Thucydides illustrated how the process works in both directions: migration usually leads to war, but war can also lead to migration. For after war takes place, one of the common consequences is the forced migration that is currently known as ethnic cleansing. Some of the earliest migrations of this kind are recorded in the Old Testament. The Assyrian kings had an established policy of exiling half the population from the lands they conquered, one they followed after conquering the kingdom of Israel. A century later the Babylonians sent part of the population of Judea into exile after subjugating that kingdom. The small quasi-Jewish communities in Kurdistan, as well as the larger, pre-1948 ones in Iraq, are said to consist of the descendants of the Israelites forced to leave Israel by the Assyrians. Both empires made a habit of bringing in other peoples to take the place of those they had exiled. Thus the Samaritans, a small community of under a thousand people who currently live in Israel and the West Bank, are believed to be descended from settlers brought to the region by its Assyrian conquerors during the seventh and sixth centuries BC.
The spectacular reliefs at the British Museum that originally decorated the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib (reigned 705-681 BC) at Nineveh provide us with some idea of what an Assyrian ethnic cleansing operation may have looked like. The subject of the reliefs is the siege of Lachish, a city in the Judean Plain, in 701 BC. In addition to the military operations, they also show us what happened to the prisoners and deserters who left the city. Men were decapitated—there are lots of headless corpses lying around—or impaled. Women and children were left more or less unharmed and were taken away by the victors, accompanied by wagons laden with loot. Since Lachish was never rebuilt, the captives presumably went to places from whence they never returned. This suggests that women and children represented the majority of those who went into exile, although accounts from the Old Testament suggest that on at least some occasions, men were spared to share their fate.
The Romans preferred not to exile those they defeated, but to subjugate, rule, and levy taxes on them. Cicero calls such taxes “a perpetual penalty for defeat”. However, during the period between 200 BC and 120 AD, they regularly took enormous numbers of prisoners. These prisoners, men, women and children, were then transported to the slave markets, especially the famous ones of Rhodes and Delos, and sold there. Entire communities, including great cities such as Corinth and Carthage, were left almost devoid of inhabitants. This conquest-based slave trade brought a wide variety of different tribes, cultures and religions together and transformed Rome, the greatest slave market of all, into a new Babylon. The men who followed Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who led the great slave revolt against Rome in 73-71 BC, came from many different lands. Spartacus’s goal was for them to all return to their countries of origin, but his men refused, preferring to stay in Italy where they could kill, pillage and rape. They were eventually defeated at Brundisium by eight legions led by Marcus Licinius Crassus, and hundreds were crucified along the Appian Way. Spartacus himself is believed to have been killed in the battle, but his body was never found.
In 66-70 AD, and again in 135-37 AD, the Jews of Palestine rose against their Roman conquerors. The Romans suppressed both rebellions and responded by engaging in extensive ethnic cleansing. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven out, and to use an expression coined nearly two thousand years later, Jerusalem was made Judenfrei. Jews were prohibited from living in the city or even entering it. Such episodes are by no means rare in history; the reason so many Jewish examples exist is that despite the forced migrations they experienced, they managed to preserve their religion and their ethnic identity. Other peoples forced to leave their homelands were either less fortunate or less determined. That does not necessarily mean that the Jews kept their race pure, however, for as modern genetic studies show, Jews settled in different countries tend to genetically resemble the host populations more than they do each other.
Not all forced migrations were the result of war. For example, throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period Jews were regularly expelled from many countries but this had little to do with war. During the century and a half after the Reformation, there were reciprocal expulsions of Catholics by Protestants and of Protestants by Catholics throughout Europe. The most famous example of these forced migrations was Louis XIV’s decision to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which resulted in 400,000 Huguenots being exiled from France. Even in Switzerland, the cantons were divided on the basis of being Catholic or Protestant and much smaller forced migrations took place.
Large-scale ethnic cleansing again raised its ugly head during the early years of the twentieth century. The Balkan Wars led to the expulsions of Muslims from the Balkan states that broke free of the Ottoman Empire. Soon after the outbreak of World War I, the Turks, fearing lest the Christian Armenians might aid and abet the Russian enemy, enacted the first modern genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men were massacred; the rest of the population was expelled and driven to the Syrian Desert where they were left to die. The Turks also expelled the Jews of southern Palestine and drove them north, although some were taken to Alexandria, Egypt, by American ships. No sooner had the Great War ended than the Turks again initiated a massive ethnic cleansing campaign, this time against the Greeks of Western Anatolia. This region had been home to important Greek communities for over three millennia, but barely 5,000 Greeks remain there today.
The period 1919-21 also witnessed the expulsion of Hungarians from Romania, and of Germans from what had been West Prussia and Silesia, but was claimed by Poland after the war. Twenty years later, the jackboot was on the other foot. Having defeated the Poles, Hitler expelled masses of them from Western Poland and replaced them with Germans. He also expelled the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, driving them into France, after which they were subsequently re-expelled to the gas chambers in Eastern Europe.
