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The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of one Ethnic Group . At one end of the Spectrum , 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 as a result of religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these. ORIGINS OF THE TERM The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a Loan Translation of the Bosnian / Serbian / Croatian phrase ''etničko čišćenje'' ( IPA ) (notice that literal translation of the phrase is "ethnic cleaning"). During the 1990s it was used extensively by the media in the former Yugoslavia in relation to the Yugoslav Wars , and appears to have been popularised by the international media some time around 1992 . The term may have originated some time before the 1990s in the military doctrine of the former Yugoslav People's Army , which spoke of "cleansing the territory" (''čišćenje terena'', IPA ) of enemies to take total control of a conquered area. The origins of this doctrine are unclear, but may have been a legacy of the Partizan era. This originally applied purely to military enemies, but came to be applied to ethnic groups as well. It was used in this context in Yugoslavia by the Serbia n media as early as 1981 , in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration allegedly creating an "ethnically clean territory" (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province {Link without Title} . However, this usage had antecedents. One usage of the term ''cleansing'' can be found in and sometimes used the term "cleansing" to describe it ( source ). At the same time, on elements. The guilty must be promptly punished and the others deported - the Croats to Croatia , the Muslims to Turkey or perhaps Albania - while the vacated territory is settled with Serb refugees now located in Serbia.'' ( source ). The term "cleansing" ("cleansing of borders", очистка границ) was used in Soviet documents of early 1930s in reference to the resettlement of Poles from the 22-km border zone in Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR . The process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941, see Involuntary Settlements In The Soviet Union and Population Transfer In The Soviet Union . A similar term with the same intent was used by the ). EARLY EXAMPLES OF ETHNIC CLEANSING The Assyria n Empire regularly deported entire ethnic groups, as did the Babylonia ns; victims of this policy most famously include the Israelites of Israel in 722 BC and the Israelites of Judah in 586 BC (see Babylonian Captivity Of Judah ). The Migration of Caribs led to the displacement of indigenous Arawaks , but they themselves were later Defeated And Expelled . Mongols , Turk s, and Russians have instigated various forced relocations of other peoples in Eurasia over the centuries. During the Islamic Invasion Of The Indian Subcontinent , several million Hindus were either murdered or forcibly removed from regions constituting modern-day Pakistan . Famous India n historian, K.S. Lal estimated in his book ''The Growth of Muslim Population in India'' that between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million. In some instances, the expulsion of Jews had some features of ethnic cleansing, especially if accompanied by violence and enacted on the whole territory of the state. Jews were expelled from ( 1494 ) were expelled to suburbs of the city, and Jews expelled from Lithuania ( 1491 ) were allowed to return 10 years later. Spain's large Muslim minority, called Morisco s, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609 – 1614 . Roma People were expelled from France , England and other European countries during the 16th Century . MODERN-AGE ETHNIC CLEANSING The term "ethnic cleansing" has come to mean the displacement or expulsion from a territory of one ethnic group by another. The displacement is usually forcible, though there are examples of voluntary or compensated ethnic cleansing. The 20th Century has seen numerous cases, particularly in Europe and the Middle East. During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In , forcibly relocating them to remote and often inhospitable reservation land. In southern Africa and Australia , Native tribes were removed from their lands so that they could be replaced by white farmers and settlers.
The American and South Pacific instances were disastrous. The native populations fell from millions to thousands in only a few centuries, a combined result of colonization policies and Epidemic s of foreign disease. 20th-century instances
21st-century instances
ETHNIC CLEANSING AS A MILITARY AND POLITICAL TACTIC The purpose of ethnic cleansing is to remove the conditions for potential and actual opposition, whether political, terrorist, guerrilla or military, by physically removing any potentially or actually hostile ethnic communities. Although it has sometimes been motivated by a doctrine that claim an ethnic group is literally "unclean" (as in the case of the Jews of medieval Europe), more usually it has been a rational (if brutal) way of ensuring that total control can be asserted over an area. The campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. The tactic was used by Croatian, Muslim Bosnian and Serbian forces. Ethnic cleansing is often also accompanied by efforts to eradicate all physical traces of the expelled ethnic group, such as by the destruction of cultural artifacts, religious sites and physical records {Link without Title} . As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant advantages and disadvantages. It enables a force to eliminate civilian support for resistance by eliminating the civilians — in a reversal of Mao Zedong 's dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it drains the water. When enforced as part of a political settlement, as happened with the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans to Germany after 1945 , it can contribute to long-term stability. The large German populations in Czechoslovakia and Poland had been sources of friction before the Second World War, but this was forcibly resolved. It thus establishes "facts on the ground" - radical demographic changes which can be very hard to reverse. On the other hand, ethnic cleansing is such a brutal tactic and so often accompanied by large-scale bloodshed that it is widely reviled. It is generally regarded as lying somewhere between Population Transfer s and Genocide on a scale of odiousness, and is treated by international law as a War Crime . ETHNIC CLEANSING AS INTERNATIONAL LAW CRIME Ethnic cleansing is designated a Crime Against Humanity in international treaties, such as that which created the International Criminal Court (ICC). The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in a similar spirit, and prosecutes these crimes under more generic names. The United Nations' General Assembly condemns "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution {Link without Title} . The emergence of ethnic cleansing as a distinct category of war crime has been a somewhat complex process. Each individual element of a programme of ethnic cleansing could be considered as an individual violation of humanitarian law - a killing here, a house-burning there - thus missing the systematic way in which such violations were perpetrated with a single aim in mind. International courts therefore consider individual incidents in the light of a possible pattern of ethnic cleansing. In the Yugoslav case, for instance, the ICTY considers the widespread massacres and abuses of human rights in Bosnia and Kosovo as part of an overall "joint criminal enterprise" to carve out ethnically pure states in the region. However, many alleged "ethnic cleansings" in the past do not fit the modern definition of "crimes against humanity." For example, the post-WW2 German Expulsions were sanctioned by the international agreement at Potsdam Conference , requiring that the actions proceed humanely. COMPARISON OF EVENTS IN THE BIBLE WITH ETHNIC CLEANSING Some narratives in the Bible which describe the Hebrew conquest of Canaan in c. 13th Century BC or before, would now be considered descriptions of ethnic cleansing or even Genocide . In several places God commands the Hebrews to kill every man, woman and child after capturing a city, and sometimes cities also had to be burnt to the ground. In Exodus , the story of the Pharaoh 's attempt to destroy the Israelites living in Egypt can also be seen as ethnic cleansing. Similarly Haman 's attempt to wipe out the Jews within the Persian empire described in Esther can be considered ethnic cleansing. SEE ALSO
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