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This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.
based upon the new scientific findings provided by bacteriology.6 In my opinion, the fact that most of the existing historiography on the relation between the Muslim pilgrimage and cholera concentrates Sanitary control of Balkan Muslim pilgrims 147 on Western Europe, the Middle East and British India is responsible for a most interesting part of the story remaining completely ignored. I am referring to the question of Balkan Muslims, and also in part to the role of the Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary), in the control of the Hajj from 1867. With regard to the
This volume aims to disclose the political, social and cultural factors that influenced the sanitary measures against epidemics developed in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. The contributions to the book provide new interdisciplinary insights to the booming field of ‘quarantine studies’ through a systematic use of the analytic categories of space, identity and power. The ultimate goal is to show the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organization of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities or the configuration of political regimes. The circum-Mediterranean geographical spread of the case studies contained in this volume illuminates the similarities and differences around and across this sea, on the southern and northern shores, in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, English and French-speaking domains. At the same time, it is highly interested in engaging in the global English-speaking community, offering a wide range of terms, sources, bibliography, interpretative tools and views produced and elaborated in various Mediterranean countries. The historical approach will be useful to recognize the secular tensions that still lie behind present-day issues such as the return of epidemics or the global flows of migrants and refugees.
v 14 v Becoming and unbecoming refugees: the long ordeal of Balkan Muslims, 1912–34 Uğur Ümit Üngör Introduction: the Balkan Wars as a watershed The twin Balkan Wars of 1912–13 truncated the Ottoman Empire and sparked more than a decade of population politics in the region. Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria wrested large territories from the Ottomans and expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims from those lands. As the conflicts escalated into total warfare, defenceless civilians were assaulted by all sides: Muslims under Bulgarian and Greek rule, and Christians
cultural boundary between the ‘civilised’ west and the ‘uncivilised’ east. 31 Foreign visitors were constantly struck by the conspicuously exotic and outlandish Ostjuden , marked out by their clothing and speech, as were the Hungarian gypsies, the Balkan Muslims and the Bohemian nursemaids. 32 It was this ethnic variety which gave such a distinctive character to the city’s social, cultural and culinary life. For domestic visitors this aspect of Viennese life brought into play numerous and opposing images of cultural identity
Russians, but viewed the Senegalese as situational opponents and Balkan Muslims with a degrading nonchalance.103 Marty’s sample of witnesses failed to include or seriously reflect upon the experience of mutineers of colour, though he did record a single rebel with a non-French name, Omar B’Ahmed, a soldier of the 117th Heavy Artillery, who faced court martial after the unrest in the Toulouse events of 31 May–1 June.104 Marty made fleeting mention of troops of colour within the French armed intervention. At the time of the mutiny, he held racialised assumptions about the
widespread ‘unmixing’ of peoples, especially among the Balkan Muslims, as a result of the formation of new nations in the region. Political change thus operated as a force for dislocation and out-migration in many directions.71 After 1914 a different form of emigration emerged: according to Akenson, the old ‘settler conquest version’ was overtaken by ‘labour-migration’ which became the primary mode – now mainly composed of urban and industrial workers and mostly from southern Europe. He sees this as a ‘filling in’ – the emigrants were now ‘engaged in the process of
Habsburg protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina, agreed in the same 1878 settlement, directly expressed a European imperial ‘civilising mission’, with which authorities sought to temper Balkan/Muslim nationalism, backwardness and poor hygiene (Okey 2007 ). Discourses and technologies of imperialism circulating through the region between the 1870s and the Paris Peace Conference underlay the ethnicity–nationhood–territory relationships behind ethnopolitical violence even as the region's long-term economic marginalisation as an agricultural periphery of both empires
the Balkan peacekeeping operations as way of helping the Balkan Muslims, descendants of the loyal subjects of the former Ottoman Empire, but without becoming unilaterally or too closely involved in the conflict. Given that very few, if any, Turks actually volunteered to fight alongside the Muslim Bosnians and Albanians, while the government refused, in principle, to be drawn in to the war, the government felt it necessary to at least be seen to be doing something for the local Muslim population. Participation in the NATO operations was the ideal solution. It put an