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Article Excerpt
Mitro Mahoumnuk reacted to the outbreak of World War One in the same way as thousands of other young men across Canada and Europe. He volunteered to join the army and fight on behalf of his country of residence. Like thousands of others who displayed a sudden, enthusiastic patriotism and an extreme naivety about what modern warfare entailed, this twenty year old was perhaps enthusiastic to experience the adventure and heroism that recruiters promised to those who joined up. Mahoumnuk, however, would never get the chance to see the Great War at the front lines. Instead he experienced the effects that war can have on the home front, bringing latent prejudices to the surface and amplifying the coercive power of the state.
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Mitro Mahoumnuk, having immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910, was classified as an "enemy alien," and interned at the alien detention centre in Brandon Manitoba. Once there, he was, along with over nine hundred other men, imprisoned for almost two years and later sent to a work camp in Banff, Alberta after the Brandon internment camp closed in 1916. Mitro's experiences are known today only because he managed to escape from the Brandon alien detention centre, only to be recaptured over six months later. (1) Due to the destruction of all official government records dealing with internment operations in the 1950s, the names of most of the internees at the Brandon camp remain unknown today. (2) However, the experiences of those interned and those who supported internment can be partially reconstructed with the help of civic records, oral history and newspaper articles. In all, over 8,579 "enemy aliens" were interned in Canada from 1914 to 1920. Of these, 5,441 were civilians and five thousand were Ukrainians who, like Mahoumnuk, had lived under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before emigrating to Canada. (3) Brandon itself was home to up to nine hundred of these people at any one time from 27 November 1914 to 19 July 1916.
The alien detention centre in Brandon was used to hold any "enemy aliens" from the province of Manitoba whom the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNMP) or Canadian armed forces decided to intern. Its location in Brandon was more than simply coincidental or practical. For a number of reasons, city leaders and middle class Brandonites who felt a strong attachment to the British Empire lobbied for the creation of an alien detention centre in their city. Although the war served as a convenient pretext for the imprisonment of thousands of mostly young, urban working class men, the detention of "enemy aliens" had less to do with the security concerns, real or imagined, of a nation at war than it did with the class and ethnic (at that time termed racial) tensions within Brandon and indeed all of English Canada. Brandon in the early 1910s was a rapidly growing, yet divided, city in which the middle class Anglo-Protestant elite held the levers of political power and sought to impose a cultural hegemony defined by unregulated capitalism, curtailment of the power of labour and a Canadian nationalism concerned with racial purity and a close attachment to the British Empire. The implementation of this middle class vision was threatened by working class Brandonites, a large portion of whom were of Eastern European descent, and who made up an increasingly large proportion of the city's population. Internment camps represented an attempt by the Canadian state, supported by the local Brandon elite, to address the threat that unemployed, foreign-born working class men potentially presented to the Anglo-Canadian middle class vision of Canada.
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When the federal government passed the War Measures Act in August 1914, it became possible to approve Orders in Council under which it was possible to arrest and detain any resident of Canada without charging him or her with a crime or providing access to a court of law. One of the government's first actions during the war was to provide for the registration and possible internment of aliens. An order-in-council was issued on 28 October 1914, stating that unnaturalized immigrants from Germany or Austria-Hungary were to be classified as "enemy aliens" and would be required to register with federal authorities. (4) Those who registered at their local NWMP office were given identity papers and required to have them with them at all times. (5) They were also forbidden to leave the country and expected to return to their local registration office at designated intervals to have their papers stamped. Failure to comply with these restrictions was to result in immediate internment. (6) Moreover, the costs associated with registration were to be paid by the aliens themselves. (7)
The legal status of these internees remained somewhat sketchy. Minister of Justice Charles Doherty told parliament that the question of appropriate treatment of the "enemy alien" was complicated by the fact that the Hague Convention governing the treatment of prisoners of war did not make mention of proper treatment of civilians whose place of origin was an enemy country. Of course, one possible conclusion to draw from this situation was that civilians were not subject to the laws of war and thus depriving them of their freedom during times of war was illegal under international law. Doherty, however, made the opposite conclusion, arguing that the absence of any mention of civilians in the Hague Convention meant that, "it did not deprive us of our right to intern them." (8) In other words, in the absence of law or precedent Canada was free to either expel or intern enemy aliens as it pleased.
Officially, "enemy aliens" interned in Brandon and elsewhere were individuals who posed an immediate danger to Canada by virtue of engaging in subversive activity such as sabotage. (9) In reality, the authorities seldom maintained the pretext that those interned were any real threat to the physical security of Canada. The Canadian government officially declared that only aliens who committed acts of "sedition" against Canada or those who attempted to return home in order to join enemy militaries had been interned. (10) The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs stated that the population of aliens within Canada was problematic for several reasons including, "reservists trying to join their armies in Europe. A Press which had natural inclinations toward the German-Austrian side of the struggle. Settlers in the West who did not yet speak English ... German Canadians who had relatives and friends in the German Forces." (11) The inclusion of language, out of place alongside the other three problems, indicates that even official sources did not bother to maintain the argument that military issues alone made enemy aliens "problematic."
Moreover, the frequently touted possibility of aliens trying to join enemy armies in Europe was preposterous when it came to most of the Manitoba immigrant population. Of the approximately 30,000 people of Austro-Hungarian citizenship identified as immigrating to Manitoba between 1901 and 1911, (12) almost all would have been Ukrainians....
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