>> GENEALOG File:  ethnic-c   (ethnic-cleansing)
>>
>> From dsinc.dsi.com!cdin-1!icdi10.compu.com!fr Mon Jul 19 23:44:23 1993
>> From: fr@icdi10.compu.com (Fred Rump from home)
 
>> > >From: dbd@urartu.sdpa.org (David Davidian)
> >Subject: _A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing_
> >Organization: S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies
> >Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 17:52:58 GMT
>
> From: _Foreign Affairs_, Summer 1993, page 110
>
> 		_A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing_
>
> by Andrew Bell-Fialkoff [formerly a Research Fellow at the Center for the
> Study of Small States, is a doctoral candidate specializing in ethnic
> conflict at Boston University].
>
>
> 		REVISITING THE SINS OF ANTIQUITY
>
> THE SERBIAN CAMPAIGN to "cleanse" a territory of another ethnic group, while
> gruesome and tragic, is historically speaking neither new nor remarkable.
> Population removal and transfer have occurred in history more often than is
> generally acknowledged. The central aim of the Serbian campaign to eliminate a
> population from the "homeland" in order to create a more secure, ethnically
> homogeneous static is in some ways as old as antiquity. Moreover, despite
> greater international attention and condemnation, such campaigns have only
> intensified in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
>
> Despite its recurrence, ethnic cleansing nonetheless defies easy definition.
> At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and
> population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and
> genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be
> understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given
> territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or
> ideological considerations, or a combination of these.
>
> Under this definition, then, the slow dispersal and annihilation of North
> America's indigenous population was indeed ethnic cleansing. In their efforts
> to gain and secure the frontier, American settlers "cleansed" most Indians
> from their lands, even though the process was slow and, until the nineteenth
> century, carried out mainly under private initiative. On the other hand, the
> removal of thousands of Africans from their home continent, however harsh and
> despite the fact that it denuded many regions of their original inhabitants,
> would not be considered ethnic cleansing. The aim was to import a desired
> slave population, not to expel any particular group.
>
> Ethnic cleansing has taken many forms. The forced resettlement of a
> "politically unreliable" population -- one conquered and incorporated into an
> empire yet still likely to rebel --  dates from the eighth century BC. That
> practice was revived, however, as late as the 1940s in the Soviet Union. As
> part of a general process toward greater homogeneity within states that began
> in the Middle Ages, "ethnic" cleansing took on medieval notions of religious
> purity, targeting minorities of "nonbelievers," whether Catholic or
> Protestant, Muslim or Jew. With the profound secularization of the modern
> world, cleansing later manifested itself in political ideology, namely as part
> of communism and fascism.
>
> Nationalism, too, as a kind of modern religion, contains quasi-spiritual
> aspects that lend to its most extreme manifestation a desire to "purify" the
> nation of "alien" groups. The important difference between modern ethnic
> cleansing and the patterns established in the Middle Ages is that in religious
> cleansing a population often had the choice of conversion. In purely ethnic
> cleansing that option does not exist; a population must move or die.
>
> 			FROM ASSYRIA TO SERBIA
>
> HISTORICAL CONTEXT should help illustrate ethnic cleansings long evolution,
> motivations and various expressions, as well as its return to Europe on the
> cusp of the 21st century. Many of today's liberal democratic states have, at
> some point in their histories, conducted campaigns to displace religious or
> ethnic minorities, events from which virtually no European nation has been
> exempt.
>
> The earliest example was cleansing carried out by Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727
> BC), the first Assyrian ruler to make forced resettlement a state policy.
> Under his reign about half the population of a conquered land would be carried
> off, and its place taken by settlers from another region. Tiglath's heirs
> continued this policy and, over the centuries, so too did the Babylonians,
> Greeks and Romans, although not always on the same scale and often for the
> prevailing economic reason of slavery.
