New Article on Crimean Tatars

The latest issue of International Crimes and History, no. 16 is a special topic issue on the Crimean Tatars and has my article, "The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism." 

Abstract of Conference Paper on Germans deported to Kazakhstan

On 8 March 2016 I presented a paper on the deportation of ethnic Germans in the USSR to Kazakhstan to a conference at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The title of the conference was Jews and their Neighbors in Soviet Central Asia during the Second World War: Realities of Life and Survival. My paper, "Wir hatten nichts": The Fate of Ethnic Germans Deported to Kazakhstan during World War II was part of the Round Table on Deported and Evacuated Populations in Central Asia: A Comparative Approach. The abstract of the paper is below.

Abstract

  "Wir hatten nichts": The Fate of ethnic Germans Deported to Kazakhstan During World War II

by

J. Otto Pohl

In the fall of 1941 the Soviet government forcibly deported some 800,000 ethnic Germans from west of the Urals to desolate areas of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Upon arrival in their new places of residence the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) classified them as special settlers, the same legal designation as deported kulaks, and placed them under severe restrictions. In particular they could not leave their newly assigned places of settlement without special written permission. These legal restrictions remained in place until the end of 1955. About half of these deportees ended up in Kazakhstan where the local authorities initially assigned almost all of them to agricultural labour. Settled into the already inhabited houses of Kazakh kolkhoz workers, abandoned buildings needing repair, and even earth huts the Germans suffered from a lack of proper housing. They also experienced severe shortages of food, medicine, and winter clothing. As a result large numbers of them perished from malnutrition, disease, and exposure. After 10 January 1942, the Soviet government began the forced mobilization of the deported Germans into labour columns known collectively as the labour army to work in lumber and construction camps run by the NKVD in the Urals as well as building railroads. They conscripted over 100,000 ethnic Germans from Kazakhstan to work in the labour army. The mass induction of women after 7 October 1942 meant that many of the Germans remaining in Kazakhstan were children without any adult relatives to look after them. Deaths exceeded births among the ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan and other regions of the USSR until 1948. Only after this date do material conditions for the exiled Germans begin to improve significantly.

Neocolonialism in West Africa

I am currently reading Samir Amin's Neocolonialism in West Africa which is nearly as old as I am. The economic problems and obstacles to development in the region he points to are almost exactly the same as the ones faced today. Unfortunately, the policies during colonial rule and the first decade of independence that created these problems are also the same as today. One crop primary commodities like cocoa for Ghana still dominate the various national economies of the region. There has been very little diversification and no successful move to either import substitution industry or value added manufacture export. Instead Ghana continues to rely excessively on the export of cheap raw cacao to fund the importation of virtually everything including basic food staples and things like toilet paper. It is kind of depressing to realize just how little real economic progress has been made in West Africa in my life time. There has been some growth benefiting the wealthy and politically connected classes that are closely associated with the Asian, European, Lebanese, and White South African owned companies that totally dominate the economy here. But, there has been no real development of any type of independent indigenous industry in the more than forty years since Nkrumah died.

A Short Comparison of the Construction of the Modern Middle East and Central Asia

The creation of modern nation states in Central Asia and the Arab Middle East bear some important similarities. In particular the carving out of a number of distinct nation states from imperial territory in the face of pressure to create a larger unified entity in both cases. In the case of Central Asia the Soviet government created the five distinct states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan from the territory of the Turkestan and Steppe governorates and the protectorates of the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva that had been part of the Russian Empire (Park 1957 and Roy 2000). In the case of the Arab Middle East the British and French partitioned the Ottoman Empire into the League of Nation's mandates of Palestine, Transjordan, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Lebanon.  These territories later became the nation states of Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. In both cases there was the creation of five new nation states constructed from a much larger imperial territory that had common binding elements that presented an alternative vision of political organization. In the case of Central Asia there was the idea of Pan-Turkism or Pan-Turanism that would unite all of the Turkic speaking Muslim peoples of the region into a single state (Zenkovsky 1960). Although it was never clear exactly what role the Persian speaking Tajiks would play if any in such a state (Bergne 2007). In the case of the Arab territories of the Middle East the challenge came from the much stronger idea of Pan-Arabism which sought to politically unite all of the Arabic speaking Muslims and Christians of the region (Mufti 1996). The Arabic speaking Jews were excluded from this project as a result of the spread of the hostilities between the Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine with the Zionist movement  into a larger Arab-Israeli conflict.  In both cases the larger pan movements lost out to smaller nation state formations.

