Ethnic cleansing

Armenian civilians, being cleansed from their homeland during the Armenian Genocide.

A Ethnic cleansing refers to various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory in order to create ethnically pure society. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia, with the violent 'cleansing' of Bosniaks. Its typical usage was developed in the Balkans, to be a less objectionable code-word meaning “genocide” but its intent was to best avoid the obvious pitfalls of longstanding international treaty laws prohibiting war-crimes. This Orwellian term has since become still more Orwellian, because it is occasionally used as a claim of war-crimes, when no war-crimes actually exist. For example, “Ethnic Cleansing” has become improperly used to describe a situation wherein poorer ethnic groups are being displaced economically, by other, generally more affluent ethnic groups.

Synonyms include sectarian revenge and ethnic purification and (in the French versions of some UN documents) nettoyage ethnique and épuration ethnique.

Definitions

The term ethnic cleansing has been variously defined. In the many words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:

[E]thnic cleansing [...] defies easy definition. At one end 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 due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

Drazen Petrovic has distinguished between broad and narrow definitions. Broader definitions focus on the fact of expulsion based on ethnic criteria, while narrower definitions include additional criteria: for example, that expulsions are systematic, illegal, involve gross human-rights abuses, or are connected with an ongoing internal or international war. According to Petrovic:

[E]thnic cleansing is a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin. Such a policy involves violence and is very often connected with military operations. It is to be achieved by all possible means, from discrimination to extermination, and entails violations of human rights and international humanitarian law."

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/). 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 field" (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 as early as 1981, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration creating an "ethnically clean" territory (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province. However, this usage had antecedents.

One of the earliest usages of the term cleansing can be found on 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 [čišćenje] our Croatia of unwanted elements [...]. The Ustaše did carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide in Croatia during the Second World War and sometimes used the term "cleansing" to describe it.

Some time later, 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 [očistiti] 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.

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). (refer to Robert Brinkman aka b dub's novel "ethnic cleansing"

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 — recognizing Mao Zedong's dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it disables the fish by draining 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. Some individuals of the large German population in Czechoslovakia and prewar 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. But this does not concern the treatment of the inhabitants of Historical Eastern Germany.

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 a crime under international law

There is no formal legal definition of ethnic cleansing. However, ethnic cleansing in the broad sense - the forcible deportation of a population - is defined as a crime against humanity under the statutes of both International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The gross human-rights violations integral to stricter definitions of ethnic cleansing are treated as separate crimes falling under the definitions for genocide or crimes against humanity of the statutes.

The UN Commission of Experts (established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780) held that the practices associated with ethnic cleansing "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore ... such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." The UN General Assembly condemned "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution.

There are however situations, such as the Expulsion of Germans after World War II, where ethnic cleansing has taken place without legal redress. Timothy V. Waters argues that if similar circumstances arise in the future, this precedent would allow the ethnic cleansing of other populations under international law.

Silent ethnic cleansing

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 ethnic Germans from former German territories during and after 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).

Instances of ethnic cleansing

This section lists incidents that have been termed "ethnic cleansing" by some academic or legal experts. Not all experts agree on every case; nor do all the claims necessarily follow definitions given in this article. Where claims of ethnic cleansing originate from non-experts (e.g., journalists or politicians) this is noted.

Early instances

• Spain's large Muslim and Jewish minorities, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, were expelled in 1502, while converts to Christianity, called Moriscos or Marranos, were expelled between 1609 and 1614.

Colonial period

• 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, particularly in the Indian Removal policy of the 1830s. The Trail of Tears, which led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 Cherokees from disease, and the Long Walk of the Navajo are well-known examples.

