Border Vigils. Jeremy Harding
8,000 Russians in the Renault works. Sams gave heart strain and TB as the main causes of illness in the refugee workforce. Problems of labour rivalry also arose. The two conventions of 1933 and 1938 to which France was a signatory urged that ‘restrictive laws’ governing foreign labour ‘shall not be applied in all their severity to refugees’. The French, however, entered a reservation in the margin about foreign labour quotas – the same quotas, Mr Sams noted drily, which meant that only 15 per cent of the musicians in a well-known balalaika orchestra could be Russian. The quota system was left in place by the Front Populaire, making it hard for new refugees with qualifications to find a position, while political attitudes tended to harden in industry. Sams hints that the refugees in Lyon suffered at the hands of the French Communist Party. ‘The Russians,’ he reported, were regarded as ‘enemies of Soviet Russia’ (a very different objection from the one raised by Lyonnais prostitutes sixty years later when the first young women with Kosovo ID papers began competing with them on the quays).
Still, there were jobs and, under the Front Populaire, a growing culture of social provision. ‘In general,’ Sams reported from Moselle, ‘any Russian with the willingness to work and good health can earn a living.’ Former German nationals, too, found sanctuary in France, which in the third quarter of 1933 received between 30,000 and 60,000 refugees from Nazism. Many remained for several years, others moved on to Palestine, Latin America, the US and South Africa. The figures began to fall in 1937, but by now 6 per cent of the population were of foreign origin and there were still refugees coming in from Germany, Austria and Spain, including ‘wounded or incapacitated German members of the International Brigades’.
It was the crisis in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the fretwork of successor states created after their demise, that gave Simpson and his team such a wealth of human material to consider. Already, between the 1880s and the eve of the Great War, enormous numbers of Jews had been driven west by the ferocity of the pogroms. By the time the Ottoman Empire had been divested, the survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915–16 were scattered in camps from Sofia to Damascus. In the 1920s, thousands of Kurds followed the Armenians out of Turkey to settle in Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq. By one count, a million and a half Russians were displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution; a third of these were still stateless by World War Two. With the dismantling of Austria-Hungary and the formation of the Baltic states, more Europeans swelled the ranks of apatrides, or stateless persons; others found that they were now members of precarious minorities with marginal rights in new political entities, confected by the postwar treaties.
At the end of World War Two, with the retrenchment of the Western empires, mass movement was largely assigned out of Europe: to India, Palestine, Indochina – and thereafter to zones of contention where the superpowers had leaseholder status and a steely readiness to wage war by proxy. During the Cold War, three million people left their homes in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, five million left Afghanistan, a million or more were uprooted in Central America, and two to three million Palestinians dug deeper into exile; on the eve of the millennium there were nearly seven million refugees in Africa and many more people displaced inside their own borders.
The end of hostilities between the Soviet Union and the West brought hundreds of aid workers and dozens of refugee monitors – the successors of John Hope Simpson and Mr Sams – back from the tropics to Europe. The dramatic character of events in 1989 and the years that followed gave them a distinctive cast, but in the Baltic countries and elsewhere it was a smeared mirror-image of interwar statelessness that now reappeared, as a series of successor states came into being after the collapse of communism. Punitive rules of citizenship denied 700,000 Russian-speakers national status in Latvia and 500,000 in Estonia. By the end of 1996, UNHCR was alarmed by the ‘significant numbers’ of Slovaks and Roma rendered stateless, in effect, by the creation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In the 1930s, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had been exemplary hosts to large refugee populations. It was now the turn of former Yugoslav and Czechoslovak nationals – Yugoslavs, above all – to spill across new boundaries in search of refuge. Many of the elements that had led to the massive evictions of the interwar years were once again in place, but the idea of sanctuary had withered.
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Western Europe was reluctant to intervene until the last minute in Bosnia, but at the end of the 1990s, with very high numbers of refugees already exiled from the former Yugoslavia and thousands more arriving from Kosovo, it was impossible to quarantine the Balkans any longer. The many asylum seekers who breached the fortress, and to whom, in the end, Germany and others opened their doors, were a pressing consideration in the Nato air campaign of 1999. A regime that had confined the effects of its misdeeds within its own borders might have fared better, but Slobodan Milosevic’s policies were foisting large numbers of terrified people on prosperous nations that wanted nothing to do with them. That was one of the issues that the European members of Nato had in mind when they spoke of a ‘humanitarian crisis’. Tens of thousands of Kosovans had already lodged asylum claims in the EU before Nato began its air strikes. The Albanian scafisti ferried hundreds across the Otranto Channel every week, while others struck out overland for Western Europe. The EU looked on with growing dismay.
Yet the extraordinary deportations with which Serbia responded to the Nato intervention made these movements look trifling by comparison. In a matter of months, the number of deportees in Macedonia and Albania stood at around half a million. This was by no means the biggest post-World War Two eviction in Europe: the brutal ‘transfer’ of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after World War Two took five years, involved twelve million people and cost at least 500,000 lives. Yet the Kosovo deportations, trifling by comparison, were shocking to those of us who never knew about the postwar persecution of ethnic Germans. The speed and intensity of the process in Kosovo gave it the appearance of rapid flight from a natural disaster.
There were fewer media organisations on hand to record the earlier movements of people on a similar scale in Europe. To get from Skopje, the Macedonian capital, to the country’s border with Kosovo during Nato’s bombing campaign, you had to negotiate a double barrier of police and military roadblocks and then, as you approached the gantries of Macedonian customs and immigration, a vast array of foreign journalists. The field at Blace, where perhaps 40,000 refugees were confined by the Macedonian Government, became the focus of round-the-clock scrutiny by hundreds of digital camcorders and telephoto lenses. It was as though the world had dispatched emissaries to record the arrival of an unknown life form, now evolving in a vast crater of mud and bodily waste. The refugees were cordoned off, victims of a threefold dispossession: forced from their homes and relieved of their belongings by Milosevic; denounced and immobilised by the government of Macedonia; inspected – though hardly addressed – by the media. Stateless, defenceless and finally voiceless. Eventually, posing as emergency workers to slip through the police lines, the press were able to enter the field and talk directly with people who had no idea when or how their ordeal would end.
Gaps began appearing in the screen of objectification thrown up around them, but these did nothing to alleviate the mixture of apprehension and dislike with which the intruders were greeted in Macedonia. Here, above all, they were seen as a potential threat to national stability (and ‘Slav’ ascendancy), already under pressure from the country’s Albanian minority. The desultory tones of Western governments – slow to offer support to the Macedonians in the face of this extraordinary crisis – gave rise to anger. There was much to extenuate the reaction of this little country to the overwhelming influx of refugees – it was no worse than the worst reactions in wealthier countries to the arrival of Kosovans – but in the end, it looked very much like a version of the same hostility that had driven people from their homes in the first place.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt remarked that ‘those whom the persecutor had singled out as the scum of the earth – Jews, Trotskyites etc – actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere.’ She was writing about the ‘denationalisations’ of the 1930s under Hitler and Stalin. The Kosovan refugees fleeing into Albania were spared the indignities of the field at Blace. They came in carts, towed by tractors, along the flaring snowline of Pastrik, down into a country that existed only in name, but which was once the lodestone of every militant Kosovan’s irredentist dreams. Here they were lodged by distant Albanian cousins: in Kukes, in the north of Albania, I