As these events touch upon one of history’s most infamous crimes, it is important to note that the series of complicated campaigns of expulsion, directed primarily against Europe’s Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, that ended in the murder of millions, could never have taken place had it not been for the cover provided by war. In Hitler’s mind, the war and the Endlösung der Judenfrage, or Final Solution of the Jewish Question were linked. Speaking to intimates in August 1941, the Führer of the Third Reich claimed the fact that so many Germans had lost their homes after World War I justified the “humane” expulsion of Germany’s Jews. Five months later, at the Wannsee Conference, the policies that lay the foundation for the Holocaust were worked out in detail.
There were more forced migrations to the east. After being unexpectedly attacked by his ally Hitler in violation of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin ordered the evacuation of the Tatars from the Crimea. His rationale was the same as many others before him; he feared the Tatars might join the advancing Germans. But the expulsion of the Tatars was nothing compared to the huge migrations that took place from 1944 to 1946. As the Soviet Red Army marched west towards Berlin, it was often joined by local militias in the Eastern European countries it occupied. 12 million Germans were driven out of their homelands in Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia (Slovenia and Croatia), Czechoslovakia, Poland, West Prussia, East Prussia, and Silesia, and about one-sixth of them died in the process. As the war came to an end, tens of millions of people were on the move across the continent. Refugees, slave workers, former concentration-camp prisoners, prisoners of war… almost all had nothing but rags to their name and were trying to either escape the advancing Russians or simply return home.
The forced migrations and ethnic cleansing did not end in 1945. The 1947 Indo-Pakistani War divided British India into two different countries and caused millions of people, terrified by the interreligious violence, to cross the newly established frontier between India and Paksistan in both directions. Triggered by the flight of ten million Bengali refugees from what was then known as East Pakistan, the Third Indo-Pakistani War, which broke out in 1971, broug
ht about the creation of an independent Bangladesh. After the Pakistani surrender, the refugees returned and a smaller, though still considerable, number of Pakistanis were driven out of Bangladesh into West Pakistan. The end of the Vietnam War led to the expulsion of 250,000 ethnic Chinese Hoa from that country, as well as the migration of the two million Vietnamese “boat people”, over half of whom ultimately settled in the United States. The 1980 Russian invasion of Afghanistan caused as many as a million Afghanis to cross the border into Pakistan’s northwestern provinces. Despite being settled in refugee camps there, they eventually came to jeopardize their hosts’ control over the region—a problem, that may very well present itself in other parts of the world in the future.
Some of the wars that have taken place in Africa since the 1970s, particularly those in the Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, Uganda, Rawanda-Burundi, the Congo, Liberia, Angola, and Mozambique also led to enforced migration on a massive scale.
And after a forty-two year hiatus, ethnic cleansing returned to Europe when, following the death of longtime dictator Tito, Yugoslavia broke up. When Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose population is predominantly Muslim, declared independence from Belgrade, the Serb minority in the province embarked on an all-out effort to avoid coming under Muslim rule. Their efforts were supported by the Serbian government under Slobodan Milosevič, which provided its kinsmen with men, weapons, and money.
The Bosnian war, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, witnessed widespread ethnic cleansing. The war was brought to an end by NATO aircraft launching airstrikes at the stronger Serbian forces. It later turned out that there was little difference between the two sides, both of whom committed atrocities, including mass executions. The number of people who were displaced by the war has been estimated at 2.2 million, including 250,000 Serbs who were driven out of the Krajina. That fact did not prevent the world, with President Clinton at its head, from pointing to the Serbs as the culprits and condemning them by every available means.
The current wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other countries in Asia and Africa are also creating large numbers of migrants. Often they are prepared to do almost anything to escape the fighting even though life as a refugee is a perilous endeavor. Women are in particular danger, as they run the risk of being kidnapped and sold as prostitutes. According to the New York Times, there are currently 60 million people who have been forced to leave their homes. That represents just under one percent of the entire global population. Of the 60 million homeless, one-third are refugees who are presently living abroad. The remaining 40 million have been displaced by civil war but remain inside their own countries. Since the figures include millions of children who were born to refugees—even second generation refugees—or displaced people after they fled, it is possible that they are inflated. That is especially true in the case of the Palestinians, whose number the Palestinian Authority puts at a literally incredible six million. However, there is every sign that the number of displaced people is only going to grow and increase the size of the global mass migration in coming years.
For example, Israel’s War of Independence, which the Palestinians call the naqba (catastrophe), actually led to the expulsion of about 600,000 people. The June 1967 War created, at most, another 300,000 refugees. Nevertheless, the refugee camps near Jericho have become ghost towns and have largely remained so to the present day. As of 2015 large numbers of Palestinian refugees are scattered in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, while others have joined the ongoing Muslim migration to Europe and the United States.
