Ethnic Cleansing

The elimination of an ethnic or religious population by mass slaughter or forced expulsion. The term ethnic cleansing was first used during the Bosnian conflict in 1991 to refer to the killing and forced migration of Bosniacs, or Bosnian Muslims, in the newly independent nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Serbians and Bosnian Serbs. In response to the crisis in Bosnia, the UN General Assembly in 1992 announced its position that ethnic cleansing would be considered a form of genocide.

Although the phrase ethnic cleansing was not used prior to the 1990s, the phenomenon was not new. The genocide of six million European Jews during World War II is the most glaring example of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century, though not the first. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, episodes of ethnic cleansing have occurred in southeastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia and was recognized by the European community and the United States, Serbia and the Bosnian Serb minority launched a massive attack on the Bosniac majority. During this assault, a million Bosnians were forced from their homes and more than 100,000 Bosniacs were slaughtered. The goal of Serbia was to remove the Bosnian Muslim population from Bosnia. The United Nations was able to dispense humanitarian aid, but it was ineffective in bringing about a peaceful settlement. The United States and the European community, through their NATO alliance, decided not to become involved. President George H. W. Bush was also reluctant to intervene, declaring that the Bosnian conflict was strictly a European concern.

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President Bill Clinton in the summer of 1999 with an Albanian refugee girl who fled ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. Clinton had been visiting refugees while at an economic summit meeting in Europe. During the strife that raged in the Balkan region of Kosovo in the late 1990s, the Serbs engaged in numerous instances of ethnic cleansing, or mass killings, against ethnic Albanians. Bosnian Muslims also experienced ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Serbs earlier in the decade.

President Bill Clinton did not involve the United States in the Bosnian conflict during his first two years in office (1993–1994), although several times he threatened to order U.S. bombings of Serbian positions to halt the bloodshed. In August 1995, however, Clinton ordered air strikes following Bosnian Serb attacks in July on two UN-established refuges that killed 17,000 Bosniacs. In November, the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, an uneasy truce between the warring parties in the region, led to a U.S. commitment to send 20,000 troops to lead a NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

During the height of the U.S.-Bosnian intervention, President Clinton declared that the United States must become involved, if only to a limited extent, to prevent the Bosnian conflict from developing into a larger war. On another occasion, Clinton stated that the United States would intervene in cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout the world.

In practice, however, the United States did not uniformly adhere to this policy. In 1994, in the African nation of Rwanda, the United States did not become involved when approximately 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army. President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later admitted that they regretted the decision not to become involved.

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