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Ethnic cleansing

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For other uses, see Ethnic cleansing (disambiguation).

The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of one ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide.

At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory as a result of religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

Origins of the term

The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a loan translation of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian phrase etničko čišćenje (IPA /etnitʃko tʃiʃtʃʲeɲe/) (notice that literal translation of the phrase is "ethnic cleaning"). During the 1990s it was used extensively by the media in the former Yugoslavia in relation to the Yugoslav wars, and appears to have been popularised by the international media some time around 1992. The term may have originated some time before the 1990s in the military doctrine of the former Yugoslav People's Army, which spoke of "cleansing the territory" (čišćenje terena, IPA /tʃiʃtʃʲeɲe terena/) of enemies to take total control of a conquered area. The origins of this doctrine are unclear, but may have been a legacy of the Partizan era.

This originally applied purely to military enemies, but came to be applied to ethnic groups as well. It was used in this context in Yugoslavia by the Serbian media as early as 1981, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration allegedly creating an "ethnically clean territory" (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province. However, this usage had antecedents.

One usage of the term cleansing can be found in May 16, 1941, during the Second World War, by one Viktor Gutić, a commander in the Croatian fascist faction, the Ustaše: Every Croat who today solicits for our enemies not only is not a good Croat, but also an opponent and disrupter of the prearranged, well-calculated plan for cleansing our Croatia of unwanted elements (source). The Ustaše did carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing in their time in the Second World War and sometimes used the term "cleansing" to describe it (source).

At the same time, on 30 June, 1941, the lawyer Stevan Moljević from Banja Luka, the main ideologue of the Serbian nationalist organization, the Chetniks, and Mihailović’s most trusted confidant, published a booklet with the title On Our State and Its Borders. Moljević assessed the circumstances in the following manner: One must take the opportunity of the war conditions and at a suitable moment take hold of the territory marked on the map, cleanse it before anybody notices and with strong battalions occupy the key places (...) and the territory surrounding these cities, freed of non-Serb elements. The guilty must be promptly punished and the others deported - the Croats to Croatia, the Muslims to Turkey or perhaps Albania - while the vacated territory is settled with Serb refugees now located in Serbia. (source).

The term "cleansing" ("cleansing of borders", очистка границ) was used in Soviet documents of early 1930s in reference to the resettlement of Poles from the 22-km border zone in Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR. The process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941, see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union and Population transfer in the Soviet Union.

A similar term with the same intent was used by the Nazi administration in Germany under Adolf Hitler. When an area under Nazi control had its entire Jewish population removed, whether by driving the population out, by deportation to Concentration Camps, and/or murder, the area was declared judenrein, (lit. "Jew Clean"): "cleansed of Jews".(cf. racial hygiene).

Early examples of ethnic cleansing

The Assyrian Empire regularly deported entire ethnic groups, as did the Babylonians; victims of this policy most famously include the Israelites of Israel in 722 BC and the Israelites of Judah in 586 BC (see Babylonian captivity of Judah). The migration of Caribs led to the displacement of indigenous Arawaks, but they themselves were later defeated and expelled. Mongols, Turks, and Russians have instigated various forced relocations of other peoples in Eurasia over the centuries.

During the Islamic invasion of the Indian subcontinent, several million Hindus were either murdered or forcibly removed from regions constituting modern-day Pakistan. Famous Indian historian, K.S. Lal estimated in his book The Growth of Muslim Population in India that between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million.

In some instances, the expulsion of Jews had some features of ethnic cleansing, especially if accompanied by violence and enacted on the whole territory of the state. Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306), Hungary (1349–1360), Provence (1394 and 1490), Austria (1421), Spain after the Reconquista, Portugal (1497), Russia in 1724, and from various parts of Germany at various times. Not all deportations of Jews affected an entire country or lasted for extended periods of time: Jews from Krakow (1494) were expelled to suburbs of the city, and Jews expelled from Lithuania (1491) were allowed to return 10 years later.

Spain's large Muslim minority, called Moriscos, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609–1614.

Roma people were expelled from France, England and other European countries during the 16th century.

Modern-age ethnic cleansing

The term "ethnic cleansing" has come to mean the displacement or expulsion from a territory of one ethnic group by another. The displacement is usually forcible, though there are examples of voluntary or compensated ethnic cleansing. The 20th century has seen numerous cases, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.

During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In North America, British and Americans ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans, forcibly relocating them to remote and often inhospitable reservation land. In southern Africa and Australia, native tribes were removed from their lands so that they could be replaced by white farmers and settlers.

