The Making of the Modern Refugee

The Making of the Modern Refugee Peter Gatrell University of Manchester, UK Keynote address for conference on ‘Refugees in the Post-war World’ Arizona State University, 8-9 April 2010 Introduction This conference matters. It matters to me and it should matter to a wide range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences and indeed to any citizen interested in how and to what ends society arranges itself. This conference matters to me because it deals with a subject that is close to my heart and because it brings together some of the people from whose work I have learned a great deal. It has a wider significance because historians are beginning to take more seriously than hitherto the origins and consequences of global population displacement. Yet although we may agree on the chief sites and episodes of displacement, it is more of a challenge to delineate the agenda for discussion. Are we trying to explain the genesis of today’s refugee regime, in order to draw conclusions that might inform the policies of governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international organisations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)? If so, there is much work to be done in order to convince these organisations that they ought to be interested in past practices and outcomes. They operate mainly in the present and show scant or superficial interest in their history, which is why current efforts to organise and utilise more thoroughly the rich archives of UNHCR are so important. Or are our efforts are directed elsewhere, towards providing a history that might satisfy refugees and their descendants who negotiate the consequences of displacement? Here what is at stake is not the agenda of governments and international organisations but the complex experiences of refugees. But such are the constraints faced by refugees and historians alike that it would be foolish to claim that this project is at all straightforward. Perhaps neither the institutional-political approach nor the refugeecentred approach fully captures the purpose of this conference, in so far as we are also trying to understand the discursive realm in which displacement is invested with meanings of one kind or another. These approaches are of course not mutually exclusive. They comprise related elements of a ‘refugee history’ whose possibilities and pitfalls I consider at the end of my presentation. Since this conference focuses primarily on the period following World War 2, it is worth asking where scholars stood on these issues in the late 1940s and 1950s. At that point refugee studies did not exist. The field was dominated by Sir John Hope Simpson’s magnum opus on the ‘refugee problem’ (published in 1939), by Jacques Vernant’s encyclopaedic study of ‘the refugee in the post-war world’, by Louise Holborn’s book on the International Refugee Organisation, and by a series of books by two eminent scholars of Russian Jewish origin, Eugene Kulischer and Joseph Schechtman. Simpson, Vernant and Holborn were commissioned to provide a study of the legal framework and institutional support for refugees, and it was a sign of the changes wrought by World War 1 2 that Vernant’s geographical scope exceeded that of Simpson. Kulischer’s history of ‘Europe on the move’ outlined a neo-Malthusian interpretation of mass migration, with a particular emphasis on Eastern and Central Europe, while Schechtman operated on a global canvas and ended up arguing that population transfers had the potential to stifle future ethnic conflict by physically separating rival groups – in short that states might deliberately create refugees for prophylactic purposes. These legal-institutional accounts have not lost their value, and for a generation they dominated the landscape. Only in the 1980s, influenced by well publicised refugee crises in other parts of the world did historians begin to tackle the history of forced migration in Europe. In addition to Michael Marrus’s overview of Europe’s ‘unwanted’, the German historian Wolfgang Jacobmeyer published a major study of ‘Displaced Persons’ in Germany (both books appeared in 1985) and Mark Wyman (1989) and others contributed political and social histories of Baltic, Polish, Ukrainian and DPs in post-war Europe. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe combined with the postmodernist challenge to grand narratives helped unleash a new round of historical research that continues apace. Although we lacked and still lack a history of displacement on a global scale, nevertheless during the late 1980s and 1990s historians began to redress the Eurocentric bias by writing about other parts of the globe and thus returning to the broader perspective associated with the names of Vernant and Schechtman. Important contributions were made by historically-minded political scientists, such as Aristide Zolberg who argued (1989) that an externalist, geopolitical perspective is needed in order to understand the origin and course of refugee crises. Zolberg also pointed out the causal link between the end of multinational empires and the rise of the modern nation state, on the one hand, and the emergence of mass refugee populations after 1918. Gil Loescher provided us with the best available institutional history of UNHCR and Claudena Skran published an informative study of the inter-war refugee regime (1995). Refugee studies took off during the 1980s, inspired by social anthropologists such as Elisabeth Colson, Barbara Harrell-Bond and David Turton, all of whom worked on African case-studies; their work along with articles by Liisa Malkki in the 1990s has been enormously influential, not least in helping to rethink questions of refugee voice, agency, and identity in