Forced Repatriation: How Tracking Missing Minors in the Balkans Complicated the Post-1918 Order in Europe

This paper examines the process of child repatriation in the borderlands between Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and the Ottoman Empire after 1918. French military authorities set up a mixed commission that interviewed minors whose families sought them following the armistice, with the goal of reuniting children with parents and other surviving relatives. Yet, multiple interviews revealed complicated family situations that make it impossible to unambiguously solve many cases. An especially thorny issue was what to do with married female minors: typically between the ages of 18 and 20, these young women tested the boundaries of international treaties, national administrative procedures, family and ecclesiastical law as well as local practices of marriage and guardianship. As officials debated matters of war, military occupation, forced migration, nationality, and citizenship, they resorted to the practice of “forced repatriation” that was supposed to protect the minors who were assumed not to have been afforded their free will. This process severely affected mixed marriages, with families torn apart by the newly emerging and constantly changing national borders after the Paris Peace settlement, which in the case of the Balkan borderlands fluctuated between 1919 and 1923. Faced with impossible choices, young women, often mothers of young children, took things in their hands, reuniting with their spouses or other family members as they saw fit. The paper teases out the contradictions and ambiguities of “forced repatriation” as a process implemented by the international community to reunite families, emphasizing its limitations in matters of marriage and child guardianship and questioning the logic of rights in the emerging post-imperial order of Europe.