War and forced migration in Egypt: the experience of evacuation from the Suez Canal cities (1967-1976).

AuthorShakur, Mohamed Abdel

THE MIDDLE EAST HAS PRODUCED more than its share of stories of refugees, displaced persons, evacuees, and other victims of politics and development. Of course the deplorable plight of the Palestinian refugees in countries neighboring Palestine is by far the most striking example. But there are others. As a contribution to this history of flight and resettlement in the Arab world, this article analyzes the story of the Egyptian "migrants" from the Suez Canal zone who fled between 1967 and 1976 as a result of the Six-Day War in June 1967. This analysis of the "forced migration" experience in Egypt is a contribution to a broader understanding of the contemporary processes of response to war and disaster in the Arab world.

The case of the displaced and the evacuees from the Suez Canal cities illustrates the social processes of the creation and absorption of refugees. As in many other cases of forced migration, people's flight was caused by unexpected warfare, but this Egyptian case has some unique features. In particular, the story shows the three phases of flight, adaptation, and return (or integration into the host setting), and it illustrates the situation where the migrants and the hosts share the same basic culture, and where the hosts played a supportive role in the beginning.

The Suez Canal became the temporary Egyptian frontier when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula in 1967. Many Egyptians departed the Canal cities and villages to avoid the combat zone in 1967, and with the heating up of the "War of Attrition" (beginning March 1969 through summer 1970) the remaining civilian population left or was evacuated (Waterbury 1973). Altogether nearly one million people were displaced from the three Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Ismailiya, and Suez, and their vicinities. Janet Abu-Lughod (1985:180-181) refers to this as a 'war-induced migration of urban people.' The peak of migration from the Suez Canal area to the rest of Egypt was in 1967-1969, and with the Egyptian recovery of the Sinai through treaty after the 1973 war, a return movement began in 1974 and continued until about 1976. Abu-Lughod relates that the return was as unforeseen as the flight. Thus at the time of the movement of the internally displaced in the late 1960s no one could anticipate that the possibility of return would occur so soon: as usual with refugees, people did not know what to expect.

The original flight was a result of a war with an external enemy, rather than as a result of an internal conflict, and the civilian population was pushed into the Egyptian heartland as the Israelis appeared on the east bank of the Suez Canal. People were fleeing warfare and not occupation and expulsion. The displaced and their hosts were politically on the same side, confronting a foreign enemy. Those who left their homes and jobs remained within Egypt, and within a decade were able to return to their starting point, although this outcome was not known at the beginning. The host population provided substantial assistance, especially in the beginning. The Egyptian administrative system remained intact, and played a key role. Those with government jobs retained them or were transferred to similar posts. The reception and integration of the displaced was handled entirely within the Egyptian system, with no foreign aid. Egyptian authorities tried successfully to avoid the word 'refugee,' to escape the parallel to the Palestinian case, and instead spoke of 'migrants' to cover both the displaced and the evacuees. Finally, one can note that this episode has not become part of a national mythology even though those affected by it remember their histories quite clearly.

There are certain features of the Egyptian handling of the case that can be seen in a wider context. The official policy was to distribute the displaced as widely as possible rather than to use camps. The same practice occurred with regard to the treatment of the Palestinian refugees from the late 1940s (Dajani 1986; El Abed 2003) and the sub-Saharan African refugees today (Cooper 1992). Refugee camps did not emerge. One consequence of this is that most refugees (or displaced persons) end up in the major cities which can best absorb a stream of individuals. Of course, this scattering also corresponded to the paths that fleeing individuals took, since many of them sought out their relatives and friends elsewhere in Egypt.

Since the Suez Canal migrations were circumscribed in time, our analysis can cover the full sequence of moments in the experience of displacement. In the chain of events we can see the different stages, from the initial flight to the eventual return, including the absorption of the displaced into a new setting, involving housing, schooling, work, and eventually marriage and the continuation of the normal family cycle, and then a second version of the same processes as people returned home. The uncertainty and the sense of loss of the displaced is part of this broader picture.

