_A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing_
David Davidian
_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 d...@urartu.sdpa.org | "Armenia has not learned a lesson in
S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies | Anatolia and has forgotten the
P.O. Box 382761 | punishment inflicted on it." 4/14/93
Cambridge, MA 02238 | -- Late Turkish President Turgut Ozal