Refugees and the End of Empire Also by Panikos Panayi: an IMMIGRATION HISTORY of BRITAIN: Multicultural Racism Since Ca

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

Also by Pippa Virdee: COMING TO COVENTRY: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers Refugees and the End of Empire Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century

Edited by

Panikos Panayi Professor of European History, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and Pippa Virdee Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK Editorial matter, selection, preface and conclusion © Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee 2011 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2011 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-22747-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30974-0 ISBN 978-0-230-30570-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230305700 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Refugees and the end of empire : imperial collapse and forced migration in the twentieth century / edited by Panikos Panayi, Pippa Virdee. p. cm. Includes index.

1. Population transfers – Europe – History – 20th century. 2. Forced migration – Europe – History – 20th century. 3. Europe – Emigration and immigration – History – 20th century. I. Panayi, Panikos. II. Virdee, Pippa, 1972– D820.P7.R44 2011 325—dc22 2011008038

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Contents

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

Part I Introduction 1 Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth- Century Europe 3 Panikos Panayi

2 The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration: Some Comparative Case Studies 28 Ian Talbot

3 The Tragedy of the Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–48 51 Mark Levene

Part II Imperial Collapse in Europe and the Middle East 4 Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: ‘Population Transfer’ and the End of Empire in Europe 81 Matthew Frank

5 Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War 102 Julie Thorpe

6 Integration without Assimilation in an Impermanent Landscape: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Arab Middle East 127 Dawn Chatty

7 Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival 152 Victoria Rowe

v vi Contents

Part III The Consequences and Legacies of British Imperial Collapse 8 ‘No Home but in Memory’: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab 175 Pippa Virdee

9 Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees 196 Ilyas Chattha

10 Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands 219 Uditi Sen

11 ‘Green for Come’: Moving to York as a Ugandan Asian Refugee 245 Emma Robertson

Part IV Conclusion Conclusions and Legacies 271 Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee

Select Bibliography of Key Works 292 Index 297 Preface: Key Themes, Concepts and Rationale

