MISSING MISSING PERSONS AND POLITICS Jenny Edkins CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edkins, Jenny. Missing : persons and politics / Jenny Edkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5029-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Missing persons—Identification—Political aspects. 2. Mass casualties—Identification— Political aspects. 3. Dead—Identification—Political aspects. 4. Missing in action—Identification—Political aspects. 5. Disappeared persons—Identification— Political aspects. I. Title. HV6762.A3E35 2011 362.87—dc23 2011022286 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. Missing Persons, Manhattan 15 2. Displaced Persons, Postwar Europe 38 3. Tracing Services 58 4. Missing Persons, London 84 5. Forensic Identification 107 6. Missing in Action 131 7. Disappeared, Argentina 155 8. Ambiguous Loss 175 Conclusion 194 Notes 199 Bibliography 243 Index 267 Preface Just before the end of my work in the archives of the postwar period, I came across an extraordinary file. Among reports of the efforts of the tracing services in the face of the overwhelming millions lost, often without trace, in concentration camps and on death marches, there is a record of a train accident.1 On May 30, 1945, a transport of displaced persons from Hildesheim near Hannover was halted outside Rheda station in Westphalia. At about ten minutes past midnight, it was hit by another train. Four people were killed and several more injured, one badly. The badly injured person, who was taken to the American Hospital, was identified as Serge Rafalovich, born on August 24, 1909, at St. Petersburg, Russia, and a resident of Paris. One of the four killed was identified. Three were not: a man of about thirty years old, a woman of about forty, and a boy of seven or eight years old. The four bodies were taken to the Catholic Hospital and were to be buried on June 6, 1945. The personal belongings of those killed were turned over to the police and kept by the burgomaster. Further inquiries as to the identity of the three had been made without any success. For each person a form had been completed, giving a personal description and details. In the file in the United Nations archives in New York are photographs of the faces of the three unidentified persons, with cards on which their finger- prints have been impressed and, pinned carefully to other specially designed cards, small pieces of fabric, each about an inch square, snipped from every item of clothing that they wore. Coming across this file was extraordinarily moving. These little pieces of material, preserved in case they might one day prove useful for future identification, were here, now, in the present, hidden deep in the archive. Out there in the world was someone, maybe, for whom those traces would have significance. This was not what I found most striking, though. What struck me deeply was that in the midst of the overwhelming chaos of displaced persons, concentration camps, forced marches—people objectified, racialized, murdered in their masses—someone, somewhere, had taken the trouble to vii viii PREFACE produce these records: records that could potentially serve to identify three particular persons, persons who mattered only to those who knew them, three persons among forty million. Wisława Szymborska writes: History rounds off skeletons to zero. A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed.2 But here, in this archive, that one counts, as a person, not an object, on the assumption that someone, somewhere, may be looking for them. This book was prompted by an anger at the way prevalent forms of politi- cal or biopolitical governance both objectify and instrumentalize the person. Contemporary systems of political management are based on the administra- tion of populations; they treat people as objects to be governed, with the aim of safeguarding populations as a whole.3 They are heartless and impersonal at best; at worst, they can be genocidal. The person is produced as an object of governance: as something without political standing, as something that has no voice, as disconnected and individualized. Contemporary politics does not see the person-as-such, only the person as object. The way this objectification works becomes starkly obvious when people go missing: our systems of administration and governance cannot see the problem. When people go missing, their relatives demand action. A particu- lar, unique, irreplaceable person has disappeared, and they want that person back. No one else will do. However, for the authorities who are supposed to act, there is really no such thing as an irreplaceable person: one person is for most purposes equivalent to another of the same sort. If a family has lost its breadwinner then some form of compensation might be in order, but the demand for the return of a particular breadwinner is incomprehensible. The demand that the missing be traced inevitably challenges the produc- tion of the person as object, and it can be seen as something more: it can be seen as a demand for a different form of politics, one in which the person-as- such is acknowledged. But what is this person-as-such? When someone goes missing those left behind examine the traces that remain to try to fathom what may have happened, to try to work out what the missing person was thinking and feeling and what may have led that person to disappear. It turns out that in some profound sense the person was in any case unknowable and unknown. And that who people are is very much bound up with who they are in relation to others. It is impossible to specify what it is that makes a person irreplaceable—it is not this or that characteristic that is missed, this or that function that is no longer performed, but something singular, something unfathomable: maybe even the person’s unfathomability in relation to our PREFACE ix own. The person cannot be pinned down: the person is missing. It is in a sense that very “missingness” that makes the person irreplaceable. In any case attempts to govern the person always break down. The person- as-such always escapes attempts at categorization or governance. We can see this in the ways in which the disappeared return to haunt the authoritarian systems that disappeared them in the first place. The seemingly diabolically effective tactic of disappearances rebounds in devastatingly unexpected ways. We can see it too on a more everyday level, in the ways in which the reach of systems of governance and objectification comes up against its limits in the quotidian actions of persons who insist on continuing to treat each other as such. In the New York archive, for example, that one counts. Chapter 1 of this book looks at the search for those missing in the after- math of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan in 2001, focusing on relatives’ attempts to find out what had happened to family members, and the production of posters appealing for information about the missing. The chapter introduces many of the themes that are developed in later chapters—the contrast between the efforts of relatives and the response of the official authorities, how as persons we are in some sense already “miss- ing” in contemporary politics, and the way in which the search for the miss- ing became a demand for a different form of politics. The posters remained on display in New York for many weeks after the collapse, a reminder that the lives lost were irreplaceable lives—lives disregarded by those who organized the events of 9/11, but also in a sense lives rendered invisible by the objectifying imperatives of corporatism and public policy, lives in a sense already disap- peared. Some were doubly disappeared: those who were not even supposed to be in the towers, the undocumented. But maybe even the documented existed only as objects of administration or as employees hidden behind an architecture designed to impress rather than to protect. The persistence of the missing posters constituted a demand that these lives—the lives of the missing—be recognized as such, not appropriated as heroes to justify revenge, not reduced to nothing but their ordinariness nor subsumed in numbers, but recognized as persons-as-such, singular lives, political in their uniqueness and irreplaceability. Though the number of people missing in New York after 9/11 is daunt- ing, it becomes small when set against the numbers missing after the Second World War; the end of hostilities in 1945 left tens of millions of people, many of whom had lost touch with family members, destitute and wandering from place to place. Chapter 2 recounts how following the Second World War