Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic cleansing is a relatively new term for the ancient practice of expelling a people, using a variety of means, from a geographic area to secure it for another people's exclusive use. The term began to be used extensively in an international context during the early 1990s in relation to the wars surrounding the collapse of Yugoslavia. It was a translation of a Serbo-Croatian phrase for the practice of using forced deportation, random attacks, and systematic rape to encourage people of a specific ethnic origin to leave a region. Ethnic cleansing was practiced to varying degrees by several sides in the conflict as a strategic goal to help establish ethnically homogeneous areas that could then be incorporated into a larger nation-state .

Since its use to describe events in Yugoslavia, the term has been widely utilized by reporters, international governmental organizations such as the United Nations (UN), and social scientists to characterize other ethnic conflicts, both current and historic. Distinguishing ethnic cleansing from related phenomena such as genocide and ethnically targeted governmental repression is not easy, and any effort to do so must examine the goals of the perpetrators. Ethnic cleansing is best understood as a conscious policy of population removal by a variety of means to achieve firm political control of a region by establishing "facts on the ground"; that is, establishing a strong position by removing people from an unwanted ethnic group.

Ethnic cleansing has not always been portrayed in a negative light. Certainly, many extreme nationalists throughout history have extolled the value of creating, by force if necessary, ethnically homogeneous areas that will help to build and defend a nation. More interestingly, some political scientists have suggested that the resulting separation of communities created by ethnic cleansing or population transfers may help to reduce ethnic conflict and promote peace. The majority opinion, however, both in the social sciences and among human rights organizations, is that ethnic cleansing is clearly a violation of human rights, and that international efforts must try to end or prevent ethnic cleansing from occurring and correcting the damage caused by it.

ethnic cleansing over the centuries

The transfer of population as a policy of war is almost as old as the recorded history of war. Assyria, one of the first historic empires (existing from around 2400 to 612 b.c.e. in the region of today's Turkey, Syria, and Iraq), practiced transfer of population as a regular policy of state to secure its hold on newly conquered areas. When Assyria conquered the Israelites in 722 b.c.e., the victorious Assyrians expelled a majority of the population, replacing the Hebrews with settlers from more politically sympathetic peoples. This policy of population transfer as a tool of empire building was practiced by other imperial powers that followed. In Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern era, the practice of ethnic cleansing frequently took on a religious cast, and the targets were most often Jews, who were expelled from England, France, Hungary, Austria, Portugal, and Spain (in this instance, along with the Muslim population).

The expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain was an important turning point, because scholars have identified this ethnic cleansing as central to Spain's formation as a state. Indeed, several scholars have argued that efforts to homogenize a population through ethnic cleansing or genocide have been essential to the formation of many states. Scholars who make this argument point not only to Spain but also to the persecution of the Huguenots in France, the forced relocation and killing of Native Americans in the United States from the 1830s to 1880s, and the English expulsion of Irish Catholics from the Ulster area of Northern Ireland during the 1700s.

treaty of lausanne

The expulsion of Greeks from Turkish lands and corresponding expulsion of Turks from Greek territory in the period between the two world wars is an example of ethnic cleansing as an attempt to stabilize international relations. The redrawing of European national boundaries at the end of World War I (1918) created several nation-states that contained large ethnic minorities. Mass transfer of these minority groups was proposed as a way to prevent ethnic separatist movements within the newly defined countries. The Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed on July 24, 1923, defined the political boundaries of Turkey and Greece, and required a population exchange between the two countries.

The population transfer involved 1.2 million Greeks and 400,000 Turks. Although the exchange was supposedly peaceful and humane, it was in reality a harsh and brutal process. Many people died during their journeys, and Greece in particular was overwhelmed by a large number of diseased and starving people. The 1923 treaty had specified monetary compensation for people uprooted from their homes but these debts were never paid. Instead of easing relations between Greece and Turkey, the forced transfer of populations led to decades of bitterness and anger between the two countries.

The Spanish repression of Protestants in the Low Countries illustrates that it can sometimes be difficult for historians to differentiate ethnic repression from ethnic cleansing. More than a hundred thousand Protestants fled that area in the sixteenth century, but many other Protestants remained in the region. Although Spain did engage in religious and ethnic repression, it is not clear whether this particular policy qualifies as ethnic cleansing.

During the twentieth century, ethnic cleansing reached new heights; the old tools of expulsion, massacres, and deportations were superseded by the planned extermination of entire ethnic groups. One of the first groups to suffer this fate were the Armenians during World War I (1914–1918). The Armenians had previously endured an attempt at ethnic cleansing toward the end of the nineteenth century at the hands of the Ottoman Empire (1899–1922). During World War I Turkey renewed this effort to annihilate the remaining Armenians with particular vigor, representing one of the first genocides of the twentieth century. The war's end also witnessed other episodes of mass ethnic cleansing: Turkey's attempts to eliminate Greeks, Greece's attempts to obliterate Turks, and Bulgaria's attempts to kill off both groups.

The Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Jews began with their expulsion from Germany and the occupied lands, but it escalated quickly to an attempt to exterminate them as a people. The same could be said of Nazi policies toward the Roma (or gypsies). Nazi policy toward the Poles, however, more closely corresponded to the classic model of ethnic cleansing; the Third Reich expelled over a million Poles from areas that German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) wanted to incorporate into Germany.

the indian wars

Relocation and killing of Native Americans as official policies of the U. S. federal government occurred between 1830 and 1890. Before 1830 Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi interacted with the governments of individual states. During the presidential campaign of 1828, however, victorious candidate Andrew Jackson promised to achieve Indian removal: the relocation of Eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi. Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which ordered the relocation of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee nations to Oklahoma and Kansas. The Seminoles resisted removal, however, resulting in the Second Seminole War (1835–1842).

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the U. S. Army was involved in a series of conflicts with the Native American tribes in the Great Plains and the Southwest. The so-called Indian Wars resulted from the country's rapid westward expansion and the closing of the frontier, in which the U.S. government gave away the Native Americans' land to homesteading pioneers traveling west from the former British colonies and Europe. Not only did this practice deprive the western tribes of their ancestral lands, it also drastically reduced available land upon which the relocated eastern Indians could be resettled. In addition, the farming practices of the pioneers threatened the buffalo with extinction, eliminating a major source of food and shelter for the Plains tribes. Many tribes chose to fight rather than give up their ancestral lands. The Indian Wars ended in defeat for the tribes and their relocation to reservations throughout the American West.

Native Americans regained political power in the 1970s, following several years of protests and court cases. As of the early 2000s, federal law regards Native American tribes as political communities with powers of self-government greater than those given to the U.S. states. The tribes are not, however, considered independent nations.

Aside from the Nazis, several other major examples of ethnic cleansing are associated with World War II (1939–1945) and its aftermath. The former Soviet Union ordered the deportation of Volga Germans, Crimean Tartars, and Chechens to Central Asia in 1944. At the war's end, Russian forces also expelled ethnic Germans from Eastern Prussia. In addition, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania expelled many ethnic Germans.

ethnic cleansing after world war ii

Despite the growth of human rights norms and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, ethnic cleansing remains a significant problem on an international scale. Europe continues to see cases of ethnic cleansing, such as the expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Turkish-occupied Cyprus and ethnic Turks from the rest of Cyprus after Turkey's invasion of the island in 1975. Toward the end of the 1990s, Yugoslavia engaged in policies of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo toward ethnic Albanians. After the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened on the side of the ethnic Albanians, reverse efforts to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of all Serbs occurred. In Bulgaria during the late 1980s the government engaged in the expulsion and repression of those ethnic Turks who had remained after the forced removals of the interwar period.

Ethnic cleansing is not just a European phenomenon, however. Ethnic cleansing took place during the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947, with countless Muslims forced to flee to the north, and Sikhs and Hindus to the south. During the 1990s Armenia expelled all Azeris from the region of

Nagorno-Karabakh, laying claim to the entire region. Others have characterized the continuing ethnic repression in Sudan and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as examples of ethnic cleansing.

international response

Throughout most of history there was no immediate international response to episodes of ethnic cleansing, and international law remained silent on the issue. Starting with the development of rules of war and human rights law, however, this situation began to change. The practice is clearly illegal under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and qualifies as a crime against humanity as defined by the 1945 charter that established the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany. Even as international law was being developed after World War II, however, the 1945 Potsdam Conference, at which the United States, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and United Kingdom were key participants, authorized the expulsion of ethnic Germans from wide areas of Eastern Europe.

Indeed, for most of the second half of the twentieth century the international community's response to ethnic cleansing has been ineffective and mute. In a European context at least, this began to change with the end of the Cold War and NATO's involvement in the Bosnian conflict, which pushed all sides to come to peace terms and resulted in the repatriation of expelled peoples to their former homes. In the case of Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia, international involvement led to NATO forces remaining in both areas, policing the regions to maintain tenuous levels of ethnic peace, protecting ethnic minorities from ethnic majorities, and in some cases preventing the reverse situation. These conflicts in the Balkans, in fact, led to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which continues to prosecute those individuals involved in ethnic cleansing during the war.

See also: Crimes Against Humanity; Dictatorship; Genocide.

bibliography

Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing." Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993):110–122.

Kaufman, Chaim D. "When All Else Fails. Ethnic Population Transfers and Partitions in the Twentieth Century." International Security 23, no. 2 (1998).

Petrovic, Drazen. "Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology." European Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 (1994).

Preece, Jennifer. "Ethnic Cleansing as an Instrument of Nation-State Creation: Changing State Practices and Evolving Legal Norms." Human Rights Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1998).

Rae, Heather. State Identities and the Homogenization of Peoples. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Walling, Carrie Booth. "The History and Politics of Ethnic Cleansing." International Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 3 and 4 (Autumn–Winter 2000).

Victor Asal