Ethnic Cleansing, Wars, and Conflicts

Characterizing Ethnic Cleansing

The term ethnic cleansing became popularized during the early 1990s in relation to the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, of the former Yugoslavia. Conflicting parties employed systematic destruction of villages, tactics of intimidation, rape, and murder to eliminate opposing parties. The resulting environment was so coercive and terrifying that the target population had no alternative but to flee or be forcedly removed. The culmination of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan War was the complete extermination of the Krajina population in 1995. During this conflict, over 200,000 Muslim civilians were murdered, and two million fled as refugees before North American Treaty Organization forces intervened to halt the genocide, as it was later deemed.

The spectrum of atrocities that fall under the umbrella of ethnic cleansing are numerous and lie on a continuum. At one end, ethnic cleansing is the psychological degradation of a marginalized population. At the opposing end, ethnic cleansing is indistinguishable from acts of genocide. Ethnic cleansing is forced emigration, with or without physical violence. However, subtle offenses, including policies that make it difficult for a specific group to exist within a population, also constitute ethnic cleansing. As an example, the former Hungarian policy of Magyarization produced a psychology of ethnic inferiority among Slovaks, forcing their assimilation into Hungarian culture. Conversely, policies of inaction, such as not providing vital infrastructure or social support programs in areas occupied by an unwanted ethnic group, represent ethnic cleansing. Systematic deportation or the forced removal of an ethnically defined population or its children is the next step in the continuum.

The deportation of ethnic Koreans from the Vladivostok region of the Soviet Union to unpopulated areas of Kazakhstan during 1937 represents such an example. More violent acts of forced expulsion, as witnessed by the Meskhetian Turks by Uzbeks in 1989, border the designation of genocide. Ethnic cleansing, though not synonymous with genocide, does include forced removal characterized by systematic murder, such as the Hutu massacre of over one million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

There is an important distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide. Forced relocations and mass killings, depending on which definition is used, may fall into one or both of these categories. Ethnic cleansing generally entails the systematic and forced removal of members of an ethnic group from their communities to change the ethnic composition of a region, regardless of the manner in which populations are removed. Genocide is simply murderous ethnic cleansing. The definition of genocide was formalized during the 1948 Convention for the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It is any of the following acts committed to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: killing members of that group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births in that group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another.

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