different institutional settings including refugee camps. Oral history too provided the basis for richer and more nuanced accounts, notably in Urvashi Butalia’s unmatched study of the impact of Partition and specifically its gendered dimensions. Where, as in the work of Pamela Ballinger on the contested borderland of Italy and Slovenia after 1945, oral testimony is brought to bear on other kinds of historical record, the results are hugely impressive. Lastly studies of transnationalism have recently redirected historians’ attention to the diasporic and other multiple connections that refugees maintained across time and space. This is an exciting time to work in refugee history. What is at stake in the ‘making of the modern refugee’? This is partly about the magnitude and global extent of population displacement, linked in complex ways to the great upheavals of the twentieth century, world war, revolutions and decolonisation, but it has at least as much to do with the creation of a legal-bureaucratic category that resulted from the consolidation of the nation-state and associated notions of membership and entitlement. Few people captured the consequences better than Hannah Arendt in her 2 book on the ‘origins of totalitarianism’: ‘the new refugees [she is distinguishing them from nineteenth-century exiles] 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 or drafted by the wrong kind of government’.1 But the making of the modern refugee is not just about categorisation or labelling; it has also been about institutional devices to manage and incarcerate refugees, such that refugees and camps have come to be mentioned in the same breath. Finally, there is a new aesthetics associated with the modern refugee including the use of mass media to draw attention to what the French political philosopher Luc Boltanski calls ‘distant suffering’. What this means is that the modern citizen has come to recognise or ‘know’ refugees, without ever coming face to face with them. Violent peacetime: Europe’s past and the global present after 1945 Let me now turn to the period that is the focus of this conference. The post-1945 world was a ‘violent peacetime’ characterised by old and new conflicts that were magnified by the Cold War. In Europe the situation was complicated by the demands of economic reconstruction. These interlocking features were closely connected to what contemporary officials variously termed the ‘refugee problem’ or simply the great ‘migration of peoples’. Beyond Europe momentous political-territorial upheavals took place in the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East and the Far East in the space of three short years 1947-1949. Their consequences continue to reverberate. Some of these refugee crises are well known but others, such as those in Korea and Vietnam during the 1950s, are poorly understood. Some episodes were connected to the retreat from empire, others were the direct result of fresh revolutionary conflagration, raising the stakes of confrontation between West and East. The prolonged conflict in Europe made it necessary to give serious consideration to questions of social and economic reconstruction. Reconstruction was linked to mass migration, not least because millions of prisoners of war and forced labourers had to be helped to return to their homes in order to help rebuild the shattered infrastructure, but also because Western governments scrutinised Displaced Persons as a resource to supplement their domestic labour force. But reconstruction was about politics as well as economics and led directly to other kinds of migration. Violent peacetime was bound up with the projection of Soviet power in east-central Europe and the intensification of the Cold War. We now know a good deal about the radical consequences of civil war in Greece, the murderous conflicts in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and the settling of wartime scores in the frontier region between Italy and Slovenia. Another vindictive bit of post-war reckoning took place in Bulgaria, where in 1950-1951 the new Communist government followed in the footsteps of its pre-war predecessor and expelled around 140,000 ethnic Turks in pursuit of a mono-ethnic polity. This tells us that post-war population displacement in Europe was not a by-product but rather a constitutive element in post-war reconstruction. At Potsdam the Allies punished the German inhabitants of Poland and Czechoslovakia irrespective of age and gender, but the agreement to launch a 1 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edition (New York: Meridian, 1958), pp. 267, 294. 3 massive transfer of population not only had a punitive purpose; it also corresponded to politically accepted ideas about humanitarian ‘population politics’ – humanitarian, because relocating people and creating ethnically more homogeneous nation states would eliminate the ‘problem of minorities’ that had bedevilled European politics in the interwar years. Much of its appeal derived from underlying assessments of the results of the population exchange under the terms of the Lausanne agreement in 1923 whereby Orthodox Greeks were obliged to move from Turkey to Greece while the Muslim population of Greece moved to Turkey. Organised expulsions might be messy and chaotic, but they had a developmental rationale in the official mind. Population displacement was also characteristic of the world beyond Europe, partly as a result of revolution, most obviously in China where the victory of the Communist Party in 1949 caused 700,000 Chinese to flee to Hong Kong; by 1956 one-third of its population was made up of refugees. Additionally, in the late 1950s the projection of Chinese power in Tibet prompted the flight of as many as 100,000 refugees