Ethnic Cleansing

5 Key excerpts on "Ethnic Cleansing"

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  The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict

  • Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff, Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff, Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff, Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 The causes and consequences of Ethnic Cleansing

  Erin K. Jenne DOI: 10.4324/9781315720425-10

  Introduction

  Ethnic Cleansing refers to “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” (Bell-Fialkoff 1993 : 110). On the most basic level, it is the deliberate policy of homogenizing the ethnic makeup of a territory. As this definition suggests, Ethnic Cleansing comprises not only ethnic expulsions and extermination during war, but also policies of ethnic homogenization undertaken during times of relative peace. In strategic terms, it involves the removal of targeted minorities from a given territory and the subsequent resettlement of members of the dominant group in the minorities’ abandoned homes and property. In sum, Ethnic Cleansing consists of policies of ethnic expulsion and resettlement, which may be implemented either violently or non-violently. These policies are all undertaken with the purpose of achieving ethno-territorial homogenization.

  The expression “Ethnic Cleansing” did not enter the modern lexicon until the 1980s, when Kosovar Serbs publicly accused the Albanian majority of ethnically cleansing the province. The term was later applied retroactively to the Serb campaign against the Muslims during the Bosnian war as well as Belgrade’s attempts to empty Kosovo of ethnic Albanians in the late 1990s. Although the concept itself is relatively new, the phenomenon to which it refers is as old as human civilization itself. The ancient Assyrians used collective deportations to manage internal unrest and rebellions as early as the thirteenth century bce; both the Assyrians and the Babylonians exiled Jewish populations in the seventh and fifth centuries bce. During and after the Crusades, Jews were massacred and expelled from Germany, England and France. In Southeast Asia, meanwhile, over 100,000 Cham people were driven out of their homes by the Vietnamese in the late fifteenth century. At the same time, the Roma and Jews were being expelled from Spain. During the religious wars, the Huguenots were driven out of France; and hundreds of thousands of Spanish Muslims or Moriscos were exiled from Spain in the early seventeenth century. In nineteenth-century America, many Native American tribes in the territories were corralled onto reservations under the policy of “Indian removal.” In Haiti, too, tens of thousands of French settlers were expelled from St. Dominique by Haiti’s new leaders, who declared the country an “all-black” nation. Following World War II, as many as 11 million ethnic Germans were driven out of East European countries on charges of collaboration with Nazi Germany.

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  Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies

  A Scholars' Initiative

  • Charles Ingrao, Thomas A. Emmert(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Purdue University Press

    (Publisher)

  •   In a collapsing state Ethnic Cleansing often appears as the side effect of military conflagration over succession in an ethnically mixed setting. As long as the ethnically distinct population is identified with the enemy, or at least as a potential source of resistance, it appears logical to remove such population from strategic areas in order to establish effective control over that territory. The more homogeneous a region, the more easily power can be exerted. In this sense, Ethnic Cleansing appeared, in Clausewitz’s terms, as a rational means to a specific end.

  •   Ethnic Cleansing may occur as a more general policy when ethnic communities are identified with territories and the main aim is to establish a coincidence between borders and nations. In areas with mixed populations, the irreversible change of the demographic composition is instrumental in justifying territorial aspirations. It may also help to assure a certain bargaining position in ensuing political negotiations aiming at ethnic partition.

  •   Under certain circumstances, the aim might have been the physical extermination of an ethnic or religious group, including the elimination of all cultural traces of their presence. In this case, Ethnic Cleansing may be interpreted as genocide (further elaboration below).16

  Definitions

  Various definitions of Ethnic Cleansing have been put forward. According to a narrower definition by Bell-Fialkoff, “population cleansing is a planned, deliberate removal from a certain territory of an undesirable population distinguished by one or more characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, race, class, or sexual preference. These characteristics must serve as the basis for removal for it to qualify as cleansing.”17 Jacques Semelin on the other hand argues that Ethnic Cleansing is not necessarily a result of intent but may well appear as a by-product of violent conflagrations.18

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  The Demographic Struggle for Power

  The Political Economy of Demographic Engineering in the Modern World

  • Milica Zarkovic Bookman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Another form of population transfer takes place when a targeted population is forced out of a region, thus cleansing it of undesirables. This results in an immediate increase in the relative size of the desired ethnic group. The population that is forced to depart is prevented from returning and often is prevented from concentrating elsewhere (this is the case of ethnic Hungarians who were dispersed across Romania; Vlahs and Pomak Turks who were also dispersed across Bulgaria; as well as Greeks who were dispersed throughout Albania). Alternatively, those that have been cleansed are sent to a region where they were previously concentrated or where their co-nationals reside (eg. Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II were sent to Germany).

