Opening the blackbox of air deportation: The case of Switzerland's “Action Black Autumn”

Abstract

In 1985, in an operation Swiss authorities termed “Action Black Autumn,” a group of (mainly) Zaïrean migrants were deported to Zaïre on Switzerland's first documented deportation charter flight. What later would become a routinised practice was at that point still experimental and encountered significant resistance. Based on primary sources, this article looks at expulsion beyond law and policy by focusing on the development of what we call deportation infrastructure. This move allows for a fuller appreciation of the material systems that mediate coercive mobility and shape struggles. The article especially zooms in on questions of violence, resistance and visibility. By engaging the case from these different angles, we will demonstrate that a perspective of infrastructure offers new insights about deportation as a practice.

A flight plan

On 15 October 1985 the head of the Federal Police Office informed the Political Section of the Federal Department for Foreign Affairs:

The action against the approximately 50 Zaïreans, who have sought asylum illegally, will start on 1 November 1985 with the arrest of the people in question. There is the political will to transfer these foreigners to Kinshasa immediately with a charter flight under police escort. We are currently busy trying to get a domestic or foreign airline committed for this flight which shall take place on 2, 3 or 4 November 1985. ¹

This marked the beginning of a long-term “operation” called “Action Black Autumn” by the authorities which resulted in the deportation ² from Switzerland of over 50 men and women to the country that was then Zaïre and is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a Swissair flight (DC-10) from Zurich Airport. ³ At the outset of the operation, no one suspected that this deportation would soon develop into a minor political crisis. ⁴ During the weeks of arrest, internment, and the actual deportation, the people in hiding had to be located in the various cantons, travel documents prepared, translators and escorts as well as various transports arranged. Quite unprecendented was the range of actors who would become involved: in addition to the deportees, the Federal Department of Justice and Police, the cantonal police forces of Ticino, Geneva, and Wadt, lawyers, doctors, aircraft personnel, politicians and diplomats in Switzerland and Zaïre, NGOs as well as journalists. According to the German weekly “Der Spiegel,” the “jet” for the operation cost the federal government 320,000 Swiss Francs plus 44,122.35 Swiss Francs additional expenses. ⁵

The history of deportation as a mechanism of immigration enforcement in Western Europe is marked with violence and exclusion and this operation would be no different, though it would have distinctive features as we will show. In a request for a parliamentary investigation made by the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, the violence was addressed: The “black autumn” had “turned into a downright deportation. The Ticino and Zurich police had behaved brutally,” so that the Zaïrean authorities summoned the Swiss ambassadors in Kinshasa to “protest against the method of deportation.” ⁶ While the Federal Police Office rejected the allegations of police violence, it did invoke a political logic of exceptional circumstances: it was claimed that the subjects of the operation “were neither refugees nor asylum seekers […], but undesirable foreigners who had tried to get asylum under a false identity” and that these people were therefore staying in Switzerland without a permit. ⁷ The Zaïrians could therefore be expelled from Switzerland at any time based on Article 12, Paragraph 1 of the “Federal Act on Residence and Settlement of Foreigners” (ANAG). The same argument was also used to justify why no refugee organisations were contacted. ⁸

Whereas expulsions from Switzerland have a long history, ⁹ this particular operation was novel inasmuch as it was presumably the first time that a charter flight from Switzerland was used for a mass deportation. ¹⁰ From this moment on, the charter operation would gradually develop into a common practice of the Swiss state in order to get rid of unwanted asylum seekers. In this paper we argue that “Action Black Autumn” should therefore be regarded as moment of transformation in what we call “deportation infrastructure”: the emergence of a new mode of coercive mobility which would feed into the so-called “deportation turn” in Switzerland with new actors and developments in “infrastructural capacity” involved in the process. ¹¹ Furthermore, in this context the case of “Black Autumn” offers us a unique opportunity to examine deportation infrastructure in the making, and in particular the place of planes and aerial-related personnel in that infrastructure. From the outset we underscore that “Black Autumn” is a valuable methodological window on wider processes and practices. As Switzerland's first deportation charter flight it presents a moment when objectives, plans, methods and ambitions had to be spelled out. Later, once the policy is routinised, they will be tacit, unspoken, latent but here they have to be articulated and justified. Its status as a window is amplified by the fact that this operation became controversial, generating inquiries, hearings, investigations and reports where actors are called upon to rationalise their actions. ¹²