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

vii viii Preface new millennium point to the continued existence of tens of millions of refugees in the world.5 Certainly there can be no dispute that the twentieth century witnessed a vast increase in the number of refugees in the world. A por- tent of what would follow emerged during the nineteenth century with the flight of exiles from the European continent as repressive regimes tried to crush emerging liberal and left-wing political movements. The numbers of people involved totalled tens of thousands at most.6 More pertinent are the mass deportations which would take place in the collapsing Ottoman Empire, which, according to some estimates, totalled millions of people.7 In the twentieth century, the figure increased, not simply to hundreds of thousands but to millions and then tens of millions, a situation which remains with us until the present day. The increase in refugees began to take off with the collapse of the empires which had controlled Europe and the Middle East from the Middle Ages, especially the Ottoman Empire, in the era of the First World War, when newly emerging nation-states eliminated people without the correct ethnic credentials from their territories. During the interwar years, the number of refugees decreased but certainly did not disappear, especially as a result of the policies of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. While the victims of the Nazis usually receive consideration under the theme of genocide, they certainly underwent displacement, either internal or between borders, to use current U.N. terminology.8 Contemporary scholars recognized the immediate aftermath of the Second World War as the period when European refugees reached their peak numbers, with estimates of more than 30 million people in the decade following the death throes of the Third Reich. People moved all over Europe, either to return home because the Nazis had transported them to another part of Europe, to satisfy the new borders of the post-war peace settlement, or, in the case of Germans in Eastern Europe, to escape vengeful regimes, which wanted to cleanse their territories of anyone associated with the regime which had decimated their countries.9 The early post-war years, however, did not simply witness an explosion in the number of refugees who found themselves in Europe, but also a similar enormous increase in the number of refugees outside Europe,10 most notably in the Indian subcontinent, where, due to the end of the British Empire and the partitioning of India to create a new state of Pakistan, an estimated 15 million people were forcibly displaced in one of the largest migrations of the twentieth century.11 Consequently, a process seen as a solution to the emergence of nation-states with ethnic minorities in Europe formalized under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Preface ix which legitimized the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey, and now became accepted as a method for ending similar con- flicts, not only within Europe, but also beyond. Just as importantly, the later 1940s witnessed the emergence of one of the most long-lasting refugee crises following the creation of Israel, which also carried out ethnic cleansing.12 Following the orgy of expulsion in the aftermath of the Second World War, the number of refugees in the world remained relatively low for several decades, despite the continuing imperial collapse, largely as a result of the Cold War freeze. Refugees certainly did not disappear from Europe, as the example of Algeria following independence,13 the expulsion of Indians from Uganda,14 the ethnic cleansing following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus15 and the flight from the Iranian revolution of 1979 would indicate.16 Similarly, the number of refugees as a result of decolonization and its aftermath also grew, indicated by the classic Refugees: A Problem of Our Time.17 One of the most publicized exoduses consisted of those who fled as a result of the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam.18 The post-war period, and more specifically the 1960s onwards, has seen a shift in refugee crises from the European nation-states to the non- European nation-states. When the U.N. High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in December 1949, its scope and agenda was more comprehensive than its predecessor, the International Refugee Organization. However, apart from the Palestinian refugee crisis,19 the UNHCR was largely concerned with the European refugee crisis, even though there were problems elsewhere, including the refugees in India and Pakistan. During the 1960s, we witnessed an increase in population displacements emerging from the developing world, which highlighted the inadequacies of the 1951 Convention on Refugees. This shift is reflected in changes such as the adoption of the 1967 protocol and the broader conceptualization of refugee concerns for the U.N. in Africa which was formalized in 1969 in the Organisation of African Unity Refugee Convention in Africa.20 This broader definition also included refugees escaping from violence and the devastation caused by war. Significantly though, overseas settlement was rarely offered to Africans as a solution, as was the case when the U.N. was dealing with the post- war European refugee crisis: the preferred solution in Africa was repa- triation.21 In the early 1970s, the UNHCR further extended its mandate to include people in ‘refugee-like situations’, although the burden on the international community of the mandate quickly highlighted the inadequacies.22 x Preface

