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ABSTRACT
In 1972, upon expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin, diasporic Asians, who had settled in East Africa during colonial times, underwent a second stage of global dispersal. Many of them managed to resettle in the United Kingdom, despite anti-immigrant sentiments and increasingly restrictive immigration legislation. Other large groups arrived in India and Canada. One group, however, got scattered around the globe: the approximately 10,000 ‘Asians of undetermined origin’, who were resettled as refugees under auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This article investigates how and why this group of stateless Asians became refugees and candidates for international resettlement. It argues that all British policy makers sought to use the international community to shoulder part of the burden of winding up empire, while trying to avoid convictions for breaching newly emerging legally binding international human rights obligations. The Ugandan Asian crisis fits within the history of the creation of modern British immigration control law that took shape from 1962 onwards. This article proposes to decentralise the geographical frame beyond the UK to include developments in Kenya, Uganda, and India, where East African Asians likewise became ‘undesirables’.
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Notes
1. East African Asians v United Kingdom – 4403/70 [1973] ECHR 2 (ECHR 1973), 14 December 1973.
2. Lester, ‘Preparing and Presenting a Human Rights Brief,’ 1061–62. The lawyers had previously tried to sue the UK on grounds of Article 3(3) of the Fourth Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, which stipulated that ‘No one shall be deprived the enter the territory of the state of which he is a national.’ However, since the British government had not yet ratified the Fourth Protocol, they could simply ignore any negative judgment against them. The lawyers of the East African Asians’ team therefore embarked on a different strategy.
3. Shah, Refugees, Race, 93.
4. Gregory, India and East Africa.
5. Amrith, Migration.
6. Ghai and Ghai, Portrait; Tandon and Raphael, The New Position.
7. Mattausch, “From Subjects to Citizens,” 128; Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 1.
8. The term ‘comprador class’ derives from Luhrmann, The Good Parsi, 17–18. I use the term ‘undesirable’ here after Paddy Hillyard, Suspect Community. Particularly in the British sources the term is regularly deployed as well. From this point onwards, scare quotes are implied.
9. Wilson III, “Strategies of State Control”; and Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 20.
10. Phillips and Phillips, Windrush, 158ff; Smith and Marmo, Race, Gender, chap. 1.
11. Hall, “The Great Moving Right,” 19; Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black, xiii; Corthorn, Enoch Powell; and Shilliam, “Enoch Powell”.
12. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration.
13. Smith and Varnava, “Creating a “Suspect Community.”
14. Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal.”
15. Bhachu, Twice Migrants.
16. According to Suhrke, there is only one successful case of burden sharing for refugees from the Global South, namely when the American government took up the defence of the Vietnamese refugees after 1975. Suhrke, “Burden-Sharing,” 413. See also Betts, Protection by Persuasion.
17. Moyn, The Last Utopia; and Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue.
18. Nagar, “The South Asian Diaspora.”
19. Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens; Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration; Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging; and Smith and Marmo, Race, Gender.
20. Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide, chap. 9.
21. Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 182; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 179; Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging, 42; Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 294. Nadine El-Enany writes that for the Ugandan Asians the refugee category was invoked ‘out of convenience, by an administration wishing to frame its actions towards the Ugandan Asians as charitable or humanitarian, rather than in terms of legal or reparative obligation.’ El-Enany, Bordering Britain, 124.
22. Guha, India After Gandhi, 157.
23. For work largely based on Hansard, see Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide. Randall Hansen regularly uses PREM and CAB, but not the FCO papers. Chibuike Uche uses FCO papers, but he investigates the UK’s foreign relations with Uganda after the expulsion, not the international resettlement. Uche, “The British Government.”
24. Grant et al., “Topic Modelling on Archive Documents.”
25. The British National Archives (hereafter TNA) FCO47/643/230, Annexe B: The National Status of Asians in Uganda in 1972, 10 November 1972.
26. Plender, “The Exodus of Asians,” 291.
27. Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, 77.
28. Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship,” 69.
29. Ibid., 78. Another independent territory from where British subjecthood could be derived was Ireland, but it would lead us to far to go into the details here.
30. Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, 125–26.
31. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Article 15 (1).