>
> Once these ancient empires had rent the organic links among ethnicity, belief
> and political citizenship, religion became the primary basis of collective
> identity. In the Middle Ages cleansing was thus applied primarily to
> religious, as opposed to ethnic, minorities, as medieval Christianity
> attempted to impose orthodoxy on nonbelievers. Despite prior episodes of
> religious suppression, such as early Christians in Rome or the persecution of
> non-Zoroastrians in Persia in the fourth century, it was only during the
> Middle Ages that persecution of religious minorities became fully
> institutionalized for substantial periods.
>
> Massacre and expulsion were the most common methods of religious cleansing,
> which tended to target Jews, the only sizable minority in most countries. Jews
> were thus expelled from England (1290), France (1306), Hungary (1349-1360),
> Provence (1394 and 1490), Austria (1421), Lithuania (1445), Cracow (1494),
> Portugal (1497) and numerous German principalities at various times. Spain was
> unique among European countries because of its sizable Muslim population.
> Having "tried" massacre in 1391, Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, then its
> Muslims in 1502, forcibly Christianizing the remaining Muslims in 1526 and
> finally expelling all Moriscos (converted Muslims) in 1609-14.
>
> In 1530 the Confession of Augsburg had explicitly laid down the principle of
> religious homogeneity as the basis of political order. Cuius regio, eius
> religio meant in effect that medieval states had begun to shape an orthodox
> citizenry. Thus by revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685, France indeed
> initiated a process of "self-cleansing," as thousands of Protestant Huguenots
> fled once denied freedom of worship. In this way, the Confession can be
> considered the ideological cornerstone of modern cleansing, a process only
> possible in centralized, absolutist states capable of enforcing "purity."
>
> Although still couched in religious terms, the first cleansings based
> primarily on ethnic discrimination were carried out by England. In the 1640s
> and 1650s, when war and plague swept away half the Irish population, England
> seized the opportunity to expel most of the remaining Irish Catholics from
> Ulster until, by 1688, 80 percent of their land was owned by English and
> Scottish Protestants. London's motivation was primarily strategic: to prevent
> Catholic Ireland from offering Catholic Spain or France a base of operations.
> Displacement of the Irish population thus completed a kind of historical
> cycle, as cleansing returned to patterns formerly established by the Assyrians
> and Romans.
>
> In North America, meanwhile, those survivors of the sweeping removals of
> native Americans conducted in the 1830s were settled in the Indian Territory.
> Then the 1862 Homestead Act opened up much of the remaining Indian lands to
> white settlers. In the two decades after 1866 the federal government proceeded
> to assign Indian tribes to reservations. Those previously unconquered -- the
> Sioux, Comanche, Arapaho and others -- resisted and were subsequently crushed.
>
> It was only in the nineteenth century that the complete destruction of an
> ethnic group manifested itself as the goal of a state, when Turkey began
> directing cleansing efforts against Greeks and Armenians. Having come to view
> those minorities as enemies within, the Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II
> encouraged Kurdish depredations on Armenian villages until hostilities grew
> into a veritable war. By 1894 Turkish regular troops had joined with the
> Kurds, and about 200,000 Armenians were killed. In the 19I5 holocaust,
> Armenians lost an estimated 1.5 million people more than half their population
> as well as about 90 percent of their ethnic territory. Despite the strains
> brought about by the First World War~, that genocide was clearly the
> continuation, on a larger scale, of ongoing Turkish attempts to eliminate the
> entire Armenian population.
>
> By the middle of the twentieth century cleansing was indeed carried out on
> purely ethnic grounds, an outgrowth of paranoid fascist nationalism that
> viewed "alien" groups as a threat to ethnic "purity." It is with the Nazi
> campaigns against Jews that ethnic cleansing reached its height: annihilation.
> Although Jews had for centuries been the victims of various forms of religious
> persecution, twentieth-century nationalism lent Central and East European
> anti-Semitism a largely ethnic character.