  Forced population movements, with the purpose of cleansing the region of undesirables, has come to be called Ethnic Cleansing. Bell-Fialkoff has defined Ethnic Cleansing 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’.30 Ethnic Cleansing has been in operation across the globe since time immemorial.31 As Bell-Fialkoff points out in his study of the practice, it is ‘historically speaking neither new nor remarkable’.32 Indeed, Procopius, writing about the lives of Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora in the sixth century A. D., describes how the Emperor’s men were directed to obliterate entire populations to clear the territory of them. ‘Examining the countries that he made desolate of inhabitants, I would say he slew a trillion people’.33 In the Americas, the arrival of Europeans led to attempts at extermination of the indigenous American Indian populations, and when that failed, their containment on reservations. Jews have been expelled throughout Europe and throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust of the mid-twentieth century. Turks cleansed regions of the Armenians, Eastern Europe cleansed their states of Germans (removing over ten million people in one sweep34 ), Stalin resettled entire nationalities (Chechens, Kalmyuks, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars and Crimean Tatars).35 Asians were forced from Uganda, and Chinese were forced from Vietnam. Ethnic Cleansing is a practice usually associated with war, although as clear from the examples above, this is not necessarily the case. McGarry and O’Leary remind us of wartime population movements such as ‘Oliver CromwelPs transplantation strategies in Ireland, Tsarist and Turkish policies in the Caucasus in the 19th century, Stalin’s movement of the Volga Germans, Cossacks and others’ among others, while Pfaff called them ‘horrific wartime and post war acts of demographic surgery’.36

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  The Dark Side of Nation-States

  Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe

  • Philipp Ther(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  The third phase was prompted by the new postwar order in Europe and lasted until the outbreak of the Cold War. During this period, Ethnic Cleansings were implemented across an even larger area, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Aegean Sea and from the Vosges to the Caucasus. If we add comparative conflicts in the former British Empire to the list, at least thirty million people were affected.

  In the fourth phase, in the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus were the scenes of the worst Ethnic Cleansings; about five million people were put to flight or expelled. By this time, the international context had changed: the great powers no longer supported Ethnic Cleansing and finally tried to contain it. The next four chapters seek to give a comprehenisve empirical account of these phases and to present the main agents of Ethnic Cleansing. In the light of the previous chapter’s findings, special attention will be paid to the consequences of nation-state building, the radicalization of nationalisms and hostility toward minorities, population policy under various regimes, and the complex of European modernity.1

  An additional aspect considered here is the momentum Ethnic Cleansings gathered. This was propelled by three mechanisms: first, violence escalated to the point of becoming self-justifying; second, the absorption of refugees led to subsequent violent conflict and population movements, and the blurring of categories of victims and perpetrators; third, the international community removed further constraints by endorsing Ethnic Cleansings. In the first three phases especially, the policies of the Western great powers played a central role. They shaped the Paris Peace Treaties, which shifted the priority from protecting to reducing minorities, the Conference of Lausanne, the Munich Agreement, and the Allied conferences after World War II, from Tehran to Potsdam. This consensus only began to dissolve well after the war. But even in the 1990s, in the former Yugoslavia and the Caucasus, basic human rights counted for little in the power games played by nation-states and their representatives.

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  Law without Nations

  • Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Stanford Law Books

    (Publisher)

  1 . Florence Chepkemoi: “We decided to return when we were told there was peace,” Mt. Elgon, July 23, 2008 (IRIN).

  2 . http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2008/ga10708.doc.htm .

  3 . Catherine Dale, “The Dynamics and Challenges of Ethnic Cleansing: The Georgia-Abkhazia Case,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1997).

  4 . That would include the Gali IDPs, who were considered persons of concern in the spring of 2008 by the UNHCR.

  5 . An early use in English of the term appeared in the Washington Post, August 2, 1991: “The Croatian political and military leadership issued a statement Wednesday declaring that Serbia’s ‘aim is obviously the Ethnic Cleansing of the critical areas that are to be annexed to Serbia.’”

  6 . The Israelites were not unfamiliar with the practice, and carried vengeance (“remember what Amalek did to you”) into a policy (“you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven”). Deuteronomy 25:17–19.

  7 . Sir John Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem: Report of a Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1939); compare Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguyo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (Oxford University Press, 1989); Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  8 . The border stability of 1945 is only relative to 1919. The physical borders in Eastern Europe changed, but no new countries were established.

  9 . Erika Feller, Volker Türk, and Frances Nicholson, eds., Refugee Protection in International Law: UNHCR’s Global Consultations on International Protection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  10 . Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Robert K. Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Robert K. Schaefer, Severed States: Dilemmas of Democracy in a Divided World

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