32. Hansen, “The Politics of Citizenship,” 78; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 45. For a discussion among civil servants proclaiming that stance, see: TNA FCO50/267/14, UK Citizens of Asian Origin in Uganda, 15 October 1968.
33. Weis, Nationality and Statelessness, 1956, 28; Bonee, “Caesar Augustus,” 148. British Nationality Act 1948. (Emphasis added).
34. Weis, Nationality and Statelessness, 1979, 20.
35. TNA CAB129/135/34, Immigration Legislation, Appendix I. The Citizenship Position, 12 February 1968.
36. TNA FCO47/643/230, Annexe B: The National Status of Asians in Uganda in 1972, 10 November 1972.
37. Sutton, “Divided and Uncertain Loyalties,” 287.
38. Gupta, “India and the Asians”; Sutton, “Imagined Sovereignty and the Indian Subject.”
39. See note 36 above.
40. TNA CAB129/135/34, Immigration Legislation, Appendix I. The Citizenship Position, 12 February 1968; and Manby, Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, 51–52.
41. Manby, Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, 53.
42. Dummett and Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, 199; Hamai, “Imperial Burden?” 430; and Uche, “The British Government,” 826.
43. Manby, Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, 52–53.
44. TNA HO344/327, U.K. Asians in Uganda, n.d. [October 1968].
45. Uche, “The British Government,” 824–25.
46. Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962.
47. Miles and Phizacklea, White Man’s Country, chap. 2.
48. Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal,” 111. See also Greenhill, “Forced Migration”.
49. Plender, “The Exodus of Asians,” 324; and Kotecha, “The Shortchanged,” 25.
50. Hansen, “The Kenyan Asians,” 827.
51. Ibid., 828–29; Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 179.
52. See note 34 above.
53. TNA FCO50/133/5, Note on Immigration for E.E.C. talks with Indian officials, 15 July 1967.
54. TNA FCO31/496/6, Otton to Croft. Scope for Domestic Action, 9 December 1968.
55. TNA FCO50/131/13, Commonwealth Immigration – British High Commissioner to New Delhi John Freeman’s visit to United Kingdom, May-June 1967, 5 July 1967.
56. TNA FCO50/131/22, Wilson’s committee visit to Pakistan and India, 14 August 1967.
57. Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 222.
58. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 20.
59. Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 276–77.
60. Hansen, “The Kenyan Asians.”
61. TNA CAB129/135/34, Immigration Legislation, Annexe, 12 February 1968.
62. TNA CAB129/135/34, Immigration Legislation, Appendix I. The Citizenship Position, 12 February 1968.
63. Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging, 37–38.
64. European Convention of Human Rights, Article 3(2) of the Fourth Protocol. Similar articles appeared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but the European Convention was important because it had an enforcement machinery in the form of the European Commission of Human Rights.
65. Hansen, “The Kenyan Asians,” 822.
66. TNA CAB129/135/34, Immigration Legislation, Annexe, 12 February 1968. Hansen.
67. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 167.
68. TNA FCO50/134/12, Freeman to Bowden – The ‘Asian Exodus’ from Kenya, 4 July 1968.
69. Ibid.
70. TNA FCO31/496/13, Secret memorandum – UK Passport Holders in Kenya and Uganda. n.d.
71. TNA FCO50/134/5, Freeman to Commonwealth Office – Asian Immigrants from Kenya, 29 April 1968.
72. See note 69 above.
73. TNA FCO50/134/48, Otton to Heddy – Kenyan Asians Travelling to India, 8 July 1968.
74. Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal,” 106.
75. Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee, 20.
76. TNA FCO31/496/2, Ministry of Information, Broadcasting, and Tourism Uganda, The President’s Press Conference Held in Parliamentary Buildings Kampala, 26 February 1968.
77. TNA HO344/327/23, Asian immigration into the U.K., 13 August 1968; TNA FCO47/643/230, Annexe B: The National Status of Asians in Uganda in 1972, 10 November 1972.
78. TNA FCO31/497/60, Tel no. 90 Scott to FCO, 29 January 1969.
79. TNA FCO50/267/17 Your Reference 3917, Letter from A. Rutter to A.F. Knight, 17 January 1969.
80. There was another small group of 200 British Subjects without Citizenship, but they were not taken into consideration in the statistics. TNA FCO31/497/60, Tel no. 90 Scott to FCO, 29 January 1969.
