Frontier Justice Read online

  Copyright © 2011 Andy Lamey

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  v3.1

  For Kirsty

  Every civilized people on the face of the earth must be fully aware that this country is the asylum of nations, and that it will defend the asylum to the last ounce of its treasure, and the last drop of its blood.

  —The Times (London), February 28, 1853

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1. The Philosopher in Exile

  2. American Lavalas

  3. A Floating Berlin Wall

  4. The Fatal Shore

  5. Raising the Castle

  6. An Asylum Made of Thoughts

  7. The Right to Have Rights

  8. The Legend of Ahmed Ressam

  9. In the Tracks of Leviathan

  Postscript: Refugees and Terror

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  PREFACE

  THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT ASYLUM. The refugees referred to in its subtitle are the ones found at the frontiers of liberal states, people who make a special claim of entry in order to avoid persecution. Refugees in this situation have obvious similarities with people stranded in refugee camps in the developing world. First and foremost, both groups share a desire not to be sent back to a place where their lives could be in danger. The treatment of the two groups has also often risen and fallen together. As I note in the chapters to come, when Western states have introduced policies curtailing the protection they extend to asylum-seekers, it has often inspired governments in Asia and Africa to invoke harsh measures against refugees seeking to cross or already inside their own borders.

  In addition to their similarities, however, the two types of refugees also have important differences. The needs of people seeking asylum can usually be met at the level of migration law. What they normally require is for Western states to recognize that they are not like other immigrants, and should be allowed to restart their lives in a strange new country. In regard to refugees in camps, relocation abroad is sometimes the best way to meet their needs. But not all residents of refugee camps want to be resettled in the West. Many would prefer instead to go home. The best way to help camp populations, therefore, will often be not through immigration law, but through humanitarian aid and diplomacy aimed at ending the crisis that sent them into exile.

  The situation of refugees warehoused in camp is an important subject, and nothing would please me more than if this book caused readers to take a heightened interest in refugees in general. But a book that tried to solve every problem faced by refugees would not only be more complicated, but much longer, than the one I have tried to write. Sheer manageability is the main reason why I have focused on the issue of refugees seeking asylum. The second reason, as we will see, is that extending justice to them is difficult enough.

  The book argues that there is an important relationship between the treatment of refugees and human rights. That relationship can be seen by noting the difference between a sufficient and a necessary condition. If this book that says so much about human rights says little about human rights issues not involving refugees, it is not because I am under the delusion that addressing the situation of refugees is a sufficient condition of ensuring human rights are respected. Obviously there are many ways human rights are violated, including many ways that do not involve refugees. But as I argue in Chapter One, it is a necessary condition of human rights having political force that refugees in particular be able to exercise them. If we cannot ensure at least that much, it calls into question the force and effectiveness of rights that are supposed to extend to all humanity. I try to show how human rights can meet this challenge, not because it is the only obstacle to human rights, but because it is a fundamental one.

  This book does not say anything about the philosophical foundation of human rights. This is deliberate. Human rights have long been endorsed by different people for different reasons. There are a number of terms for this kind of agreement, whereby people who disagree at the level of first principles come together behind a shared political project. The most colourful label may be one used by economists, who sometimes refer to coalitions of Baptists and bootleggers, named after two groups in the United States who supported prohibition of the sale of alcohol. The doctrine of human rights is the biggest Baptist-bootlegger coalition in history, in that it has now been endorsed by a huge variety of philosophical, religious and cultural traditions. It is reasonable to debate any given justification for human rights, but there is a difference between this philosophical task and the more practical one of showing how rights might be respected in practice. It is this more down-to-earth project I try to accomplish in this book.

  In this regard I take my inspiration from the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the lead-up to the Declaration’s adoption in 1948, the United Nations consulted with thinkers from around the world regarding what rights to include. Jacques Maritain, a French philosopher involved in the drafting, noted that the intellectuals the UN consulted disagreed profoundly on the theoretical foundation of human rights. “At one of the meetings,” Maritain wrote, “someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.’ ” This book seeks to create a similar consensus around a particular framework for upholding human rights, whether or not every reader agrees with my ultimate rationale for those rights.

  ONE

  THE PHILOSOPHER IN EXILE

  IN MARCH OF 1933, German politicians voted to grant their new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the power to govern with impunity. Members of the Nazi party physically attacked parliamentarians before the vote to influence its outcome, but this terror campaign, it soon turned out, was nothing next to what would follow. It was suddenly normal for critics of the government to be beaten in the street. The most outspoken anti-Nazi activists became the first victims of the newly established concentration camp system, at the same time as anti-Semitic decrees expelled Jews from the civil service and other positions. In response to the wave of persecution, thousands of people began to flee the country. Among them were a young Jewish woman and her mother, who, shortly after the initial anti-Jewish laws were passed, left their home in Berlin for the last time.

