Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic cleansing, as a deliberate process of murdering minority groups of people so that land and/or wealth may be wrongfully taken, is probably as old as human history. It has been perpetrated in the name of nationalism and patriotism for centuries, but according to the David Levinson, the term ethnic cleansing seeped into the contemporary vernacular around 1988, when it was first used in reference to a localized conflict in Azerbaijan. There, local Azeris in Ngorno-Karabakh were “cleansing” the area of Armenians. The term received international exposure in 1992 when journalists cited the phrase to describe atrocities perpetrated in the devolving state of Yugoslavia, where culturally dominate Serbs “cleansed” various areas of Serbia of Muslim minority Bosnians and Croats. According to some reports, the Serbian-controlled ...