Our interest in deportation infrastructure builds in part on debates about migration infrastructure which have expanded in recent years allowing for a fuller appreciation of the material systems that mediate mobility and shape struggles. ¹³ We argue that this lens can be extended to the study of the ways in which people are forcibly removed, or threatened with removal. A perspective of infrastructure insists that deportation be analysed at the level of the actors, technologies, built structures, regulations and practices that combine to facilitate but also, at times when they fail or get subverted, hinder the coerced movement of population. ¹⁴

Infrastructure matters. Mobility infrastructures typically generate relations of inclusion and exclusion, and reshape hierarchies of power in the course of their operations. Sometimes these exclusions are unintended. For example, an underground railway system built in the 1930s becomes a focus of concern when disability rights groups mobilise 60 years later to highlight that it cannot be accessed by people who use wheelchairs. But no one planned to exclude them when the system was built. Sometimes it is not clear whether exclusion was planned or not, as with the famous case of Robert Moses and the low bridges on the Long Island parkways of New York. Did Moses lower them to prevent buses and the less affluent, racialised communities who relied on those buses, from travelling on the parkways? ¹⁵ But sometimes these exclusions are the whole point of the exercise from the outset, which is our focus here. With deportation infrastructure we are looking at systems built with the express purpose of exclusion. Or, more accurately, we are looking at certain ways in which the existing aviation infrastructure is adapted and repurposed by state actors so that its networks of connection and aerial mobility can be utilised for disconnecting people and enforcing borders and boundaries. In his characteristically contrarian fashion, George Orwell wrote in 1945 that: “We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.” ¹⁶ Orwell was writing about fighter planes and bombers, technologies of violence which seemed not to transcend but to uphold and reinscribe the territorialised world of nation states and superpowers. But his point remains valid when we look at civil aviation as well. As we show in our case, civil aviation can be viewed as a regime of global interconnection and a regime of border-making and exclusion, at one and the same time.

Building on the small but significant body of scholarship interested in the coercive mobilities of deportation, ¹⁷ as well as scholarship that considers infrastructures of detention, ¹⁸ this paper examines how charter flights first became an instrument of forced removal in Switzerland. Deportation is usually studied at the level of laws, bureaucracies, policies and the struggles of various individual and collective actors. ¹⁹ A focus on deportation infrastructure moves us beyond this perspective on law and policy and asks, as historian Ethan Blue has put it, where do states acquire not just the sovereign right or political will but the material capacity to forcibly remove people? Laws and policies matter but so do vehicles and routes and the techniques of pacification, deception, persuasion, intimidation that experts have fashioned to shepherd people along those routes. ²⁰

An infrastructural perspective has become very prominent in the social sciences. ²¹ One of the most important accomplishments of this wide-ranging literature, as we see it, is that it has significantly amended earlier scholarship – abundant in the 1990s – that saw the world in terms of networks, flows and scapes. Infrastructural approaches ground and materialise these images, resisting the temptation to turn them into transcendentals. For every mention of “flow,” the infrastructurally-minded scholar asks: Show me the canal, pipeline, cable or satellite by which this flow is enabled! How was it built? What is it made from? How is it maintained? Where is the friction? What power relations stem from its construction, maintenance, breakdown, and so on? Our study of “Action Black Autumn” brings these considerations of the work, the materials, the markets and the personnel underpinning mobilities into the study of deportation. Infrastructure matters because it is not inert or neutral. By the start of the last century, coal miners and dock workers acquired collective political leverage in part because networks of canals and railways – narrow, heavy and relatively fixed in space – proved susceptible to disruption by the organised action of workers, as Timothy Mitchell has shown in his path-breaking study of carbon democracy. ²² Likewise, civil aviation certainly does afford the state new powers and capacities when it comes to expelling people, allowing for deportation on a scale that was not possible when it was confined to geographies of land and sea. But this aviation network has its own vulnerabilities and weak points, as deportees and their allies have shown, through actions that range from delaying the departure of flights to tarnishing the carefully-managed brand image of airlines. ²³

But for all its value, we argue that an infrastructural perspective should be combined with attention to the microphysics of power. As such, our approach complements that of Andreas Greiner who stresses the need for a “micro-analytical” perspective as a way of fostering more “grounded” global histories of civil aviation. ²⁴ Our microphysical lens takes seriously power relations at the level of the body, and explores power not just in its legal and political manifestations but in ways that are deeply physical, material, racialised. Removing people is an intensely “corporal” act, as Shahram Khosravi has stressed. ²⁵ Without methods of grasping, pacifying, inspecting, calming, deceiving, punishing bodies, often in very direct fashion, states would be weakened in the immigration enforcement field. Without security officers who enjoy a “superiority of numbers,” as one UK report put it, ²⁶ with regard to the deportees on planes and buses, the wheels of the deportation machine would perhaps grind to a halt. Attending to this corporeal dimension, we will show that a combination of infrastructure and micro-physics perspectives allows for a powerful theorisation of deportation.

