Jochen Lingelbach, Postdoctoral Researcher in African History (University of Bayreuth), Fellow in the Research Group “Internalizing Borders” (Centre for Interdisciplinary Research Bielefeld)
Current discussions and recently failed plans to send refugees to Rwanda or other places outside Europe have historical antecedents. Among other places, the British imperial government even transferred refugees to Rwanda during the Second World War. This little-known episode connects with a longer imperial history of sending supposedly problematic groups from Europe to Africa or elsewhere in the colonies. Recent externalization plans build on the same imperial worldview that regards Africa as a space where European problems might be solved.
Introduction
The Rwanda scheme never materialized and has just been buried by the British Labour government. However, it remains to be feared that this is not the end of the story. Other governments and political actors in Europe and beyond have already taken up the idea despite its proven illegality, unfeasibility and ridiculous costs. However, in this short text, I do not want to speculate about the future but write about the past. Sending refugees to Africa is not without precedents in European history. Actually, during the Second World War, the British government did even send refugees to Rwanda. The refugees who found a safe haven in Rwanda and other African countries were not from Africa, but from Greece and they never tried to set foot onto the British Islands.
About 2,700 Greek refugees were sent by the British colonial administration from the Middle East to the Belgian colonies of Ruanda-Urundi and the Congo where they stayed for the duration of the war.[1] Some one hundred fifty of them lived in a camp in what is today Rwanda. The Greek were part of a larger group of refugees from the Aegean Islands who fled in 1941/42 from the brutal Nazi occupation and famine conditions. Illegally they sailed in small boats to Turkey from where the British eventually transferred them through Aleppo to Palestine and Egypt. They had escaped along the same routes people are travelling on today – just in the opposite direction. The Greeks who stayed in camps in what are today Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo had been evacuated during the Alamein crisis in the summer of 1942 when fascist troops were advancing into Egypt. I will first tell their improbable history in more detail before concluding by discussing the relation of this episode with other schemes for the forced movement of undesired people. While conditions and circumstances may differ, the imperial worldview lying beneath European ideas of moving people around (formerly) colonized spaces is the same.
From the Aegean Islands to Rwanda
The odyssey of the Greek refugees who sat out the wartime in central Africa started when they fled from the Aegean Islands of Chios, Lesbos, Samos or some of the Dodecanese Islands. Risking their lives, they took the illegal route to the Turkish mainland on small boats with hundreds capsizing and drowning in the same sea where refugees are dying today.[2] In Turkey they were safe, but the neutral Turkish government became increasingly reluctant to admit more of them. Eventually, most refugees came under the care of the British and Greek refugee relief administration, particularly after the Turkish government threatened to repatriate them. Closely connected with the army, the British Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) was established to deal with the incoming Greek, Poles and later Yugoslav civilians. Greek refugees arriving in Turkey were first sent by train to a transit camp in the hills near Aleppo, in Allied-occupied Syria. There all incoming refugees were disinfected, registered, quarantined for fourteen days, interrogated by British intelligence officers and, after some weeks, sent onwards to refugee camps in Egypt or Palestine. Up to one thousand refugees passed through Aleppo every month.
In Egypt, the British established refugee camps where tens of thousands of European refugees stayed.[3] During the Alamein crisis in June 1942, when the Axis forces were advancing towards Alexandria, the British refugee administrators in Egypt hastily sent some three thousand Greek refugees further south to British colonies in East Africa, much to the dismay of their governors. They had already received some nineteen thousand Polish refugees[4] and accepted only five hundred Greeks in a camp in Kigoma, Tanzania. The East African officials asked the Belgian governor of neighbouring Congo if he could take in some of the refugees. Congo was the largest Belgian colony and Ruanda-Urundi (today the two countries of Rwanda and Burundi) were League of Nations Mandates under Belgian administration and governed in close connection with the Congo. During the war, both were cut off from the colonial metropole, which was occupied by the Germans. During that period, the Belgian colonies cooperated closely with the British Empire and the Allies supplying soldiers and crucial goods.[5] Congo’s governor agreed, and some 2,700 Greeks were sent to six refugee camps in the eastern Congo and two additional camps in Ruanda-Urundi.