The number of refugees throughout the world began to increase during the 1980s, partly as a result of the increasingly intolerant and repressive policies of the Soviet Bloc regimes desperately hanging on to power.23 A new global refugee crisis would emerge following the end of the Cold War, as extreme nationalism surfaced in areas which had previously witnessed mild manifestations of this ideology. The collapsing Soviet Empire and death of Yugoslavia represented the key developments in Europe. But the Cold War thaw outside Europe meant an even larger increase in the number of refugees there, especially in Africa and the Middle East, which have become the key areas of concern for the UNHCR.24 Refugees have, therefore, formed a key aspect of the evolution of the world since the First World War. While they may have declined in numbers in particular periods, tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people have found themselves displaced globally over the past century. The purpose of the present volume consists of an attempt to explain the emergence of refugees by concentrating upon one particular theme and three particular geographical foci. It does not claim to cover all examples of the relationship between imperial collapse and the end of empire. Refugee creation does not always link with imperial collapse. The establishment of revolutionary regimes wishing to make a break with the past and, above all, total war, have played a central role in displacement in the twentieth century. In fact, the most dramatic examples of forced migration have occurred when these three factors have come together.25 Nevertheless, this volume constitutes the first attempt to examine in detail the link between the end of empire and refugee creation. It aims to analyse the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong credentials and the refugee experience. Rather than taking a global approach to the issue, the volume essentially examines the end of the European empires in the era of the First World War and the British Empire in India and its wider legacies in the second, contex- tualized with introductory essays, which set the scene in Part I. This focus receives partial explanation in the papers which emerged from the conference upon which this volume is based.26 While more than 30 people spoke at the event, the editors decided to work with those which best illustrated the developments suggested in the initial call for papers. Nevertheless, there are key intellectual reasons for the three geographical concentrations. One of these consists of the fact that the events which occurred in India and Pakistan in 1947 essentially fol- Preface xi lowed the template laid down as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Curzon was the first to phrase this as ‘the unmixing of peoples’ in response to the unravelling of the Ottoman Empire and, subsequently, the complete restructuring of populations.27 It is the end of this regime which prepares the way for much of the forced migration which would take place later in the twentieth century and beyond. The essays in the introductory section in particular provide a background to the developments which would occur in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War and the Nazi Empire at the end of the Second World War. Parts I and II, therefore, set the background for the events in South Asia and its aftermath in 1947. Without the events which followed the collapsing Ottoman Empire in particular, the ethnic cleansing accompanying the partition of India may not have happened in the way that it did. Significantly, the largest population displacements which occurred in the twentieth century did so in the aftermath of the Second World War. While we cannot ignore the plight of the Palestinians, the scale of their expulsion remained smaller in number than that of the Germans in Eastern Europe or those who fled from India and Pakistan. The policy- makers who authorized the expulsion of perhaps 30 million people in total from these events had become desensitized to the human suffering inherent in ethnic cleansing as a policy partly because of the precedents set by the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the background of the mass killing of the Second World War in both Europe and Asia must also have played a role in the callous policies pursued. Perhaps at no other point during the twentieth century had the wishes of individuals become so meaningless for policy-makers. The European and Middle Eastern section of the volume partly acts as a background for events in South Asia, while the three parts demonstrate continuities. The essays by Virdee and Robertson, together with the conclusion and the essays by Panayi, Levene and Frank, demonstrate the centrality of ethnic cleansing as a policy throughout the twentieth century. While it may have reached its height in the aftermath of the Second World War, its legacy has continued until the present. The main focus of the book may consist of Europe, the Middle East and the collapse of the British Empire in South Asia, which represent a series of case studies, but it does not ignore events elsewhere. The volume has two key themes. In the first place, it attempts to explain the reasons why forced migration and consequent refugee creation has formed such a key aspect of imperial collapse. As several of the essays will demonstrate, from the end of the Ottoman Empire xii Preface until the present, it almost seems as though ethnic purification had become accepted as part of the process of the move away from imperial to nation-state control. While the former old-fashioned method of rule could operate upon the basis of several ethnic groups living together in relative harmony (although not in the Nazi case) with an imperial people who ultimately remained in control (whether Turkish Muslims in the Ottoman case, or white Britons in the British Empire), this formula could not operate in the early stages of emerging nation-states. The latter require more centralization, which partly operates through the manufacturing of citizens with a common nationality, meaning that those who do not have the right credentials face expulsion. The precedent here again consists of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, where ethnic cleansing happened upon all sides, especially