Both the Soviet delimitation of borders in Central Asia as part of the larger project of korenizatsiia (indigenization) and the British and French partition of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire as part of establishing the League of Nations mandate system involved the idea of guiding new nations towards self determination. In the Soviet case it involved the creation of national state formations, Soviet Socialist Republics, within the USSR that would serve this function. These SSRs were united under the leadership of Moscow in a socialist union with a single political and economic system controlled by a centralized Communist Party. Symbolically they had the trappings of sovereign nation states but had no real political or economic autonomy. They had borders, national languages, flags, and various government institutions to administer the rule of Moscow. They also had a host of cultural institutions in their indigenous languages promoting Sovietized versions of their culture. These included schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, theatres, museums, research institutes, radio broadcasts, and other similar media. To rule over these national territories the Soviet government actively promoted members of the titular nationalities in the local government and branches of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Glenn 1999 and Martin 2001). The state and party apparatus of each SSR was to be nationalized and eventually members of the local titular nationality came to dominate on this level even as the central government and head of the party in Moscow became increasingly more Russian and largely excluded Central Asians.

The League of Nation mandates of Syria and Lebanon under French administration and Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq under British rule were all to become independent states with governments friendly to the former mandatory power. Except for Palestine they all did become independent nation states by the summer of 1946. Palestine as of yet has still not achieved independence as initially envisioned in the original League of Nations mandate. Instead the establishment of the State of Israel and the mass expulsion of over three quarters of the indigenous Arab population from the parts of Palestine that became Israel in 1949 has indefinitely delayed Palestinian national self determination (Sayigh 2007). As fully independent states albeit ones in which the former mandatory powers still exercised considerable influence their political and economic development differed from the Central Asian republics which had only symbolic and cultural national self determination and no real political or economic autonomy (Allworth 1999). The key questions of political rule and economic development in Central Asia remained under the firm control of Moscow even if these policies were executed by local Communist Party members belonging to the indigenous nationalities.

Development, defined as the creation of a modern industrial economy and the accompanying physical and social infrastructure became a key concern for both the newly independent Arab states and the USSR with regards to Central Asia. In addition to increasing the material standards of living these states also sought to improve education, health care, and access to modern expressions of indigenous culture (Wheeler 1964 and Amin 1980). The Soviet effort to develop Central Asia along modernist lines already began in earnest in the 1920s and greatly accelerated after 1928 with the first five year plan (Nove and Newth 1967). Despite setbacks during the 1940s due to the Great Patriotic War the 1950s again saw the return of a significant development agenda to Central Asia which continued into the 1960s and even 1970s.

One common feature of successful development both in Soviet Central Asia and the Arab states was the fact that both depended considerably on oil revenues. The most successful states in terms of development among those being compared in this article were Iraq and the USSR both of which produced and exported very large amounts of oil.  The huge profits from oil dominated both the Iraqi and to a lesser extent the Soviet generation of foreign exchange. This was particularly true during the 1970s following the massive increase in oil prices after the 1973 oil embargo by OPEC in response to the Yom Kippur War. A price increase that also benefitted non-OPEC producers such as the USSR (Shelley 2005). This allowed the Soviet Union to continue to boost the standard of living in Central Asia despite a massive slowdown in economic growth compared to the 1950s and 1960s.

