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Ethnic cleansing

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Ethnic 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.

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 in the 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.

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 an exodus of Serbs from Kosovo creating an "ethnically clean territory" in the province. However, this usage had antecedants: in February 1942, 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 Serbian 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.

Ethnic cleansing in history

Although ethnic cleansing is most often associated with the Yugoslav wars, it is a very old tactic. 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. Every country that hosted them felt entitled to expell them, if conditions changed. (See Jewish diaspora.) Spain's large Muslim minority, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609–1614.

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 reservations. Much the same happened in southern Africa and Australia, where native tribes were removed from their lands to be replaced by white farmers and settlers.

Ethnic cleansing was used on a massive scale during the 20th century, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. Notable 20th century instances of ethnic cleansing include:

  • The mass deportation of ethnic minorities from their homelands like East Timor and Papua by the Indonesian government, from the Indonesian independance in 1947 (and subsequent occupation of East Timor and Papua) until today.
  • 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 were the Serbian "cleansing" of eastern Bosnia (1992), the Croatian "cleansing" of the Serbian-inhabited Krajina region of Croatia (1995), the Serbian "cleansing" of Kosovo (1999), and the Kosovar "cleansing" of Kosovo after the NATO campaign.

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 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 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 deportation of Germans east of the Oder-Neisse Line 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 and international law

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.

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