The article will focus on three aspects. First, we will examine the mechanisms of violence: The question we will answer here is, how violence manifested itself in the context of this first mass deportation, how this was legitimised and which actors were involved? Second, we will look at questions of resistance. Deportation spaces have always been marked by acts of contestation and resistance by the people affected and by communities of solidarity. Moving away from a state-centred perspective towards examining deportation as a process of negotiation and struggle between various actors, this approach stresses the importance of both subtle and open forms of resistance. By recognising the agency of deportees, however limited, rather than viewing them as mere victims, deportations become procedures that are prone to “disruptions.” Finally we argue that different visibilities are at play during the process of deportation. The airplane, the prisons and other spaces of deportations show an ambivalent dialectic of visibility and invisibility. By exploring the case from these different angles, we will demonstrate that a perspective of infrastructure offers new insights about deportation as a practice. But before we consider these themes, it is necessary to briefly sketch some context for our case.

Processes of violence

The “Action Black Autumn” in Switzerland has to be understood against the background of changes at the legal and discursive level in the asylum policy of the post-war period. First, as a result of the world economic crisis of 1973, new processes of negotiation of immigration policy took place, which represented the transition to a more restrictive quota policy. Second, this process was largely supported by economic interest groups, but above all by right-wing authoritarian nationalist movements and parties. Most political parties in Switzerland responded preventively to their demands by complying with more stringent asylum laws. ²⁷ Thirdly, the changes were also responses to the change in transnational mobility movements and the increasing number of asylum seekers, whose diversity of origin was presented as a new challenge. Migrants arriving mainly from Sri Lanka and Turkey and in smaller numbers from Zaïre, Angola, Somalia, and Eritrea changed the sentiments within Swiss society. After the Second World War, still in view of the reverberations of the Holocaust, “respect” for the refugees arriving from communist countries was one of the accepted moral sentiments. This also correlated with practical considerations of labour demand. These sentiments changed in the late 1970s with the arrival of asylum seekers from the Global South. ²⁸ By the second half of the nineteenth century, Switzerland had implemented a federal law which allowed for the “legitimate” deportation of specific groups of people. ²⁹ Between 1981 and 2008, Swiss authorities introduced 15 partial or total revisions of the law. These have often led to the introduction of more restrictive measures, “as a result of increasing suspicion over the sincerity of asylum applicants’ motives in the public sphere.” ³⁰ The first “asylum law” came into force in 1981. However, quickly its liberal principles were criticised, and the asylum law was partially revised in 1983 with the aim of accelerating asylum procedures. This was the prelude to multiple revisions of the increasingly restrictive asylum law in the years that followed. ³¹ According to Hans-Rudolf Wicker, a migration regime emerged from the 1980s in which the ascription of illegality heavily played into possible deportations. ³² This fell in line with the names coined for the deportees by the officials during the “Action Black Autumn” as “pseudo-refugees” (Pseudo-Flüchtlinge) and “fictitious asylum seekers” (Scheinasylanten). ³³ Undergirding these developments in deportation policies was the question of violence.

In thinking about violence the historian Jürgen Martschukat suggests we interrogate “the rationalities, conditions of possibility and forms of violence” in specific historical configurations. He also states that a specific coding of violence in certain fields can be recognised in the modern age: For example, in the “regulation of violence” and in the “orientation of violent action” towards people who are not recognised as “Western subjects.” ³⁴

During the actual deportation on 3 November 1985, 114 police officers, an emergency doctor and a paramedic accompanied the deportees. The violent resistance of the people to be deported was already taken into account, as can be seen in a letter from the accompanying anaesthesiologist to the Zurich cantonal police: “We equipped ourselves in such a way that we could have transported several people who suddenly fell ill or were injured in any violent actions to the nearest responsible hospital with efficient assistance, i.e. in extreme cases with secured vital functions and with adequate pain relief and sedation.” ³⁵

