Forced Displacement and the Weaponisation of Humanitarian Aid during the Greek Civil War, 1947–50

Despite the burgeoning literature on historical humanitarianism and transnational history, little work has sought to explain the humanitarian intervention in the ‘first battleground’ of the Cold War, namely the Greek Civil War (1945–9). This paper casts light on the intricate relationship between civilians’ forced displacement and humanitarian aid during the late phases of this conflict. It also questions the extent to which humanitarianism was embedded into liberal and conservative politics of the early Cold War. From 1941, multiple humanitarian organisations distributed aid to famine-stricken Greek areas, while the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) intervened in Greece in 1943. As the civil strife intensified, more than 700,000 civilians were displaced during the royalist counterinsurgency operations against the communist rebels, while humanitarian groups received the mandate by the royalist government to feed, accommodate and rehabilitate these populations. Most of these relief workers had grappled with wartime famine and relied on the restoration of the pre-war political system to solidify their presence in Greece. Drawing on archival material from UNRRA and the personal records of humanitarian workers Charles Schermerhorn and Ewan John Christian Hare, I scrutinise how humanitarian logistics became embedded into the conflict, and how the distribution or withholding, of aid determined the forced displacement of civilians. On a second level, I focus on the antagonism between the aid distributed by ‘purely’ humanitarian organisations, such as UNRRA, the NEF and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the so-called ‘development’ aid, as institutionalised by the European Recovery Program in 1948.