during the era of the First World War. Not only did, for example, the move from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism mean the elimination of Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia, the emerging nation-states in the Balkans expelled their Turkish populations. Several of the essays, especially in Parts I and II of the volume, therefore, tackle the reasons for forced migration and refugee creation at the end of empire. The volume takes a broad definition of empire, uniting both the medieval European regimes, which had controlled much of the continent and found themselves rapidly disintegrating during the nineteenth century, and also the ‘colonial’ empires, which rose and declined more rapidly. Both forms of control had the characteristic of accepting a loose form of rule, which recognized the existence of ethnicity, largely in order to ensure that the loose form of control survived.28 This con- trasts, however, with the Nazi Empire, which tried to crush ethnicity, although, according to the Nazi Racial hierarchy, some racial groups had a higher status than others.29 On the one hand, the book deals with traditional concepts of decolonization, as understood when referring to the European retreat from Africa and Asia.30 However, the volume revolves around the issue of imperial collapse, in which the First World War, in the case of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires,31 and the Second World War, in the case of the Nazis,32 played a key role. In the case of the first two, the unravelling of empire had taken hundreds of years, rather than the decades in the case of Britain overseas. The ethnic groups which had emerged in the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, British and French empires gradually increased their con- fidence during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether their ethnic basis relied upon religion, language or appearance. These ethnic groups would eventually emerge into nationalities, help- Preface xiii ing to overthrow these empires. Unlike the previous regimes, which tolerated a variety of ethnicities, the new nation-states had a clearer conception of who belonged, as opposed to those who could not fit into this pattern.33 Those who fell into the latter category would face expulsion beyond the borders of the newly constructed national enti- ties. This forced migration became a characteristic of twentieth-century state creation, legitimized by a whole series of treaties which established new nation-states. Thus, while some of the essays in this volume try to tackle the issue of individual experiences, the macro approach taken by some of the others, accepts the tens of millions of people affected by the act of expulsion practised from the end of the nineteenth century and legitimized at the highest state and diplomatic level particularly, as an important precedent and template, by the Treaty of Lausanne. Forced migration, the expulsion of millions of refugees from their homes during the course of the twentieth century, became part of the state- building process.34 The second key theme of the book consists of the experience of the refugee. While policy-makers and governments increasingly ignored the plight of the people on the ground, tens of millions of people suf- fered loss of homes, relatives, trauma and dislocation: their experiences have been captured with the development of oral history within the discipline. The use of oral history was popularized in the 1960s as a means of democratizing history, but its emergence within the discipline has also coincided with wider social–political developments, namely, decolonization and feminist and civil rights movements in the 1960s.35 These developments demanded new forms of capturing voices that had previously been left out of the history pages.36 Oral history has, therefore, been associated with the marginalized in society, which also aptly fits into the marginal status of oral history itself within mainstream historiography which often refuses to consider personal memories as valid sources.37 Ronald J. Grele, Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli38 have been crucial in pushing the boundaries of oral history, challenging us to consider not just what people remember but rather why they remember.39 Indeed, without the work on memory,40 we would have little understanding of the true horrors of holocaust: the experiences of people in the concentration camps, the fight for survival, and about the pain and loss experienced by individuals.41 Those lived experiences of individuals which cannot be revealed through official documents because they do not capture the emotional and human dimension are more often concerned with the ‘high politics’. For this reason, first-hand accounts are xiv Preface more useful in ascertaining perceptions and opinions. The combined approach of documentary sources and personal accounts provides a more balanced picture and, thus, lessens some of the methodological problems associated with first-hand accounts.42 Oral testimonies can, therefore, help us in filling those gaps and provide a more nuanced understanding of individual refugee experiences of migration, resettlement and the associated trauma. For a historian, they can compliment the official source material, providing an altogether more comprehensive analysis. Furthermore, the level of detail required in localized case studies is often absent in official documentation, especially if the emphasis is on the people rather than the place. In the historiography of India/Pakistan Partition literature, developments in oral history allowed scholars to explore events from a com- pletely different perspective. The use of oral narratives have traditionally been associated with the rights of women43 and stem from the associa- tion of providing a voice to the ‘voiceless’ in society. Within Partition literature, the human dimension and the female voice has been com- pletely absent and generally overlooked in favour of the nationalist discourse. Thus, the plight of women during the Partition has, until recently, received no scholarly discussion. Sheila Rowbotham’s conten- tion is that gendered accounts were often ‘hidden from history’ and now allow us to challenge ‘historical interpretations based upon the lives and documentation