to India and Nepal. Elsewhere decolonisation was the main motor of refugeedom. The hasty implementation of Partition in the Indian sub-continent in 1947 unleashed an enormous cross-border movement of refugees that continued for years, directly affecting around 15 million people who moved from West and East Pakistan to India and vice-versa. (Of course not everyone moved, and it is important to remember this.) A different imperial retreat took place when Japan’s lengthy occupation of Korea came to an end. Here the consequences were equally momentous, because East-West rivalry culminated in a war that divided the country and displaced around nine million people. By 1960 there were still three million registered refugees in South Korea making up one-quarter of its total population. Likewise the division of Vietnam following the Geneva Accords in 1954 forced nearly 900,000 refugees to flee from the Communist North across the 17th Parallel.2 The end of colonial rule led directly to other refugee crises, particularly when marginalised indigenous groups sought redress as in Rwanda during the revolution of 1959-1962, when Hutu rebels contested the relative dominance of Tutsi under Belgian rule. Decolonisation also led Italian, Dutch and Belgian colonial elites and their clients to flee to the metropolis, in a pattern repeated when France finally accepted defeat in its attempt to retain control of Algeria, during a war that forced 160,000 Algerians to seek refuge in neighbouring Morocco and Tunisia and that displaced many more people internally. Past and present were linked in other ways. Although Jewish migration to Palestine gathered pace between the two world wars, the Holocaust in central Europe lent it added urgency and legitimacy in the eyes of Zionists and sympathetic Western politicians, and others too. Those who survived the destruction of European Jewry looked to Palestine as a place of safety, and their future was closely bound up with that of its indigenous Arab population. The implications for Palestinians were well understood by leading figures in 2 Estimates from Elfan Rees, We Strangers and Afraid (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1959), p. 8, offer a more comprehensive picture than UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (Geneva: UNHCR, 2000), p. 310. 4 the Zionist movement long before the state of Israel came into being. The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 gave rise to the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian refugees. As one elderly Palestinian refugee put it in 1957, ‘we have become refugees on the borders of our own country to make room for other refugees from many parts of the world’.3 Discursively too, global displacement was connected to the European past. Countries that hosted refugees in large numbers frequently specified the challenges they faced by alluding to other situations. During the UN campaign for World Refugee Year in 19591960, Pakistan agreed to participate, ‘despite the heavy burden which the resettlement of ten million refugees had placed on the national economy’, but made a particular point of promising to provide funds for refugees in West Germany and for Palestinians, acknowledging both the magnitude of its own problems and its internationalist perspective. Nor was Pakistan alone in referring to events on the European continent. India’s Ministry for Rehabilitation dispatched an official to Germany to track its policy towards the expellees and refugees. He concluded that whereas India regarded refugees as a ‘distinct and separate problem’, Germany regarded them as ‘an integral aspect of general reconstruction’, a pertinent if overdrawn contrast. Other observers referred to contemporaneous events to make a different and tendentious point. Thus an eminent Bengali historian told an audience in 1948 that ‘refugees’ from East Pakistan who arrived in India should be made welcome, because they would help revive rather than undermine the local economy, by analogy with Jewish farmers in Palestine who in his opinion provided ‘a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and stagnation’. The violence of Partition led one Sikh politician in 1947 to speak of a potential Holocaust if they remained in West Pakistan: writing to India’s Deputy Prime Minister he complained that we have been ‘handed 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. The [Muslim] League has … threatened us that those who would not be staying in Pakistan will be declared as absconders and steps would be taken to forfeit their all. Our conditions will be like jews [sic] in the Hitlerite regime.4 In other sites of post-war displacement, external intervention rather than domestic power politics was validated in relation to past events in Europe. Addressing the situation in Nepal following the decision by the Dalai Lama and his followers to flee the Chinese occupation of Tibet, a Swiss official from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation took the lead in securing international backing for carpet manufacture to help sustain refugee enterprise in exile. He explained his motives partly in terms of the need to preserve Tibetan culture but also because of a sense of shame at what he termed 3 Per-Olow Anderson, They Are Human Too: a Photographic Essay on the Palestine Arab Refugees (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), p. 23. 4 Quotations from Nilanjana Chatterjee, ‘Interrogating victimhood: East Bengali refugee narratives of communal violence’, Dept of Anthropology: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, unpublished; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst & Co., 2000), pp. 230-1. 