  • The colonization of the Americas by European powers, particularly Spain and Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in the 15th century and continuing into the 20th.
  • The colonization of Australia by Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in 1788. It is important to note that the Maori were not ethnically cleansed in New Zealand. Many Maori were dispossessed of ownership of their land, but few were ever forcibly removed, and when this did happen it was mostly as a result of punishment for fighting and losing against colonial troops during the New Zealand Wars.
  • The invasion of Gibraltar by Britain in 1704 led to an ethnic cleansing of the local Andalusian population, who were expelled from the territory in 1704
  • The removals and massacres of native populations in the African colonies of various European powers.
  • Carib Expulsion in the Lesser Antilles
  • In Canada the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 from their ancestral lands in Nova Scotia or Acadia by the British military because of the French and Indian War.
  • In the United States in the 19th century there were numerous instances of relocation of Native American peoples from their traditional areas to often remote reservations elsewhere in the country, such as the Long Walk of the Navajo and the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe that led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 people.
  • Expulsion and cleansing of Turkish, Muslim, and Jewish populations from Balkans following the independence of Balkan countries (e.g., Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria) from Ottoman Empire from early 1800s to early 1900.
  • Cleansing of Muslim populations in Northern Caucasus by imperial Russia throughout 19th century. Particularly, expulsion of Circassians to Anatolia in 1864.

The American and South Pacific instances were disastrous. The native populations fell from millions to thousands in only a few centuries, a combined result of colonization policies and epidemics of foreign disease.

20th-century instances

21st-century instances

Silent Ethnic Cleansing

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Silent ethnic cleansing is a term coined in the mid-1990s by some observers of the Yugoslav wars. Apparently concerned with Western-media representations of atrocities committed in the conflict — which generally focused on those perpetrated by the Serbs — atrocities committed against Serbs were dubbed "silent", on the grounds that they were not receiving adequate coverage.

Since that time, the term has been used by other ethnically oriented groups for situations that they perceive to be similar — examples include both sides in Northern Ireland's continuing troubles, and those who object to the expulsion of Volksdeutsche from Soviet-occupied Germany in the years ending and immediately following World War II.

Some observers, however, assert that the term should only be used to denote population changes that do not occur as the result of overt violent action, or at least not from more or less organized aggression - the absence of such stressors being the very factor that makes it "silent" (although some form of coercion must logically exist).

Ethnic cleansing as a military and political tactic

The purpose of ethnic cleansing is to remove the conditions for potential and actual opposition, whether political, terrorist, guerrilla or military, by physically removing any potentially or actually hostile ethnic communities. Although it has sometimes been motivated by a doctrine that claim an ethnic group is literally "unclean" (as in the case of the Jews of medieval Europe), more usually it has been a rational (if brutal) way of ensuring that total control can be asserted over an area. The campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. The tactic was used by Croatian, Muslim Bosnian and Serbian forces. Ethnic cleansing is often also accompanied by efforts to eradicate all physical traces of the expelled ethnic group, such as by the destruction of cultural artifacts, religious sites and physical records .

As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant advantages and disadvantages. It enables a force to eliminate civilian support for resistance by eliminating the civilians — in a reversal of Mao Zedong's dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it drains the water. When enforced as part of a political settlement, as happened with the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans to Germany after 1945, it can contribute to long-term stability. The large German populations in Czechoslovakia and Poland had been sources of friction before the Second World War, but this was forcibly resolved. It thus establishes "facts on the ground" - radical demographic changes which can be very hard to reverse.

On the other hand, ethnic cleansing is such a brutal tactic and so often accompanied by large-scale bloodshed that it is widely reviled. It is generally regarded as lying somewhere between population transfers and genocide on a scale of odiousness, and is treated by international law as a war crime.

Ethnic cleansing as international law crime

Ethnic cleansing is designated a crime against humanity in international treaties, such as that which created the International Criminal Court (ICC). The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in a similar spirit, and prosecutes these crimes under more generic names.

The United Nations' General Assembly condemns "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution .

The emergence of ethnic cleansing as a distinct category of war crime has been a somewhat complex process. Each individual element of a programme of ethnic cleansing could be considered as an individual violation of humanitarian law - a killing here, a house-burning there - thus missing the systematic way in which such violations were perpetrated with a single aim in mind. International courts therefore consider individual incidents in the light of a possible pattern of ethnic cleansing. In the Yugoslav case, for instance, the ICTY considers the widespread massacres and abuses of human rights in Bosnia and Kosovo as part of an overall "joint criminal enterprise" to carve out ethnically pure states in the region.

However, many alleged "ethnic cleansings" in the past do not fit the modern definition of "crimes against humanity." For example, the post-WW2 German expulsions were sanctioned by the international agreement at Potsdam conference, requiring that the actions proceed humanely.

Comparison of events in the Bible with ethnic cleansing

Some narratives in the Bible which describe the Hebrew conquest of Canaan in c. 13th century BC or before, would now be considered descriptions of ethnic cleansing or even genocide. In several places God commands the Hebrews to kill every man, woman and child after capturing a city, and sometimes cities also had to be burnt to the ground.

In Exodus, the story of the Pharaoh's attempt to destroy the Israelites living in Egypt can also be seen as ethnic cleansing. Similarly Haman's attempt to wipe out the Jews within the Persian empire described in Esther can be considered ethnic cleansing.

See also

References

  • Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew (1993). "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing". Foreign Affairs. 72 (3): 110.
  • Petrovic, Drazen (1994). "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology". European Journal of International Law. 5 (1): 359.

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