssey that involved millions of
people. Families were separated, sometimes for good.12
At least five million peasants also lost their homes and livelihoods (and nearly a
million were drowned) because of the decision to breach the dikes of the Yellow
River in the summer of 1938 by China, in a desperate attempt to hold up the en-
emy’s advance by ‘replacing troops with water’. Around 70,000 square kilometres
were affected. Survivors of the flood-induced displacement were forced to settle in
West Henan and Shaanxi provinces or in more remote areas, where they were ex-
pected to cultivate waste land and thereby contribute to their survival and to the
war effort. The government settled 50,000 people on the Huanglongshan Project
in Shaanxi province, whose population increased by more than one-third to 14
million. The environmental consequences of such hasty land clearance programmes
were deeply damaging. In 1945 some six million people from the flood-affected
region were counted as homeless refugees; many suffered from endemic infectious
disease.13 Three hundred miles to the west of Shanghai, the city of Wuhan, to

10
Lary, The Chinese People at War, 22–9; Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness, 60–84.
11
Patricia Stranahan, ‘Radicalisation of Refugees: Communist Party Activity in Wartime Shang-
hai’s Displaced Persons Camps’ Modern China, 26, no.2 (2000), 166–93; Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitter-
ness, 53–7; Toby Lincoln, ‘Fleeing from Firestorms: Government, Cities, Native Place Associations
and Refugees in the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance’ Urban History, 38, no.3 (2011), 437–56.
12
Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness, 12–15, 35–7, 102.
13
Diana Lary, ‘Drowned Earth: the Strategic Breaching of the Yellow River Dyke, 1938’ War in
History, 8, no.2 (2001), 191–207; China’s Relief Needs (Washington D.C., National Planning Associa-
tion, 1945), 42–5; Micah S. Muscolino, ‘Violence against People and the Land: the Environment and
Refugee Migration from China’s Henan Province, 1938–1945’ Environment and History, 17, no.2
(2011), 291–311.
182 Mid-Century Maelstrom

which hundreds of thousands of other refugees fled, became a dynamic and cos-
mopolitan site of new projects in health and welfare. The Red Cross and Chinese
municipal authorities provided some assistance, but refugees were often forced to
rely on their own initiative. Overseas Chinese were cut off and unable to send
money or relief packages. Local people played a prominent role in assisting refu-
gees, not unlike the work performed by their counterparts in Russia’s voluntary
organizations during the First World War.14
In broader terms, refugee relief became deeply politicized. In Shanghai’s refugee
camps the Chinese Communist Party forged a united front with the anti-com-
munist Guomindang but used the opportunity to gain the support of refugees by
an astute mixture of patriotic propaganda and practical assistance, such as the re-
settlement project at Nanniwan in Shaanxi province. Communist officials sought
to return refugees to their homes rather than resettle them in remote parts of the
country. The Party gained new recruits in Shanghai, where refugees and other civil-
ians came to believe in the Party’s competence and ‘humanitarianism’, as well as its
commitment to driving out the Japanese army. Scorched earth policies and mass
evacuation—such as the lovely city of Guilin in autumn 1944—were reluctantly
accepted. This left a difficult legacy when the war came to an end. Only when
UNRRA launched a massive rehabilitation programme could a start be made on
rebuilding infrastructure, beginning with the Yellow River dikes.15
The return of refugees was equally painful. Those who had fled treated with con-
tempt those who remained behind; the former felt that they had borne the brunt of
suffering during the war. When they returned, they wished to reclaim what they
viewed as rightfully theirs.16 By these means the mass internal wartime displacement
of population inflicted permanent damage on countless lives, turned households
and the entire society upside down, and contributed to the revolution in 1949.

KO R E A N R E F U G E E S : F RO M ‘ R E L I E F ’
TO ‘ D E V E L O P M E N T ’

The 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea ended in 1945. As in Germany, the ter-
ritory of Korea was divided pending the outcome of discussions on the formation
of a unified state. The UN General Assembly recognized the Republic of Korea in
December 1948. In June 1950 North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel with
the support of Chinese armed forces who now confronted US troops on Korean
soil. Prior to the invasion around 650,000 people fled from the North to the south-
ern half of the country, although this figure was disputed by the US army, which
believed that local authorities inflated the total in order to secure additional relief
supplies. According to the UN, South Korea was home to 5.3 million refugees by

14
Stephen R. MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008).
15
Stranahan, ‘Radicalisation of Refugees’, 177–80; Lary, The Chinese People at War, 92, 153.
16
Lary, The Chinese People at War, 181.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 183

July 1951, of whom 1.8 million were living outside the provinces where they ordi-
narily lived, 1.9 million were within such provinces, 1.2 million were originally
from Seoul, and 0.3 million were from North Korea. No-one knew how many
refugees there were in the North. It may be that between six and eight million
people left their homes before the opposing sides agreed to an armistice in July
1953. For the remaining decade, South Korea was a country of refugees.17
The Korean crisis demonstrated the continued importance of geopolitical con-
siderations in determining the extent to which the resources of rich countries
would be harnessed to refugee relief. Following the start of hostilities, the US-led
United Nations Command (UNC) provided aid to civilians caught in the combat
zone. In September 1950, responsibility for civilian relief was transferred to the
United Nations Civil Assistance Command in Korea (UNCACK), a unit of the
United States Eighth Army in Korea. The presence of American soldiers encour-
aged prostitution and black market transactions from which refugees did not
exempt themselves. Refugee children from poor families could not afford to attend
schools and worked as street cleaners or shoe-shine boys to earn money. Obviously
little of this surfaced in the official record. UNCACK instead publicized its cam-
paign to inoculate people against smallpox and typhoid. It operated like a mini-
state. Some of its personnel were drawn from the Red Cross and from the IRO, but
most came from the military, and they did not take kindly to civilians who refused
to obey orders to move to specified locations in the south of the country instead of
seeking to return to their homes close to the demilitarized zone.18
Those refugees from the North who were regarded as a ‘security risk’ were im-
mediately placed in camps. UN welfare workers encouraged refugees to stay with
family or friends, on the grounds that experience with DP camps in Europe had
done little to promote individual responsibility. Around half made their way to
urban centres, putting the infrastructure under great strain and creating an under-
class in overcrowded cities such as the port city of Pusan, where the pre-war popu-
lation of 500,000 may have trebled by 1951. The city authorities were overwhelmed
and left refugees to their own devices, allowing them to take over municipal build-
ings and factories. Inflation was rampant. Water was rationed. Refugees in Pusan
complained that they were at a disadvantage compared to those in camps who
could be assured of shelter and a hot meal. Seoul, in the centre of the country, had
been ‘well steamrollered three times’ and had become a ‘ghost city [in which] a
population of refugees from within the city and from the north ekes out a bare
existence, trying to find lost children, waiting for help from wherever it may come’.
According to Korea’s Ambassador to Washington, ‘we are confronted with the
problem of caring for the victims of war who cannot help themselves in the face of

17
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, volume 1: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate
Regimes 1945–1947 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 54–60. UN estimates from Joseph
Lehmann, Executive Director of ARK, ‘Report on Field Trip to Korea’, 2 November 1951, AFSC
Archives, Foreign Service—Korea 1947–2002.
18
UNCACK was renamed Korean Civil Assistance Command (KCAC) in 1953. Vernant, The
Refugee in the Post-War World, 779.
184 Mid-Century Maelstrom

the disaster which has overtaken them and for which they are in no wise responsi-
ble. They have left their homes, taking with them only what they could carry in
their arms. The children, the aged and the sick are in need of medical attention’.
Interviews with refugees painted a picture of arduous journeys by rail, road or boat
during the winter of 1950. Women struggled to hold on to their young children as
they travelled in crowded boats and trains—like a ‘dark fog with no light’, as one
refugee described it—towards the relative safety of Seoul. Messages about missing
persons were scribbled on the walls of public buildings. One refugee recalls that
‘we lived like insects’.19
In December 1950 following the North Korean attack on the Republic of Korea
in June, the new United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) was
launched, with a mandate ‘to plan and supervise rehabilitation and relief ’; it
became fully operational when the armistice was signed. Most of its funding came
from the USA and its personnel were subordinated to the US army. As in Germany
in 1945, restrictions, for example on access to civilians, caused concern among relief
workers. But UNKRA developed a far-reaching agenda. According to UNKRA’s
director of Public Information and Liaison, ‘Korea presents a unique opportunity
in the Far East. It is ripe for an economic and cultural renaissance of the first order,
which could have effects all over the Far East’. The displacement of civilians during
the war provided an opportunity to rebuild society whilst simultaneously being ‘a
most effective way of halting communism in Asia’.20 It helped that (in the words of
UNKRA’s director) Korean refugees demonstrated ‘fortitude and [an] indomitable
spirit. They have suffered indescribably, but they are amazingly strong and hopeful
for the future’.21
Alongside UNKRA, NGOs demonstrated an increased readiness to venture
beyond the European continent, brought together under the umbrella of the Korea
Association of Voluntary Agencies. American Catholic organizations invested
heavily in refugee relief, although Catholic Relief Services painted a picture of im-
mense need that had yet to attract widespread publicity, partly because (as they put
it) the Korean refugee preferred to suffer in silence. The Lutheran World Federa-
tion was another important presence. The idea of the distressed but inherently
proud refugee underlay the decision by the American missionary Bob Pierce to

19
Jonathan Rhoads and Lewis Waddilove, ‘Report on a Mission to Korea’, December 1952, AFSC
Foreign Service—Korea 1947–2002; Memo to UN Security Council, 31 July 1950, Records of
UNKRA S-0526-0027-0008 (Civilian relief to Korea—General policy, 1 August 1950–31 January
1953); Janice Kim, ‘Living in Flight: Civilian Displacement, Suffering, and Relief during the Korean
War, 1945–1953’ Sahak Yonku (Review of Korean History), 100 (2010), 285–327; Ji-Yeon Yuh, ‘Moved
by War: Migration, Diaspora and the Korean War’ Journal of Asian American Studies, 8, no.3 (2005),
277–91.
20
Memo on briefing by Don Pryor, UNKRA, New York, 22 June 1953, NCWC Office for UN
Affairs, CUA Archives Washington, Collection 10, Box 170, Folder 5, Korean Relief 1950–53. Steven
H. Lee, ‘The UNKRA in War and Peace: an Economic and Social History of Korea in the 1950s’, in
Chae-Jin Lee and Young Ick Lew (eds), Korea and the Korean War (Seoul: Yonsei University Press,
2002), 357–96.
21
J. Donald Kingsley, 1951, LWF Archives, Box 36, Newspaper clippings, Folder, ‘Refugees, Gen-
eral, 1948–1957’.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 185

establish World Vision. Journalists too focused on the figure of the abandoned
child. Save the Children opened health clinics and attached particular importance
to improving health education, by organizing lectures and slide shows and paying
for Korean doctors to train in Hong Kong. American Relief for Korea (ARK)
brought together the US government and private charitable organizations (the
Hollywood film star Douglas Fairbanks became its public face) and arranged for
the delivery of clothing and other items to Korean civilians. The USA alone sup-
ported Korea to the tune of around $330 million in just three years.22
Following relief work in Germany, Palestine (Gaza), China and India, the Quak-
ers also became involved. The Friends Service Unit established orphanages, neigh-
bourhood centres, clinics and hospitals, and trained local nurses, midwives and
anaesthetists in Kunsan, home to around 33,000 refugees. Much was made of the
fact that refugee groups were provided with building materials, trained by local
Korean builders, and encouraged to construct their own homes. Documentary
films advertised success stories to audiences in North America. But Quakers agon-
ized about the role they were expected to play: ‘Do we fall into a routine of “sup-
plementing” large-scale governmental efforts, sometimes eating and sleeping in
barbed wire compounds? After a generation of this with a great many people
making a career out of foreign aid and refugee services, one can’t escape that new
insights are demanded. It is a haunting feeling’.23 From this point of view it was
vital that refugees should play a part in their own rehabilitation through dignified
and cooperative labour, so much at odds with prevailing government corruption
associated with the clique around President Syngman Rhee. The AFSC privately
denounced his bloated army that consumed resources that might have gone into
education and training: ‘the military, political, economic climate is not receptive to
the longer range community development type of programme that Friends might
otherwise consider carrying on’. Still, they remained directly involved until the end
of the decade, in the hope of creating something of ‘permanent value’.24
The alleviation of suffering in Korea, as in Germany, relied in the short term on
an awkward collaboration between the military leadership and non-governmental
relief workers. A more durable solution hinged on sustained economic growth that
generated additional jobs. In the early 1950s this prospect seemed far off. The
Korean economy depended heavily upon foreign aid. Refugees from North Korea
indirectly benefited from this largesse, as well as from non-governmental philan-
thropy, and over time they prided themselves on becoming successful entrepre-
neurs. By contrast, internally displaced Koreans paid a heavier price in terms of
material deprivation, which they mitigated by assisting one another. They suffered
in silence because Rhee curbed civic organizations and political parties.

22
Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media, 156; Rachel M. McCleary, Global Compassion:
Private Voluntary Organizations and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 74.
23
Louis Schneider to Frank and Julia Hunt in confidence, 11 November 1954, AFSC Archives,
Foreign Service 1954—Country reports—Korea—Visitors.
24
Louis Schneider to Frank Hunt, 30 October 1953, AFSC Archives, Foreign Service 1953—
Country reports. The AFSC established a presence in North Korea in the 1970s.
186 Mid-Century Maelstrom

H O N G KO N G : A ‘ P RO B L E M O F P E O P L E ’ ?

If we discount repatriation, the defeat of those opposed to the revolution in China

left them with three options for resettlement, only two of which were viable. The
least realistic was the possibility of settling outside the region. The US Immigration
and Naturalization Service vetted any prospective immigrant who claimed family
ties with Chinese Americans, believing this to be part of an attempt at Communist
infiltration. Other non-communist states likewise regarded refugees from China
with suspicion, although countries such as Australia and Canada were keener to
resist the mass immigration of people of Asian descent on purely racist grounds.
There was no equivalent here to the policy of admitting European ‘escapees’ from
communism. The American administration adjusted its immigration quota only
slightly to provide for refugees from Chinese communism, causing one US con-
gressman to observe in 1953 that doing nothing would ‘serve notice [to] those
with yellow skin that you cannot join the white man’s club. Where will these people
look in such an event? The answer is obvious: to the club organised by Uncle Joe
Stalin’.25 But this view cut little ice. Why not (he was told) let the Chinese refugees
throw themselves on the mercy of the Nationalist government in Taiwan or seek
sanctuary in Hong Kong?
In fact around 100,000 Nationalist Army officers as well as civil servants did
move to Taiwan, where they established a government-in-exile, the ‘Republic of
China’, which became a thorn in the flesh of Beijing as well as the colonial admin-
istration in Hong Kong. Although making up only 10 per cent of Taiwan’s post-
war population, the exiles exerted a political and cultural influence out of all
proportion to their size, reinforcing authoritarian rule in the ROC, which regarded
itself as the guardian of Chinese nationalism, as expounded by Sun Yat-sen, and
Confucianism, at the expense of indigenous Taiwanese tradition. Yet their relation-
ship with the native population was an uneasy one. They were described as waish-
engren, ‘people from outside the province of Taiwan’, and this isolation persisted.
A decade after their arrival the leading intellectual Wang Hongjun offered the
caustic assessment that, ‘If you ask them where they came from, why they came,
where they’re going, they have nothing to say’.26
Meanwhile in Hong Kong the numbers confronted the colonial authorities with
a ‘problem’ that they could not ignore. Around 700,000 Chinese refugees fled the
mainland for the adjacent British colony of Hong Kong, most of them between
1949 and 1951. The colony’s population had been much depleted when, following
the Japanese invasion and occupation, one million Chinese fled to the mainland.
This outflow was now reversed. By 1951 its population had doubled to 2.3 mil-
lion. Natural increase accounted for some of this growth, but most of it was due to

25
Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door,
1945–Present (New York: Praeger, 1986), 238.
26
A-chin Hsiau, ‘A “Generation in-Itself ”: Authoritarian Rule, Exilic Mentality, and the Post-war
Generation of Intellectuals in 1960s Taiwan’ The Sixties: a Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 3,
no.1 (2010), 1–31, at 14.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 187

immigration—in 1956 one in three residents in Hong Kong counted as a refugee.

They were expected to return to the mainland rather than attempt to settle in the
colony. Once it became clear that they had no intention of doing so, the British
chose to avoid using the term refugee, a key consideration being that no offence
should be caused to the People’s Republic by implying that it persecuted anyone.
Taiwan had no such qualms, seeking to make political capital out of the flight of
refugees. The British complained that the Nationalists were seeking to ‘foment
intrigue’—there was an element of truth in this accusation—thereby jeopardizing
Anglo-Chinese relations. The upshot of this difficult balancing act was that the
colonial administration increasingly described the newcomers as ‘illegal’ immi-
grants and ‘squatters’ whose economic motives deprived them of entitlement to
protection under the 1951 Convention.27
Included in the total number were members of Shanghai’s erstwhile mercantile
elite, many of whom were active in cotton-spinning and already familiar with the
economic scene in Hong Kong where they had made valuable contacts. Some fled
before 1949, in anticipation of the Communist victory, although they hedged their
bets and until 1952 entertained hopes of returning to the mainland. After a while
they enjoyed an environment favourable to capitalist enterprise, including ‘liberal’
labour legislation, advantageous terms for leasing land and an abundant work-
force.28 Other family members joined them after the PRC came to power, a move
that convinced the colonial authorities that the influx of refugees was more a func-
tion of family reunification and economic aspiration than political persecution.29
Whereas wealthy business people soon found their feet, those of more modest
means encountered a chilly reception from the colonial government. The governor,
Alexander Grantham, set the tone by commenting that he did not want the colony
to become ‘a glorified soup kitchen for refugees from all over China’, since they
were ‘not our own people’. Grantham maintained that poor economic conditions
in China and not persecution led these ‘traders and travellers’ to cross into the
colony; he comforted himself with the belief (or hope) that most would return
once they found life difficult in Hong Kong. His administration introduced entry
permits and identity papers.30 Grantham’s successor, Sir Robert Black, argued that
the colony faced an economic challenge and that it was unwise to dwell ‘on the
circumstances of the mass exodus from Communist China’, lest it complicate dip-
lomacy. Thus, he continued, ‘the Hong Kong refugee problem is in fact identical

27
Glen Peterson, ‘To be or not to be a Refugee: the International Politics of the Hong Kong Refu-
gee Crisis, 1949–1955’ Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 36, no.2 (2008), 171–95.
28
Siu-Lun Wong, Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong (Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press, 1988).
29
Agnes S. Ku, ‘Immigration Policies, Discourses, and the Politics of Local Belonging in Hong
Kong, 1950–80’ Modern China, 30, no.3 (2004), 326–60.
30
Hu Yueh, ‘The Problem of the Hong Kong Refugees’ Asian Survey, 2, no.1 (1962), 28–37; Chi-
Kwan Mark, ‘The “Problem of People”: British Colonials, Cold War Powers and the Chinese Refugees
in Hong Kong, 1949–1962’ MAS, 41, no.6 (2007), 1145–81; Christopher A. Airriess, ‘Governmen-
tality and Power in Politically Contested Space: Refugee Farming in Hong Kong’s New Territories,
1945–1970’ Journal of Historical Geography, 31, no.4 (2005), 763–8.
188 Mid-Century Maelstrom

with the complexity of problems created by a rapidly swollen and rapidly increas-
ing population’. According to Black:
We are not a staging post on a great migration; we are a terminus and a goal. We
cannot let ourselves be transformed into a camp with all its nomadic and temporary
implications, the object of fleeting charity, a soup-kitchen queue for those less fortu-
nate than we are, as they pause here, waiting to know whither they can go. We are a
community who have had some measure of success, the fruits of resource and endur-
ing efforts.
Black concluded that ‘we are not (repeat not) callous, calculating capitalists who
deny the rights of those still living in our slums to better housing. Our calculations
we direct, we hope in a realistic and unsentimental way, to discovering how to fulfil
our humanitarian role within the boundaries of this small geographical location’.31
Tougher rules on immigration in 1962 were portrayed as protecting the ‘special’
character of the colony, although these measures did not deter successive contin-
gents from trying to get into Hong Kong.32
The very real plight of refugees in Hong Kong did not escape the notice of
UNHCR. A report prepared on its behalf left its readers in no doubt that these
refugees required urgent attention, but it took until November 1957 for the UN
General Assembly to decide that ‘the problem of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong
is such as to be of concern to the international community’ and to urge the High
Commissioner to ‘use his good offices’ to secure financial resources to contribute
to their relief in situ. They were, it appeared, now de facto refugees, although the
colonial authorities continued to insist otherwise. Nor did the UN take a view on
the legal status of those who fled. In this situation a great deal of the day-to-day
responsibility for assisting the refugees fell upon voluntary organizations which
entered the field with a self-proclaimed ‘humanitarian’ mission.33
Doubtless it helped that most newcomers proved more resourceful than
Grantham and Black anticipated or were led to believe. An article in a Catholic
newsletter praised their resilience, adding that the ‘noble’ Chinese refugees envis-
aged Hong Kong as ‘the city of freedom and hope’. ‘A Chinese family arriving in
Hong Kong did not go to a welfare organisation for aid; instead, the family mem-
bers, one and all, went into the alleys and dumps of Hong Kong in search of
boards, crates, wire, tin and tarpaper. This they laboriously carried to a hillside
where they ingeniously constructed a hut’. According to one refugee, ‘Here I can
do what I want’, even if it meant living in a makeshift hut. The author concluded
optimistically by suggesting that Catholic relief work ‘has so aroused the interest of
the refugees that great numbers of them are turning to Catholicism. In this free
world of Hong Kong, they see love expressed through the priests and sisters whose

31
Speech to the Hong Kong Legislative Council, 1 March 1961, TNA CO 1030/1311.
32
Laura Madokoro, ‘Borders Transformed: Sovereign Concerns, Population Movements and the
Making of Territorial Frontiers in Hong Kong, 1949–1967’ JRS, 25, no.3 (2012), 407–27.
33
Edvard Hambro, The Problem of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1955);
UNHCR, Fonds 11 Series 1, 15/2/1. Hambro’s report was translated into Chinese by the Free China
Relief Association.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 189

lives are devoted to helping them in their trouble’. The Maryknoll Sisters organized
youth clubs and set up a family counselling service to inculcate good citizenship,
and stressed that refugees had made the right choice in escaping from Commu-
nism. There were rich pickings for the Catholic Church and its anti-communist
crusade.34
The support given to Chinese refugees by churches and secular organizations
dismayed colonial officials because they raised the prospect that refugees would put
down ‘roots’, although NGOs were more concerned that ‘the youth is entirely
confused, disappointed and virgin soil for any radical philosophy of life promising
them a better future’. Only after a terrible fire in the squatters’ camp of Shek Kip
Mei on Christmas Day 1953 and riots in 1956 did the colonial administration
adjust its policy, by agreeing to fund the construction of seven-storey ‘H blocks’ in
Kowloon to offer greater protection against fire and the spread of infectious dis-
ease, and thus to benefit the resident population at large. In 1964 the government
evicted squatters from Wong Tai Sin and relocated 180,000 in the high-rise ‘reset-
tlement estates’ of Chi Wan Shan (‘Mercy Cloud Village’). Private sector invest-
ment in housing also made a big difference, as it did in South Korea. The colonial
government agreed to provide land to refugees from neighbouring Guangdong.
Gradually the authorities in Hong Kong came to regard integration as a ‘durable
solution’—not that this prevented them from rounding up unwanted migrants
and sending them back to China, particularly when large numbers of people en-
tered the colony following the Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine in
1962. In the medium term the situation eased thanks to the rapid growth of the
Hong Kong economy to which refugees contributed by making clothes, electrical
products and plastic goods for export, with a similar outcome to that of West
Germany.35
How was population displacement understood by those most directly affected?
Chinese nationalist opponents of the PRC who sheltered in Burma and Thailand
described an arduous escape from Yunnan and the attempt to sustain as normal a
life as possible. In Burma they were assisted by longstanding Chinese migrant
communities, who saw them as guardians of Han identity—‘informants often
mention that their villages are like small Chinese societies’.36 They framed exile as
an expression of the fight against communism (profits from the trade in narcotics
helped) and sustaining a sense of ‘tradition’, including Buddhist belief. Their hatred
of communism and affection for pre-revolutionary rural Yunnan remained un-
dimmed, in ways that recall the worldview of Russian émigrés after 1917. Today it

34
Mgnr. John Romaniello, ‘A Missionary’s Experience with Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong’ Mi-
gration News, 7, no.1 (1958), 12–13; Cindy Yik-Yi Chu, The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921–
1969: In Love with the Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 106.
35
Pastor Ludwig Stumpf to Henry Whiting, 12 October 1954, LWF Archives, Box WS/V.2.a,
Resettlement Offices, Hong Kong, 1954–1967; Wong, Emigrant Entrepreneurs, 16–18, 37–8,
176–7.
36
Wen-Chin Chang, ‘From War Refugees to Immigrants: the Case of the KMT Yunnanese Chi-
nese in Northern Thailand’ IMR, 35, no.4 (2001), 1086–105, at 1097. During the 1980s ethnic
Chinese fled from Burma to join these refugees in Thailand.
190 Mid-Century Maelstrom

is cemented by memorial books—clan genealogies—that affirm ‘the achievements

of our ancestors [and] educate the offspring to retain Han history and civilization’.
These books, carefully copied from scarce texts that survived destruction, support
a history not so much of flight in 1949 as of heroic Han migration to Yunnan
under the Ming Dynasty.37
We know little of the attitudes of other refugees. It would be an over-simplifica-
tion to assume a ‘refugee mentality’ that contributed to the absence of political
activism, particularly when the British discouraged political organization and ex-
pression in Hong Kong, as did Syngman Rhee in South Korea. The Nationalist
Free China Relief Association maintained a presence in some of the refugee settle-
ments, and this was one outlet. Although refugees do not appear to have written
about the homes they left or their journey to Hong Kong, they nevertheless regis-
tered a presence in cultural as well as economic terms. Film and popular music
brought a more dynamic edge to the colony’s hitherto conservative cultural scene.
Like the rebetika music brought from Asia Minor, audiences in the 1950s and early
1960s lapped up popular songs such as ‘Shanghai by Night’ composed by refugees.
The same enthusiasm manifested itself in respect of Mandarin films, until they too
were eclipsed by Western products. In the absence for whatever reason of personal
testimony, and of significant commemorative activity, this dynamism indicates
that refugees left their mark on the history of Hong Kong.38

D I S P L A C E M E N T, D I A S P O R A A N D VA L O R I Z AT I O N :
T I B E TA N R E F U G E E S

At the end of the 1950s, as the claims of Korea and Hong Kong on international
public opinion weakened, the flight of Tibetan refugees began to grab the head-
lines. In 1959, following a concerted attempt by the Chinese Communist Party
and the People’s Liberation Army to transform social and economic relations in
Tibet, tens of thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile in neigh-
bouring India, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, in the belief that they would soon be
able to return. (Others, of course, opted to stay in Tibet, and about their experi-
ences we know next to nothing.) Although their motives were mixed, refugees
often mentioned religious persecution, as well as ‘increasing hardship and mental
torture’ according to one unidentified farmer who fled in 1971. Some had fought
against the Chinese army of occupation, while others wished to evade the collect-
ivization of their livestock. By 1960 around 45,000 refugees were registered in
India, 25,000 in Nepal and 4,000 in Bhutan; an additional 14,000 fled to the

37
Wen-Chin Chang, ‘Home Away from Home: Migrant Yunnanese Chinese in Northern Thai-
land’ International Journal of Asian Studies, 3, no.1 (2006), 49–76, at 66.
38
Benjamin K.P. Leung, Perspectives on Hong Kong Society (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
1996), 64–5; Janet Salaff, Siu-Iun Wong and Arent Grove (eds), Hong Kong Movers and Stayers: Nar-
ratives of Family Migration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 102. Second-generation refu-
gees did however protest against Beijing after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 191

Portuguese colony of Macao. Smaller numbers added to the exile population later
on. India’s Buddhist heritage was thought to provide a point of cultural and reli-
gious contact.39
In Nepal the refugees were regarded as temporary visitors to be looked after by
the local Red Cross or the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society of Canada, whose founder
provided an excellent summary of their social world. Those who reached India
were assisted by various private bodies and by the Ministry of Rehabilitation (chap-
ter 5) which placed refugees in transit camps. Anticipating Chinese spies in their
midst, the government in Delhi dispersed refugees rather than leaving them close
to the border. Another factor was the government’s wish to discourage political agi-
tation among Tibetan refugees by insisting that the admission of refugees was a
purely ‘humanitarian’ gesture. India and Nepal—like the British in Hong Kong—
regarded the internationalization of the crisis as an unwelcome development that
threatened to damage relations with China. Other governments betrayed no such
anxiety. From the outset the USA looked upon refugees as pawns in the struggle
against communism, and thus deserving of substantial financial support. In 1959
the CIA created a front organization, the American Emergency Committee for
Tibetan Refugees, which offered clandestine support for the resistance army on
Tibetan soil, the Chushi Gangdrug, some of whose members escorted the Dalai
Lama to safety in 1959. This strategy continued until the early 1970s when the
USA sought a rapprochement with China.40
Informal settlements sprang up in India and Nepal, but living conditions left
much to be desired. The Indian government wanted to tread carefully lest it en-
courage the belief among Bengali refugees that Tibetans received preferential treat-
ment. For his part, the Dalai Lama feared that the refugees would ‘be dispersed and
then sink to the level of the poorest Indians’.41 These anxieties were not unfounded.
A confidential UNHCR memorandum argued that visitors to India got a distorted
picture of the situation, because they visited picturesque Tibetan hill stations at
which children enjoyed good health, whereas remote and disadvantaged places
escaped their attention. Here refugees were put to work on arduous road construc-
tion projects in the Himalayan region, living on site in flimsy tents and without
access to medical care. The author spoke apocalyptically of ‘the social downfall of
the Tibetan refugees’, far exceeding all other post-war refugee problems, adding
that ‘when I saw the situation of the Tibetan refugees, six years after their arrival in
India, I was struck by the similarity with the problems in Europe in 1951, six years
after World War 2’. Although the Indian government had done a reasonable job,
since 1963 ‘no new initiatives of any size have been undertaken’, something that

39
Margaret Nowak, Tibetan Refugees: Youth and the New Generation of Meaning (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 11.
40
George Woodcock, ‘Tibetan Refugees in a Decade of Exile’ Pacific Affairs, 43, no.3 (1970),
410–20; Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA and Memories of a Forgotten War
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
41
High Commissioner, New Delhi, to Commonwealth Relations Office, London, 2 June 1959,
TNA FO 371/145388; Edward Sniders, UK Permanent Delegation, Geneva, to Selwyn Lloyd, 22
September 1959, TNA FO 371/145404.
192 Mid-Century Maelstrom

Indian officials attributed to the shortage of land and the influx of 900,000 refu-
gees from East Pakistan. He concluded that international support would contrib-
ute to their integration, provided UNHCR embarked on ‘planned development’,
an indication of the connection that was being envisaged between individual refu-
gee ‘rehabilitation’ and nationwide economic modernization.42
Public opinion in the West soon began to pay close attention to the plight of
Tibetan refugees. Ethnic stereotyping affected contemporary attitudes. Those who
made their way to Nepal were described as an inherently ‘nomadic’ population
who were deemed to be less susceptible to psychological damage than Europeans.
One condescending report suggested that they ‘withstood wonderfully well their
miraculous journey through the Himalayas’.43 This did not lessen the responsibili-
ties of foreign philanthropy which took its cue from the notion of a Buddhist
utopia, popularized by the novelist James Hilton before the Second World War
and turned into a celebrated film, Lost Horizon. Sentimental attachment to this
‘Shangri La’ combined with Cold War considerations helped engineer interna-
tional support. In 1960 World Refugee Year enabled sympathizers to provide Ti-
betan refugees in Nepal with literacy classes, so that following their ‘eventual return
[they might] be the torch bearers to lead their country to peace and prosperity’.
But this was not a uniform view. One British official advocated resettlement in a
newly-built ‘Tibetan town’ housing 25,000 people in Punjab or Himachal Pradesh,
which could ‘absorb the unrehabilitated [sic] refugees working at present on the
roads as well as such of the colonists who have found agricultural work uncongen-
ial or unattractive’.44 The World Council of Churches also supported resettlement
projects, including better facilities for health care and vocational training, lest Ti-
betan refugees form a ‘hard core’ and fall victim to what was called the ‘refugee
psychosis’. Some of these initiatives had lasting consequences. Within a few years
the government-in-exile established schools whose teachers inculcated the ‘cultural
uniqueness’ of Tibet and imposed sanctions on recalcitrant students. In Nepal,
Swiss relief workers helped Tibetans to develop a thriving carpet weaving industry,
with the backing of foreign capital and expertise. Repatriation vanished from the
diplomatic lexicon.45
In the longer term Nehru’s decision to admit the Dalai Lama and his followers
made it possible to develop Tibetan culture in exile. The chosen site was the North-
ern Indian settlement of Dharamsala (in Hindi this conveys the idea of a guest-
house or ‘temporary abode’) whose monasteries had been built by Tibetan migrants

42
K. Brouwer, UNHCR representative in The Hague, 15 March 1965, Fonds UNHCR 11, Series
1, 1951–70, 15/GEN/TIB, Tibetan refugees, 1959–67.
43
UNOG Archives, ARR 55/0088, File Box no. 046; Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library,
White House Central Files, 1953–61, Official File, Box 579 (Refugees-DPs 1958–60), Folder 116-G
1959–60.
44
Report by Maurice Frydman, April 1964, Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 1951–70, 15/0/IND/
TIB, Tibetan refugees in India, 1959–65, Folder 3; Dibyesh Anand, Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in
Western Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
45
Memo by W.S. Kilpatrick, Director, Service to Refugees, WCC, Geneva, 29 January 1962, Box
WS V.3.b, Service to Refugees, Material Relief, India, 1954–62.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 193

in the nineteenth century. Its facilities were initially lamentable. The Indian gov-
ernment initially issued refugees with ID cards and prevented them from acquiring
farm land or owning a business. In due course, refugees came to regard the cards
not as demeaning but as a token of pride, affirming their decision not to renounce
their refugee status. Over time, this ‘temporary abode’ took on a more permanent
appearance and settlement became the new mantra; in 1969 Tibetan refugees were
permitted to work without hindrance and to own land. From time to time new
groups of refugees made their way into India. Dharamsala acquired the name
‘little Lhasa in India’. It housed the renowned Library of Tibetan Works and Ar-
chives. 10 March became the annual day of commemoration of the moment when
Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile—organizers of the first demonstration
were keen to ensure that publicity material was made available in English in order
to maximize international publicity for this event. Since then the date has been
fixed as ‘National Uprising Day’.46
Among Tibetan refugees a distinctive politics was associated with ideas of home
as ‘sacred space’. Elderly refugees described a ‘life [that was] smooth and well regu-
lated by the forces of nature. Floods, earthquakes and foreign invasions were con-
sidered as indicative of a disruption in the relationship between the divine forces
and us mortals’. Tibetan exiles denounced the desecration of their homeland as a
consequence of Chinese administration. But refugeedom exposed divergent opin-
ions between pro-Western Tibetans who have embraced a democratic outlook and
ordinary Tibetans who continue to endorse a tradition in which kinship and pa-
tronage are paramount. Older Tibetans bemoan the fact that the young generation
‘do not understand what we have gone through in life; they are far more attracted
to material things. The love that we have for our land is missing in them’.47 Veter-
ans of the Chushi Gangdrug resistance feel that their actions have been forgotten
by the creation of a dominant narrative of non-violence. The Dalai Lama lamented
what he regarded as a tendency for Tibetans who remained behind to ‘think and
behave like Chinese’, while Tibetan exiles who arrived in Dharamsala in the 1980s
and 1990s were mocked for their ‘Chinese ways’. One refugee described how he
became ‘properly Tibetan’ by learning patriotic songs—‘I got better at it as I did it
again and again’.48
Even if the prospect of a return to ‘free Tibet’ appears remote, nevertheless in-
vestment in cultural programmes contributed to a sense that Tibet is ‘alive’ among
its exiled communities. This has sometimes taken surprising forms. Dharamsala is
now the site of the annual ‘Miss Tibet’ competition. According to its website the
winner in 2008 was Sonam Choedon who was born in 1990 in Kham, Eastern
Tibet. ‘She is a student, has studied up to class 8 in Tibet. She is fluent in Chinese
as well as Tibetan. She came into exile in India in June 2008 in search of better

46
Nowak, Tibetan Refugees, 33–4; Honey Oberoi Vahali, Lives in Exile: Exploring the Inner World
of Tibetan Refugees (Routledge, 1999), 95–6.
47
Vahali, Lives in Exile, 9, 15.
48
Emily Ting Yeh, ‘Exile Meets Homeland: Politics, Performance and Authenticity in the Tibetan
Diaspora’ Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 25, no.4 (2007), 648–67, at 653, 662.
194 Mid-Century Maelstrom

opportunities for education. Her hobbies include dancing, reading and studying
languages. In the future she would like to become a dance teacher and also work
on languages. She would also like to use her life and strength to help others in need
as people have done for her when she first arrived in India’. Choedon praised the
relevance of Gandhi to the Tibetan people: ‘Gandhi is the most important freedom
fighter of India. He fought with non-violence. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is fol-
lowing his path and pursuing the Middle-way approach to resolve the Tibetan
issue.’ However, she said that she had not been able to study Gandhi in Tibet and
was ‘speaking from the brief knowledge I have gained and heard after coming into
exile’.49
For Tashi, a young Tibetan in Dharamsala, educational provision exposed a
paradox:
Our school principal was Tibetan but she could only speak Chinese. That is one reason
why our parents sent us to India; in this school we are learning about our history and
also Tibetan language. And now I am in India I am also learning Chinese. I think
going back to Tibet will be very difficult but if I can go back in the future I think I
should know Chinese.50
Some refugees thus developed a more cosmopolitan outlook. Older people found
this troubling. One elderly refugee described how, having settled in Bhopal he
developed a greater understanding of his Indian neighbours, such that ‘without
really knowing it, we had begun to eat like Indians, speak like them, dress and even
laugh like them . . . it was only when people remarked that we had adapted rather
well that I sometimes felt uncomfortable’. He turned down the offer of a plot of
land in a neighbour’s village and returned to Dharamsala: ‘Why had I come to
India? To forget? Who was I? What was my past?’51 The point is that it would be a
mistake to regard settlements such as those in Dharamsala or Nepal as the embodi-
ment of a stable, unproblematic and uncontested Tibetan identity, even if foreign
friends of Tibet might wish it otherwise. Displacement exposed divergent views
about ‘authenticity’.

C O N C LU S I O N S

War, occupation, civil war and revolution constituted the matrix of mass popula-
tion displacement in South-East Asia in the middle years of the twentieth century.
The lengthy struggle to dislodge Japan from its grip on mainland China produced
the greatest mass movement of refugees in modern history. Civil war exposed ir-
reconcilable political and ideological differences; as in Russia in 1917–21, one
result was an exodus of people opposed to the revolutionary project. Western
public opinion portrayed the government of Communist China in negative terms,

49
<http://www.misstibet.com/>.
50
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7926559.stm>.
51
Vahali, Lives in Exile, 21–3.
 War and Population Displacement in East Asia, 1937–1950 195

but this was a somewhat simplistic appraisal, neglecting the role of communist
forces in defeating the Japanese. Nor should the flight of Nationalist forces and
civilians obscure the fact that most Chinese got on with their lives as best they
could.
The Cold War determined the way in which the refugee crisis was framed and
addressed, not only by governments but by NGOs. Conservative voluntary agen-
cies such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services made no secret of their
anti-communist stance, which coloured their attitude towards Chinese, Korean
and Tibetan refugees. Western relief workers did not all sing from the same hymn
sheet: Quakers in particular denounced the authoritarian and corrupt regime of
Syngman Rhee. However, these failings were not the sole preserve of the political
leadership: the unconventional behaviour of some refugees also contributed to
what was widely perceived as ‘moral degradation’.
Although Western sympathy for Tibetan refugees owed a good deal to the ‘Com-
munist menace’, their high place in the international pecking order, out of all
proportion to their numbers, was reminiscent of public support in the West for
Armenian refugees earlier. They benefited from the readiness of foreign sympathiz-
ers to associate themselves with the preservation of Tibetan culture in exile. To a
lesser extent this was also true of Korean refugees, whose Catholic faith ensured
backing from the influential Catholic lobby in the USA. Religious ties and cultural
sentiment thus helped shape the contours of humanitarianism. Some groups
were better placed than others to trade on positive representations of their
predicament.
Refugees in South Korea and Hong Kong made use of entrepreneurial skills
and seized new economic opportunities. In both societies, the economic ‘mira-
cle’ in the later 1950s and 1960s helped to alleviate the material misfortunes of
refugees and contributed to their local integration. Foreign aid and government
investment contributed to economic reconstruction, helping to keep conserva-
tive forces in power. Elsewhere in South-East Asia the outcome was less favour-
able to refugees. For all the virtues that were ascribed to Tibetan refugees, the
story was of hardship and uncertainty. Very few Asian refugees were admitted
to the USA or Commonwealth countries, which modified their exclusionary
policy only in the late 1970s in response to the exodus of refugees from Vietnam
(chapter 7).
Bringing this chapter to a close only serves to expose the lack of anything like a
full social and cultural history of displacement in South-East Asia. There are nev-
ertheless some pointers. We are beginning to understand how difficult it was for
Korean refugees to negotiate the upheaval of war and forced migration. It is less
clear how plebeian Chinese refugees came to terms with their bleak experience of
life in Hong Kong. Diaries written by Chinese merchants and teachers have sur-
vived from the Second World War, throwing light on their experiences of dis-
placement including changes in gender relations brought about by mixing peasants
and middle-class students: a displaced sociologist wrote of the impact this made
on household relations: ‘My landlady is able to learn from my wife the way of
196 Mid-Century Maelstrom

bringing up children. And, owing to my constant interference, the beating of his

wife by my landlord has become less frequent’.52 We know that Tibetan refugee
communities incorporated a history of life before the Chinese occupation into
their interpretation of exile. The politics of social and cultural life is transparent:
while China proclaims its role as liberator from feudal rule and ‘obscurantism’ in
old Tibet, the exiled followers of the Dalai Lama bemoan the ‘slavery’ now imposed
by Chinese rule. This is a contested history of displacement, and it does not always
lend itself to informed debate. But it shows that the past is of paramount
importance.