The similarities in the construction of the Central Asian states in the USSR and the Arab states to come under British and French rule after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire as modern political entities have remained underexplored. This is in large part due to the reluctance of scholars to engage in comparative studies and an insistence on the uniqueness of the Soviet experiment . As such the Central Asian states have largely been excluded from larger discourses over post-colonialism (Moore 2001). Yet even a cursory examination of their recent political and economic history demonstrates a considerable number of significant similarities (Kandiyoti 2002). Certainly there should be far more comparative work on the history of the two regions in the near future.

Works Cited

Edward Allworth ed., Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview, Third Edition, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994).

Galal A.  Amin, The Modernization of Poverty: A Study of the Political Economy of Growth in Nine Arab Countries (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1980).

Paul Bergne, The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic (London and NY: IB Tauris, 2007).

Alec Nove and J.A. Newth, The Soviet Middle East: A Model for Development? (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967).

John Glenn, The Soviet Legacy in Central Asia (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK and NY: Palgrave, 1999).

Deniz Kandiyoti, "Post-Colonialism Compared: Potentials and Limitations in the Middle East and Central Asia," International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, no. 34 (2002), pp. 279-297.

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939  (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

David Chioni Moore, "Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique," PMLA, vol. 116, no. 1, pp. 111-128.

Malik Mufti, Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (Ithaca, NY and  London: Cornell University Press, 1996).

Alexander G. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan 1917-1927 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1957).

Oliver Roy, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (London and NY: IB Tauris, 2000).

Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Books, 2007).

Toby Shelley, Oil: Politics, Poverty & the Planet (London: Zed Books, 2005).

Geoffrey Wheeler, The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1964).

Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islamism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

Abstract of "The Persecution of Ethnic Germans in the USSR during World War II"

I have an article, "The Persecution of Ethnic Germans in the USSR during World War II" coming out in the April 2016 issue (vol. 75, no. 2) of The Russian Review. Here is the abstract below.

The ethnic Germans were the single largest and one of the oldest diaspora groups in the USSR connected to a foreign state. During the Second World War the Soviet government forcibly resettled the German communities living in territory it controlled west of the Urals to Kazakhstan and Siberia. It placed these internal deportees under special settlement restrictions which greatly limited their freedom of movement and choice of residency. The NKVD counted, registered, and instituted a system of surveillance over the special settlers to prevent them from moving from their assigned places of resettlement. This in turn greatly constrained their options regarding education and employment. Initially almost all of the deportees including urban populations from Engles and other cities found themselves settled on kolkhozes and sovkhozes and assigned to unfamiliar agricultural work. The failure to integrate these men and women into productive agricultural work on the kolkhozes led to widespread unemployment, lack of work days, and subsequently severe food shortages. The Soviet solution to integrating them into the economy was to again move them and assign them to extractive enterprises. This took two forms. The first was a second deportation of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to Siberia northward to work in the fishing industry. These men, women, and children remained special settlers. The second form was the mobilization of ethnic German men and later women into the labor army to work building factories, felling trees, and laying rail lines in NKVD camps, and mining coal, extracting oil, and manufacturing munitions for civilian commissariats under UNKVD supervision. The restrictions on the men and women in the labor army which ultimately comprised over a quarter of all ethnic Germans in the USSR were even more onerous than the special settlement regime and closely resembled the situation of convicted Gulag prisoners. The Stalin regime's policy towards its ethnic German citizens during World War II involved ethnic cleansing, the imposition of apartheid like residency restrictions, and their mass conscription into forced labor detachments.

Maru

Today I read Bessie Head's short 1971 novel Maru dealing with racism in Botswana by blacks against what are referred to in the book as Masarwa.  I think most English speakers are more familiar with the term Khoisan which refers to the the larger language group to which their indigenous tongue belongs. Even more common is the term "bushman" which is evidently considered highly derogatory. At any rate it was quite interesting. The final paragraph to the book is quoted below.