5 Switzerland’s ‘infamous slogan, ‘the boat is full’, with which Switzerland justified sending back thousands of Jews to certain death in Hitler’s Germany’. Events in Europe also served as a point of reference for a UNHCR official who wrote in 1965 that ‘although the Indian government had done a great deal, ‘no new initiatives of any size have been undertaken’. He added, ‘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’.5 It should therefore be clear that for many contemporaries the European past was, so to speak, a significant point of departure and a prompt to action. Putting 1945-60 in context If these expressions of concern reflected a historical sensibility, this still leaves unanswered the question as to what was distinctive about the decade and a half following the end of World War 2 in relation to the preceding period. Certainly some contemporaries believed that the situation in 1945 bore little resemblance to the situation after World War 1. When a former official of the League of Nations was invited to spell out lessons for his counterparts in the new United Nations he found little of value to pass on, because the League’s attention had been devoted to refugees who never intended to repatriate or who had lost their citizenship, whereas he assumed that ‘Displaced Persons’ and others would return to their homes because they had not ‘lost the protection of their home government’. But his assumption was misplaced. Following an initial burst of repatriation, the remaining DPs in Europe opted to stay put rather than return to their homes in the Soviet bloc.6 Beyond this, so this insider maintained, the legacy of the League of Nations in relation to refugees in 1945 amounted to very little. But his perspective was misplaced; in fact, the two post-war eras displayed some important similarities. Numbers In the first place, the magnitude of displacement beggared belief. Some 23 million people were ‘uprooted’ in Europe alone during the final stages of World War 2 and thereafter, as a result of repatriation, territorial readjustment and population transfer. Two million Poles and Ukrainians were caught up in the transfer agreed between the USSR and Poland. At least nine million ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Czechoslovakia also expelled 200,000 Hungarians under the ‘Košicky Programme’, although some of them managed to evade the deportations by acquiring 5 Ann Frechette, Tibetans in Nepal: the Dynamics of International Assistance among a Community in Exile (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), p. 40; Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World: Displacement and Integration (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1963), p. 323; Confidential memo by C. Brouwer, UNHCR representative, The Hague, to UNHCR, Geneva, 15 March 1965, Fonds UNHCR 11, Records of the Central Registry, Series 1, Classified Subject Files, 1951-1970, 15/GEN/TIB [folders 1 & 2] Tibetan refugees, 19591967. By the early 1960s Nepal, India, Bhutan and Sikkim hosted between 75,000 and 100,000 Tibetan refugees. 6 A. Loveday to Arthur Schoenfeld, US State Dept, 17 July 1945, League of Nations, Fonds Nansen, Box C1771, doc. 1771-1. 6 Slovak citizenship. Alongside these dramas it is important not to overlook other episodes, such as the 4,000 Kirgiz and Turkmen who fled the USSR to Iran during the 1940s. Beyond Europe – in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and South-East Asia, the numbers amounted to around 20 million. By the end of the 1950s one estimate put the global total of refugees at 40 million.7 How does this compare with the period immediately following World War 1? As the main crucible of population displacement, Europe was home to around nine million refugees by the early 1920s, including Russians, Armenians, Bulgarians and Hungarians as well as Greek and Turkish refugees who were variously displaced by the Balkan Wars, the world war and the international agreement at Lausanne. The numbers are smaller than in the late 1940s. Yet World War 1 certainly gave rise to a sense of the overwhelming scale of ‘uprooting’ in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, and in Greece where refugees comprised one-quarter of the total population by 1923. In Armenia the authorities spoke of three nightmares: ‘bandits’, earthquakes and refugees. Russians and Armenians scattered around the globe – Armenians in Marseille and San Francisco, Russians in Calcutta and Xinjiang, Brazil and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo. In Soviet Russia itself, wrote one academic, ‘we have 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’.8 Impressions and proportions matter. The pan-European reverberation of these displacements led one precocious English child (Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans) to imagine a new country called ‘Refugia’ that would become a homeland for the dispossessed. World War 1 no less than World War 2 left contemporaries with an impression of a world chock full of refugees, an apocalypse of displacement. Cold War and Bolshevism Perhaps the distinctiveness lies not in absolute numbers and proportions but in the geopolitics of the refugee crisis? Certainly the Cold War suffused virtually all discussions of population displacement in the period 1945-1960. The documentary record – and not just in Europe – testifies to anxiety about fifth-columnists who disguised themselves as refugees and escapees (the Indian government expressed alarm about the possibility that Chinese spies had infiltrated the ranks of Tibetan refugees), although the main issue was less potential subversion but rather the desperate decision made by ordinary people to escape from totalitarian rule whether in Eastern Europe or China. