ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Captive Climates: Political incarceration, Health and Environment in the Cold War Mediterranean

• In Event: The Authoritarian Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Party States and the Mobilization of Earth and Climate Knowledge

English Abstract

The Greek Civil War (1946–1949), or ‘the first war of the Cold War’, was the catalyst of a particular iteration of incarceration on the Aegean islands. It was shaped by what the anti-communist regime saw as the ‘rehabilitation’ of its political prisoners afflicted by the ‘red poison’. Between 1949 and 1956 in socialist Yugoslavia, the islands in the Adriatic were commandeered as open-air political prisons for those Yugoslav socialists who opposed Tito in the Yugo- Soviet 1948 Cominform dispute. They were sent away to undergo ‘socially beneficial labour’ for the purposes of ‘political re-education’ by their own Communist Party comrades. Both prison systems were characterised by extreme physical violence and gruelling forced labour. However, the environment and the climate of these prison sites often extended the violence beyond intra-human relations. The hot, arid , wind-whipped terrains of these prison islands often come up as central to prisoners’ jarring embodied experiences of 're-education’ and ‘rehabilitation’.

This paper will examine how the two ideologically opposite regimes (socialist Yugoslavia and the Greek monarchy) used the knowledge of the Mediterranean climate and environment, routinely associated with human wellbeing and longevity, to suppress political dissent. It will examine the role of these harsh, insular, arid environments and their atmospheric traits in forcing political congruency. The paper draws from the archival materials pertinent to both prison systems, as well as from the political prisoners’ knowledge of the climates and environments of their prison sites accrued during their incarceration and recorded in their written accounts and oral histories. Thinking with these sources, I will attempt to determine whether the saline air, temperamental winds, and the hot Mediterranean sun were used as inadvertent blunt tools, or parts of a more deliberate, planned and researched political re-education/rehabilitation program design.

Author

• Milica Prokic, University of Strathclyde