52
Lary, The Chinese People at War, 83.
 PA RT I I I

REFUGEES IN THE GLOBAL

C O L D WA R A N D I T S A F T E R M AT H
This page intentionally left blank
 One cannot run from one’s own past
( Johannes Østrup)

Previous chapters demonstrated that wars, the clash of ideologies and the forma-
tion of new states contributed to widespread population displacement in the first
half of the twentieth century. Although self-preservation provided one motive for
flight, governments targeted entire groups of people in pursuit of political, social
and economic transformation. The dissolution of empires and the creation of
nation-states produced enormous demographic upheaval. During the 1950s the
struggle against colonialism extended to large parts of the globe. A refugee crisis in
North Africa where Algerian nationalists fought to overthrow France’s grip on their
country was one outcome. Independence struggles in other parts of the Third
World had similarly turbulent results. Communism too captured popular imagin-
ation throughout the Far East, in China and North Korea, in Vietnam and
Cambodia, and in Ethiopia. Social relations were turned upside down by con-
certed campaigns against property owners, not just the wealthy elite but peasant
farmers and petty traders as well. The situation was complicated by the global Cold
War, because the superpowers invested in conflict by arming proxies in the Third
World and sustaining clients who had fled abroad. In the case of Afghanistan, the
Soviet attempt to shore up a communist regime had long lasting consequences in
terms of population displacement.
The end of the Cold War in the 1990s witnessed a shift from a bipolar world in
ways that are still being worked out at the level of states and in diplomatic engage-
ment. One strand of thought maintains that ideological divisions have been replaced
by a new struggle construed as ‘culture’ versus ‘barbarism’, manifested in a discourse
that asserts the values of ‘civilization’ as opposed to ‘ancient hatreds’ and religious
‘fundamentalism’, although this would come as a surprise to those who denounced
Ottoman atrocities in the late nineteenth century in similar terms.1 Another line of
argument holds that the post-Cold War era spawned a new style of warfare fuelled by
a combination of localized grievances and struggles on the one hand, and access to
globalized resources on the other. In fragile states, such as Somalia and Bosnia, new
warriors secured funding from the proceeds of organized crime, from supporters
in the diaspora and by siphoning off substantial amounts of humanitarian aid for

1
Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: the Merging of Development and Security
(Zed Books, 2001).
200 Refugees in the Global Cold War

military purposes. In these violent settings, dominated by paramilitaries, mercenaries

and warlords, civilians served as a resource to be conscripted or taxed. UNHCR of-
ficials speak of intervening in conflicts that recognize no distinction between military
personnel and others, making it difficult to assist ‘genuine’ refugees.2
It is easy to be seduced into thinking that the tectonic plates shifted fundamen-
tally towards the end of the twentieth century, but the extent of the upheaval can
be exaggerated. As we have seen, both world wars blurred the distinction between
uniformed combatants and civilians. Orchestrated attacks on civilian targets took
place during the First World War and its aftermath. The brutal Russian Civil War
was fuelled by rival ideologies, conducted by paramilitaries as well as organized
armies, and sustained by foreign intervention. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-
Herzegovina had antecedents in the early twentieth century, and its purpose was as
transparent then as it was in the 1990s. The main difference is that warlords now
find it possible to gain access to external resources on a much larger scale than
hitherto, including resources destined for displaced civilians.
The capacity of international and inter-governmental organizations to manage
the consequences of refugee crises increased rather than diminished in the second
half of the twentieth century. One hallmark was the extension of UNHCR’s remit
beyond Europe. This new dispensation first emerged in North Africa in the late
1950s, when UNHCR assisted refugees in Morocco and Tunisia fleeing the Alger-
ian war of independence, citing a willingness to use ‘good offices’ to support those
who did not fall within its mandate.3 This was only the first step in charting an
increasingly global course that by the end of the millennium encompassed great
swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, South-east Asia and Latin America. Questions arose
about the appropriate ‘durable solution’ to pursue in each case—whether repatri-
ation, resettlement or local integration—and how this might square with the inter-
ests of host states and countries of prospective immigration. Inevitably decisions
reflected not the wishes of UNHCR, but the interests of member states, each of
which affirmed its sovereignty in respect of decisions over asylum.
UNHCR thus had to tread carefully. It engaged awkwardly with governments
in South-East Asia that expressed considerable doubts in the 1970s about their
ability to cope with large number of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. The
delicate balance between advocacy and respect for state sovereignty continues to
preoccupy UNHCR. In the new millennium its spokespersons point to the per-
sistence of protracted refugee situations and advocate ‘international solidarity, co-
operation and responsibility-sharing’, all of which have been in short supply in the
post-Cold War era. They lament the lack of ‘clear parameters [to] describe how
states should help one another with hosting refugees’ and the crisis in the global
economic order that fosters even more restrictive policies on the part of countries
of prospective asylum.4

2
The State of the World’s Refugees 2012, chapter 1; Chandler, ‘The Road to Military Humanitarian-
ism’, 693; Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity,
2001).
3
Cecilia Ruthström-Ruin, Beyond Europe: the Globalization of Refugee Aid (Lund: Lund University
Press, 1993).
4
The State of the World’s Refugees 2012, chapter 8.
 Introduction to Part III 201

Already in the 1960s and 1970s voices within UNHCR and in NGOs began
to suggest that the nature of the ‘refugee problem’ had changed. Louise Holborn
maintained that decolonization meant coming to terms with very different chal-
lenges than those confronted by the aftermath of war in Europe. African refugees
were predominantly subsistence farmers or herdsmen who lacked contact with
‘modern society’, unlike their counterparts in Europe. Refugee movements in
Africa, she went on, ‘occurred in an entirely different political, economic, social
and cultural context [and] the characteristics of the African refugees themselves
and the absence of institutional infrastructure presented a refugee problem of a
new nature and of new dimensions’. Other scholars shared the view that the
phenomenon of ‘new refugees’ bore little resemblance to previous patterns of
displacement, in so far as the numbers were far greater and because refugees from
less developed countries (‘preliterate mountain tribesmen’) lacked cultural or
ethnic ties with host societies in Europe and North America that encountered
them in greater numbers.5 This interpretation exaggerates the differences of scale
and obscures similarities in policy over time. The number of refugees in sub-
Saharan Africa was considerable, but so too was the magnitude of displacement
in Europe and in China at the end of the Second World War. Nor should one
minimize the difficulties that confronted refugees and DPs earlier on, including
the need to improvise ‘institutional infrastructure’. Finally, ‘new refugees’ who
sought to settle in distant locations did not necessarily lack kinship ties, precisely
because they favoured destinations where they could count on diasporic connec-
tions and networks.
Humanitarian organizations increasingly described their work with refugees as a
part of a commitment to long-run economic development as well as short-term
relief. They justified programmes of economic and technical assistance as a means
of enabling refugees either to resettle or—preferably—to repatriate, since aid pack-
ages would induce the country of origin to take refugees back and to generate the
kind of stability that would forestall further displacement.6 All the same, this focus
on development per se as a means of addressing protracted refugee crises was not a
complete departure from past practice. During the 1920s, for instance, the League
of Nations advocated investment in Greece to assist the integration of refugees
from Turkey. These programmes incorporated a technocratic agenda of ‘rehabilita-
tion’, implying that refugees could become fully-fledged members of society once
they had been helped to get over the trauma of displacement. In this sense UNHCR
followed in Nansen’s footsteps.
NGOs acquired a global reach. In the inter-war period, they were dominated by
special-interest organizations that assisted Armenian, Russian, Spanish and Jewish
refugees, in some cases drawing on the knowledge and expertise of refugees them-
selves. From the 1950s onwards, the largest NGOs did not confine their attention
to one group but instead adopted a more universal focus, garnering huge resources
from donors and in many cases lucrative contract work on behalf of international

5
Holborn, Refugees, 825–7; Stein, ‘The Refugee Experience’, 330.
6
Coles, ‘Approaching the Refugee Problem Today’, 391.
202 Refugees in the Global Cold War

organizations. All too often, however, their evolution along the lines of ‘modern-
ization, standardization and professionalization’ went hand in hand with an
increasing distance between NGO field workers and ordinary refugees.7
The institutionalization of assistance thus provided refugees with limited
opportunities to influence policy-makers. Attempts have been made to address this
issue, for example by committing resources to the dissemination of eyewitness
testimony; the websites of UNHCR and leading NGOs such as Oxfam indicate
the importance that they attach to refugee stories. The Evelyn Oldfield Unit com-
missioned a community project to collect the ‘untold stories of refugees who have
settled in London since 1951’, including Chinese, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Kurdish,
Tamil and Ugandan refugees. The UNHCR now presents a ‘Gallery of Prominent
Refugees’ who have ‘achieved special status within a community because of their
achievements, or because they have overcome hardship to build a new life’. But
these attenuated vignettes are carefully framed by external agencies to garner a
positive response to their work from host governments and donors rather than to
provide an opportunity for unfettered self-expression, still less to involve refugees
in the decision-making process.8
Beyond this specific purpose, two other points can be established with some
certainty to demonstrate the significance of attempts to engage with the past. First,
refugee leaders looked to history as part of a campaign to turn the tables on their
rivals. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, refugee historians located dis-
placement and incarceration along a broad chronological spectrum of victimiza-
tion. Prolonged exposure to refugee camps intensified these sentiments and provided
an opportunity to mobilize mass opinion for political purposes. The genocide in
Rwanda made clear the painful consequences of articulating extreme views of ethnic
differentiation among refugees who had been radicalized over many years of exile.
Second, the descendants of displaced and resettled refugees who took a close
interest in the experiences of their parents and grandparents could now capitalize
upon new information technologies to share their findings and reflect upon their
experiences. This was facilitated by the opportunity to return to the places that
were left behind, whether in Cyprus, Vietnam and elsewhere. Not for the first
time, commemorative activity highlighted collective trial and tribulation. In a par-
ticularly dramatic instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled the descend-
ants of deported nationalities to draw attention to the suffering of individuals and
communities during the Stalin era, and where possible to secure recognition and
restitution. Whether as part of external humanitarian or diasporic endeavours, the
accounts provided by refugees continued to be subsumed in a broader enterprise.

7
Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 219.
8
Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee’ JRS, 15, no.3
(2002), 248–64. See <http://www.refugeestories.org/> for the exhibition at the Museum of London
(2006–07) with oral testimony collected by the Refugee Communities History Project. For UNHCR
see <http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c74.html>.
 7
‘Villages of Discipline’
Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia

Those vicissitudes we have experienced

Cause our hearts to break
(Nguyen Du)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Forty years ago, war and foreign intervention in South-East Asia filled the pages
of the global mass media. It is not hard to understand why. Violent rivalry between
established regimes and their revolutionary opponents, backed by the world’s
superpowers, led to social and demographic disaster. Communist victories in South
Vietnam, Cambodia (Kampuchea) and Laos in 1975 displaced two million people
to neighbouring states and resulted in internal flight on an even greater scale.
Vietnamese refugees made hazardous attempts to flee by boat; many did not sur-
vive the journey. In Cambodia the victorious Khmer Rouge inflicted enormous
damage on the population, including the country’s Vietnamese, Chinese and
Muslim minorities: ‘to keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no less’, went the
slogan. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia at the end of 1978 culminated in mass
exodus to camps along the Thai border of a mixed population of survivors of the
genocide and remnants of the Khmer Rouge who sought to regroup. These dra-
matic episodes were once common knowledge, but the experiences of refugees
from Vietnam and Cambodia presently command scant attention in the Western
world.
Other crises were much less talked about at the time because they did not easily
map on to the East-West confrontation. Political leaders in post-independence
Burma set about reshaping state and society, with disquieting results for ethnic
minorities that had been relatively privileged under British rule. Persecution
reached its peak in 1978, when the government of Burma targeted the 800,000-
strong Rohingya Bengali-speaking Muslim minority, declaring them to be ‘non-
nationals’. Their flight to neighbouring Bangladesh brought them into direct
contact with an already impoverished host population (chapter 5). Controversially,
UNHCR argued that few Rohingya refugees had a legitimate claim to recognition
and pressed them to accept repatriation without giving adequate assurances about
204 Refugees in the Global Cold War

their security. Thousands who refused to return faced an uncertain future in refugee
camps in Bangladesh or Malaysia, victims of yet another aggressive state-building
project.1
Whereas the situation in Burma garnered little international attention, Viet-
namese and Cambodian refugees became the focus of emergency relief efforts and
‘durable solutions’. Efforts to solve these crises were mired in controversy. In the
case of Cambodia, the US administration refused to countenance Vietnamese and
by extension Soviet control of Cambodia: refugees became pawns in the Cold War
whom it was politically convenient to support in the camps whether they were
Khmer Rouge warriors or civilians. By contrast UNHCR committed itself to their
repatriation on the grounds that it was safe to return to Cambodia irrespective of
the influence wielded by Vietnam.2 Cold War considerations also loomed large in
respect of Vietnamese refugees. In the late 1970s American leaders proclaimed
their readiness to admit refugees from Vietnam on the grounds of protecting
human rights, not just showing favour to prominent anti-communists. The result
was the admission of former military officers and Vietnamese fishermen alike, des-
pite public misgivings.3
The reduction in Cold War animosity and an increase in asylum applications led
the US administration to place stricter limits on immigration although not before
1.4 million refugees had been admitted. In 1988, those fleeing Vietnam, many of
them by boat, were held in detention centres, where officials decided who qualified
as refugees. UNHCR participated in this deterrent regime, securing the agreement
of Malaysia and Indonesia to a ‘Comprehensive Plan of Action’ which denied refu-
gee status to ‘boat people’ unless they could prove persecution. An elaborate screen-
ing programme underpinned this plan. Those deemed to be ‘economic migrants’
were promptly sent back to an uncertain future in Vietnam. It was an eerie re-
minder of UNRRA policy after the Second World War, except that the process
now included generous sweeteners to a grateful Vietnamese government.
In the light of these momentous upheavals the time is ripe to offer a fresh assess-
ment of the outcome of refugeedom in South-East Asia. One way of doing so is to
adopt a broader historical perspective by relating the drama of war and revolution
in the 1970s to earlier and overlooked forgotten episodes of displacement. Post-
colonial Vietnam is a case in point. Another is to reflect on refugees’ experiences of
incarceration. How did this affect refugees’ sense of the past and how have their
children and grandchildren attempted to address remote experiences? Vietnamese
and other refugees such as Hmong were valorized as elements in the global struggle

1
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with
Japan (Penguin, 2005), 84–5, 171–2; Maudood Elahi, ‘The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: His-
torical Perspectives and Consequences’, in John R. Rogge (ed.), Refugees: a Third World Dilemma
(Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), 227–32; Sandra Dudley, Materialising Exile: Material
Culture and Embodied Experience among the Karenni Refugees in Thailand (New York: Berghahn Books,
2010).
2
Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, 170–3.
3
Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 146–54.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 205

against communism. Those who were able to flee cultivated a sense of being doubly
victimized, not just by communist regimes but by being forced to spend years in
camps prior to resettlement. Displacement was associated with a lengthy test of
resolve. By contrast the reflections of Cambodian refugees are mostly hidden from
history, except insofar as they emerge in the record of relief organizations. In par-
ticular there was no Khmer equivalent to the large Vietnamese diaspora whose
extensive transnational connections have begun to illuminate refugee experiences.
Ubiquitous refugee camps provided voluntary agencies with access to displaced
persons and facilitated a range of educational initiatives and self-help schemes.
Refugees took to this activity with gusto, as a means of putting distance between
themselves and the regime they fled. Yet refugee camps also exposed them to tor-
ment at the hands of local officials who seemed more interested in making their life
as unpleasant as possible. Subsequent resettlement is beginning to generate memoir
material about the difficult journey into exile and the painful experience of incar-
ceration. The internet has become an important means of collecting information
from disparate sources and disseminating it more widely. Subject to several quali-
fications discussed later on, the meanings that refugees attached to their displace-
ment have begun to emerge.

VIETNAMESE REFUGEES

Vietnam became a French colony in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Colonial rule went hand in hand with the organized recruitment of labour; in
particular the rubber plantations thrived on indentured labour supplied by the
indigenous peasantry. Peasants provided the main support for communist-led re-
sistance to French and then to US occupation. The Second World War weakened
France’s grip on its colonial possessions. Peasant rebels who backed the Viet Minh
fled to neighbouring Thailand to regroup. Vietnam became independent in 1948.
The subsequent division of the country into North and South following the Geneva
Accords (1954) displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Some 140,000 Viet
Minh found berths on Soviet and Polish troop ships and moved to the North.
Many more—around 930,000 Vietnamese, the majority of them Catholic peas-
ants—fled in the opposite direction following communist land reform and food
shortages in North Vietnam. An additional 55,000 escaped to Thailand. A senior
official with the International Rescue Committee put this in context by arguing
that ‘Vietnamese peasants have gone from the North to the South in search of land
and sometimes in search of freedom, for at least one thousand years’. Their ‘re-
markable faces, incredible misery, but no cold and probably no hunger’ put him in
mind of the European refugees he encountered in 1945.4

4
Louis Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Vietnam, 1945–
1975 (New York: Westport Press, 1988), 9, 109; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 180–5.
206 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Those who settled in the South did not qualify for recognition under the 1951
Convention, because they were internally displaced. Catholic Relief Services, Lu-
theran World Relief and CARE helped refugees in South Vietnam to enrol on
training programmes and find jobs. Keen to keep existing communities intact, the
government resettled at least 600,000 refugees on virgin land. Huge development
projects were launched at Honai and Go Vap, close to Saigon, and at Cai San near
the Gulf of Siam, providing refugees with seven acres apiece to plant rice, bananas,
sugar cane and sweet potatoes. This was largely a tactic to keep them out of Saigon,
whose population increased by a factor of five since the outbreak of war. In an echo
of the rhetoric in Hong Kong and Nepal, the Vietnamese commissioner in charge
of land development praised the quality of the refugees, arguing that the success of
the programme lay ‘in the perseverance and resolute determination of the refugees
to give of their best for the reconstruction of their homes and their unwavering
struggle against subversive propaganda’. Other sources mentioned ‘new refugee
settlements [each with] its own schools, markets, infirmaries, churches, pagodas or
temples, which are sometimes even better than those in the older indigenous com-
munities’. For these reasons, ‘transplantation’ was regarded as a success. However,
this verdict downplayed continuing tensions between Catholic northerners and
the resident Buddhist majority in the South. It also overlooked the fact that the
influx of staunchly anti-communist refugees helped to magnify the potential for
civil war in Vietnam.5
Further upheavals followed as a result of territorial rivalries between Vietnam
and Cambodia, which claimed parts of South Vietnam as its own. Vietnamese
refugees protested that as ‘Cambodians’ they had been attacked both by the Viet-
cong and by forces loyal to the government of South Vietnam. In 1961 Cambodia
complained that the government of South Vietnam was following an agenda of
‘extermination’ in relation to its Khmer minority. With some exasperation,
UNHCR responded that the refugees’ living conditions were probably no worse
than those of the local Vietnamese. Another element in the strategy pursued by
President Ngo Dinh Diem was that of resettling refugees and other ‘loyal Vietnam-
ese’ in the highlands bordering Laos and Cambodia to prevent incursions of com-
munist guerrillas from North Vietnam; this too was designed to relieve the pressure
of population in the coastal plains. However, Diem’s project alienated the indige-
nous Montagnard farmers whose land was appropriated for these purposes, and his
programme of creating ‘agrovilles’, designed to enable his regime to keep a close
watch on the rural population, also backfired.6
Over the next 15 years the population of Vietnam experienced even greater
damage. A sustained bombing campaign by the US in 1965 compelled half a mil-
lion peasants to leave their homes, where they were believed to be targets for ‘com-
munist infiltration’ by the Vietcong. In 1968 the intensification of the war increased

5
Bui-van-Luong, 12 January 1960, Fonds UNHCR 4, Sub-fonds 1, box 4, File 12/1/14 WRY;
Ly-Trung-Dung, ‘Integration of Refugees in Vietnam’ Migration News, 7, no.4 (1958), 11–12.
6
Wiesner, Victims and Survivors, 20–30.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 207

the registered refugee population in South Vietnam from 868,000 to 1,328,000.

The bitter divisions created by the war were reflected in rival analyses, which at-
tributed displacement either to military attacks by the Vietcong or to the impact
of American military ‘pacification’ tactics. The government of South Vietnam em-
phatically defined refugees as ‘war victims who leave their homes to escape from
communist terrorists or to evade military action’, a definition that omitted the fact
that around one-tenth of the total displaced population comprised people who
had been forcibly relocated by the government of South Vietnam.7
In these difficult conditions around 30 separate foreign voluntary agencies in-
vested in refugee relief. The AFSC, Lutheran World Relief and the League of Red
Cross Societies supported centres in Saigon, Qui Nhon and Hue whilst criticizing
conditions in government-run refugee camps. According to the World Council of
Churches, sex work became the norm: ‘men work as day labourers in the surround-
ing villages or wash American soldiers’ clothes and cars . . . many can earn more by
buying and selling American goods or getting girls for American soldiers’. Some
camps housed up to 25,000 people and became organized communities. Other
refugees lived independently with relatives. Much of this has a familiar ring from
other episodes of mass displacement.8 NGOs relied on the US army to transport
relief supplies, but they were accused of being too close to the top brass for whom
refugees were a valuable source of military intelligence. The presence of refugees
attracted shipments of food aid that were quickly diverted to paramilitaries fight-
ing the Vietcong. Certainly the financial ties between the US government and
Catholic Relief Services were very close, and the American administration had no
difficulty in regarding CRS as an ‘integral part of the war effort’.9
Following the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975 and
the government’s ensuing relocation programme, more than one million people
fled the country (see Map 7). One explanation was that urban residents as well as
peasants were expected to move to ‘New Economic Zones’, established with the
aim of increasing food production in remote or war-damaged regions of Vietnam.
Entrepreneurs complained of punitive tax rates. Survival depended on transactions
in the black market. For many refugees the final straw came when the revolution-
ary government decided to create ‘re-education camps’ in which up to 100,000
Vietnamese were incarcerated. The refugees were a mixture of Vietnamese and
ethnic Chinese, many of whom formed part of the country’s commercial elite.
Some were admitted to the USA because of a sense of obligation on the part of the
American administration towards its former allies. In addition, around a quarter of
a million ethnic Chinese moved to China under UNHCR auspices. Hanoi rec-
eived payments in gold in order to persuade it to allow civilians to leave. More fled

7
UNHCR London Office memo, 19 September 1968, Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 1951–70,
File 15/7, Vietnamese refugees.
8
Report by Geoffrey Murray, 21 October 1966 and ‘An Approach to Post-war Service Priorities in
South Vietnam’, October 1969, LWF Archives, Box WS V.3.b, Resettlement and Relief, Vietnam,
1966–69.
9
Nichols, The Uneasy Alliance, 102–3.
208 Refugees in the Global Cold War

following the failure of the rice crop in 1977 and the outbreak of hostilities be-
tween Vietnam and China in 1979.10
Tens of thousands of poorer refugees escaped on unsafe boats captained by inex-
perienced seamen. Secrecy made it difficult to plan properly. Strangers were thrown
together. An unknown number died at sea when overcrowded vessels capsized.
These ‘boat people’ were vulnerable to attacks by pirates. Rape and extortion were
commonplace. Refugees met with a largely unsympathetic response wherever they
landed. A publicity campaign orchestrated by Parisian activists had little resonance
beyond France, where it forced the government to admit more refugees but also
split the recently-formed Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).11 None of the countries
of first destination had signed the 1951 Convention. Malaysia and Singapore
turned away refugees until they reached an agreement in 1979 to admit refugees
temporarily, subject to steps being taken to resettle them in a third country. Refu-
gees who survived the sea voyage ended up in camps across the region. UNHCR
organized so-called transit camps, but an archipelago of closed camps (where refu-
gees had to remain until they agreed to repatriation or were admitted by a third
country) was directly administered by the governments concerned. In a disconcert-
ing echo of post-war Germany, protests erupted in the camp at Sungei Besi under
the control of the Malaysian government which made living arrangements as basic
and tedious as possible, in the hope that word would get back to Vietnam and
discourage those others who were thinking of following in their footsteps.12
While awaiting decisions about their status, refugees were incarcerated in ware-
houses, army barracks (as at Kai Tak in Hong Kong) and prisons that housed
young offenders and drug addicts. Refugees described heroic attempts to get by in
the face of unsympathetic treatment, cramped living conditions and the threat of
violence. Unaccompanied children found the experience of isolation extremely
distressing. In Sikhiu camp, Thai guards beat refugees for minor infractions and
gained a reputation for exploitation and for sexually assaulting women. An ex-
army colonel painted a picture of degradation: ‘people were so poor, so denigrated,
so discouraged by their unknown and uncertain future that they abandoned them-
selves to vices. Everyone took advantage of any good opportunity that happened to
him to exploit to the detriment of others. There was no law in this community.
Everyone thought that he was the centre of the universe’.13 The selection of refu-
gees for resettlement was no less troubling. In Kai Tak, administered by the Red

10
John Knudsen, ‘When Trust is on Trial’, in Daniel and Knudsen (eds), Mistrusting Refugees,
13–35; Kwok Bun Chan and Kenneth Christie, ‘Past, Present and Future: the Indochinese Refugee
Experience Twenty Years Later’ JRS, 8, no.1 (1995), 75–94.
11
Rony Brauman, ‘From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism: Remarks and an Interview’ South
Atlantic Quarterly, 103, nos.2–3 (2004), 397–417.
12
Quynh-Giao N. Vu, ‘Journey of the Abandoned: Endless Refugee Camp and Incurable Traumas’
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32, no.3 (2007), 580–4; Gisèle Bousquet, ‘Living in a
State of Limbo: a Case Study of Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong Camps’, in Scott Morgan and
Elizabeth Colson (eds), People in Upheaval (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1987), 34–53.
13
James Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1989), 347.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 209

SOUTH JAPAN
KOREA
CHINA

Hong
MYANMAR
Kong

LAOS

Ban Vinai
VI
ET

THAILAND
N
AM

PHILIPPINES
Bangkok

CAMBODIA
Phnom Penh

Pulau
Bidong

MALAYSIA

MALAYSIA
SINGAPORE
Pulau
Galang

Refugee
movements
I N D O N E S I A
0 500 km

Map 7: Map of Refugee Flows in/from South-East Asia

Cross and the Hong Kong Christian Service, visitors commented on how migra-
tion agencies ‘skimmed’ the qualified refugees, leaving behind a demoralized ‘hard
core’. In describing the abandonment of some refugees and the widespread col-
lapse of self-discipline, they unwittingly reproduced the terms for DPs trapped in
Germany after the Second World War.14
One 11-year-old girl who fled with her father (and 150 others, on a boat meant
for 40 people) described her arrival on the Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong,

14
Kwok Chan and David Loveridge, ‘Refugees “In Transit”: Vietnamese in a Refugee Camp in
Hong Kong’ IMR, 21, no.3 (1987), 745–59, at 758.
210 Refugees in the Global Cold War

where she found a lack of adequate housing but an abundance of rats and thieves.
Adults spoke of ‘social death’:
I just need to get out of hell. I have to get out every day, I need to answer a telephone,
type a letter, listen to people who live a normal life, listen to a conversation about
normal things, make a cup of coffee. When I return [to the camp] the gate will lock
behind me, the freedom still playing on my mind.15
Visitors were expected to refer to the inmates as ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘illegal immi-
grants’, since to employ the term ‘refugee’ was to raise hopes in their mind that
their status had been satisfactorily resolved. Refugees fought back and demanded
rights, including the right not to be treated as criminals. When one group offered
to donate blood to support the Western Allies during the first Gulf War, they were
rebuffed by the authorities, fearful that this would be tantamount to recognizing
their ‘political’ status rather than labelling them as trouble-makers or ‘illegals’.16
Around 100,000 ‘boat people’ were given asylum in Australia, whose govern-
ment had supported the US campaign against North Vietnam, and others were
admitted to the USA and Canada. However, the ‘rescue’ aroused a great deal of
controversy and provoked disagreement as to its rationale, since it seemed to en-
courage more Vietnamese to make the hazardous journey without any guarantee of
success. In a more promising development, the Communist government in Viet-
nam arranged for the emigration of its citizens who hoped to be reunited with
family members, under the so-called ‘Orderly Departure Programme’, agreed in
May 1979. Boat people distinguished themselves from the ODPs: the former ‘ex-
perienced untold hardships and survived; many took pride in their stamina and
resourcefulness. The ODPs were, by implication, soft’. For their part, many ODPs
had contacts and knew how to use them in order to speed up the resettlement
process; in addition, relatively privileged ODPs had been able to collect more of
their personal belongings before leaving Vietnam. An official working for the Inter-
national Catholic Migration Commission—he might have been speaking of
DPs in Europe in 1945—maintained that ‘ODPs are a positive force here because
they have not learned to behave like refugees. They have not been shredded by
institutionalisation’. In his view other refugees needed to learn how to become
more ‘self-sufficient’. But this dismissive characterization overlooked the resource-
fulness with which they had found their way to the Philippines in the first place.17
The boat became a powerful image, partly because it resonated with American
audiences used to stories of the Mayflower as an iconic means of deliverance from

15
John Knudsen, Chicken Wings: Refugee Stories from a Concrete Hell (Bergen: Magnat Forlag,
1992), 36.
16
Ronald Skeldon, ‘Hong Kong’s Response to the Indochinese Influx, 1975–1993’ AAAPSS, 534
(1994), 91–105; Kwok Bun Chan, ‘Hong Kong’s Response to the Vietnamese Refugees: a Study in
Humanitarianism, Ambivalence and Hostility’ Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 18, no.1
(1990), 94–110.
17
Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 52–3; Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media,
129–30.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 211

oppression, and partly because it offered a dramatic counterpoint to the famous

image of a helicopter rescuing privileged Vietnamese allies from the rooftop of the
US embassy in Saigon.
In these holding centres Vietnamese refugees were scrutinized by the grotesquely
named ‘Processing Community Organisation and Social Services Group’, where
they were ‘prepared’ for resettlement. PROCOSS understood its task of contribut-
ing to the ‘rehabilitation’ of refugees by compelling refugees to perform ‘labour
service’, something that they bitterly resented. One camp at Bataan province in the
Philippines saw a rapid turnover of refugees. It took on the appearance of a shanty
town, with streets called UN Avenue and a central square called Freedom Plaza,
‘where boats that had been used to escape were enshrined as memorials’. Here the
refugees were ‘prepared’ for resettlement in the USA. Regular lists were displayed
on notice boards to indicate whose request had been granted. The particular pur-
pose of this camp contributed to an atmosphere in which ‘refugees showed a pro-
nounced disinterest in getting involved in aspects of [camp] life beyond those
requisite for their release’. They reluctantly accepted this administrative routine as
part of the package that governed the conditions of being accepted for entry to the
USA. Another processing camp, administered by UNHCR between 1975 and
1996, was located at Pulau Galang in Indonesia. Some 28,000 were sent back to
Vietnam between 1989 and 1993, having been ‘filtered’ out. Those who were ad-
mitted to the USA or other countries described themselves as ‘sojourners’ (Viet
Kieu) who maintained contact with family members in Vietnam, for example by
sending them money on a regular basis. Some of these exiles opposed the Com-
munist government, while others made return visits and capitalized on the liberal-
ization of the Vietnamese economy. Most saw themselves as guardians of an
‘authentic’ national culture.18
Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong nevertheless were adept in devising strat-
egies to survive and avoid being repatriated. A female refugee who reached Hong
Kong in the 1990s described how refugees were able to obtain marriage papers to
enable them to travel abroad or to trade upon overseas connections. It helped, she
said, that ‘the camp was like a country, you can find all sort of person, doctors,
lawyers. I don’t know how they did it’.19 Refugees and their lawyers learned how to
respond to interrogation in such a way as to achieve recognition. Those who failed
the test might evade detection by working semi-legally in the Hong Kong econ-
omy. Others experienced displacement as a lengthy period of incarceration until
such time as they joined the growing refugee diaspora.

18
Reyes, Songs of the Caged, 43–6, 49; Rona Fields, ‘Life and Death on a Small Island: Vietnamese
and Cambodian Refugees in Indochina’ Migration World, 20, no.5 (1992), 16–20; Lynellyn Long,
‘Viet Kieu on a Fast Track Back?’, in Ellen Oxfeld and Lynellyn Long (eds), Coming Home? Refugees,
Migrants, and Those Who Stayed Behind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004),
65–89.
19
Yuk Wah Chan, ‘Revisiting the Vietnamese Refugee Era’, in Chan (ed.), The Chinese/Vietnamese
Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People (Routledge, 2011), 3–19, at 12.
212 Refugees in the Global Cold War

THE HMONG REFUGEE DIASPORA

The prolonged war in South-East Asia also disrupted the lives of villagers in Laos.
Those most affected by the ongoing conflict were Hmong (Meo/Miao), Montag-
nard and Catholic farmers who engaged in slash and burn cultivation and who
therefore habitually moved from place to place. In the early 1960s the American
military recruited guerrilla forces from their ranks to help fight the communist
Pathet Lao and the Vietcong. Funds granted by Congress to assist Laotian refugees
who fled to Cambodia and Thailand were diverted for this secret war. Hmong and
Yao villagers suffered the effects of heavy US aerial bombardment designed to de-
moralize and defeat the Vietcong who travelled in and out of Laos via the Ho Chi
Minh trail. The communist triumph in Laos turned Hmong into targets and
prompted their mass flight.20
One elderly woman, Xiong Vang, described how recurrent conflicts and food
shortages in Vietnam and Laos compelled her to move 30 times before she ended
up in a large settlement close to the Thai border that went by the name of Ban
Vinai, literally ‘village of discipline’. Originally the 400-acre site housed 5,000
refugees, but by the mid-1980s a high birth rate meant that its size ballooned to
45,000 inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places in the
world. Hmong refugees lived reluctantly within this dense social space; three-quar-
ters of all refugees in Ban Vinai lived there for more than 10 years. Daily life did
not follow the rhythm of the seasons but revolved instead around a mixture of
market transactions, the distribution of UNHCR rations, educating young chil-
dren, and festivities such as New Year celebrations. Maintaining camp facilities was
largely the responsibility of refugees, although they received little recognition and
no recompense from the authorities.21
Camp refugees formed part of a transnational network. They sold products in
distant markets with the help of the Hmong diaspora that kept their cause alive in
the United States. Refugees who were admitted to the USA mounted a vocal cam-
paign in support of the admission of family members, which led eventually to the
1980 Refugee Act and a relaxation of entry. Other refugees meanwhile continued
to languish in Thai camps. Several hundred Hmong eventually settled as farmers
in French Guiana. Ban Vinai remained open until 1992, when the Thai govern-
ment made arrangements together with UNHCR to repatriate any refugee who
had not already been admitted to the United States; thousands of Hmong refugees
evaded repatriation by fleeing to the remote hills in Northern Thailand.

20
Alfred McCoy, ‘America’s Secret War in Laos, 1955–75’, in Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco
(eds), A Companion to the Vietnam War (Blackwell, 2006), 283–314; Jeffrey L. MacDonald, ‘ “We are
the Experts”: Iu-Mien (Yao) Refugees Assert their Rights as Scholars of their Own Culture’, in Ruth
Krulfeld and Jeffrey MacDonald (eds), Power, Ethics, and Human Rights: Anthropological Studies of
Refugee Research and Action (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 97–122.
21
Lynellyn Long, Ban Vinai: the Refugee Camp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58,
122, 135.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 213

Thus the collapse of the US intervention and the communist victory in Vietnam
and in Laos sealed the fate of the Hmong who became caught up in the great
exodus that turned one-tenth of the population of Laos into refugees from com-
munism. However, the Pathet Lao government, backed by its Vietnamese allies,
proved durable. Lao refugees who reached the USA had to come to terms with a
severe loss of status as they exchanged professional jobs for menial work. Like their
Vietnamese counterparts, in recent years they have begun to move back and forth
between their homeland and the countries of resettlement, making return visits to
keep in touch with relatives who remained behind. The surviving Hmong military
leadership denounced Hanoi and demanded that America acknowledge their con-
tribution to the war effort and their subsequent persecution at the hands of the
Vietnamese. Non-elite refugees appear to have come to terms with displacement
by exploiting diasporic possibilities.22

C A M B O D I A’ S R E F U G E E S

The refugee crisis in Cambodia originated in the infamous rule of the Khmer
Rouge that lasted from 1975 until 1979. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot ex-
ploited the widespread suffering caused by the prolonged US bombardment of
Cambodia whose purpose was to weaken the supply routes of the Vietcong but
whose result was to force hundreds of thousands of people to seek refuge in the
capital Phnom Penh. On coming to power the Khmer Rouge ruthlessly targeted
‘class enemies’ as well as Muslim, Chinese and Vietnamese ethnic minorities whose
position was already exposed. A radical programme of de-urbanization removed
internally displaced people from the cities and turned the established order upside
down. Urban professionals and Buddhist priests bore the brunt of Pol Pot’s pro-
gramme. Priests were executed, temples were pulled down and religious books
were destroyed. Anti-Khmer Rouge forces gathered in rapidly expanding refugee
camps in neighbouring Vietnam (they housed 160,000 people by 1978), but they
could not stop the terror. Eventually Vietnamese troops supplemented by contin-
gents of armed refugees invaded Cambodia at the end of 1978 in order to remove
the Khmer Rouge from power. Phnom Penh fell in January 1979.23
The defeat of the Khmer Rouge by invading Vietnamese forces helped give birth
to an international Cambodian ‘refugee problem’ as civilians and military forces

22
Nicols, Uneasy Alliance, 132–44; W. Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: the Indochinese Exodus
and the International Response (Zed Books, 1998), 231–8; Wanni Anderson, ‘Between Necessity and
Choice: Rhode Island Lao American Women’, in Wanni Anderson and Robert Lee (eds), Displace-
ments and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005),
194–226.
23
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
1975–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
214 Refugees in the Global Cold War

made their way to the Thai border. This motley group included surviving peasants
who objected to conscription, land seizures and requisitioning of food, as well as
Khmer forces hoping to turn the tables on the Vietnamese. The border thus became
both a buffer zone and a basis for guerrilla resistance to the Vietnamese army, as
well as an issue of grave concern for the new government in Phnom Penh. Thailand
did not recognize the Cambodians as refugees, characterizing them instead as ‘eco-
nomic migrants’ who were to be prevented, by force if necessary, from moving into
the Thai interior. Officials in Bangkok also did their utmost to keep outside ob-
servers away.24
In 1979 thousands of refugees were driven back over the Cambodian border
by Thai troops, who were accused of committing atrocities against a defenceless
group of people. But the government in Bangkok complained that Western poli-
ticians adopted a hypocritical stance in expecting Thailand to accommodate
refugees from Cambodia when the West had done little to assist the Vietnamese
‘boat people’. At the end of that year, following a renewed Vietnamese onslaught
and a desperate food crisis, a second exodus took place. The Thai government
relented and agreed that no refugees would be turned back. UNHCR established
camps on the Thai border housing 160,000 refugees. (According to some
estimates, three quarters of a million refugees lived along the border.) Oxfam,
the ICRC and other agencies provided aid to refugees as well as stricken civilians
in Cambodia itself, although they had for political reasons to keep the two
operations entirely distinct. Refugee relief included a clear political as well as a
‘humanitarian’ element. For example, the US administration and American
voluntary agencies, including Catholic Relief Services and World Vision, capital-
izing on years of pro-Thai diplomacy in the Cold War, hoped to cement the basis
for anti-Vietnamese resistance among the refugees; collaboration with the Khmer
Rouge was a price worth paying to nip Vietnamese ambitions in the bud. This
also meant handing over large sums of money to maintain good relations with
the Thai government and overlooking the abuse that refugees endured in the
camps.25
Different political factions controlled different camps. For example the Khmer
Rouge dominated the camp in Sa Kaeo; other camps were loyal to former ruler
Norodom Sihanouk. The largest camp or ‘holding centre’ went by the name of
Khao-I-Dang. Initially it had a rudimentary infrastructure, but by the mid-1980s,
with a population of 60,000, it had developed with UNHCR support a relatively
robust economy, with ‘flourishing markets, an adequate water supply, excellent
feeding facilities, schools, recreational facilities, and even a local Khmer dance
academy’. But it also became a byword for rape and extortion.26 NGOs were om-
nipresent—40 separate organizations operated in Khao-I-Dang alone by 1980—

24
William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 72–5, 115–23, 169; Cheryl Benard, ‘Politics and the Refugee Ex-
perience’ Political Science Quarterly, 101, no.4 (1986), 617–36.
25
LWF Archives, WS Y.5.1 Emergency projects—Kampuchea, 1979–81.
26
Ong, Buddha is Hiding, 53.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 215

and provided jobs. Other refugees traded with impoverished Thai peasants or
engaged in semi-legal or black market activity. Refugees became marginally less
vulnerable and, by the same token, cautious about returning prematurely to Cam-
bodia. However, the fact that medical provision was superior to that available to
the locals gave Thai politicians a pretext to whip up resentment against the refu-
gees. Consequently refugees who lived in border camps boasting schools, temples,
pharmacies, taxi firms, brothels ‘could find just about anything they wanted on the
border except a safe way out’.27
US support for the border camps helped promote anti-Vietnamese activity,
and thereby enabled the Khmer Rouge to regroup. In the camps it controlled,
the Khmer Rouge managed to appropriate the food aid destined for refugees.
This only increased their liability to attack from the Vietnamese and their Cam-
bodian allies. At the same time it was ironic to give these camps greater auton-
omy, since this merely enhanced the power of the Khmer Rouge. UN officials
expressed concern that ‘international generosity may have gone too far in terms
of the care and maintenance, even spoon-feeding of Cambodians in exile—we
wonder if the refugees are now capable of re-acquiring initiative and independ-
ence’, wrote Sergio Vieira de Mello, although he subsequently decided that they
were.28
Thai refugee camps served an invaluable administrative purpose for American
authorities, because it became possible to identify those suspected of being com-
munists. More subtle processes and procedures were also at work, in that Western
NGOs inculcated among refugees the ‘appropriate’ behaviour that would improve
their prospects of qualifying for asylum in the USA by educating them in English
and transforming them (as Aihwa Ong puts it) into ‘modern human beings’. This
practice may have been more straightforward in Khao-I-Dang, which provided a
home to refugees from a middle-class background. But the emphasis on individu-
alism challenged Khmer-Buddhist values of compassion and reciprocity that had
already been undermined by the ferocious oppression inflicted by the regime of Pol
Pot. Another outcome was that women were taught about gender equality, chal-
lenging Buddhist Khmer tradition; they had in any case shouldered considerable
responsibilities as they entered the camps. Rifts also emerged between people born
prior to the Khmer Rouge seizure of power and brought up in the Buddhist tradi-
tion, and those who were deprived of the right to practise any religion. Living in
refugee camps underlined these transformative experiences.29
When Vietnamese troops finally withdrew in 1988, the Khmer Rouge in the
guise of the ‘Coalition of Democratic Kampuchea’ forced refugees to return. Eight
years earlier the Khmer Rouge had impressed on refugees in Sa Kaeo camp the
alarming ditty that:

27
Robinson, Terms of Refuge, 95.
28
Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Allen
Lane, 2008), 85, 122; Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 114–15, 122–5, 132.
29
Ong, Buddha is Hiding, 52–63, 276–7.
216 Refugees in the Global Cold War
Those who go back first will sleep on cots/Those who go back second will sleep on
mats/Those who go back third will sleep in the mud/Those who go back last will sleep
under the ground.
It is not clear if this was intended as a threat or a realistic assessment of the situa-
tion.30 Several rival groups now jockeyed for position; the Khmer Rouge no longer
enjoyed a monopoly of power. In 1991 the United Nations secured the agreement
of the various factions to the creation of a new transitional authority that would
oversee new elections. A ‘peaceful and orderly’ repatriation was a vital element in
preparing the ground for political change, although the difficulties appeared
almost insuperable. A UN survey earmarked land for returnees. Like the Allies in
Germany at the end of the Second World War, the UN put on film shows adver-
tising the opportunities presented by repatriation and minimizing the threat in
Western Cambodia from land mines and malaria. In March 1992, de Mello
approved a plan that gave 362,000 refugees cash to enable them to take their own
decision as to where and how to return. UN assumptions that refugees would
automatically want to return ‘home’, that is to their native villages, did not take
account of the lack of suitable land. Many repatriants moved to shanty towns
where they encountered discrimination and eked out an uncertain existence. The
UN made little headway with economic and social reconstruction, pinning its
hopes on the political process. Subsequent events showed that political stability
was fragile.31

C U LT U R A L R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S O F R E F U G E E S
A N D R E L I E F E F F O RT S

Much of this recent history was bound up with the refugee camp. The large refugee
camp on the island of Palawan in the Philippines had earlier been earmarked for
lepers and criminals; the island has since become a popular ‘exotic’ tourist destina-
tion. In the 1980s, Palawan afforded opportunities for Vietnamese refugees to
trade and work in the neighbouring towns. Around one third of them became
long-term residents, staying for more than a decade. Some children attended local
schools. There was a rich cultural and sports programme. Palawan camp also hosted
numerous religious and voluntary associations including a Catholic Youth Group,
Buddhist Youth Group and a Martial Arts Group. Refugees entertained one an-
other with songs that had been banned by the communist government. Christian
evangelical aid agencies also conducted proselytization campaigns. Some refugees
chose to be baptised in the belief or expectation that it would assist their passage to

