Ethnic Cleansing

THE IDEA OF ETHNIC CLEANSING, of physically removing a targeted human population group either by genocide or forced migration, has existed since the dawn of recorded history. Though the United Nations debated in the early 2000s definitions of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the concept of removing an undesired population has been used by both leftist and rightist rulers, as evidenced by the policies of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. However, ethnic cleansing has been most apparent on the right side of politics, as it has been an extreme facet of fascism, nationalism, and totalitarianism.

The roots of ethnic cleansing can be seen as early as 586 b.c.e.: In the second siege of Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon ended the problem of continued Hebrew resistance to Babylonian rule by effectively [Page 631]transplanting the entire city population to his capital city. This was the period of Hebrew history known as the Babylonian captivity. In 538 b.c.e., after his capture of the city, Cyrus the Great of the Persians permitted the Hebrews to leave the “waters of Babylon” to depart for their ancestral home again.

However, not all such examples of ethnic cleansing were so benign. In the 1580s, during the British conquest of southwest Ireland, Munster, a purposeful campaign seems to have been undertaken to remove the native Irish population and make room for the “Plantation” of the country by English adventurers. Richard Berleth writes in The Twilight Lords: An Irish Chronicle of how the English commander William Pelham admitted that “we consumed with fire all inhabitants and executed the people wherever we found them.” These depredations made the region a traditional hotbed against British authority in Ireland.

In modern times, ethnic cleansing was seen in a stark way during World War II in the Soviet Union. When faced with the massive German invasion of June 1941, Soviet Premier Josef Stalin reverted to the harsh tactics of Tzar Ivan the Terrible in the 15th century. Entire populations were deported east to Siberia from homelands where they had lived for centuries, including Germans who had come to Russia to help modernize the country in the reign of Peter the Great (1689–1725), Crimean Tartars, and other ethnic groups deemed disloyal in the Great Patriotic War. It was not until Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power following the death of Stalin in March 1953 that many of these people were allowed to return home. But thousands died in Stalin's ethnic cleansing campaign. Indeed, the insurrection in Chechnya in the 2000s has its roots in the sufferings of the Muslim Chechens in World War II at the hands of Stalin's brutal NKVD secret police and his Red Army.

Undoubtedly, the most horrific example of ethnic cleansing in modern times was the concerted attempt by Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to erase the Jewish population in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” In what became known as the Holocaust, nearly 6 million Jews were uprooted in Europe by the Nazis and regimes of collaborators in countries like Romania, Hungary, France, and the Netherlands and sent to concentration camps or outright extermination camps, according to Edward Cranshaw in Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny. (Genocide may be the more applicable term for the Holocaust, though the Nazi mission was to cleanse the ethnicity of the Aryan race via genocide of the Jews and other “undesirables.”) In the Nazi SS, as Cranshaw wrote, Reinhard Heydrich “was formally in charge of the ‘final solution,’ and [it was Adolf] Eichmann and his subordinates who rounded up the Jews and arranged for their delivery to the gas chambers.” The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after the war was the first instance in which perpetrators of such war crimes were tried, according to the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal, for “violations of war or the customs of war.”

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