of men’.44 Similarly, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin45 have all contributed significantly to re-address this imbalance and have forced sensitive and often taboo subjects on to the agenda. Oral history has bought the experiences of women to the fore and has begun to expose the harsh realities of abduction, rape and violence against women in a patriarchal society, revealing personal and subjective accounts of individuals who experienced the turmoil of partition first hand. Some of the chapters included in this volume continue this trend within oral history and more specifically within Partition Studies of exploring marginal and localized experiences. For example, Rowe’s study draws on memoirs and narratives by women to explore their experiences of the Armenian genocide; Chatty utilizes a number of interviews conducted with refugees in the Middle East; Sen focuses on the Andaman Islands and the refugees who were relocated from camps in West Bengal; Chattha’s localized study incorporates narratives from Kashmiris settled in Sialkot; Robertson’s study of York focuses on a female migrant expelled from Uganda; while Virdee’s essay brings in narratives from both India and Pakistan to provide a comparative Preface xv dimension. The methodology, therefore, fits aptly into these new direc- tions of understanding refugee accounts and, therefore, the human dimension of ‘population exchange’. However, the different contributors have employed a range of methodologies. Thus, the conceptual essays in Part I are broader historical narratives, while some of the latter essays are narrower in their focus and are based on case studies which utilize personal narratives and deal with individual refugee experiences. This mixture of methodologies and concerns with the macro and micro within these contributions attempts to capture the changes and developments within the study of forced migration and refugees. There is, then, a logical progression from the broad canvas of state politics and exclusionary nationalism presented by Panayi, Talbot and Levene to the narrow and individual- ized accounts presented in Robertson, Sen and Virdee which help us to understand the impact of these policies on individuals. The key concept under consideration in this volume therefore consists of refugees, both collectively and individually. Most of the essays which deal with their creation essentially tackle the issue as a mass phenomenon. During the Yugoslav conflict, the idea of ethnic cleansing emerged as Serbs, Croats and Muslims expelled their populations, essentially continuing the precedent which had been set in the Balkans and the Middle East in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Some of the articles in the volume, therefore, deal with refugee creation as a mass phenomenon, rather than with the plight of individuals fleeing due to a well-founded fear of persecution, a phenomenon which reached its peak during the nineteenth-century Age of Revolutions and the Cold War in Europe. The processes under consideration have attracted a number of labels over the years, whether forced migration, population displacement, population exchange, ethnic cleansing or even genocide. All of these have led to refugee creation on a large scale, even though Genocide Studies, for instance, rarely tackle concepts such as refugees, especially in the context of events in Nazi Europe. On the other hand, the link between ethnic cleansing and refugee creation in the Armenian case, for example, remains more obvious, especially as the League of Nations Office for Refugees emerged partly from the concern for Armenians.46 This volume tries to fit into two historiographies, covering forced migration and refugees and the collapse of empire. While studies of refugees certainly predate the Second World War, a good starting point consists of its immediate aftermath, when Jacques Vernant and Eugene Kulishcer considered the consequences of the two World Wars for dis- xvi Preface placement.47 In 1975, there followed the detailed account by Louise Holborn, which provided a history of refugees in the twentieth century but concentrated more upon the contemporary situation.48 From that time, country-specific studies have dealt with refugees. For instance, while American and British scholars increasingly became obsessed with the crimes of the Nazis, German research devoted much attention to the refugees who had fled to the Federal Republic from further East in the aftermath of the Second World War.49 In South Asia, much of the early scholarly discussion was centred around and influenced by nationalism: for two post-colonial, nascent and fragile nations, the priority was the need to strengthen the nation-state. From a European perspective, a seminal work consisted of The Unwanted by Michael Marrus, published in 1985, before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its consequences, which provided a summary of the major catastrophes until that time. More recently, the Journal of Refugee Studies came into existence in 1988, linked with the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford. However, an analysis by Tony Kushner demonstrated that only 4 per cent of papers submit- ted to the Journal of Refugee Studies covered historical themes.50 While it would be erroneous to suggest that historians have ignored refugees as a theme of study, paradigms have tended to follow particular groups or particular nation-states, with key areas of study including refugees from Nazism, post-war refugees to Germany and Palestinians. While many of the refugee movements studied by historians have looked at the consequences of the collapse of empire, few students have actually focused specifically upon this theme. Books on the Armenian Genocide, for example, tend to use the concept of genocide partly to prove that this constituted such an act against Armenians in opposition to denials by the Turkish state.51 One scholar who has helped the move away from this paradigm is Donald Bloxham, not only in his study of the Armenian Genocide, but also in his more recent volume which has examined the ‘unweaving of Europe’, where the focus remains firmly upon genocide.52 Similarly, the increasing numbers of volumes on ethnic cleansing, while they might take a long-term historical approach, examine refugee creation