>
> The Nazi campaigns were an ethnic cleansing in the sense that they were
> intended to remove Jews from territories of the Reich. The German term
> Judenrein, "clean of Jews," which was used to designate areas from which
> all Jews had been deported, testifies to this fact. But the Holocaust was much
> more. It combined elements of deportation, expulsion, population transfer,
> massacre and genocide. In that way it was "complete," truly a final solution.
> Altogether about six million European Jews were murdered between 1933 and
> 1945. About 250,000 Gypsies and an equal number of gays were also killed by
> the Nazis.
>
> The Germans also practiced cleansing through deportation alone, without
> (immediate) extermination; for instance the Germanization of Polish
> territories incorporated into the Reich. Starting in October 1939 at Gdynia,
> expulsion orders were often issued without warning and implemented at night.
> Deportees were given between 20 minutes and two hours to collect what was
> usually limited to one suitcase containing personal effects. German
> authorities made no provisions for these deportees either on their way to or
> in those Polish areas not incorporated into the Reich, where they were dumped.
> In the first two years of German occupation 1.2 million Poles and 300,000 Jews
> were transferred from these incorporated territories in the largest, but by no
> means only, cleansing implemented by the Germans.
>
> Hitler also carried out a kind of reverse cleansing in his effort to
> consolidate the Reich. Ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) were in effect cleansed
> from Eastern Europe as they were recalled and resettled in Hitler's occupied
> territories, especially western Poland. By spring 1942 more than 700,000
> Germans (and non-Germans claiming German origin) had been transferred from the
> Baltic states, Bukovina, South Tyrol and elsewhere, and resettled in
> territories Hitler sought to Germanize.
>
> After Hitler's megalomaniacal efforts began to collapse, advancing Russian
> armies in turn forced most Germans back in their path. What ensued was the
> largest and most sweeping ethnic cleansing in history: the removal of over ten
> million Germans from Eastern Europe. The final decision to remove German
> populations from Eastern Europe was taken by the United States, the U.S.S.R.
> and Britain on August 2, 1945, in Potsdam. It is impossible to give exact
> figures, but it is estimated that nearly 12 million Germans were cleansed from
> Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia after World War II.
> About 2.1 million of these died from a combination of war, hunger, cold and
> disease.
>
> Germans were not the only group slated for cleansing. The Czech government,
> with Stalin's consent, expelled 20,000 to 30,000 Hungarians by the end of
> 1945. For various reasons, the Czech government later preferred to settle
> "the Hungarian problem" through population exchange. A 1946 agreement between
> Hungary and Czechoslovakia allowed for the eventual exchange of 31,000
> Magyars for 33,000 Slovaks. After both countries were communized the exchange
> ceased.
>
> Within its own borders, the Soviet Union also cleansed about 600,000 people
> from regions that had proved themselves "unreliable" in the war, such as the
> autonomous Kalmyk, the Checheno-Ingush republic and the Karachaev region in
> northern Caucasus. During the war Crimean Tartars formally requested
> permission from Romania, the occupying power, to exterminate all Russians
> remaining in the peninsula. When that request was denied, the Tartar Council
> organized a mass slaughter on its own, killing between 70,000 and 120,000
> Russians. Consequently, Tartars too were transferred en masse by the Soviets
> after the war.
>
> Twentieth-century communist ideology introduced yet another type of cleansing,
> that of economic class. The destruction of propertied classes in Stalinist
> Russia or Maoist China bore all the markings, including vocabulary, of an
> "ethnic" cleansing. Marx applied Christian rejection of the Jew, once based on
> religion but during his time transformed into racialism, to class analysis and
> the elimination of certain "parasitic" groups. In this way, the patterns of
> "self-cleansing" established in the Middle Ages had returned yet again, this
> time manifested in the modern totalitarian state's own mechanism for ensuring
> "purity," the purge.
>
> 			THE BALKAN TRAGEDY: ACT II
>
> EVENTS IN YUGOSLAVIA cannot be fully understood without their historical
> antecedents. Especially in the Balkans, ongoing cycles of tragedy and atrocity
> remain historically fresh and provide not only the context but the basis for
> today's brutal cleansing campaigns. The gruesome events being played out in
> former Yugoslavia are merely the second act of a tragedy that opened in April
> 1941.
