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The term ethnic cleansing came into common parlance during the war in Bosnia in the spring of 1992. It was initially used to describe the attacks by Serbs on Bosnian Muslims, which were undertaken for the purposes of driving the Muslims out of targeted Bosnian territory that was claimed by the Serbs. Eventually, the term was also applied to similar attacks by Croats against Bosnian Muslims, as well as, retroactively, the attacks of Serbs and Croats against each other during the fighting of the late summer and fall of 1991. In the winter of 1998–1999, ethnic cleansing was similarly used to describe the assaults of Serbian forces against Kosovar Albanians, which prompted an enormous refugee crisis and, subsequently, NATO military intervention. In 2004, Kosovar Albanians were accused of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs living in Kosovo. Beyond the Balkans, ethnic cleansing has also been used to describe attacks on native populations. In the Sudan, for example, the deadly fate of the people of Darfur at the hands of government-supported Arab militia has been documented as a contemporary case of ethnic cleansing.

From the outset of the war in Bosnia, some analysts challenged the validity of using the term "ethnic cleansing" as a euphemism for genocide. However, the term remains in use precisely to distinguish ethnic cleansing, which is considered both as a crime against humanity and a war crime, from genocide. The definition of genocide, codified in the UN Convention of December 9, 1948, and upheld in the International Courts formed for the purposes of trying criminals from the wars in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, focuses on the intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group. The purpose of ethnic cleansing, by contrast, is the forced removal of a population from a designated piece of territory. Although campaigns of ethnic cleansing can lead to genocide or have genocidal effects, they constitute a different kind of criminal action against an ethnic, religious, or national group than genocide. The transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia frequently mention ethnic cleansing, but subsume it under the category of forced deportation, a crime against humanity that was widespread particularly in Bosnia. Genocide, on the other hand, has been much more difficult to prove in court, since it involves the intent to murder a part or all of a population. However, the mass murder of roughly 7,300 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 has been designated by the court as genocide.

Genocide and ethnic cleansing occupy adjacent positions on a spectrum of attacks on national, religious, and ethnic groups. At one extreme, ethnic cleansing is close to forced deportation or what has been called "population transfer;" the idea is to get people to move, and the means are meant to be legal and semi-legal. At the other extreme, ethnic cleansing and genocide are distinguishable only by the ultimate intent. Here, both literally and figuratively, ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as mass murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people. Further complicating the distinctions between ethnic cleansing and genocide is the fact that forced deportation often takes place in the violent context of war, civil war, or aggression. At the same time, people do not leave their homes peacefully. They often have deep roots in the locales; their families are buried in local graveyards. The result is that forced deportation, even in times of peace, quickly turns to violence, as local peoples are forcibly evicted from their native towns and villages and killed when they try to stay.

Ethnic cleansing takes on genocidal overtones not only at the initial point of violence. Victims often die in transit or in refugee camps at their destinations. The history of ethnic cleansing is replete with cases where transportation on foot in long treks, in rail cars, in the holds of ships, or in crowded buses causes severe deprivation, hunger, starvation, and death by disease. Disease-ridden refugee camps similarly contribute to the high mortality of people forced not just from their normal homes, but from their work places, their land, and their traditional sources of food and medicine. When international or state organizations are allowed to step in to help, they are often late and erratic with relief. As a consequence, the victimization of the ethnically cleansed cannot be said to cease once they have been chased from their homes.

Scholars argue about the modernity of ethnic cleansing, whether it is something that can be traced back to the origins of human history or whether it, like genocide, constitutes the kind of attacks of one nation, religious, or ethnic group on another that belong to the twentieth century. There are abundant examples from the ancient world, documented in Homer, as well as the Bible, where nations attack others for the purposes of expulsion. The medieval and early modern world saw countless examples of such expulsions—of the Incas and Aztecs of South America, of the Jews of Spain, the Albigensians, and the Huguenots. Settler and government attacks on the North American Indians, the Australian aborigines, and the African peoples by their colonial oppressors also could be classified in this way. In this sense, ethnic cleansing can be seen as a constant feature of human history.

