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For the video game, see Ethnic Cleansing (computer game).
Ethnic cleansing refers to various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory in order to create a supposedly ethnically "pure" society. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia. Its typical usage was developed in the Balkans, to be a less objectionable code-word meaning genocide, but its intent was to best avoid the obvious pitfalls of longstanding international treaty laws prohibiting war crimes.
Synonyms include sectarian revenge[citation needed] and ethnic purification and (in the French versions of some UN documents) nettoyage ethnique and épuration ethnique.Drazen Petrovic, "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology", European Journal of International Law, Vol. No. 3. Retrieved 20 May 2006.
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The term ethnic cleansing has been variously defined. In the many words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:
Drazen Petrovic has distinguished between broad and narrow definitions. 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:
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"Hayden, Robert M. (1996) Schindler\'s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers. Slavic Review 55 (4), 727-48.
However, ethnic cleansing rarely aims at complete ethnic homogeneity. The common practice is the removal of stigmatized ethnic groups, and thus can be defined as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory", occupying the middle part of a somewhat fuzzy continuum between nonviolet pressured ethnic emigration and genocide.Martin, Terry (1998). The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing. The Journal of Modern History 70 (4), 813-861.
In reviewing the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Bosnian Genocide Case in the judgement of Jorgic v. Germany on 12 July 2007 the European Court of Human Rights selectively quoted from the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian Genocide Case to explain that ethnic cleansing was not enough on its own to establish that a genocide had occurred:
The term \'ethnic cleansing\' has frequently been employed to refer to the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are the subject of this case ... General Assembly resolution 47/121 referred in its Preamble to \'the abhorrent policy of \'ethnic cleansing\', which is a form of genocide\', as being carried on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ... It [i.e. ethnic cleansing] can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the [Genocide] Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area “ethnically homogeneous”, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterizes genocide is “to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement. This is not to say that acts described as \'ethnic cleansing\' may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, \'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part\', contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region. As the ICTY has observed, while \'there are obvious similarities between a genocidal policy and the policy commonly known as \'ethnic cleansing\' \' (Krstić, IT-98-33-T, Trial Chamber Judgment, 2 August 2001, para. 562), yet \'[a] clear distinction must be drawn between physical destruction and mere dissolution of a group. The expulsion of a group or part of a group does not in itself suffice for genocide. ...
The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a loan translation of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian phrase etničko čišćenje (pronounced [etnitʃko tʃiʃtʃʲeɲe]).[dubious] 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, [tʃiʃtʃʲeɲe terena]) of enemies to take total control of a conquered area. The origins of this doctrine are unclear, but may have been a legacy of the Partizan era.
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 as early as 1982, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration creating an "ethnically clean" territory (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province.Marvine Howe in the New York Times (July 12, 1982), quoting an Albanian official in Kosovo However, this usage had antecedents.
One of the earliest usages 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 [...].Pavelicpapers.com The Ustaše did carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide of Serbs in Croatia during the Second World War and sometimes used the term "cleansing" to describe it.Pavelicpapers.com
Some time later, on 30 June, 1941, Stevan Moljević, a lawyer from Banja Luka who was an ideologue of the Chetniks, published a booklet with the title On Our State and Its Borders. Moljević assessed the circumstances in the following manner: One must take the opportunity of the war conditions and at a suitable moment take hold of the territory marked on the map, cleanse [očistiti] it before anybody notices and with strong battalions occupy the key places (...) and the territory surrounding these cities, freed of non-Serb elements. 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 Moljevic Memorandum
The term "cleansing", more specificly the Russian term "cleansing of borders", ochistka granits (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. The process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941, involving many other ethnicities with cross-border ties to foreign nation-states, see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union and Population transfer in the Soviet Union.
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. racial hygiene).
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. The campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. The tactic was used by Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Serb forces. 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.[citation needed]
In 1993, during the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, armed Abkhaz separatist insurgency confronted with large population of ethnic Georgians implemented the tactic of ethnic cleansing directed against ethnic Georgians (which made the majority of the population) of Abkhazia. US State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993, Abkhazia case As the results, more than 250,000 ethnic Georgians were forced to flee and approximately 30,000 people were killed during separate incidents involving massacres and expulsion. (see Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia) Chervonnaia, Svetlana Mikhailovna. Conflict in the Caucasus: Georgia, Abkhazia, and the Russian Shadow. Gothic Image Publications, 1994. S State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993, February 1994, Chapter 17.
As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant impact. It enables a force to eliminate civilian support for resistance by eliminating the civilians — recognizing Mao Zedong\'s dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it disables the fish by draining the water. 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 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Penguin Press, 2005. . 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 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Penguin Press, 2005. . 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 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.
Armenian civilians, being cleansed from their homeland during the Armenian Genocide.
There is no formal legal definition of ethnic cleansing. Ward Ferdinandusse, [http://www.ejil.org/journal/Vol15/No5/9.pdf The Interaction of National and International Approaches in the Repression of International Crimes], The European Journal of International Law Vol. 15 no.5 (2004), p. 1042, note 7. 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).Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7; Updated Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Article 5. 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.Daphna Shraga and Ralph Zacklin "The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia", The European Journal of International Law Vol. 15 no.3 (2004).
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. Furthermore ... such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." The UN General Assembly condemned "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution.A/RES/47/80 ""Ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred" United Nations. 12/16/1992. Retrieved on 2006, 09-03
There are however situations, such as the Expulsion of Germans after World War II, where ethnic cleansing has taken place without legal redress. Timothy V. Waters argues that if similar circumstances arise in the future, this precedent would allow the ethnic cleansing of other populations under international law.Timothy V. Waters, On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing, Paper 951, 2006, University of Mississippi School of Law. Retrieved on 2006, 12-13
Silent ethnic cleansing is a term coined in the mid-1990s by some observers of the Yugoslav wars. Apparently concerned with Western-media representations of atrocities committed in the conflict — which generally focused on those perpetrated by the Serbs — atrocities committed against Serbs were dubbed "silent", on the grounds that they were not receiving adequate coverage. Krauthammer, Charles: "When Serbs Are \'Cleansed,\' Moralists Stay Silent", International Herald Tribune, 12 August 1995
Since that time, the term has been used by other ethnically oriented groups for situations that they perceive to be similar — examples include both sides in Northern Ireland\'s continuing troubles, and those who object to the expulsion of ethnic Germans from former German territories during and after World War II.
Some observers, however, assert that the term should only be used to denote population changes that do not occur as the result of overt violent action, or at least not from more or less organized aggression - the absence of such stressors being the very factor that makes it "silent" (although some form of coercion must logically exist).
This section lists incidents that have been termed "ethnic cleansing" by some academic or legal experts. Not all experts agree on every case; nor do all the claims necessarily follow definitions given in this article. Where claims of ethnic cleansing originate from non-experts (e.g., journalists or politicians) this is noted.
