Between 1914 and 1920, Canada interned thousands of Ukrainians and other immigrant groups as “enemy aliens,” in conjunction with the outbreak of World War I. As citizens of Austria-Hungary and other enemy states, thousands of men, women, and children found themselves behind barbed wire fences and walls, often performing forced hard labor with little or no remuneration. Dr. Luciuk explains how prevailing anti-immigrant attitudes in Canada, labor demands, and broader geopolitical tensions resulted in these internments. He also suggests that the lessons in human rights and civil liberties afforded by Canada’s First National Internment Operations have gone largely unlearned, as similar injustices have been repeated in Canadian history and elsewhere: a theme of particular relevance in a post-9/11 society.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk is professor of Political Geography in the Department of Politics and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is the author or editor/co-editor of over fifteen books, including In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada’s First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920 (2001) and The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine (2011). He is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio, the BBC, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and for twenty years he was a leading activist in the successful effort to obtain acknowledgment of the internment operations from the government of Canada.