The camps were administered by Greek and Belgian officials and maintained by thousands of African workers. The camps consisted of well-built houses, were located in rather disease-free regions, had great medical care and were materially well-supplied. The reason for this privileged treatment of European refugees in Africa lies in the colonial division of society. Although British and Belgian administrators looked down on the Greeks, who mostly had a humble background as peasants or fishermen, they considered it necessary to maintain them to an acceptable ‘European standard’ while they were in the colonies. One report noted after visiting the refugee camps in the Congo and Ruanda-Urundi: “The Greek refugees in the Congo are undoubtedly housed better than any other refugees in the Eastern Hemisphere and probably in the world.”[6] They were definitely much better than today’s European refugee camps on the Aegean islands. Conditions in the camps were good at that time because they were built for white people in colonial societies. Thousands of Africans constructed, supplied and worked in the camps. Some were even conscripted to do this under war regulations giving colonial governments the power to force people to work.[7] The privileged position of the European refugees becomes even more pronounced in comparison with the generally difficult living conditions for Africans during the war when the colonies’ economies were geared towards the war effort. In Rwanda, this contributed to the massive Ruzagayura famine that started in October 1943 and was caused by a drought, but exacerbated by the redirection of the economy towards the war. Rwandans had to work in war-related industries and parts of their agricultural products were sent to the Congo to feed people working in the important mines.[8] An estimated three hundred thousand people died in this famine, while the Greek refugees were rather well-fed.
Nyanza camp was located just two miles away from the town of Nyanza in Rwanda and home to 146 Greek refugees. It consisted of neat rows of small, whitewashed brick houses with tiled roofs on a hill, each inhabited by one family. According to one report, Nyanza was “perhaps the all-time high for refugee luxury.” The camp was reminiscent of a modern planned American suburb when seen from afar. According to a Belgian colonial official, the camp was built in record time with support from Christian missionaries and an established Greek company from Usumbura (today Burundi’s capital Bujumbura). It was set in a very healthy area and consequently, no patients were in the hospital in Nyanza town in June 1944 when an American Red Cross official visited. An extra wing of the hospital had nevertheless been set apart for the Greeks. In the camp, two refugees worked in the bakery, and three in a garden project, but no other economic or leisure activities were planned or done. In contrast to this apparent idleness, some four hundred Africans were employed in running the camp. That is more than twice as many Rwandan workers as Greek refugees.[9]
After the end of the war, most Greek refugees returned home. Due to transport delays, some refugees were left behind for months in Kigoma, Tanzania. They became disgruntled and started a hunger strike and when the governor visited Kigoma, a part of the camp was burning. British officials suspected that the refugees had set it on fire. By early 1946, the last Greek had finally returned.[10]
Three telling differences
Current debates about the externalisation of asylum from the European Union to African countries differ from this earlier history in three regards: First, it was a time when Europe was a battlefield people tried to escape from and the African continent was comparably peaceful. The refugee transfer was not a means to try to block people from entering Europe but rather an evacuation from a potential warzone. Secondly, the refugees were Europeans and as such privileged by their whiteness. In the hosting colonial societies of East and Central Africa, racial hierarchies were the basic principle of social order and whites enjoyed privileges accordingly, no matter how destitute they had been before arrival.[11] And thirdly, the refugees were hosted in colonial territories, that were clearly, officially and legally part of European empires. Rwanda was part of a Belgian colony, but the transfer was orchestrated by the British, who at that time, ruled the largest empire in the world. Moving people through imperial spaces was a tried and tested political, economic and social technique during the era of colonial empires.