Yet the twentieth century brought with it a number of aspects of modernity that made ethnic cleansing more virulent, more complete, and more pervasive. The development of the nation state and the end of empires gave the state unprecedented power, the ostensible mandate, and the means for attacking and transferring large, allegedly alien populations. The drive of the modern state to categorize and homogenize its populations has contributed to this phenomenon, as has its intolerance for economic or political anomalies within its society. Modern ethnic entrepreneurs, politicians ready to exploit ethnic and national distinctions through the media, have also played an important role. The development of integral nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized the racial essence of national groups, thus serving as a convenient ideological motivation for ethnic cleansing. The origins of industrial murder during World War I serves as the backdrop for a century of ethnic cleansing, as well as for the horrors of genocide.

Prominent cases of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century underline its modern character. The modernist Young Turk government attacked its Armenian population in 1915, forcing the vast majority on fearsome treks through the Anatolian highlands to Mesopotamia. These death marches were at the heart of the first widely recognized case of genocide in the twentieth century. At the end of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–1922, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), at the head of the infant Turkish Republic, engaged in an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the country's Greeks. The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks by confirming a "population transfer" between the remaining Greeks in Anatolia and the Turks in Greece. Hitler is known to have said on the eve of his murderous attack against Poland, August 22, 1939, "Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?" Certainly, the indifference of the world to the fate of the Armenians and Greeks gave Hitler every confidence that his planned attack on the Jews would rouse little opposition. Like the mutation of the Young Turk campaign of ethnic cleansing into genocide, one could argue that what started as a Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s—the expulsion of Jews from Germany and Europe—ended in the genocidal mass murder of the Jews.

Other prominent cases of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century underline its murderous character. When Stalin and Beria decided to deport entire nations, such as the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean Tatars, from their homelands to Soviet Central Asia during World War II, there was no discernable intent to kill large numbers of these peoples. Yet the brutal processes of transfer and resettlement to barren and hostile lands served as the source of substantial mortality, perhaps as much as 40 percent of some of the peoples involved. Similarly, when the Polish and Czechoslovak governments decided at the end of World War II to forcibly deport their respective German populations, totaling more than 11.5 million people, as many as 2 million died, mostly from disease, exposure, and hunger. In both sets of cases, the modernity of the operations was evident in the completeness of the transfers, the nationalism that drove them, the state-defined legality that supported them, and the means of moving people from their homes. The transfer of the Germans should be seen as a case of ethnic cleansing, one that was given an international imprimatur by the Potsdam Treaty of July–August 1945.

Many of the characteristics common to ethnic cleansing over the course of the twentieth century are exemplified by the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. War itself serves as a cover for ethnic cleansing, offering the means and the strategic justification for its perpetrators. Yet the violence of ethnic cleansing goes beyond the rules of war and involves the brutalization, humiliation, and torture of victims. In the campaigns to drive out all Bosnian Muslims (Serbs, Croats, or Kosovar Albanians), the authors of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans also mimic the totalist preoccupations of earlier perpetrators. Attacks on women and mass rape, most notable in the case of the Serbian assault on Bosnian Muslims, similarly is often part of the general process of ethnic cleansing. Instances of robbery, theft, the killing of animals, the burning of homes, and extortion accompany ethnic cleansing, whether in the Balkans or elsewhere. The Yugoslav cases demonstrate, as do the others, that ethnic cleansing involves not just the driving out of a people, but the eradication of their culture, architectural monuments, and artifacts. The idea is to eliminate entire civilizations from targeted territories, along with the peoples who represent them.

SEE ALSO Bosnia and Herzegovina; Cossacks; Ethnicity; Ethnocide; Holocaust; Karadzic, Radovan; Kosovo; Massacres; Mladic, Ratko; Nationalism; Sri Lanka; Sudan; United States Foreign Policies Toward Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity; Yugoslavia

Norman M. Naimark