as a consequence of imperial collapse (if they do at all) implicitly rather than explicitly.53 The essays which follow will examine the relationship between imperial collapse, the emergence of successor nationalism, the exclusion of ethnic groups with the wrong credentials and personal refugee experiences. The individual essays examine both the structural forces which created refugees as a result of imperial collapse, as well as focusing upon the consequences of these processes for individuals. The book emerges Preface xvii out of the De Montfort University Conference on ‘Refugees and the End of Empire’. The organizers and editors have selected the nine best and most appropriate papers, while Panikos Panayi has written a new overview paper on twentieth-century Europe, and Pippa Virdee has added a new contribution. They are also bookended by this preface, a conclusion and a bibliography. Although the remainder of the essays originate in the conference, their authors have revised and significantly extended the original presentations. The editors decided to divide the volume into three distinct sections. The first of these contains three overview pieces, focusing upon the End of Empire in Europe and beyond. Part II focuses specifically upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of the First World War, with individual essays on specific case studies. Part III examines ‘The Consequences and Legacy of British Imperial Collapse’, with a particular focus upon the experiences of South Asians immedi- ately after the Partition of India and the specific case of Uganda. Panikos Panayi’s ‘Imperial Collapse and the Creation of Refugees in Twentieth-Century Europe’ traces the consequences of the end of empire for those groups which found themselves in a series of successor states at key moments. First, the collapse of the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after the First World War; second, the end of the Third Reich in 1945; and third, the end of the Cold War and its consequences in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Ian Talbot on ‘The End of the European Colonial Empires and Forced Migration Studies’ focuses upon the collapse of the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese empires during the twentieth century and covers a series of key themes. These consist of the consequences of imperial collapse for refugee creation, and, more specifically, the experiences of European settlers and col- laborators. He devotes particular attention to the Partition of India in 1947 and its consequences for forced migration, but also demonstrates the ways in which the end of empire sometimes has repercussions for minority populations decades later. Talbot’s contribution further focuses upon the personal experiences for individuals by examining ‘Trauma, Loss and Identity’. Mark Levene’s contribution on the theme of ‘The Tragedy of the Rimlands, Nation-State Formation and the Destruction of Imperial Peoples, 1912–1948’ places the mass expulsion of European and Middle Eastern imperial peoples within the context of radical or abrupt nation-state development, particularly in the period 1912–48. By concentrating on the rimland regions of the Ottoman, Romanov and ‘German’ empires (Habsburg and Hohenzollern), Levene demonstrates a fatal synergy between ruptured time – that is from the time of xviii Preface the European crises from ca. 1912 – and geographical space, which set on course the creation of new political formations and, in turn, deter- mined a ‘minority’ status for non-dominant communities. By co-relating the European and Middle Eastern incidence of extreme violence, including genocide, to these rimland regions, the essay shows how mass human displacement, whether through conscious ethnic cleansing or ‘voluntary’ migration, was a further consequence of this same pattern. Part II of the book focuses upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of the First World War. Matthew Frank in ‘Fantasies of Ethnic Unmixing: “Population Transfer” and the End of Empire in Europe’ examines the genesis of the concept of ‘population transfer’ which emerged in response to the rapid retreat of the Ottoman Empire from south-eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and the fear that the minorities left behind – both Christian and Muslim– would continue to be a target of persecution and a focus of irredent- ism, and therefore a source of instability within the state and between states. The essay locates population transfer in the ‘fantasies of ethnic unmixing’ that emerged in early twentieth-century writing on the so- called ‘nationalities question’, which sketched out radical schemes for the reshaping of the ethnographic and political map of Europe and which became even more far-reaching in scope with the outbreak of the First World War. Frank pays particular attention to the ideas of Siegfried Lichtenstädter and George Montandon who, at the start of the twentieth century, viewed ethnic cleansing as an inevitable outcome of the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. There then follows Julie Thorpe’s contribution on ‘Displacing Empire: Refugee Welfare, National Activism and State Legitimacy in Austria-Hungary in the First World War’, which examines how, on the eve of imperial collapse, the Austro-Hungarian Empire incarcerated its displaced internal nationalities, despite the fact that they held the citizenship of the empire. She argues that the internment of wartime refugees became a means of separating ‘citizens’ from ‘unreliable’ nationalities in Austria- Hungary along ethnic and civic lines of belonging, which helped create a popular stereotype of the refugee that would re-emerge in the interwar period. Dawn Chatty’s chapter on ‘Integration without Assimilation in an Impermanent Landscape: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Arab Middle East’ outlines the waves of involuntary migration from outside the Ottoman Empire and along its borders into the heart of its former Arab provinces. It then sets out to make sense of the individual experiences within the dispossessed populations, as a step in understanding the mechanisms whereby new ‘communities’ came into being, Preface xix often without a contiguous territorial basis. Such an examination is aimed at understanding the context of such