• Expulsion 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.
• Expulsion of Muslim populations in Northern Caucasus by imperial Russia throughout 19th century. Particularly, expulsion of Circassians to Anatolia in 1864. (see Muhajir (Caucasus) for more details)

20th century

• The ethnic cleansing of the Thracian Bulgarians by the Young Turks in the Ottoman portion of Thrace in 1913.
• The Armenian Genocide and the Pontian Greek Genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922.
• The ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Turkey and of Turks from Greece during the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 and the sack of Smyrna by Turkish troops and as a consequence of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
• The persecutions and expulsions of Jews in Germany, Austria and other Nazi-controlled areas prior to the initiation of mass genocide in 1941.
• Mass expulsion of Germans after World War II Over 16.5 million people were expelled between 1946-1948. Estimated number of killed in the process is 2 million with a variation in estimates of up to 30% of the total.
• The mass deportation of Ukrainian speaking ethic minorities from the territory of Poland after World War II, culminating in 1947 with the start of Operation Wisla.
• Mass expulsions of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India, and of Muslims from India to Pakistan. The controversy surrounding this move resulted in the killings of Hindus, Muslimss and Sikhs in riots. This was known as the partition of British India in 1947. Well over 10 million people were violently displaced, making it the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history.
• The Nakba or Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Arab Palestinians (approximately 700,000) in the areas of Palestine that became part of Israel fled or were deported by Israeli forces following the Arab invasion igniting the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• Jewish exodus from Arab lands, in which 99 percent of Jews (approximately 800,000) from Arab countries were deported by Arab governments, or fled oppression and discrimination, between the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Six Day War in 1967. The major populations affected were in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
• The mass deportation of ethnic minorities from their homelands, including East Timor and Papua, by the Indonesian government, beginning with Indonesian independence in 1949 (and subsequent occupation and annexation of Papua until the present day and of East Timor until 1999).
• Displacement of Kashmiri Hindus living in Kashmir due to the ongoing and anti-Indian insurgency. Some 300,000 Hindus have been internally displaced from Kashmir due to the violence.
• Displacement of Palestinians (Jordanian citizens) from areas captured by Israel after the Six Day War in 1967, particularly from East Jerusalem.^{[better citation needed]}
• Forced removals of non-white populations in South Africa under Apartheid.
• The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying 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 the Albanian-dominated breakaway Kosovo province (of Serbia) (1999). Large numbers of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians were forced to flee their homes and expelled.
• The forced displacement and ethnic-cleansing of more than 250,000 Georgians and other non-Abkhaz from Abkhazia during the conflict and after in 1993 and 1998.
• The 1994 massacres of Tutsis by Hutus, known as the Rwandan Genocide^{[better citation needed]}
• The mass expulsion of southern Lhotshampas (Bhutanese of Nepalese origin) by the northern Druk majority of Bhutan in 1990. The number of refugees is approximately 103,000.

21st century

• Attacks by the Janjaweed Arabs, Muslim militias of Sudan on the non-Arab African population of Darfur, a region of western Sudan.
• The removal of around 8,500 Jews (including the forced removal of about half of them) from the Gaza Strip, and around 660 from four small settlements in the West Bank, in 2005 through the implementation of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan.
• The US evacuation and rebuilding policies for predominantly African-American New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
• Activists on both sides of the 2006 US immigration debate have argued that their opponents' proposals amount to ethnic cleansing.^{[better citation needed]}

See also

• Ethnocide
• Population transfer
• Civilian casualties, civilian, non-combatant persons killed or injured by direct military action
• Command responsibility
• Crime against humanity
• Ethnic Cleansing, a computer game.
• Persecution of Hindus

References

• Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew (1993). "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing". Foreign Affairs. 72 (3): 110. [2]
• Petrovic, Drazen (1994). "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology". European Journal of International Law. 5 (1): 359. [3]

External links

• Documents and Resources on War, War Crimes and Genocide
• Photojournalist's Account - Images of ethnic cleansing in Sudan
• Timothy V. Waters, On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing, Paper 951, 2006, University of Mississippi School of Law (PDF)
• Genocides and Ethnic Cleansings of Central and East Europe, the Former USSR, the Caucasus and Adjacent Middle East -- 1890 - 2007