Because Israel’s Arab neighbors find it useful and have no intention of permitting it to go away, the plight of the displaced Palestinians is both the most persistent refugee situation as well as the one that has attracted the most sustained international attention. Unfortunately, the future does not bode well, since the possibility that Jordan will eventually fall to Daesh (ISIS) is all too real. Should that come to pass, it is not inconceivable that the government in Jerusalem would deem it necessary, for reasons of national security, to drive out the two million Palestinians remaining in the West Bank as well.
3. Voluntary War-Related Migration
Though the use of force is war’s outstanding characteristic, not all war-related migrations are carried out by force. Very often, people decide to leave a war-torn region out of their own free will. One reason for doing so, which played an important role during the nineteenth century, is the desire to avoid conscription. In the decades following the development of the French Revolutionary Army, conscription became common throughout Europe and was rigidly enforced. Many of those wishing to evade forced military service went to the U.S.A., the British colonies, and Latin America.
Today, Eritrea is the country that produces the largest number of refugees trying to avoid national service, military or other. The country is governed by a despot named Isaias Afwerki. Freedom and human rights are unknown. Men and unmarried women are conscripted, often for life. This has caused thousands of Eritreans, particularly young men, to flee to Ethiopia. From there they usually continue on towards any other country they can enter, legally or illegally.
War also leads to migration in another way. From the earliest days of war, victorious soldiers have been besieged by the women of the defeated in search of safety, food, and, not least, sheer masculine force. That still remains the case. Armies often prohibit fraternization, as the Allied ones did in Germany after World War II. Some states even forbade marriages between their troops and women from the occupied population. Usually these efforts are to no avail. In World War II, American soldiers, “overpaid, oversexed, and over here,” as their British allies described them, often had the time of their lives after the war’s end. Most of them eventually returned home alone. But an estimated 60,000 American soldiers brought back a signorina or a Fräulein as a wartime souvenir. The Korean War is known to have produced an even larger migration, most likely because the ban on marrying Japanese women—Japan served as the principal U.S. base during the Korean war—was lifted. From 1942 to 1952, the number of GIs who married foreign women was around one million.
The wars in Southeast Asia from 1965 to 1975 that involved about 2.5 million American troops generated another crop of war brides. But although the phenomenon is not entirely unknown in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is much less common. The difference is that Muslims are extremely jealous of their women and segregate them as much as possible. Hence the U.S. military, in the hope of not further inflaming the occupied populations, has done its best to discourage the troops from fraternizing with the local women.
Much more important than either of these forms of post-war migration is the kind which is driven by the hope of a safer, more orderly, and more prosperous life abroad. This describes the majority of modern migrations. Their destinations are primarily the rich countries of the West, as well as Australia. Migrants with a Christian background are normally absorbed without too many problems, especially if they are white, as refugees from the former Yugoslavia are. However, the Lebanese Christian diaspora has shown that even those from Arab backgrounds can adapt to the West. Hindus and Buddhists also tend to do well.
By contrast, most Muslim migrants are fanatically opposed to any kind of cultural assimilation. Using their mosques as community centers and accepting religious imams as their leaders, they actively resist any attempt to integrate them. Some even begin proselytizing for their way of life, as they have every right to do in a democratic country. Their objective is to spread their views on what the late Samuel Huntington used to call identity. Identity, as Huntington describes it, includes “the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy.” It also includes general relations between the sexes as well as the rights of homosexuals, as well as many of the rights many Westerners hold dear in both their priva
te lives and in the socio-political arena.
As of 2015, Muslims form about eight percent of the population of the European Union. In large cities, especially wealthy ones situated on important communication lines or featuring seaports, the percentage of Muslims tends to be much higher. In some cities, entire neighborhoods have been taken over and reshaped in accordance with the migrants’ preferences. These neighborhoods, such as Tower Hamlets in east London and the Kuregem district of Brussels, have assumed a decidedly Mohammedan character, complete with mosques, veiled women, and muezzins calling the faithful to prayer. Most of these neighborhoods are slums where the inhabitants tend to be unskilled, under-educated, and unemployed. Many of the residents cannot even speak the language of their hosts. Further complicating the situation, the newcomers lose their accustomed control over wives and children who tend to be more amenable to integration; this ongoing intra-family conflict not infrequently leads to domestic violence. Muslim immigrants often feel underprivileged and discriminated against, even though they are living off the largesse—one might even say the tribute—of the people whose lands they are occupying.
It is true that only a small percentage of the immigrants in question turn to violence, let alone politically motivated violence. But it is also true that in all the countries to which they have immigrated, Muslim immigrants are committing crimes at a rate that far exceeds the native population. A portion of this crime represents the continuation of politics that is indistinguishable from terrorism and will inevitably lead to harsh countermeasures, and eventually, reprisals. The present situation is more than a little reminescent of past migration-inspired wars and bodes ill for the future; it is estimated that as many as 5 million of France’s Muslims already live in zones urbaines sensibles where the French police and government have relatively little control.
There Will Be War Volume X Page 14