The doctors accompanying the flight carried a whole set of materiel with them, such as syringes, intubation equipment, resuscitation bags and medication with pain-relieving, sedating and anti-psychotic effects. ³⁶ On the part of the doctors “both the tendency of the people being returned home to violent actions, as well as the ‘reserve material’ brought by the police to secure the situation […] during the operation” made it clear “that [they] based their (brief) preparations on realistic ideas.” ³⁷

The anticipated violent actions during the deportation found their physical expression in bite marks that three police officers had on their forearms. In addition, a man reported serious pain in his left wrist, “caused by impetuous behavior in handcuffs.” ³⁸ According to another report by the cantonal police, it was true that a few of those who were deported behaved rebelliously and aggressively at the airport and initially on board the plane, “spitting at the police officers and kicking them with their feet.” ³⁹ This behaviour then led to coercive measures in individual cases, although “proportionality was absolutely maintained,” as they stated in their report. The measures, it is further explained, were all the more justified in that there was already “violence at the police station in Chiasso, during the course of which a police officer suffered a broken arm.” No one was beaten on board, it was said, no one was tied up, and jump chains were never applied. When everyone was aware of the inevitability of deportation, the situation calmed down. ⁴⁰

This point about the “inevitability” of deportation and the point at which deportees “calmed down” is worth considering from the point of view of the difference that infrastructures make. More than twenty years after the “Action Black Autumn,” a senior British security official involved in air deportations would offer a similar observation about the timing of struggle on planes. Speaking to a journalist, he noted: “You get a lot of agitation and resistance going on, but as soon as the plane leaves the runway, calmness pervades the plane. They know the game is up.” ⁴¹ The extent to which this is generally valid, and what it might indicate about the specific affordance of the plane as a vehicle of deportation, is worth further reflection. Would people on a bus behave similarly, that is, resigning themselves to their fate once it left the station? Or is there something distinctive about air travel, about being 30,000 feet in the sky in a narrow metal tube, which eventually fosters a mood of resignation? In turn, does this mean that struggle is especially concentrated in the time leading up to the departure, then eases off once airborne? These questions are worth pursuing in future research since they would illuminate that far from being inert “carriers” of the deported, the vehicles and their infrastructure actively shape the experience and the terrain of struggle.

On the Swiss plane, the medical staff attended to the deportees’ injuries and needs. The descriptions are condescending: The deportees are described as renitent, their “alleged” pains constantly put in question and infantilised by describing them as minor “boo-boos.” ⁴² Within the overall deportation infrastructure this raises the question of the role of the medical staff. These passages not only demonstrate that the process of forced mobility met with strong resistance, at least from some of the deportees, which in turn was regulated and in crucial moments violently suppressed by the police. Importantly, this rare and detailed example of an early deportation flight from Switzerland shows how from the beginning of larger deportation procedures the healthcare professionals were involved in the biopolitical management of migrants’ mobility and were part of “smoothing its eliminative function.” ⁴³

A few weeks after the deportation, the commander of the Zurich cantonal police wrote to the medical staff involved:

This deportation transport was also a novelty for us, and we are in the process of systematically evaluating the experiences we have made and are recording this in writing as a basis for any later deployments of a similar type. Your recommendations from a medical point of view are therefore very valuable to us and will be included in the evaluation documentation mentioned. I am happy to take the opportunity to thank you once again for your willingness to accompany this deportation flight. Actions of this kind always have many burdensome aspects for us, and no police officer takes part in them with pleasure. For us, however, this is simply a legal duty from which no one can escape. ⁴⁴

Possibly their presence within the journey of deportation was necessary to ensure the deportees access to medical care, yet their role risked being instrumentalised to ensure the sustainability of detention and swiftness of deportations. The work and knowledge of the medical staff was fundamental to keep the deportation infrastructure working smoothly and presumably served as blueprint for future large-scale deportations on airplanes. They became part of the power invested in policing deportations. The enormous amount of police officials and medical staff demonstrates their role in ensuring the efficiency of this form of regulation and disciplining. For further mass operations the anaesthesiologist recommended to integrate a larger medical staff: “The reasons for this arise from the injury patterns, which on the one hand must be expected and on the other need to be mastered.” ⁴⁵

At the same time, the “Action Black Autumn” is a case in point for unravelling the violence against non-Western subjects in deportation processes. Would this level of violence, this herding of people be deemed acceptable were it, say, white Australian nationals who were being sent “back” to their “home” country in 1985? Or are processes of racialisation crucial here, so that in the eyes of a watching public, the act of forcing black Africans onto a plane, despite the violence it entails, does not seem to extraordinary at all? We think the latter, especially if we consider, again, the wider immigration mood in Switzerland.