People like the Batswana, who did not know that the wind of freedom had also reached people of the Masarwa tribe, were in for an unpleasant surprise because it would be no longer possible to treat Masarwa people in an inhuman way without getting killed yourself.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that no white liberal or leftists in 1971 or even today for that matter can recognize even the possibility of black racism anywhere. But, Bessie Head, a South African born of a white mother and a black father and exiled to Botswana instantly saw the similarities between the Batswana treatment of the Masarwa and the situation in the country of her birth. To her it was obvious.

Ghana takes Yemeni detainees from Gitmo

Okay this is my first blog post of the year 2016. I haven't seen any blog posts on the following subject yet so I might as well be the first one. The US has released two Yemeni detainees from Gitmo to Ghana. Their upkeep will be paid for by the US. They also have to stay in Ghana for two years. There has been quite a bit of complaint about this by members of the opposition political party. It appears that President Obama wants to shut down the detention center in Cuba before leaving office by resettling its detainees in countries other than the US.

Happy New Years

Well 2015 is almost over. That means I have been in Africa almost five whole years now. It also means this blog is well over a decade old. So on average about one person has read it for every year it has been around. 

For 2016 blogging will probably continue to be slow. I have pretty much run of things that fit into a blog sized post to write about. Already this blog feels fairly repetitive. Instead I will be focusing more on writing longer pieces. 

The coming new year

Optimism is something that you acquire as a survival skill in Africa. I especially try to be optimistic when starting a new year which will happen in a couple of days. I am hoping that this next year that I can make some solid accomplishments.Converting those accomplishments into money, however, is another matter and considerably more difficult and less probable. Nevertheless, I am going to follow the advice of the quotation in the little square to the right here. If anybody has any suggestions on making this belief a reality please put them in the comments.

Happy Boxing Day

Today is Boxing Day which has an official status in most Commonwealth countries. When I was very young and first saw it on calendars I thought it referred to the sport of boxing. But, in reality it refers to boxing up left overs and giving them to the hired help.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to the half a dozen people that will see this blog post.

The Revival of Internal Colonialism as a Scholarly Model?

Between about 1980 and 2009 or so it seemed that the concept of internal colonialism completely disappeared from contemporary scholarship. However, in recent years I have seen an increasing revival of the concept. I am not sure what to make of this. I personally think the concept is a lot more useful than most social science models. But, for what ever reason it wasn't very popular in the 1980s, 1990s, or the first decade of the 21st century. Its recent revival also seems puzzling since there doesn't seem to be any single origin or inspiration for the new crop of scholarship making use of the model. If anybody has any insights into the reasons behind this new interest in a model that had seemingly died in the 1980s please leave comment below. My own contribution to the use of internal colonialism as a model for understanding the relationship between marginalized ethnic groups and their surrounding society and ruling government is here.

The Future

The year is coming to an end. As with most years I did not accomplish as much as a I wanted to. But, I did get some stuff done which is a lot better than getting nothing done. Next year I am hoping to figure out a way to greatly increase my productivity. Apparently a decent raise with promotion does not occur until one makes full professor which requires more publications to get at the University of Ghana than at any other institution in the world. So I should really be aiming at writing at least one journal article a month next year. Otherwise I could reach the mandatory retirement age of 60 before I make it up through the ranks from lecturer to senior lecturer to associate professor to full professor. I applied for promotion from lecturer to senior lecturer in April but apparently that will only increase my salary by about $200 a month. Whereas reaching full professor would more than double it to about $2,000 a month. I would still be making only about 10% of what US based professors make. But, that is a lot better than the less than 5% I am currently earning. If I make a serious push I might be able to make it to full professor in another five years. I just need to publish a whole bunch and submit for the next promotion as soon as the last one is approved.

Violence in Burundi

There are predictions that the recent violence in Burundi might escalate into a civil war or even another genocide like happened in neighboring Rwanda a little over twenty years ago. The African Union is threatening to intervene with a force of 5,000 peace keepers regardless of the wishes of the current government of Burundi. This in the wake of 87 deaths last week in an increasing spiral of violence. Since April more than 400 people have been killed in political violence in Burundi, 3,500 arrested, and 220,000 have fled the country. Violence of course is nothing new to Burundi which has been plagued by conflict between Hutus and Tutsis since gaining independence from Belgium. The silence by media, politicians, pundits, intellectuals, and others in the US is not new either. African lives just do not seem to concern them.

