Ethnic cleansing

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

The term ethnic cleansing defies a simple definition. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, 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 due to 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 literal translation of the Serbo-Croat phrase etnicko ciscenje. During the 1990s it was used extensively by the media in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in relation to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, 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" (ciscenje 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 Partisan era.

This originally applied purely to military enemies, but came to be applied to other ethnic groups as well. It was used in this context by the Yugoslav media as early as 1981, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration allegedly creating an "ethnically clean territory" (i.e. "clean" of Serbs) in the province. However, this usage had antecedents. The earliest known usage of it appears to have been in February 1942, when the Bosnian Serb nationalist Stevan Moljevic proposed that an ethnically pure Serbia should be extended across Bosnia into Dalmatia and that there should then follow "the cleansing [ciscenje] of the land of all non-Serb elements." It is possible that the revival of nationalism in the 1980s reintroduced ethnic cleansing - which was practiced by all sides in the Second World War - into Yugoslavia's political debate and language.

A similar term with the same intent was used by the Nazi administration in Germany under Adolf Hitler 50 years earlier. 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.

Ethnic cleansing in history

In ancient times, the Roman Empire would often enslave or exile entire peoples, most famously the Jews following the revolt of 70 AD in Judea. After the expulsion Jews became nomadic nation without homeland. During the Middle Ages every country that hosted them, felt entitle to expel them, if conditions changed.

However, sometimes the expulsion of Jews had some features of ethnic cleansing, especially if it were accompanied by the violence and were enacted on the whole territory of the state. I.e. Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306), Hungary (1349–1360), Provence (1394 and 1490), Austria (1421), Portugal (1497) and various parts of Germany at various times, Russia in 1724. 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 were expelled from Lithuania (1491) and allowed to return 10 years later. Expulsion of Jews in some cases can be compared to the expulsion of illegal immigrants, as is practised by modern countries from time to time. Spain's large Muslim minority, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609–1614.

England expelled Gypsies, France expelled Huguenots.

During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In North America, British and American settlers ethnically cleansed dozens of Native American tribes, forcibly relocating them to concentration encampments, called reservations. In southern Africa and Australia, native tribes were removed from their lands that they could be replaced by white farmers and settlers.

The ethnic cleansing term is now applied to some massive scale events during the 20th century, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. Alleged 20th century instances of ethnic cleansing include:

• Expulsion of the Acadians in 1755.
• The Armenian Genocide and Pontian Greek Genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922.
• The expulsion of Poles from Belorussia and Ukraine 1932–1936 to Kazakhstan.
• The form of ethnic cleansing was also Jewish Holocaust, in which people were expelled to death camps.
• The expulsions of Jews from Austria after the Anschluss, and deportations of Poles and Jews from Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany.
• The deportations of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians from areas occupied by Soviet Union 1939–1941.
• The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia from Poles by the Ukrainian guerilla groups.
• The mass deportation of the Chechens, Volga Germans, Balkars, Kalmyks and other minorities living in the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1943–1944.
• The expulsion of Poles from Zamosc Voivodship by Germans in 1944.
• The expulsions of 800,000 Poles from Warsaw to concentration camps after defeat of Warsaw Uprising 1944, caused 200,000 deaths. The million city of Warsaw was ordered to be completely demolished on the personal order of Hitler, completed in 80%. Himmler stated, that the aim, was to remove permanently the obstacle for German Eastern expansion, allegedly Poles had been for the last 700 years.
• The evacuation and expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, notably from the Sudetenland and East Prussia, started as an evacuation by the German authorities, hastened by revenge attacks by Soviet troops and ultimately completed by USSR and its satellite states following the decisions at the Potsdam conference.
• The mass deportation of ethnic minorities from their homelands like East Timor and Papua by the Indonesian government, from the Indonesian independence in 1947 (and subsequent occupation of East Timor and Papua) until today.
• The expulsion of Arabs from Israel in 1948.
• The expulsion of large Jewish communities from Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan during 1948–1950.
• The mass deportation of people from Tibet after the Chinese invasion in 1950.
• The mass expulsion of Turks and Greeks from each other's respective parts of Cyprus during the 1974 civil war and Turkish invasion.
• The very widespread ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, of which the most significant examples occurred in eastern Croatia and Krajina (1991-1995), in most of Bosnia (1992-1995), and in Kosovo (1999). The tactic was used by all sides in the wars, with millions of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians expelled or otherwise forced to flee from their homes.
• The forced excursion of hindus from the Indian region of Kashmir by terrorist organizations (originated, supported and/or trained by Pakistan) which started in late 1989 and continues to date.

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 Serbian campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. As well as fighting a traditional war with the Bosnian Army, the Serbian forces sought to eradicate the entire non-Serb population of the areas they controlled, either through massacres (as at Srebrenica) or more usually through terrorization of the civilian population to encourage them to flee to territory controlled by government forces. The tactic was also adopted by Croatian and Bosnian forces, and was repeated on a large scale during the Kosovo War in 1999. 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 Tse Tung'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 Germans from outside of Germans border 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 very 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. It can also create political problems in the long term as "cleansed" communities campaign to be allowed to return home, as in the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

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 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 cleansing" in the past doesn't fit in the modern definition of the crime against humanity. For example German expulsions was sanctioned by the international agreement at Potsdam conference. The agreement required the action to be proceed in humanitarian way.

References and Links

• "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing", Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (1993) 110
• "Ethnic Cleansing — An Attempt at Methodology", Drazen Petrovic, European Journal of International Law, 5 EJIL (1994) 1-359