Despite these differences, there is something to learn from this history. Actually, the three differences are the interesting part that can tell us something about recent ideas and plans for the externalisation of asylum procedures away from Europe. First, the whole regime of international refugee protection grew out of the failure to provide safe places for refugees who tried to flee from Nazi persecution in Europe. After the Second World War, putting into international law the right to asylum in a safe country was a major lesson learned from this deadly failure. This seems to be forgotten in today’s debates, especially by people who have been lucky enough to live in a peaceful country since then. Secondly, the privileging of white refugees stands in stark contrast to the situation of Black refugees and refugees of colour who arrive on Europe’s shores. The idea of externalisation is not to bring people into safety but to make them disappear from view. This follows an idea of a supposedly natural order, where Europe is imagined as a white continent and Africa as Black. This connects with the third difference, namely the fact that there are no formal European colonies anymore. Ideas of externalisation seem to ignore this and carry on a colonial imagination of Africa as an empty space where Europeans can do what they want. Political actors show their imperial mindset when they come up with such ideas. The same holds for the right-wing government plans in Denmark and Italy. Relatedly, a postcolonial relation exists between Italy and Albania, the latter having suffered under fascist Italian occupation as a Protectorate from 1939 until 1943.[12] But I want to extend here on the European imperial idea of empty space and migration management.
Sending “problematic” population groups elsewhere
Sending “problematic” parts of the population (poor, criminal, Jewish) elsewhere is a tried practice and idea in European history. The convict colonies of North America, the Caribbean and Australia come to mind as places where the British government sent population segments it deemed problematic. The transportation of convicts served two purposes: Getting rid of a problematic population and developing white settlements in the empire’s colonies. The solution to domestic problems in urbanizing and industrializing Britain was solved by sending the undesired away. The relocation of poor children from Britain in the 1880s echoed these transportations. At that time British welfare organisations were organising the transfer of poor children to Canada and Australia again in order to increase the British settler population in the dominions but also to alleviate the problem of the poor urban population in British cities.[13] A revival of this plan on a smaller scale happened in the 1930s when a child welfare organisation sent children to Southern Rhodesia. The heads behind the scheme wanted to increase the British element in the white settler population as a means to increase British dominance vis-à-vis Afrikaner or other supposedly inferior “racial stock”.[14]
The British ideas had an infamous echo in the so-called “Madagascar Plan” of the German Nazis.[15] Before the unthinkable and unprecedented industrialized genocide of the Holocaust, other anti-Semites had proposed to relocate the German Jewish population to the island of Madagascar. Other ideas for Jewish settlement in colonies were floated around at the same time, but none was put into practice.[16] Throughout, especially the impoverished Eastern European Jewish population was seen by many in Europe as a problem to be solved by settling them elsewhere. As a further complication, Britain tried to hinder a larger Jewish migration movement into its colonial Mandate Palestine up until the founding of Israel in 1948. Earlier, especially before the First World War, some colonial territories had been rather open towards Jewish immigration and several planned and unplanned settlement schemes were tried around the world.[17] All such schemes had the same underlying assumption: The people were identified as a problem in Europe and sending them away was perceived as a way to settle supposedly empty lands. As Michael Marrus sums up the plans for Jewish resettlement in the interwar period: “Behind most of these plans was the hope that the refugees could be sent far away – to remote, unsettled regions where they would not pose serious difficulties.”[18]
The funny thing with all these remote and unsettled regions is, however, that there are already people living there. The colonial myth of the empty lands is just that, a myth. While disease, war and mass murder could free some space in settler colonies, this was not always an option. Already the European refugees were not completely welcome in the British and Belgian colonies. The problems with public opinion in colonial territories were also pronounced in the aftermath of the Second World War when colonial governments feared the growing opposition against foreign rule. Again, some politicians in Europe floated the idea of sending displaced persons from Europe to Africa. One unlikely group who tried to push this were Polish exile politicians in London.[19] They were the remnants of the anti-Soviet pre-war Polish government and tried to find a place where they could settle the Polish displaced persons from Europe who refused to return to a Soviet-dominated Poland. Suggesting the establishment of a Polish colony in Africa to solve this problem they met stiff resistance from British imperial administrators. They had no interest in East European settlers and had enough trouble with the emerging anti-colonial movements in the post-war era. Current ideas of externalizing asylum encounter related problems. There are already people. In the case of Rwanda, there is an authoritarian regime that has an interest in funding and recognition from Britain, but not too much commitment to human rights.