30
Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy, 316.
31
Arthur Helton, The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82; Marita Eastmond and Joakim Öjendal, ‘Revising a
“Repatriation Success”: the Case of Cambodia’, in Richard Black and Khalid Koser (eds), The End of
the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), 38–55.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 217

the USA—a particular kind of ‘salvation’ that carried the implication of setting the
past to one side in favour of a ‘bright’ future. Others ‘carefully crafted [a] life his-
tory’ for the same purpose.32 This ethnography suggests a correspondence with the
DP camps in Europe, insofar as refugees were closely scrutinized for political suit-
ability and signs of physical or mental disability. Resettlement became a distant
prospect for those who were deemed insufficiently ‘fit’, and who continue to live
in basic conditions.
Living in camp communities afforded some opportunity to think about the past
as well as the future. Refugees from Laos who were held in Ban Vinai looked for-
ward to their eventual resettlement in the USA but reflected too on the lives they
lived in Laos before the communist takeover and on an even more distant past in
China, which they regarded as their ancestral home. Adult women produced
handicrafts for the Thai and American markets; they incorporated references on
traditional quilts to their experience of war and displacement, and also included
American emblems. The quilt thus embodied a sense of past and anticipated a
future resolution of their status. Furthermore, its production and marketing re-
vealed the importance of Hmong kinship networks. But there was another show in
town, mounted by relief workers whose ‘range of experiences and motivations
varied widely from fundamentalist missionaries, Vietnam veterans, world travel-
lers, ex-Peace Corps volunteers, social workers, teachers and others from assorted
walks of life and social classes’.33
Refugees who arrived in the USA from Vietnam and Laos aspired to be ‘ac-
cepted’ in the host country, and they drew a clear distinction between a hopeful
future in North America and a traumatic past. Vietnamese lamented the destruc-
tion of village burial grounds, a sense of loss only partly mitigated by a readiness to
propitiate their ancestors by making offerings of one kind or another. Others re-
called their intense sadness at having been instructed by their parents to pack their
bags in a hurry without being able to say goodbye to friends or to complete their
education. The anguish was compounded by leaving family members behind as
well as a way of life that maintained parental discipline and fostered respect for the
elderly. Cambodian refugees likewise found it difficult to regard the past with any
degree of contentment. Not only was their experience of life under the Khmer
Rouge intensely traumatic, but displacement led them to question cultural as-
sumptions about the period before Pol Pot seized power. According to one scholar,
who worked with survivors in North America, Buddhist notions of karma sug-
gested that Cambodians were being punished for transgressions in a previous
life.34

32
Knudsen, ‘When Trust is on Trial’, 22; Linda Hitchcox, Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian
Camps (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 177–211.
33
Long, Ban Vinai, 85, 108, 184.
34
Margaret Muecke, ‘Trust, Abuse of Trust and Mistrust among Cambodian Refugee Women: a
Cultural Interpretation’, in Daniel and Knudsen (eds), Mistrusting Refugees, 36–55.
218 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Narratives of multiple displacements were common. One Vietnamese refugee

described how her family had been displaced more than once:
My parents were originally from the north. They left the north after the communists
killed my grandfather, who was a simple trader. During the war our family moved
from place to place in order to escape from the communists, and at the end we lost the
war and there was nowhere else to go to, so we went back to our original place in the
highlands. So you can see the history of my family—we have been refugees more than
once. You can’t imagine how hard it was for my family. I was very happy to get out of
Vietnam. It was like a thousand kilos was lifted off my shoulders.35
Vietnamese who initially welcomed the new regime because it brought the long
years of war to an end soon became disillusioned by its policies, which they as-
sociated with revenge and corruption rather than justice and reconciliation.
From a vantage point in Australia they looked forward to a day when the home-
land would become more ‘democratic’ and less ‘corrupt’. They nevertheless re-
tained a connection to friends and family members who remained in Vietnam.
These connections often induced feelings of pain at being separated. Interview-
ing two surviving Vietnamese sisters, the Vietnamese-Australian scholar Nath-
alie Nguyen writes how family members ‘remained silent about central events in
each other’s lives, either because to speak was too painful or too difficult, or be-
cause silence allowed a measure of control over events and was judged to be the
best way to protect a loved one’.36 Accounts written by refugees from Cambodia
emphasized mass killing and the drama of escape, but they also testify to a land
that was fertile and abundant and a society whose stability reflected Buddhist
beliefs and family integrity. Inevitably these ideas were refracted through reset-
tlement in North America, producing contradictory notions about past, present
and future.37
Like the recollection of life prior to the rupture of displacement, these memo-
ries must be evaluated in relation to political projects. This inevitably produces
uneven results. We lack testimony from Tibetans and Vietnamese who embraced
rather than rejected the communist cause. How displaced Koreans understood
their experiences is not any easier to establish. Other unresolved issues included a
refusal to speak whether because of ‘trauma’ (a problematic construct), shame or
other considerations including mistrust of the person and therefore also the
institution that requires the refugee to provide an account of her or his displace-
ment. Biting one’s tongue might be a means of self-preservation. To show one’s
feelings in a refugee camp ran the risk of being interpreted as someone with
psychological ‘problems’: no-one could afford to be categorized as suffering mental

35
Diane Barnes, ‘Resettled Refugees’ Attachment to their Original and Subsequent Homelands:
Long-term Vietnamese Refugees in Australia’ JRS, 14, no.4 (2001), 394–411, at 400.
36
Nathalie Nguyen, ‘Memory and Silence in the Vietnamese Diaspora: the Narratives of Two Sis-
ters’ Oral History, 36, no.2 (2008), 64–74, at 65.
37
Ong, Buddha is Hiding, 29–33; Janet McLellan, Cambodian Refugees in Ontario: Resettlement,
Religion, and Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 219

affliction that gave immigration officers a pretext to deny that person the chance of
being considered for resettlement in the West. In any case the screening process
was usually hasty and discouraged refugees from reflecting on the past.38
The emergence of a second generation and the rise of the internet helped
generate fresh testimony as well as commemorative activity. In the UK the
Heritage Lottery Fund supported an initiative of Refugee Action to interview
Vietnamese refugees.39 There is now an online resource of the recollections of
Vietnamese boat people who were detained at the uninhabited Malaysian island
of Pulau Bidong from 1978 until it closed in 1991, as well as testimony from
relief workers from the Malaysian Red Crescent Society. Refugees who ended
up there subsequently posted several stories and images on a dedicated website.
Pride of place belongs to a photograph of a concrete memorial in the form of a
boat. Other photos include underwater shots of a barnacle-encrusted boat.40
For some refugees, such as Quynh-Giao Vu, Pulau Bidong provided opportuni-
ties to study, to learn to look after himself and ‘to become an excellent
swimmer’.41
Pilgrimages now take place to former refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia.
A report from the former camp at Pulau Galang in Indonesia describes how visitors
return to pay their respects to relatives and friends who died in the camp:
A plaque in front of the graveyard says: ‘Dedicated to the People Who Died in the Sea
on the Way to Freedom’. Little has changed, according to the visiting former boat
people. The Catholic Church and Buddhist temple and the Youth Center in the
sprawling camp freshly painted for the reunion. But the scattered wooden barracks
once housing the refugees remain in a state of disrepair.42
This ‘dark tourism’ reflects an insistence by the older generation on the corres-
pondence between escaping from communism and drawing on religious faith. It
asserts the political significance of these sites of memory, which refugees hope to
preserve and which the Hanoi government wishes to see destroyed. It also betrays
a degree of anxiety lest the younger generation fail to invest sufficiently in com-
memorating displacement.
Vietnamese and Tibetan diasporas include refugees who would never entertain
returning to a homeland under communist rule, even if it were possible. Others are
attracted by the possibility of being able to make a short visit to see for themselves
the places that they learned about from first-generation refugees. Cambodian and
Vietnamese refugees send remittances to family members. In each case the people

38
Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 158–9.
39
<http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/ourwork/projects/vietnamese.aspx>.
40
<http://www.pulaubidong.org/Boat SS 0937 IA - KT 756> (KT = Kuala Terengganu), La Toàn
Vinh.
41
Vu, ‘Journey of the Abandoned’, 580–4.
42
<http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/3263>. Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-
Beattie, ‘Dark Tourism, Diasporic Memory and Disappeared History: the Contested Meaning of the
Former Indochinese Refugee Camp at Pulau Galang’, in Chan (ed.), The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora,
147–60.
220 Refugees in the Global Cold War

who left and returned, as well as those who stayed behind, articulated a complex
relationship with the past. Kesang Takla, Minister for Information and Interna-
tional Relations in the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, remembered:
Annual picnics, festivals and visits to the monasteries, horse-riding; it was very close
to nature. Once we arrived in India suddenly everything changed. We travelled by car
from Sikkim and I didn’t like the smell of the petrol but it was also strangely exciting.
I’ve been trying for a long time to get a picture of the old home but I think it is unrec-
ognisable now. As an exile I suppose in a way I have never felt I have a home
anywhere.43

C O N C LU S I O N S

Population displacement in South-East Asia evokes similarities with other episodes

and situations. Revolution produced winners and losers. The winners inaugurated
programmes for radical social transformation; their opponents kept a low profile
or became refugees. Like those who fled Russia after 1917 and China in 1949,
refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia included people of relatively modest means;
not everyone belonged to the privileged elite. The claim to have fled persecution
gave them a degree of leverage in countries of prospective asylum, although this
did not allay fears that there might be fifth-columnists in their midst. Other paral-
lels also emerge. Attempts by UNHCR to get refugees to return were reminiscent
of the situation facing DPs in Western Europe after 1945. Like their counterparts
in the DP camps, Vietnamese and Hmong refugees expressed a desperate wish to
avoid repatriation to a communist state, and anti-communist sentiments flour-
ished in the refugee camps maintained by the Hong Kong and Thai authorities.
But precisely because the refugees had fled communism, US officials sought to
establish the political credentials of those who could be admitted to the USA.
Privileged and powerful refugees as well as those with desirable skills were quickly
spirited away to safety, sometimes to be debriefed by intelligence officers. Others
were detained in camps for much longer. Those who could not construct a con-
vincing case were sent back to Vietnam under the ‘Comprehensive Plan of Action’
(CPA).44
The camps in South-East Asia demonstrated refugees’ capacity to fashion a rich
cultural life, as they did in Europe after the Second World War. But the restrictions
and, above all, uncertainty about the future created conditions in which refugees
became extremely anxious. These afflictions lasted not months but years: it was not
uncommon for Vietnamese refugees to be confined for a decade, becoming a kind
of ‘hard core’. Their estrangement from family and friends, which had been fos-
tered by their flight in overcrowded boats, was now compounded by an insecure

43
See her account at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7926559.stm>.
44
Ferris, Beyond Borders, 180–2.
 Revolutionary Change and Refugees in South-East Asia 221

existence in the camps. It took a great deal of individual effort and courage to
create a decent life. Those who returned to Vietnam under the CPA were moni-
tored by UNHCR officials, although ironically the biggest problem thereafter was
not police harassment but programmes of economic liberalization that disadvan-
taged single mothers and the sick.
Comparisons between the situation in South-East Asia during the 1970s and
1980s and conditions in Europe after the Second World War make clear the chal-
lenges facing these refugees. After 1945 demand for labour in industrialized coun-
tries was buoyant, and in some instances (such as in Australia, where Japanese
attacks during the war revealed the country’s vulnerability), national security con-
siderations helped generate public support for immigration. These concerns all but
evaporated during the last quarter of the century. Global recession reduced the
demand for immigrant labour, placing refugees in a virtually impossible bargaining
position. Détente weakened the drivers of policy in the 1950s. To be sure, Australia
continued to provide sanctuary to refugees in significant numbers until the 1990s,
under a series of quota agreements. Here, as elsewhere, the tide of public opinion
and government policy turned against refugees. The Australian example demon-
strates that geopolitics and economic framed programmes of assistance and deter-
mined whether refugees would either be resettled, encouraged to repatriate or
deterred from fleeing in the first place. The West regarded South Korea, Hong
Kong and South Vietnam as strategically significant bulwarks against Commu-
nism, and the aid that poured into those countries swelled the resources available
for refugee relief. Refugee camps on the Thai border became a means of sustaining
anti-Vietnamese activity. But by the late 1980s the Cold War had begun to exhaust
its capacity to influence policy. Those who fled from communist rule to adjacent
countries and sought admission to third countries had to show that they had suf-
fered direct persecution. If unable to provide this testimony, they faced being
repatriated.
Questions remain about how refugees framed their displacement. How did refu-
gees who fled from North to South Vietnam reflect on their lives prior to 1954 and
to what extent did they draw upon notions of pre-war culture to negotiate their
new environment?45 How might the history of Cambodian displacement be writ-
ten into the story of genocide, flight and repatriation or resettlement, in a way that
affords them the licence denied them both by Pol Pot and by external relief organ-
izations? We know little of how refugees navigated their return to Cambodia and
nothing of the incorporation of their experiences of Khmer Rouge ‘re-education’
camps and in the refugee camps into broader national narratives.
Answers to these questions are thus necessarily provisional. One thing that is
clear is that the consequences of the refugee crises in China and South-East Asia
were measured not only in the number of refugees and the size of refugee camps
but also in new forms of associational activity. No-one could accuse the camps of
fostering cultural collapse or economic stagnation. These practices should neither

45
A powerful semi-fictional account is Kim Thúy, Ru (Clerkenwell Press, 2012).
222 Refugees in the Global Cold War

be discounted nor romanticized. Refugees from different socio-economic back-

grounds spoke of the need to ‘stick together’: ‘we try to help each other because
everyone is lonely, everyone has lost their country’. This was not always an elite
preoccupation. In Palawan camp, the Vietnamese Refugee Council encouraged a
sense of collective national identity by creating a ‘little Vietnam’, although this
project was dominated by former officers in the South Vietnamese army and its
description carried connotations of exclusivity. Yet camps also exposed divisions.
Refugees from South Vietnam who ended up in Hong Kong drew a distinction
between themselves as educated professionals and ‘peasants and fishermen’ who
fled from North Vietnam. Vietnamese refugees from a middle-class background
who reached Hong Kong blamed their plebeian neighbours for the unsanitary
conditions in the holding centres, even though the main responsibility lay with the
government officials who had no wish to make any improvements that might en-
courage other refugees to flee.
Other kinds of division manifested themselves in relation to age and gender.
Generational distinctions emerged in the rift between the first influx of Karen
refugees who fled Burma in the late 1980s and those reaching Thailand in 1996–97
reflected the fact that recent arrivals followed traditional religious customs, whereas
the more established refugees began to develop something akin to pan-Karenni
nationalism. When asked to reflect on his experiences, an elderly Vietnamese refugee
who enrolled in college in the USA announced that ‘it is hard to study because we
do not remember, but we study to forget the past’.46 The past can evoke painful
memories, as if history must be refused rather than embraced. For many Vietnamese
women life in refugee camps in Indonesia and Hong Kong held greater danger
than the persecution they suffered in Vietnam. Yet profound changes also occurred
in gender relations. Cambodian women’s lives were turned upside down, because
their survival depended upon behaving in a manner that went against traditional
norms of female virtue.
Refugees invested heavily in commemorative sites and practices. A Vietnamese
American, Trần Trung Ðạo, favoured the preservation of monuments to boat
people, ‘not only in memory of our countrymen but as part of the history of Viet-
nam. A hundred years hence, younger Vietnamese will look for Bidong, Galang,
Palawan to retrace the steps of those who went before and to overhear the ocean
whisper about a woeful and majestic path that was trodden’. Others insisted that
the sites should be visited by everyone, not just refugees: ‘after all, Vietnamese boat
people are a global phenomenon’.47

46
Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow, 361.
47
Carruthers and Huynh-Beattie, ‘Dark Tourism’, 152, 156.
 8
‘Long Road’
Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’

In spite of the hardship and suffering displacement entailed, exile has opened
our eyes and we have no intention of closing them ever again. We shall only
move forward and never backward
(anonymous Eritrean refugee)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Although news bulletins in the First World might suggest otherwise, the history of
modern Africa amounts to much more than a chronicle of war and displacement.
Media pronouncements regularly reduce Africa’s past to a series of reflections on
unalterable deprivation, widespread corruption and unending conflict. A more
informed analysis takes into account the intertwined histories of ethnic groups and
powerful pre-colonial, colonial and independent states, the growth of long-dis-
tance trade and migration including forced migration over several centuries.1 This
multifaceted history of mobility needs to be acknowledged. One sign of this was
the award in 2009 of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye for her novel Trois
femmes puissantes, whose protagonists include a Senegalese teacher living in France
who decides to embark on a visit to her father’s home in Africa. Another was the
success of Black Mamba Boy, Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel (2009), which draws
on her father’s tales of travelling between Aden and Eritrea in the hope of finding
his own father, weaving into this personal odyssey the violent impact of Mussolini’s
attempt to build an Italian empire in North-East Africa. Themes of displacement,
suffering and resolution are threaded through these literary works.
To be sure, the sub-continent has been the site of immense refugee movements;
Africa accounted for more than half of the world’s total refugee population at the
turn of the millennium. To understand why this situation came about requires a
historical perspective.
The struggle to throw off colonial shackles generated population displacement
on a large scale. Cold War confrontation spread to Africa, sustaining proxy forces
and helping to fuel internecine conflict. There was no respite during the 1990s and
2000s, when ‘new wars’ in weak states demonstrated a vicious and uncompromising

1
Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 139–62.
224 Refugees in the Global Cold War

competition for resources between rival paramilitaries.2 The presence of refugees in

adjacent states further destabilized the sub-continent. This happened in two ways.
Displacement enabled refugee warriors to regroup in order to overthrow an oppres-
sive regime or restore the status quo ante. This brought unwelcome consequences
for the host country. Rhodesian troops regularly crossed Mozambique’s border
during the 1970s in pursuit of Zimbabwean guerrillas who fought against the white
settler regime. In the 1990s, Chad sheltered refugees from the war in neighbouring
Darfur, prompting Sudanese troops to attack the camps over the border to frighten
or kill their adversaries. Second, the arrival of refugees placed a burden on the fragile
infrastructure of host states and the environment. Periodic shortages of food in-
flamed existing social tensions and political differences. Economically disadvan-
taged countries struggled to adjust to the influx of large numbers of refugees.
Many African states have simultaneously produced refugees and provided sanc-
tuary to refugees from neighbouring countries. Sudan’s protracted civil wars caused
refugees to flee in large numbers to Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt and other states, but
Sudan also offered refuge to refugees fleeing the conflict between rebel troops sup-
porting the Eritrean Liberation Front and the combined Ethiopian, Soviet and
Cuban forces who aimed to suppress Eritrean independence; furthermore, Sudan
accommodated Ethiopian opponents of the Marxist government of Colonel Haile-
mariam Mengistu in the late 1970s. Somalia was home to around one and a half
million refugees by 1980, most of them dependents of men who had been taken
to fight in Eritrea. Meanwhile Somali opponents of the government of Mohamed
Siad Barre sought sanctuary in Kenya and Ethiopia, and 300,000 people fled in
1991 in the wake of the coup that unseated Barre and after a severe famine. These
displacements need to be located in a broader chronological framework. Through-
out the nineteenth century local tribespeople in Mozambique evaded capture by
slave raiders by escaping to what is now Zambia. Later on, in order to avoid Por-
tuguese colonial exactions, they migrated to the Zambian copperbelt. Angolan
refugees who settled in the western provinces of Zambia to escape fighting between
rival liberation armies revisited places they encountered earlier when their country
was ruled by Portugal. Susanna Mwana-uta recounted a lifetime on the move from
one village to another inside Angola, because of family conflicts, marriages (includ-
ing with a white Portuguese trader), as well as a succession of wars and peace agree-
ments that took her back and forth between Angola and Zambia. What appear at
first sight to be distinctive refugee crises were thus one phase in a succession of
cross-border movements reflecting the arbitrariness of colonial borders that separ-
ated people with historically close cultural affiliations and economic ties.3

2
Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, 39–40, 120–5; Holborn, Refugees, 963–1004;
Westad, Global Cold War, 207–49; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: the Past of the Present (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 104–5.
3
Julia Powles, ‘Home and Homelessness: the Life History of Susanna Mwana-Uta, an Angolan
Refugee’ JRS, 15, no. 1 (2002), 81–101; Oliver Bakewell, ‘Repatriation: Angolan Refugees or Migrat-
ing Villagers?’, in Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks and Joke Schrijvers (eds), Refugees and the Transfor-
mation of Societies: Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 31–41; Michael
Barrett, ‘The Social Significance of Crossing State Borders: Home, Mobility and Life Paths in the
Angolan-Zambian Borderlands’, in Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving (eds), Struggles for Home: Violence,
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 225

How did these crises affect the way in which refugees were understood as a ‘prob-
lem’? A recurring theme concerns the geopolitics of displacement and the causes and
consequences of international intervention. One direction points to the history of
late colonial rule and to decolonization, to the fact that ‘the Western colonial powers
who were also among the founding members of the international refugee regime
[and] newly independent states sought a means to avoid the embarrassment of treat-
ing refugees involving their supporters and close allies as victims of persecution’.4 The
chosen diplomatic route was to empower UNHCR to take ‘appropriate’ action.
Apart from assisting refugees in the short term, UNHCR also contemplated the
‘integration’ of refugees in situ. From the 1960s onwards, UNHCR and the NGOs
within its orbit argued that durable solutions entailed thinking about the poverty
of states in which refugees settled and the impoverished circumstances of states to
which they returned. Programmes of long-term social and economic development
had great attraction, until they were overtaken by ideas of containment and repa-
triation that were more attuned to post-Cold War geopolitics and declining inter-
national aid budgets. NGOs frequently substituted for weak and impoverished
states where ordinary people have been politically marginalized, none more so than
refugees.5
What of the perspective of refugees themselves? Not all refugees in Africa were
confined to camps, but it is nevertheless the case that refugee camps not only
served the purpose of managing refugees but also acted as an instrument of politi-
cal mobilization. The Zimbabwean liberation movement was sustained by histories
of resistance to colonial rule; guerrilla leaders in Mozambique, Botswana and
Zambia spoke of carrying on the chimurenga, the Shona word for the rebellion of
1896. Political leaders knew that guns were not the only resource at their disposal;
they also encouraged the creation of an archive. Refugee camps encouraged a social
history of displacement. Of course the accumulation of personal testimony did not
depend exclusively upon incarceration, but the camp allowed for the dissemina-
tion of a shared political and social history. As in other settings, the camp helped
validate individual suffering by locating it in a larger struggle for self-expression,
including that of the nation. Refugee crises sustained the belief among belligerents
that they had ‘unfinished business’, which made history part of the ideological and
political armoury of warring parties.6

Hope and the Movement of People (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 85–107; David Newbury, ‘Returning
Refugees: Four Historical Patterns of Coming Home to Rwanda’ Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 47, no.2 (2005), 252–85.
4
Loescher, UNHCR, 92.
5
Patricia Daley, ‘Population Displacement and the Humanitarian Aid Regime: the Experience of
Refugees in East Africa’, in Mirjam de Bruijn (ed.), Mobile Africa: Changing Patterns of Movement in
Africa and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 195–211.
6
Alex de Waal (ed.), Who Fights? Who Cares? War and Humanitarian Action in Africa (Trenton NJ:
Africa World Press, 2000); Stella Tandai Makanya, ‘The Desire to Return: Effects of Experiences in
Exile on Refugees Repatriating to Zimbabwe in the Early 1980s’, in Tim Allen and Hubert Morsink
(eds), When Refugees Go Home: African Experiences (UNRISD/James Currey, 1994), 105–25; Jeremy
Jackson, ‘Repatriation and Reconstruction in Zimbabwe during the 1980s’, in Allen and Morsink
(eds), When Refugees Go Home, 126–66.
226 Refugees in the Global Cold War

COLONIAL LEGACIES: RECURRING THEMES

The consolidation of foreign rule in Africa went hand in hand with population
displacement, either as an instrument of colonial control or because it offered a
means of escape and a chance to regroup. At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury German troops in South-West Africa (Namibia) suppressed an uprising by
Herero farmers who resisted attempts to deprive them of land and cattle; the sur-
vivors fled to neighbouring Bechuanaland, where they were promptly enlisted by
the British to work in the South African mines.7 In Mozambique the Portuguese
colonial administration maintained its authority by brutal means. Half a million
people were forced into fortified village camps where they could be closely guarded.
(The same policy prevailed in Kenya during the Kikuyu or ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion.)
In Portuguese-occupied Angola, a British diplomat who visited the border in
July 1961 reported that refugees ‘fled in panic [after witnessing] group executions,
beatings, theft and destruction, and napalm bombing’. UNHCR kept a low profile
for fear of alienating the Portuguese state. Only in secret internal correspondence
did the truth begin to emerge about colonial repression: ‘It is said that young men
with any education or powers of leadership are being selected and shot in order to
destroy any leadership among the tribesmen, and that indiscriminate bombing and
machine gunning of villages and groups of Africans is being carried out in order to
terrorize the population’.8 The crisis spilled over into the Belgian Congo whence
150,000 Baluba fled in the course of a few weeks (half of them were under 10 years
of age), exacerbating a situation in which rival groups fought to control the rich
mineral resources in Katanga province. UN officials decided that the needs of
Baluba refugees ‘cannot be separated from those of the local population [and that
assistance to them] must be viewed within the framework of assistance to the Con-
golese population as a whole’. This doctrine, linking relief programmes and devel-
opment projects, was enthusiastically embraced by newly independent states and
UNHCR. Inter-governmental organizations and NGOs thus turned refugee crises
into development opportunities.9
Other colonial legacies were equally insidious. New states typically rested on
fragile political and economic foundations. Attempts to secure resources for basic
infrastructure brought rulers into conflict with powerful local interests that sought
to retain their autonomy. Often these rivalries were expressed in ethnic terms,
partly because ‘tribal’ differentiation had been the register in which colonial powers
had sought to rule. Chad’s difficulties stemmed in part from the impact of French

7
Jan-Bart Gewald, ‘ “I was afraid of Samuel, therefore I came to Segkoma”: Herero Refugees and
Patronage Politics in Ngamiland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1890–1914’ Journal of African History,
43, no.2 (2000), 211–34; David Wilkin, ‘Refugees and British Administrative Policy in Northern
Kenya, 1936–1938’ African Affairs, 79, no.317 (1980), 510–30; David Turton, ‘Migrants and Refu-
gees: a Mursi Case Study’, in Tim Allen (ed.), In Search of Cool Ground: War, Flight and Homecoming
in North-East Africa (UNRISD/James Currey, 1996), 96–110.
8
J. D. Kelly, ‘Report on Refugees from Angola’, 26 June 1961, Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 13/7/
GEN–15/0/GEN/ANG, Angolan refugees; British Embassy, Leopoldville, to West and Central Afri-
can Department, 25 July 1961, TNA, FO 371/155062.
9
Unsigned Report, United Nations Review, 9, no.7 (July 1962), 18–20.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 227

colonial policies of divide and rule that favoured the southern savannah which
became a centre of cotton and rice cultivation at the expense of the Muslim North,
which periodically carried out raids on the South. At independence the southern-
ers alienated their rivals by denying them government posts and introducing dis-
criminatory taxes. This North-South bifurcation contributed to the outbreak of a
prolonged civil war in 1965, fuelled by external intervention. Refugees spilled over
into Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon and Nigeria.10 Little news
broke beyond the region. By contrast, the crisis in Nigeria, which manifested itself
in the decision by leaders of the minority Ibo population to declare an independ-
ent state of Biafra in 1967, resonated far and wide. The conflict displaced inter-
nally upwards of three million people. It galvanized international public opinion
by virtue of astute Biafran publicity efforts—the noted author Chinua Achebe
penned a famous poem, ‘The Refugee Mother and Child’ that drew on Catholic
iconography of suffering. Although other African politicians and the UN argued
against intervening in a civil war, a group of French doctors denounced the UN
and NGOs for standing by whilst civilians suffered. This stance became the launch
pad for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).11
These episodes did not exhaust the legacy of decolonization and state forma-
tion. Decolonization had specific consequences for colonists who ‘returned’ to
the metropolis. Its eventual defeat during the Second World War obliged Italy to
renounce its colonial possessions in Africa, as well as the Julian Marches and the
Dodecanese islands between 1943 and 1954. The Dutch and Belgian govern-
ments admitted ‘repatriates’ from their former colonies in the East Indies and
central Africa respectively. They were described as ‘national refugees’, a device that
allowed the UN to disclaim responsibility for crafting durable solutions to their
predicament, even as they struggled to gain acceptance in a new and unfamiliar
environment.12

R E F U G E E  G E N E R AT I N G A N D R E F U G E E  H O S T I N G
S TAT E S : A L G E R I A

Many of the themes just noted are illustrated in Algeria. The Algerian refugee crisis
was a conspicuous example of the powerful forces unleashed by the anti-colonial
struggle. But it had other implications. The number of refugees who crossed an
international frontier was more than matched by the number of internally dis-
placed persons. The crisis marked the start of a connection between UNHCR and
NGOs in the Third World that became a hallmark of the refugee regime. It helped
drive forward plans for repatriation of Algerian refugees, and thus the need for

10
Mario Azevedo, Roots of Violence: a History of War in Chad (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach,
2008); Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, Escape from Violence, 56–63.
11
Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media, 95–108, 124–7; Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 42–3;
Chandler, ‘The Road to Military Humanitarianism’, 683–4.
12
Ballinger, ‘ “Entangled” or “Extruded” Histories’?
228 Refugees in the Global Cold War

preparatory measures. Decolonization made it necessary to resettle colonists. Fi-

nally, Algeria illustrates the point that African states both generated and hosted
refugees: in accommodating Sahrawi refugees later on, Algeria facilitated the con-
struction of Sahrawi refugee identity.
The crisis erupted in 1954 when Algerian nationalists took up arms to end the
long French occupation of their country. The bitter war owed much to the fact
that the French authorities regarded Algeria as an integral part of France. In re-
sponse to an insurrection organized by the pro-independence FLN (Front de
Libération Nationale), French troops cleared the indigenous population from
areas adjacent to the borders with Tunisia and Morocco as part of a ‘pacification’
strategy; more than three and a half million Algerians were internally ‘resettled’
in concentration camps between 1954 and 1962. These tactics strengthened
popular support for the FLN, which engaged in a brilliant diplomatic offensive.
In addition, some 200,000 Algerians fled to Tunisia and Morocco. Several NGOs
were involved in the relief of Algerian refugees, including the AFSC, Oxfam,
Norway’s Redd Barna, and the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
They pulled no punches, referring to ‘the denial of elementary human rights and
the legitimacy of the Algerian demand for independence’ and to the need ‘to al-
leviate the sufferings of the young men and women who had to leave Algeria as
refugees’. In Algeria itself, the Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprès de Evacués
(CIMADE), a French Protestant charity, supported Algerians who had been in-
ternally displaced and who lived in squalid shanty towns.13
At the request of Tunisia and Morocco, UNHCR agreed to extend its ‘good of-
fices’ formula to North Africa, notwithstanding French objections that Algerian
refugees were its citizens. They were finally repatriated from Tunisia and Morocco
when Algeria became independent in 1962. UNHCR coupled repatriation to a
programme for long-run reconstruction, on the grounds that ‘the fate of the repatri-
ated ex-refugees can no longer be disassociated from that of the Algerian population
as a whole’. Islamic NGOs advocated a youth programme to provide ‘wholesome
alternatives to enforced idleness’. Infrastructure projects pointed to an ‘overriding
concern to provide work so that the unemployed can gain self-respect by supporting
themselves’. The Lutheran World Federation funded ambitious reforestation pro-
grammes, experimental farms and training centres, as well as clinics, kindergartens
and milk stations. This was the start of a commitment to ‘development’ as a response
to refugee crises in Africa, and the secondment of technical experts to get projects
under way.14

13
‘Algerian Refugees Return—to what?’ Migration News, 11, no.4 (1962), 22–3; Keith Sutton,
‘Population Resettlement: Traumatic Upheavals and the Algerian Experience’ JMAS, 15, no.2 (1977),
279–300; Ammar Bouhouche, ‘The Return of Algerian Refugees following Independence in 1962’, in
Allen and Morsink, When Refugees Go Home, 71–7.
14
Algeria, a Cry of Need: a Study Devoted to the Problems of Algerian Refugees Published in Recognition
of WRY (Brussels, World Assembly of Youth, 1960); Felix Schnyder to U Thant, 3 October 1962,
Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 13/1/31/ALG; JAI proposal dated 25 February 1960, Fonds UNHCR
11, Series 1, Classified Subject Files 15/64-15/74; Holborn, Refugees, 839; Howard Adelman and John
Sorenson (eds), African Refugees: Development Aid and Repatriation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 229

Repatriation also took on a different guise. Around one million colonial settlers
(pieds-noirs) as well as thousands of Algerian ‘loyalists’ (harkis) resettled in metro-
politan France at the end of the war—General De Gaulle tried unsuccessfully to
persuade the government of Chad to settle them in its desolate northern region.
Although they were citizens of France, many harkis were unceremoniously directed
to camps that had been used to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War.15
Little more than a decade after independence, Algeria became host to refugees
from another crisis zone. In 1975, on the eve of Spain’s withdrawal from its 90-year
long occupation of the Western Sahara, Morocco invaded and asserted its terri-
torial claim to lands rich in phosphate deposits. Armed resistance was led by the
Polisario Front. Around 130,000 Sahrawi refugees fled to the remote and arid
south-west of Algeria. Others remained under Moroccan administration, where
their political rights were severely circumscribed. Following a ceasefire in 1991 the
refugees expected to return to their homes, but the Moroccan government laid
land mines along the border to prevent them from doing so. The result was to
perpetuate refugee camps for more than 30 years: each is named after a town in the
Western Sahara. Refugees elected a government-in-exile, the Sahrawi Arab Demo-
cratic Republic.16
The camps cultivated a history of struggle against Moroccan rule that disrupted
a harmonious and peripatetic culture: ‘[W]e had camels and goats, men used to go
to towns or cities and return carrying goods that lasted for a month. Women made
the tents and took care of everything related to the running of domestic life’. An-
other added, ‘when we moved from one place to another, all the friq [tents] moved
together, we were like one family’. Older informants who had spent half their life
in the camps indicated that the younger generation had gone soft: ‘[W]e the people
of old could stay without food for a whole month or more. Such stamina you will
not find in the younger people [who] live in a different and developed age and are
exposed to more luxuries’. In part this is a tribute to an educational system that
gave children an excellent grounding and allowed students to complete their stud-
ies abroad. Returning refugees published newspapers and launched an interna-
tional film festival in 2003, so there is little evidence of diminution in Sahrawi
solidarity or purposefulness.17

R E VO LU T I O N A N D D I S P L A C E M E N T I N T H E
HORN OF AFRICA

Displacement in the Horn of Africa pointed to the legacy of not one but two co-
lonial regimes. As an Italian colony, Somaliland provided social and educational

15
Jean-Jacques Jordi, ‘The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles, 1962’,
in Smith, Europe’s Invisible Migrants, 61–74.
16
Dawn Chatty (ed.), Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the
Middle East (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 49–50, 71, 77.
17
Jacob Mundy, ‘Performing the Nation, Pre-figuring the State: the Western Saharan Refugees,
Thirty Years Later’ JMAS, 45, no.2 (2007), 275–97.
230 Refugees in the Global Cold War

advantages to the Mejerteen clan. The subsequent rule of Siad Barre courted the
Marehan group instead and made life intolerable for its rivals. Eritrea was also
governed by Italy for half a century until the British took over in 1941 and expelled
the Italian administration. Initially the Foreign Office envisaged turning Eritrea
into a colony for European Jews, but British officials abandoned these plans in
1943. After the war the British planned to re-arrange Eritrea’s borders with Ethio-
pia, Sudan and Kenya, measures that contributed to the creation of a united op-
position inside the country as well as to the self-imposed exile of its political leaders.
In 1951 the UN imposed a federation on Eritrea and Ethiopia, against Eritrean
wishes. Ten years later Ethiopia annexed its neighbour, provoking a lengthy con-
flict that turned the lives of Eritreans upside down. The ensuing war of liberation
only ended in 1993 when Eritrea was finally granted independence. Prolonged vio-
lence deprived farmers of cattle and grazing land, and a terrible famine in 1984–85
prompted further flight from Ethiopia. In all some half a million Eritreans fled
over the border to the eastern region of Sudan or to Kenya; later on, UN and other
assistance programmes made it possible for them to recover some of their assets.
Some refugees fled further afield, adding to the large Eritrean diaspora in Western
Europe.18
Sudan maintained a tough regime for refugees whom it regarded as a security
threat and as contributing to unstable relations between itself and Ethiopia. For
example, in 1974 the government of Khartoum decreed that they could not own
land and had to live on prescribed settlements, the expectation being that this
would alleviate economic difficulties in the eastern part of the country and that the
refugees would return to Eritrea. Eritrean refugees (laj’in) who had settled in Khar-
toum were made to leave the city, being blamed for all manner of social and eco-
nomic ills as well as ‘moral decay’. There is, however, another reading of Eritrean
displacement which places the emphasis on the creation of new social relations
among the refugee population. The refugee crisis called into question longstanding
kinship and clan ties and undermined the role of traditional village elders. The new
contacts and networks in the transit and refugee camps in Sudan sustained a strong
sense of national identity.19
The revolutionary transformation that took place in the Horn of Africa offers a
parallel with events in Russia over half a century earlier. In 1974 Colonel Mengistu
seized power in Ethiopia and his Derg regime dominated Ethiopian politics until
1987. The revolutionaries adopted the terminology of the civil wars in Russia and
Hungary with their depiction of ‘Red’ and ‘White terror’. Mengistu pressed for the
creation of Soviet-style collective farms, and the associated relocation of Ethiopian
peasants disrupted the entire rural economy and resulted in mass starvation. Fur-
ther emergency resettlement took place after the famine of 1984–85. Not everyone
left at gunpoint—some younger peasants wanted to make a fresh start elsewhere,

18
Anna Arnone, ‘Journeys to Exile: the Constitution of Eritrean Identity through Narratives and
Experiences’ JEMS, 34, no.2 (2008), 325–40.
19
Gaim Kibreab, ‘Resistance, Displacement, and Identity: the Case of Eritrean Refugees in Sudan’
Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34, no.2 (2000), 249–96.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 231

even if it meant having to encounter hostility from villagers where they were reset-
tled. Members of the old elite fled to Europe and the United States, in another
echo of developments in Russia 60 years earlier. One villager, born in 1969, de-
scribed how the Derg deprived her family of its land and sent her brothers to fight
in Eritrea; ‘[B]efore Mengistu everything was cheap, food, clothes, even people
with no education could get a job. With Mengistu everything changed. We had
cattle and started a small farm shop for survival [but] political education was new
to us. I left [for Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya] in 1984’. Some groups prospered
by throwing in their lot with Mengistu, only to become refugees in turn when the
regime collapsed.20 Those resettled people who were tempted to go back to their
homes had little prospect of benefiting from this new dispensation. Fresh conflict
between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1998–2000 produced yet more upheaval; thou-
sands of Eritreans fled from the advancing Ethiopian army, while others were sum-
marily deported by the Ethiopian authorities in ways that call to mind Tsarist and
Ottoman practice during the First World War.
The Ethiopian revolution encouraged liberation movements in Eritrea and
Tigray to seek independence. The ensuing struggle produced another refugee crisis,
as Tigrayan leaders urged people to seek sanctuary in Sudan on the grounds that
‘conditions favoured extinction: there cannot be a test worse than this. Man dies,
man is born; a village is razed, a village sprouts. But when a people perish that is a
final loss’. Flight became a patriotic duty, albeit one that exposed refugees to fur-
ther torment. Birhani Paulos, a Tigrayan refugee who reached Sudan in January
1984, described the difficulties he encountered at the hands of Sudanese officials
in Gedaraf: ‘[T]hey insulted me, and they said: “smell the earth”. By this they
meant, “put your face in the dirt and smell that it is not your land” ’. Only when it
emerged that he worked for an international organization did they let him go. He
concluded that ‘I cannot have a stable plan. Everything depends on the govern-
ment in Sudan. I am not in my own hands, I am in the government’s hands’.21
Many refugees died in the camps before they returned to their homes in 1986
under the auspices of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

T H E G R E AT L A K E S R E G I O N : G E N O C I D E A N D
P O P U L AT I O N D I S P L A C E M E N T

Two sites of violence and displacement in sub-Saharan Africa loom larger than all
others in contemporary consciousness. One is Sudan, the other Rwanda and
neighbouring Burundi. The dramatic outbreak of mass murder in the African con-
tinent that took place in Rwanda in 1994 was neither ‘spontaneous’ nor random.