13 December 1955

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the decree from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet removing the last of the ethnic Germans in the USSR from the restrictions of the special settlement regime.

On Lifting the Restrictions on the Legal Status of Germans and Members of their Families, found in special settlements. 

Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 13 December 1955

Having learned that the existing restrictions on the legal status of special settler-Germans and members of their families, exiled to various regions of the country, are no longer deemed necessary, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet resolves: 

1. To lift from the count of special settlement and free from administrative surveillance of the organs of the MVD Germans and members of their families, exiled as special settlers in the period of the Great Fatherland War, and also Germans - citizens of the USSR, that after repatriation  from Germany were moved to special settlements.

2. Establishes, that the lifting from Germans of the restrictions of special settlement will not lead to the return of property confiscated during exile, and that they do not have the right to return to the places from which they were exiled.  

Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

K. Voroshilov

Secretary of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

N. Pegov

Translated to English from Russian by J. Otto Pohl.

A.A. German and O. Iu. Silant'evoi, eds., "Navechno, bez prava: Ochevidtsy i issledovateli o nemetskom spetsposelenni v SSSR: Sb. nauchn. statei i vospominanii (Moscow: MSNK-Press, 2015), doc. 7, p. 99.

An Idea

I am wondering if maybe I should print out the better blog entries here and compile them into a book form. Or maybe print out the whole thing just to have it in book form? For me personally the journal like entries are the most interesting reread not the essays. Maybe I should make a couple of copies for family members? I am not exactly sure about the technical details that would be involved but I am pretty sure it is doable. If nothing else it could go into the family archives for anybody wishing to do research in the future. It is just an idea right now, however, I am thinking a bound copy of the blog would be nice to have around.

A Dying Breed

At this point this blog is a barely living dinosaur. It is the last politically reactionary blog written by a US citizen with a UK PhD in Oriental history in the world I believe. There were never very many academic right wing blogs. Academic blogs were for the most part dominated by the left and extreme left with almost all of the more moderate ones dying in recent years leaving only a few radical socialist group blogs still around. My readership was never large. But, it has gotten smaller as the years have gone by. It is now to the point where I can reach more people faster by e-mail or a phone call than I can with this blog. At this point I have completely given up on trying to get any readers other than the six I currently have. Other people on this planet who read English and have access to the internet obviously do not share any of my interests. If I wanted to be rich and famous I should have taken the opposite stand on everything from what I did. But, I am just too stubborn to do that.

Free Crimea

Writing about the mundane?

I am thinking about maybe trying to write something for commercial publication about my life and work in Ghana. I am not sure if there would be any interest by any periodicals in such a piece or not. Certainly, articles on life in Africa as normal rather than exotic are rather lacking in the US and other Western countries but, maybe such a piece would be different enough that I could sell it? I mean there has been some writing and film showing work and life in South Africa in this manner. Of course South Africa especially in cities like Johannesburg is much more economically developed and prosperous than Ghana. Nonetheless, in many ways Ghana even at its most mundane probably appears more exotic to many Americans than South Africa. In large part this is because there is not any settler population here with a standard and way of life comparable to North America or Europe. The population here is almost entirely black and the vast majority of them are not living nearly as well as most white people anywhere in purely material terms. On the other hand the stereotype of extreme poverty that many westerners have of Africa is for the most part not applicable to Ghanaians living in urban and especially exurban areas. If anybody has any suggestions leave them in the comments please.

Blogging for one

At this point the main function of this blog is to provide notes to myself so I don't lose them. It really is just a private journal in cyberspace.  It is true that theoretically people other than myself can read it. But, in reality except for a very few exceptions such as my parents I don't think I actually have to worry about other people actually ever reading it. I once thought I could get a dozen regular readers for this blog. But, after more than a decade I am pretty sure now that is an impossible goal.