>
> Only about fifty years ago that is within the lifetime of an individual
> Croatian nationalists carried out massacres of Serb civilians in a Nazi puppet
> state comprising most of today's Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Ustashi,
> as these nationalists were known, regarded Croatia's more than two million
> Serbs as a threat to national integrity. The Croatian minister of education,
> for example, speaking at a banquet in June 1941, remarked that "one-third of
> the Serbs we shall kill, another we shall deport and the last we shall force
> to embrace the Roman Catholic religion and thus meld them into Croats." This
> policy was officially enunciated later the same month by the governor of
> western Bosnia, Viktor Gutich. In a speech at Banya Luka, Gutich urged that
> the city, and all of Croatia, be "thoroughly cleansed of Serbian dirt."
>
> What followed was less a cleansing than a wholesale massacre. The list of
> atrocities is staggering and seemingly endless. In one instance, in August
> 1941 in the small Bosnian town of Sanski Most, two thousand local Serbs were
> killed in three days of executions. In other villages Serbs were rounded up
> and burned in their churches. Those trying to escape were gunned down. Others
> were killed along ditches and then buried, or dumped into rivers. So many
> corpses were thrown into the Danube in the summer of 1941 that German
> authorities were forced to close the river to swimming. Some atrocities defy
> belief. The Croatian fuhrer, Ante Pavelich, is supposed to have shown the
> Italian author Curzio Malaparte a 40-pound basket of human eyes gouged from
> his Serbian victims. Between May and October 1941 it is estimated that the
> Ustashi killed between 300,000 and 340,000 Serbs.
>
> The extermination of Serbs was part of a wider campaign by Germany and its
> allies. Hungarians who occupied parts of Yugoslavia massacred the Serbian
> population of two large villages on the Serbian Orthodox Christmas in January
> 1942, and killed another 15,000 Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad, the capital of
> Vojvodina. About 2,000 of these were thrown alive into holes in the frozen
> Danube. Bulgarians too obliterated several villages in southern Serbia.
> Altogether about 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 25,000 Gypsies were
> annihilated. Others were expelled. In a clear example of cleansing, Bulgaria
> uprooted 120,000 Serbs, and Hungary 70,000, from their portions of occupied
> Yugoslavia. The deportees were given 24 hours notice and allowed one suitcase
> and about six dollars.
>
> When the Croatian army finally surrendered in May 1945, the British promptly
> turned over their prisoners to Marshal Josip Tito's Partisans. The Croats were
> immediately marched south into Yugoslavia. Some 5,000 were shot just within
> the borders of Slovenia, and over the next few days an additional 40,000 were
> killed. Serbs marched several "death columns" across the country on foot,
> denying their prisoners either food or water. Villagers along the route were
> forbidden to offer the Croats food or drink, and all those who could not
> complete the journey were shot. The exact number of Croats who died is
> uncertain, but it is estimated at about 100,000. Such was the Serbian revenge.
>
> To some the horrors of a half-century ago may seem remote or unreal, but to
> many in the Balkans these atrocities remain vivid to this day. One Serb in ten
> died in that war, virtually every family lost someone, and many of the
> survivors are still living. Thus even before the country collapsed, population
> transfers were discussed extensively in the Yugoslav media. In 1991 the
> popular Serbian magazine Nin featured an article about (voluntary) population
> exchange between Serbia and Croatia. Bosnia and Krajina (a Serb enclave in
> Croatia), it said, would remain in Yugoslavia. Serbs living in areas with a
> Croatian majority would resettle in Vojvodina and other areas where the Serb
> component had to be strengthened. Croats from Bosnia and Krajina would settle
> in Croatia in houses abandoned by the Serbs. The Nin article appeared along
> with the first violent clashes in Croatia, which started in Pakrac on March 1,
> 1991. Already at that early stage-- before Croatia had even declared
> independence, before full-scale war had even begun -- about 20,000 Serbs fled
> Croatia, most for Vojvodina.