20
Stephanie F. Beswick, ‘ “If You Leave Your Country You Have No Life!” Rape, Suicide, and Vio-
lence: the Voices of Ethiopian, Somali, and Sudanese Female Refugees in Kenyan Refugee Camps’
Northeast African Studies, 8, no.3 (2001), 69–98.
21
Carole Kismaric, Forced Out: the Agony of the Refugee in Our Time (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1989), 127.
232 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Although its implications only became apparent a generation afterwards, and al-
though it was not internationalized at the time, an ominous refugee crisis flared up
in the wake of revolution in Rwanda in 1959. The majority Hutu population
sought revenge on the Tutsi minority for having been favoured by Belgian admin-
istrators who subscribed to the racist belief that Tutsi were inherently superior to
the Hutu by virtue of intelligence and descent (variously supposed to be from an-
cient Egypt or Ethiopia). The physical features of Tutsis and Hutus could scarcely
be distinguished in the way propagandists on both sides maintained (Tutsis were
believed to be taller and to have larger noses); they spoke the same language, lived
side by side and often intermarried. Nevertheless the colonial authorities intro-
duced identity cards which identified the holder as Tutsi or Hutu, or as a member
of the smaller Twa group. During the revolution, Hutu militiamen singled out op-
ponents whom they reviled as ‘cockroaches’ (inyenzi). Sometimes the militias cut
off their noses or chopped off their victims’ feet in order to ‘make them short like
the Hutu’.22
When Rwanda achieved independence in 1962 around 120,000 mainly Tutsi
refugees fled Rwanda for neighbouring Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Congo
(Zaire). Although many Tutsi stayed put—and it is important to emphasize that
only a minority ever enjoyed significant privileges under colonial rule—they risked
becoming second-class citizens in Rwanda. Meanwhile exiled Tutsi militants
formed a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) with the aim of recapturing power. The
regime in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, used the existence of the RPF as a stick with
which to beat those Tutsi who remained in Rwanda, enlisting impoverished Hutus
in the cause.23
Tutsi exiles had something in common with White Russians, who forfeited
a privileged position in society when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. Unlike
the Russians, however, the Tutsis not only anticipated a return ‘home’ but suc-
ceeded in realizing that vision. In exile they conceived of themselves as victims of
revolution who sought restitution for the losses inflicted upon them. Ethnicity and
social class differences combined to produce a combustible mix. Many Hutus be-
lieved that they and not the Tutsi ‘invaders from the north’ had a privileged claim
to Rwanda. Displacement raised the stakes. Although some refugees became rela-
tively prosperous, the majority struggled in the refugee camps. UNHCR officials
hoped to help Tutsi refugees in Kivu province to become ‘firmly established [since]
their misery would perpetuate general chaos, whereas their successful settlement
would stimulate general progress’. In Tanzania, the government of Julius Nyerere
ordered Rwandan refugees to settle in the north-west of the country and to clear
the land. Refugees who resisted this offer faced having food rations withdrawn,

22
The situation was more complex than this summary suggests, because radical elements in the
Catholic Church encouraged the ‘downtrodden’ Hutu to gain an education during the 1950s, thereby
creating a ‘counter-elite’. See Newbury, ‘Returning Refugees’, 270–2.
23
Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (Hurst, 1998), 35–54; Rachel van der
Meeren, ‘Three Decades in Exile: Rwandan Refugees 1960–1990’ JRS, 9, no.3 (1996), 252–67; Mah-
mood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14, 73–5, 101–2, 160–70.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 233

and their leaders were arrested and deported. Officials found it easier to focus on
the project of ‘development’ than on the freely expressed wishes of refugees.24
In Burundi, socio-economic differences between Hutu family farmers and wealth-
ier Tutsi cattle and landowners were similarly entrenched by Belgian administration
which maintained Tutsi privilege. Independence in 1962 and the collapse of the
monarchy three years later brought Tutsi leaders to power. Political instability was
heightened by the presence of 40,000 Rwandan refugees by mid-1962 whom
UNHCR hoped to confine to the interior in order to forestall cross-border raids. But
the policy backfired when in the following year a group of armed Tutsi attacked from
Burundi provoking severe reprisals inside Rwanda and leading to a further influx
of refugees. Although the newcomers helped introduce improvements to the local
Burundian economy, the Hutu locals resented the connections that Tutsi refugees
quickly forged with banks, churches and NGOs, regarding this as a sign that Hutu
subordination and Tutsi superiority would be reinforced in Burundi. When the ma-
jority Hutu population turned on their rivals in 1972, the Tutsi fought back, killing
between 80,000 and 250,000 Hutu whom they demonized as ‘pythons’.25
Around 200,000 Hutus, including traders, civil servants, priests and teachers,
crossed the border into Tanzania. For many of them it was a profound shock:
‘[A]rriving in the area of settlement we got scared to death. It was in the middle of
nowhere. Never in our lives had we seen such thick forest inhabited by wild ani-
mals, snakes, and big biting flies’.26 The Tanzanian authorities directed them to
build clinics, schools, roads and other infrastructure funded in large part by
UNHCR, and to become self-sufficient in food as well as producers of coffee and
tobacco for export. Complaints surfaced that ‘we are the granaries of the Tanza-
nians. We are qualified workers, and they know it. They are savage. They do not
want us to leave their country. We cultivate a lot, they eat a lot. We feed all the
poor regions of Tanzania. We have become their slaves. We have been given a pet
name here, “the tractors” ’. Tanzanian officials reportedly looked askance at at-
tempts to sustain secondary education in the camp at Mishamo, Rukwa province:
‘[T]hey think if we are educated we will not cultivate anymore, that we will go and
fight in our own country’. Refugees who moved to Dar-es-Salaam in search of
work had to maintain a secretive and fragile existence. There were thus strict limits
to Tanzania’s open-door policy.27
Against this harsh backdrop, examples of resilience and dynamism came to the
fore, as in the story told by Innocent, who fled Burundi in 1995 for the relative
safety of Tanzania:

24
Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 1951–70, 15/SA ‘Refugees from Rwanda—Resettlement in Africa’.
25
Rene Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Peter Uvin, Life after Violence: a People’s History of Burundi (Zed Books, 2009), 10.
26
Marc Sommers, Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania (New York: Berghahn,
2001), 37–41.
27
Malkki, Purity and Exile, 41–2, 119–20, 136–7; Sommers, Fear in Bongoland, 13; James Milner,
Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109–14;
Hanne Christensen, Refugees and Pioneers: History and Field Study of a Burundian Settlement in Tanzania
(Geneva: UNRISD, 1986), 137.
234 Refugees in the Global Cold War
I was transferred to a camp for 1972 refugees who had a right to plots of land. I, too,
eventually managed to get one. I cultivated it and sold my production [sic]. I did some
artisan jobs and sold the products and began acquiring a small capital to do a commerce
[sic] of dried fish. When returning [to Burundi] two years ago, my money was stolen
but I did not abandon the métier. I still had my bike and I borrowed money and started
a little trade. When the fields started producing well, I sold part of the land to increase
my capital, so now I own a boutique and I pay others to help my wife cultivate the lands.
I live in my own house.
Since the signing of a peace accord in 2002, which brought the bitter Burundian
civil war to an end, the Tanzanian government encouraged half a million refugees
to repatriate. Here they were given the chance either to live side by side with farm-
ers who had seized their lands or to be settled in ‘peace camps’. Not surprisingly,
neither prospect enhanced their sense of security: it does not help that Burundi is
one of the poorest countries in the world. But there were personal gains: Innocent
added that by returning to Burundi he was reunited with his wife whom he had
not seen for seven years.28
In 1990 a Tutsi-led incursion by the RPF, with the strong backing of the gov-
ernment of Uganda keen to be rid of armed militants on its territory, facilitated
the return to Rwanda of 700,000 largely Tutsi refugees. In the following four
years the government of Juvénal Habyarimana (who had held power since 1973)
tried to come to an agreement with the RPF. These efforts were undermined by
economic decline brought about by a collapse in the price of coffee, the main
export commodity, and the decision to devalue the Rwandan franc at the behest
of the International Monetary Fund, making imports more expensive. The mass
migration of landless peasants from North to South in the early 1990s, often in
response to military offensives, magnified local tensions. When Habyarimana was
killed in a plane crash in April 1994 along with the president of Burundi, the
finger of blame was pointed at Hutu extremists opposed to his attempts to manage
the economic and social crisis. The consequences were catastrophic. During the
ensuing genocide around 800,000 and perhaps one million people were killed,
many of them but by no means all by organized Hutu militias (the Interahamwe
or ‘those who attack jointly’). In Cambodia, it was wise not to be found wearing
spectacles; in Rwanda even the size of one’s nose made one vulnerable. Few Tutsi
and moderate Hutu of any age and gender escaped mutilation or sexual assault.
The speed of the killings was matched only by the torpor of the UN. Hutu refu-
gees from Burundi and internally displaced Hutus from the north of the country
played a crucial role in the genocide, seeking retribution for years of exile and
marginalization.29
As the RPF gained the upper hand, inflicting retribution on Hutu citizens, the
radicalized Interahamwe along with civilians fled west to neighbouring Zaire or east

28
Uvin, Life after Violence, 29–30.
29
Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 205–6, 214; Newbury, ‘Returning Refugees’, 275–6;
Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke (eds), The Path of a Genocide: the Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to
Zaire (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1999).
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 235

to Tanzania, an exodus of as many as two million people. In addition, hundreds of

thousands were internally displaced. Although probably only one in 20 of those
who fled to Congo belonged to the armed forces or militias, most refugees were
looked upon as having been complicit in the genocide, a view shared by respected
analysts.30 The establishment of huge new refugee camps on the borders further
destabilized the entire region; Hutu refugee militias launched raids on Rwandan
territory. Civilians faced deprivation and grave personal risks. In 1996–97 Hutu
refugees were attacked by the armies of the new Congolese leader Laurent Kabila
and by Rwandan government troops who were intent on revenge. Marie Béatrice
Umutesi, a professional social scientist of Hutu background, with good contacts in
and beyond Rwanda, wrote a moving account of the struggle to survive amidst
hostile rebel militias and suspicious locals, and without adequate support from
NGOs. UNHCR rode roughshod over the wishes of refugees and espoused repat-
riation as the most appropriate ‘solution’, rewarding villagers who turned refugees
over to the authorities. Umutesi reserves some of her most scathing remarks for
this ‘bounty hunting’. Yet, at the same time as describing the death and disease that
ravaged refugees during their retreat, Umutesi also draws attention to the resource-
fulness of those like herself who bartered goods, cared for each other and managed
to keep one step ahead of their pursuers.31
Events in Rwanda thus spilt over into neighbouring states (see Map 8). The
continuing violence and instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo has
been fuelled by the lucrative trade in gold and diamonds that are mined in the
eastern part of the country. Weak state institutions did nothing to bring the vio-
lence under control. In Tanzania the UNHCR-administered camps conferred an
advantage on refugees from the North who got there earlier at the expense of
those from the South of the country. The management of relief thus tended to
reproduce Rwanda’s regional divisions. In Uganda, a combination of population
pressure and political pressure by the government of Milton Obote created diffi-
culties for Rwandan refugees who were treated as scapegoats for the economic
crisis in the early 1980s, and who have suffered recently for the same reason. As
so often, refugees were also regarded as a ‘security risk’, meaning that their own
security took second place to considerations of state. Many Hutu refugees in
camps in Zaire/DCR and Tanzania believed that UNHCR was in league with the
Kigali regime to arrange for their repatriation. They wanted to learn at first hand
from returnees about conditions in Rwanda, but UNHCR refused to arrange
such sessions, on the grounds that this would breach its non-political stance.
Umutesi expressed dissatisfaction with UNCHR officials who seemed unable to
understand that ‘refugees can also be intellectuals not beggars’.32

30
De Waal, Famine Crimes, 195–203; Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 2–5, 173–82, 240.
31
Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: the Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 211; Adelman and Barkan, No Return, No Refuge, 140–2.
32
Johan Pottier, ‘Relief and Repatriation: Views by Rwandan Refugees, Lessons for Humanitarian
Aid Workers’ African Affairs, 95, no. 380 (1996), 403–29; Johan Pottier, ‘The Self in Self-Repatriation:
Closing down Mugunga Camp, Eastern Zaire’, in Black and Koser (eds), The End of the Refugee
Cycle? 142–70.
 236 Refugees in the Global Cold War

SOUTH SUDAN
ETHIOPIA
Juba

Kakuma
Lake
Turkana

UGANDA
Lake
Albert

SOMALIA
KENYA
Kampala Dadaab
Co

NORTH Lake
ng

KIVU Victoria Nairobi

RWANDA
o

Kigali

SOUTH
Bujumbura
Bujumbura
KIVU
BURUNDI
Mombasa
Kigoma

Mishamo Dodoma

DEMOCRATIC Dar-es-Salaam
REPUBLIC OF Lake
THE CONGO Tanganyika TANZANIA

INDIAN
OCEAN

Lake
Malawi
ZAMBIA
Refugee routes

0 250 km

Map 8: Map of Refugee Movements in the Great Lakes Region

Refugees who fled to Kivu following the victory of the RPF and who were then
forced to return to Rwanda, faced hostility from people who had occupied their
homes with the blessing of the government and who made crude assumptions
about their complicity in the genocide. This is precisely what refugees feared, and
why UNHCR policy was clumsy and premature. (Wealthier Hutu on the other
hand could settle in third countries thereby avoiding these problems.) More than
a decade on from these terrible events, North Kivu remains a war zone in which
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 237

armed Hutu, with access to mineral wealth and other resources, have been able to
keep up their fight against the Congolese army and local Tutsi militias, with UN
peacekeepers as bystanders, unable to protect the civilian population from vio-
lence, abduction and rape. The crisis of mass internal displacement was made all
the more volatile by plans to repatriate Congolese Tutsi from Rwanda; this initia-
tive, likewise backed by UNHCR, alarmed ethnic groups such as the Nande and
Hutu.33

S U D A N : WA R , D I S P L A C E M E N T A N D D E V E L O P M E N T

Independence in Sudan, the second largest country on the African continent, led
to a bitter civil war that lasted close on two decades. Religious, economic and cul-
tural distinctions between the predominantly Muslim and relatively developed
North, and the ‘African’ and less developed South, intensified under British colo-
nial rule between 1898 and 1956 that maintained a dual administrative arrange-
ment for the two halves of the country. Until 1946 British officials went so far as
to forbid ‘northerners’ from travelling to the South. The British did little to inte-
grate the immense western region of Darfur into the colonial state, thereby storing
up problems for the future. When the British departed, the poverty of the South
served to draw attention to its lack of political influence. In this fragile polity, ten-
sions between the northerners and southerners reached boiling point. In 1962 a
full blown conflict erupted between a guerrilla army in the South (the self-styled
Anyanya, or ‘snake venom’) and the dominant northerners whose forces bombed
villagers from the air. Around 20,000 Southern Sudanese fled to Zaire and Uganda
in 1964 (when UNHCR first opened an office in Kampala); more followed when
peace talks collapsed the following year.34
By 1970 UNHCR counted 166,000 refugees in neighbouring states including
Uganda, Zaire, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic. A concerted effort was
made to arrange for their repatriation in the wake of a peace agreement concluded
at Addis Ababa in 1972, the aim of Khartoum being to neutralize any potential
incursion from armed refugees in neighbouring states. Education and health care
were entrusted to the Anyanya under a deal which created a Southern Assembly
and a president of the Southern Region. The agreement required ‘the whole nation
of Sudan’ to contribute to the ‘resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees’. This
was an immense challenge. Internally displaced people far exceeded the recognized
refugee population; estimates of the displaced southerners range from 500,000 to
one million. To complicate matters further Juba, the chief provincial capital, dou-
bled in size during the war due to an influx of rural migrants brought about by the
activities of troops supporting one side or another. Economic and regional divi-
sions persisted, there were too few jobs to go round, and southerners continued to

33
Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter, 92, 209.
34
Holborn, Refugees, 832, 994–7; John R. Rogge, Too Many, Too Long: Sudan’s Twenty Year Refugee
Dilemma (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), 41.
238 Refugees in the Global Cold War

feel marginalized. International NGOs did not coordinate their actions and failed
to engage local Sudanese Christian and Muslim organizations. This added to the
uncertainty.35
In Sudan, economic and political issues were closely linked. UNHCR disposed
of substantial resources and could up to a point dictate settlement policy, for ex-
ample insisting that refugees could not settle closer than 50km to the territorial
frontier. This measure was ‘intended to reduce political activity by refugees in the
country of origin from across border locations and is thereby aimed at preventing
tensions between the origin and asylum states’.36 UNICEF and NGOs including
Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief sup-
ported the fragile peace agreement that brought a temporary halt to the civil war.
Refugees in Sudan were vulnerable to exploitation by government officials and
landlords who appropriated even the modest belongings of refugees. Animosity
increased as pressures on local resources intensified and prices rose. Some of the
problems were alleviated by organized settlement schemes funded by overseas aid
that regulated employment and supplied basic necessities to refugees, but locals
managed to siphon off resources for themselves. Refugees also lost out when they
were moved on and deprived of land that they had already cleared and cultivated.
The 1974 Asylum Act formally barred them from owning land and other immove-
able property. Although the government cultivated an image of generosity, in prac-
tice refugees—Eritreans in particular, deemed not just an economic burden but a
‘security threat’—faced considerable hardship.37
Organized settlement also came at the price of discouraging initiative. The wide-
spread reluctance to involve refugees in the decision-making process allowed offi-
cials to claim that refugees had become excessively dependent on state welfare.
Many refugees in Sudan settled not in camps but in urban settlements where they
eked out an uncertain existence made more precarious by overcrowding. As if to
prove the point, the military regime burned down a camp in Khartoum in 1990
inhabited by 30,000 internally displaced southerners. UNHCR attempted to build
a working relationship with the government of Sudan by assisting with programmes
to support Congolese and Ethiopian refugees on Sudan’s territory. UN officials were
also involved in economic reconstruction, even though the circumstances did not
correspond to the Convention’s definition of a refugee situation—High Commis-
sioner Sadruddin argued that there were circumstances (and this was one) where
‘displaced persons clearly need some form of international protection’.38
In the early 1980s civil war flared up again. The Sudanese People’s Liberation
Army (SPLA), founded in 1983 by John Garang with backing from the Derg
regime in Ethiopia, confronted the government in Khartoum. The conflict was
complicated by the prevalence of famine in 1983–84 and by the government’s

35
Holborn, Refugees, 1358; J.O. Akol, ‘A Crisis of Expectations: Returning to Southern Sudan in
the 1970s’, in Allen and Morsink (eds), When Refugees Go Home, 78–95.
36
Rogge, Too Many, Too Long, 60.
37
Ahmed Karadawi, Refugee Policy in Sudan, 1967–1984 (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999); Ferris, Beyond
Borders, 139.
38
Loescher, UNHCR, 153.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 239

decision to arm ‘Arab’ militias; in practice the two elements were linked. The Arab
population of Sudan historically maintained uneasy relations with Dinka and Nuer
tribes because of rival claims to land and cattle, and many Dinka pastoralists ended
up being enslaved by Arab overlords. The resurgence of civil war brought about a
fresh exodus of around 1.5 million people to Zaire, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt and
Southern Ethiopia, where refugees were particularly vulnerable. It also generated at
least 4.5 million internally displaced people who sought refuge from the govern-
ment’s aggressive counter-insurgency measures and its attempts to conscript civil-
ians, as well as from the requisitioning tactics adopted by the SPLA. Relatively few
resources came their way. Those who moved to Khartoum faced fresh problems
when the government declared war on the squatter settlements. Refugees who fled
to Egypt fared little better. Sudanese refugees in Cairo testified that the stress they
suffered from their encounter with UNHCR was second only to the trauma of
escape from Sudan, although the ‘displacement of anger originally directed at au-
thorities in Sudan towards those in authority in Cairo may in part explain [these]
findings’.39 How the 2011 revolution in Egypt has affected the situation is as yet
unclear.
Under international pressure, the government in Khartoum and the SPLA—
now deprived of support from Ethiopia—signed a Comprehensive Peace Agree-
ment in 2005, as a result of which refugees began to return to Sudan, albeit under
conditions of considerable uncertainty. This fragile situation was more than
matched by that in Darfur where the crisis reflected longstanding problems brought
about by the pressure placed on local Fur and Masalit farmers by Arab camel-
herding tribesmen from drought-affected northern parts of the region who moved
south in search of grazing land. Drought appears to have been a major factor in
intensifying conflict and encouraging mass internal migration. For example, fol-
lowing the drought in the mid-1980s around 400,000 Arab pastoralists encroached
on Fur lands, already struggling to accommodate refugees from the civil war in
Chad. More recently the ‘pacification’ campaign orchestrated by the central gov-
ernment crushed local Fur efforts to secure greater autonomy and unleashed an
‘Arab’ militia, the Janjaweed, whose name became a byword for mass murder and
rape of the ‘African’ population. There were 600,000 internally displaced people in
Darfur by 2004, in addition to 100,000 refugees who crossed into Chad to escape
the fighting and to find food. The authorities in Khartoum tried to paint a reassur-
ing picture of Darfur’s camps and limited access by foreign aid agencies. This may
reflect anxiety in Khartoum that the USA was seeking to use the conflict—not for
the first time—to engineer greater influence in Sudanese politics.40
Historians cannot yet digest the impact of these upheavals. Nevertheless, oral
accounts by Uduk migrants from Southern Sudan described an arduous trek in

39
Susan M. Meffert, ‘Feelings of Betrayal by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
and Emotionally Distressed Sudanese Refugees in Cairo’ Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 26, no.2
(2010), 160–72, at 167.
40
Martin W. Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow: a History of Destruction and Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 262–3.
240 Refugees in the Global Cold War

rough mountain terrain and across floodplains, where they were at risk from disease,
starvation, banditry and other hazards, including being ‘sold to the war’ when sol-
diers went looking for recruits. They recalled this as bway tur, ‘long road’. The out-
come was that ‘they found themselves locked into an unpredictable zigzag of
journeys’ across unfamiliar terrain. Several thousand ended up at a new settlement
at Bonga just inside Ethiopia, where UNHCR established schools, churches and
sports fields, and where refugees were expected to live independently. Many of them
did exactly that, only to find themselves coming under criticism from relief workers
for taking steps to secure additional resources by cutting down trees and hunting for
food without permission. Females from Southern Sudan who made their way to
Cairo found only find poorly paid jobs as domestic servants and were vulnerable to
discrimination and exploitation. Their children gained only a basic education be-
cause of government restrictions. Egyptian officials refused to recognize the identity
cards issued by UNHCR.41
The response to challenges faced by these and other Sudanese refugees—such as
being required to wait for months to be seen by UN officials—emerged in the tes-
timony collected recently by the US-backed ‘Voice of witness’ project. Marcy Narem
remembered little about the journey from Sudan to Kakuma at the age of five, but
described her prowess in the football team, her cautious negotiation of gender rela-
tions and the ever-present threat from the indigenous Turkana people. Although she
complained that ‘since I’ve been here, nothing has happened to me’, nevertheless
she aspired to a better life: ‘I dream of being a nurse or a pilot. I remember flying to
Nairobi, being high up in the sky, and I think it would be so great to be a pilot in a
plane like that’. A 20-year-old South Sudanese man who arrived in Kakuma in 1994
commented that after 10 years in the camp, he no longer found ‘mutual distrust.
Nowadays people have changed. They understand each others’ lives . . . each and
every person has an aim to do something’. A South Sudanese woman reported that
since reaching Egypt, ‘Now I can think of what to do in this world’.42 Refugees
began to fight back. Women’s access to income in the informal economy and educa-
tion enabled them to assert themselves vis-à-vis men whose authority and status
were hitherto unquestioned. This empowerment extended also to a more acute his-
torical awareness: one women’s self-help group, Rabita, discussed the history of
Sudan and the complex and often painful relations between northerners and south-
erners during and after colonial rule, thereby providing them with a clearer under-
standing of the circumstances that led to the crisis of displacement.
The impact of the virtually uninterrupted wars in Sudan is graphically portrayed
in the fictionalized autobiography of a young Dinka boy, Valentino Achak Deng,
who fled to Ethiopia and found sanctuary in Kakuma refugee camp in North-
Western Kenya before eventually settling in the United States. Kakuma camp was

41
Wendy James, War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 113, 120, 150.
42
Craig Walzer, Out of Exile: Narratives from the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan (San Fran-
cisco: McSweeney’s, 2009), 245, 249, 435; Jane Kani Edward, ‘South Sudanese Refugee Women:
Questioning the Past, Imagining the Future’, in Patricia Grimshaw (ed.), Women’s Rights and Human
Rights: International Historical Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 272–89, at 284.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 241

established in 1992, primarily to house refugees fleeing fighting and scarcity in

Sudan and Somalia. It had a population of 90,000 in 2005 when Deng was living
there. Valentino Achak poignantly described the moment when he was forced to
leave his village in Western Sudan: ‘[I]t was the beginning of the end of knowing
that life would continue’.43 Officials symbolically conferred a new life on these ‘lost
boys of Sudan’ by giving them all the same birthday, 1 January. Deng’s story is one
of periodic ‘uprooting’ and escape, and of the loss of friends and acquaintances to
sudden death at the hands of militias. His narrative also embraces chance encoun-
ters with people he never expected to see again, and above all it is a story of getting
by, falling in love, growing up and seeing the world.

I N C A RC E R AT I O N : A D O U B L E  E D G E D S WO R D

The experiences of countless refugees in the African continent have been bound up
with the refugee camp. Its ubiquity requires an explanation. Bureaucratic opinion
maintains that the camp protects refugees from external attack, but this misleading
assumption has been painfully exposed on numerous occasions. Camps serve other
purposes, however: refugees are easier to manage in an institutional environment
than if they are self-settled. We have already seen how camps helped pave the way
for repatriation. They also aid the interests of political leaders who can promulgate
their message to a captive constituency. For warlords the camp is a means to recruit
soldiers. In Zaire, military commanders sustained their position among the massed
ranks of Hutu refugees by creaming funds from aid agencies and extorting cash
from refugees, as well as drawing on their own foreign bank accounts and the prop-
erty they had brought with them from Rwanda. It was not just about buying guns
and bullets. As one Hutu commander boasted, ‘We have the population’. Camp
inmates were regularly reminded through press bulletins and radio broadcasts of the
need to safeguard the interests of the Hutu ‘nation’. Creating this bond became a
means of effacing the difference between refugee warriors and civilians, although at
least two relief agencies were unconvinced by these cynical tactics: MSF and the
International Rescue Committee both withdrew from Zaire, although UNHCR
remained on the grounds that it had a duty to protect refugees prior to promoting
their repatriation, and other aid agencies invoked the need to provide humanitarian
assistance even if it entailed making unpleasant compromises.44
Somali experience provides a telling illustration of the reasons for the persistence
of refugee camps despite their evident shortcomings. Camps set up in Somalia for
ethnic Somali refugees (650,000 people at a conservative estimate) from the disputed
territory of Ogaden in 1977–78 allowed President Siad Barre to consolidate his posi-
tion as leader of a ‘greater Somalia’ and to tap international aid. The US—keen to
support Barre in his rivalry with the pro-Soviet leadership of Ethiopia—channelled

43
Dave Eggers, What is the What: the Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (Penguin Books,
2006), 75.
44
Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 166–81; Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries, 78–97.
242 Refugees in the Global Cold War

this package of assistance via CARE and the World Food Programme. With these
resources the camp population set up a health system, schools and workshops.
Thousands of Somali citizens who managed to get jobs in the refugee camps were
understandably reluctant to renounce them; here as elsewhere, the camps created
a role for ‘big men’ who energetically exploited their position. The government in
Mogadishu discouraged alternative modes of existence, because self-sufficiency
would undermine the case for emergency financial and material resources from
abroad. Another factor supporting international intervention was the widely-held
view among NGOs that refugees were too ‘traumatized’ to take any initiative—
these assumptions about ‘dependency syndrome’ and ‘refugee mentality’ clearly
echoed views about ‘DP apathy’ in Europe a quarter of a century earlier. Many refu-
gees described camp life as a form of ‘slavery’ that reminded them of stories of Arab
dominance in generations gone by.45
The misplaced assumption that high dependency ratios in camps or among
self-settled refugees deprived them of a capacity for enterprise is belied by the
historical evidence, although this is not to overlook the fact that refugees might
emphasize their vulnerability for tactical reasons, such as to improve access to re-
sources. Refugees worked hard to make a living in the hope of accumulating suf-
ficient resources, as for example in the Ogaden where they developed a varied mix
of economic activities. Evidence elsewhere supports this finding. Tigrayan refu-
gees survived in overcrowded refugee camps in Sudan, often by circumventing
local laws that prohibited them from trading with local townspeople. Refugees
also helped one another. Eritrean refugees in Sudan turned to cash crops and
adopted new agricultural technologies, proclaiming ‘we shall only move forward
and never backward’. Many of the 180,000 refugees who returned to Eritrea like-
wise resolved to make a fresh start.46
This is not to say that conditions in refugee camps were anything other than
challenging. Somali refugees who arrived in the Dadaab camp complex in Kenya
in 1991 stayed for 15 years or more, and managed to survive with difficulty thanks
to UNHCR support (including taking jobs as NGO community workers) and
remittances from those who had already left. Studies of Dadaab and Kakuma tes-
tify to the disciplinary regime of the enclosed refugee camp and the risks to which
women were continually exposed.47 But life in refugee camps was never a catalogue
of unmitigated misery. In 2006 the large settlement at Buduburam in Ghana
housed 38,000 refugees from Liberia, who turned it into a thriving town with its
own temples, mosque, cinema, bank and supermarket. Sudanese refugees who had
been settled at Kiryandongo in Masindi district, Uganda, since 1991 did not live a
one-dimensional life. In addition to meeting the needs of family members from

45
David Laitin and Said S. Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State (Boulder: Westview Press,
1987), 125–6; Simon Turner, ‘Suspended Spaces: Contested Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp’, in
Thomas B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the
Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 312–32.
46
Gaim Kibreab, ‘Refugeehood, Loss and Social Change: Eritrean Refugees and Returnees’, in
Essed, Refugees and the Transformation of Societies, 19–30, at 27.
47
Hyndman, Managing Displacement, 93–110, 121–31.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 243

the plots of land assigned to them, they devised a range of entertainments including
both poignant songs (‘Sudanese live in sorrow’) and frivolous pieces.48 Dances such
as the larakaraka simultaneously evoked a longing for Sudan and affirmed the pos-
sibility of making a decent life in a community of exiles. These cultural expressions
are, like political activity, dynamic rather than static. Newer opportunities for social
encounter, such as discos, draw attention to inter-generational disharmony that
displacement intensified. Refugee life in camps has, so to say, never stood still.49
Camps additionally enabled political activists and militants to prepare refugees
for future struggle or for eventual ‘homecoming’. ZANU-administered camps in
Mozambique instructed Zimbabwean exiles in the history of white oppression—
not a difficult task in view of the settler regime’s fondness for creating tightly con-
trolled ‘protected villages’ in Rhodesia, as a means of depriving nationalist guerrillas
of potential support. (The number of internally displaced people was put at 750,000
in the late 1970s.) The camps across the border became an instrument of political
as well as military mobilization, sustaining incandescent rage against white rule and
the settlers’ monopoly of land that had displaced African farmers earlier in the cen-
tury. The camp at Wampoa College for example promoted a powerful historical
narrative, emphasizing the historic absence of political rights and economic pros-
pects, not to mention the aggression shown by the Rhodesian army to its oppo-
nents. Teachers and other professionals trained the next generation and maintained
a disciplined regime in exile. As in camps at other times and in other places, voca-
tional training went hand in hand with sports and music. Unhappily the process of
return to independent Zimbabwe was hampered by great haste and administrative
confusion, which relief organizations such as Lutheran World Federation, the Men-
nonites, and Zimbabwean church leaders attempted to alleviate.50 Much of the
country was devastated by the war, and extensive rural poverty continued to play
havoc with the lives of ordinary peasant farmers. The uncompromising stance of the
Mugabe government—typified by its treatment of opponents which reached a cre-
scendo during the war in Matabeleland in 1983–86 and brought about a fresh
exodus to Botswana—owed much to the political opinions and educational pro-
grammes promoted in the camps and the atmosphere of suspicion brought about
by years of enforced exile. The camp hardened political opinions, sustained a history
of struggle, and—dare one say—combined bravery with brutalization.

‘ D U R A B L E S O LU T I O N S ’

Recurrent refugee crises in many parts of Africa gave rise to immense relief efforts
on the part of UNHCR and NGOs. As we have seen, there was a clamour to

48
This was not the first time that Masindi had been home to refugees: a small community of Polish
refugees lived there from 1943 to 1948.
49
Tania Kaiser, ‘Songs, Discos and Dancing in Kiryandongo, Uganda’ JEMS, 32, no.2 (2006),
183–202.
50
Janice McLaughlin, On the Frontline: Catholic Missions in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (Harare:
Baobab Books, 1996).
244 Refugees in the Global Cold War

impose ‘durable solutions’: repatriation, resettlement or integration. African lead-

ers articulated their own programme. In 1969 the Organisation of African Unity
(established in 1963, and renamed the African Union in 2002) agreed a refugee
convention that widened the definition of refugees to include internally displaced
persons as well as those who crossed an international frontier. The 1969 Conven-
tion also took into account the political realities in countries where white settler
regimes led pro-independence freedom fighters to continue the struggle in exile.
Claims to protection were to be made on the basis of group determination, not
unlike the situation in Europe between the wars when Russian and Armenian refu-
gees were regarded as a collective entity. Asylum was seen as a ‘peaceful and hu-
manitarian’ gesture, not to be construed by any member state as an ‘unfriendly act’.
Governments agreed to settle refugees in the interior of the receiving country, in
order to reduce the possibility that refugees would make cross-border incursions
into the country of origin—a significant provision that underlined the security
concerns expressed by OAU member states. For 40 years UNHCR has based its
actions in the sub-continent on the OAU Convention. When the Convention first
came into force, the refugee population in Africa was around 900,000; 20 years
later it reached 5.5 million.51
However, focusing on external intervention neglected the actions of refugees
who provided for themselves. One example emerges from the aftermath of famine
in Darfur in 1984–85 which was exacerbated by the presence of large numbers of
refugees from the war in Chad. Unfortunately UNHCR adopted a highly restric-
tive definition of those entitled to receive food aid—focusing primarily on those
who conformed to the internationally agreed definition of refugee—and over-
looked the needs of others. The outcome was not only widespread casualties that
could have been prevented but also a legacy of bitterness between the local popula-
tion and the newcomers. Addressing the needs of both subsequently involved con-
siderable efforts. Other initiatives included programmes for cross-border assistance
in an attempt to prevent farmers whose crops failed from becoming refugees. Since
many farmers were nomads, particularly in the Horn of Africa, UNHCR opted to
take a leaf out of the book of the OAU, rewriting the rules that hitherto precluded
it from assisting internally displaced persons.52
Broadly speaking repatriation became the preferred option. The first significant
repatriation effort took place in the early 1960s when Algerian refugees returned
from Tunisia and Morocco under UNHCR auspices. UNHCR advertised other
success stories, such as the organized return of Ethiopian refugees in the 1980s and
Mozambican refugees in the early 1990s, and lamented the circumstances that pre-
vent repatriation, as in the case of Eritrean refugees in Sudan, who remained in exile
for decades as a result of precarious conditions in their home country. But repatria-
tion was rarely an unalloyed success or a straightforward option. The practical con-
sequences have already been mentioned—and the repatriation of Liberian refugees

51
Fonds UNHCR 11, Series 1, 1/1/71 ‘Good Offices Policy’ (1967–70); Zolberg, Suhrke and
Aguayo, Escape from Violence, 28–9.
52
Loescher, UNHCR, 303–4.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 245

from Buduburam is another case in point. Poor and war-torn countries have often
been overwhelmed by the cost of rebuilding homes and infrastructure. Organized
return did not always correspond to the wishes of displaced people: pastoral nomads
in the Horn of Africa wanted land for their cattle, rather than to be required to move
to a prescribed ‘home’. Other considerations also hampered repatriation. UNHCR
found it cheaper to maintain Eritrean refugees in situ than to pay for a large-scale
repatriation scheme. The government in Sudan came to rely upon UNHCR largesse.
In Kenya and Tanzania too, the presence of refugees attracted goods and services that
brought tangible benefits to non-refugees as well.53
Aid has often gone hand in hand with ideas about ‘rational’ social organization
and economic development. The International Conferences on Assistance to Refu-
gees in Africa (ICARA) convened under UN auspices in Geneva in 1980 and 1984
agreed on the need for investment in infrastructure—education, health and trans-
port—in order to alleviate the burden on host countries. Although little came of
these initiatives, the debates drew attention to the link between displacement and
development. In Tanzania, which provided refuge to Hutu farmers fleeing the
fighting in Burundi in the 1970s, the government in conjunction with UNHCR
and the Lutheran World Federation set aside unpopulated forest land at Ulyankulu
for refugees to cultivate maize, beans and cassava in accordance with the doctrine
of village settlement (ujamaa). Programmes for ‘rehabilitation’ and economic de-
velopment were designed in part to weaken the pressure for further displacement.
By the 1980s this had become accepted doctrine. The development agenda served
an important purpose in indicating to officials in the country of settlement that the
needs of local people would not be overlooked in the process of assisting refugees.
Everyone, that is to say, would be entitled to international aid. In these circum-
stances UNHCR had to tread carefully because it was not an ‘operational’ agency;
precisely for this reason repatriation commended itself as a preferable alternative to
the lengthy commitment to support refugees in the country of first asylum. But by
the late 1990s Tanzania had had enough—officially, it reported 800,000 refugees
in 2005—and in response to claims from Burundi that it was providing a safe
haven for rebel groups, launched a concerted programme to round up Burundian
refugees. By forcing large numbers into camps, cutting the size of plots of land
reserved for their use and depriving them of wage-earning opportunities in the
local economy, the Tanzanian authorities began to look upon incarceration as the
prelude to organized repatriation. Something of the same stance applied in respect
of refugees from Rwanda. In late 1996 the authorities told UNHCR of their inten-
tion to send refugees back. Within a few weeks some 450,000 Hutu refugees had
been forced across the border.54
Whatever the preferred ‘solution’, a question mark hangs over the meanings that
refugees assigned to places and to their past. The ‘place’ to which one returned

53
Johnathan Bascom, Losing Place: Refugee Populations and Rural Transformations in East Africa
(Oxford: Berghahn, 2001); Elizabeth Holzer, ‘A Case Study of Political Failure in a Refugee Camp’
Journal of Refugee Studies, 25, no.2 (2012), 257–81.
54
Milner, Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum, 126.
246 Refugees in the Global Cold War

might have become very different from the place it once was, partly because of the
damage inflicted by war and partly because newcomers took over the homes and
farms belonging to those who fled. It is thus appropriate to think of returnees as
‘starting over’ rather than ‘coming home’. Tigrayan refugees, originally farmers
from the highlands who returned from neighbouring Sudan to lowland Ethiopia
in 1993, ‘were neither creating a new way of life from a clean slate nor going back
to a previous state of being’.55 The past figured in their homecoming as a reminder
that migration was a recurrent feature of Tigrayan life. In other circumstances—
Rwanda is the obvious case in point—the past acquires a different meaning in rela-
tion to repatriation, because ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ now confront one another
about misdeeds and mass murder. In addition to these political and psychological
dimensions, material elements arise from claims for compensation and other kinds
of restitution. Sometimes, as in Ethiopia, repatriates were obliged to get used to
new farming practices. For all these reasons repatriation has never been a straight-
forward choice on the part of individuals or a straightforward policy. It has always
come at a price, usually paid disproportionately by refugees, and it always entails a
complex relationship to the past.

R E F U G E E H I S TO R I A N S , R E F U G E E J O U R N E Y S

An intense historical consciousness manifested itself in the situations just described.

In Tanzania’s refugee camps, to which tens of thousands of Hutu exiles were con-
fined after the bitter conflict in Burundi in 1972, refugees manifested a powerful
sense of nostalgia for the coffee fields and the cattle that they had left behind. They
hoped to return, provided that Burundi was ruled by a Hutu government and not
by Tutsis. But far more was at stake. The camps gave vent to the expression of an
exclusive ethnic identity whereby refugees rationalized the discrimination and his-
toric suffering to which they had been exposed. Refugees in Mishamo portrayed
themselves as the embodiment of a Hutu nation clearly distinguishable from Tutsi
‘interlopers’ from the far north. They deployed a strong sense of the past in order
to shore up their identity. Specifically they constructed a strongly woven and di-
dactic narrative of political, economic and social marginalization at the hands of
Tutsi ‘foreigners’ to whom negative qualities were ascribed without qualification.
Among Hutu refugees this blunt characterization of ethnic difference went hand
in hand with an idealization of the distant past when Hutus lived together in peace
and a belief that the present torment of displacement cemented Hutu solidarity.
History—or rather, a ‘mythico-history’ now ‘seized centre stage’ and provided refu-
gees with a morality tale, a way of ordering the world, and a guide to appropriate
behaviour.56

55
Laura Hammond, This Place Will Become Home: Refugee Repatriation to Ethiopia (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004), 15.
56
Malkki, Purity and Exile, 53.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 247

Yet it would be wrong to overlook the cosmopolitan outlook expressed by other

refugees. An anonymous Sudanese in Kakuma described his relations with local
Kenyans: ‘In my life as a refugee, I have come to socialise with people of different
cultures, understand them, and appreciate them. And then also I have come to
know different political ideas’.57 Burundi refugees who settled in the Tanzanian
township of Kigoma embraced a less rigid identity than their counterparts in refu-
gee camps. Nevertheless, here too ‘refugee historians’—self-appointed custodians
of the past who occupied a senior position in refugee society—did not hesitate to
tell stories of Hutu suffering at the hands of Tutsis. Whether originating from the
Lake Region or the highlands, Hutu refugees were enjoined to remember and to
avenge their persecution. While making the most of life in ‘Bongoland’ (‘brain-
land’, the term they gave to Dar-es-Salaam), they looked upon themselves as the
real ‘owners’ of Burundi, whereas the Tutsi were regarded as ‘interlopers’ who had
benefited from Belgian favouritism in the past. In this atmosphere expressions of
resolve sounded menacing rather than reconciliatory: the phrase ‘never again’ ac-
quired a particularly sinister overtone.58
In post-genocide Rwanda, the state offers its own version of the past. Deliberate
efforts are being made to ‘re-educate’ people in accordance with ideas of reconcili-
ation, ‘de-ethnicization’ and ‘unity’ (ubumwe). Rwandan citizens are barred from
making public reference to their ethnicity, and schools may not teach the history
of the genocide. Newly instituted ingando or ‘transition camps’ are designed to
inculcate ‘harmony’. They promote themselves as part of an ‘ancient Rwandan
tradition’, and their instructors emphasize that colonial rulers pitted Rwandan
against Rwandan, an interpretation that oversimplifies a complex history and over-
looks pre-colonial divisions, but which clearly serves a political purpose in modern
Rwanda, namely to quash difference by government fiat. The project extends not
only to the current crop of young citizens but also to older Tutsi who fled Rwanda
between 1959 and 1961.59
The richest material for the social and cultural historian of refugee displacement
emerges in a different context, in relation to Jews in Ethiopia who looked upon
themselves to be the descendants of a ‘lost tribe’ that fled Egypt in 1300 bce. The
men among them worked as blacksmiths or metalworkers, the women as potters;
many were also tenant farmers. None of them benefited from the revolutionary
changes undertaken by the Mengistu regime, and several thousand took the fateful
decision to escape to neighbouring Sudan. En route they were exposed to attack by
Ethiopian bandits (shifta) and militias to whom bribes had to be paid to allow
them to cross the sealed border. One in five lost their lives before reaching Sudan.
The authorities in Sudan placed most of them in refugee camps whose conditions
were little better than those they left behind in Ethiopia. They suffered infectious
disease and dehydration. Some refugees believed they were being deliberately

57
Walzer, Out of Exile, 435.
58
Sommers, Fear in Bongoland, 42–64.
59
Andrea Purdeková, ‘Rwanda’s ingando Camps: Liminality and the Reproduction of Power’
Working Paper no.80 (Oxford: RSC, 2011).
248 Refugees in the Global Cold War

poisoned. The Sudanese authorities harassed them and punished any attempt on
their part to escape their confinement. They had little opportunity to work either
as farmers or as craftsmen. When Israel launched ‘Operation Moses’ in November
1984, and airlifted refugees from Sudan to Jerusalem via Brussels, the plan was con-
ceived as deliverance from an intolerable situation. The government in Khartoum
came under intense US pressure and was in no position to hinder these efforts.60
Important work by Israeli psychotherapist Gadi BenEzer, who encouraged
young Ethiopian Jews to speak about their ordeal, reveals that they imbued their
journey from Ethiopia to Sudan with notions of vulnerability and suffering, but
also with a sense of having embarked on an epic adventure that would eventually
take them to ‘Yerussalem’. They exhibited abundant reserves of personal courage
and fortitude, as well as impressive resourcefulness in having secured food, hidden
money and disguised themselves from the Ethiopian authorities. Amos recounted
in graphic detail his attempts to save his brother from the Ethiopian and then the
Sudanese border guards, which ended with them being reunited. It is a tale of near-
drowning, thorns in the flesh and bleeding, and incessant running to escape. The
narrative is also suffused with Amos’s sense of duty towards his brother. Other nar-
ratives spoke of ‘walking through an unknown land, facing obstacles, enemies,
sickness and death [that set them] on their way to becoming Israelis’. For young
refugees the flight required them to fulfil adult roles and to learn lessons about
responsibility. Boaz organized a group for self-defence against the shifta, turning
the tables on the soldiers:
After a short time we started to behave bravely and people started to be afraid of us.
We began to act like others around us, lifting up a stick [to fight] and so on. We
started to get control over the situation, to be active. People then became afraid of our
small group.
These narratives contradict the official view that ‘heroic rescue’ was the sole pre-
rogative of the Israeli state acting in the interests of incapable refugees. Takaleh
described the harsh conditions in the Sudanese camps: ‘I learned what it is not to
belong’, while Tena spoke of learning what the world is like: ‘I did not know what
bad things were. Now I know everything’. The mental universe of refugees had
grown rather than shrunk, and they displayed an impressive maturity and capacity
for emotional development.61
Episodes of this kind constitute a story of a specific ‘homecoming’ and resolu-
tion that gains credence by virtue of constant retelling of stories of bravery and
destiny, particularly at family gatherings and at holiday time. But they also suggest
the rehearsal of historical myths, one element of which was the firm belief that
their ancestors settled in Ethiopia many centuries earlier. Thus ideas of cohesion
and solidarity are reinforced through the construction of a national epic. Tales of

60
Ahmed Karadawi, ‘The Smuggling of the Ethiopian Falasha to Israel through Sudan’ African Affairs,
90, no.358 (1991), 23–49.
61
Gadi BenEzer, The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977–1985
(Routledge, 2002), quotations at 146, 153, 170.
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 249

personal anguish, sacrifice and salvation form part of a collective portrait of suffer-
ing, endurance and redemption. The element of myth served as a means of ‘open-
ing up a space for the Ethiopian Jews as a group in the Israeli psyche’. That is to say,
there was a connection between the Ethiopian Jewish odyssey and deep-seated Is-
raeli notions of Biblical struggle and the modern aliyot or immigration episodes.
Ultimately, ‘being Jewish was experienced not only as a risk factor but also as a
major resource for survival’.62
Nevertheless this ‘homecoming’ was not trouble-free. In part this reflected the
need to deal with traumatic experiences, but it also had to do with the reception
that the refugees encountered in ‘Yerussalem’. Israelis found it difficult to come to
terms with Jews whose skin colour was black. There was also a widespread percep-
tion that they had been ‘rescued’ by Israelis; although in one sense this was true, it
made no room for the intense deliberation and difficulty that went with the deci-
sion to flee from Ethiopia to Sudan. Ethiopian Jewish refugees underwent addi-
tional humiliation, first by Israeli officials who transferred them to ‘absorption
centres’ for months or even years and then at the hands of religious authorities who
required them to ‘convert’, as if to emphasize their inauthenticity compared to
Jews who arrived from the Soviet Union. This added another layer to communica-
tion and affirmation of collective endeavour and draws attention to the interplay
between different Jewish histories that could not easily be reconciled.