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the World Council of Churches regularly compiled a series of ‘human interest’ stories from individual refugees who gave formulaic accounts about the persecution they endured in countries such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. The aim was also to demonstrate the courage they displayed and the potential contribution they might make to Western society. Extracts from these files were published along with photographs of refugees to exemplify the trajectory of people who were given the This equates to around 1.3% of the world’s population in 1960. Currently the estimated number of refugees and IDPs is also put at around 40 million, or 0.58% of the world’s population. 8 Quoted in Don Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002), p. 187. 7 7 opportunity to ‘start again’. In Hong Kong, Korea and Vietnam the Catholic Church made much of the sturdy and individualistic character of refugees who had overcome an ordeal and who would now help buttress anti-communism in South-East Asia. In the Middle East the Cold War operated in a different guise: throughout the 1950s the spectre of communism stalked discussions about the impoverishment of Palestinian refugees, even if it is difficult to gauge how far these fears were genuine and how far the communist threat was magnified in order to coax more resources from governments to sustain UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Yet Cold War rhetoric also suffused discussions of refugee crisis after World War 1. There was already an ‘iron curtain’ in Europe, as Patrick Wright recently reminded us. During the 1920s concern was expressed about ‘infiltration’ by communist subversives, especially in countries hosting Russian refugees. Familiar anxieties surfaced in respect of the coupling of ‘dubious’ political belief and infectious disease – the widespread panic about TB in the 1950s had its counterpart in fears of typhus-bearing refugees from Russia who arrived at the Polish or Lithuanian frontier and who needed to be scrutinised both for signs of disease and for their political affiliation. Jews in particular felt the full force of this ‘filtration’. But this worked both ways. Although the suspicions of the Soviet state towards bourgeois fifth-columnists reached fever pitch in the late Stalin era, they were also articulated by first revolutionary generation. In Armenia, for example, the newly installed Soviet government viewed Near East Relief as a cover organisation that ‘funded counter-revolutionaries’, while Communist officials were also keen to vet prospective Armenian returnees from Mesopotamia lest they included ‘British spies’.9 In this guise, therefore, the Cold War inflected attitudes towards refugees after both world wars. UNHCR, NGOs and the refugee regime Maybe we should look instead at the components of the international refugee regime for a sign that the aftermath of World War 2 inaugurated a new era. In 1951 signatories to the United Nations Refugee Convention formally acknowledged that the chief criterion for legal recognition of the refugee should be that of demonstrating a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. By contrast, the inter-war refugee regime operated with a gradually evolving concept of a collective loss of protection. The provision introduced in 1951 reflected Cold War belief about the costs imposed by political persecution in continental Europe. It betrayed a partial if highly influential understanding of the character, scale and scope of displacement. In other parts of the world, either ad hoc arrangements were put in place, such as separate UN agencies for displaced Palestinians and Koreans, or else the UN decided to make no formal provision, as in the Indian subcontinent and in Hong Kong, where the British colonial authorities were keen to keep UNHCR at arm’s length. But in any case legal definitions do not tell the whole story. What about the institutional and financial underpinnings of the chief agencies of refugee relief? Noteworthy here was the dearth of resources at the disposal of both UNHCR and 9 National Archives of Armenia, f. 113, op. 38, d. 22, l. 172; f. 113, op. 3, d. 53, ll. 87-88; f. 113, op. 1, d. 153, ll. 88-9. Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War (Oxford: OUP, 2006). 8 the League of Nations. Neither organisation had a significant budget – only in the 1960s did UNHCR begin to establish itself on a firmer footing, as participating governments looked to the UN to help underwrite the attempt to address refugee crises in sub-Saharan Africa and in South-East Asia. During the 1950s, however, only an emergency grant from the Ford Foundation helped UNHCR to stay afloat. Similarly, the League’s office for refugees limped along with great difficulty during the 1920s, thanks to revenue from the sale of Nansen passports and one-off government donations rather than a regular income stream. The case by case approach adopted by Fridtjof Nansen and the League of Nations gave it an air of impermanence, but it is worth reminding ourselves that the constitution of UNHCR had to be renewed every five years.10 Like UNHCR, the League also relied heavily on a number of non-governmental organisations to operate refugee relief programmes. Although the number of NGOs expanded enormously after 1945, no fundamental differences characterised their modus operandi compared to the inter-war period. Some were faith-based; others had a clear purpose that derived from sentimental rather than religious attachments. NGOs focused on relief work and avoided confronting the root causes of displacement in order to maintain the doctrine of being ‘non-political’. Some drew heavily on established diasporic associations; others were new on the scene. They provided financial and other