It was during those years that the incoming migrants were divided into “true” and “false refugees.” Already some time before the “Action Black Autumn,” the change in moral politics was fuelled by a narrative of racial and cultural “incompatibility,” or as one of the politicians of the “Nationale Aktion” and members of the Swiss National Council, Valentin Oehen, bluntly put it:

We are of the opinion that a definitive admission should only count for refugees coming from the occidental cultural region. This implies the notion, that this can only include people with white skin color. One does not have to be a racist in order to understand that all racially mixed societies up to the present have not been capable of organizing a peaceful co-existence. Why should we impose ourselves such a problem voluntarily? Why should we also take on the problems which are preoccupying the USA, South Africa and England? ⁴⁶

The arrival of asylum seekers from the Global South had been rendered synonymous with the Swiss nation-state's purported “loss of control” of its borders and administrative capacity. Moreover, racial mindsets and discourses permeated politics, authorities and sciences alike and were closely linked to practices also within migration policies. Herein, evidence of culture and diversification was closely linked to spatial and geographical as well as phenotypic references. ⁴⁷

On this background the speaker of the “Coordination Committee of the Zairian Opposition,” Mathieu Musey, voiced the most forceful critique against the “Action Black Autumn” and pointed to the racialisation of the deportation process. Himself a political opponent in Zaïre, his case turned into one of the most famous and spectacular deportation cases in Swiss history. ⁴⁸ In the context of the “Action” Musey asked, “why the mass deportation was tested on Africans of all people. The former black slaves have now been used as guinea pigs.” ⁴⁹ And in the following press conference the fear of further concerted mass actions was voiced: “In Geneva, for example, actual raids are being carried out on black people.” ⁵⁰

The point here is crucial: this early experiment in collective deportation, with its round ups, its brutality, its animalisation of the deportees, was not being conducted on some kind of generic, featureless “immigrant” body. ⁵¹ It was not merely a response to the logistical challenges posed by the civil aviation regime – such as pressure to fill seats once a whole plane was booked – or political pressure to look tough on illegal immigration. It was being mobilised in light of deeply-entrenched colonial geographies and histories in which the image of the forcible, collective movement of Africans by Europeans was not in the least extraordinary. The figure of the “migrant slave” and the comparison and evocation of the Zairian deportees as “guinea pigs” and animals, leads to the question what the formation of the deportation regimes in Switzerland has to do with colonialism and colonial history. It is important to scrutinise the often dehistoricised ways in which contemporary migrations and deportations have come to be associated with imaginaries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by putting the stories back into their context. Such deportations can also be understood in the context of colonial history and Switzerland's deeply rooted relationships with countries in the Global South. Zaïre is a paradigmatic example of relations reaching back to the nineteenth century colonial period.

The colonisation of Belgian Congo under King Leopold II (1865–1909) was supported by Swiss officers, administrators and traders who were also involved in the slave trade. ⁵² Between 1877 and 1898, various societies emerged that committed themselves to combating the slave trade by Muslims within Africa and the Middle East under the guise of a “civilising” mission. Also, a committee to support geographical exploration of Africa was established during this period. In 1876, the Belgian King Leopold II organised a conference of national geographical societies in Brussels, which planned further research trips to Central Africa in order to gain further knowledge for later colonisation. The “Association Internationale Africaine” founded at this conference opened sections in various countries, including the “Comité national suisse pour l’exploration et la civilization de l’Afrique centrale” in Switzerland in 1877. ⁵³ They raised money for further research expeditions. After the Berlin Congo Conference, which awarded the Congo Basin to the Belgian king, the section dissolved in 1885. However, the end of colonisation did not mean the end of Swiss relations with the Congo. In the interwar period, and especially after 1945, economic and financial relations with the Belgian Congo intensified through the sale of technical equipment, chemical products, textiles and other materials. Conversely, Switzerland obtained a wide variety of raw materials. In parallel to economic relations and investments, there was a movement of migration in both directions. In addition to Zairean students, the first refugees came shortly after the independence of the Congo in 1960, who for a long time represented the largest group of African refugees in Switzerland. But these entanglements and shared histories dating back to the colonial era were completely lost during the formation of the deportation regimes in Western Europe. By the 1980s in Switzerland, as in many western European countries, there would be a kind of “imperialist amnesia” ⁵⁴ surrounding questions of migration control. Political attention would focus on the “legality” or “illegality” of migrants whereas colonial connections and colonial mobilities would disappear into the background. Political attention could then also focus on practical questions, such as how can we be tough yet humane in our quest to “remove” those with no right to be here.