C O N C LU S I O N S

Political rivalries and state-building, security concerns and competition for re-
sources have combined to ensure that in parts of Africa, as in other parts of the
world, displacement has become a way of life. African states struggled to maintain
administrative control over their territory in the face of rival and secessionist claims
to rich mineral deposits and other resources. When the availability of external de-
velopment aid and weaponry is taken into account, it is not difficult to see why
politics should become so combustible. Population displacement was one out-
come. This generalization does not apply to the entire subcontinent. States such as
Ghana, Senegal, and Botswana managed the transition from colony to independ-
ent state with relative ease, and they have become stable sovereign polities.63 At
present (2013) civil war in Côte d’Ivoire makes things extremely uncertain, but it
was not always so. Mozambique was badly affected by the struggle for independ-
ence during the 1960s and early 1970s, but it subsequently became a peaceful, albeit
economically disadvantaged society, and in 1995 was rewarded with membership
of the British Commonwealth (Rwanda was also admitted, in 2009). Tanzania, not

62
BenEzer, The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus, 86, 198. The hardship and prejudice that they encoun-
tered in Israel are addressed in the film Va, vis et deviens (Radu Mihaileanu, 2005), in which the
mother of a Sudanese boy disguises her son as a so-called Falasha, entitling him to a seat on the plane
to Jerusalem but simultaneously launching him on a troubling journey of self-discovery.
63
Ghana has accommodated large numbers of refugees from Togo and Liberia.
250 Refugees in the Global Cold War

a wealthy country by any international measure, accommodated hundreds of thou-

sands of refugees without being destabilized, although the government kept a close
watch on Hutu refugees from Burundi and life got much harder for refugees in the
1990s, when the collapse of apartheid weakened the claims of refugees to be ‘free-
dom fighters’ and their political legitimacy evaporated. But the general point re-
mains: it makes no more sense to describe Africa entirely in terms of its displaced
population than it would be to generalize about Europe on the basis of the collapse
of Yugoslavia.
Africa also figures in the history of population displacement as a key site of ex-
ternal assistance and the appropriation of the refugee as a de-historicized figure.
Africa’s large refugee population made it possible for NGOs, UNHCR and other
international organizations to expand their operations and to establish greater le-
gitimacy as well as a public profile. They were not disinterested parties. Their grow-
ing importance required them to focus on current crises. The expanding machinery
of humanitarian intervention discounted the root causes of population displace-
ment and turned the refugee into a kind of blank slate on which could be written
plans for integration and development or repatriation. NGOs claimed the right to
speak on behalf of the refugee. New states too appropriated the refugee for their
own ends. Proto-states took shape in the refugee camp where they were constructed
around the history of displacement and a mythico-history that validated their en-
titlement to a monopoly of territory.
Where does this leave the social history of population displacement in sub-
Saharan Africa? This field is largely uncultivated and its contours are not yet clear.
Often the sources are difficult to come by. Marie Béatrice Umutesi collected stories
from refugees who were held alongside her in the camp at Tingi-Tingi in Zaire,
only to find that this precious cargo disappeared during their hurried retreat. This
is not the only stumbling block. The performance of external agencies indicates
how little scope they afforded refugees to articulate their views. However, some
provisional conclusions can be reached. One is the need to set displacement in the
broader historical context of pre-colonial and colonial rule. Decolonization pro-
vided new states with a chance to redress real or perceived wrongs by turning the
tables on ethnic groups that hitherto enjoyed the patronage of colonial rulers. This
was the emerging pattern in Chad, Sudan, Somalia and Rwanda.
Beyond this, the complex movements of people in colonial as well as post-colo-
nial times shaped the subsequent course of forced migration. Refugee movements
across state frontiers reflected historic economic and personal ties that created
nearby affiliations as well as extensive transnational and diasporic connections.
Transnational communities channelled resources to displaced people as well as to
fund political causes. One telling example is that of Somali refugees in Kenya,
North America, and Western Europe, who supported each other in distant places
and situated their experiences in a transnational framework. They interacted with
one another, with Somali groups in Somalia itself, and with refugees in the huge
and overcrowded camps in Ifo, Dagahaley, or Hagadera that form part of the Dadaab
complex in Kenya. One woman described how she had worked for 10 years in
Somalia on behalf of CARE International, before being forced in 1991 to leave for
 Africa’s Refugees, Decolonization, and ‘Development’ 251

Dadaab where her husband had a job with UNHCR. By drawing attention to a
nomadic past that was characterized by economic insecurity, she and others
‘mobilise[d] images of being adventurous, tough and independent, rather than
marginalised, displaced and helpless’.64 In similar vein, a study of the Uduk people
of the Blue Nile suggests that ‘the bland language’ of humanitarian intervention,
with its talk of ‘survival’ and ‘coping’, does scant justice to the depth of their cul-
tural imagination and practices, or the intensity of the adventures during their trek
across difficult terrain.65
Displacement entails thinking critically about the politicization of history.
Youthful Zimbabwean exiles grew up in camps in Mozambique or Zambia learn-
ing about the brutal occupation of their country and the seizure of land by white
settlers. Cameroonian asylum seekers who reached Johannesburg in the mid-1990s
aligned themselves with the political struggle in their home country, turning this
into the dominant discourse.66 Hutu refugees in Tanzanian camps emphasized
their victim status, but young Hutu men and women in the township lived an
adventurous and imaginative life, without necessarily subscribing to ideas of ‘ethnic
absolutism’. The evidence does not always point in a single direction. Umutesi’s
riveting personal account (which she combines with an historical analysis) de-
scribes ‘ordinary’ human interaction, with scarcely a mention of Hutu solidarity
and manifests a refreshing readiness to engage with and to compare notes with her
Tutsi acquaintances. Some refugees hoped to be ‘reborn’, not as nationalists but as
the faithful adherents of evangelical churches. Others gave themselves nicknames—
‘Rambo’, ‘Eddy Muffy’ [Eddie Murphy] and ‘Maiko’ [Michael Jackson]—that al-
luded to Western cultural icons rather than the prescribed Hutu heroes. Unhappily,
the social world of these refugees was turned upside down in 1994, and new claims
were made on their allegiance, with painful and disturbing consequences.67
We need to bring political, social, cultural and economic histories into closer
alignment. History affected refugees’ relationships with governments and relief agen-
cies, with other refugees, and vice versa. A modern social history of displacement
needs to connect the aspirations and actions of refugees, on the one hand, to statist
and non-governmental projects and the changing geopolitical agenda on the other.
Refugees used existing contacts to gain publicity for their cause or to secure material
advantage. Sometimes that resourcefulness is deeply troubling, as in the behaviour of
refugee warriors. The difficulties and dangers—the risks that women in particular
faced when they collected firewood beyond the bounds of the refugee camp or when
they were expected to grant sexual favours in exchange for ‘protection’—should not
be underestimated. But they do not tell the whole story. Ethiopian women fleeing

64
Nauja Kleist, ‘Nomads, Sailors and Refugees: a Century of Somali Migration’ Sussex Migration
Working Paper no.24 (University of Sussex, 2004), 11.
65
James, War and Survival, xv, 120.
66
Mario Azevedo, Tragedy and Triumph: Mozambique Refugees in Southern Africa, 1971–2001
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002); Ernest Pineteh, ‘Memories of Home and Exile: Narratives of
Cameroonian Asylum Seekers in Johannesburg’ Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26, no.4 (2005),
379–99.
67
Sommers, Fear in Bongoland, 132–3; Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter, 114–15.
252 Refugees in the Global Cold War

from Mengistu’s ‘Red terror’ described hardship but also spoke nostalgically of the
life they left behind. As refugees they demonstrated plenty of resourcefulness. The
same was true of Somali women who fled to Kenya in the early 1990s and who
reported widespread sexual violence and exposure to HIV/AIDS, but who also
participated in income-generating projects and in providing reproductive health
care in the refugee camps. Cultural enrichment and personal adventurousness were
part of the equation: terms such as deprivation and exploitation capture only a
fraction of the refugees’ social world.
The results of refugees’ efforts to create an historical record of displacement may
become better known in years to come. What is already clear is that it behoves us
to pay due attention to the multi-faceted histories of migration, including the
journeys that refugees made, and their awareness of changes that occurred and how
they related to the places, people and lives left behind. It is worth reflecting on the
words of Wendy James’s Uduk informant who told her about the vibrant cultural
life in Bonga, which had become ‘home’:
[There is a] kind of new talk which they have invented here in Bonga, the new way
of speaking, but this is not just done by children. Grown-ups do this here. They’re
inventing a lot of new songs, and inventing new ornaments and fashions. It’s all just
new styles, invented in this place. And the dancing is now different, it is completely
new.68
This is not to overlook danger or to romanticize displacement, but rather to do
justice to the meanings with which it is imbued and the multiple possibilities that
it disclosed.

68
James, War and Survival, 224.
 9
‘Some Kind of Freedom’
Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices in
Contemporary History

We walked a long way on foot, but you’ve reached some kind of freedom, so
you keep on walking
(an unnamed Bosnian Muslim refugee)

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Seismic changes took place across the globe towards the end of the long twentieth
century. Soviet domination of Eastern Europe came to an end and the USSR itself
vanished from the scene, to be replaced by new states. Soviet communism’s last
hurrah in the Third World sounded as an invasion of Afghanistan, generating a
prolonged refugee crisis and a storm of violence in the region that has yet to abate.
NATO’s decision to respond to the attacks on the USA in September 2011 by
launching a ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan against mujahideen (refugee warriors)
whom they had earlier welcomed as harbingers of anti-communist resistance com-
pounded the crisis of displacement. In Europe the imminent collapse of commu-
nism did not lead to pre-emptive invasion and widespread flight as it did in 1956
in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia; instead the evaporation of Soviet power
in Eastern Europe in 1989 was contained by domestic political transformation.
However in Yugoslavia all hell broke loose, unleashing the greatest refugee crisis in
Europe since the end of the Second World War. Politicians and paramilitaries tar-
geted ethnic minorities and settled old scores. European governments and interna-
tional organizations did their utmost to keep refugees within the borders of the
former Yugoslav state, with some success, although tens of thousands of citizens
of the former Yugoslavia sought refuge in Germany and other Western European
countries.
These events had the consequence of hiding from view other sites of upheaval,
not just in Europe, where the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 launched a new
phase in Greek-Turkish rivalry and a crisis that remains unresolved, but also in Sri
Lanka and Bhutan where displaced populations live beyond the international gaze.
The end of communist rule and the formation of new states in post-Soviet space
did not culminate in continent-wide migration. Anxieties that territorial refashioning
254 Refugees in the Global Cold War

would cause a mass movement of refugees westwards failed to materialize. The

numbers were significant only in the case of ethnic Germans who moved from
Russia to Germany. Although at one stage EU states provided protection to around
700,000 refugees from the imploding Soviet bloc most of the repercussions of ter-
ritorial refashioning were confined within new states that emerged out of the Soviet
wreckage without provoking serious conflict, with the notable exception of Arme-
nia and Azerbaijan where rival claims to Nagorno-Karabagh led to a refugee crisis.
Russia’s lengthy attempt to secure control over Chechnya also produced a bitter
war that killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Here, too, the crisis
was contained at a regional level. Lest this paint too sanguine a picture, it should
be remembered that the demise of the USSR created a situation not unlike that
in 1918 where new states were populated by substantial non-titular minorities.
Around 25 million ethnic Russians were living in ex-Soviet republics other than
the Russian Federation, their families having migrated when the Soviet state pro-
moted the industrialization of ‘less developed’ republics. This serves as a reminder
that crises of displacement should be set in a broad chronological context.1
In addition to territorial changes, the post-communist political dispensation
afforded unprecedented opportunities to publicize and engage with earlier histor-
ies of mass population displacement. Survivors of Stalin-era deportations, their
children and grandchildren could speak openly of the suffering they endured.
Other options opened up too. For example, Crimean Tatars who were deported to
Central Asia during the Second World War began to contemplate the possibility of
returning to their ‘homeland’, which now found itself part of independent Ukraine.
The leaders of newly independent Baltic States encouraged former DPs who had
settled overseas to make a return visit and even to resettle permanently, although
relatively few took up the offer in the face of misunderstandings and disputes over
title deeds.2
The negotiation of memory was not confined to former Soviet states. Yugosla-
via’s dissolution paved the way for contested interpretations of the post-war history
of the Italian-Yugoslav borderlands. Now the talk was of ‘history as something to
be exhumed, as having been submerged and only now being brought into the
light’.3 Angry debates also ensued in Greece and in the diaspora about the fortunes
of Macedonian children who were despatched by the Greek Communist Party to
Eastern Europe during the Greek Civil War: right-wing commentators have gone
so far as to label this a ‘genocide’ (see later in this chapter). Another example of post-
communist reckoning concerned the fate of 400,000 Karelians who were ‘evacuated’
to Finland following the Soviet-Finnish agreement of 1944. Early assessments of
this transfer suggested that they adjusted quite quickly to life in Finland; in fact the
reality was more complex. In the 1990s survivors could retrace the steps taken half

1
Rogers Brubaker, ‘Migrations of Ethnic Unmixing in the “New Europe” ’ IMR, 32, no.4 (1998),
1047–65.
2
Wyman, DPs, 9–10.
3
Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 12.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 255

a century earlier. A freshly-laid ‘trail of the displaced’ aimed to ‘reawaken’ and share
memories with the younger generation who were expected to dress for the part.4
These cultural constructions and practices belong in any discussion of the contem-
porary refugee regime.
Much of this history is occluded in contemporary public discourse. Certainly
from a vantage point in the First World, debates around refugees carry a strong
whiff of parochialism. One would hardly know from reading the British popular
press that most of the world’s refugees struggle to survive far from UK shores. To
be sure, newspapers and broadcasters periodically carry stories of human suffering
from distant sites of crisis, but public opinion expresses an anxiety about being
‘overwhelmed’ by refugees and asylum seekers, as if Britain were a vessel at risk of
capsizing. The attendant demand for rigorous border controls is matched by claims
that Britain had sufficiently discharged its responsibilities towards refugees in the
past: the genealogy of ‘welcome’ is alive and well. (The same discourse operates in
Australia too, for example.) In a think-piece on ‘the battle at the borders’, Jeremy
Harding pointed out that many asylum seekers look to the West precisely because
of its history of intervention in distant lands: ‘[T]he West’s exertions on far-off
battlefields, shaping a world in its likeness, are among the reasons Europe is the
place of choice for thousands of people. In ways we fail to acknowledge, we issue
the invitation and map their journeys towards us’.5 Against the backdrop of eco-
nomic depression, it has become ever more difficult for refugees to obtain asylum.
Governments seek to detain and deport promptly those whose claims to recogni-
tion are deemed to be unfounded. With little grasp of histories of conflict and
dispossession on the part of officialdom, refugees meet with underlying suspicion
and outright hostility. But refugees nevertheless achieve a degree of momentum by
managing their expectations and confronting the past.

N O RT H  W E S T F RO N T I E R S O F D I S P L A C E M E N T

Around five and a half million refugees left Afghanistan, initially after the coup
mounted against the old monarchy in 1978 by the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, and then in much greater numbers in the wake of the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the campaign to suppress resistance to the
puppet regime. Taking account of internal displacement and one million estimated
war-related deaths, the consequences of the Soviet invasion affected around half
the Afghan population. Only during the more enlightened leadership of Mikhail
Gorbachev did an agreed withdrawal of troops take place in 1989. Soviet analysts
of the crisis dismissed refugees either as members of the old elite who could play

4
Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, ‘The Mobilities of Forced Displacement: Commemorating Karelian
Evacuation in Finland’ Social and Cultural Geography, 10, no.5 (2009), 545–63.
5
Jeremy Harding, ‘Europe at bay’ London Review of Books, 34, no.3 (2012), 3–11; Guy Goodwin-
Gill, ‘Asylum 2001: a Convention and a Purpose’ International Journal of Refugee Law, 13, nos.1–2
(2001), 1–15, at 4.
256 Refugees in the Global Cold War

no role in ‘progressive’ (that is, Soviet-dominated) Afghanistan or as ‘simple folk,

deceived or alarmed by reactionary propaganda’.6 Continued political turmoil
throughout the 1990s and renewed conflict among the resistance led to further
mass displacement, although many refugees decided to return to Afghanistan fol-
lowing the fall of the Taliban government in 2002. They ‘crossed paths with in-
creasing numbers of cross-border migrants, traders and new refugees moving in the
opposite direction’. Returnees in turn added to the numbers of internally displaced
persons.7
Iran and Pakistan as adjacent states became the main destinations for Afghan
refugees. The Iranian authorities settled them in poor urban neighbourhoods,
where the newcomers took over the jobs of Iranians who were conscripted during
the war against Iraq. It helped that for decades Afghan men had migrated in large
numbers to Iran for economic, cultural and religious reasons. Faced with this new
crisis Iran sought financial assistance from UNHCR, but aid only began to flow in
1983, and whereas $1 billion was earmarked for the needs of Afghan refugees in
Pakistan, only $150 million went to Iran. Unwilling to contemplate a large num-
bers of refugee welfare claimants on its territory, Tehran re-classified them as ‘mi-
grants’ and in 1996 stopped issuing refugee cards. Educational opportunities were
also circumscribed, one consequence being that Afghan refugees made clandestine
provision for their children. The offspring of Iranian mothers and Afghan fathers
were placed at a particular disadvantage by being denied Iranian citizenship. Ira-
nian public opinion was at best indifferent and at worst hostile to refugees, por-
traying them as ‘dirty’ and ‘lazy’. One Hazara woman described being trapped
between her desperate present circumstances and a hopeless future: ‘What can we
do? Afghanistan is kharaab, destroyed, and it will never get better. Life is so hard
here, but it is impossible there. Nowhere is home for us’. A Pashtun refugee com-
pared her former life in Afghanistan with her current situation in a small village in
Iran:
In Afghanistan, we didn’t live like this. We had regular homes, not clay and straw
shacks. I planted crops and we had plenty to eat. Then the Uzbeks came and took
everything and destroyed whatever was left behind. We had to leave. The land is good
for nothing now. And my body is sterile. Here, everyone calls me ‘the woman who has
nothing’, because I have no home, no land, no herds.8
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that young Shi’a adults
made a meaningful life, for instance gathering in coffee shops and libraries where
they read their poetry to one another, reaffirming the importance of the poet as a
major cultural figure in Afghan and Iranian society. Many young people read and
write poems that often explore the pain of exile. Mohamed Kazem Kazemi wrote

6
Vasilii I. Potapov, Bezhentsy i mezhdunarodnoe pravo (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia,
1986), 90–1; Westad, Global Cold War, 348–9.
7
Khalid Koser, ‘The Migration-Displacement Nexus and Security in Afghanistan’, in Koser and
Martin (eds), The Migration-Displacement Nexus, 131–44, at 131.
8
Diane Tober, ‘ “My Body is Broken Like my Country”: Identity, Nation and Repatriation among
Afghan Refugees in Iran’ Iranian Studies, 40, no.2 (2007), 265–85, at 278, 281.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 257

a famous poem in 1991 that alluded to the indifference shown to Afghan refugees
by Iranians. There is evidence too of an unfettered and cosmopolitan imagination.
In one of his love poems Seyyed ‘Asef Hosseini ‘compares his suffering for his be-
loved to all the suffering in the world, jumping through a dizzying array of im-
agery, including recent events in Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, the genocide in Poland,
hunger in the Horn of Africa, and the shackled prisoners of Guantanamo’.9
Different conditions applied in Pakistan. In the view of some scholars, Muslim
solidarity helped ensure that the government committed itself to ‘compassion and
companionship’ with the Afghan refugees.10 But the material expression of that
solidarity did not correspond to the rhetoric. Some 350,000 Afghan refugees in
Pakistan—mostly Pashtuns and Baluchis—were housed in ‘temporary’ refugee
camps close to the border or else were expected to build their own homes in the
North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, where pressure of numbers led to
shortages of water, wood and grazing land. Refugees were forbidden to buy land
or other property in Pakistan. Women (who far outnumbered men) worked on
domestic tasks including weaving and embroidery.11 Higher numbers kept local
wages low. Farming skills were forgotten, partly because generous external assist-
ance created an alternative economy dominated by racketeering and warfare.
More to the point, there were fewer restrictions on political and military organ-
ization than in Iran, because the government of Pakistan curried favour with the
USA in the late stages of the Cold War, whereas Teheran wanted to maintain
cordial relations with its powerful northern neighbour. From their base in Paki-
stani refugee camps, resistance factions carried out sustained raids in occupied
Afghanistan. This archetypal ‘refugee warrior community’ lived off enormous
quantities of foreign aid, little of which found its way into the hands of ordinary
refugees. The flow of aid prepared the ground for the triumphant return of muja-
hideen and for the Taliban to assert their claim to be the legitimate rulers of liber-
ated Afghanistan.12
The political radicalization of Afghan refugees during their enforced exile in
Pakistan and Iran had well-known consequences. But important questions
about the relationship between returnees and the Afghan population who stayed
behind under Soviet occupation are yet to be answered. The situation was com-
plicated by the Taliban whose policies forced moderate Afghans to flee to Iran.
Children had to endure playground taunts that their country contributed little
to human civilization and their parents called for an ‘Afghan pride booklet’ that
would show something of Afghan history and achievements. This is a poignant

9
Zuzanna Olszewska, ‘ “A Desolate Voice”: Poetry and Identity among Young Afghan Refugees in
Iran’ Iranian Studies, 40, no.2 (2007), 203–22, at 220.
10
M. Nazif Shahrani, ‘Afghanistan’s Muhajirin (Muslim “Refugee Warriors”): Politics of Mistrust
and Mistrust of Politics’, in Daniel and Knudsen (eds), Mistrusting Refugees, 187–206.
11
Saba Gul Khattak, ‘Living on the Edges: Afghan Women and Refugee Camp Management in
Pakistan’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 32, no.3 (2007), 575–9.
12
Matthew Fielden, ‘The Geopolitics of Aid: the Provision and Termination of Aid to Afghan
Refugees in North-West Frontier Province’ Political Geography, 17, no.4 (1998), 459–87; Rüdiger
Schöch, ‘UNHCR and the Afghan Refugees in the Early 1980s: between Humanitarian Action and
Cold War Politics’ RSQ, 27, no.1 (2008), 45–57; Lischer, Dangerous Sanctuaries, 44–72.
258 Refugees in the Global Cold War

reminder that circumstances can conspire against refugees who seek to maintain
a collective self-worth.13
Were such a history to be written, previous episodes of displacement in Afghani-
stan and enduring ties of kinship between refugees and local households would
provide an inescapable element. Future historians may detect important differ-
ences between the life stories of refugees who spent time in Pakistan’s refugee camps
and those who were more or less self-settled in Iran. Apart from narrating these
recent shocks, room might also be found for the history of Kabul’s community,
which was swollen by an influx of Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union in the
1920s and 1930s. So far as Afghans themselves are concerned, exile appears to have
been understood not only in terms of physical safety but as the necessary precondi-
tion for safeguarding Islam. This obligation was deeply embedded in Muslim con-
sciousness, since it belonged to a tradition that went back to the time of the
Prophet’s hijrah (exile). Ironically many Tajik refugees in Pakistan had themselves
fled from the Red Army when the Bolsheviks established Soviet rule in Central
Asia during the early 1920s, and their descendants helped to buttress the anti-
Soviet resistance in the 1980s. Some observers have detected signs of hope in
Afghanistan. The Swiss photographer Ahad Zalmaï, who was born in Afghanistan
but fled following the Soviet invasion, felt sufficiently confident to make a photo-
graphic record, including images of refugees who set up temporary homes in the
caves that previously housed the famous Bamian Buddhas before they were de-
stroyed by the Taliban. Afghanistan nevertheless remains a highly volatile reminder
of the legacy of the Cold War.14
These responses must be set in the context of the turbulent politics of Iran and
Iraq. Iran had the misfortune to become embroiled in a long and bitter war with
Iraq between 1980 and 1988, when its neighbour took advantage of the political
uncertainty brought about by the Iranian revolution. The precise demographic
consequences are obscure, but the flight of Iraqi Shiite civilians to Iran com-
pounded the burden caused by the influx of Afghan refugees. Iraq’s own internal
political crisis generated widespread suffering and population displacement. When
the first Gulf War ended in 1991, around 1.3 million Kurds fled from Saddam’s
Iraq to Iran and 450,000 to the frontier with Turkey. The so-called ‘safe haven’ for
Iraqi Kurds was portrayed as ‘humanitarian intervention’, although it served Tur-
key’s interests by deterring Kurds from seeking refuge inside the country, which is
home to a large Kurdish minority population. The first and second Gulf Wars also
had catastrophic consequences for Palestinian refugees who had sought sanctuary in
Baghdad after 1948 but who were forced by the fighting over the future of Iraq to
shelter in squalid camps inside Syria, such as Al-Tanaf. The US-led invasion of Iraq
is widely recognized to have had disastrous results including a refugee population

13
Chatty, Deterritorialized Youth, 152–8.
14
<http://www.lightstalkers.org/zalmai>; Ahad Zalmaï, Return, Afghanistan (Geneva: Aperture Foun-
dation, 2004); Magnus Marsden, ‘Muslim Cosmopolitans? Transnational Life in Northern Pakistan’
Journal of Asian Studies, 67, no.1 (2008), 213–47; Sara Koplik, ‘The Demise of Afghanistan’s Jewish
Community and the Soviet Refugee Crisis, 1932–1936’ Iranian Studies, 36, no.3 (2003), 353–80.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 259

put at nearly four million (including 1.7 million internally displaced), one in eight
of the Iraqi population. The refugee population includes people who worked for
US occupation forces as translators or in other capacities, and who fled Iraq to
avoid the dangers posed by insurgents who resisted the occupation. But trying to
find a safe passage to the USA has been immensely difficult, even more so than for
DPs from central Europe and for Vietnamese refugees. Here, too, the elements of
a refugee history have yet to emerge.
UNHCR was heavily involved for example in supporting Afghan refugees, at
the invitation of a country (Pakistan) that had not signed the 1951 Convention.
International NGOs such as MSF and CARE also sought to improve conditions
in refugee camps in Pakistan. They included Red Crescent and various organiza-
tions with a shared commitment to ‘Islamic relief ’ (ighatha islamiya). At one stage
Hezb-e Islami maintained 250 schools with 43,000 students in Pakistan. These
organizations expressed unease at the scale of Western programmes of humanitar-
ian action and a wish to differentiate themselves from the ‘missionaries’ and the
ICRC. For a while at least, Islamic relief agencies mobilized support across the
Middle East and further afield among countries keen to assist refugees and to in-
vigorate the Afghan resistance, thereby hastening the Soviet retreat. This activity
was taking place at the same time as the mobilization of transnational Islamic net-
works in Bosnia (see later in this chapter). Over time, and particularly in the wake
of the ‘war on terror’, it behoved Islamic NGOs such as the British-based Islamic
Relief to emphasize their professional expertise and non-political, charitable cre-
dentials lest their activities be construed as giving comfort to militants.15
What did the management of Afghan refugees imply for self-expression? Only a
tentative answer is possible. To be sure, vulnerability remained a serious concern.
But long exposure to incarceration whilst it obliged refugees to leave traditional
farming life behind nevertheless created thriving communities. But we should not
press the point too far, because the camps sustained refugee warriors and new
power-brokers whose world-view made it even more difficult for women to express
themselves. All this means that although the history and perspectives of Afghan
refugees will be difficult to establish, it is likely that the mujahideen among them
will doubtless seek to impose their interpretation of the past.

S OV I E T D I S S O LU T I O N A N D P O P U L AT I O N
DISPLACEMENT

Notwithstanding the intensity of these dramas and their global significance, it is ap-
propriate that this chapter should come full circle by revisiting Europe’s experience
of mass population displacement. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, long regarded
as a stable polity, enabled former Soviet republics to become sovereign states. Tension
in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupted into violence in 1991.

15
Jonathan Benthall and Jérôme Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the
Muslim World (Tauris, 2003), 52, 69–84; Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 69.
260 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Chechnya has been a running sore. A long-running dispute between the Russian
Federation and Georgia turned into open warfare in August 2008, as Russia sought
to protect ethnic Russians in the small enclave of South Ossetia. In June 2010 a vio-
lent confrontation between Kirgiz and Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan displaced around
250,000 Uzbeks; tens of thousands fled to neighbouring states. Yet Soviet fission was
by and large a non-violent process.
The collapse of the Soviet Union posed particular problems for 25 million ethnic
Russians who lived outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Non-Russian
majorities in newly independent states regularly made it clear that Russians now
occupied a subordinate place in society. As one migrant put it, reflecting on the
fact that the borders moved while he had not, ‘we suddenly found ourselves im-
migrants within our own country. But we were still in our own country’.16 Mount-
ing discrimination caused 10 million people to move to Russia from Central Asia
and the Caucasus between 1991 and 2001, either under duress or more commonly
because they feared their Russian ethnicity would put them at a future disadvan-
tage. They were initially treated in accordance with the provisions of legislation
passed in 1992 which stated that a forced migrant was an individual ‘who has citi-
zenship of the Russian Federation and who has left or intends to leave his or her
place of residence on the territory of another state or on the territory of the Russian
Federation as a result of violence or other form of persecution towards him or
herself or members of his or her family’. Persecution included being the target of
threats ‘in connection with the conducting of hostile campaigns towards individu-
als or groups of individuals, mass violations of public order or other circumstances
significantly restricting human rights’.17 This neat legal formulation and the recog-
nition of citizenship rights had little meaning for migrants who encountered bu-
reaucratic indifference; worse, the Russian Federation began to prioritize domestic
‘security’ and the regulation of migration over practical assistance to those who
arrived. This calls to mind the situation of Dutch, French, Italian and Portuguese
citizens who found themselves repudiated upon their ‘return’ to the metropolis as
‘national refugees’.
The priority of Russian migrants was to establish decent living arrangements,
but instead they had to make do with substandard accommodation. To some
degree these difficulties were alleviated by various self-help strategies, such as rely-
ing on family and other personal connections. Local people resented their pres-
ence; it did not help that their arrival coincided with pronounced economic decline
in the Russian Federation during the 1990s that put a great strain on all welfare
programmes. At the same time, these Russians from the ‘near abroad’ were also
regarded in the first Putin era (2000–08) as a resource helping to offset the decline
of the ethnic Russian population. Some of them cultivated a belief that they had a
‘higher cultural level’ than that of Russians who had lived their lives within the
Russian Federation: ‘[I]t is [as one informant told Moya Flynn] highly qualified,

16
Moya B. Flynn, Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation: Reconstructing Homes and Home-
lands (Anthem Press, 2004), 70.
17
Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 1998), 37.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 261

cultured, intellectual, well brought up people who have arrived. They want to
bring their culture and strong labour potential to the economy and culture of
Russia’. Thus migrants claimed the right to support by drawing a distinction be-
tween other Russians and themselves, rather than by asserting a straightforward
cultural affinity. They were the custodians of the ‘real Russia’.18
The outbreak of conflicts between newly independent states (such as Armenia
and Azerbaijan) as well as within the Russian Federation (in particular, Chechnya)
produced displacement and deprivation. When the two enclaves of Abkhazia and
South Ossetia broke away from Georgia, 250,000 ethnic Georgians sought safety
in other parts of the country; war in 2008 further magnified these numbers.
Between 1988 and 1992 around 300,000 ethnic Armenians and 500,000 Azeris
fled the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabagh, the mountainous region adminis-
tered by Erevan and connected to Armenia by a narrow corridor through
Azerbaijan. Both countries found themselves in dire economic straits (Armenia’s
energy crisis was magnified by the blockade imposed by Turkey and Azerbaijan),
making life extremely difficult for everyone. At the start of the millennium
Armenia had by far the largest number of recognized refugees per head of popula-
tion. In Chechnya the brutal conflict between Russian and Chechen forces lasted
a decade and a half. It left a terrible legacy. Hostilities commenced in 1995 when
Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops to suppress the attempt by Chechens to gain
freedom from the Russian Federation. The ensuing war displaced some 250,000
Chechens to neighbouring territories of Ingushetia, Dagestan and North Ossetia.
Even greater numbers of people sought sanctuary in these adjacent lands when
war flared up again in 1999 during the Putin presidency. UNHCR struggled to
contain as many people as possible within the borders of Chechnya, but its assist-
ance left a lot to be desired and it was hamstrung by the reluctance of foreign
governments to alienate Russia by questioning its claim to sovereignty over
Chechnya.19 As we shall see, Russian-Chechen relations were closely bound up
with the history of wartime deportations.

TO G E T H E R I N D I S H A R M O N Y: T H E D I S S O LU T I O N
O F Y U G O S L AV I A

In 1991, following Croatia’s declaration of independence, local Serbs established a

‘republic of Krajina’ and expelled the Croat population from their homes. Further
displacement took place when Serbs in turn were expelled from Croatia/Krajina in
1995. Official figures suggest that 200,000 refugees fled the country and 350,000
were internally displaced, while 20,000 lost their lives. The conflict was fuelled by
rival claims to land and drew upon religious and cultural differences between
Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs. Croats expressed a belief that they had suf-
fered from longstanding subordination to local Serbs who dominated the local

18 19
Flynn, Migrant Resettlement, 52, 136. Loescher, UNHCR, 276, 336–7.
262 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Communist Party. In fact, relatively cordial relations had been maintained be-
tween Serbs and Croats during the communist era, but the collapse of Yugoslavia
revived memories of rivalries before and conflict during the Second World War,
helping to inflame national differences (Krajina was formally re-incorporated into
Croatia in 1998).
In Bosnia-Herzegovina around 2.5 million people were forced out of their
homes during the war that lasted from 1992 until 1995. Forces loyal to the Bos-
nian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić were directed by paramilitary leaders such as
the notorious Željko Ražnatović (‘Arkan’) to rape, torture and murder Bosnian
Muslims in a systematic fashion. UNHCR lacked the wherewithal to prevent at-
tacks on Muslim enclaves in so-called ‘safe havens’. Civilians in the besieged cities
of Sarajevo and Tuzla experienced the war not as displacement but as a trap. The
bombardment of the market in Sarajevo in February 1994 caused international
outrage exceeded only by the Serb massacre of Bosnian Muslim refugees in Sre-
brenica in July 1995. Eventually, as a result of international intervention, the
Dayton Accords in December of that year led to the formation of two ethnically-
defined polities, one Bosnian and the other Serb (Republika Srpska). The agree-
ment made provision for people to move to ‘their’ country, an assumption that
took no account of ‘mixed’ marriages nor satisfied those who felt an attachment to
Yugoslavia and who now thought of themselves (as one refugee put it) as ‘an en-
dangered species’. Some 500,000 people fled Bosnia for adjacent countries includ-
ing Croatia and Slovenia. An additional 700,000 people took refuge in Germany,
Sweden, Denmark and elsewhere (see Map 9). These population movements were
accompanied by an economic collapse which made it difficult for refugees to re-
ceive adequate assistance in places of temporary local asylum in former Yugoslavia.
Providing earlier economic aid might have reduced the tensions that brought the
crisis about.20
In Kosovo, the conflict took the form of a bitter struggle between ethnic
Albanians and Serbs, already evident in the communist era and intensified by
discriminatory policies pursued by Serbian authorities after 1989. This led to
the mass exodus of around 400,000 Kosovar Albanians to Western Europe,
North America and Albania during the 1990s. Kosovar authors drew a parallel
with the calamities that befell the local Albanian population during and after
the Balkan Wars at the beginning of the century. Serbian presence was further
strengthened by Slobodan Milošević’s decision to settle ethnic Serb refugees
from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia on Kosovar territory. A war in 1998 pro-
duced a huge refugee crisis. NATO’s bombing campaign early in 1999 was
conceived and implemented as a ‘humanitarian war’ designed to destabilize the
Milošević regime in Belgrade, but it only magnified civilian suffering on both
sides. A total of 460,000 Kosovar Albanian refugees were displaced when the
air strikes commenced and a further 800,000 subsequently fled to Albania and

20
Ivaylo Grouev, Bullets on the Water: Refugee Stories (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2000), 29,
144–51; Stef Jansen, ‘The Violence of Memories: Local Narratives of the Past after Ethnic Cleansing’
Rethinking History, 6, no.1 (2002), 77–94; Helton, The Price of Indifference, 299.
 AUSTRIA Refugee
HUNGARY movements

SLOVENIA
0 100 km
Ljubljana
Zagreb

CROATIA VOJVODINA
Gulf
Novi Sad ROMANIA
of
Venice
Belgrade
Banja Luka
To other
BOSNIA AND
European
HERZEGOVINA
countries
Srebrenica
Sarajevo SERBIA

Split
Mostar

A MONTENEGRO
D
R Priština
I A
T Podgorica
I C Dubrovnik KOSOVO BULGARIA
S
ITALY E
A
Skopje

F.Y.R.
MACEDONIA

ALBANIA
GREECE

Map 9: Map of Refugee Movements in Former Yugoslavia

264 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Macedonia, neither of which welcomed refugees. When Macedonia closed its

border and deported Kosovar refugees to Albania, Greece and Turkey, American
officials entertained the possibility of transferring numbers of refugees to the US
military base at Guantanamo Bay, where they would not be recognized as refugees
under US law. The entire crisis caught UNHCR ‘off guard’ and exposed a lack of
coordination between the military and NGOs, most of whom threw in their lot
with NATO in order to get access to refugee camps.21
Nor did Serbian civilians escape unscathed. A 35-year old Serb who fled Bosnia
and took refuge in Belgrade spoke of the years he had lost to war: ‘I was born at
the wrong time’. When Serbian troops withdrew from Kosovo, NATO and
UNHCR stood by while the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and ethnic Albanians
targeted the remaining Serb population and occupied their homes in order to
force them to leave Kosovar territory.22 Surviving Serbs were now confined to en-
claves in the interior of Kosovo and the region bordering Serbia itself. Those who
fled to Serbia met with hostility from the local population who complained that
these ‘peasants’ enjoyed unearned privileges. Refugees described the toll taken on
families living in makeshift accommodation outside Belgrade, pointing out that
‘we left houses one thousand times better than here’ and bemoaning the likely
difficulties in returning to them.23 Serb sentiments of being victimized were suf-
fused with arguments about historic claims to Kosovo, the territory lost to Ottoman
forces in the battle of 1389. They expressed sorrow at having had to abandon
Orthodox monasteries and churches as well as their homes in Kosovo. Nationalist
politicians reinforced this stance by recalling Serbia’s humiliation during the First
World War and recycling memoirs of ‘Golgotha’ for a modern Serb audience (see
chapter 1).
The break-up of Yugoslavia led to hastily arranged deals, such as when Croats
driven out of Vojvodina—a place familiar with forced migration ever since Ger-
mans were forced to abandon their homes and businesses at the end of the Second
World War—exchanged their homes with Serbs who left Zagreb. The decision to
flee had huge emotional and psychological costs, as in the case of a young Kosovar
Albanian who joined his family at the behest of the woman he loved and whom he
left behind in Pristina: ‘I felt the need to scream like a wild animal when you said
goodbye’, he wrote. These departures left a bitter taste.24
Sometimes the destinations chosen by refugees reflected existing economic ties,
as when Bosnian Muslim families joined adult male relatives who worked in Slov-
enia’s third largest town, Celje. Struggling to make ends meet, one mother told a
visiting researcher why she encouraged her children to learn Slovenian: ‘I would
like my children to get the most out of the surroundings they live in. Every culture
has its good sides and can offer opportunities for learning. I wish that they would

21
Helton, The Price of Indifference, 30–77; Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 186–91.
22
UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 2000, 234; Helton, The Price of Indifference, 68.
23
Natale Losi, Luisa Passerini and Silvia Salvatici (eds), Archives of Memory: Supporting Traumatized
Communities through Narration and Remembrance (Geneva: IOM, 2001), 89–90.
24
Losi, Passerini and Salvatici, Archives of Memory, 31.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 265

integrate the new patterns with the old Bosnian ones’.25 But her willingness to
embrace hybridity remained a minority view. Usually displacement reinforced feel-
ings of incomprehension, combined with a sense of national victimhood and
staunch proclamations of an eventual return. As a Kosovar woman told her
interviewer:
Well, you cannot describe it. It is awful, very hard to be like that. The name can show
you, you know, R.E.F.U.G.E.E. is like the worst thing in the world, so it is something
that you cannot describe. You don’t have any power and you don’t have anything but
your soul, your body and nothing else. This is very difficult and very hard for every-
body. Even for the people who accepted refugees it was very hard, every time you feel
like you are not you. So, every day you feel empty, you feel . . . I mean it’s just very
hard; without any power, with nothing.
Her only crumb of comfort came from securing a job with an international aid
agency in Kosovo.26
The conflict in Bosnia enabled a multitude of Muslim NGOs to advance rival
claims to intervene on behalf of Bosnian Muslims who were portrayed as victims
twice over: as victims of communism and now as the object of secular and Chris-
tian meddling. The Red Cross, MSF and other organizations did not escape the
accusation of advancing a Western cultural model. Egyptian and Saudi relief
agencies worked incessantly in refugee camps in Croatia and Slovenia, with the
blessing of UNHCR, distributing food and medicine and providing counselling
services. But these efforts went hand in hand with attempts to enable refugees to
return to their homes or to move to Muslim countries rather than remain a be-
leaguered minority. It is unclear how refugees responded to attempts to foster a
‘feeling of community’ between Bosnian Muslims and the umma or community
of believers.27
Private initiatives, prompted in part by the constant media attention to the
conflict, enabled some refugees to seek asylum in the West. But governments were
reluctant to make it easy for refugees to enter, and the oft-repeated claims about
the large numbers of ‘economic migrants’ were reminiscent of rhetoric in the late
1950s. The states of former Yugoslavia shouldered most of the burden, helped by
external economic assistance that did not always benefit the people for whom it
was intended. Repatriation began in earnest following the Dayton Accords, under
which all refugees and internally displaced persons were entitled to return and re-
claim their homes. International relief organizations arranged ‘go and see visits’ to
help refugees decide if they wished to return permanently. Many displaced people
favoured repatriation in principle—elderly refugees had no wish to die and be
buried in a foreign country—but they would only consider returning if there were
stable political and social conditions, meaning not just access to jobs and housing

25
Natalja Vreĉer, ‘The Lost Way of Life: the Experience of Refugee Children in Celje from 1992–
1994’, in Renata Kirin and Maja Povrzanoviĉ (eds), War, Exile, Everyday Life: Cultural Perspectives
(Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology, 1996), 133–46.
26
Losi, Passerini and Salvatici, Archives of Memory, 70.
27
Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent, 140–3.
266 Refugees in the Global Cold War

but a more secure framework of government and the prospect of not being victim-
ized. Although thousands opted to remain in Western Europe, more than a million
people displaced by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina decided to go back, half of
them to areas where they remained ethnically a minority.
Repatriation was beset by enormous difficulties including having to cope with
damage to housing, infrastructure and poor provision of education and healthcare.
Simply finding work posed problems. One Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) family re-
turned to Banja Luka hoping that peace would enable them to recover a way of life
that meant they did not have to lock their door at night, but this prospect seemed
a long way off. Others reclaimed their houses but sub-let them in order to main-
tain a kind of ‘transnational’ existence, as did Bosniaks who fled to Croatia and
opted to live there long after the war was over. The important consideration was to
keep one’s options open, although this was not always possible. Serbs who fled
Croatia during the war in 1991–95 faced an uphill struggle to return, not least
because the government of Franjo Tuđman maintained that Croats should be given
priority in the allocation of scarce resources—this being the man who proclaimed:
‘We have established a state and now we will decide who are its citizens’. Most Serb
refugees settled in Serbia or else remained in a kind of limbo. In Kosovo, where
repatriation took place within a matter of months in 1999–2000, the challenges
were equally daunting given the lack of a functioning civil administration and the
ever-present dangers from landmines.28
Some of the difficulties were negotiated imaginatively. The self-styled ‘Commu-
nity of Displaced and Exiled Croats from Vojvodina’ required refugees who arrived
in Zagreb in 1991 and 1992 to complete a questionnaire before being allowed to
join. This had important consequences: ‘the brevity and stiffness of the forms have
a powerful psychological effect, because it channelled strong emotions and helped
the exiles to accept the fact that they were not alone in this experience and that
their departure had been inevitable’.29 The documentation provided for an amalga-
mation of experience, underpinning a ‘community’ of displacement. But the proc-
ess of return posed considerable challenges. The old state no longer existed, and
basic infrastructure had been damaged. Refugees were expected to return to a place
about which they expressed considerable ambivalence. Returnees were often por-
trayed as having had an easy time of it in Western Europe, as if having spent several
years as a refugee amounted to a luxury compared to the experiences of those who
were forced to endure the battle for Sarajevo. Those who remained behind called
them pobjeglice, people who had fled in order to save their skins and implying a
degree of cowardice; they reserved the term izbeglice for ‘real refugees’. In these