assistance to nominated groups and lobbied governments on behalf of their clients and in order to maintain a high profile. Armenia is again a good example – pre-existing organisations such as the New York based ‘Daughters of Armenia’ combined with new agencies such as the ‘British relief Mission in Transcaucasia’ which linked Save the Children, the Armenian Refugees’ (Lord Mayor’s) Fund and ‘The Friends of Armenia’. NGOs provided the operational underpinnings for the refugee regime both during the inter-war era and after 1945. Organisations such as CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Christian Aid and Oxfam expanded rapidly. Oxfam followed up its involvement in postwar Europe by helping refugees during the Korean War, the Chinese civil war, the Hungarian uprising and the Algerian war, as well as displaced Palestinians. The Canadian Jewish Congress advertised its ‘considerable experience in the settlement of refugees following World War One and in large numbers in assisting in the rescue, relief and rehabilitation of victims of concentration camps after the liberation of Europe’ (as well as from Shanghai) … and therefore associates itself with ‘the world wide plans to bring succour and relief to those who deserve and will appreciate it’.11 Yet if the numbers and financial resources were far greater in the 1950s than during the inter-war period, the principles of intervention did not change. Development as durable solution Another area worth mentioning is the search for a ‘durable solution’ to displacement. Repatriation in the inter-war period was a non-starter in Soviet Russia or Spain following the victory of the Nationalists, and was obviously inconceivable in Nazi Germany. It 10 Claudena Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: the Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 284; Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society: between Sovereigns (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). 11 Canadian Committee for WRY, Folder 6 (1 November 1959). 9 found some support among the Soviet Armenian authorities, but there were relatively few takers among the diaspora. After World War 2 repatriation again reared its head in Armenia, but stood no chance in the DP camps after the first flush of enthusiasm, nor among Chinese refugees in Hong Kong. In the Middle East, the prospect of repatriation was blocked for reasons that remain hotly disputed. Where resettlement in third countries was difficult, the other option was local integration. This agenda was linked to the doctrine of economic development. But what did this mean? The World Council of Churches encouraged a series of debates throughout the 1950s about the need to promote development, without coming to a clear view as to whether this meant a series of technical measures – investment in farming techniques, land irrigation etc. – or more fundamental programmes of land reform.12 Following the sustained economic growth in Germany, Hong Kong and Korea, development became a key element in UN and UNHCR doctrine in the 1960s, partly because of a belief that poverty reduction would contribute to the alleviation of conditions that encouraged conflict and flight, and partly because aid and development were expected to sustain displaced populations and host communities alike. This doctrine lay at the heart of programmes devised by the Indian government, which was keen to avoid potential confrontation between refugee newcomers and the local population, although things did not always work out as the government hoped. Here and elsewhere the ethos of ‘development’ suffused debates throughout the 1950s and beyond. Development thinking also stalked the corridors of the League of Nations. That is to say, alongside schemes of incarceration (such as the notorious Camp Oddo for Armenian refugees in Marseille, or the camps administered by the British in Mesopotamia), discussions took place about the scope to promote economic development in countries that hosted significant refugee populations. Two examples stand out. First, the League sponsored an impressive Greek Refugee Resettlement Commission that invested external aid in infrastructure such as roads, irrigation projects, dispensaries and schools. Officials advertised the achievements of the Commission which they attributed in part to ‘the capacity for work and receptivity to new ideas which characterise the mass of refugees’, who belonged to a ‘truly national enterprise’.13 Second, Nansen promoted irrigation and other projects in the fledgling Soviet Armenian republic. He did not see this as an exclusive option – there was some support for the idea that Armenian refugees might be variously relocated in South West Africa or in Australia, where ‘vast tracts of land [are] quite unoccupied’. When little came of these fantasies (Nansen was told ‘they want a white Australia’), development and local integration became the preferred option.14 12 David P. Gaines, The World Council of Churches: a Study of its Background and History (Peterborough, NH: Richard R. Smith Co Inc., 1966). 13 Eliot G. Mears, Greece Today: the Aftermath of the Refugee Impact (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1929), pp. 291-2; Elizabeth Kontogiorgi, Population Exchange in Greek Macedonia: the Rural Settlement of Refugees 1922-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 265-96. 14 League of Nations, Fonds Nansen, Box R1763, doc. 39145, dated Sept 1924; Marshall Fox to Nansen, 7 Jan 1930, Fonds Nansen, Box C1586, doc. 17729. 