What was at stake here was the successful political administration of the resisting body. While the taming and neutralisation of the body could take place with a wide variety of means – a decade later also using adhesive tapes, gags and helmets, as human rights organisations emphasised – according to the official rhetoric, proportionality was always absolutely maintained. However, the example illustrates elements of what scholars have called “soft deportation”: This consists of techniques and a rhetoric of care as well as a power of violence – whereby the care is no less rationalised and calculated than the exercise of violence.

Questions of resistance

What becomes visible when the history of the deportation is viewed not from the perspective of the state, but from that of the deportees and the groups that ally themselves with them? Deportation spaces have always been marked by acts of contestation and resistance by the people affected and the intervention of allies from the outside. The negotiation between various actors shows the diverse forms of resistance – ranging from bodily resistance, as shown in the chapter before, to protest acts by communities of solidarity. These are moments when deportations are marked by “disruptions.”

The vivid descriptions in the sources show that deportee resistance was strong from the outset of the deportation as noted in a police report: “This morning, at around 7:30 a.m., 6 African citizens, arrested and detained in the Gendarmerie security cells No. 2 and 3 in Chiasso 1, started a riot. First they demolished the foil in the cells, then the two access doors and got into the entrance area armed with pieces of boards and large pieces of bathroom sinks.” ⁵⁵ They were “disarmed and sedated with half a tear gas spray and the intervention of the present staff after a fierce fight.” The physical injuries suffered by the deportees are not recorded in the sources. Those experienced by officials are. The report mentions “bruises and damages to the uniforms” and “broken bones on the right hand” of a police officer. ⁵⁶ This violent resistance on the part of the deportees points to the psychological and emotional stress that forced deportations generate. Here, again, the political administration of the resisting body through the intervention of the police officers becomes particularly obvious.

Yet, resistance was not limited to the deportees. Shortly after the deportation, migrant communities and political protagonists managed to articulate and activate different forms of social protest. ⁵⁷ The “Action Black Autumn” not only drew international protest: in front of the Swiss embassy in Stockholm, for example, Zaïrean citizens demonstrated against the deportation. ⁵⁸ Rather, during the 1980s, many anti-deportation campaigns in Switzerland draw on human rights discourses by highlighting the vulnerability, innocence, and need of protection of deportable populations. In some cases they managed to raise public awareness. Different forms of political resistance during the 1980s were often based on closely knit solidarity groups between Swiss citizens, potential deportees and at times also international supporters. These included a whole range of actors including housewives, politicians, priests, writers, lawyers and many others. Besides demonstrations, sit-ins and the examples of the well-known church asylums, a network of anti-deportation activists reaching beyond Swiss borders into safe third countries helped individual potential deportees into hiding. ⁵⁹ This conscious disobedience of law by hiding and protecting the potential deportees was carried by different organisation. ⁶⁰ Parallel to the Black Autumn, the Swiss government was trying to deport 52 Chilean political refugees, including several children. The group received church asylum and the support of refugee helpers from a Protestant church in Seebach, Zurich.

The list of accusations against the Swiss government and its action was long. The “League for Human Rights,” which documented and often organised protests and petitions on human rights abuses, voiced serious allegations against the head of the Justice and Police Department and the Federal Police Office (BAP) after the incident:

A dossier presented to the press on Friday alleged that the BAP was unable to make detailed inquiries about asylum seekers. Based on our own research on the recently deported 59 Zairians, the league wants to prove that both the embassy in Kinshasa and the BAP have made serious mistakes. In its dossier, it demands that the Federal Council take a position on the allegations, no longer repatriate rejected asylum seekers as long as there are uncertainties and that the investigations are not only carried out correctly, but also in cooperation with humanitarian organizations. ⁶¹

