Ethnic cleansing

The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. 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.

Some political commentators avoid use of the term, which they see as a political euphemism which attempts to apply a word with positive connotations (cleansing) to a morally objectionable act (forced population movement usually achieved through violence).

Origins of the term

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.

The earliest known usage of it may been in May 16, 1941, during the Second World War, by one Viktor Gutić, a commander in the Croatian fascist faction the Ustaše.
An article in the Hrvatska Krajina newspaper[1] describing the visit to the Franciscan monastery in Petrićevac quotes Gutić's speech:

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 [...]

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. (cf. racial hygiene.)

Ethnic cleansing in history

For example, according to the biblical narrative, the people of the Caananite village of Ai are massascred by Joshua's troops in Joshua 8:20-25. In one passage detailing "the holy war against Midian" (Numbers 31:1-24). In verses 13-24 Moses asks the victorious Hebrew troops why they have spared the lives of all the women who had "perverted the sons of Israel" into rejecting God. Moses then orders the Hebrew troops to kill all the male children and women who are not virgins.

The Assyrian Empire regularly deported entire ethnic groups, as did the Babylonians; victims of this policy most famously include the Jews of Judah (see Babylonian captivity of Judah), and before them the Jews of Israel in 722 BC.

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 a nomadic nation without a homeland. During the Middle Ages, every country that hosted them felt entitled 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), Spain after the Reconquista, Portugal (1497), Russia in 1724, and 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 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.

Ethnic cleansing of the Jews in pre-state Israel by Arabs was as follows:
March 1920: Jews driven from Tel Hai
March 1921: Arabs tried unsuccessfully to cleanse Petah Tikvah, in the West Bank, of Jews who had lived there for 40 years.
August 1929: Jews driven from Hebron, Nablus, West Bank, and several communities in Gaza--all of these communities had existed for centuries.
1948 War: Jews driven from Kfar Darom, Gaza; Bet Ha'arava, Neveh Yaakov, Atarot, and the Old City of Jerusalem.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palestinian leader became an advisor to Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust and said to Hitler, "Accord to Palestine the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries."

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.

Russia forced Muslim Crimean Tatars to leave Crimea for the Ottoman Empire in a gradual and consistent process starting in 1783. Finally, Soviet Union deported the remaining Crimean Tatars from their homeland of Crimea 18 May 1944. The Tatars were replaced by slavic settlers from other parts of Russia.

Colonization-related ethnic cleansing

During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In North America, British and American settlers ethnically cleansed millions 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 Land Wars.
• The removals and massacres of native populations in the African colonies of various European powers.
• The concentration of Boers by Britain during the Second Boer War

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.

Older examples

• 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, which was the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe that led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 people.
  

  Alleged 20th Century instances

• The 1913 Convention of Adrianople, annexed to the Peace Treaty between Bulgaria and Turkey, provided for an exchange of ethnic Turks and Bulgarians in a 15 kilometer strip.
• The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly-Sur-Seine provided for the reciprocal emigration of ethnic minorities between Greece and Bulgaria.
• In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne between the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, on the one part and Turkey on the other, which ended the First World War in the East, as well as post-War hostilities between Greece and the newly-formed Republic of Turkey. The treaty provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.
• The Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Pontian Greeks perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922.
• The expulsion of Poles from Belorussia and Ukraine 1932–1936 to Kazakhstan.
• The term includes the German Nazi government's treatment of the Jews (the Holocaust) and the Gypsies, in which the Nazis forcibly moved whole populations 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.
• Generalplan Ost, in which the Nazis planned to kill or expel most or all ethnic Slavs from large regions of Eastern Europe and replace them with German settlers.
• The German exodus from Eastern Europe.
• The deportations of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians from areas occupied by Soviet Union 1939–1941.
• The deportations of Karelians from East Karelia by Soviet Union in 1930s.
• The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia by Ukrainian guerrilla groups.
• The mass deportation and exile of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Balkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and other minorities living in the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1943–1944, under the pretext that they were collaborating with Nazi Germany
• 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 city of Warsaw, population of one million, was ordered to be completely demolished on the personal order of Hitler. Approximately 80% of the city was demolished. Himmler stated, that the aim, was to remove permanently the Polish population which the Nazis viewed as an obstacle to German Eastern expansion for the last 700 years.
• The evacuation and expulsion of several millions ethnic Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, notably from the Sudetenland and East Prussia. Begun 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.
• Finnish evacueeded from Finnish Karelia and other parts occupied by Soviet Union after World War II. This was voluntary, and they evacuated because of fearing Soviet rule.
• 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).
• The Nakba, or Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Palestinians in the areas of Arab Palestine that became part of Israel fled prior to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• The mass flight of large Jewish communities from Yemen and Iraq, and small ones from the West Bank during 1948–1950, as well as flights which took place later from Egypt and Libya.
• The mass expulsion of Turks and Greeks from each other's respective sections of the divided island of Cyprus during the 1974 civil war and Turkish invasion.
• 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 province of Serbia called Kosovo (1999). Large numbers of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians were forced to flee their homes and expelled. In 2004, following an upsurge in violence, 4100[1] Serbs were forced to temporarily flee their homes in the province (now United Nations administered) by Albanian rioters.
• The near-complete forced exclusion of the hindu and sikh populations from then West-Pakistan (current Pakistan) to India and the forced exclusion of parts of the muslim population from India to Pakistan following the partition of British-India in 1947.
• The forced exclusion since 1989 of Hindus from both the Pakistani and Indian occupied regions of the disputed territory of Kashmir by Islamic paramilitary groups, which the Indian government accuses the Pakistani governmnent of assisting.
• After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of post-Soviet independent states witnessed out-migration of Russians, perceived as "colonizers" there because of the Soviet Union's politics of Russification. For example, after the inclusion of Latvia in the USSR, Latvians became a minority in their own country.
• Forced conversions and killings of Hindus and tribals in India's northeast by Christian militants since 1989.
• The 1994 massacres of Tutsis by Hutus known as the Rwandan Genocide
• Attacks by the Janjaweed Arab Muslim militias of Sudan on the non-Arab African Muslim population of Darfur, a region in western Sudan.
• Attacks on Muslim communities in Gujarat, India. Done by extrmist Hindus with support of Gujarat Government. Official figures are above 1000 but NGOs say it is more than double that figure.
  

  Ethnic cleansing as a military and political tactic

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 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 displaced communities campaign to be allowed to return, 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 were sanctioned by the international agreement at Potsdam conference. The agreement required the action to proceed in humane way.

References and external 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
• Photojournalist's Account - Images of ethnic cleansing in Sudan