  The frightened women made their way south to the Erzgebirge mountain range, which marked Germany’s frontier with Czechoslovakia. Neither one had a passport or visa. They were familiar, however, with a German exile group in Prague, which had set up a network of safe houses for escaping Jews and leftists. Armed with this knowledge, the two Berliners went to the mountain town of Carlsbad, where they sought out a kind-hearted family who could provide them with a simple yet invaluable means of avoiding the border patrol: the house they lived in had its front door in Germany and its back door
in Czechoslovakia. The two fugitives were taken in by their benefactors while it was light out, offered dinner, and released into the night. When their feet touched Czech soil, two things happened. They became refugees. And they set in motion a major episode in the history of human rights.

  The escaping Jews were Hannah Arendt, then twenty-six, and her mother, Martha Beerwald. Why was their flight from fascism so remarkable? The answer has to do with Hannah Arendt’s later transformation into one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. Arendt’s philosophy was influenced by her experience as a refugee. So perhaps the best place to start in understanding Hannah Arendt, and seeing what we can learn from her about human rights, is by retracing the steps of her journey. As we will see, it is a journey that has much in common with that of refugees even today.

  Arendt did not stay long in Czechoslovakia. After sending her mother to the relative safety of East Prussia (from where she would again flee the Nazis five years later), Arendt continued on to Switzerland and then to France, where she was reunited with her husband. Günther Stern, a communist and friend of the famous playwright Bertolt Brecht, had fled Germany several months in advance of his wife and mother-in-law. He was prompted to do so after Brecht had an address book confiscated by the Gestapo, which Stern feared would shortly result in the arrest of everyone whose name it contained. Now, in Paris, he and his wife were part of a wave of twenty-five thousand German refugees, 85 percent of them Jewish, who had poured into France, a greater number than that received by any other country.

  Arendt’s exile in Paris was not a happy time. Even before they became refugees, she and her husband had many differences. When it came to politics, for example, she never shared his commitment to communism. (Before the Nazis came to power, in fact, she was barely interest in politics at all, and always dated her political awakening to the rise of Hitler.) Now Arendt and her husband had little to unite them save the hardscrabble urgencies of refugee existence. When Stern left Paris for New York in 1936, his marriage to Arendt had long been over in all but name.

  Things were hardly better for Arendt on a political level. The arrival of the German refugees, even though they represented a minuscule portion of France’s population, was regarded in France as a major crisis. To be sure, there were people who spoke out on the refugees’ behalf. They included not only French Jews but Socialists, liberals, left-wing Catholics and a few stray conservatives. But throughout the 1930s, these partisans of “hospitality,” to use the term they most frequently invoked, had to engage in a fierce political battle with conservative and centre-left politicians, rank-and-file union members (union leaders tended to be pro-refugee) and business groups, all of whom filled the air with cries of “France for the French!” and denounced the Jews as economic parasites and “undesirables.”

  France’s refugee crisis came to a head at the end of the decade. By this point Arendt’s personal situation had improved somewhat: she was employed by a French Jewish charity and had managed to have her mother join her from Prussia. There was even a new man in her life, another German (albeit non-Jewish) refugee named Heinrich Blücher. But after Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which sent another wave of desperate Jews into France, the political situation of every refugee in Paris deteriorated. France introduced repressive laws making admission much more difficult. Jews who were already present were barred from holding certain jobs or were sent back to Germany. Others were turned away at the border. A mood of despair spread through the Jewish community, and many refugees chose suicide. After a Polish Jew living in Paris shot a German embassy official, the Nazis responded with Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—burning and looting Jewish homes, shops and synagogues across Germany. Anti-refugee voices in France were already alleging a Jewish conspiracy to drag France into a needless war with Germany; Kristallnacht, perversely, was taken as evidence for this view and resulted in calls for harsh reprisals against refugees. Paris’s Jews lived in terror of what would happen next.

  The answer came in the fall of 1939. Hostilities between France and Germany had now formally begun (albeit in the form of the phony war, before the bombs began to fall), and France ordered that all German men with suspicious political backgrounds be interned. It didn’t matter that Heinrich Blücher and thousands of others had fled Germany precisely because they were Communists, and so would be the last people on earth to engage in pro-Nazi activities. Blücher was sent to a labour camp in a small French village, sleeping with two dozen other men in a barn that left them exposed to the constant cold rain, where he soon became ill.