dispossession, statelessness and forced migration, as well as the social, political and environmental price which is paid regionally and globally. Although some groups of self-defined communities forced to move within the region have suc- ceeded in physically assimilating and creating new identities as minorities (e.g. Armenian, Circassian, Chechnyan and Albanian) many others have been left stateless (e.g. Palestinian, Kurds and Bidoon). Still others have found themselves internally displaced, with little recourse to international human or cultural rights protection (Bedouin nomadic pastoralists), while a minority may have managed to escape the region altogether by joining the ranks of refugees and emigrants seeking resettlement in Europe and North America and giving the term ‘diaspora’ new meanings (e.g. Palestinian, Armenian, Assyrian, Yazidis and Kurds). Yet these communities have remained largely coherent, despite the often deterritorialized nature of their social and cultural ideology. Victoria Rowe’s ‘Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival’ examines the experiences of one particular group at the end of the Ottoman Empire as a consequences of the First World War and the Armenian Genocide. Rowe analyses the ways in which women, who had experienced these events, developed strategies of survival. These included the use of networks and accepting their new fate, in the case of those who had married into Muslim families. She examines how these strategies transferred into the refugee experience in Aleppo and impacted on women’s roles in social reconstruction in Armenian communities in Syria. The essay, rooted in the literature on the Armenian Genocide and its consequences, also uses memoirs by Armenian refugees and documents from the League of Nations’s archives. Part III of this book examines ‘The Consequences and Legacy of British Imperial Collapse’, with a particular focus upon the experiences of South Asians in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, which created one of the largest individual refugee crisis of the twentieth century. Many of the themes developed in Part II of the volume, with its focus on Europe in the interwar years, find reflection in India, Pakistan and beyond after the end of imperial rule in South Asia. Pippa Virdee in ‘ “No Home but in Memory”: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab’ explores the legacies of colonial rule in the Punjab and its consequences for those who were uprooted due to Partition. Individual accounts highlight the longevity of the resettlement process, rebuilding homes and lives, which at times went on for 10 to 15 years. Some refugees moved a number of times before finally settling xx Preface down. This restlessness and loss of their homeland is evident through oral narratives that capture those traumatic years of being perpetually displaced. Virdee then focuses on individuals who chose to leave and resettle in Britain. This is at a time when nationalism and patriotism was at its height in the two new states. What compelled these individuals to migrate to a country that had subjugated their land for more than 300 years? And why, having already been displaced, did they choose to go through that process again? Ilyas Chattha’s ‘Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim Refugees’ focuses upon the interreligious violence that occurred in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir at the end of the British colonial rule in India, which included a possible ‘genocide’ of Muslims in September–October 1947. One million people were uprooted in the Kashmir region alone. Despite the growing concerns of the ‘new history’ of Partition, the experience of Kashmiri refugees has largely been overlooked because of the tendency of Partition historians to concen- trate on events within the Punjab. This essay represents an important contribution to the existing literature by highlighting the attitude and role of the state in mass violence and the development and expulsion of refugees. Uditi Sen, in ‘Dissident Memories: Exploring Bengali Refugee Narratives in the Andaman Islands’ deals with one particular experi- ment of nation-building in independent India, which was at the same time a project of refugee rehabilitation. The essay tackles the 6,000 Bengali refugee families from different parts of East Pakistan who were used by the Government of India to ‘colonize’ the Andaman Islands between 1949 and 1961. She uses a combination of government records and numerous interviews carried out at a random selection of villages in the Andamans in a free-flowing oral format. The essay seeks to pro- ductively de-stabilize the normative framework in Indian historiography for studying refugees born of the creation of East Pakistan, using the voices and experiences of the Bengali refugees of the Andaman Islands. Emma Robertson in ‘ “Green for Come”: Moving to York as a Ugandan Asian Refugee’ demonstrates that the end of empire had an impact on the city of York, Britain, and its inhabitants when Idi Amin expelled thousands of Asians from the former British colony of Uganda, many of whom headed to Britain. Despite holding British passports, they were classified as refugees and most were placed in resettlement camps until they could find ‘appropriate’ work and housing. York was classified as a ‘green’ area suitable to receive a small number of refugees, in contrast to ‘red’ areas such as Leicester where there were apparently already many non-white residents. Drawing on oral history and using Preface xxi the case study of ‘Julie’, the chapter explores the processes of migration and of establishing a new life in the local community. How did it feel to move to York in the early 1970s? What was the significance of York’s particular relationship with empire for her individual experience of displacement? The volume, therefore, brings together a coherent range of essays which offer a highly original way of examining the refugee experience and its relationship to the end of Empire on a global scale. The focus upon Europe and the Middle East between 1900 and 1948 and the Partition of India and its legacies from 1947 allows a unique comparative insight into both the short- and long-term causes and consequences of imperial collapse for refugees during the course of the twentieth century.

