ETHNIC CLEANSING  (© Stuart D Stein. To be published in Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies, edited by Ellis Cashmore, Routledge, 2003)  

   Broadly, refers to a policy of forced population movement to render a geopolitical locality homogeneous in relation to ethnicity. As with many concepts employed in the field of race and ethnic relations, the terminology is of more recent derivation than the practices it designates.  The term first began to be extensively deployed during the wars that accompanied the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, particularly in connection with the warfare and attendant ethnic/religious violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, 1991-1995, and later in connection with the conflict in Kosovo, 1999. A Commission of Experts established by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to enquire into “grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia,” referred in its report of April 1994 to 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. 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.” (http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/III-IV_D.htm#III.B)

   Ethnic cleansing is a sub-type of population cleansing, one that involves the forcible removal of members of an ethnic group from a particular locality. In terms of the orientation and motivations of its perpetrators, and their interactions with victims, it is conceptually difficult at times to demarcate entirely satisfactorily ethnicity, religion, nationality, and culture in connection with forced population movements. Many of the underlying factors associated with ethnic cleansings are common to the motivational, etiological and interactive contexts of other types of cleansings, as in those where the demarcation lines are drawn on the basis of religion, culture or nationality.  Similarly, ethnic cleansings can be associated with other policies designed to disempower and discriminate against targeted populations, in some instances being associated with mass killings, rape and torture.  In extreme instances these policies shade into genocides.

   Bell-Fialkoff suggests that it is fruitful to view such population transfers in the context of a continuum. At one end of this is emigration, which may or may not be encouraged by state polices involving the creation of a negative climate conducive to the attainment of such an objective. Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1939, created a climate that encouraged many of its Jewish inhabitants to leave, and established bureaucratic procedures to expedite this.  The violence that accompanied the partition of India and Pakistan encouraged mass migrations in both directions. The next node on the continuum is the exchange of populations, such as those that occurred between Greece and Turkey in the years 1920-23.   Toward the middle point of the continuum are situated transfers of populations under pressure, deportations or expulsions, such as those that were directed at Ugandan Asians in the 1960s, and Kosovar Albanians in the late nineties. At the other end of the continuum Bell-Fialkoff situates genocide. It is, however, necessary to view such a continuum as a useful classificatory mnemonic rather than as an accurate representation of contiguous underlying realities.  Although emigration, population exchanges, deportations, expulsions and genocide may all achieve the cleansing of a particular locality from an undesired population group differentiated by some trait, it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable to contend that there may be qualitative differences between achieving this objective by way of their physical relocation, and policies designed to secure the destruction of the group in whole or in part.

   Many examples of population cleansings from all eras can be cited. In antiquity the Assyrians allegedly resettled millions of subjects in conquered territories, during 883-859 BC and 669-627 BC. In 146 B.C. the Romans, having laid siege to the city of Carthage for three years, razed it to the ground and prohibited any of its former inhabitants who survived from returning. It is presumed that they were exiled and enslaved. Similarly, the wars between the Romans and the Jews, in 66-70 AD, the Great Jewish War, and during 132-35 AD, the Bar Kochba revolt, were accompanied by the displacement of nearly the entire Jewish population from its settled lands.

   In medieval and early modern Europe, the cleansing of religious groups from various lands was not unusual. Bell-Fialkoff suggests that the modern notion of cleansing can be derived from the medieval dichotomy of religious purity/impurity: “The impure, by the very logic of such a Manichean dichotomy, have to be banished.  It was therefore natural that nationalism, with its strong religious and messianic components…would display the same tendency toward (self-) cleansing and (self-) purification.”

  Many large-scale twentieth-century cleansings have been associated with wars and their aftermath. The Balkan wars of 1912-13 were characterised by massacres and expulsions on both sides, designed in part to legitimise claims for territory based on the ethnic homogeneity of their inhabitants. At their conclusion, the terms of the Turkish-Bulgarian Convention, 1913, allowed for population exchanges of 48,570 Turks and 46,764 Bulgarians from the frontier zones. As Martin notes, “the populations concerned had already been expelled and the treaty served only to formalize the expulsions and regulate property claims.”(p.818) Population exchanges were also one of the consequences of the successful resistance of the Turks to the Greek invasion of 1919. The Treaty of Lausanne, 1923, formalized the expulsion from the Aegean area of Turkey of a million Greeks, the forcible expulsion of Turkey’s remaining Greek population, as well as that of Greece’s Turkish population.

