Ethnic cleansing

Victims of the Srebrenica massacre exhumated after ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forcible expulsion of ethnic, racial and religious groups from a given area, with the intention of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct expulsion, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forcing migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing their return, such as murder, rape and destruction of property. It constitutes a crime against humanity and may also fall within the scope of the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, although ethnic cleansing has no legal definition in international criminal law.

Throughout history there have been many cases of ethnic cleansing; the term was first used by authors as a euphemism during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Since then, the term has gained wide acceptance as journalism and the media increasingly use it in its meaning generic.

Origins of Expression

The term "ethnic cleansing" derives from the Serbo-Croatian expression etničko čišćenje, which translated into Spanish means "ethnic cleansing." Although the expression ethnic cleansing entered English —and through it into the other languages of the world— as a semantic carbon copy of the Serbo-Croatian etničko čišćenje (SAMPA /etnitSko tSiStS'eJe/), and during the 1990s XX was widely used in the media as a result of Yugoslav wars, this concept can be applied to other historical events that had the objective of displacing an ethnically settled population from a certain territory, and replacing them with settlers ethnically belonging to the aggressor people.

Definitions

The expression "ethnic cleansing" It has received several definitions. According to Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, the expression is not easy to define.

While on the one hand it is practically impossible to distinguish it from forced emigration and population exchange, on the other it is confused with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the forcible expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory as a consequence of religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of both..

Drazen Petrovic proposes to distinguish between broad and narrow definitions. The broad definitions focus on the fact that the expulsion is based on ethnic criteria, while the narrow definitions include additional criteria: for example, that the expulsions are systematic, illegal, involve flagrant violations of human rights or are linked to a contemporary national or international conflict.

According to Petrovic: ethnic cleansing is a well-defined policy of a particular group of people to systematically remove from a given territory another group of people for reasons of their national, ethnic or religious origin. Such a policy is violent and is often linked to military operations. It is considered that it must be carried out by all possible means, from discrimination to extermination, and implies violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.

Relationship with other concepts

Broadly speaking, the differences between ethnic cleansing and genocide are less distinguishable than their similarities. Both share the rejection of minorities with specific characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion or political affiliation; they seek to maintain the purity (in terms of exclusion) of a specific space, however, according to Benjamin Lieberman, the crucial distinction is found in the final objective, unlike genocide, ethnic cleansing does not have the extermination or destruction of a group as its objective in particular, but the forced removal of said group. It is during forced removal that they appear to be indistinguishable from one another, as ethnic cleansing uses forms of violence that are capable of being classified as genocidal acts, or that will eventually trigger genocide.

The phenomenon can be traced throughout history, the motivations have been transformed according to the formation, development and organization of societies. However, it was not until the 1990s that the term appeared as one of the "most widely known forms of violence directed against groups" and as a concept proper to modernity. The debate here is that unlike the forced resettlement of the past, "the ethnic cleansing efforts of the 20th century have been driven by the rise of nationalist movements with racist theories fueled by the desire to "purify" the nation through expelling (and in many cases destroying) groups considered alien.

The controversy appears to be fueled by legal loopholes surrounding ethnic cleansing, as it has never been codified in international law. (see legal situation) Therefore, the term is almost invisible or unimportant, at least in the legal-formal level.

The truth is that ethnic cleansing is a fact distinguishable from the concepts with which it is commonly confused or associated (Forced Migration, Genocide); Although the barrier is thin, each phenomenon has specific motivations and scope. The most common situation is that it occurs within a genocide or that it is a condition that causes it.

For Michael Mann, ethnic cleansing is the removal, by a dominant ethnic group, of another ethnic group from its own society. Mann distinguishes between partial and total cleansing, and classifies it according to five levels of violence, the lowest of which would be voluntary cleansing, in the form of cultural assimilation; the most violent would correspond to genocide.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide

Both concepts are linked, to the point that the UN General Assembly declared that ethnic cleansing is a form of genocide. However, both terms are not synonymous, so it is important to know how each is distinguished. term. The term "genocide" was first coined by Raphael Lemkin and refers to "any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." While in general, "ethnic cleansing" is understood as the expulsion from a territory of an "undesirable" population.

In cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing processes usually take place, either as a previous step or as a consequence of the genocidal acts. This occurred in the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandan genocide, for example.

However, processes of ethnic cleansing can take place, understood as forced or induced displacement of the population, without the express intention of physically destroying the group. This is the case of the "transfer" of the Arab population abroad from the territories controlled by Israel, or the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey, the Soviet Union and Germany, or India and Pakistan. In these cases one could speak of ethnic cleansing, but not of genocide.^{[citation needed]}

Legal status

Ethnic cleansing takes place without legal redress and argues that if similar circumstances arise in the future, the precedent of other international law populations will be allowed.

Within resolution 780 of the United Nations Security Council and in accordance with resolution 713 and 771, and the resolutions consequent to 780 encompasses that constitute crimes against humanity (disgusting and terrible acts) committed by the government or a group of people before racial hatred and this is within the resolution of 1992.

Before the International Criminal Court it is established that war crimes and aggression are covered by resolution 260 and during these periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity throughout its decades; and she is in turn convinced that international cooperation is needed to free humanity from an event with so many precedents.

Examples of ethnic cleansing