28
Helton, The Price of Indifference, 35–50; Anders Stefansson, ‘Homes in the Making: Property
Restitution, Refugee Return and Senses of Belonging in a Post-war Bosnian Town’ International Mi-
gration, 44, no.3 (2006), 115–37; Marita Eastmond, ‘Transnational Returns and Reconstruction in
Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina’ International Migration, 44, no.3 (2006), 141–66; Ellen Oxfeld
and Lynellyn D. Long, ‘Introduction: an Ethnography of Return’, in Oxfeld and Long (eds), Coming
Home, 9. For Kosovo, see UNHCR, State of the World’s Refugees 2000, 241–2.
29
Nives Ritig-Beljak, ‘Croatian Exiles from Vojvodina: between War Memories and War Experi-
ence’, in Kirin and Povrzanoviĉ (eds), War, Exile, Everyday Life, 173–88, at 181.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 267

circumstances, the best (and most charitable thing) one could say, as did Alma who
repatriated from Germany, was that ‘we have all changed’.30

P O S T  S OV I E T M E M O R I E S A N D C O M M E M O R AT I O N

The dissolution of the Soviet Union made it possible to publicize memories of

deportation and resettlement, in ways that would have been inconceivable before
1991. Children could travel to the place of their parents’ birth and see for them-
selves what they had only been told about. Ideas about ‘homeland’, return and
restitution emerged as central issues in post-Soviet life. This is seen most clearly in
relation to the Crimean Tatars, who built a thriving Islamic civilization during the
Crimean Khanate, only to find it threatened following the annexation of the
Crimea to the Russian Empire in 1783. Their presence had tragic consequences in
the Soviet 1930s, when the Stalinist state lashed out at national minorities that
were thought to be in league with co-ethnics abroad. On 18 May 1944 Stalin or-
dered the deportation of the Tatars to the Urals and to Central Asia, accusing them
of ‘treason’, although Crimean Tatars were prominent in Soviet partisan detach-
ments. Around 191,000 individuals of all ages—many able-bodied men were at
the front, serving the Soviet cause—were given just a few hours’ notice to leave
their homes on what they came to call this ‘black day’ (kara gün). They were herded
on to cattle trucks. Stalin’s henchmen violated Islamic traditions, for example by
preventing the proper burial of Tatars who died en route, and obliterated Tatar
place names, insisting on incongruous new designations such as ‘Pretty’ and ‘Happy’.
Mosques were turned into cinemas and storage depots. The Crimean Tatar artist
Rustem Eminov, who was born in Tashkent in 1950, depicted this painful episode
in a series of paintings: ‘I didn’t see this, but I imagined it within myself from the
remembrances of my mother’. In the post-Stalin era, conditions for the Crimean
Tatars improved somewhat, and in 1967 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR annulled
the charge of treason. But the Soviet government opposed their attempts to return
to Crimea, on the grounds that they enjoyed full rights of citizenship in Central
Asia, to which the Crimean Tatar leadership retorted that they could trace their
ancestry in Crimea to the time of the ancient Scythians, and that Crimea was the
‘homeland’.31
These painful episodes of communist-era displacement could now be publicly
aired and commemorated. The political and cultural consequences were immense.
Stories of deportation under Stalin painted a graphic picture of personal and group
deprivation. Edward Guzovskii, an elderly Polish man deported in 1935 from the
Soviet western borderlands to Kazakhstan, recalled that in Ukraine, ‘everything

30
Anders Stefansson, ‘Sarajevo Suffering: Homecoming and the Hierarchy of Homeland Hard-
ship’, in Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Stefansson (eds), Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 54–75, at 64.
31
Greta Lynn Uehling, Beyond Memory: the Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return (Palgrave,
2004), 128, 137.
268 Refugees in the Global Cold War

was wonderful, there were peonies, daffodils, chestnuts to pick. I remember stick-
ing my hand deep into my grandfather’s beehive and eating the honey by the fist-
ful’. Although he managed to build a Ukrainian-style cottage on the Kazakh steppe
and to become the head of a local school, what remains most vivid was the rupture
of displacement: ‘[W]e were given a few hours to pack our things, we travelled a
week through Donetsk then Voroshilovgrad and then further until the train
stopped, they unloaded us and brought us to a bathhouse. It was something hor-
rible: dirt, steam, nose, people running about overhead. I didn’t know whether
they were people or demons’.32
Many of those like Guzovskii who were deported to Kazakhstan between 1935
and 1941 made their way to Western Europe via the Middle East when the Soviet
Union joined the alliance against Hitler. Some of them spent years in isolated set-
tlements in East Africa. Others remained behind. When Kazakhstan became inde-
pendent its new president expressed the hope that Slavs would depart to their
‘motherland’. In post-communist Poland nationalists described exiled families as
the ‘lost sheep of the Polish nation’ (not unlike their counterparts during the First
World War—see chapter 1), whose culture had been undermined by Russification.
Teachers and social workers were duly despatched to Kazakhstan to promote the
Polish language. But this ‘return’ to Poland was fraught with difficulties, and only
300 out of an estimated 100,000 people of Polish descent in Kazakhstan were ac-
cepted by the Polish government during the 1990s: ‘They tell us [said one inform-
ant] that if you aren’t from the Second Republic you are not a Pole’. Having been
forced from their homes for spurious political reasons, exiled Poles now faced the
prospect of being regarded not as a lost flock but as the black sheep of a post-
communist state. There was nothing straightforward about the decision to leave or
the decision to stay: ethnic Greek survivors of the Stalinist deportations expressed
sadness at the departure of families for Greece, and lamented that ‘we are like the
Etruscans here, we will soon disappear and no one will know that we have ever
lived in Central Asia’.33
With the collapse of communism, stories surfaced in the public media not only
of the brutality of the deportation and the ordeal of resettlement but of medical
experiments and an official campaign of ‘extermination’. Crimean Tatar farmers
had to take jobs in factories and coal mines in Tashkent and Samarkand. Relations
with the local population who shared their Islamic (Sunni) faith appear to have
been reasonably good, unlike those with officials in the ‘special settlements’ where
deportees were obliged to live. More importantly, exiled Crimean Tatars managed
to sustain a collective national identity. Their knowledge of the Russian language
also enabled some of them to get ahead. But the constraints were obvious. Under
Soviet rule discussion about the pain of deportation took place largely within a
family setting where discretion could be more or less assured; subsequently, the
recollections of parents and grandparents helped to shape the cultural framework

32
Brown, A Biography of No Place, 142–3.
33
Eftihia Voutira, ‘Post-Soviet Diaspora Politics: the Case of the Soviet Greeks’ JMGS, 24, no.2
(2006), 379–414, at 386; Brown, A Biography of No Place, 232–3.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 269

of the second- and third-generation, as in the case of Eminov. A visiting journalist

who reported on the fiftieth anniversary of the deportation was impressed to be told
that ‘most children say “mama” or “papa” as their first word; our children said “Krym”
[the Russian word for Crimea]’. Lilia Bujurova, the acclaimed Crimean Tatar poet,
put her feelings into words: ‘Don’t spare me, don’t leave anything out’.34
Beyond the discursive realm there were other challenges to confront following
the end of the Soviet state. Around 250,000 deportees and their descendants even-
tually returned to Ukraine. But repatriation posed material difficulties, as it did in
former Yugoslavia. Returning Tatars either squatted on vacant land or conducted
frustrating and often distressing negotiations with competing (non-Tatar) claim-
ants and the city authorities. Some family members relocated to Ukraine while
others decided to remain in Central Asia where housing conditions were more
tolerable. Debates within the family about relocation exposed complex emotions.
It was perfectly possible for Crimean Tatars to conceive of the Crimean ‘homeland’
(the vatan or rodina that evoked sun, water and fruits) and Uzbekistan in broadly
positive terms without any contradiction. All the same a tension manifested itself
between the nationalist rhetoric of return and a frequently expressed wish to remain
in Uzbekistan. As Greta Uehling puts it, ‘images of flying back collided with images
of houses and homes which cannot be put on airplanes’. A more extreme emo-
tional viewpoint meant feeling ‘at home’ in neither place. Legal difficulties com-
pounded the difficulty. Thousands of Crimean Tatars were stateless. In 1999 the
Ukrainian government insisted that those who resettled in Ukraine had to renounce
their Uzbek citizenship. But unlike the indigenous Russian population they failed
to establish an autonomous republic or to have their ‘national assembly’ (Mejlis)
recognized officially. Caught, so to speak, in the midst of an intense Russian-
Ukrainian rivalry, Crimean Tatars insisted on the right to be recognized as indige-
nous inhabitants of Crimea.35
Memories of the forced re-settlement of Chechens and Ingushetians in Siberia and
Central Asia during the Second World War likewise sustained feelings of victimiza-
tion and contributed to the creation of a ‘mythico-history’. In Chechnya, resistance
to Russian rule during the 1990s and beyond was strengthened by a deliberately
cultivated consciousness among Chechens of Russia’s occupation of their land during
the nineteenth century and of the Stalin-era deportation in February 1944, whose
sixtieth anniversary was marked by the European parliament’s decision to recog-
nize this as a ‘genocide’. Heroic figures such as Imam Shamil (1797–1871) inspired
the Chechen resistance.36 History mattered to the refugees; it was also contested by
Russian nationalists who were convinced that Chechens had behaved in traitorous
fashion. On the other hand, for reasons that remain obscure, Meskhetian Turks,
who also suffered under Stalin, expressed much less anger.

34
From her poem, ‘Govori’ (‘Speak’), translated from the Russian in Brian Glyn Williams, The
Crimean Tatars: the Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 415, 416.
35
Uehling, Beyond Memory, 115.
36
Brian Glyn Williams, ‘Commemorating “the Deportation” in Post-Soviet Chechnya: the Role of
Memorialisation and Collective Memory in the 1994–96 and 1999–2000 Russo-Chechen Wars’ His-
tory and Memory, 12, no.1 (2000), 101–34.
270 Refugees in the Global Cold War

With the demise of the USSR diaspora communities could also travel to the
‘homeland’ that had hitherto only been accessible in photographs and the stories
told by older family members. The descendants of Circassian refugees who settled
in Syria, Jordan and Turkey in the late nineteenth century have made ‘return’ visits.37
True, a handful of Armenians visited ‘Hayastan’—their name for Soviet Armenia—
but mass ‘diaspora tourism’ did not begin until the 1990s, by which time Armeni-
ans had begun to head in the opposite direction to settle in North America.
Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians all participated in organized tours
or made private journeys to the land where their parents or grandparents were born,
and began to turn the diaries they inherited and the photographs they took into
commemorative websites. Other cultural practices echoed those embarked upon
by displaced populations elsewhere, such as compiling memorial books, whereby
Armenians commemorated the ‘lost villages’ that are now situated in Turkey. This
was just one element of a wide-ranging diaspora activity: for example, the Armenian
Relief Society, formed in 1910 by American-Armenians, continues to ‘serve the
social and educational needs of Armenian communities everywhere’.38 The diaspora
also mobilized at times of crisis, for instance establishing a Fund for Armenian
Relief in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Armenia in 1988. A key
element throughout has been frequent references to the genocide and the fate of
survivors.
Elsewhere, too, new political realities encouraged and facilitated a complex
confrontation with past experience, previously suppressed or repressed, which
often reinforced feelings of individual and collective suffering that contributed in
turn to the validation of nationalist claims and the exclusion of other memories.
In the Baltic States, well-resourced museums chronicle the deportation experi-
ence and describe the Soviet ‘occupation’ as ‘genocide’. These projects went hand
in hand with the removal of memorials that do not correspond to the nationalist
project. Croats and Serbs manifested radically different understandings of the
Second World War, which the former recalled as a time when local Serbs massa-
cred Croat partisans towards the end of the war, while Serbs recollected the mur-
ders committed by members of the paramilitary Croatian Ustaša in 1941.39 (Croat
spokesmen also complained about prolonged discrimination under communism.)
Wartime upheaval and displacement were connected to strong feelings of loss,
‘damage’ and victimization. In this respect what Croatian villagers forgot or
downplayed—such as the co-existence that manifested itself in inter-marriage or
just good neighbourliness—is as significant as what they recollected.
When Latvia achieved independence in 1991 the psychologist Vieda Skultans
found that she could carry out research in the country she left as a young baby.
Skultans wanted to study the meanings attributed by Soviet-trained doctors and

37
Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession, 124, points out that they portray themselves as the prog-
eny of noble-born migrants, in contrast to the supposedly poor and enslaved Circassians who re-
mained in the Caucasus.
38
<http://www.ars1910.org/>.
39
The Ustaša movement was founded in 1934 as a Croatian attempt to counter Serb domination
of Yugoslavia.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 271

patients to ‘neurasthenia’ or nervous exhaustion, but she soon found herself engag-
ing with representations of Latvia’s past and the history of Latvians who were de-
ported to Siberia or Central Asia during the Second World War and in the final
months of Stalin’s rule. Drawing upon a series of interviews with around 30 Latvian
informants, who either had direct experience of deportation or had otherwise been
closely affected by forced migration, Skultans distinguished ‘illness narratives’ from
other kinds of account. An illness narrative conveyed the erosion of meaning,
whereas other narratives suggested a capacity ‘to retrieve meaning and purpose
under the most inauspicious circumstances’. She argued that ‘many people with a
terrible past do manage to author lives which give a sense of satisfaction and com-
pleteness. Those who fail in this enterprise complain not only of the painfulness of
past experience but also of the incoherence of their life stories. They have failed
twice over, both as agents and as authors’.40
Although many of her informants gave vent to a belief that their life lacked co-
herence, former deportees who embraced the idea of pilgrimage and adventure
were better able to adjust to changing circumstances. Personal torment coexisted
with a reflective attitude that enabled each of them to evaluate the past and estab-
lish a grasp of agency and of a meaningful life. One informant, Solveiga (b.1921),
fashioned a dramatic narrative of being deported to Siberia as a 20-year old, her
return to Riga and her second period of exile; she recounted a life of stories of
misfortune, exploits, ‘magical coincidences’ and the kindness of strangers.41 Among
other Latvian exiles, particularly those in the diaspora that swelled in size when
DPs opted to remain in the West after 1945 in conditions of privation, analogous
torments described in the Bible (Israelites in the wilderness) or evoked in Latvian
folk tales and songs, afforded a degree of comfort, and have parallels with BenEzer’s
therapeutic work with Ethiopian Jews who made the difficult journey to Israel (see
chapter 8). Skultans’s rich ethnography also sheds light on ideas of exile and home-
coming. Memories of life in Siberia were bound up with a vast and desolate wintry
landscape, which contrasted starkly with the fertile, compact and ordered home-
land. Lidija (b.1922) recalled how the water in Lielupe smelled of yellow water
lilies: ‘[W]hen we went barefoot, the meadow flowers clung to our legs, the pollen,
flower petals. It was beautiful’.42 But homecoming proved no less painful than
exile. Late Soviet Latvia, with its corrupt officials and declining economy, did not
correspond to the pastoral images they kept in mind during the long years of exile.
Deportees described their disappointing and painful encounters with Latvians
when they returned many years later. Locals accused them of having ‘deserved’
their punishment (‘all the deportees should have been shot’). Yet Latvia remained,
for better or worse, ‘home’.
Vivid eyewitness accounts testified to the repercussions of violence in former
Yugoslavia. Journalist James Dalrymple reported from the border between Kosovo
and Macedonia in terms that drew upon images of biblical torment to ‘paint a
picture’ in which the human figure was effaced:

40
Vieda Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (Routledge, 1997), xii.
41 42
Skultans, The Testimony of Lives, 59–66. Skultans, The Testimony of Lives, 149.
272 Refugees in the Global Cold War
Through the river mist at dawn it looked like an oil painting of Hell, with the added
dimensions of smell and sound. The colours came from the clothing of the densely
packed human flotsam that filled the wide valley as far as the eye could see. As the
rising sun of Good Friday started to reveal this awesome panorama, the image of
Golgotha, the hill at Calvary, came easily to mind.43
Perhaps he was unaware of the use of Golgotha by eyewitnesses of the Serbian refu-
gee exodus during the First World War. These accounts have been amplified by the
testimony contributed by displaced women who survived the onslaught in Bosnia.
They paint a graphic picture of how neighbour turned on neighbour, how mothers
had to watch the murder of their children, and how Bosnian Muslim survivors
(sometimes aided by sympathetic Serbs) hid in the forest for days or weeks at a
time. Mixed in with descriptions of these painful scenes are characterizations of the
peaceful existence that refugees had to renounce. Thus refugees spoke of having
built their own homes and planted fields with crops that gave a good yield. Now,
however, they describe a never-ending journey in search of security: one refugee,
Ćamka, fled to Slovenia: ‘[W]e walked a long way on foot, but you’ve reached
some kind of freedom, so you keep on walking’.44
Other personal testimony reveals something of the ‘memory work’ associated
with refugeedom. Young Croat children were encouraged to write short accounts
of the circumstances surrounding their abrupt departure from their homes. Not
surprisingly their stories are informed by images of violence, particularly where
close family members were concerned, and by a heroic insistence that they will
eventually reclaim their homes. Particularly interesting is the way in which per-
sonal accounts corresponded to ‘official’ discourse and were infused with historic
grievances, as in the case of Serbian memories of displacement that connected
present suffering to the disasters during the First World War. Material objects also
had the capacity to trigger powerful recollections of displacement. Hajrija, a
Muslim refugee from Donji Vakuf in Bosnia-Herzegovina who had settled in Is-
lamabad, described her anxiety that her children would forget the town where they
were born:
My husband made a model of our town to keep the memory alive . . . It takes a long
time to build a town because it isn’t easy to find the right materials here [in Pakistan].
We had to have red roofs on the houses and lots of green for the trees. The green was
particularly hard to find. My husband was very determined. He looked and looked
and finally we found some branches that we could cut to look like small trees. We
must tend the model all the time because the green turns yellow. My husband made
the clock tower separately, so it could sit alone above the town, just like at home.
The inscription on this object read: ‘These are our houses, on the land inhabited by
our forefathers. We are going back there no matter when and in such a way that
we’ll be so powerful that no one will be able to force us to leave our land again’.

43
The Independent, 3 April 1999.
44
Janja Beč, The Shattering of the Soul (Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia,
1997), 59.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 273

This resolution echoes similar expressions of intent on the part of Greek Cypriot
and Palestinian refugees, while the architectural form corresponds to attempts to
recreate in books and films towns in Bosnia that were destroyed in the early 1990s.
One such memorial book commemorates the Bosnian Muslim town of Foca-on-
Drina whose mosque was dynamited and turned into a car park.45
Post-communist political turbulence made it possible to address other episodes
of state-induced population displacement. Pursuing these opportunities was nei-
ther straightforward nor benign. One neglected post-war situation deserves men-
tion, because it connects with the geopolitics of territorial and social reconstruction,
and with contested memories of displacement. It concerns the Julian Marches lo-
cated between Italy and Slovenia. German troops occupied Italy following its with-
drawal from the Axis in 1943, and Italy’s capitulation simultaneously provided an
opportunity for communist partisans to advance in the entire region. Between
1943 and 1954, when the Allies’ regional administration finally came to an end
and Tito’s Yugoslavia was granted control of part of Istria, a total of 300,000 Ital-
ians and 50,000 Slavs fled westwards. Their purpose was to evade the retribution
meted out by partisans who threw their fascist opponents—the precise numbers of
those judged and punished for being so designated are uncertain—into the numer-
ous karst pits (foibe) that are a feature of the Istrian landscape.46
The Italians who left Istria after 1945 were officially classified as refugees (profughi).
They were sent to makeshift accommodation, including former concentration
camps, and thence to transit camps before eventually settling in government-
built apartments in Trieste or in more distant locations in Italy and even abroad.
Luckier ones found lodgings with friends or relatives. Many refugees were still living
in camps a decade or more after their displacement. As in other similar situations,
life in the camp created a kaleidoscope of experience. Older men and women faced
great difficulties as it dawned on them that they would not see their homes again.
Among younger refugees in particular, the camp became a place of romance and
liberation, where a new world ‘opened up’, partly by exposing them to Italians from
former colonies in Ethiopia, Libya, and the Dodecanese. One woman recalled how
‘even the tragedy of the war was for me a curious adventure: bombings, fires, alarms,
and flights to the shelter seemed undecipherable episodes that didn’t endanger me
but rather made my life more interesting’.47
A study prepared prior to the collapse of communism found that survivors were
reluctant to speak about these events, but a much clearer picture now emerges of
how they recollected and represented their experiences. Identifying themselves as
exiles (esuli), the Istrian refugees told one another stories and poems, and devised
commemorative practices that are familiar from other refugee situations, for exam-
ple, setting up shrines in their new home to honour departed souls or displaying

45
By 1997 Hajrija had moved to Utica, New York, leaving the model town behind. Julie Mertus
(ed.), The Suitcase: Refugee Voices from Bosnia and Croatia (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 90–1; Slyomovics, Object of Memory, 2.
46
Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty
in Twentieth-century Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).
47
Ballinger, History in Exile, 201.
274 Refugees in the Global Cold War

photographs of abandoned villages. Interviews with the children of esuli confirm

the significance of the lost landscape: one second-generation refugee remembered
that his father bought a pair of binoculars to enable him to see the oak tree mark-
ing the entrance to the village he had been forced to abandon. Their behaviour
reflected a belief that they were victims and martyrs, something that their failure
to gain sympathy for their cause in Italy did nothing to diminish. Visual imagery
highlighted suffering as ‘Calvary’ and exodus from ‘paradise lost’. Other images
portrayed Istria as a mutilated female: a cartoon by esuli artist Gigi Vidris repre-
sented ‘the end of Istria’ in the shape of a murdered woman who is overlooked by
a skeleton emerging from the foibe pointing a bony finger of accusation at the
Allies: a highly racialized figure of a Yugoslav partisan is suitably startled and scut-
tles away. Exiles reinforced the message by asserting that they maintained a ‘pure’
Italian identity, such that they were made to feel ‘strangers in our own home’.48
Some esuli found meaning in various political activities, including a readiness to
entertain irredentist claims on the territory they had abandoned to Yugoslavia.
Claims for compensation were still being debated in the 1980s. Whether conserva-
tive, liberal or socialist in outlook, the esuli were frequently confronted with the
charge that all exiles were ‘fascists’. These experiences informed their relationship
to the past and thus their subsequent representations of displacement. In the light
of recent political changes—above all, the collapse of Yugoslavia—the esuli in par-
ticular portrayed themselves as victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’; this proposition,
embellished by the terrible stories of the foibe, was relentlessly affirmed by exile
associations. Among the esuli at large, the narrative of ‘submersion’ occupied a
particular significance. It operated on two levels: as an allusion to hidden crimes
(‘Slav treachery’) that needed to be uncovered, and as a way of drawing attention
to the mass graves that were the last resting place of Italian victims of (Slovene)
partisan violence in the latter stages of the Second World War. Here too, being
displaced in Europe implied in the late twentieth century an entitlement to recog-
nition and an opportunity to publicize stories that were either little known or kept
to oneself.49
Although several hundred thousand Italians fled from the advancing commu-
nist forces, others stayed put out of political sympathy with anti-Fascist partisans.
Italians who remained in Istria after 1943—and who became known as rimasti—
articulated feelings of suffering born of persecution during the Fascist era, particu-
larly for those who had espoused progressive politics in the region’s villages and
towns. Their ethnic origin exposed them to taunts by local Croats and Slovenes
that they were ‘fascist’. Some were able to participate in cultural events legitimized
by the communist state whose officials more or less tolerated the Italian minority
in Istria, and others joined communist organizations in order to affirm their pol-
itical loyalty. But a more complex political and cultural process was also at work.
Rejecting the claims of esuli that they were ‘contaminated’ by virtue of their as-
sociation with the Slovenes and Croats in Yugoslavia—‘there are no Italians left in

48 49
Ballinger, History in Exile, 198. Ballinger, History in Exile, 145–67.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 275

Istria’, as one exile put it—the rimasti expressed pride in the affirmation of a
mixed Latin-Slav identity.50 Although most did not learn to speak Serbo-Croat,
they did inter-marry across the ethnic divide. In response to accusations of being
indelibly tainted by communism, the Istrian rimasti subsequently claimed rather
to have been marginalized in Tito’s Yugoslavia, thereby enabling them to portray
themselves as victims. One element of this self-ascription is an ‘interior’ dis-
placement in the new Slovenia. This condition includes feelings of loss at the
decline of towns such as ‘Red Rovigno’ (which was a thorn in Mussolini’s side,
and which was assigned to Yugoslavia in 1947) and a broader lament at being
surrounded by the ‘ruins’ of a once viable community that included an Italian
cultural component.
The collapse of Yugoslavia and the end of the Cold War also affected public
debate in Greece and Macedonia, and further afield, in relation to the history of
the thousands of children who were ‘evacuated’ from Greece during the civil war
and sent to homes in Eastern Europe. This episode was and remains an issue over
which opinions are deeply divided. In 1950 the Greek government appealed to the
UN to recognize that the evacuation of children by the Greek Communist Party in
1948 amounted to ‘hostage taking by Slavo-communists’. Queen Frederica de-
scribed this as ‘genocide’; so, too, did the voluble right-wing diaspora organization
of Greek Macedonians, the Pan-Macedonian Association Inc. For its part, the left-
wing League for Democracy in Greece, a short-lived body based in London, argued
that the evacuation offered Greek and Macedonian children the possibility of a life
of ‘peace and prosperity’. The Communist Party had undertaken ‘a vast humanitar-
ian enterprise’.51
Enduring and irreconcilable divisions exposed by the evacuation exposed the
complex meanings of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’. Whether these children returned to
Greece in the late 1950s (as some did) or remained in the host country, they ex-
pressed ambivalent feelings towards the country of their birth. Having spent their
formative years in Hungary, East Germany, Yugoslavia and other locations, where
they learned a new language and received an education, they discovered a ‘second
homeland’. The children who returned faced discrimination at the hands of the
right-wing government. Returning to Greece exposed complex emotions, as in the
case of Stefanos Gikas (a pseudonym) who was born in the early 1940s and evacu-
ated to Budapest before returning to Greece in 1958. He recalls an early childhood
not in a society rent by political factions but in an impoverished village. When he
returned (‘I wanted to go back to Greece, and yet at the same time I didn’t’), Gikas
was dismayed by the continuing poverty—‘all they had was milk’. He was put on
a boat to the island of Leros where ‘we didn’t learn as much. Life in Eastern Europe
was better, we were freer then’.52 Things did not improve when he went back to

50
Ballinger, History in Exile, 13.
51
Danforth and Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, 39–40, 268.
52
The island of Leros was returned to Greece after the Second World War, having previously been
under Italian administration. In the 1960s the Greek Colonels used it as a dumping ground for political
opponents.
276 Refugees in the Global Cold War

Athens, until he realized that ‘a man hires five people, they work, and he earns the
most money’. Capitalism became his passport to integration in Greece.53
For decades much of this story was kept under wraps, because the governments
of Greece and Yugoslavia sought to maintain a reasonable working relationship. In
the late twentieth century this began to change. In 1988, shortly before the dissolu-
tion of Yugoslavia, the Toronto-based Association of Refugee Children from the
Aegean Macedonia organized a reunion for the evacuees in Skopje. The reunion was
an occasion for proclamations about the ‘exodus’ of children who had—as it was
said—been rescued from their ‘persecution’ at the hands of Greek right-wingers.
Their suffering during this ‘Golgotha’ was connected to ideas about the fragile status
of Macedonia and the potential for its ‘liberation’. Ten years later, when Macedonia
had become independent, the country’s president spoke of the part played by the
evacuation in protecting Macedonia from ‘obliteration’. His appropriation of their
experience, which he rolled up in the emotionally charged language of ‘ethnic
cleansing’, deliberately overlooked the fact that ethnic Greek children had also been
evacuated. Meanwhile, conservative figures continued to trumpet in wholly partial
terms the violence inflicted by communist partisans during the Civil War.54 These
politically divisive statements contrast with the dignified stance taken by many of
the survivors who did not forget what happened to them but who were willing to
be reconciled and who abjured the politicians’ divisive rhetoric.

C Y P RU S : H O P E S A B R I D G E D

Amidst these dramatic stories of displacement it is salutary to be reminded that

one refugee crisis in Europe has festered for decades without any sign of being set-
tled. Bitterness between the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus derived in
part from the legacy of conflict on the mainland earlier in the century (see chapter 2).
Although this did not stop neighbourly relations from being forged between the
two communities on Cyprus, the island was by no means an undisturbed idyll: for
example, in 1964 Turkish Cypriots fled after being targeted by their Greek neigh-
bours. Nonetheless, when Turkish troops invaded Cyprus 10 years later the shock
was palpable. Around 200,000 Greek Cypriots (two-fifths of the total population)
and 50,000 Turkish Cypriots fled their homes in search of sanctuary. Many left
within 24 hours of being confronted by the occupation and found temporary
shelter with relatives or in makeshift accommodation in zones newly demarcated
by the United Nations, expecting to return to their own homes before long. One
refugee described how his hasty and surreptitious departure, and the need to grab
what belongings he could, made him feel ‘as if we were thieving from our own
houses’, just as Palestinians recalled their experiences in 1948.55

53
Danforth and Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, 137–46, 194.
54
Danforth and Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War, 252–8, 270–6.
55
Peter Loizos, The Heart Grown Bitter: a Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981), 105; Peter Loizos, Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health
in Cyprus (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 140.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 277

The crisis was largely contained within Cyprus itself, although the UN moni-
tored the so-called ‘green line’ between the two halves of the island. According to
international law those who fled were classed as internally displaced persons. Nev-
ertheless, UNHCR took on the task of coordinating emergency assistance. The
label of refugee quickly stuck, but Greek Cypriots resented it, because this implied
that they were unlikely to be able to return in the near future to what they termed
the ‘occupied areas’ (ta katexomena).56 Refugees also rejected the label on the
grounds that it implied a loss of independence, although this did not stop them
creating a ‘Refugee Committee’ to defend their interests. Not all refugees were
equally disadvantaged, because some of them owned second homes on the island.
Some enterprising refugees traded on their status and established new businesses
which they named ‘Refugee Kebabs’ and ‘Refugee Taxis’, significantly terms that
connoted instant gratification rather than a kind of long-term investment in exile.
Villagers—the overwhelming majority—found the move to town hugely discon-
certing. It did not help that they met with barely disguised contempt from locals.
One refugee recalled that ‘You could rarely see discrimination [but] there were
people who used to say to their children “eat your food or else the refugee will
come and eat it”, or pointed their finger at us saying “these are refugees” ’. It helped
to be able to share sensory pleasures with fellow villagers such as memories of
smells from the local bakery and the taste of fruit from the orchards they
abandoned.57
In response to refugees’ demands, the government set aside homes and land
abandoned by Turkish Cypriots in order to make affordable public housing avail-
able to the newcomers from the North. This programme was underpinned by the
provision of $20 million of international aid. Greek Cypriot refugees responded to
the catastrophe by encouraging their children to receive an education, drawing
either upon government loans or other resources. The authorities in the Greek-
administered zone treated the refugees as a resource rather than as a burden: the
Orthodox Church invested in factories that recruited refugee workers, and farmers
were able to obtain land and thereby prevent their skills from going rusty. Other
refugees worked in the booming construction industry or the growing tourist
sector. Their children were highly motivated and able to make their way in the
world. The outcome had parallels with Germany and South Korea in the 1950s,
where an economic ‘miracle’ contributed to the integration of refugees.58
Cypriot history suggests the need to take account of some of the broader implica-
tions of population displacement in relation to refugees’ adaptability and resilience.
While wealthier refugees were able to build homes on land set aside by the govern-
ment of Cyprus, others were provided with terraced houses on purpose-built estates
(synikismos). Refugees who lived on these estates lamented the destruction of hitherto

56
Rebecca Bryant, ‘Partitions of Memory: Wounds and Witnessing in Cyprus’ CSSH, 54, no.2
(2012), 332–60.
57
From an interview with Markos M. aged 72, conducted in July 2011 by Andrea Papaioannou,
cited with permission.
58
Loizos, Iron in the Soul, 41–51; Roger Zetter, ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a
Bureaucratic Identity’ JRS, 4, no.1 (1991), 39–62.
278 Refugees in the Global Cold War

thriving communities, and they established new relationships only with difficulty.
Refugees from the same village managed to stay in touch with one another to the
extent of inviting former neighbours to family weddings and funerals. Complaints
were heard that these assistance programmes subordinated refugees to a state-led
project of development, and that providing refugees with a ‘permanent’ place to live
was a decidedly mixed blessing. Although the state enabled refugees to adjust to the
circumstances of displacement, and although economic growth made a difference,
refugees’ own self-help measures enabled them to come to terms with protracted
exile. Religious leaders stressed that they were not alone and enjoyed spiritual protec-
tion. But the past retains its capacity to become like a ‘splinter of iron which has been
trapped inside the now-healed flesh’.59
It has proved difficult to translate ideas of return and restitution into action. The
partition of Cyprus turned what refugees believed would be turned a temporary
sojourn into a lengthy internal exile. When they spoke of ‘no going back’, refugees
employed the phrase in a dual manner, meaning a determination to see through
their journey to a place of safety and their despair at the diminishing likelihood of
returning for good to their original village. Notices placed by refugees (‘temporar-
ily residing in Limassol’) only served to draw attention to the fact that—as among
Palestinian, Tibetan and other refugees—desire did not easily translate into repa-
triation. In 2003 the Turkish Cypriot authorities allowed refugees to make short
visits to the north of the island. Half of those who made the journey planned to
make further visits. Many came away with a renewed and painful feeling that their
homes were near yet so far, as well as with disturbing impressions of buildings and
cemeteries that had fallen into disrepair and a clear indication of renamed streets
and monuments to Turkish ‘martyrs’. Others refused the offer of a visit, regarding
it as offensive that they were being asked to show their passports in order to gain
admittance. One person eloquently described feeling ‘tied like another Odysseus
who could not accept this degrading process’.60
All refugees, whatever their background and whether Greek or Turkish Cypriot,
confronted the material consequences of displacement and potential repatriation. The
failure of UN mediation in 2004 reflected Greek Cypriot misgivings about the con-
tinued presence of ‘Turkish settlers’ and a lack of clear provision for the unconditional
return of Greek refugees. These feelings of bitterness have been accompanied by a re-
alization that there is unlikely to be an easy resolution to displacement. As a result,
refugees have adopted an idealized version of home. At the same time, although the
death of a loved one, a newspaper headline about the events of 1974 or another
screening of the well-known documentary film, Attila ’ 74 (Mihalis Kakogiannis,
1974) might trigger painful memories, refugees from both communities showed an
impressive capacity to get on with their lives, whether in Cyprus or in the diaspora.61

59
Loizos, Iron in the Soul, 153–62, 186.
60
Lisa Dikomitis, ‘A Moving Field: Greek Cypriot Refugees Returning “Home” ’ Durham Anthro-
pology Journal, 12, no.1 (2004), 7–20.
61
Roger Zetter, ‘Reconceptualizing the Myth of Return: Continuity and Transition amongst the
Greek-Cypriot Refugees of 1974’ JRS, 12, no.1 (1999), 1–22; Nergis Canefe, ‘From Ethnicity to Nation-
alism: Intricacies of Turkish Cypriot Identity in the Diaspora’ Rethinking History, 6, no.1 (2002), 57–76.
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 279

H I D D E N A N D E M E RG I N G H I S TO R I E S

Other sites of displacement disclose important aspects of state practice, attempts to

forge ‘durable solutions’, and refugees’ engagement with the past.
Some conflicts have been brought to an end by virtue of outright victory for one
faction and defeat for the other. The clearest example in recent history is Sri Lanka.
Here the prolonged war between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil liberation
movement (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE) displaced 800,000
people internally from a total population of 20 million. Around 100,000 Tamils
fled to India during the 1980s and 1990s, where many of them ended up in make-
shift refugee camps. In autumn 1990 Tamil warriors turned on the 60,000-strong
Muslim population in the North, accusing them of being ‘traitors’ and giving them
only a few hours to leave. Internally displaced Muslims faced hostility from resi-
dents in the western district of Puttalam who complained about competition for
business and the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour of refugee women and children—a re-
minder that displacement has often been associated with moral laxity on the part
of the host population. The defeat of the LTTE in 2009 enabled the government
of Sri Lanka to confine 300,000 internally displaced people in the innocuous-
sounding Menik Farm and in other camps, where officials ‘scrutinised’ individual
refugees.62
The implications of the civil war for the Tamil diaspora have been profound.
The anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel argued that the first generation of mi-
grants who arrived in Europe in small numbers belonged to the Tamil elite, but
manifested an attachment to the state of Ceylon to which they expected to return
with the professional qualifications that would cement their role as leaders. During
the 1960s and 1970s, the diaspora grew in size with the arrival of student activists
who were affiliated to the Tamil nationalist cause; they argued that differences
between Sinhalese and Tamils could not be bridged and unlike the elite Tamils
found it impossible to conceive of Sri Lanka as a multi-ethnic polity. A third
cohort reached the First World in the 1980s, as refugees whom the elite group in
the diaspora regarded as ‘riff-raff ’. Each group invested the past with different
meanings: the elite embraced a unified national history of Ceylon, while the stu-
dent cohort were transfixed by histories of Tamil chieftains and kings. The third
group ‘opted out of the project of the nation’. The experience of applying for
asylum left them feeling cynical about nations and national laws—the realization
of a Tamil nation, if it came to pass, would in their eyes simply consolidate the
rule of the professional elite. They pursued the relative security that came from
getting jobs in the UK economy, and from feeling that they were part of a large
and non-territorialized diaspora, rather than entertaining the prospect of a na-
tion-state they could call their own. The only history that meant anything to them
was their recent bruising encounters with British officialdom and the Tamil elite.

62
Oberoi, Exile and Belonging, 200–31; Joke Schrijvers, ‘Fighters, Victims and Survivors: Con-
structions of Ethnicity, Gender and Refugeeness among Tamils in Sri Lanka’ JRS, 12, no.3 (1999),
307–33.
280 Refugees in the Global Cold War

It remains to be seen whether this ‘national indifference’ is a transitory phenomenon

within the diaspora.63
Like the Tamil conflict, other situations are largely hidden from the interna-
tional gaze. In the remote kingdom of Bhutan (home to Tibetan refugees since
1959), the king adopted the Orwellian slogan of ‘Gross National Happiness’ as its
guiding principle in the 1990s. Unfortunately the elements of such happiness were
not shared equally. From the 1980s onwards the minority Lotshampa popula-
tion—most of them descendants of migrants from Nepal—found political and
social conditions intolerable when the regime insisted on the need for all subjects
to sign an oath of loyalty to the monarch and to subscribe to ‘national harmony’.
The government justified this stringent programme on the grounds that Bhutan is
a small state that cannot afford the ‘luxury’ of cultural pluralism. Anyone opposing
these changes was labelled a ‘terrorist’. Those who gave notice of their intention to
leave Bhutan had to sign a form stating that they left voluntarily. Around 110,000
refugees settled in camps in South-Eastern Nepal during the 1980s, leaving a small
number of Lotshampa in Bhutan.
History illuminates this state of affairs in several respects. From their vantage
point in the refugee camps, Lotshampa maintain that their presence in Bhutan
dates back as far as the seventeenth century, whereas their Bhutanese counterparts
detect no trace of a Nepali presence before 1900. Refugees created a ‘mythico-
history’ in which their forefathers were farmers who taught Bhutanese peasants the
value of education and progressive agricultural practices. Their feelings of superior-
ity also derived from a belief that they kept themselves apart from mainstream so-
ciety. For their part, the Bhutanese affirm the superiority of Buddhist religion and
culture. However, in the 1950s the monarchy’s drive to modernize Bhutan im-
posed greater central control of the South. Things took a turn for the worse in
1988–90 when the government conducted a census to classify the population into
citizens and aliens. Many Lotshampa lost out as a result, and they continued to
suffer throughout the 1990s. This proved the final straw.64

C O N C LU S I O N S

In the new millennium humanitarian personnel engaged in a good deal of soul-

searching, drawing attention to difficult issues, including factors such as climate
change and food scarcities that threaten to bring about more widespread popula-
tion displacement, inequities in states’ asylum procedures, and the ‘shrinking of
humanitarian space’. It needs to be said that UNHCR and NGOs have at times
contributed to such shrinkage by discouraging field staff from maintaining close
contact with refugees on a daily basis. In Kampala, for example, the decision to move

63
E.V. Daniel, ‘Suffering Nation and Alienation’, in Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret
Lock (eds), Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 309–58.
64
Michael Hutt, Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
 Refugees, Homecoming, and Refugee Voices 281

its local office to a distant part of the city led refugees to claim that ‘UNHCR is
just running away’. It was often easier to obtain the views of self-appointed spokes-
men rather than solicit the opinions of ordinary refugees.65 UNHCR has been
accused of complicity with governments in hindering outside access to refugee
camps and hampering independent research. Other shortcomings and abuses have
come to light, such as the sexual exploitation of refugees by relief workers. At the
same time, warriors have perpetrated attacks on humanitarian personnel. All this
paints a depressing picture of the limits to as well as the limitations of humanitar-
ian intervention. Critical voices including those within the agency itself accuse it
not of overweening ambition, but of insufficient room for manoeuvre, unprece-
dented challenges, and a retreat from its mandate to protect refugees in favour of
emergency humanitarian relief.66
The modern era affords new possibilities for self-expression that derive from
more accessible technologies of communication, as well as manifesting what
appears at first sight to be a greater attentiveness to refugee testimony. Yet it is
worth asking how far we have come since the 1950s, when the UNHCR can
still talk in bland terms of refugee life as ‘desperately simple and empty’? The
Refugee Communities History Project under the aegis of the Evelyn Oldfield
Unit seeks to ‘counter misapprehensions’ and to ‘demonstrate the contribution
that refugees have made to London’, but the focus on ‘contribution’ inevitably
plays down or even discards as unimportant the life they lived hitherto. If his-
tory matters, we need to take account of the complexity of these biographies
and, in Doreen Massey’s words, ‘the conjunction of many histories and many
spaces’.67
What does contemporary displacement imply for refugees? Has the multi-
plication of resources—crucial in arguments about the efflorescence of ‘new
wars’—improved things by affording refugees greater access to communication
technologies? If so, what uses have they made of these means to advance their
claims to recognition and to defend their interests? Elites regularly drew upon
ideas of historic catastrophe to justify repatriation and/or restitution, whereas
non-elite voices struggled to be heard, sometimes for very practical reasons. Refu-
gees have begun to create websites devoted to the commemoration of displace-
ment. But access to new technologies or even basic means of communication is
neither guaranteed nor equally distributed. A female refugee from Ethiopia dis-
closed that, ‘I associate writing with giving good news. I had nothing good to say
about the misery of our life. Besides we did not have money to buy stamps’, neatly

65
Harrell-Bond and Voutira, ‘Barriers to Access’; Kristin Sandvik ‘Negotiating the Humanitarian
Past: History, Memory, and Unstable Cityscapes in Kampala, Uganda’ RSQ, 31, no.1 (2012), 108–22,
at 116.
66
Jeff Crisp, ‘Why Do We Know so Little About Refugees? How Can We Learn More?’ FMR, 18
(2003), 55; Alexander Betts, Gil Loescher and James Milner, UNHCR: the Politics and Practice of Refu-
gee Protection into the Twenty-first Century (Routledge, 2011); The State of the World’s Refugees 2012
(Geneva: UNHCR, 2012).
67
<http://www.evelynoldfield.co.uk/rchp/index.shtml>; Doreen Massey, ‘Places and their Pasts’
History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), 182–92; Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 21.
282 Refugees in the Global Cold War

encapsulating emotional and practical difficulties in creating and disseminating a

record of displacement.68
The collapse of Soviet communism enabled survivors of Stalin-era deportations
and their descendants to visit and sometimes to return to their former homes.
Others chose not to exercise this option, and not everyone had the requisite re-
sources. Families were once more broken up when younger members opted to emi-
grate whilst elderly parents stayed behind. The end of the Cold War opened up the
possibility not only of migration but also of commemorating past displacement
and engaging with the meaning of ‘homeland’. This was not an unmixed blessing.
Altered political realities in Eastern Europe brought submerged stories to the sur-
face, albeit in ways that exacerbated rather than lessened political tensions; suppos-
edly ancient antagonisms might be invoked in order to claim privileged treatment
or compensation. Political changes laid the foundation for bitter quarrels over the
legacy of the Second World War and over the consequences of communist rule, as
in the case of the child evacuees from Greece. In Serbia the contested memories of
historic battles amplified existing grievances and inflamed relations between Serbs
and other ethnic groups in the collapsing Yugoslav state. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ became
a rallying-cry for different campaigns, a rhetorical device in the hands of political
leaders who were staking a claim to power. Nor was it just a matter of asserting
claims for repatriation or restitution, or at long last being able to draw public at-
tention to immensely damaging historic episodes. The relaxation of constraints on
commemoration went hand in hand with a process of forgetting a time when
people lived side by side in relative harmony. I return to this repudiation in the
conclusion.

