Ethnic Cleansing

First widely recognized in the 1990s during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the term ethnic cleansing has been defined as the forced removal, through violence and intimidation, of an ethnic group from a particular territory. Ethnic cleansing features in campaigns employed by diverse groups or perpetrators, ranging from official forces under the command of a government to irregular formations and paramilitaries.

In state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, official units deployed by a state or government remove targeted groups in acts of forced migration. In a second type, paramilitaries, militias, and armed bands drive out victimized groups. These two types of ethnic cleansing can overlap, but they also tend to deploy terror in different ways. Irregular forces rely more on extremely violent acts of terror, while state authorities in many instances seek to use a show of overwhelming power to quell all resistance to forced migration.

Armed bands that carry out ethnic cleansing typically employ methods that many would define as terror. These include arson attacks carried out against homes and businesses, assassinations and massacres, and rape. This style of terror dehumanizes victims and stems at least in part from the very status of irregular forces as self-constituted groupings that lack official sanction. Without any other source of authority to compel an unwanted population to leave, irregular forces make terror a central instrument of ethnic cleansing.

State-sponsored ethnic cleansing, in comparison, takes a more organized form when official state forces deport unwanted groups. Though armies are sometimes directly involved, internal security forces or police more commonly undertake such actions. These units commonly arrive at an area and tell members of an unwanted group that they must leave very shortly. The threat of force is omnipresent, but the units involved may hold back from direct violence or employ terror selectively. Should a show of overwhelming force backed by state power fail to motivate the targets of cleansing to comply with orders to vacate their homes quickly, acts of terror similar to those employed by irregular or paramilitary forces are used to accelerate the departure of the targeted group.

State-sponsored ethnic cleansing has taken place in the swiftest fashion under powerful states, [Page 188]including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Soviet security forces were particularly noteworthy for collecting and moving targeted populations with extraordinary speed. During World War II, Stalin unleashed such ethnic-cleansing operations against minorities that he saw as disloyal in the war against Nazi Germany. In particular, Stalinist ethnic cleansing targeted religious minorities, including many from the Caucasus region, including Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Meskhetian Turks, and Kalmyks, and Soviet security forces also expelled Tatars from the Crimea. In operations that took only days, a Soviet policing organization called the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (known by its Russian acronym, NKVD) surrounded villages and dispatched the targeted group into trucks, from which they were transported east in trains. NKVD agents carried out both isolated shootings and more widespread massacres, but they reported relatively little immediate resistance in the face of overwhelming force. However, large numbers of people died from hunger, disease, and exposure during transit or resettlement in areas of Central Asia.

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