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Ethnic cleansing

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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. In broader definitions it is effectively a synonym of population transfer.

Synonyms include sectarian revenge and ethnic purification and (in the French versions of some UN documents) nettoyage ethnique and épuration ethnique.<ref>Drazen Petrovic, "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology", European Journal of International Law, Vol. No. 3. Retrieved 20 May 2006.</ref>

Contents

Definitions

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

[E]thnic 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 an "undesirable" population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.<ref>Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing", Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 110, Summer 1993. Retrieved 20 May 2006.</ref>

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:

[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. Such a policy involves violence and is very often connected with military operations. It is to be achieved by all possible means, from discrimination to extermination, and entails violations of human rights and international humanitarian law."<ref>Petrovic, "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology", op. cit.</ref>

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/). (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, IPA /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 1981, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration creating an "ethnically clean" territory (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province<ref>Marvine Howe in the New York Times (July 12, 1981), quoting an Albanian official in Kosovo</ref>. 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 [...].<ref>Pavelicpapers.com</ref> 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.<ref>Pavelicpapers.com</ref>

Some time later, 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. 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.<ref>The Moljevic Memorandum</ref>

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. The process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941, 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). (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. The campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. The tactic was used by Croatian, Muslim Bosnian and Serbian 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]

As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant advantages and disadvantages. It enables a force to eliminate civilian support for resistance by eliminating the civilians — in a reversal of Mao Zedong's dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it drains 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[citation needed]. 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[citation needed]. It thus establishes "facts on the ground" - radical demographic changes which can be very hard to reverse[citation needed]. But this does not concern the treatment of the inhabitants of Historical Eastern Germany.[citation needed]

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.<ref> 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.</ref> 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)<ref>Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7; Updated Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Article 5.</ref>. 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.<ref>Daphna Shraga and Ralph Zacklin "The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia", The European Journal of International Law Vol. 15 no.3 (2004).</ref>

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.<ref>A/RES/47/80 ""Ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred" United Nations. 12/16/1992. Retrieved on 2006, 09-03</ref>


Silent Ethnic Cleansing

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Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

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. [citation needed]

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).

Instances of ethnic cleansing

Early instances

Colonial period

  • 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<ref> JACKSON, William (1990): The Rock of the Gibraltarians. A History of Gibraltar. Gibraltar Books, 2nd edition. Grendon, Northamptonshire, UK. ISBN . General Sir William Jackson was Governor of Gibraltar between 1978 and 1982, a military Historian and former Chairman of the Friends of Gibraltar Heritage.</ref>
  • 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. The Trail of Tears, which led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 Cherokees from disease, and the Long Walk of the Navajo are well-known examples. <ref>Perdue, Theda, Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500-1850, p. 526, (Routledge (UK), 2000)</ref> <ref>Committee on Indian Affairs, US Senate, Cherokee Settlement and Accommodation Agreements Concerning the Navajo and Hopi Land Dispute, (US General Printing Office, 1996)</ref>[Quote from source requested on talk page to verify interpretation of source]
  • Expulsion of Turkish, Muslim, and Jewish populations from Balkans following the independence of Balkan countries (e.g., Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria) from Ottoman Empire from early 1800s to early 1900.<ref>Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, (Princeton, N.J: Darwin Press, c1995</ref>

20th century

21st century

  • Attacks by the Janjaweed Arabs, Muslim militias of Sudan on the non-Arab African Muslim population of Darfur, a region of western Sudan. <ref> Collins, Robert O., "Civil Wars and Revolution in the Sudan: Essays on the Sudan, Southern Sudan, and Darfur, 1962-2004

", (p. 156), Tsehai Publishers (US), (2005) ISBN 0-9748198-7-5 .</ref><ref>Power, Samantha "Dying in Darfur: Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped?"[1], The New Yorker, 30 August 2004. Human Rights Watch, "Q & A: Crisis in Darfur" (web site, retrieved 24 May 2006). Hilary Andersson, "Ethnic cleansing blights Sudan", BBC News, 27 May 2004.</ref>

"Borders=Ethnic Cleansing?", FrontPage Magazine, 30 August 2005.</ref>

See also

Notes

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References

  • Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew (1993). "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing". Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 110. [2]
  • Petrovic, Drazen (1994). "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology". European Journal of International Law 5 (1): 359. [3]

External links

et:Etniline puhastus es:Limpieza étnica fr:Nettoyage ethnique ko:민족청소 it:Pulizia etnica he:טיהור אתני nl:Etnische zuivering ja:民族浄化 no:Etnisk rensning ru:Этнические чистки sr:Етничко чишћење fi:Etninen puhdistus sv:Etnisk rensning tr:Etnik temizlik uk:Етнічна чистка zh:种族清洗

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