by Itamar Mann and Umut Özsu
In September 1922, the city of Izmir served as the site of one of the
most brutal episodes of forced migration of the early twentieth century. The
event occurred toward the end of the 1919 – 22 Greek-Turkish War, a bloody
and protracted struggle over western Anatolia that marked the culmination of
the Ottoman Empire’s violent disintegration. The 1912 – 13 Balkan Wars, the
First World War, the Armenian genocide, and a variety of related conflicts
and massacres had already put to rest any hopes of a peaceful resolution
of the “Eastern question”. The Greek-Turkish War capped this process, further
destabilizing a deeply unstable region.
By late 1922, the war had proven enormously costly to
Greeks and Turks alike. Atrocities had been committed by both armies, and much
of the Anatolian hinterland had been razed to the ground. Nowhere, though, had
the two camps’ ambitions been concentrated with greater ferocity than in regard
to Izmir, a vibrant and cosmopolitan port city that was pivotal to the
political economy of the eastern Mediterranean. Izmir was the centrepiece of
both the British-backed Greek occupation of Asia Minor and the Soviet-supported
Turkish nationalists’ drive to forge a nation-state on the ruins of the
Ottoman Empire.
When Turkish troops seized Izmir from Greek forces in
September 1922, the city’s Christian quarters were set on fire and much of its
Greek and Armenian population was forced to flee. These movements were
subsequently formalized in a treaty that called for a compulsory “exchange”
of minority populations between Greece and Turkey. From 1922 to 1934, when the
international commission set up to administer this treaty-based “exchange” was
dissolved, over one million Greeks and roughly 350 000 Muslims were uprooted
from their homes. The demographic composition and socio-political identity of
each country was changed forever. And the precedent was later invoked elsewhere
in order to legitimize dispossession and displacement along ethnic or religious
lines. A notable case in point is that of Israel-Palestine during and
after 1948.
Nearly a hundred years later, Izmir once again
finds itself at the centre of the world’s attention on refugees, this time
chiefly in connection with the civil war that has engulfed Syria. Among the
roughly two million refugees currently in Turkey, growing numbers are finding
their way to Izmir. The Greek islands of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos lie just off
the coast, and refugees pay large sums of money to make the voyage to Europe on
rafts, many of which are poorly constructed and highly unreliable. With local
authorities paid off or looking the other way, smugglers profit handsomely, driving an informal economy that has injected capital
into a country where growth has slowed and the burden of providing shelter
and services to refugees has come at a high cost. It is of little concern
to most smugglers, and the countless agents and intermediaries with whom they
collaborate, that refugees do not always survive the voyage.
Of course, today’s mass migrations are structured and
furthered through different legal means than those of the interwar period.
Instead of expulsions that are subject to after-the-fact formalization or
group-wide transfers that are implemented through treaty law, what we have in
Izmir and other cities now are criminal enterprises that benefit from
international efforts to restrict migration. Pursuant to a “readmission agreement”
between Turkey and the EU,
“irregular migrants” who have entered the EU may
be returned to Turkey. Such agreements have recently been reinforced to augment
migration controls. Perversely, though, it is precisely these and related legal
instruments that bolster the power of smugglers in places like Izmir. Unable to
access Europe through legal channels, many refugees are left with little choice
but to rely upon the resources and expertise of traffickers.
The population transfer treaties of the early twentieth
century fostered mass migration directly in the name of nation-building
projects of one kind or another. Contemporary “readmission agreements” attempt to prevent illicit migration, but indirectly and somewhat
unwittingly reinforce it by depriving many refugees of a viable alternative to smugglers.
Indeed, while clearly very different in form, the substantive consequences of
yesterday’s population transfer treaty and today’s “readmission agreement” are
not entirely dissimilar: both engender forced migration. Perhaps, then, it
should come as no surprise that Izmir, a city situated at the crossroads
of different cultures and continents, continues to play a central role in
the lives of refugees.
Itamar Mann is the national security law fellow at
Georgetown University Law Centre. He is author of the forthcoming book Humanity
at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
Umut Özsu is an assistant professor at the University
of Manitoba Faculty of Law. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement:
International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015).
No comments:
Post a Comment