Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

ETHNIC CLEANSING, UNDERTAKEN IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Ethnic Cleansing. In a January 1993 report, a UN Commission of Experts, which was
established by the UN Security Council, defined “ethnic cleansing” as “rendering an area
ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups
from the area.” Ethnic cleansing, in fact, is a term that reaches back to at least World
War II. During the latter period of World War II, the Nazi-backed Croats used the term
to refer to their brutal actions against the Serbs. The Nazis, themselves, also used the term
Säuberung to denote the “cleansing” of the Jews from countries, towns, and territories. The
term ethnic cleansing gained wide use during the 1990s to explain actions carried out in the
former Yugoslavia, during which various sides in the four wars purposely and systematically
forced entire groups of people from their homes, village, towns, and land in an effort
to “cleanse” the area of rival ethnic and/or religious groups. Ethnic cleansing in the former
Yugoslavia was undertaken via various means, including but not limited to: arbitrary
arrest and detention, vile mistreatment of both civilian prisoners and prisoners of war,
attacks on hospitals, extrajudicial executions, military attacks or the threat of attacks
against civilians and civilian centers, murder, mass murder, rape and others types of sexual
assault, torture, the ransacking of homes, and the utter destruction of property, including
religious and cultural edifices (e.g., mosques, libraries, and monuments). Article 49 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 expressly forbids “individual or mass forcible
transfers, as well as deportation of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory
of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country.” It also stipulates that only
the security of the civil population or “imperative military reasons” may serve as justification
for the evacuation of civilians in occupied territory.
Ethnic Cleansing, Undertaken in the Former Yugoslavia. Like genocide, the term
ethnic cleansing is relatively new, but what it describes is centuries old. The phrase in relation
to the former Yugoslavia was originally introduced by reporters covering the Yugoslav wars
of disintegration between 1991 and 1995. At first, the term was employed to describe the
violence aimed at uprooting Serbian minorities from Croatia, in particular from territories
inside historic Croatia such as Krajina and Slavonia. It quickly was expanded to
denote any attempt throughout Yugoslavia to force minorities off their lands. Strangely,
and euphemistically, ethnic cleansing then became a substitute for genocide in popular
discourse, as mass killings proliferated throughout the former Yugoslavia. The many offensives
to drive out minority populations intensified with the formation of paramilitary
units. Although the end goal was the “liberation” of land from its “alien” inhabitants,
greater and greater emphasis was placed on killing as a means of ensuring that those displaced
would never return. In other words, mass killings and, in certain cases, genocide,
presented themselves as the most efficient way of ridding an area of an unwanted minority.
Typically, the policy of ethnic cleansing would begin with the harassment of local citizens
of an unwanted group, who would be terrorized and intimidated, often in fear for
their lives, to leave their homes. Such terror often included a combination of torture,
rape, beatings, mutilation, and extended to the murder of others as an example to the
wider population. Sometimes, wholesale murder of much larger numbers was undertaken.
Lethal violence as terror, for example, typified the Croatian tactic to expel Serbs from
Krajina in August 1995, as it did the Serbs’ efforts to evict Kosovars during 1998 and
1999. Once an area had been “cleansed” of its unwanted population, the perpetrators
moved in their own people, which altered the character of the region as though the original
owners had never existed; in this way, the perpetrators laid claim to the region as of
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