Notes

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

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

32. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. 33. Panikos Panayi, Ousiders: A History of European Minorities (London, 1999). 34. See the contributions of Mark Levene and Matthew Frank below. 35. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), pp. vii, ix. 36. See further, Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 3rd Edition (Oxford, 2000), who is considered a pioneer of oral history and life stories. 37. Brigitte Halbmayr, ‘The Ethics of Oral History: Expectations, Responsibilities and Dissociations’, in Marta Kurkowska-Budzan and Krzysztof Zamorski, eds, Oral History: The Challenges of Dialogue (Amsterdam, 2009), p. 195. 38. See further, Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson, eds, The Oral History Reader (London, 1998); and Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. 39. See ‘Introduction’ in Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. 40. Maurice Halbwach, On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL, 1992), is considered to be one of the earliest published works examining the construction of collective memory. 41. Halbmayr, ‘Ethics of Oral History’, p. 195. See further, Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History. 42. For a further discussion on oral history, see Ronald J. Grele, ‘Movement without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History’, pp. 38–52 and Joan Sangster, ‘Telling Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History’, pp. 87–100, both in Perks and Thompson, Oral History Reader. See the section in critical developments in the second edition of The Oral History Reader (New York, 2006). 43. Grele, ‘Movement without Aim’, p. 4. 44. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (London, 1973). See also Sangster, ‘Telling Stories’, pp. 87–100. 45. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998), and Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Jersey, 1998) have contributed considerably to raising the profile of women within Partition literature in India. 46. See, for instance, Laura Barnett, ‘Global Governance and the Evolution of the International Refugee Regime’, International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 14 (2002), pp. 241–5. 47. Kulischer, Europe on the Move; Vernant, Refugee in the Post-War World. 48. Holborn, Refugees. 49. Key works include: Theodor Schieder, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 4 Volumes (Bonn, 1954–61); Eugen Lemberg and Freidrich Edding, eds, Die Vertriebenen in Westdeutschland: Ihre Eingliederung und ihr Einfluss auf Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft, Politik und Geistleben, 3 Volumes (Kiel, 1959).Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (London, 2001), pp. 51–87, considers the growth of this historiography in the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. 50. Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees: Then and Now (Manchester, 2006), p. 223. 51. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005). xxiv Preface

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

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

xxv xxvi Notes on Contributors

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

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