Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of
forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.[1][2][3][4][5] Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group.[6][7][8]
Although scholars do not agree on which events constitute ethnic cleansing,
nation states" or emphasize security concerns and the effects of democratization, portraying ethnic tensions as a contributing factor. Research has also focused on the role of war as a causative or potentiating factor in ethnic cleansing. However, states in a similar strategic situation can have widely varying policies towards minority ethnic groups perceived as a security threat.[10]
Tsitsekun", designated Russian military operations targeting Circassian natives by the term “ochishchenie” (cleansing).[13][14]
Ottoman empire, which resulted in the elimination of a million Armenians.[15]
An antecedent to the term is the Greek word andrapodismos (ἀνδραποδισμός; lit. "enslavement"), which was used in ancient texts. e.g., to describe atrocities that accompanied
Imperial Russian general Nikolay Yevdakimov, who supervised the operations of Circassian genocide during 1860s, dehumanised Muslim Circassians as "a pestilence" to be expelled from their native lands. Russian objective was the annexation of land; and the Russian military operations that forcibly deported Circassians were designated by Yevdakimov as “ochishchenie” (cleansing).[13]
In the early 1900s, regional variants of the term could be found among the Czechs (očista), the Poles (czystki etniczne), the French (épuration) and the Germans (Säuberung).
Carnegie Endowment report condemning the actions of all participants in the Balkan Wars contained various new terms to describe brutalities committed toward ethnic groups.[20]
In its complete form, the term appeared for the first time in the Romanian language (purificare etnică) in an address by Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu to cabinet members in July 1941. After the beginning of the invasion by the Soviet Union,[clarification needed] he concluded: "I do not know when the Romanians will have such chance for ethnic cleansing."[27] In the 1980s, the Soviets used the term "etnicheskoye chishcheniye" which literally translates to "ethnic cleansing" to describe Azerbaijani efforts to drive Armenians away from Nagorno-Karabakh.[28][29][30] At around the same time, the Yugoslav media used it to describe what they alleged was an Albanian nationalist plot to force all Serbs to leave Kosovo. It was widely popularized by the Western media during the Bosnian War (1992–1995).
The Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to
Security Council Resolution 780
defined ethnic cleansing as:
a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas", [noting that in the former
rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property. Those practices constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.[32][33]
The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group."[34] As a category, ethnic cleansing encompasses a continuum or spectrum of policies. In the words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, "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 a population from a given territory."[35]
Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory" and as "occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end."[26]
Genocide Watch, has criticised the rise of the term and its use for events that he feels should be called "genocide": because "ethnic cleansing" has no legal definition, its media use can detract attention from events that should be prosecuted as genocide.[36][37]
As a crime under international law
There is no international treaty that specifies a specific crime of ethnic cleansing;
Preussische Treuhand v. Poland). Timothy v. Waters argues that similar ethnic cleansing could go unpunished in the future.[41]
Mutual ethnic cleansing
Mutual ethnic cleansing occurs when two groups commit ethnic cleansing against minority members of the other group within their own territories. For instance in the 1920s, Turkey expelled its Greek minority and Greece expelled its Turkish minority following the Greco-Turkish War.[42] Other examples where mutual ethnic cleansing occurred include the First Nagorno-Karabakh War[43] and the population transfers by the Soviets of Germans, Poles and Ukrainians after World War II.[44]
Causes
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943. Most Poles of Volhynia had either been murdered or had fled the area.