>
> Massive population transfers swelled as fighting intensified among
> Yugoslavia's various factions. By the beginning of 1992 there were 158,000
> refugees in Serbia alone, the vast majority ethnic Serbs. Within one month of
> Bosnia's declaration of independence on March 3, 1992, some 420,000 people had
> fled Bosnia or were forced from their homes. According to the U.N. High
> Commissioner for Refugees, by the end of that July the number of displaced
> persons had reached 2.5 million. By August one-third of all Serbs who had
> resided in Croatia had left; the number of ethnic Croat refugees was estimated
> at about 10 percent of that republic's Croat population. There were also
> 50,000 ethnic Magyars who fled to Hungary.
>
> While there are indeed extraordinary numbers of people who have been
> displaced, not all of them have been technically "cleansed." From the very
> start, fear itself created large numbers of refugees. There are thus those who
> fled "voluntarily," like the initial 20,000 Serbs who "moved" to Vojvodina.
> There are others who, once their towns were taken by enemy forces, were simply
> too afraid to stay. Such was the evacuation of Jajce, which fell in October
> 1992, whose 25,000 survivors went to Travnik. These people are technically
> "voluntary" refugees, but the line separating them from the cleansed has worn
> increasingly thin.
>
> The thousands who have been forced to leave their towns by partisans in the
> war, especially those made to leave even after an area has been militarily
> secured, belong unequivocally to the category of ethnic cleansing. These
> people are removed for ethnic and strategic considerations and are clearly
> victims of cleansing campaigns. In the Sanjak, for instance some 70,000
> Muslims out of a prewar population of 200,000 were terrorized into fleeing
> their homes. In another case, Serb guerrillas encircled the village of
> Turalici, cut off all communications and went door to door, throwing out
> everyone they could find before setting the village afire. This was a "gentle"
> cleansing, no one was known to have been killed or raped. Often those carrying
> out a cleansing loot all they can find TV sets, washing machines, bicycles.
> Cleansing thus has economic motivations as well.
>
> These campaigns to create ethnically homogenous regions are, in the history of
> ethnic cleansing, unique in only a few regards. First, much ethnic cleansing
> has been carried out not by regular government troops but rather by irregular
> civilian forces. This is perhaps inevitable in what may be considered a
> "civil" war. But the fact also attests to the very personal nature of the
> animosities in many areas of the Balkans, with some families resuming feuds
> that were frozen since the end of World War II. Civilian fighters have carried
> out what they understand to be their "duty as patriots," sometimes committing
> atrocities on their own initiative, even if aware of higher-level, of official
> and semiofficial encouragement and expectations.
>
> Another "innovation" has been the creative use of prisoner of war camps. While
> the men are held in camps, the women are presented with an ultimatum: the
> prisoners will be released only if families agree to leave the territory. Some
> 5,000 Muslim families from Bihac "expressed" such a desire, according to
> Bosnian Serb authorities, and signed kinds of affidavits to that effect. In
> August 1992, Croats and Muslims estimated at 70,000 the number of prisoners
> held by Serbs in some 45 camps; Serbs claimed that 42,000 compatriots were
> detained in 21 camps, where 6,000 prisoners had died. Since the Serbs control
> most of Bosnia, they are in a position to conduct much of their cleansing in
> this manner.
>
> There is also overwhelming evidence of mass rape perpetrated against mostly
> Muslim, but also Croat, women. The number of women raped is estimated to range
> from 30,000 to 50,000. Although rape has long been a concomitant of war,
> organized rape is fairly rare. In the Second World War, for instance, Japanese
> authorities kidnaped thousands of Korean and Filipino women to serve in
> army-run brothels. In Yugoslavia thousands of women, many of them minors, have
> also been interned in rape camps. Female refugees have testified to this and
> other mistreatment, and large numbers of these reports have been documented.
