EIGHT DECADES after the event, Janis Cecins cannot know whether the Soviet train guard who transformed his family’s destiny was being kind or dim. Either way, the soldier allowed Mr Cecins’s parents—a young Latvian couple being forcibly transported to the Soviet zone in occupied post-war Germany—to leave his train one night, on a promise to return in the morning. Mr Cecins’s parents skipped that appointment, and eventually found their way to an Allied-run camp for displaced persons (DPs). The pair were among a million or so civilians with no wish to return to their pre-war homes. The fate of those DPs led in time to the creation of the modern asylum system, including the Geneva convention of 1951, which bars states from returning refugees to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
As the world learned of the evils of the Holocaust, attention focused, understandably, on Jewish survivors in DP camps. But most DPs were non-Jewish Slavs and Balts resisting attempts to make them go to the Soviet Union. Many were from lands annexed by the Russians under a pact with Nazi Germany, including the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and formerly Polish regions of western Ukraine. Mr Cecins’s parents, a book-keeper and a telephone technician from Riga, Latvia’s pre-war capital, were among them.
A dynamic 74-year-old, Mr Cecins is a pillar of Sydney’s Latvian community, helping to oversee folk dances, choirs, film screenings and Latvian-language classes for youngsters. His parents chose Australia, over offers of resettlement in America or Canada, “to get away as far as possible from the Russians”, he says. For Sydney’s Balts, the liberal world order felt personal. They were proud to be political refugees from tyranny, not just economic migrants. Many expressed sympathy for the “boat people” fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s, whom they saw as fellow victims of totalitarianism.
Today, that liberal order is crumbling worldwide. The notion that asylum-seekers enjoy absolute rights to protection as refugees, if they have “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”, to cite the Geneva refugee convention, is one of the pillars closest to toppling.
In Australia—but not only there—ever-tougher questions are asked about the values and work ethics of putative refugees. For some years Australia has paid third countries, such as the Pacific island of Nauru, to receive and hold asylum-seekers for “offshore processing”, an approach that other Western democracies have since tried to copy, though without success. A member of parliament from the conservative opposition, who noted that Australia resettles 20,000 refugees and humanitarian cases each year, says that the public wants the authorities to be “generous but also discerning”. A government offer of visas to Palestinians from Gaza has proved “very controversial”, he adds, amid concerns that some may have been inculcated with the extremist ideology of Hamas.
All over the world, abstract principles about the right to protection are losing ground to more subjective judgments about deserving and undeserving refugees. Idealists might yearn for a return of the moral certainties of 1945 that emerged in response to the horrors of the second world war. Actually, the birth of the post-war order was messier, more political and more influenced by public opinion than idealists might suppose. “Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War”, by Sheila Fitzpatrick, offers a masterful account of how Allied governments wriggled and squabbled when they learned, to their shock, that more than a million DPs wanted to choose where they lived.
Politics quickly intruded. The public and rank-and-file Allied troops were appalled by forced repatriations of Soviet prisoners of war and labourers in 1945, some of whom went straight into Stalin’s gulag, and the policy quietly changed. Later, international outrage left Britain badly isolated as it blocked Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine, then British-run. Non-Jewish DPs found the mood turning against them, notably in America, the biggest source of funding for the camps that housed them. Congress shut down the international agency supporting DPs, which was called a hotbed of liberal hand-wringers and communist sympathisers.
The refugees saved by the cold war
The luck of those fleeing communism in the Soviet Union turned after 1947, as cold-war tensions mounted. Baltic and Slavic DPs began to brand themselves as “victims of communism” yearning to breathe the free air of democracy, writes Ms Fitzpatrick. American funding for DP camps resumed, with a new mission: resettlement rather than repatriation. For refugees to spurn life in the USSR was a propaganda win for the West.
Resettlement was an economic boon, too. A British programme, named “Westward Ho!”, recruited 77,000 workers for farming and the cotton and coal industries, most of them Latvians, Poles and Ukrainians. It excluded Russians, Jews and Armenians. Australia, its immigration minister said, wanted “horny-handed toilers” for farming and construction. Intellectuals were not wanted, so some professionals and academics posed as manual workers to gain passage Down Under. Baltic refugees had a good tale to tell, with Australia’s immigration minister predicting that clean, polite “beautiful Balts” would win over the public.
In these less hospitable times, anti-immigrant hardliners tell stories about bad foreigners to play on public anxieties about a world more mobile than anyone imagined in 1945. Still, history shows that telling the right stories about refugees can be effective, too. Defenders of openness need to prepare emotional and economic counter-arguments, and not just talk of universal legal principles. Narratives are too important to leave to nativists. ■
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