ethnic group. Democracy, therefore, is tied to ethnic and national forms of exclusion. Nevertheless, it is not democratic states that are more prone to commit ethnic cleansing, because minorities tend to have constitutional guarantees. Neither are stable authoritarian regimes (except the nazi and communist regimes) which are likely perpetrators of murderous ethnic cleansing, but those regimes that are in process of democratization. Ethnic hostility appears where ethnicity overshadows social classes as the primordial system of social stratification. Usually, in deeply divided societies, categories such as class and ethnicity are deeply intertwined, and when an ethnic group is seen as oppressor or exploitative of the other, serious ethnic conflict can develop. Michael Mann holds that when two ethnic groups claim sovereignty over the same territory and can feel threatened, their differences can lead to severe grievances and danger of ethnic cleansing. The perpetration of murderous ethnic cleansing tends to occur in unstable geopolitical environments and in contexts of war. As ethnic cleansing requires high levels of organisation and is usually directed by states or other authoritative powers, perpetrators are usually state powers or institutions with some coherence and capacity, not failed states as it is generally perceived. The perpetrator powers tend to get support by core constituencies that favour combinations of nationalism, statism and violence.[45]
Ethnic cleansing was prevalent during the
Age of Nationalism in Europe (19th and 20th centuries).[46][47] Multi-ethnic European engaged in ethnic cleansing against minorities in order to pre-empt their secession and the loss of territory.[46] Ethnic cleansing was particularly prevalent during periods of interstate war.[46]
Ethnic cleansing has been described as part of a continuum of violence whose most extreme form is genocide. Ethnic cleansing is similar to forced deportation or population transfer. While ethnic cleansing and genocide may share the same goal and methods (e.g., forced displacement), ethnic cleansing is intended to displace a persecuted population from a given territory, while genocide is intended to destroy a group.[48][49]
Some academics consider genocide to be a subset of "murderous ethnic cleansing".[50] As Norman Naimark writes, these concepts are different but related, for "literally and figuratively, ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as mass murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people."[51] William Schabas states "ethnic cleansing is also a warning sign of genocide to come. Genocide is the last resort of the frustrated ethnic cleanser."[48] Multiple genocide scholars have criticized distinguishing between ethnic cleansing and genocide, arguing that because both ultimately result in the destruction of a group, the use of the term "ethnic cleansing" is a form of genocide denial.[a][52][36][37]
As a military, political, and economic tactic
Croat
forces in 1993
Russian invasion of Circassia. Russian military forces massacred and forcibly deported between 95 and 97% of all native Circassians during the Circassian genocide.[53][54]
Ethnic cleansing was a common phenomenon in the wars in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This entailed intimidation,
of the unwanted ethnic group as well as the destruction of the places of worship, cemeteries and cultural and historical buildings of that ethnic group in order to alter the population composition of an area in the favour of another ethnic group which would become the majority.
According to numerous ICTY verdicts and indictments, Serb
Herzeg-Bosnia
by the Croats).
Survivors of the ethnic cleansing were left severely traumatized as a consequence of this campaign.[59]
Area C of the West Bank as a form of nationalist and economic warfare.[60][61][62]
When enforced as part of a political settlement, as happened with the
expulsion of Germans after World War II through the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans to Germany in its reduced borders after 1945, the forced population movements, constituting a type of ethnic cleansing, may contribute to long-term stability of a post-conflict nation.[63][page needed] Some justifications may be made as to why the targeted group will be moved in the conflict resolution stages, as in the case of the ethnic Germans, some individuals of the large German population in Czechoslovakia and prewar Poland had encouraged Nazi jingoism before World War II, but this was forcibly resolved.[63][page needed
]
According to historian Norman Naimark, during an ethnic cleansing process, there may be destruction of physical symbols of the victims including temples, books, monuments, graveyards, and street names: "Ethnic cleansing involves not only the forced deportation of entire nations but the eradication of the memory of their presence."[64] In many cases, the side perpetrating the alleged ethnic cleansing and its allies have fiercely disputed the charge.[clarification needed]
^ "How could ‘forced deportation’ ever be achieved without extreme coercion, indeed violence? How, indeed, could deportation not be forced? How could people not resist? How could it not involve the destruction of a community, of the way of life that a group has enjoyed over a period of time? How could those who deported a group not intend this destruction? In what significant way is the forcible removal of a population from their homeland different from the destruction’ of a group? If the boundary between ‘cleansing’ and genocide is unreal, why police it?"[52]
Notes
^ ab"Ethnic cleansing". United Nations. United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Retrieved December 20, 2020.