In an attempt to prove the integrity of the deportees and deflect human rights concerns, president Mobutu invited Swiss journalists to Zaire for a public demonstration on TV. ⁶² Others argued that despite president Mobutu's will to “perform” the 59 Zairian deportees live on TV, this was no assurance that they would not face abuse and possibly death in the aftermath of their official public presentation, as it was known that torture was common in Zaire. “In previous actions, the President had also carried out such demonstrations, but then had those affected killed after they were presented (…).” ⁶³ The Zürich based “Asylum Committee” argued that the “Black Autumn Campaign” jeopardised Switzerland's reputation as a humanitarian country. The “repatriation” not only disregarded the right of asylum, but also the prohibition of torture. “The substance of Swiss asylum law is crumbling, asylum seekers are treated inhumanely (…) and a short-sighted opportunism can no longer be overlooked by the authorities.” ⁶⁴

Such protests against deportations by communities of solidarity were not only an attempt to rehumanise the deportees, but also made them visible in the first case. While deportees often struggle to be visible and recognised at all, they are most often dependent on allies. It was only their reports and political interpellations that gave the deportees an “empirical presence”; here one can speak, as Brighenti has put it, of visibility as recognition. ⁶⁵ However, Brighenti insists that visibility is never one-dimensional. There are multiple forms which need to be distinguished analytically. If visibility as recognition can be wielded in support of people facing deportation, in the next section we will see how state actors use other forms of visibility to enhance deportation infrastructure.

Visibility of deportation

According to the historian Jürgen Martschukat, violence is often kept hidden and outsourced to places that elude immediate perception. Because these spaces are invisible to the public, people in them can be particularly vulnerable to violent and arbitrary treatment. ⁶⁶ Since deportations are inherently violent and touch on human rights issues, they often trigger conflict and public mobilisation against them. As political scientist Antje Ellerman argues, the most efficient way for bureaucrats to pre-empt challenges to their deportation efforts is to use administrative and infrastructural resources to render implementation invisible. ⁶⁷ Concealing violence has become an inherent part of deportation processes. Nevertheless, there is always an ambivalence, because deportations are related to a particular politics of visibility and generate multiple forms of visibility and non-visibility. In the case of the “Action Black Autumn,” the affair turned into a powerful spectacle yet with different regimes of visibility at play. ⁶⁸

The deportation of the Zaïreans was a combination of careful surveillance of the deportees on the one hand and concealment of the deportation process on the other. ⁶⁹ Charter flights in particular shield the events from a broader public. But deportation flights were not undisputed. Although it was known in the 1980s that the responsible airline, Swissair, carried out numerous flights, it did not communicate this since they were aware that deportations were a sensitive political issue. ⁷⁰ Swissair was under pressure from different sides as sources show shortly after the operation. On the one hand, the airline was well aware that air deportations were a controversial topic and were closely observed by certain politicians and a critical public. On the other hand the federal authorities pushed Swissair to relax its transport regulations and required them to review the maximum amount of deportees to be transported per flight. There was also a debate about whether people could be transported in a cell specially designed for deportations on the plane or in the cargo hold. Both were rejected by Swissair, in the case of the cell installation stating that this was out of the question for technical, commercial and customer service reasons. The Zurich cantonal police, in turn, asked Swissair not to turn away those people who “merely” offered verbal resistance.

But in fact, on the part of the authorities the whole procedure showed an efficiency and swiftness which allowed for little interference and increased the concealment effect. As a Telex message shows, during the two days of collecting and transporting the deportees from the different cantons, the cantonal police staff in Ticino, Wadt and Zurich agreed to support the deportation process by providing staff for “street transports” (Strassentransporte), “prisoner transport wagons” (“Gefangenentransportwagen”) in order to bring the deportees to “intermediate camps” (“Zwischenlager”) and other procedures. The final command issued and sent out by Telex to the cantonal police and described as “urgent / confidential” reads: “command: - sunday, November 3rd, 1985, 0400 O’clock, Kloten airport, - vehicle access via gate 101.” ⁷¹ That the transport to Zurich airport was scheduled for 4 a.m. and a separate gate assigned for the vehicle points to the strategic concealment of the operation.

That the “Action Black Autumn” became public at all, was mainly due to a coincidence: If you believe the Swiss tabloid “Blick,” a journalist from French-speaking Switzerland found out about the deportation by accident and obtained information from the authorities. Only afterwards did the authorities announce the deportation in a press release. They justified the covert nature of the operation with remarks about the Zaïreans’ “illegal” status and the risk that their targets could have gone into hiding. To prevent this, the “greatest discretion” was required. The newspaper wrote that the spokesman as well as the authorities “[were] trying from the beginning to surround the ‘Action Black Autumn’ with the greatest possible secrecy.” ⁷² Here one can speak of a visibility of control and monitoring.

