A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing

Andrew Bell-Fialkoff

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

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Summary:  Serbian efforts to force Bosnian Muslims from cities and villages throughout the Balkans have only recently lodged ethnic cleansing in the public mind. But in the annals of history such atrocities are far from new. From ancient Assyria to modern Serbia, campaigns to homogenize populations within inviolate borders have been carried out variously in the name of God, nation or ideology. Yet ethnic cleansing remains difficult to define. Less understood is the compulsion for national "purity" at such horrific costs. The most likely outcome of the Balkans war is a patchwork of ethnically distinct regions, with few minority populations. Perhaps then the violence will end.

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 state-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 cleansing's 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 ...

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