68
Helene Moussa, Storm and Sanctuary: the Journey of Ethiopian and Eritrean Women Refugees
(Dundas: Artemis Enterprises, 1993), 170.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

It is the misleading familiarity of ‘history’ which can break open the daily
naturalism of what surrounds us
(Denise Riley)

Refugees have been allowed only a walk-on part in most histories of the twentieth
century, and even then as subjects of external intervention rather than as actors in
their own right. The Making of the Modern Refugee argues that they belong to the
mainstream rather than the margins. Familiar processes such as war, revolution and
state-building take on fresh meanings when examined through the prism of popu-
lation displacement. Refugees were an integral element in these transformations.
They were first targeted, then expelled or ‘transferred’ because they were deemed
not to belong or because they opposed revolutionary projects. Sometimes they
were displaced when the borders of their country were redrawn around them to
create a new polity. Granted, refugees might flee for their lives when enemy armies
trampled over their towns and villages, but it is myopic to think of them as mere
flotsam and jetsam, moving ‘spontaneously’ in search of safe ground. Nor was
displacement always a catastrophe; it could be an opportunity to assert claims to
political recognition. Where they became part of a new state, refugees shaped gov-
ernment practices by their very presence. They might be portrayed as victims who
had finally found a proper berth in the newly-forged nation-state. To be sure, this
acknowledgement did not always extend very far or go very deep, and refugees
were frequently excised from the history of the state they helped to construct. This
makes it all the more remarkable that refugees affirmed a sense of purpose. Not-
withstanding the obstacles put in their way, refugees actively participated in inter-
preting displacement and staking a claim to be taken seriously. In the conclusion
I deal with this aspect of refugees and their history.
A refugee-focused history entails considering not only the process of displace-
ment but also the contours of assistance. Here, too, it is difficult to escape the
claims made by the modern state. Governments appeal to a history of ‘generosity’
towards refugees (a history heavily laced with myth), but this frequently serves as a
justification for maintaining tough controls on admission.1 Although humanitarian

1
Loescher and Scanlan, Calculated Kindness; Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and
Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Klaus Neumann, Refuge Australia:
Australia’s Humanitarian Record (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004).
284 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

relief efforts were a significant endeavour in their own right, that history too
remains under-explored. International organizations and NGOs show scant inter-
est in the past unless making some bland claim about their reputation. It suffices
that the world is full of refugees whose needs must be addressed here and now, as
though the clock starts again with each new emergency. Humanitarianism concen-
trates on the present circumstances of refugees and treads cautiously when it comes
to thinking about the root causes of displacement. Humanitarian doctrine also
succumbs to the temptation to treat refugees ‘as if they were tabula rasa with no
history, past experience, culture, anticipation, skills, coping mechanisms to inter-
pret new situations’.2 This is a field where history dare not speak its name.
Placing refugees at the centre of historical enquiry exposes certain paradoxes and
pitfalls. One risk is taking the refugee label for granted. Labels have consequences.
The Making of the Modern Refugee problematizes the category by showing how it
emerged and shifted over time and place. States, international organizations and
NGOs, and refugees too, invested in the term. The refugee crisis in Russia during
the First World War introduced a new word into the lexicon, ‘refugeedom’. What
began as an unsettling episode in a collapsing empire rapidly became a continental
and global phenomenon with high political stakes. It was not just a question of
numbers, large though these were. Population displacement in the aftermath of
both world wars led to the creation of a refugee regime, with a League of Nations
office (before 1939) and the UNHCR (after 1951) at its core. As High Commis-
sioner in the 1920s, Nansen attended to specific groups of refugees who had lost
the protection of their state. Thirty years later, the United Nations adopted a defini-
tion that centred upon the individual victim of persecution. Although diplomats
initially took the view that displacement was limited in time and space, events
moved faster than they envisaged.
Successive high commissioners repeated the mantra that the UNHCR was non-
political. In so doing they discouraged public discussion of the fundamental causes
of refugee crises, although in truth political considerations lay close to the surface of
this humanitarian diplomacy. The post-1945 regime introduced the principle that to
be recognized as a refugee it had to be established that persecution had taken place,
and it was no secret that this meant persecution by the totalitarian state. It now
sufficed to create a brief personal case note, not to embark on an extended historical
analysis. In a similar vein, whether refugees could in practice safely return was a
bureaucratic question about the future, not about the past and how it impinged on
the present. History was kept out of the picture; it was an unnecessary distraction
and an unwelcome complication. Far better to concentrate on vital technical issues—
counting heads, delivering food and medicine—and on boosting the profile of the
UNHCR by means of campaigns such as World Refugee Year or publicity stunts
such as the ‘Refugee Run’, an annual fixture at the Davos summit in which business
leaders and politicians are invited to imagine themselves as refugees.3

2
Gaim Kibreab, ‘The Myth of Dependency among Camp Refugees in Somalia, 1979–1989’ JRS,
6, no.4 (1993), 321–48, at 336.
3
<http://refugeerun.unhcr.org/>.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 285

After the war the numbers and scope of NGOs grew rapidly. They provided the
chief conduit for emergency relief and implementing ‘durable solutions’. They
raised enormous sums of money and employed thousands of staff who moved
around with consummate ease. In addition to technical solutions, their actions
were informed by religious doctrines (faith-based organizations mushroomed)
and cultural assumptions, including an image of refugees as helpless victims who
had lost self-control rather than as ordinary people with the capability to surmount
the extraordinary difficulties they encountered. Only occasionally—Quakers are a
notable example, ‘humane and quietly efficient’ in Francesca Wilson’s words—did
humanitarian organizations negotiate with refugees on equal terms, as well as
seeking to establish the basis for peace and reconciliation.4 More often than not,
NGOs went looking for expressions of unalloyed gratitude and ‘success stories’
that would keep supporters happy and staff on their toes. True, refugees were
sometimes directly employed on externally-managed relief projects, as in Greece
during the 1920s and with UNRWA in the 1950s. Yet generally speaking the re-
lationship between refugees and relief agencies operated asymmetrically, and still
does. Assisting refugees implied appropriating their experiences, making assump-
tions about their bewilderment, and disqualifying them from expressing an opinion
of their own.
History directs our attention to the way in which refugees have been valorized
by non-refugees and how they valorized themselves in order to negotiate a way out
of their predicament. This is partly about the blanket ascription of qualities to
displaced populations, making some more deserving of assistance than others.
Greek refugees from Asia Minor were portrayed as ‘backward’ (particularly if they
came from the far corners of Anatolia) or, if they originated from Smyrna and
Eastern Thrace, as sturdy individualists, ‘a progressive factor and a rural element of
the first class’.5 Refugees from the Punjab figured in contemporary descriptions of
Partition as capable and independent, whereas their Bengali counterparts did not
escape being characterized as ‘weak and effeminate’. Armenians drew upon the image
of oppressive Turkish rule to depict themselves as the embodiment of Christian
civilization and thus deserving of Western humanitarian assistance. Hungarians
and Vietnamese Catholic refugees trumpeted their anti-communism as a means of
turning themselves into (more or less) desirable refugees. Tibetans made much of
their virtues as Buddhist victims of communist oppression, although their positive
portrayal also hinged upon embedded cultural references to ‘Shangri-La’. Like
Armenians, they were hyper-historicized.
Refugees of necessity engaged with the label attached to them. This was only
partly about gaining legal status. Recognition in accordance with the 1951 Con-
vention conferred definite advantages, assuming that the host state had signed the
Convention. Cultural and political considerations and not just legal status came
into play. Officials and employers deemed the Latvian DPs who reached the UK

4
Francesca Wilson, Aftermath: France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, 1945 and 1946 (Penguin
Books, 1947), 130.
5
Pentzopoulos, Balkan Exchange of Minorities, 102.
286 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

after the Second World War under the European Volunteer Workers scheme to be
economic migrants, whereas they saw themselves as refugees from communism.
Sometimes, as with refugees from Bangladesh who arrived in India in 1971, refu-
gees were described as ‘war victims’, a term that spoke only obliquely of their per-
secution and implied nothing about any prospective rights. Refugees might be told
that they could become citizens, but they faced discrimination and contempt on a
daily basis. Those who had to move from Greece to Turkey in 1923 were called
muhacir or mübandil, terms for ‘refugee’ that differentiated them from locals. Armenian
refugees in Cyprus were ‘refugees’ (kaghtagan), not ‘natives’ (deghatsi). Partition
refugees loathed being called haranarthi (‘refugees’) and styled themselves pur-
sharthi, a term that advertised self-reliance. Nor were pejorative distinctions such
as these invariably imposed by non-refugees. Refugees from an earlier vintage did
not hesitate to draw a line between themselves and refugee newcomers, usually in
detrimental terms. The gap in understanding was even greater where elite migrants
confronted later cohorts of refugees.6
Specific issues arose for women who were exposed to abduction, degradation
and sexual violence. Such risks constitute an important element of the history of
refugees and of humanitarianism. Sometimes the consequences of displacement
affected their property rather than their bodies, as when Palestinian women lost
their dowry wealth in the war of 1948. Ideas of a vulnerable female population did
not float freely and were moored to political projects such as attempts to build the
nation-state or safeguard the ‘nation-in-exile’. The violence done to women and
children symbolized the calamity that befell the entire nation, as in the Armenian
genocide in 1915 or France’s refugee crisis in 1939–40. It strengthened ideas of
suffering that could be deployed in fundraising campaigns, usually without any
context or explanation, turning refugees into passive creatures. Yet the female en-
counter with displacement might be deemed shameful enough to hide it from
view, as happened to Sikh women and girls who suffered at the hands of their own
husbands and fathers during Partition. A gendered history of displacement also
discloses that women often took charge of the household and rose to the challenge
of dealing with officialdom and relief workers, ‘being strong’ (awiyye) as Palestinian
women put it. It allows for women’s participation in the armed struggle, as with
Tamil Tigers who praised the ‘sacrifices’ made by female warriors on the nation’s
behalf. It recognizes the centrality of women’s direct involvement in projects of
refugee relief, bringing them to the political fore.7
To write refugees into history is to take seriously the way in which refugees en-
gaged with displacement. The Making of the Modern Refugee has traced the impact
of displacement on the lives of refugees but has sought to avoid making trite as-
sumptions about a common experience. Whose experience counts, and why? How,

6
Daniel, ‘The Refugee’, 273–4.
7
Fiona Reid and Sharif Gemie, ‘Constructing Citizenship? Women, Welfare and Refugees in
France, 1939–1940’ Women’s History Review, 20, no.3 (2011), 347–68; James Clifford, Routes: Travel
and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997),
258–60.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 287

precisely, is it articulated? Being forced to leave one’s home could leave terrible
scars. Fear went hand in hand with feelings of profound loss for which a new
vocabulary had to be found; Ethiopian refugees used the evocative term sedetagna
to express how people lost everything that was dear to them.8 But this has been a
starting point of this enquiry, not a foregone conclusion. New experiences and
encounters were mediated by various means, including information sources and
political propaganda that painted displacement with a palette of mixed emotions
including outrage and despair, but also resolution and hope. Emotions might
furthermore be rearticulated in the present, for example to instil in children an
attachment to a ‘homeland’ they have never seen. This emotional register forms an
inescapable part of the history of displacement. History demonstrates what kind of
representation emerged, whose voices gained greater exposure and credence, at
what time and under what circumstances.
Displacement did not invariably override other meaningful elements in the
social life of those who became refugees. Addressing the circumstances of displace-
ment takes us, so to speak, only so far. There are, it is true, powerful countervailing
forces. Refugees regularly turned the spotlight on the moment of their displace-
ment, regarding it as an abrupt calamity that overturned routines and shattered
lives forever. Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire referred to their mass
displacement in the Balkans in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War on 1877–78 as
the ‘great unravelling’. Punjabi spokesmen described Partition as raula, a sharp
break or ‘vivisection’. Palestinians looked upon the events of 1948 as the nakba, the
disaster that dismantled a traditional way of life and condemned them to a life of
torment in exile: Mourid Barghouti speaks of being ‘struck by displacement’.
Crimean Tatars alluded to kara gün or the ‘black day’, marked by the arrival of
NKVD detachments in their village with instructions to deport entire families to
Central Asia. Exiled Tibetans observe 10 March as the anniversary of their sudden
departure. In these instances, commonly-held expectations of being gone for a
matter of weeks dwindled as refugees came to terms with prolonged displacement.
The moment of departure acquired particular significance. Patriots advertised the
overwhelming abruptness of departure so as to maintain the pulse of commemora-
tive activity with the ultimate aim of recapturing the state.
To probe further the question of how refugees comprehended their displace-
ment is to acknowledge that personal accounts are located in an extensive and in-
tricate web of meaning. Refugees often explained displacement in contingent
terms—as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—but also related
it to collective misfortune. One can therefore detect an ‘engulfment of individual
narratives by the collective narrative of history’, such as the belief that an entire
nation had been targeted and wronged.9 Hutu refugees who fled Burundi and were
cocooned in Tanzania’s refugee camps created a ‘mythico-history’ that purported to
validate their claims to the land whilst simultaneously depicting Tutsis as imposters.

8
Helene Moussa, Storm and Sanctuary: the Journey of Ethiopian and Eritrean Women Refugees
(Dundas: Artemis Enterprises, 1993), 168.
9
Skultans, The Testimony of Lives, 7.
288 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

Other camps—in Baqubah, Argelès, Wildflecken, Kurukshetra, Shatila, Dharamsala,

Mishamo and Pulau Bidong—fostered this intense historicity. No-one could accuse
these refugees of a dearth of historical consciousness. Tibetan refugees perceived
themselves as guardians of a distinctive civilization. Basque refugees constructed
a self-image not as victims of Franco but the embodiment of a socialist and repub-
lican tradition which they sustained in exile. Armenian refugees interpreted dis-
placement as a state of being rather than as a momentary episode. Diasporic groups
were enlisted in this enterprise. Like refugees, they were (in the memorable phrase
with which Salman Rushdie introduced Midnight’s Children), ‘handcuffed to
history’.
Histories of population displacement need to allow for process as well as
rupture. This is not to minimize the impact of being suddenly and violently dis-
placed. Rather, it seeks to contextualize displacement and to challenge overarching
narratives of abrupt, traumatic catastrophe. At a basic level this means that dis-
placement could entail a protracted sequence of moves from one place to another.
Thinking about process also invites us to consider the connections that refugees
capitalized upon. Labouring men who moved to the canal colonies during the era
of the British Raj returned to their ancestral villages when Pakistan and India
became independent, but cross-border migration here and in Bengal continued,
notwithstanding the efforts of government officials to stem this ‘long Partition’.
Wealthy Palestinian refugees who fled to Beirut in 1948 followed in the footsteps
of family members who had forged commercial contacts throughout the Middle
East. Refugees from the Spanish Civil War followed the tracks made by earlier
generations of labour migrants who moved to France to pick grapes and harvest
sugar beet or who sailed to Argentina. Refugees from the bitter civil war in
Mozambique fled to Malawi because of a family history of migration. Bosnian
Muslim women who were attacked by Serb militias during the war over the car-
cass of Yugoslavia sought refuge in Slovenia because their menfolk had tradition-
ally found work in Ljubljana. Tunisians fleeing the political turbulence in their
country in 2011 made their way to the Italian island of Lampedusa, whence they
were despatched to camps on the Italian mainland. Some attempted to get to
France via the so-called ‘death pass’, the mountain path used in the 1930s by Italian
exiles who rejected Mussolini’s rule.
Thus the trajectories of displaced people rarely had a random character but were
instead associated with historic ties, journeys and diasporic formations that can
best be understood as ‘the culmination of evolving forces operating much earlier
than the actual physical migration of people’.10 As has been aptly said, refugees
‘went into exile as persons enmeshed in relationships, and the processes by which
they experienced their displacement were indeterminate because of the myriad
relationships which they carried with them’.11 Kurdish refugees numbering about

10
Shami, Population Displacement and Resettlement, 4; Peter Loizos, ‘Generations’ in Forced Migra-
tion: Towards Greater Conceptual Clarity’ JRS, 20, no.2 (2007), 193–209.
11
Harri Englund, From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 4, 33.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 289

30 million people worldwide did not see themselves as belonging to a ‘small minority’
but as members of a diasporic nation.12 Similar views were held by Armenians and
Jews, Palestinians and Tibetans. These patterns point to the importance of history and
ancestry. Ethiopian Jewish adolescents made sense of their hazardous journey from
Ethiopia to Israel via Sudan by associating the migration of their forebears with their
own resolve. The journey took on the character of an odyssey intertwined with a
history of nation and diaspora. Decisions to join communities overseas could
nevertheless lead to painful separation, as in the case of children from leftist families
who were shipped to Eastern Europe during the Greek Civil War.
To be designated a ‘refugee’ throughout the twentieth century frequently meant
demeaning treatment at the hands of governments and host populations, an obser-
vation that is not fundamentally altered by the protection afforded refugees recog-
nized under the 1951 Convention or by humanitarian assistance. There never was
a golden age for the modern refugee. A sense of mortification figured most strongly
among Palestinian refugees who preferred to think of themselves as prospective
‘returnees’. Refugees from East Bengal were provided with the acronym ‘East
Pakistan Displaced Persons’ whom West Bengalis mocked as ‘East Pakistan Dis-
eased Persons’. But the word could also be seized upon by those to whom it was
applied: a badge advertising a broader history of national calamity and even a
source of collective pride, as with Hutu refugees in Tanzania, or a clever bit of
marketing, as with the ‘Refugee Taxi’ and ‘Refugee Kebab’ businesses that people
from Northern Cyprus established in the southern sector after 1974. Refugees
from the East Punjab who settled in Lahore named their businesses and sports
clubs after the places they left behind, as in the case of the Amritsar Rovers Hockey
Club (this did not stop their children who made good in the 1960s from refusing
to be labelled as refugees). The same link between past and present operated among
Greek refugees from Turkey who settled in Piraeus. Displacement was framed in
complex terms in relation to Jewish DPs, who were invited to look to a future in
the new state of Israel forged from the terrible experience of the Holocaust and
legitimized by scripture. Dwelling on the past could be a vital element in shaping
one’s prospects.
The history of displacement is by definition a history of place—of departure and
of arrival, sometimes of multiple journeys, and also of staying put. Refugees left
their mark on destinations such as Beirut, Kokkinia, Marseille, Bourg-Madame,
Chandigarh, Karachi, Hong Kong, Shatila and Masindi. Their descendants too
imaginatively reconstructed the places they left behind, investing them with no-
tions of beauty, pleasure, fecundity and stability. ‘The past [as Salman Rushdie put
it], is home’.13 Home was portrayed as a place where one’s ancestors lived, died and
were buried, and where one had been raised. It made basic necessities available as
a result of working the land alongside neighbours: as one Greek Cypriot put it, ‘in
Lapithos, fruit and cheese and other food and goods were exchanged or given away

12
Östen Wahlbeck, ‘The Concept of Diaspora as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Refugee Com-
munities’ JEMS, 28, no. 2 (2002), 221–38.
13
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Granta, 1991), 9.
290 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

to friends and relations’, whereas ‘here everything has to be bought’.14 Yet the evi-
dence also suggests that some refugees felt a double affiliation: Crimean Tatar de-
portees spoke of Crimea as a lost land to which they might one day return, but
nevertheless evinced a genuine attachment to Uzbekistan. Children evacuated
from Greece during the civil war spoke in adulthood of Macedonia as the ‘home-
land’, but in the same breath described feeling ‘at home’ in Hungary or East
Germany. ‘Where are you from?’ was never an innocent question, nor would it
generate a trivial response. Place was both a geographic location and a rich meta-
phor that expressed varied emotions and experiences.15
Some places became a destination for refugees from very different points of
origin. This happened in refugee camps as well as cities and countries. In Kenya,
Dadaab variously housed refugees from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. During the
1920s Armenians made their way to Lebanon where they transformed the small
settlement of Bourj Hammoud into one of Beirut’s most bustling suburbs, where
they were joined by Palestinian refugees three decades later. Tunisia was succes-
sively home to Serbian refugees during the First World War, to Algerian refugees
in the 1960s, and to refugees from Libya in 2011. Cyprus was a destination for
Armenian refugees in the 1890s and again in the 1920s, and for Jewish survivors
of the Holocaust, as well as the site of mass internal displacement following the
Turkish invasion in 1974.
The spatial consequences of displacement were poignant and sometimes ironic.
Chandigarh was an entirely new city built to accommodate refugees from Pakistan,
at the expense of the local peasantry who were displaced to help realize Le Corbusier’s
grand vision. Sosúa—a symbol of Trujillo’s cynical ‘offer’ to provide a haven for refu-
gees from Nazi Germany—is now a thriving tourist resort offering sand and sex, a
‘trans-national town’ in which local and global networks intersect. Although the
owner of the Tropix Hotel advertises himself as ‘a living example of the town’s refu-
gee history’, fewer than 10 Jewish families now remain as a tangible reminder of
the history of forced migration. Other attractions have supplanted these episodes:
‘Prepare [says the website of a major travel company] to be enchanted by the
friendly islanders, beautiful scenery and hypnotic rhythm of the merengue’.16
Refugees established a foothold in new places but also recalled the places they
left behind and invested them with meaning, ‘playing out the drama of their lives
in more than one location’.17 Memorial books, compatriot unions, visits—virtual
or otherwise—and belongings, practices and performances need to be understood
in the light of these claims upon the past and the central place that social memory
plays in the construction and reproduction of identities. They encapsulate a sense
of loss, and may also (re)store a sense of self.18 Memorial books reconstruct a history

14
Roger Zetter, ‘The Greek-Cypriot Refugees: Perceptions of Exile under Conditions of Protracted
Exile’ IMR, 28, no. 2 (1994), 307–22, at 311.
15 16
Kassem, Palestinian Women, 29. Gigliotti, ‘Acapulco in the Atlantic’, 43.
17
Lincoln, ‘Fleeing from Firestorms’, 456.
18
David Parkin, ‘Mementoes as Transitional Objects in Human Displacement’ Journal of Material
Culture, 4, no.3 (1999), 303–20.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 291

of the village, enumerate its former inhabitants and their dwelling places, and
establish an association between the displaced and their original homes. Han
Chinese refugees who fled Yunnan in 1949 recreated elaborate clan genealogies.
Websites that draw attention to Armenian sites in the Ottoman Empire as well as
Jewish memorial books testifying to life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust
are a didactic means to educate the next generation. Palestinian village books and
the books compiled by Greek Cypriot and Bosnian refugees have an overtly politi-
cal purpose, being informed by the realization that careful investment in the land
and the arduous toil of their forefathers had been dissipated. They are not mere
gazetteers, but texts that associate place with sensory perceptions—the smell of sea
breeze, the taste of lemons, or the sight of a familiar shop. These texts, like the keys
to abandoned properties, establish a claim to land that has been forfeited but might
yet be restored.
Commemoration invites us to acknowledge amnesia. Official discourses and
histories play an important part in blocking out inconvenient truths. The Russian
Revolution obliterated memories of population displacement during the 1914–17
war. Patriotic Chinese scholars were silent on the disastrous human consequences
of the decision to breach the dykes of the Yellow River in 1938. Fascist and au-
thoritarian regimes adopted the same stance: Mussolini had no wish to be re-
minded of Italy’s defeat and subsequent population displacement during the First
World War; Franco drew a veil over the displacement of civilians during the Spanish
Civil War—it was left to Spanish exiles in South America to keep the flame alive;
and the authoritarian rule of Syngman Rhee kept the school curriculum free from
any mention of the distress suffered by Korean refugees. The Gaullist myth in post-
war France found no room for official commemoration of the defeat and ‘exodus’
in 1940, let alone for the events of 1914. The Second World War was recollected
as a time of heroic resistance, not demeaning displacement; in any case, the bitter
Algerian war shifted the focus to a contemporary crisis.
Authoritarian polities tended to discourage discussion of refugee crises. In
addition to Kemalist Turkey, one thinks of Chinese refugees in Hong Kong.
Bangladesh appears reluctant to acknowledge that it was founded on population
displacement, perhaps because to address this history would be to raise difficult
questions around Bihari refugees. It took concerted effort and sometimes political
cataclysm to discuss these episodes. The deportation of non-Russian minorities in
the Stalin era only attracted publicity following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
helping to underscore the legitimacy of post-Soviet states such as Latvia and
Lithuania. A new generation in Spain began to rewrite the history of refugees as
part of a reassessment of the Franco era, encouraged by the 2007 Law on the
Recovery of Historical Memory.
Other kinds of amnesia and censorship are also at work. Refugees often excised
from history their former neighbours who had turned upon them at the moment
of displacement; their presence in the historical narrative was too disturbing. Fol-
lowing the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the neighbourliness shown by
Orthodox and Muslim villagers was rewritten as a history of mutual disdain, or
else entirely overlooked in the process of constructing the Hellenic national epic.
292 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

Hindu refugees who arrived from Pakistan in September 1947 and moved into
Muslim houses in Delhi refused to acknowledge its Muslim past; many Muslims
likewise wrote the multicultural elements of Lahore out of history. The state of Israel,
with the backing of most of its Jewish citizens, threw its weight behind attempts to
transform the landscape of Palestine leaving few traces of its erstwhile Arab inhabit-
ants. Poles who were forcibly resettled from Western Ukraine after 1945 did their
utmost to erase the German presence in the ‘recovered lands’ from which ethnic
Germans had been expelled. The displaced might think of themselves as a spectral
‘presence’, but they turned former neighbours into ghosts as well. This is about re-
writing the past for present purposes, a politics of negation and oblivion.19
However, there is a cosmopolitan stance that needs to be acknowledged too.20
Some of the commemorative work undertaken by refugees embodied a different
kind of nostalgia, an appeal to a time when neighbours lived in harmony with one
another whatever their religion or ethnicity. Elderly Greeks who found sanctuary
in the North Aegean island of Lemnos in 1922 spoke subsequently of their friend-
ships with Muslim neighbours in Smyrna. Other refugees introduced more
‘worldly’ attitudes into parochial host communities: Baltic refugees who reached
the Russian interior in 1915–16 were thought likely to introduce more modern
farming methods, drawing on a history of agricultural improvement that could be
shared with the local peasantry. Some fictional representations of pre-Partition
Indian villages described a life of pleasure and abundance that allowed for toler-
ance between people of various faiths who negotiated their difference on a daily
basis. Refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina described Sarajevo as a cosmopolitan city
where Serbs, Croats and Muslims ‘were mixed like corn and flour’ in the work-
place.21 These generous interpretations of the past challenged ultra-nationalist
dogma and projects designed to cement ineradicable difference.
Cosmopolitanism emerged also in the attitudes of relief workers. Quakers pro-
tested Allied endorsement of ‘competitive nationalism’ in Europe’s DP camps at
the end of the Second World War and urged the need for international reconcilia-
tion; Francesca Wilson looked upon the DP camp at Föhrenwald as ‘a little
UNO’.22 The Dominican priest Father Georges Pire believed that working with
these refugees afforded an opportunity to ‘surpass all the barriers that so often
cause such deep divisions amongst men. Thus men of very different backgrounds,
by uniting sincerely in a common purpose to help other men, discover in them-
selves a great similarity giving rise to understanding and mutual liking’. Pire de-
scribed how a ‘Europe du coeur’ took shape in the refugee villages he sponsored,
expressed as a brotherhood of ‘all men, working in unison in a spirit of solidarity,
serving a cause which is utterly humane and absolutely true’. This spirit had a pol-
itical component, but it transcended Cold War rivalry on behalf of a universalized
humanitarianism.23

19
Pandey, Remembering Partition, 135, 146; Rebecca Bryant, ‘Partitions of Memory’, 332–60.
20 21
Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession, 37, 283. Grouev, Bullets on the Water, 60.
22 23
Wilson, Aftermath, 124. Gatrell, Free World?, 246.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 293

One must accordingly thread into the narrative of displacement the motivation,
orientation and narratives of the numerous individuals who took upon themselves
the task of assisting and managing displaced persons in their capacity as psycholo-
gists and psychiatrists, doctors, social workers, statisticians, lawyers and engineers,
as well as military personnel, policemen and civil servants. The doctrine of inter-
vention was itself connected to the notion of rupture. That is to say, the more that
displacement was construed as ‘spontaneity’, ‘panic’ and ‘trauma’, the more it be-
hoved professional experts to introduce a necessary element of control. Interven-
tion was designed to overcome the harmful psychological consequences of
displacement and turn refugees into responsible and worthy citizens. Sometimes,
as with ‘culturally’ different refugees, this tested the patience of external aid work-
ers. Writing in 1919, a British army officer prefaced his report on the camp for
Armenian refugees at Baqubah by stating that: ‘I have had to write from know-
ledge derived from intercourse with the refugees themselves, much of which on
close examination proved to be quite unreliable’.24 It is not difficult to see how in
these circumstances relief workers were able to substitute their own impressions for
the insights of refugees.
Refugees regularly encountered humiliation and infantilization; their world
having been turned upside down already, they were subject to further kinds of
deprivation. Structures and styles of assistance that act upon rather than with the
participation of refugees had a corrosive effect: as Barbara Harrell-Bond says, ‘it is
not that refugees do not need help; they do. The problem is the kind of help they
receive, the way help is provided and the role which they are forced to assume to
get it’. She maintains that refugees were subjected to a different set of practices in
the late twentieth century compared with the 1950s, when they were supposedly
granted more autonomy. Refugee camps that are suffused with externally imposed
notions of order must bear a particular responsibility for promoting these atti-
tudes, which include judgements about ‘traumatized’, ‘untrustworthy’ and even
‘subversive’ refugees. Yet many relief workers operated with similar suppositions
throughout the twentieth century, as did the British psychiatrist who diagnosed a
young Jewish DP girl as a disturbed patient on the grounds that she combed her
hair with a broken comb and looked at herself in a broken mirror, until a Jewish
DP dentist pointed out that he might consider providing her with a decent comb
and mirror before assuming she was ill.25
The administrative constraints and legal requirements imposed on refugees
sometimes enabled engaging with the past for instrumental purposes. Refugees
caught up in the upheaval of Partition likened their circumstances to that of Jews
in Nazi Germany. Others likewise deployed historical allusion to highlight their
predicament or to demand recognition as potential citizens of the country in which

24
Lieutenant H.L. Charge, Memoranda on the Armenian and Assyrian Refugees (Baghdad: Government
Press, 1919), 10.
25
Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 20; Harrell-Bond, ‘The Experience of Refugees’, 140–3; Harrell-
Bond, ‘Can Humanitarian Work with Refugees be Humane?’ HRQ, 24, no.2 (2002), 51–85; Hyndman,
Managing Displacement, 127.
294 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

they settled. Refugees seized upon history as a means of asserting or maintaining

claims to restitution, as with ‘Partition refugees’ who claimed that their pension
entitlements were being ignored.26 Ethnic German expellees who were forced from
their homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945 asked on arrival in Austria to
be accorded preferential treatment on the grounds that ‘our parents were all citi-
zens of the former k. and k. [kaiserlich und königlich] Monarchy. Their achieve-
ments in terms of culture and patriotism should be well known to you’.27 Karen
refugees in Myanmar ascribed their persecution partly to their Christian religion,
a reminder of their history of association with the British prior to the independ-
ence of Burma in 1948. They cultivated a strong sense of ethnic identity in the
refugee camps on the Thai-Myanmar border, another indication of how displace-
ment can strengthen collective affiliation.
Refugees were allowed to speak under quite specific circumstances. An emerg-
ing oral history provides a point of departure to consider the meanings that refu-
gees attributed to their displacement and to the assumptions that were made about
‘homecoming’. How far refugees can claim the mantle of expertise for themselves
is also an important issue. Social scientists sometimes urge that refugees should be
‘subjects in their own enquiry’ rather than objects of study, but in practice scant
attention has been paid to verbal exchanges between refugees, or to those between
refugees and external agencies. Refugees are frequently required to testify in a
prescribed setting that puts pressure on them to establish a story that will carry
legal and bureaucratic credibility; at best one might describe this as a sensitive
kind of eavesdropping. Legal procedures generated a large (and largely hidden)
documentary record into which history intruded selectively.28 Whereas British
government officials betrayed a kind of amnesia about the historically close ties
between Britain and colonial Rhodesia, Zimbabwean female asylum seekers refer
to Britain’s oft-asserted claim to be a country of ‘fair play’.29 Writing refugees back
into history means asking questions about the sources at the disposal of the histor-
ian. Governments, inter-governmental organizations and NGOs left behind a
documentary record. These resources are invaluable but they are limited in scope,
and they testify to the power vested in departments of state and humanitarian
bureaucracies. Technical experts and relief workers assembled field reports, kept
diaries and wrote their memoirs, underlining the privileged stance of these eye-
witnesses.
Such first-hand testimony as is available from refugees must be interpreted care-
fully. There is an expectation on the part of immigration and asylum officers that
‘real’ refugees should tell a convincing story of the immediate circumstances of
their individual persecution. Sudanese refugees complained bitterly that ‘UNHCR

26
Kaur, ‘Distinctive Citizenship’, 437–8.
27
Tara Zahra, ‘ “Prisoners of the Postwar”: Expellees, Refugees, and Jews in Postwar Austria’ Austrian
History Yearbook, 41 (2010), 191–215, at 195.
28
Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: an Inquiry into the Condition of
Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 250–74.
29
Terence Ranger, ‘The Narratives and Counter-narratives of Zimbabwean Asylum: Female Voices’
Third World Quarterly, 26, no.3 (2005), 405–21.
 Conclusion: Refugees and their History 295

caseworkers always think that any story [we] tell during the interview is a lie’.30
Refugees and DPs who petitioned the IRO in 1947 had to demonstrate a ‘valid
objection’ to being repatriated to Eastern Europe, and thus needed to construct a
credible account for the eligibility officers. This pattern of interrogation persists.
Often the resulting accounts are brief and formulaic, because this is what the bu-
reaucratic mind requires in order to reach a decision; other aspects of their life are
of no concern. But some refugees might say little or nothing, perhaps because they
were traumatized or silenced by officials who had heard enough. Silence can also
be a kind of defiance—a deliberate refusal to confess one’s private thoughts, or a
calculated decision to wait until the time is right: ‘silence can nourish a story and
establish a communication to be patiently saved in periods of darkness until it is
able to come to light in a new and enriched form’.31 Of Vietnamese refugees who
found sanctuary in Norway it is said that ‘some cherish the past, while others leave
it to itself’. Historians need to understand why, in certain circumstances (as Virginia
Woolf once put it), ‘language runs dry’, but also how it can unleash a torrent of
claims and explanations.32
The course of population displacement in the modern era is thus complex and
contested. So too is the process of writing that history. The answer to the questions
posed here about narrating experience is that much hinges on the situation in
which refugees find themselves. Writing in 1943, Hannah Arendt described Jewish
refugees from Nazi Germany who reached France or the USA (of whom she was
one): ‘[W]e were told to forget. Apparently nobody wants to know that contem-
porary history has created a new kind of human being, the kind that are put in
concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends. Even
among ourselves we don’t speak about this past’.33 For every voice that speaks
loudly there are dozens that are suppressed. Many refugees lacked the means to
enforce their understanding of what befell them. Their voice might be muffled by
earlier vintages of refugees who claimed greater legitimacy and questioned the in-
tegrity of those who fled later on—this certainly seems to have happened among
refugees from the Spanish Civil War who settled in South America, and among
Tibetan refugees in Nepal. Where there exists the capacity for enforcement, refu-
gees may be reluctant to embrace it. Nationalist claims regularly effaced other
stories, as in the case of the young Palestinian man who loftily informed his inter-
viewer that ‘my mother told us about Palestine, but she didn’t know the plots’, an
important reminder that age and gender play an important part in framing these
narratives.34

30
Jane Kani Edward, Sudanese Women Refugees: Transformations and Future Imaginings (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 117.
31
Luisa Passerini, ‘Memories between Silence and Oblivion’, in Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah
Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: the Politics of Memory (Routledge, 2003), 238–54, at 238.
32
Knudsen, Capricious Worlds, 3; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Produc-
tion of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 22–6; Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (eds),
Shadows of War: a Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
33 34
Arendt, Jewish Writings, 265. Sayigh, ‘Palestinian Camp Women’, 42.
296 Conclusion: Refugees and their History

To focus exclusively on particular kinds of ‘plot’, such as concentrating on vic-

timization and deprivation is to miss important features of refugee resourcefulness.
Another way of putting this is to say that there needs to be a history of refugee
activism, whether it be petitioning, hustling, self-defence or other forms of expres-
sion. Vietnamese refugees made every attempt to circumvent restrictions on their
departure from Vietnam and to survive in sanctuaries that turned out to be hostile.
Umutesi’s memoir of her arduous trek to Zaire in the aftermath of the genocide in
1994 testifies to the capabilities of female refugees, without minimizing the depriv-
ation and dangers they faced. Where male adult ‘breadwinners’ were killed or fled,
women assumed positions of responsibility as head of the household or as inde-
pendent economic actors. Women’s groups in refugee camps as well as women’s
contributions to the work of NGOs have been important hallmarks of change.
History invites us to spot these different identities and tactics, and to open up a
discussion of contexts and views. It may not be the history we wish to hear. For
some refugees, it is as if ‘history had seized centre stage’, as though ‘the events of
violence are not past, that they have the potential of becoming alive any moment’.35
That potential can be troubling when history becomes part of the armoury of
mutual incomprehension or provokes a wish for vengeance, whether in Eastern
Anatolia in 1915, Rwanda and Burundi after 1972, Kosovo in the 1990s, or among
nationalist politicians in India’s BJP whose uncompromising stance reflects their
background as Partition-era refugees, where ‘the victims of today are potentially
the aggressors of tomorrow’.36
We cannot nor should we strive for a final resolution of all the questions posed
by a history of displacement. It is best to contemplate instead what is at stake in
maintaining an ongoing conversation, even if this is a dialogue between unequals.
Time and again, the terms of the conversation are set not by rank and file refugees
but by those who speak and act on their behalf and whose programmes dominate
the institutional record. No matter how good their intentions, the appropriation
of refugee experience is deeply ironic. Refugees have usually lost enough as it is:
must they also forfeit the right to speak for themselves? Does it matter that they
offer contrasting perspectives, like the Vietnamese refugee who proclaimed, ‘who
I am is who I was, and not who I have become’, whereas a female refugee in South
Sudan took the opposite stance, saying ‘now I can think of what to do in this
world’? How can they be enabled to speak out, even if this risks reviving disputes
and confrontations that gave rise to displacement in the first instance? My hope is
that an informed critical history will enrich that conversation and contribute to
dissolving the malign manifestations of refugeedom in the modern world.