But in the case of Black Autumn media visibility was just as crucial. Yet, the “black box” of deportation only became visible to a broader public after the fact and served as a catalyst for further debates on deportation. Human rights groups and politicians only got involved once the case was reported to the media. Shortly after the Zaïreans were deported, the German weekly “Der Spiegel” wrote that the deportees were shackled and treated brutally and that the deportation was carried out like a “cattle transport.” ⁷³ Yet, in terms of visibility the question of the “post-deportation” phase was equally important in this case. As indicated by Mathieu Musey, the time after the return was the most delicate phase, for example in terms of respect for human rights. ⁷⁴ A few weeks after the “action,” a journalist of the Swiss weekly “Weltwoche” followed the “traces of the 59 Zaïrean refugees” and flew to Zaïre together with other media people to Zaïre at the invitation of President Mobutu – “to count the number of refugees who have returned, of which, according to a ‘La Suisse’ headline, six should be lying dead in the cold rooms of the Mamayemo hospital.” In his article titled “How Mobutu teaches the little Swiss to count” he described the “performance” of the deportees: “In the large ‘Voix de Zaire’ television studio, the spotlights fall on a group of silent, quietly sitting people who left Switzerland on November 3rd, handcuffed.” Several people reported about their experiences in front of the camera: Minister Ramazzani ranted against the “shameful campaign against Zaïre” carried out by Switzerland; the Belgian chief doctor Jean Seghers from the Mamayemo Hospital reported that “15 people received outpatient care immediately after arrival because they had injuries inflicted on them by Swiss police officers.” ⁷⁵ In circling spotlights the Zaïrean TV camera revealed the deportation story to the whole world.

These examples clearly point to the ambivalence of visibility. It provokes the legitimate question of whether media, human rights reports and other possible forms of visibility of deportees can represent a kind of “counter-visibility”? Visibility does not always follow a logic of disclosure or lead to an empowerment for affected groups or individuals, as the example of Mobutu's TV “performance” shows. At the same time, it could be countered that in the absence of media, campaigns or interventions only numbers, cases and statistics of deportations would exist. Instead, by making the case visible the deportees received a face, a recognition of their humanity. Yet, as Yves Winter asks: “On what grounds can we assume that violence occurs always at the surface, that its effects are always visible?” ⁷⁶ The injuries on the bodies and soul often stay invisible, leaving traces only for the deportees. And they seldom leave traces in the sources for scholars to decipher. ⁷⁷ Furthermore, the “after-story” of the 59 deportees lastly remained obscured despite the diplomatic exchanges following the deportation spectacle. ⁷⁸

Conclusion

Susan Leigh Star has pointed out that while infrastructures may present helpful “bridges” for many people, they might equally be obstructive “barriers” for others. “One person's infrastructure is another's topic, or difficulty” and infrastructure becomes real “in relation to organized practices.” ⁷⁹ Thinking along these lines towards a more material and praxeologically-oriented understanding of infrastructure, the concept “deportation infrastructure” allows us to focus on coercive mobility and resistance, on the discrepant realities and temporalities for the diverse actors involved in creating practices of in- and exclusion as well as the shaping of hierarchies of power in the course of deportations.

Compared to the present-day situation with the ever expanding detention facilities, its effective bilateral treaties with the Global South, ⁸⁰ the intensified flight deportation and private firms gaining from the deportation business, in the case under scrutiny such extensive transnational and logistical operations were not quite in place yet. But the article shows that some of the elements that would become integral features of deportation infrastructure are to be found in the 1980s with the deportation machinery still being rather inchoate and clearly in an experimental phase – but already based on the all too familiar forms of racism, violence, and concealment. This micro-physics played out at the level of the body. Our example illustrates that the body can be understood as an active site not only affected by the violence of infrastructures of control and coercion, here directed against non-Western subjects, but also as a vulnerable, yet resistant body in highly asymmetrical spaces such as camps and deportation planes.

We have also pointed to the ambivalent dialectic of visibility and invisibility which counters the common assumption that infrastructures are invisible and just background for other kinds of work. ⁸¹ In asking the important question of what served as infrastructure for whom and what, the “Black Autumn” case reminds us that deportation procedures and infrastructures, which today almost seem ordinary and naturalised, and have almost fallen out of sight, have developed out of a long line of contestations and struggles between state and non-state actors, including deportees. ⁸² But as a principle, it seems, states up to the present have been careful about what they show and what they conceal when it comes to deporting people.