. Most frequently, however, the aim of ethnic cleansing is to expel the despised ethnic group through either indirect coercion or direct force, and to ensure that return is impossible. Terror is the fundamental method used to achieve this end. Methods of indirect coercion can include: introducing repressive laws and discriminatory measures designed to make minority life difficult; the deliberate failure to prevent mob violence against ethnic minorities; using surrogates to inflict violence; the destruction of the physical infrastructure upon which minority life depends; the imprisonment of male members of the ethnic group; threats to rape female members, and threats to kill. If ineffective, these indirect methods are often escalated to coerced emigration, where the removal of the ethnic group from the territory is pressured by physical force. This typically includes physical harassment and the expropriation of property. Deportation is an escalated form of direct coercion in that the forcible removal of 'undesirables' from the state's territory is organised, directed and carried out by state agents. The most serious of the direct methods, excluding genocide, is murderous cleansing, which entails the brutal and often public murder of some few in order to compel flight of the remaining group members.13 Unlike during genocide, when murder is intended to be total and an end in itself, murderous cleansing is used as a tool towards the larger aim of expelling survivors from the territory. The process can be made complete by revoking the citizenship of those who emigrate or flee.
. The Commission considered techniques of ethnic cleansing to include murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, sexual assault, confinement of civilian populations in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian populations, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property.
^The danger of overstretching the term can be avoided...The goal of ethnic cleansing is to permanently remove a group from the area it inhabits...There is a popular dimension to ethnic cleansing because there are people needed to threaten with violence, to evict homes, organize mass transports, and to prevent the return of the unwanted...The main goal of ethnic cleansing was the removal of a group from a certain territory The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History. (2012). United Kingdom: OUP Oxford.
^Joireman, Sandra Fullerton. Peace, preference, and property : return migration after violent conflict. University of Michigan. p. 49. Violent conflict changes communities. "Returnees painfully discover that in their period of absence the homeland communities and their identities have undergone transformation, and these ruptures and changes have serious implications for their ability to reclaim a sense of home upon homecoming." The first issue in terms of returning home is usually the restoration of property, specifically the return or rebuilding of homes. People want their property restored, often before they return. But home means more than property, it also refers to the nature of the community. Anthropological literature emphasizes that time and the experience of violence changes people's sense of home and desire to return, and the nature of their communities of origin. To sum up, previous research has identified factors that influence decisions to return: time, trauma, family characteristics and economic opportunities.
^Thum 2010, p. 75: way. Despite its euphemistic character and its origin in the language of the perpetrators, 'ethnic cleansing' is now the widely accepted scholarly term used to describe the systematic and violent removal of undesired ethnic groups from a given territory.
. 'Ethnic cleansing' is probably better described as a popular or journalistic expression, with no recognized legal meaning in a technical sense... 'ethnic cleansing' is equivalent to deportation,' a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions as well as a crime against humanity, and therefore a crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal.
. The thesis being proposed here is that the Armenian Genocide was not implemented solely as demographic engineering, but also as destruction and annihilation, and that the 5 to 10 percent principle was decisive in achieving this goal. Care was taken so that the number of Armenians deported to Syria, and those who remained behind, would not exceed 5 to 10 percent of the population of the places in which they were found. Such a result could be achieved only through annihilation... According to official Ottoman statistics, it was necessary to reduce the prewar population of 1.3 million Armenians to approximately 200,000.
. The concept seems to have been borrowed from the Slavic expression etnicheskoye chishcheniye, first used by Soviet authorities in the 1980s to describe Azeri attempts to expel Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh area, and then immediately reappropriated by Serb nationalists to describe their policies in the central region of Yugoslavia.
^Cox, Caroline. "Nagorno Karabakh: Forgotten People in a Forgotten War."Contemporary Review 270 (1997): 8–13: "These operations were part of a policy designated `Operation Ring, comprising the proposed ethnic cleansing (a word used in relation to Azerbaijan's policy before it became familiar to the world in the context of the former Yugoslavia) of all Armenians from their ancient homeland of Karabakh."
^"Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 780 (1992)"(PDF). United Nations Security Council. May 27, 1994. p. 33. Archived from the original on May 14, 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2020. Upon examination of reported information, specific studies and investigations, the Commission confirms its earlier view that 'ethnic cleansing' is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent, it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances and a powerful driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion of the purged group or groups. This policy and the practices of warring factions are described separately in the following paragraphs. Paragraph 130.
^[1]Archived May 3, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, Mann, Michael (2005), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ch. 1 "The Argument," pp. 1–33.