35
Quotations from Malkki, Purity and Exile, 53; Veena Das (ed.), Remaking a World: Violence,
Social Suffering and Recovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xx.
36
Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, 223.
 Further Reading

If asked to name a handful of books that have inspired me, I would begin with the work of
anthropologists. John C. Knudsen, Capricious Worlds: Vietnamese Life Journeys (Transaction
Publishers, 2005) is a moving reflection on the experiences of Vietnamese refugees in Hong
Kong and Norway. Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees
(Oxford University Press, 1986) and Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and
National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago University Press, 1995)
helped change the way we think about the world of the refugee camp and about refugees in
general. Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans
(Princeton University Press, 2003) is far more than a ‘regional’ study. The late Peter Loizos
wrote a think-piece, ‘Misconceiving refugees?’ in Renos Papadopoulos (ed.), Therapeutic
Care for Refugees: No Place Like Home (Karnac Books, 2002) that encapsulated a lifetime of
reflection on displacement, particularly in Cyprus. To these should be added Gadi Ben-
Ezer, The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus: Narratives of the Migration Journey to Israel 1977–1985
(Routledge, 2002).
Historians of refugee crises in Europe and their aftermath are indebted to pioneering works
by John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (Oxford University Press,
1939) and Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford University Press, 2002) both strong on institutional responses, and Eugene
Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1948), an unsurpassed study of demography and politics. A model study of an
intertwined history is Maud S. Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews
in Twentieth-Century France (Duke University Press, 2003). On the Ottoman Empire and
Turkey, I recommend Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State
in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–50 (Oxford University Press, 2011); for Russia see Peter Gatrell,
A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Indiana University Press,
1999). There is a rich literature on the Greek-Turkish population exchange. The essays in
Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: an Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population
Exchange between Greece and Turkey (Berghahn, 2003) are a good starting-point.
Among recent histories of post-war displacement, refugee relief and resettlement, see Anna
Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar
Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2011), and Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s
Displaced Persons in the Post-War Order (Oxford University Press, 2012). On Jewish refugees
in Germany I recommend Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope:
Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany (Northwestern University Press,
2001).
There is much to be learned about the geopolitical origins of refugee crises beyond Europe
from the path-breaking book by political scientists Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and
Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World
(Oxford University Press, 1989). Essential for understanding the international refugee
regime are Claudena Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: the Emergence of a Regime (Clare-
ndon Press, 1995) and Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs
298 Further Reading
européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Publications de la Sorbonne,
2003) for the inter-war period, and Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: a Perilous
Path (Oxford University Press, 2001) for the UNHCR era. Fiona Terry, Condemned to
Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Cornell University Press, 2002) is a thought-
ful and wide-ranging study of post-Cold War practices. The archives of the League of
Nations and UNHCR are an extraordinary treasure trove. The history of refugee relief as
seen through the lens of NGOs is still to be written.
Some of the richest literature on population displacement comes from studies of Palestinian
refugees. Top of my list are Edward Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
(Faber, 1986) and Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (Bloomsbury, 2004). A good over-
view is Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge
University Press, 2011). Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee
Camps (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and Susan Slyomovics, Object of Memory:
Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) are in-
sightful; so, too, are numerous articles by Rosemary Sayigh and Ilana Feldman.
Two very different but equally illuminating books on the Indian sub-continent are Urvashi
Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Hurst & Co., 2000), a
landmark study, and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making
of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, and Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007).
The historiography is rich and growing all the time. A good summary is Ian Talbot and
Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
The Japanese invasion of China has lately been the subject of three books: a masterly over-
view by Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation,
1937–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and specialized studies by Stephen
MacKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (University of
California Press, 2008), and R. Keith Schoppa, In a Sea of Bitterness: Refugees during the
Sino-Japanese War (Harvard University Press, 2011). There is as yet nothing comparable on
Vietnam, Korea or Cambodia. On Hong Kong in the wake of the Chinese revolution in
1949 we await the publication of an excellent doctoral dissertation by Laura Madokoro.
Meanwhile there is Yuk Wah Chan (ed.), The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the
Boat People (Routledge, 2011).
On sub-Saharan Africa, in addition to Liisa Malkki’s work, I learned a lot from the memoir
by Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: the Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in
Zaire (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and the essays in Tim Allen and Hubert Mor-
sink (eds), When Refugees Go Home: African Experiences (UNRISD/James Currey, 1994),
particularly Terence Ranger’s reflections on social history.
From the voluminous literature on diaspora and transnationalism, I would single out Aihwa
Ong, Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (University of California
Press, 2003). The implications of the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe
are spelled out by Pamela Ballinger (see earlier in this section), Greta Uehling, Beyond
Memory: the Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Return (Palgrave, 2004) and Loring
M. Danforth and Riki van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the
Politics of Memory (Chicago University Press, 2011).
Finally, several websites contain valuable material, including documents, maps, photo-
graphs and personal testimony. For UNHCR see <http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/
home>. For academic activity, see the website of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of
 Further Reading 299
Oxford, <http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/>. For specific situations monitored by Human Rights
Watch, go to <http://www.hrw.org/en/category/topic/refugees>. A UK perspective is pro-
vided by the Information Centre for Asylum and Refugees, at <http://www.icar.org.uk/
index.html>. A new Refugee Archives and History Group has been established by Paul
Dudman at the University of East London. For details see <http://refugeearchiveshistory.
wordpress.com/>.
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 Index

Abkhazia 261 Armenian refugees 3, 5, 20, 31, 37, 42, 49, 56,
Abu Ali, Mustafa 139 59–62 passim, 93, 96, 136, 285, 286,
Achebe, Chinua 227 290, 293
Acre 127 Assyrians 31, 49, 56, 61, 80
Adams, John 146 asylum, claims and rhetoric 1, 6, 53, 200, 204,
Aden 223 210, 220, 244, 251, 255, 265, 279, 294
Afghanistan 10, 199, 253 Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal) 25, 54, 70
Afghan refugees 255–9 Athens 63, 67, 166
repatriation of 256 Atholl, Katharine, Countess of 74
Soviet invasion 255 Attlee, Clement 124
African Union 244 Australia 110, 186, 210, 218, 221, 255
AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) Austria 4, 112, 294
109, 129, 130, 137–8, 185, 207 Austria-Hungary, see Habsburg Empire
al-Ali, Naji 140–1, 146 Ayn al-Zaytun 125
al-Arif, Arif 119 Ayn Hawd (Ein Houd) 142
al-Husseini, Jumana 141 Azerbaijan 254, 259, 261
Albania 29, 40, 111, 262, 264
Alden, Percy 40 Bachmanis, Kristaps 43
Aleppo 59, 62 Baku 48
Alexander, Horace 161, 162, 165 Balfour, Arthur 120
Algeria 73, 200, 227–8, 291 Balkan Wars 18, 19, 24, 62
Front de Libération Nationale 229 and refugees 23
refugees from 227–9, 244 Baluba, as refugees 226
and Sahrawi refugees 228, 229 Baluchistan 257
Aliens Restriction Act, 1914 34 Ban Vinai 212, 217
Allan, Diana 139, 145 Bandera, Stepan 101
Alsace-Lorraine 91 Bangladesh 148, 170, 204, 291
American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Biharis, persecuted in 171–2, 291
Refugees 191 refugees from 148, 170–1, 286
American Relief Administration 40 relief operations 171
American Relief for Korea 185 Baqubah 61, 80, 288, 293
Amieva, Celso 76 Baracco, Antonio 106
Amman 135, 143 Barcelona 73
Amritsar 151, 153, 163, 173, 174 Barghouti, Mourid 118, 132, 139, 141,
Anand, Balwant 173–4 146, 287
Anatolia 18, 22, 23, 24, 59, 285 Barre, Mohamed Siad 224, 230, 241
Muslim refugees settled in 18, 23, 25, 31, Barrow, Florence 40, 58
63, 287 Barthes, Roland 10
Andaman Islands 163, 174 Bartolí, Josep 73
Anderson, Per Olow 129 Basque refugees 73, 75, 76
Anglo-Hellenic League 24 Beirut 119, 136, 137, 139, 140, 288, 290
Angola 224, 226 Belarus 89
Arendt, Hannah 77, 90, 95, 101, 121, 295 Belarusian refugees 42–3
Argelès 73, 76, 288 Belgaum refugee camp 57
Argentina 75, 110, 288 Belgian War Refugees Committee 32–33, 36, 40
Armenia Belgium 19, 25, 89, 100, 110, 115
genocide 3, 30–1, 59 colonial rule 19, 46, 55, 226, 227, 233, 233
Ottoman administration of 18, 22 refugees in the First World War 19, 26,
post-Soviet 1, 254, 259, 261, 270 32–3, 34, 35–3, 38–9, 40, 47, 49–50,
Soviet Armenia 59, 60, 61, 79, 96 75, 107
see also diaspora, Armenian; Nagorno-Karabagh refugees in the Second World War
Armenian General Benevolent Union 59 77–78
Armenian genocide 3, 30–1, 59 Belgrade 40
302 Index
Bell, Colin 180 Catholic Relief Services 87, 156, 184, 195,
Beneš, Edvard 92 206, 207, 214, 238
BenEzer, Gadi 248, 271 Central African Republic 227, 237
Ben-Gurion, David 122 Central Asia 43, 74, 254, 258, 260, 267, 268,
Bergman, Ingrid 105 269, 271; see also Kazakhstan,
Bermuda Conference 95 Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan
Bharatiya Janata Party 172, 174, Chad 224, 226, 229, 239, 244, 250
176, 296 Chagall, Marc 140
Bhopal 194 Chandigarh 165–66, 172, 290
Bhutan 280 Chatterji, Joya 160
refugees 1, 190, 253, 280 Chechnya 22, 92, 254, 260, 261
Biafra 227 deportations from 269
Bihari refugees, see Bangladesh Chile 136
Birbili, Maria 68 China 5, 10, 114, 179, 189, 190, 207–8, 291
Black, Robert 187–8 civil war 180–1
Blum, Léon 73 Communist Party 182, 190
Bogen, Boris 58 Japanese invasion and internal population
Bombay (Mumbai) 57, 156, 158, 159 displacement 4, 85, 178, 181
Bosnia-Herzegovina 21, 23, 200, 262, 264 Jewish refugees in 120
pre-1914 refugees 21, 23 refugees from 12, 179, 186–90, 290
Bosnian Muslim (‘Bosniak’) refugees in revolution 4, 179
1990s 262, 264–6 passim, 272, 273, Russian refugees in 56–7
288, 292 see also Hong Kong; Tibet
and Muslim relief organizations 259, 265 Choedon, Sonam 193–4
Botswana 225, 243, 249 Choudhury, Supriya 175
Bourke-White, Margaret 10, 150 Chowdhury, Jogen 172
Bryce, James 24, 61 Chowdhury, Namita 165
Buduburam 242 Christian Aid 109
Bujurova, Lilia 269 Church Missionary Society 129, 131
Bukovina 27, 30, 45 Church World Service 162, 238
Bulgaria 23, 24, 55, 111 Churchill, Winston 92
refugees 21, 23–24, 62–3, 70 Chushi Gangdrug 191, 193
Turks expelled from 92–3 Cinecittà 106
Burdett-Coutts, Angela 24 Circassians 21, 22, 23, 270
Burma (Myanmar) 178, 179, 189, 203–4 Clark, Hilda 40
Karen refugees 222, 294 Clift, Montgomery 106
Rohingya refugees 203–4 Cobb, Richard 78
Burundi 12, 231, 233, 234, 246, 287 Cocteau, Jean 114
refugees from 233–4, 245, 247, 250 Cold War 7, 86, 87, 90, 99, 107, 109, 111,
refugees in 233 116, 179, 191, 195, 199–200, 204,
Butalia, Urvashi 168, 169 221, 292
Buxton, Charles and Noel Roden 24, 36 and ‘escapees’ from communism 97, 109, 112
Comité Inter-Mouvements Auprès de Evacués
Calcutta 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 165, 166, (CIMADE) 228
167, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176 Congo, Democratic Republic of 235
Cambodia 5, 7, 203, 206, 216 Congolese refugees 10–11, 226
Khmer rule in 203, 213 Constantinople 23, 56, 57
refugees from 203, 213–16, 218 Corfu 29, 63
Vietnamese invasion of 203, 213 Corsica 40
Cameroon 227, 251 Côte d’Ivoire 249
Canada 110, 186, 210 Creighton, Lucy 37
Capa, Robert 10 Crete 68
Caporetto 27, 48 Crimean Tatars 12, 21, 92, 254, 267, 268, 269,
CARE 40, 87, 104, 109, 113, 171, 206, 242, 287, 290
250, 259 Crimean War 21
Carrington-Wilde, Gertrude 37 Croatia 21, 261, 262, 265, 266, 270, 274
Cartier-Bresson, Henri 150 refugees 261, 264, 266, 270, 272
Casals, Pablo 80 Cuba 2, 224
Catholic Church 112, 188–9, 227 Curzon, Lord 4, 64
 Index 303
Cushman, Emma 61 Displaced Persons (DPs) 4, 7, 90, 94–107 passim,
Cyprus 60, 124, 202 110, 114, 115, 205, 210, 254, 259, 271
Armenian refugees in 59, 60, 286 and ‘apathy’ 100, 104–5, 116, 242
Turkish invasion in 1974: 12, 253, 276 definition of 94–5, 108
refugees displaced by 276–8, 289, 290 Estonian 97, 103, 105
Czechoslovakia 53, 253 ‘hard core’ 91, 113, 114
population expulsions from 4, 85, 90, Jewish 97, 110, 116, 117,
92, 294 120–24, 293
Latvian 97, 102, 116, 285–6
Dadaab 242, 250, 251, 290 Lithuanian 4, 97, 100, 102
Dalai Lama 190, 191, 193, 194 Polish 4, 97, 100, 110
Dalrymple, James 271 repatriation of 95–7, 98
Dandakaranya Development Authority Ukrainian 4, 97, 99, 101
162–3, 171 see also DP camps; European Volunteer
Daniel, E. Valentine 279 Workers; UNRRA; World Refugee Year
Ðạo, Trần Trung 222 Dobrudja 23
Dar-es-Salaam 233, 247 Dominican Republic 114, 120
Darfur 224, 237, 239, 244 DP camps 87–8, 91, 94, 95, 98–103 passim,
‘dark tourism’ 219 122–3, 183, 209
Darwish, Mahmoud 118, 119, 144 cultural and educational activities 87–8, 100,
Dashnaks 60, 79 103, 123
Dayton Accords 262, 265 Föhrenwald 123, 292
Debussy, Claude 38 Landsberg 123
decolonization and population displacement 5, Maczków (Haren) 100
85, 125, 153, 178, 199, 201, 205, 223, Mannheim 116
225, 227–8, 250 political activity inside 99, 102
Dehlavi, Shahid Ahmad 173 Stadl Pura 103
Deir Yassin (Givat Shaul) 125, 142 Wildflecken 106, 288
Delhi 150, 151, 156, 159, 165, 166, 172, Dubrovnik 23
173, 174 ‘durable solutions’, see ‘development’;
De Gaulle, Charles 229 ‘integration’; repatriation; resettlement;
de Mello, Sergio Vieira 215, 216 UNHCR
Deng, Valentino Achak 240–1
de Pol, Lluís Ferran 73 East Pakistan 150, 154, 155, 158, 162, 164,
‘development’, doctrine of 20, 66, 87, 135, 167, 169–70, 177; see also Bangladesh
159–66 passim, 180, 201, 206, 225, Ede 34
226, 228, 233, 245 Egypt 125, 128, 129–30, 133, 139, 144, 232,
Dey, S. K. 165 239, 247
Dhaka 170, 171, 175 refugees from Sudan 224, 239, 240
Dharamsala 192–3, 194, 288 Ein Hod, see Ayn Hawd
diaspora 12, 19, 20, 54–55, 91, 96, 100–101, Einstein, Albert 108
108, 112, 166, 270, 288–9 Erevan 59, 261
Armenian 45, 61, 96, 261, 270 Eritrea 223, 224, 230, 231
Chinese 182 refugees from 11, 202, 230, 231, 238, 242,
divisions within 101 244, 245
Eritrean 230 Eritrean Liberation Front 224
Greek 254, 275 ‘escapees’, see Cold War
Hmong 212–13 Ethiopia 5, 224, 231, 232, 238, 239,
Jewish 45–6, 77, 119, 138, 145 240, 241
Kurdish 288–9 famine 230, 238
Latvian 271 refugees from 202, 230, 238, 244, 246,
Palestinian 119, 145 251–2, 287
Polish 45 refugees in 224, 237, 239, 240–1
Tamil 279–80 revolution 224, 230, 231
Tibetan 193–4, 219–20 Ethiopian Jews 247–9, 289
Ukrainian 100–1, 270 ‘ethnic cleansing’ 21, 200, 274, 276, 282
Vietnamese 205, 219 European Volunteer Workers 102, 110–11, 286
Diem, Ngo Dinh 206 Evelyn Oldfield Unit 202, 281
Dillon, E. J. 24 Evian Conference 77
304 Index
Fairbanks, Douglas 185 Greece 21, 23, 53–4, 55, 111
Faridabad 165 Civil War 79, 90, 275–6, 289
Fazzini, Alixandra 10 Communist Party 69, 79, 90
Feldman, Ilana 134–5 population exchange (1923) 4, 19, 62–72
Finland 52, 254 passim, 86, 289, 291, 292
First World War 3, 17–18, 25–51 passim, 75, see also Balkan Wars
120, 182 Greek Refugee Settlement Commission 64,
aftermath 4, 5, 19, 52–3 66–67
Flynn, Moya 260 Grossman, David 146
Food and Agriculture Organisation 113 Grossmann, Atina 123
Ford Foundation 109 Grünfeld, Sophie 45
France 7, 34, 55, 56, 73, 77–78, 114, 205, Guangdong 189
208, 288 Guantanamo Bay 2, 257
Armenian refugees in 61 Guilin 182
French refugees during the First World Gujral, Satish 172
War 26 Gula, Sharbat 10
French refugees during the Second World Gulf War 210, 258
War 286, 291 Gusovskii, Edward 267–8
refugees from the Spanish Civil War 73–4,
75–6, 107–8 Habash, George 135
Serbian refugees in 29, 36, 48 Habsburg Empire 21, 26–7, 29
see also Algeria refugees in 27, 30
Franco, General 3, 72, 73, 74, 76, 288, 291 Habyarimana, Juvénal 234
Free China Relief Association 190 Haifa 127, 131, 142
Freeman, E. A. 24 Haiti 2
French Guiana 212 Harbin 56, 57
Friuli 27 Harding, Jeremy 255
Fry, Ruth 26, 39, 47 Hardy, Bert 10
Harmsworth, Cecil 56
Galicia 25, 27, 30, 41, 45, 47, 92, 97 Harrell-Bond, Barbara 293
Gandhi, Indira 170 Harrison, Earl G. 122–3
Gandhi, Mahatma 194 Haverfield, Evelina 40
Gaza 125, 128, 129–30, 131, 133, 134–5, 140, Hazebrouck 50
145; see also Palestinian refugees Herero uprising 226
Geldard-Brown, Mabel 103 Heritage Lottery Fund 219
Georgia 260, 261 Heymont, Irving 123
Germany 4, 25, 26, 27, 33, 34, 46, 55, 78, 94, Hezb-e Islami 259
123, 130, 135, 184, 226, 254 Hill, Christopher 74
refugees from former Yugoslavia 253 Hilton, James 192
Ghana 242, 249 Hirschon, Renée
Ghatak, Ritwik 175 Hitler, Adolf 4, 89, 90, 106
Ghosh, Nimai 175 Hmong refugees 204, 212–13, 217, 220
Gladstone, William 24 Holborn, Louise 102, 111, 201
Goba, Alfreds 48 Homeless European Land Program
Goedhart, Gerrit Jan van Heuven 92 (HELP) 113
Goldmanis, Jānis 42 Hongjun, Wang 186
Goma 10 Hong Kong 7, 180, 186–7, 188, 211
Gomułka, Władysław 92 Chinese refugees in 12, 88, 186–90
Gorbachev, Mikhail 255 Hong Kong Christian Service 209
Grantham, Alexander 187 Vietnamese refugees in 208, 211
Great Britain 7, 56, 100, 108, 187, 255 Hoover, Herbert 40
colonial rule and officialdom 57, 61, 64, 80, Hosseini, Seyyed ‘Asef 257
85, 119, 121, 138, 148, 160, 174, 178, Huanglongshan Project 181
203, 226, 230, 237 Huguenots 2, 177
and refugees Hulme, Kathryn 106
First World War 19, 32–3 passim, 46, 107 human rights, and refugees 77, 79, 115, 116,
Second World War and aftermath 78, 97, 204, 228, 260
100, 110, 122, 124 humanitarianism, see NGOs and humanitarian
from Spain 74–5 relief
 Index 305
Hungary 111, 113, 275 Ireland 32, 52
refugees after the First World War 53 Islamabad 272
uprising in 1956, and refugees 111–13, Islamic Relief 259
253, 285 İsmet Paşa 70
see also Austria-Hungary Israel 128, 137, 248, 249, 289
Husain, Intizar 173 creation of 124–5
Hutu refugees 234, 235, 241, 245, 246, 247, invasion of Lebanon 137
250, 251, 287, 289 policies towards Palestinian refugees 127,
Huxley, Aldous 73 132, 135, 292
and Six-Day War 119, 128, 135
India 10, 57, 148, 158, 160, 163, 179, see also diaspora, Jewish; Ethiopian Jews;
191–2, 193 JDC; Zionism
refugees from Bangladesh 170–2 Issa, Mahmoud 133, 143
Partition 86, 88, 148–9, 150–55, 288 Italy 12, 106, 110, 115, 288
refugees resulting from Partition 7, 149, colonial possessions 90, 223, 227,
150–59 passim, 167, 285, 286, 287, 229–30, 273
289, 292, 293–4 refugees during the First World War 26–7,
cultural representations of 166–9, 174–6 33–4
Dalits 176 see also Julian Marches
government regulation of 154, 155, 157–8 Izmit 72
petitions 158–9
political activities 160–1 Jabra, Ibrahim 138
refugee camps 150, 156, 157, 160, 161, Jacir, Emily 141
164–5, 167, 170, 176 Jackson, Michael 251
‘rehabilitation’ and development 149, Jackson, Robert 171
155, 157, 165, 167 Jaipur 159
squatter colonies 155, 159–60, 165, James, Wendy 252
174, 176 Jami’at al Islam 143, 156
Sikhs 150–1, 153, 156, 164, 168, 169, 172, Janco, Marcel 142
174, 286 Japan 85, 161, 175, 178
see also Bangladesh; Bharatiya Janata Party; occupation of China 178, 180–1, 186
Kashmir; Pakistan; Tibetan refugees occupation of Korea 55, 85, 178
Indonesia 179, 204, 211, 219, 222, 291 JDC (American Jewish Joint Distribution
Inglis, Elsie 36 Committee) 45, 58, 77, 87, 109, 124
integration, as a ‘durable solution’ 7, 87, 91, Jebb, Eglantyne 24
94, 102, 113, 115, 136, 189, 192, 195, Jeppe, Karen 62
200, 225, 250, 277 Jewish refugees
Interahamwe 235 in Afghanistan 258
Intergovernmental Committee on European in the First World War 30, 32, 42, 44–5, 47
Migration (ICEM) 86, 109, 110 from Iraq 128
International Conference on Assistance to attempts to leave Nazi Germany 19–20, 21,
Refugees in Africa (ICARA) 245 40, 77, 81, 230, 295
internal displacement and IDPs 2, 6, 26, 57, during the Second World War 92
87, 118, 145, 180, 181, 185, 206, 213, after the Second World War 120–4 passim,
259, 265, 277 128, 129, 142, 143
International Catholic Migration see also DP camps; Ethiopian Jews
Commission 210 Jewish relief, see JDC
International Committee for the Relief of Jews
Turkish Refugees 24 in Eastern Europe 58, 123
International Committee of the Red Cross in France 78
(ICRC) 55, 129, 157, 171, 183, 214, 259 and the Holocaust 12, 89–90, 115, 120,
International Refugee Organisation 86, 90, 97, 124, 138, 140, 289
105, 107–8, 111, 113, 130, 179, 183, 295 in Nazi Germany 3, 89
International Rescue Committee 205, 241 see also diaspora, Jewish; Israel; Zionism
Iran 258 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 151, 155, 157
Afghan refugees in 256–7 Jordan 23, 125, 131, 133, 135
Iraq 61, 128, 256, 258 Palestinian refugees in 125, 128, 135, 136
refugees in 258–9 Julian Marches (Italian-Yugoslav
Irby, Pauline 23 borderlands) 254, 273
306 Index
Kabila, Laurent 235 Lausanne, Treaty (1923) 4, 54, 64, 86
Kakogiannis, Mihalis 278 Le Corbusier 165–6, 290
Kakuma 231, 240–1, 242, 247 League of Nations 6, 19
Kanaana, Sharif 142 Mandates system 4, 60, 121
Kanafani, Ghassan 139, 140 and refugees 53–4, 61, 62–3, 64, 77, 109
Kanaropúlu, Marika 68 League of Red Cross Societies 129, 207
Kancher, Eugene 43 Lebanon 23, 137
Karachi 156, 159, 163, 166, 168 Armenian refugees in 59, 60, 290
Karadžić, Radovan 262 Palestinian refugees in 125, 127, 128, 132,
Karelians 254–5 133, 136–7, 139, 141, 143, 144,
Karen refugees 222, 294 145, 290
Karmi, Ghada 139, 143 Lemnos 57
Kashmir 155, 156 Liberia 242, 244
Kazakhstan 267, 268 Libya 290
Kazan 38 Lindt, Auguste 114
Kazemi, Mohamed Kazem 256–7 Lithuania 39, 58
Kaye, Danny 142 Lithuanian refugees
Kazantzakis, Nikos 68 First World War and aftermath 42, 43, 57, 58
Keeny, Spurgeon 40 see also Displaced Persons, Lithuanian
Kemal, Mustafa, see Atatürk Lotshampa 280
Kenya 224, 226, 230, 239, 240, 242, 245, 250, Lubya 143
252, 290 Lugard, Flora 32
Khao-I-Dang 214, 215 Lutheran World Federation 109, 184, 228,
Khaled, Samir 138 243, 245
Khan, Ayub 164 Lutheran World Relief 162, 206, 207, 238
Khan, Liaquat Ali 149, 155, 156 Lutheran World Service 171
Khan, Yasmin 162 L’viv 64
Khouri, Ellen Kettaneh 138 Lydda 129
Kielce pogrom 123 Lyon 36
Kigoma 247
Kiryandongo 242 McCurry, Steve 10
Kokkinia 67 McDonald, James G. 77
Korea Association of Voluntary Agencies 184 Macao 191
Korean War 10, 179, 182–3, 184 Macedonia 70, 79, 254
population displacement 179, 182–5 passim, before 1914 22, 23
218, 291 and Greek civil war 90
refugee camps 183 inter-war 62, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71
see also South Korea; United Nations Korean post-1989 264, 271, 275, 276, 290
Reconstruction Agency Macedonian Relief Committee 24
Kosovo 27, 262, 264, 266, 271, 296 Machado, Antonio 76
Kosovo Liberation Army 264 Mackenzie, Georgina 23
refugees from 262, 264, 265 MacPhail, Katharine 40
Krajina, Republic of 261, 262 Malawi 288
Kulischer, Eugene 109–10 Malaysia 204, 208, 219
Kunsan 185 Malkki, Liisa 41
Kurds 3, 22, 31, 70, 202, 258 Mansour, Suleiman 140
Kurukshetra 156, 165, 176, 288 Manto, Saadat Hasan 173
Kuwait 135, 140 ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion 226
Kyrgyzstan 260 Mardiganian, Aurora 62
Marseille 61
Lahore 150, 159, 163, 164, 165, 169, 172, Marx Brothers 142
173, 176, 289 Maryknoll Sisters 188
Lange, Hope 113 Massey, Doreen 281
Laos 203, 206, 212, 213, 217 Matulionis, Jonas 102
Latvia 39, 271 Médecins sans Frontières 208, 227, 241,
Latvian refugees 259, 265
First World War and aftermath 38, 42, 43, memorial books 12, 142–3, 190, 270, 273,
47, 57, 58 290–1; see also refugees and
see also Displaced Persons, Latvian commemoration
 Index 307
Mengistu, Hailemariam 224, 230, 231, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 7–8,
247, 252 20, 87, 105, 116, 183–4, 201–2, 225,
Mennonites 72, 243 228, 284
Menon, Ritu 168 humanitarian relief 8, 9, 20, 23–4, 40, 58,
Mexico 75 182, 293
minorities, and Afghan refugees 259
vulnerability 18–19, 49, 53, 58 before 1914 24
Minsk 38 during the First World War 19, 26,
Mishamo 233, 246, 288 32–35, 37, 39, 40
Mohamed, Nadifa 223 Indian sub-continent 150, 155–9
Mohr, Jean 139 inter-war Europe 54, 61
Montenegro 23, 29 and Palestinian refugees 129, 131, 135
Moon, Penderel 150 in South-East Asia 180, 189, 204, 207,
Moorehead, Caroline 11 214–15, 217, 221
Morgan, Frederick 123–4 sub-Saharan Africa 233, 235, 238,
Morgenthau, Henry 64, 66, 80 242, 250
Morocco 228, 229 post-1945 Europe 107
and refugees from Algeria 228, 244 see also AFSC; CARE; Catholic Relief
see also Sahrawi refugees Services; Christian Aid; ICRC; Islamic
Morris, Benny 125 Relief; JDC; Lutheran World Relief;
Morrison, Samuel 131 Near East Relief; Oxfam; Quakers;
Moscow 42, 44, 45 Red Cross; Save the Children Fund;
Mountbatten, Edwina 157 UNHCR; World Vision
Mouravieff, Madame 57 Norfolk, Simon 10
Mozambique 224, 225, 226, 243, 244, 249, Northcote, Dudley 61, 80
251, 288 Norway 110, 114, 295
Mugunga 10 Nunspeet 34
Müller, Anita 31 Nyerere, Julius 232
Murdoch, Iris 106
Murphy, Eddie 251 Obote, Milton 235
Murphy, H. B. M. 104–5 Ogaden 241, 242
Murray, Don 113 Office of the United Nations High Commis-
Mussolini, Benito 48, 223, 275, 291 sioner for Refugees, see UNHCR
Mwana-uta, Susanna 224 Ong, Aihwa 9, 215
Myanmar, see Burma Organisation of African Unity 6, 244
Oslo Accords 144
Nablus 136 Ottoman Empire 3, 4, 18, 21, 23–5, 30–1,
Nagorno-Karabagh 254, 261 53, 62
Nakba 118, 119, 137, 138, 140, 144–6 passim, Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and
287; see also Palestinian refugees Immigrants 25
Namibia 226 see also Anatolia; Armenia; Turkey
Nansen, Fridtjof 55–6, 57, 59, Oxfam 10, 171, 202, 214
63, 201
Nansen passport 56 Paget, Muriel 36–7, 39
Narem, Marcy 240 Pakistan 148, 150, 163, 169, 172,
Nasir Bagh 10 257, 259
Nasser, Gamel Abdul 129 Afghan refugees in 257–8
National Catholic Welfare Conference 109 Muhajir Qaumi Movement 156, 176
NATO 253, 262, 264 Muslim League support for 151, 153
Nazım, Mehmed 25 refugees in 155–6, 157, 163–4, 289
NDiaye, Marie 223 camps 155, 156
Near East Relief 54, 77, 129 development projects 164, 166
Nehru, Jawaharlal 149, 154, 155, 157, 158, see also Bangladesh; India
162, 165, 166, 192 Palawan 216, 222
Nepal 179, 191, 192, 280 Pale of Jewish Settlement 44
Netherlands 26, 34, 227 Palestine, revolt in 1936 121, 138
Nguyen, Nathalie 218 Palestine Liberation Front 146
Nigeria 227 Palestinian Film Archive 139
Nilokheri 162, 165 Palestinian Liberation Organization 136
308 Index
Palestinian refugees 1, 7, 12, 88, 118–20, First World War 20, 26, 40
124–47 passim, 258, 286, 287, 289 in the Indian sub-continent 156
cultural creativity 139–41 and Korean refugees 185
engagement with history 118–19, 138, and Palestinian refugees 129, 130, 135,
143–45, 204–5, 295 137, 143
as ‘hard core’ 138 see also AFSC
in refugee camps 133, 134, 136, 143, 144
return, aspirations of 119, 127, 133, 135–6, Rabin, Yitzhak 146
138, 141, 144 Radcliffe, Cyril 149, 151
status of 130 Ramallah 133, 134, 141, 143
villages, abandoned and destroyed 125, 141–2 Rankin, fashion photographer 10–11
see also Gaza; Jordan; Lebanon; Nakba; Syria; Rao, U. Bhaskar 167
UNRWA; West Bank rape 62, 125, 156, 168, 170, 208, 239,
Partition, see under India 252, 262
Pašić, Nikola 41 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 156, 169
Pate, Maurice 40 Rathbone, Eleanor 74, 120
Paulos, Birhani 231 Rawalpindi 151, 172
Peel Commission 121 Ray, Manas. 174
Peteet, Julie 132 Ražnatović, Željko (aka ‘Arkan’) 262
Petrograd 36, 42, 44, 45 rebetika music 67–8, 190
Philippines 210, 211, 216 Red Crescent 259
photographs and photography 10, 36, 104–5, Malaysian 204, 219
114–15, 129, 139, 142, 150, 165, 167, Turkish 64
171, 219, 258, 270, 274 Red Cross 20, 66, 129, 171, 265
Pickard, Bertram 85 American 34, 57, 63, 64
Pierce, Bob 184 British 36, 37, 40, 63, 157
Pinsk 58 Chinese 181, 182
Piraeus 67, 69, 72, 289 Hong Kong 209
Pire, Georges 40, 292 Italian 34
Pol Pot 5, 213, 217, 221 Korean
Poland 42, 55, 58, 268 Nepalese 191
population expulsions 4, 85, 90, 92, 292, 294 Russian 57
Polish refugees see also International Committee of the Red
First World War and aftermath 41, 42, 49, Cross
57, 58 Red Swastika Society 181
Pontic Greeks 64, 68–9, 79 Refugee Action 219
Popular Front for the Liberation of refugee camps 1, 9, 49, 114, 281, 290, 293, 296
Palestine 135, 140 First World War 29, 32, 34, 37, 45
population transfers and expulsions inter-war 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 64, 73, 76, 80
criticised 79, 85 former Yugoslavia 264, 265
Germans, expelled from Czechoslovakia and Hungarian refugees in 112
Poland 4, 85, 90, 94, 292, 294 post-1945 Europe, see DP camps
Greek-Turkish population exchange 4, Middle East 133, 134, 136, 139
62–72 passim, 86, 121, 289 South Asia 150, 156, 157, 167, 170, 257,
in Palestine 121–22 258, 259, 279
between Poland and Ukraine 85, 92 South-East Asia 120, 182, 204, 205, 212,
between Bulgaria and Turkey 23 214, 294
see also Lausanne, Treaty of Sub-Saharan Africa 225, 229, 232, 235, 238,
Portugal 224, 226 241–3, 246, 287
Potsdam 90 see also DP camps
Prizren 27 Refugee Convention, UN (1951) 7, 108–9,
Pulau Bidong 209–10, 219, 222, 288 113, 115, 179, 187, 205, 238, 285
Pulau Galang 211, 219, 222 adopted 6, 87
Punjab, see India non-refoulement 109
Pusan 183 non-signatories 6, 208, 259
refugee regime, see International Refugee
Quakers (Society of Friends) 47, 59, 72, 115, Organisation; League of Nations;
117, 180, 285 UNHCR
and DPs in Europe 99, 107, 110 ‘Refugee Run’, Davos 284
 Index 309
refugees women 36, 67, 73, 80, 92, 105, 107, 145,
cash remittances of 77, 113, 135, 219, 242 217, 251–2, 256, 259, 273, 279
as a category 7, 49–50, 94–5, 108–9, 116, active role of 38, 140, 160, 164–5,
130, 157–8, 176, 273, 284 184, 215, 222, 229, 240, 257,
children 37, 73, 74, 90, 104, 132, 134, 146, 286, 296
165, 171, 183–4, 208, 240, 254, 257, assistance offered to 54, 61–2, 215
270, 275–6, 277, 290 targeted 37, 63, 168–9, 207, 272
class and social mobility 29, 32, 80, 102, See also ‘development’; diaspora; Displaced
134, 155, 159, 164, 213, 222, 232 Persons; First World War; human
and commemoration 46–8, 69–72, 118–19, rights; Internally Displaced Persons;
138, 143–5, 172–3, 193, 204–5, population transfers and expulsions;
254–6, 267–76, 287, 291–5; see also refugee regime; refugee warriors; NGOs
memorial books and humanitarian relief; repatriation;
cosmopolitanism, expressions of 51, 69, 103, Second World War; UNHCR; UN
194, 292 Refugee Convention; UNRRA
cultural representations of 9–11, 19, 29, Rejano, Juan 76
35–41, 46, 49–50, 54, 59, 62, 64, Renault 56
67–8, 78, 88, 103–7, 166–9, 174–6, repatriation, of refugees, as a ‘durable solution’
188, 206, 216–20, 271–2, 285, 289; see 7, 9, 281
also photographs and photography post-1918 Europe 56, 57
as ‘economic migrants’ 4, 75, 112, 113, 154, post-1945 Europe 86, 90–1, 95–6, 97, 98,
204, 214, 256, 265, 286 101, 105–7, 116, 269, 278
education and training 29, 33, 34, 39, 44, in South-East Asia 204, 208, 211, 212,
45, 67, 71, 87, 100, 133, 161, 194, 216, 220
206, 229, 256, 266, 270, 275, 277 in sub-Saharan Africa 244–5
employment 32, 35, 36, 38, 45, 56, 66, 110, in former Yugoslavia 265–6, 267
136, 154, 161, 165, 170, 228, 240, resettlement, of refugees, as a ‘durable
242, 256, 268 solution’ 7, 47, 91, 104–5, 111, 112,
global total, estimated 1, 3 192, 210–11, 217, 237
health 35, 57, 99–100, 151, 171, 185, 192, Reshid, Mehmed 25
247, 252 Rhee, Syngman 185, 190, 291
hostility and discrimination faced by 35, 44, Rhodesia, Southern, see Zimbabwe
47, 60, 67, 75, 94, 99, 128, 134, 170, Riga 38
181, 205, 231, 233, 236, 238, 256, Ringland, Arthur 40
264, 277, 279 Rockefeller Foundation 77
legal status, see refugees, category Rohingya, as refugees 1, 203–4
migration routes 73, 122, 205, 224, 254, Romania 21, 23, 53, 62, 70, 93, 111, 142
256, 288 Roosevelt, Eleanor 142
and the nation-state 4–5, 17, 18, 50, 53, 70, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 77, 95
148, 176, 199, 279, 286 Rosen, Joseph 77
and ‘national’ identity 41–3, 46, 79, 100, Rossellini, Roberto 105
102, 134, 189, 194, 222, 228, 230, Rothschild family 32
246, 268 Roussillon 73
psychological damage, presumed 40, 91, Royds, Kathleen 40
104–5, 106, 112, 116, 167, 192, Rushdie, Salman 288, 289
218–19, 242, 264, 266, 293 Russell, Bertrand 108
‘refugee warriors’ 61, 137, 224, 241, 251, Russian Aid Society 57
253, 257, 259, 286 Russian Empire 18
‘rehabilitation’, doctrine of 9, 20, 54, 77, 87, refugees during the First World War 27, 29,
88, 95, 98, 117, 122, 131, 136, 149, 30, 33, 35–6, 42–46 passim, 292
155, 157, 165, 167, 182, 185, 237, 245 revolution in 3, 47, 48, 52, 54, 55, 291
testimony 24, 71, 75, 124, 139, 174, 194–5, see also Soviet Union
210, 212, 218, 231, 234, 239–40, Russian Federation 254, 260–1
248–9, 264, 294–5, 296 Russian refugees
as tourists 139, 202, 211, 219, 254, 265, after 1917 5, 19, 55–7, 179,
270, 278 231, 232
victims, portrayed as 29, 30, 33, 35, 38–9, after the disintegration of the Soviet
46, 50, 61, 95, 111, 118, 140, 154, Union 254, 260–1
169, 170, 183, 205, 264–5, 269 Russo-Turkish War 18, 21, 24, 287
310 Index
Rwanda 5, 12, 231–2, 234, 249 Society of Friends, see AFSC; Quakers
colonial rule in 232–3 Somalia 229–30, 241, 250
genocide 202, 234–5 refugees in 224, 241–2, 250
Rwandan Patriotic Front 232, 234, 236 refugees from 224, 242, 252
see also Hutu refugees; Tutsi refugees; Sosúa 290
UNHCR South Africa 226
South Korea 55, 87, 183, 189; see also Korean War
Sabra 137 South Ossetia 260, 261
Saha, Sambhu 150 South Sudan 237, 240, 296
Sahrawi refugees 1, 228, 229 Soviet Union 56, 58, 74, 77, 254, 258, 268, 269
Said, Edward 139, 141, 144 disintegration of 202, 254, 260
Saigon 206, 207, 211 deportations in 53, 89, 92, 202, 254, 261,
Saksena, Mohanlal 161 267–71 passim
Salonika 29, 63, 64, 71, 80 and repatriation of Russian refugees 56, 60, 96
Salvatori, Jack 106 see also Chechnya; Cold War; Russian
Sandes, Flora 40 Federation
Sarajevo 262, 266, 292 Soviet-Polish War,1920 48
Sardinia 113 Spain
Sarkar, Jadunath 177 Civil War in 3, 10, 72–6 passim
Sarolea, Charles 75 refugees from 3, 20, 21, 40, 115, 229,
Save the Children Fund 20, 40, 64, 72, 109, 185 288, 291, 295
Scelle, Georges 79 Srebrenica 262
Scheidegger, Ernst 165 Sri Lanka 5, 171, 253, 279–80; see also Tamils
Scott, Flora 36, 37 Stalin, Joseph 90, 92, 96, 186, 267, 269
Scott, Joan 11 Stamboliiski, Aleksandr 62
Scottish Women’s Hospital 36, 40 statelessness 95, 108, 144
Second World War 3, 4, 63, 77–8, 91–2, 146, Stead, W. T. 24
227, 270 Streicher, Julius 123
aftermath 4, 7, 12, 85, 89–90, 91–4 Stroup, Herbert 167
Sen, Salil 174 Sudan 224, 230, 237–8, 245, 247–8
Senegal 223, 249 Asylum Act 238
Seoul 183, 184 Comprehensive Peace Agreement 239
Serbia 22, 23, 27, 29, 40 refugees from 237, 239–40, 242–3, 247,
Serbian refugees 248, 294–5
disintegration of Yugoslavia and 261, 262, refugees in 224, 227, 230, 231, 239,
264, 272 240–1, 242
in the First World War 27, 29, 35, 36–7, 40, Sudanese People’s Liberation Army
48, 264, 272, 290 (SPLA) 238, 239
see also Kosovo; Yugoslavia see also South Sudan
Serbian Relief Fund 36, 37, 39, 40, 47 Summerskill, Edith 75
Seton-Watson, R. W. 37 Symonds, Richard 156
Shamil, Imam 269 Syria 23, 70, 131, 133, 258, 270
Shammout, Ismail 140 Armenian refugees in 59–60
Shanghai 56, 120, 178, 181, 182, 187, 190 Palestinian refugees in 133
Shatila 136, 137, 144, 145, 288
Shaw, George Bernard 108 Taiwan 179, 186, 187
Shehadeh, Raja 143 Tajik refugees, in Pakistan 258
Shils, Edward 104 Takla, Kesang 220
Siamanides, George 71 Talaat Pasha, Mehmed 25
Sihanouk, Norodom 214 Taliban 256, 257
Simbirsk 38 Tambov 45
Simpson, John Hope 53, 57, 76–77, 94, 122 Tamils 279
Sindh 150, 163, 165 as refugees 5, 202, 279–80, 286
Singapore 208 Tannenberg 25
Singh, Khushwant 173 Tanzania 234, 245, 249–50
Skopje 37 refugees in 232, 233, 235, 245, 246, 247
Skultans, Vieda 270–1 Tatiana Committee 39
Slovenia 262, 264, 265, 272, 273, 274–5, 288 Thailand 179, 189, 205, 222
Smolensk 33, 38 refugee camps 212, 214, 294
Smyrna (Izmir) 54, 63, 68, 285, 292 and Vietnamese refugees 208, 214
 Index 311
Thant, U 171 and refugees in Cyprus 277
Thompson, Dorothy 120 ‘Gallery of Prominent Refugees’ 202
Thrace 23, 24, 63, 64, 66, 70, 285 ‘good offices’ formula 117, 200, 228
Thurstan, Violetta 42 refugees in Hong Kong 188
Tibet: and Hungarian refugees 111–12
Chinese rule in 179, 190 as a ‘non-political’ agency 97, 226, 284
as ‘sacred space’ 193 and refugee crisis in the Great Lakes 232,
Tibetan refugees 179, 190–4, 195, 280, 285, 233, 235–6, 237, 241, 245
287, 295 and Tibetan refugees 191–2
as potential ‘hard core’ 192, 220 and Vietnamese refugees 208, 211, 214
Tigrayan refugees 231, 242, 246 ‘Comprehensive Plan of Action’ 204,
Torres, Dolores 75 220–1
Toynbee, Arnold 61 and Yugoslav refugee crisis 262, 264, 265
Treaty of Berlin 22 see also Refugee Convention (1951);
Trento 26 repatriation
Trevelyan, G. M. 37 UNICEF 40, 130, 157, 238
Trieste 26 United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency
Trujillo, Rafael 120, 290 (UNKRA) 184–5
Truman, Harry S. 122 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Tuđman, Franjo 266 Administration (UNRRA) 86, 90, 94,
Tunisia 55, 228, 288 95–6, 105–7, 116, 123, 204
refugees from Algeria 228, 244 attitudes towards 98
refugees from Palestine 144 in China 182
refugees from Serbia 290 personnel 95, 98, 103
Tuqan, Fadwa 140 UNRRA ‘University’ 102–3
Turkey 12, 19, 55, 92–3, 258, 261, 264, 270 see also refugees, ‘rehabilitation’
invasion of Cyprus in 1974 12, 253, 276 United Nations Relief and Works
population exchange (1923) 4, 19, Administration for Palestine Refugees in
62–72 passim, 86, 286 the Middle East (UNRWA) 130–2,
see also Ottoman Empire 133–4, 137
Tutsi refugees 232–33, 234 employment of Palestinian refugees 132, 285
established 130
Uduk 239, 251, 252 ration cards 131–2
Uehling, Greta 269 education and training provided by
Uganda 202, 234, 235 133–4
refugees in 224, 232, 237, 239, 242–3 United States 37, 97, 108, 114, 117, 130, 131,
Ukraine 92, 101, 254, 267, 269, 292 156, 183, 185, 186, 191, 212, 239,
Ukrainian refugees 241, 253, 257
during the First World War 34, 41 and Cambodian refugees 213, 215
see also DPs Displaced Persons Act 110
Umutesi, Marie-Béatrice 235, 250, 251, 296 Lao refugees in 213
Union of Zemstvos, Russian 33 US Escapee Program 109
United Nations 86, 95, 124–5, 130, 133, 183, and Vietnamese refugees 204, 206–7,
188, 215, 216, 226, 276, 278 210–11
Economic and Social Committee and ‘war on terror’ 253, 259
(ECOSOC) 108 see also Cold War
United Nations Civil Assistance Command in Uzbekistan 260, 290
Korea 183
United Nations Conciliation Commission for Vang, Xiong 212
Palestine 132 Varah, Chad 54
United Nations High Commissioner for Varna 56
Refugees, Office of (UNHCR) 6, 7, 9, Veneto 27
114, 117, 157, 179, 200–1, 203, 225, Venizelos, Eleftherios 63, 67, 68
226, 256, 261 Vidris, Gigi 274
and Afghan refugees 259 Vienna 27, 30, 31, 39, 41, 45
and Algerian refugees 228 Viet Minh 205
Bangladesh, relief operation in 171 Vietnam 5, 7, 114, 202, 205, 207–8, 210,
and Cambodian refugees 204, 206 211, 221
created 86–7 and Cambodian refugees 213
criticized 280–1 invasion of Cambodia 203, 213
312 Index
Vietnamese refugees 114, 203, 205–11, 214, Wright, Basil 73
219, 285, 295 Wuhan 181–2
camps for 212, 214, 216
engagement with history 204–5, 217–18, Xihui, Jin 181
219, 296
in Hong Kong 208–9, 211 Yad Vashem 124
‘Orderly Departure Programme’ 210 Yalçın, Kemal 72
‘Processing Community Organisation and Yalta 90
Social Services Group’ 211 Yčas, Martynas 43
in Thailand 208 Yeltsin, Boris 261
Vindry, Noël 81 Yemen 128
Vojvodina 264, 266 YMCA 40, 156
Volhynia 92 Young Turks 23, 24–5
Vu, Quynh-Giao 219 Yugoslavia 12, 53, 55, 70, 273,
275, 276
Warburg, Felix 46 disintegration 253, 254, 261–7 passim
Weis, Paul 108 formation 41, 62
West Bank 125, 128, 133, 134, 135, 143, partisans 270, 273, 274, 276
144, 155 see also Croatia; Kosovo; Macedonia;
Wigham, John 73 Montenegro; Serbia
Wildflecken, see under DP camps
Wilkinson, Ellen 74 Zagreb 23
Wilson, Francesca 72–3, 107, 285, 292 Zaire 232, 234, 235, 237, 239, 241, 250, 296
Wilson, Roger 107 Zalmaï, Ahad 258
Woolf, Virginia 295 Zambia 224, 225, 251
World Council of Churches 88, 105, 111, 130, Zangwill, Israel 121–2
131, 192, 207 Zayyad, Tawfiq 138
World Food Programme 242 Zemgor 57
World Health Organization 157 Zimbabwe 224, 225, 243, 251, 294
World Refugee Year (1959–60) 91, 114–15, Zinnemann, Fred 106
179, 192, 284 Zionism 45, 77, 118, 119, 121, 124,
World Vision 185, 195, 214 125, 128