   During World War II Germany engaged in an abortive demographic experiment, transferring Volksdeutsche from recently conquered areas to that part of Poland annexed to the Reich, the Warthegau, and banishing Poles, both Christians and Jews, to that part of Poland known as the General Gouvernement, in the quest for an ingathering of all racially pure Germans to the Reich. Although the policies were never fully implemented due to the containment of German advances on the eastern front, by October 1941 some 1.3 million Christian and Jewish Poles had been relocated eastwards, whereas some 1.25 million Germans from Eastern Europe and the Reich had been resettled in their place.

   The defeat of the Reich was accompanied by a demographic tidying operation, in which between 10 and 14 million Germans were removed from countries of Eastern Europe. These expulsions had been authorised under the terms of Article XIII of the Protocol of the Potsdam Conference, which allowed for the transfer of the eastern Germans to what remained of the Reich.    Some 2.5 million were expelled from Czechoslovakia, 3 million from Poland, 500,000 from Yugoslavia, and smaller numbers from Hungary, Romania and elsewhere. Other millions fled to the Western part of Germany to escape the clutches of the advancing Soviet armies. Although Article XIII of the Potsdam Protocol had stipulated that the removals were to be conducted in an orderly and humane fashion, this was far from being the case, particularly in the early phases. Germans were often given only moment’s notice to move to the railway stations, without any opportunity for collecting belongings, including warm clothing. Trains arrived in Berlin with cattle cars full of dead adults and children.

   Population relocations have characterised more recent wars as well, both international and internal. In the course of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, during the nineteen nineties, both Serbs and Croats implemented policies designed to achieve ethnic homogeneity in particular localities.  The Croats banished Serbs from the Krajina salient, and the Serbs forced the flight of millions of Muslims through calculated policies of terror, rape and massacre, as well as by forcibly deporting them from recently conquered territories. The Israeli authorities, on a much smaller scale, have deported Palestinians from the Occupied West Bank to the Gaza Strip, and to Lebanon.  During the course of the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in the nineteen-eighties, the Israeli authorities were also instrumental in securing the deportation of large numbers of Palestinians to Tunisia and the flight of undesired Arab populations from Lebanese border regions.

  Population relocations on a large scale were undertaken in the USSR during the nineteen-thirties and in the course of World War II, and have also occurred in some of the successor states. Armenians have been expelled from Azerbaijan, and Azeris, in turn, from Armenia. Ethnic Russians have felt pressurised to relocate to Russia. The formation of many other states during the twentieth century, or the galvanisation of their populations around notions of ethnic interest or purity, have been accompanied by forced cleansings of targeted outgroups. The partition of India was accompanied by the flight of millions on both sides, encouraged by widespread massacres, burnings, and property confiscations and looting. The partition of Cyprus also resulted in the unmixing of ethnic groups. In Rwanda, in 1994, the desire for ethnic homogeneity led to the mass killings of some 800,000 Tutsi and non-compliant Hutu. Although generally characterised as genocide, it was at the same time an ethic cleansing, this constituting a pre-eminent underlying motive.

 Reading

Ethnic Cleansing by Andrew Bell-Fialkoff (St Martin’s Press, 1996) provides a broad historical overview.

Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe by Norman M Naimark (Harvard University Press, 2002) includes discussion of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Soviet expulsions of the Chechen-Ingush and the Crimean Tartars, expulsions following the Second World War, and the ethnic cleansings accompanying the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East, 3^rd Edition,  by Alfred M De Zayas (University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

“Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Population Transfers” by R M Hayden (in Slavic Review, Vol. 55, No. 4, 1996) focuses on conceptual issues in the context of the expulsions of Germans following the Second World War and the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia.

“The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” by T Martin (in Jnl. of Modern History, Vol. 70, No.4, 1998)