ethnic cleansing - Definitions, Origins of the term, Ethnic cleansing as a military and political tactic

The systematic removal of a racial, political, religious, or cultural group from a geographical area. Ethnic cleansing differs from genocide in that the objective is not to exterminate all members of the group; however, mass murder, either organized or on an ad hoc basis, has often been part of the process of ethnic cleansing. The term became widely applied to the activities of various governments in the Balkans during the break-up of former Yugoslavia following the death of Tito, and has been criticized for sanitizing a social evil that tends to accompany most civil wars.

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Ethnic cleansing refers to various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia, with the induced cleansing of Bosniaks ("Bosnian Muslims"). The term became known to the world as Serbian war overheads most of the time either openly discussed or indicated their plans in cleansing (čišćenje) of territories. Narrower definitions equate ethnic cleansing with forcible population transfer accompanied by gross human-rights violations and other factors.

Definitions

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

[E]thnic cleansing [...] defies easy definition. 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. 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.

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.

This originally applied purely to military enemies, but came to be applied to ethnic groups as well.

One usage 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.

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. 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.

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. (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. 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. 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.

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. The UN General Assembly condemned "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution.

Silent Ethnic Cleansing

Instances of ethnic cleansing

Early instances

The St. Brice's Day massacre of all Danes living in England on the orders of the Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred the Unready. 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 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. Nazi Germany wiped out entire populations of Jews, Roma people and Sinti ("Gypsies") during World War II (see also the Holocaust). Genocide and ethnic cleansing by Hungarian, German and Croatian Axis troops against Serb, Jewish and Roma civilians in Vojvodina province of Serbia between 1941 and 1944 (See: Crimes of the occupiers in Vojvodina, 1941-1944). Killings by Yugoslav communist partizans against ethnic Hungarians and Germans in Vojvodina province of Serbia in 1944-1945 (See: 1944-1945 Killings in Bačka). Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. The Nakba or Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Palestinians (approximately 700,000) in the areas of Palestine that became part of Israel fled or were deported by Israeli forces during the Arab invasion igniting the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Jewish exodus from Arab lands, in which the substantial majority of Jews (approximately 800,000) from Arab countries fled or were deported by Arab governments between the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Six Day War in 1967. 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 Palestinians (Jordanian citizens) from areas captured by Israel after the Six Day War in 1967, particularly from East Jerusalem. This included many Jews, Zoroastrians, Baha'is, and Christians (most ethnic Armenians), all of whom had been persecuted for centuries. 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). Activists on both sides of the 2006 US immigration debate have argued that their opponents' proposals amount to ethnic cleansing.