81. TNA FCO31/497/75A, Tel no. 175 Scott to FCO, 20 February 1969.
82. Ibid.
83. TNA FCO50/267/34, Loss of Ugandan Citizenship, Resumption or U.K. Citizenship, 30 September 1969.
84. TNA FCO50/267/47, Arthur to Brian Lea, 16 October 1969.
85. TNA FCO50/268/65, Readers’ letter by B.T Somaiya and B.D. Makwana, Uganda Argus, 5 December 1969. (Emphasis added).
86. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration, 192–95.
87. Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal,” 107.
88. Read, “Some Legal Aspects of the Expulsion,” 200.
89. Ugandan National Records Center and Archives (hereafter UNRCA), Office of the President, Box 2 Ref. No. 17, Citizenship and Immigration Act 1969, Ugandan Citizenship – Irregularities.
90. Speech Amin, cited in “The Future of Asians in Uganda,” Uganda Argus, 5 August 1972. In: Zane Lalani, Ugandan Asian Expulsion: 90 Days & Beyond Through the Eyes of the International Press (1997), 1.
91. Kotecha, “The Shortchanged: Uganda Citizenship Laws and How They Were Applied to Its Asian Minority,” 1–2.
92. Ibid., 2.
93. Read, “Some Legal Aspects of the Expulsion,” 202; and Hundle, “Exceptions to the Expulsion.”
94. UNRCA, Confidential, Chief Secretary’s Office, Entebbe, Box 37 Ref. SRA/11, Economic War, Decree No. 17 of 1972, Statutory Instrument No, 124 of 1972, 22 August 1972.
95. TNA FCO47/643/230, The Asian Diaspora from Uganda, 10 November 1927.
96. TNA CAB128/50/41, CM72 40th Conclusions, 8 August 1972. Emphasis added.
97. TNA FCO31/1401, Meeting between Geoffrey Rippon, QC MP, and the Foreign Minister of the United Republic of Tanzania, Mr. J.S. Malecela, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dar Es Salam, 14 August 1972.
98. TNA FCO31/1401, Meeting between Geoffrey Rippon and General Amin, held at the command post, Kampala at 11.00am on Tuesday, 15 August 1972.
99. TNA FCO31/1401, Visit of Mr. Rippon to East Africa. Note of a secret meeting at Chequers on 9.30am on Wednesday, 16 August 1972.
100. See note 96 above.
101. UNHCR Archives, Fonds 11 Series 2 (hereafter UNHCR 11/2), Box 1281, 641.UGA, Expulsion and Deportation – Uganda [Vol.1] (1972), folio 11a, Asians in Uganda, 16 August 1972.
102. Ibid.
103. UNHCR 11/2, Box 1281, 641.UGA, Expulsion and Deportation – Uganda [Vol.1] (1972), folio 12 III a, Letter from the High Commissioner to his Excellency, The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kampala, Uganda, 20 August 1972.
104. UNHCR 11/2, Box 1281, 641.UGA, Expulsion and Deportation – Uganda [Vol.1] (1972), folio 15, Outgoing Cable, 21 August 1972.
105. Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, 168.
106. UNHCR 11/2, Box 1281, 641.UGA, Expulsion and Deportation – Uganda [Vol.2] (1972), folio 81B, Notes on the Informal Meeting of the Representatives on the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s programme, 13 October 1972.
107. When the Ismaili community from Tanzania resettled in large part to Canada, under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau, Sadruddin Khan did not get involved in his capacity as High Commissioner for Refugees, so his heritage alone can never be sufficient explanation. See Nagar, “The South Asian Diaspora,” 70.
108. UNHCR 11/2, Box 205100.UGA.ASI Refugees from Asia in Uganda Vol.3 (1972), folio 94B, Strictly Confidential, Asians in Uganda, 21 October 1972.
109. TNA FCO31/1406/490, Alec Douglas-Home, Telno 771 Stateless Asians in Uganda, 3 October 1972.
110. Tandon and Raphael, The New Position, 17; and Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal.”
111. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue.
112. Bhachu, “New Cultural Forms”; and Bhachu, “Twice Migrants and Multiple Migrants.”
113. Cosemans, “The Politics of Dispersal”.
114. Suhrke, “Burden-sharing.”