  Through desperate lobbying, Arendt managed to secure Blücher’s release (a friend of hers tracked down the widow of a police prefect who agreed to serve as his guarantor). When Blücher returned to Paris he and Arendt married. But instead of a honeymoon, they had to contend with a new internment order—one that now included most German women. Four months after their wedding, Arendt and her husband reported to separate sports stadiums in Paris. Arendt was made to sleep on the stone bleachers of the Winter Velodrome alongside other Jewish women branded “enemy aliens.” Every time a plane passed overhead they feared it was a German bomber come to end their lives. Finally, after a week, Arendt and the other female refugees were taken to a camp near Gurs, a town in southwest France. Constant rains had turned the camp into a muddy swamp. Although inmates were not forced to work, the residents kept themselves busy emptying the latrines and engaging in other chores to stave off depression.

  During her internment, with the war situation growing worse, and not knowing whether she would ever see her husband again, Arendt was overcome with thoughts of killing herself. It was something many other camp residents considered. At one point, there was talk among the refugees of committing suicide en masse, as a form of protest against the way they had been treated by the French government. But the inmates soon decided that this would only please their captors. As Arendt later wrote, “When some of us suggested that we had been shipped there pour crever [to be snuffed out] in any case, the general mood turned suddenly into a violent courage of life.”

  Several weeks after Arendt’s arrival in Gurs, German troops invaded Paris. All communications broke down and the camp descended into chaos. Many women decided to stay, afraid to leave the one place their husbands would at least know to look for them. When Gurs later came under the jurisdiction of the collaborationist Vichy government, most of these inmates were handed over to the Nazis for extermination. Arendt was lucky: she had somewhere she could go. The same Paris friend who had secured Heinrich Blücher’s release, a wealthy German exile, was renting a house near the southern French town of Montauban. Arendt could reach it by travelling on foot and hitchhiking.

  Montauban was in total confusion when Arendt arrived. Many homes had been left empty in the panic of war, and the mayor had chosen to express his opposition to the new Vichy government in northern France by turning empty buildings over to former internees. As a result, thousands of refugees were streaming into Montauban from all across France. They slept on empty floors, dragging in every mattress they could find, creating conditions almost as crowded and cramped as in the camps they had just escaped.

  It was against this backdrop that Hannah Arendt had one of the happiest experiences of her life. One day she found herself on the main avenue of Montauban. There, amid piles of mattresses, furniture and garbage, she saw her husband walking down the street. Blücher’s camp had been evacuated when the Nazis took Paris, and he had joined the great migration of people—travelling on bicycles, in the backs of trucks, on foot with everything they could carry—streaming into unoccupied southern France. Surrounded by crowds of refugees scavenging for scraps of food and tobacco, others seeking word of missing loved ones, Arendt and Blücher fell into a deep embrace. There would be other hurdles still to come. They would have to go to horrendous lengths to obtain visas. They would only narrowly avoid arrest. But from that moment forward, Hannah Arendt redoubled her “violent courage of lif
e.” Travelling with her husband, and followed shortly by her mother, she reached the safety of the United States in 1941.

  What can we learn by looking back at Hannah Arendt’s experience today? Luck clearly played a major role in her eventual escape to safety, such as her chance meeting with her husband in southern France. Arendt and Blücher were also fortunate to marry when they did. Shortly after their ceremony, wartime conditions made obtaining a French marriage licence next to impossible. The special emergency visas Arendt and Blücher eventually obtained were given only to single people or to couples who could produce a licence. Unmarried couples had to choose which of them would stay behind and hope for some other opportunity of escape. Yet although these and other details were specific to Arendt’s case, she is not the only person fleeing persecution whose survival has been due to chance. Many refugees continue to make it to safety after just barely catching the right flight or running from their homes at the last possible minute. In this and other ways, Arendt’s experience calls to mind the situation of people still seeking asylum today.

  Arendt took flight from an anti-Semitic campaign that eventually became the worst genocide of all time. This made her a quintessentially modern refugee. Not because every refugee is necessarily fleeing genocide, but because before the Armenian genocide of 1915, refugees of this kind did not exist. Today we have been taught by events in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda not to be surprised when genocide or its cousin, ethnic cleansing, drive yet another group of refugees across yet another border. But even today, crises of this kind are exacerbated by the inability of outsiders to reckon with evil. When refugees from genocide come forward to recount their experiences, they are often initially met with skepticism. Arendt herself was one of the first people to point out the inverse relationship between persecution and believability. “The very immensity of the crimes,” she wrote, “guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth.”