The Six-Day War also aggravated a refugee situation to the east of Israel, where roughly 400,000 Palestinians crossed the Jordan River (Dodd and Barakat 1969:5; Abu-Lughod 1971:163). Additionally, Syrians were displaced by the occupation of the Golan Heights. Moreover, the Israeli conquest of the Sinai meant that many Egyptian citizens fell under foreign occupation (Lavie 1990). The Egyptian story that we present here is distinct from the story of the Palestinian refugees, and from the experiences of the Sinai population under occupation.

The number of displaced from the Suez Canal was roughly equal to the number of Palestinians who fled from their homes during the period of the creation of Israel in 1947-49 (Abu-Lughod 1971; Morris 1987). In Egypt, both the authorities and the people had the Palestinian parallel in mind and were determined to avoid it. There were some similarities in the way people fled--like the Egyptians, the Palestinians rarely went straight to another destination, but moved several times; they often attempted to return home when they thought they could; they tried not to cross the border out of Palestine. Dodd and Barakat (1949) have analyzed the reasons for the flight of West Bank Palestinians in 1967 : fear of physical harm, the psychological pressure of dealing with the occupying army especially with regard to the honor of the women and the senior men, destruction of homes. Of these, the first was the most obvious in the Egyptian case. Since the Egyptians always remained on the Egyptian side of the front, the question of honor was not a factor in Egypt in 1967-1970. Apparently also notions of honor were much less important in the Palestinian reaction to the Six-Day War (Farsoun 1997:134-136). Direct contact with the Israeli occupier was restricted to the people in Sinai who remained there.

The forced migration of three-quarters of a million people to Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt for a period of five to seven years, and then their return to the war-torn cities under reconstruction, remains an untold story. It is largely a story of displaced urban populations representing the full range of the social spectrum, although the farming villages between Ismailiya and Suez were also involved. Moreover, both the refugees and the host population were Egyptian, sharing cultural expectations, personal relations, and even kinship. Some parts of the process were organized by the Egyptian government, while other parts relied on individual and personal links. This is thus an account of the process of social change in Egypt, notably the expansion of individual horizons through movement around the country.

METHOD

There are many ways to approach this moment in Egyptian history. In this article we focus on the accounts of the "migrants" themselves. The history of the efforts of the Egyptian government to cope with the human needs of the population of the Canal cities and villages, and at the same time to pursue its foreign policy goals of recovering lost territory, are analyzed elsewhere (Baker 1990:95-96; Smith 1996:217-220).

Our study draws primarily on the personal testimonies of people who fled, and then either returned or remained. We assume that everyone is an expert on his or her own experience and feelings. We use this material not to reconstruct history but rather to construct a composite picture of personal pasts. Of course these personal pasts are also constructed in memory, so there are multiple layers. The comments refer to the past but they reflect contemporary values. The data are illustrative rather than demonstrative. They also of course provide a commentary on Egyptian society, particularly the ebb and flow of internal migration and the formation of relationships of utility and trust. The approach is broadly anthropological.

In 2001, over 30 years after the migration, we began to assemble information on the human dimension of the forced migration. One of the authors conducted 81 interviews with migrants in either the places where they had settled after migration, like Zagazig, the capital city of Sharqiya governorate, or in the original cities and villages in the Canal cities to which they had returned. Most of the interviewees were between the ages of 40 and 65, and were of low to middle social-economic standard. The group included 13 women (16%) and 68 men (84%). Some of the interviewees were children or teenagers at the time of migration, while others were already adults. The age range in 1967 was from small children to people in their forties. The interviewees were selected using the snowball method--each interviewee led us to others. This produced a certain clustering in the sample--a cluster from the Railways Organization in Zagazig or a cluster of farmers from the villages south of Ismailiya. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and translated: the texts should be considered as paraphrases. The secretary of the Arab Socialist Union, Egypt's single party...

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