Already in 2002, the British labour government had internally discussed a plan along the lines of the Rwanda scheme. Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell compiled ideas for sending arriving refugees elsewhere, floating ideas from the Isle of Mull, the Falklands to Turkey and Tanzania. In files released by the National Archives recently, he noted: “We would like to try to extend this to return any illegal immigrant regardless of the risk that they might suffer inhuman or degrading treatment.” Although he admitted that such a scheme would be stopped by the European Court of Human Rights he still wanted to pursue it, noting: “We would almost certainly lose this case when it got to Strasbourg. But we would have 2-3 years in the meantime when we could send a strong message into the system about our new tough stance.”[20] Let us hope that the new Labour government does not follow these earlier ideas.
Footnotes
[1] This text is the outcome of research conducted within the “Africa Multiple” Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC 2052/1–390713894. Parts of it were published in extended form in the following paper: Jochen Lingelbach, ‘Imperial Refugee Management. Moving Greek Refugees Through the British Empire and into the Belgian Congo (1942–1945)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50, no. 5 (2022): 1005–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2022.2084939.
[2] See also Jochen Lingelbach, ‘Swimming to Safety’, Refugee History (blog), 24 September 2020, http://refugeehistory.org/blog/2020/9/24/swimming-to-safety.
[3] Jochen Lingelbach, ‘Lager für europäische Geflüchtete im kolonialen Afrika. Soziale Ordnungen zwischen Selbstorganisation, kolonialrassistischer Gesellschaft und internationalen Organisationen (1941–1951)’, in Institution Lager. Theorien, globale Fallstudien und Komparabilität, ed. Annett Bochmann and Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2023), 141–70.
[4] Jochen Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness. Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2020).
[5] Bruce Fetter, ‘Changing War Aims: Central Africa’s Role, 1940-41, as Seen from Léopoldville’, African Affairs 87, no. 348 (1988): 377–92.
[6] UN Archives, New York: S-1254-0000-0119-0000, ‘Report on Refugee Camps in Congo,’ n. a. [UNRRA],
- d. [1944 or 1945], 2.
[7] At least the Polish refugee camps in Tanganyika were built with conscripted labour. See Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness, 234.
[8] Dantès Singiza, ‘Ruzagayura, Une Famine Au Rwanda Au Cœur Du Second Conflit Mondial’, Analyse de l’IHOES, no. 97 (September 2012).
[9] Detailed references for this paragraph can be found in Lingelbach, ‘Imperial Refugee Management’.
[10] Lingelbach.
[11] On this issue see my book on the Polish refugees who stayed in Africa during the war: Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness.
[12] See Pamela Ballinger, The World Refugees Made: Decolonization and the Foundation of Postwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 40.
[13] Ellen Boucher, ‘The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare, and the Interwar Extension of Child Emigration to Southern Rhodesia’, Journal of British Studies 48, no. 4 (2009): 914.
[14] Boucher, 122.
[15] Magnus Brechtken, ‘Madagaskar für die Juden’ Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885 – 1945 (München: Oldenbourg, 1997), https://open.ifz-muenchen.de/handle/repository/4697.
[16] The secret “M Project” initiated by US president Roosevelt surveyed African and South American options to resettle Jews from Europe. See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Lawrence Stone Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 111–15.
[17] Frank Wolff, ‘Global Walls and Global Movement: New Destinations in Jewish Migration, 1918–1939’, East European Jewish Affairs 44, no. 2–3 (2 September 2014): 187–204, https://doi.org/10.1080/13501674.2014.950542.
[18] Michael Robert Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 183.
[19] Janusz Wróbel, ‘Polskie Dominium w Afryce?’, Biuletyn IPN – Pamięć.Pl, no. 7 (2012): 19–24; Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness, 120–21.
[20] Quotes from: Caroline Davies and Kevin Rawlinson, ‘Rwanda-Style Asylum Plan Was “Nuclear Option” for Blair in 2003, Records Reveal’, The Guardian, 29 December 2023, sec. UK news, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/29/tony-blair-rwanda-style-asylum-plan-2003.