10 Was nothing distinctive? This brief overview leaves us with the question as to what might be distinctive about the period 1945-1960. Scale mattered, but it was not the defining feature that might be imagined. Cold War rivalries persisted, even if they now stretched over a global canvas. The institutional features of the inter-war refugee regime did not change radically in the aftermath of World War 2. Even the deportation, mass murder and flight of the surviving Jews in Europe was in many ways prefigured by the experience of Armenians after World War 1; the efforts made on their behalf by the diaspora, and the complex search for a ‘solution’ to their predicament, in many ways mirrored one another.15 We thus have to look elsewhere for distinctive characteristics of the period 1945-1960. The first indication that something new was afoot was the post-war emphasis on ‘rehabilitation’ as something other than the restoration of physical capability. What did contemporaries understand by the term and what was its genesis? Who deserved to be rehabilitated and by what means? The doctrine of rehabilitation seems to have entered the lexicon during World War 2, as if the combination of innumerable DPs and the pernicious psychological legacy of Nazi rule gave it a particular credence. After the war it was closely connected to ideas of political reconstruction and democratisation, and specifically to addressing the crisis of post-war citizenship. The Nazi grip had finally been prised from the ‘thousand-year Reich’, but it had exercised a powerful hold on Germans and indirectly on non-German victims. This was linked in the West to the need to demonstrate that totalitarianism had been defeated in Germany but also that democracy had a superior moral claim than that asserted by Soviet communism. But the discursive tentacles of rehabilitation spread far and wide, above all in India and Pakistan, where the construction of the new nation went hand in hand with creating a sense of citizenship and thus establishing the duties as well as the rights of the nation’s refugees – hence the need for a ‘Ministry of Rehabilitation’. Tibetan refugees too became the object of a rehabilitation agenda that aimed (according to the YMCA) to ensure that they would be ‘torch bearers to lead their country to peace and prosperity’ when they eventually returned to their homes.16 Thinking about ‘rehabilitation’ leads directly to questions of social psychology and the ways in which specific groups of experts engaged with the mental world of displaced people. As World War 2 came to an end its meaning appears to have been subsumed into a set of practices to which refugees were expected to submit. UNRRA employed social workers in a new ‘Personal Counselling Service’ that was subsequently taken over by the IRO in 1948. They envisaged that each refugee should have an individual programme designed ‘to make some plan for his future’. Psychologists diagnosed a condition they labelled ‘DP apathy’ and were scathing about the consequences of inadequate support. A prominent sociologist argued that ‘they live in hordes and live by marauding … they promise to become the new gypsies, undisciplined, untrained, ready for any political 15 Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in TwentiethCentury France (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). 16 UN Records and Archives Sub-Unit, Geneva 55/0088, File 046, ‘Other refugee groups’. 11 disorder and without any sense of communal responsibility’. I am not claiming that DPs experienced no psychological difficulties, but I would argue that the diagnosis of ‘apathy’ or maladjustment led outsiders to discount productive and inventive features of life in the DP camps. To the best of my knowledge this flurry of professional expertise had little or no counterpart in the inter-war period. But it was entirely characteristic of the aftermath of World War 2 that the famous British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott should maintain that ‘the psychology of democracy was rooted in the ‘ordinary good home’’. This sentiment informed World Refugee Year in 1959-1960, whose proponents made it a matter of urgency to clear the remaining camps in Europe and to atone for the West’s inability to do so much sooner.17 I do not want to press this point too far. One thinks of Quakers active in DP camps and in Gaza after World War 2 and of individuals such as the Dominican priest Father Georges Pire, who remarked that working with refugees and DPs in Europe provided an opportunity to ‘surpass all the barriers that so often cause such deep divisions amongst men. Men of very different backgrounds, by uniting sincerely in a common purpose to help other men, discover in themselves a great similarity giving rise to understanding and mutual liking’. He described how a ‘Europe du coeur’ took shape in different settings that encouraged a brotherhood of ‘all men, working in unison in a spirit of true solidarity, serving a cause which is utterly humane and absolutely true’. This spirit had a political component, but it transcended Cold War rivalry on behalf of a universalised humanitarianism. Refugee history, opportunities and challenges In the last part of my talk I want briefly to raise some broader issues that arise out an attempt to write a refugee history of the modern world. What are the elements of a refugee history? This is partly a question about the sources that historians have at their disposal. But it is also about the paradoxical consequences of putting refugees at the centre rather than the margins of historical enquiry. It is one thing to embrace refugee history in the spirit that animated social historians of labour in the 1960s, rescuing refugees, so to speak (as E.P. Thompson famously sought to do on behalf of the English working class during the industrial revolution) from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. But is there a risk that by focusing on refugees we end up reinforcing the category rather than challenging it, reifying refugees rather than problematising the label, and discounting their other attributes and histories? And what is at stake when refugees take ownership of their history – are the results inherently benign or might they have exclusionary consequences? 