> The pattern of rape is too consistent and widespread to be dismissed as
> propaganda or mere lapses in the discipline of individual soldiers. Some
> Serbian fighters claim they were ordered to rape, just as they were also
> ordered to kill (mostly male prisoners) in order to "toughen" themselves up.
>
> It is possible that, at least initially, rape was not intended as an
> instrument of ethnic cleansing. As in many wars, rape may have been viewed
> with a blind eye, permitted in order to "boost morale" or "reward" the soldier
> or to inflict lasting humiliation and demoralize the enemy. Cleansing per se
> may have been an unintended effect. But as the stigma of rape was seen to be
> effective in driving away women and their families from the lands that Serbs
> sought to conquer, rape indeed became a new and gruesome weapon in the ancient
> quiver of ethnic cleansing.
>
> 		SOURCES AND CONSEQUENCES OF CLEANSING
>
> THE FORCES THAT DRIVE such atrocities are of course larger and far less
> scientific than "simple" strategic motivations. The attitudes and emotions
> that define the relations between different peoples are extraordinarily
> complex. Discrimination and prejudice provide the thread that ties together
> the long history of religious and ethnic cleansing.
>
> In the Balkans, too, bigotry has fueled the fighting on all sides. While
> grudgingly acknowledging that Croats have a higher standard of living that
> they are in effect more "European" Serbs may dismiss them as effete or
> submissive, a people that has willingly served stronger Austrian or German
> masters. Likewise, Serbs may regard Bosnian Muslims as the descendants of
> Slavic "turncoats" who converted to Islam under Turkish rule, a time when it
> was most opportune. In contrast, the perception is passed among Serbs
> themselves that they are a heroic, independent and virile race, a tenacious
> fighting people who were among the first to throw off 400 years of Ottoman
> domination. These historic feats, as well as Serbia's well-established claims
> to statehood, entitle it to lead the other (often ungrateful) South Slavs, who
> in turn regard the Serbs as domineering brutes seeking continually to impose
> their will and to infuse nastiness into their relations with other peoples.
>
> The hollowness and exaggeration of these claims are revealed as each side will
> alternately emphasize their common roots when it indeed suits its purposes.
> Before the war, for example, when the Serbs still hoped to keep Bosnia in
> Yugoslavia, the media frequently highlighted similarities with the Muslims,
> while Croats often stressed that Bosnia had been part of historical Croatia
> and that most Bosnian Muslims were originally of Croatian descent.
>
> The difficulty of bridging prejudice will only be compounded by the wellspring
> of fresh fresh atrocities that this latest Balkan war provides. Particularly
> troubling, if the abuse is indeed as widespread as reported, is how a
> generation of "half-breed" children, spawned of rape and "corrupted" with the
> blood of another ethnic group, will be received and cared for among
> populations that will have concluded a brutal war in which the purity, and
> indeed the very survival, of nationalities has been held so consciously in the
> fore.
>
> Ultimately, whether compelled by deliberate attempts at cleansing or by the
> "voluntary" flight of refugees, the processes that have shifted thousands of
> lives in the Balkans will accomplish the same end. War, prejudice and a
> desire, finally, to be left in peace will have transformed the peninsula into
> a land more closely resembling other parts of Europe that have already
> undergone their own tragic upheavals. The Balkans too may become a patchwork
> of ethnically distinct territories. With no sizable minorities left within any
> state and with the warring factions securely walled off behind "national"
> boundaries, the best that can be hoped for is that the motors of conflict will
> be disabled and the fatal cycles of violence that have marred Balkan history
> will finally have reached their end.
> --
> David Davidian dbd@urartu.sdpa.org   |
> S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies |
> P.O. Box 382761                      |
> Cambridge, MA 02238                  |
> ---
> W. Fred Rump 	office:	   fred@compu.com	Es war einmal!
> 26 Warren St.   home: fr@icdi10.compu.com
> Beverly, NJ. 08010                          		
> 609-386-6846    bang:uunet!cdin-1!icdi10!fr