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 Yugoslavia military drove 700,000 ethnic minorities from their homes in Bosnia, forcibly relocated another 600,000 persons, killed an unknown number, perhaps in the tens of thousands, and dumped their bodies in mass and unmarked graves.

The Serbs resurrected the tactic of mass rape of women as a tool of ethnic terror. In some places, virtual concentration camps were established in which Muslim girls and women were imprisoned and systematically and routinely raped by groups of Serbian soldiers, police, and other officials as a method of breaking down minority resistance to the Serbs, and as a way of demoralizing the confined. Simultaneously, while the women were herded into camps, men and boys between the ages of 15 and 50 were dragged from homes and taken in groups of differing sizes to a variety of locations and never seen again, leading many international investigators to look for forensic remains in mass graves, some of which were detected only by satellite photographs.

The most egregious and notorious example of ethnic cleansing surfaced in the 20th century, with the Nazi practice during World War II of targeting Jews, gypsies, the mentally deficient, and physically infirm for government-sponsored and systematic extermination. The killing of more than 6 million persons, confined and executed in concentration camps, stands as an indelible indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

The Armenian genocide in World War I similarly stands as a particularly odious episode. The Turks of the Ottoman Empire, allied with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in fighting the British and the French, killed approximately 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, as a way of securing eastern Turkey as a Muslim state at the expense of the Christian (Greek Orthodox) Armenians.

Ethnic cleansing has been responsible for the elimination of entire tribes and/or ethnic groups of people. Biblical writers recount episodes of Israelite and Philistine massacres, and Roman legions had few qualms about annihilating groups of opposing civilians. Spanish conquistadors savaged indigenous Andean tribes in their pursuit of imperial treasure, and American settlers pushing westward, backed by the technology of the U.S. Army, did not hesitate to permanently remove Native Americans from lands the settlers wished to occupy. In the 1960s, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled all Ugandans of South Asian origin from Uganda and effectively “cleansed” Uganda of non-Africans.

William A. Schabas's monumental work Genocide in International Law cites conventions and treaties that protect minorities and endangered persons. The word genocide comes from the Greek word for group or tribe (genos) and the Latin word for killing (cide). Under the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, there are five definitional distinctions, [Page 149]meaning that any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethic, racial, or religious group constitutes genocide, genocidal actions, or ethnic

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