17 Quotations from Louise W. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization: a Specialized Agency of the United Nations, its History and Work, 1946-1952 (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 267; E.A. Shils, ‘Social and psychological aspects of displacement and repatriation’, Journal of Social Issues, 2, no. 3 (1946), pp. 318. Winnicott is quoted in Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2006). See also H.B.M. Murphy, Flight and Resettlement (Paris: UNESCO, 1955). 12 The most readily accessible sources at our disposal were not created by refugees. We have a much better idea of the stance adopted by governments and NGOs, professional experts and ‘humanitarians’ such as Father Pire. By contrast the institutional opportunities for refugees to voice their experiences and express their wishes have been limited, for example to testimony at legal tribunals; this material is valuable, but it needs to be interpreted with great care. Historical accounts by workers in the field are more numerous, but inevitably they place the author at the centre of attention. They are infused with ideas of epic adventure and of being the privileged observer of events that the ordinary reader can scarcely comprehend. Not only do they put the relief worker to the fore, but their accounts frequently treat refugees ‘as if they were tabula rasa with no history, past experience, culture, anticipation, skills, coping mechanisms to interpret new situations’.18 Marie-Béatrice Umutesi’s gripping narrative of her odyssey from Rwanda to Congo in the aftermath of the genocide of 1994 is doubly impressive for being authored by a trained social scientist from a Hutu background, who not only charts the flight of Hutu refugees but also sketches the social history of Rwanda. Such accounts are rare, although they can be pieced together from diaries, letters and other vernacular testimony, provided we know where to look.19 How then did refugees seek to comprehend their displacement? Answering this question requires locating personal interpretations in an extensive web of meaning, in which cultural-historical representations of displacement often assumed political significance. Accounts that draw upon experiences in sites of incarceration such as the refugee camp are likely to emphasise that one’s own suffering belongs to a broader narrative of national hurt. Liisa Malkki’s ethnography in Tanzanian refugee camps resonates with findings from Armenian refugees in Mesopotamia after World War 1 and DPs of various ethnic backgrounds in Germany after World War 2 whose enforced confinement provided an opportunity to situate themselves in the nation’s past and present. This history consciousness manifested itself in ideas about a ‘world we have lost’ and a ‘time that was’. Memory books, visits (virtual or otherwise) and other practices and performances can be understood in this light. Armenian, Jewish and Palestinian memory books reconstructed a cartographic and demographic record and also established an association between the displaced and ‘home’. But what is forgotten and who is excluded are as important as what is recollected and commemorated. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s study of Partition narratives shows how Hindu memories of a pastoral landscape in Bengal succeeded in removing Muslims from the scene. They suggest that refugees not only record but also make and re-make history and geography, and that these initiatives do not exist in a political vacuum. Oral testimony too is politicised, as with the revealing remark made by a young Palestinian man who loftily informed Rosemary Sayigh that ‘my Gaim Kibreab, ‘The myth of dependency among camp refugees in Somalia, 19791989’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 6, no. 4 (1993), pp. 321-48 (here p. 336). See also Peter Loizos, ‘Misconceiving refugees?’, in Renos Papadopoulos, ed., Therapeutic Care for Refugees: No Place Like Home (London: Karnac Books, 2002), pp. 41-56. 19 Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: the Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 18 13 mother told us about Palestine, but she didn’t know the plots’.20 Here is a glimpse of how one version of refugee history was being fashioned and simultaneously gendered. Perhaps, in the spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin, we should not strive for a final resolution of these questions, but contemplate instead the possibilities of an ongoing conversation, even if it is often a dialogue between unequals. Time and again the terms of the conversation have been set not by refugees but by others who claimed the right to speak and act on their behalf. The appropriation of refugee experience is deeply ironic. Refugees have usually lost enough as it is. Must they also forfeit the right to speak on their own behalf? How might they be enabled to speak, even if it disturbs convention and challenges complacency? Who will listen, and how attentively? My hope is that this conference will contribute to and enrich these conversations regarding the making of the modern refugee. Rosemary Sayigh, ‘Palestinian camp women as tellers of history’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 27, no. 2 (1998), 42-58 (here p. 42); Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered villages: representations of Hindu-Bengali memories in the aftermath of partition’, South Asia, 18 (1995), Special Issue, pp. 109-29. 20 14