Lieberman, Benjamin (2010). "'Ethnic cleansing' versus genocide?". In Bloxham, Donald; Moses, A. Dirk (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford University Press.
. Explaining the relationship between ethnic cleansing and genocide has caused controversy. Ethnic cleansing shares with genocide the goal of achieving purity but the two can differ in their ultimate aims: ethnic cleansing seeks the forced removal of an undesired group or groups where genocide pursues the group's 'destruction'. Ethnic cleansing and genocide therefore fall along a spectrum of violence against groups with genocide lying on the far end of the spectrum.
. When murder itself becomes the primary goal, it is typically called genocide... Ethnic cleansing is probably best understood as occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end. Given this continuum, there will always be ambiguity as to when ethnic cleansing shades into genocide
. The crime of genocide is aimed at the intentional destruction of an ethnic group. 'Ethnic cleansing' would seem to be targeted at something different, the expulsion of a group with a view to encouraging or at least tolerating its survival elsewhere. Yet ethnic cleansing may well have the effect of rendering the continued existence of a group impossible, thereby effecting its destruction. In other words, forcible deportation may achieve the same result as extermination camps.
Walling, Carrie Booth (2000). "The history and politics of ethnic cleansing". The International Journal of Human Rights. 4 (3–4): 47–66.
. These methods are a part of a wider continuum ranging from genocide at one extreme to emigration under pressure at the other... It is important - politically and legally - to distinguish between genocide and ethnic cleansing. The goal of the former is extermination: the complete annihilation of an ethnic, national or racial group. It contains both a physical element (acts such as murder) and a mental element (those acts are undertaken to destroy, in whole or in part, the said group). Ethnic cleansing involves population expulsions, sometimes accompanied by murder, but its aim is consolidation of power over territory, not the destruction of a complete people.
. A new term was needed because ethnic cleansing and genocide two different activities, and the differences between them are important. As in the case of determining first-degree murder, intentionality is a critical distinction. Genocide is the intentional killing off of part or all of an ethnic, religious, or national group; the murder of a people or peoples (in German, Völkermord) is the objective. The intention of ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory. The goal, in other words, is to get rid of the "alien" nationality, ethnic, or religious group and to seize control of the territory it had formerly inhabited. At one extreme of its spectrum, ethnic cleansing is closer to forced deportation or what has been called "population transfer"; the idea is to get people to move, and the means are meant to be legal and semi-legal. At the other extreme, however, ethnic cleansing and genocide are distinguishable only by the ultimate intent. Here, both literally and figuratively, ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as mass murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people.
. Hitler wanted the Jews utterly exterminated, not simply driven from particular places. Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, involves removals rather than extermination and is not exceptional but rather common in particular circumstances.
^"Tadic Case: The Verdict". Archived from the original on October 14, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2023. Importantly, the objectives remained the same: to create an ethnically pure Serb State by uniting Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and extending that State from the FRY [...] to the Croatian Krajina along the important logistics and supply line that went through opstina Prijedor, thereby necessitating the expulsion of the non-Serb population of the opstina.
^"Prosecutor v. Jadranko Prlic, Bruno Stojic, Slobodan Praljak, Milivoj Petkovic, Valentin Coric and Berislav Pusic"(PDF). Archived(PDF) from the original on September 5, 2021. Retrieved February 8, 2023. Significantly, the Trial Chamber held that a reasonable Trial Chamber, could make a finding beyond any reasonable doubt that all of these acts were committed to carry out a plan aimed at changing the ethnic balance of the areas that formed Herceg-Bosna and mainly to deport the Muslim population and other non-Croat population out of Herceg-Bosna to create an ethnically pure Croatian territory within Herceg-Bosna.
Weine, Stevan M.; Becker, Daniel F.; Vojvoda, Dolores; Hodzic, Emir (1998). "Individual change after genocide in Bosnian survivors of "ethnic cleansing": Assessing personality dysfunction".
Dahbour, Omar (2012). "National Rights, Minority Rights, and Ethnic Cleansing". Nationalism and Human Rights: In Theory and Practice in the Middle East, Central Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan US. pp. 97–122.
