Ethnic cleansing

Based on Wikipedia: Ethnic cleansing

In 1992, German linguists selected a phrase as their "Un-word of the Year"—a term so morally offensive in its sanitizing language that it deserved public condemnation. That phrase was ethnische Säuberung. Ethnic cleansing.

The word "cleansing" suggests something positive. We cleanse wounds to heal them. We cleanse our homes of clutter. We cleanse our bodies of toxins. But ethnic cleansing means forcing entire populations from their homes through terror, violence, and murder. The euphemism does exactly what euphemisms are designed to do: it makes the unbearable sound almost bureaucratic.

This matters because language shapes how we respond to atrocities. And ethnic cleansing has happened again and again throughout history, under different names, with different justifications, but with remarkably similar methods.

What Ethnic Cleansing Actually Means

The United Nations defines ethnic cleansing as "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group." But that clinical definition obscures the human reality.

Ethnic cleansing operates through a brutal toolkit: murder, rape, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, the destruction of homes and property, and the constant threat of violence. The goal is not simply to kill everyone—though killing certainly happens—but to make life so unbearable that people flee and never return.

Think of it as existing on a spectrum of horror. At one end sits forced emigration, where people are pressured to leave through discrimination and harassment. At the other end sits genocide, the deliberate destruction of an entire group. Ethnic cleansing occupies the vast, bloody middle ground.

This distinction matters legally and morally. Genocide requires proving intent to destroy a group. Ethnic cleansing requires only proving intent to remove them. A perpetrator might argue: "We didn't want to kill them. We just wanted them gone." As if terror and displacement were somehow more acceptable than murder.

The Ancient Roots of Removal

The term ethnic cleansing entered widespread use only in the 1990s, but the practice stretches back millennia.

Ancient Greeks had a word for it: andrapodismos, literally meaning enslavement. When the Athenian general Chares seized the city of Sestos in 353 BCE, the aftermath was so brutal that historians needed a special word to describe it. When Alexander the Great conquered Thebes in 335 BCE, the same word applied.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire practiced systematic population removal in the 9th and 7th centuries BCE—some scholars consider this among the earliest documented cases of ethnic cleansing. The Assyrians would conquer a territory, then forcibly relocate entire populations to different parts of their empire, replacing them with settlers from elsewhere. This served multiple purposes: it broke the power of local resistance, mixed populations to prevent unified rebellion, and reshaped the demographic map according to imperial design.

Between 1609 and 1614, Spain expelled the Moriscos—Muslims who had converted to Christianity, often under duress, but were still viewed with suspicion. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes in what some historians consider the first state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in modern Western history. The Spanish crown justified this as religious purification, protecting Catholic Spain from supposed internal enemies.

The Circassian Catastrophe

The Circassian genocide of the 1860s deserves particular attention because it established a template that would be followed again and again.

The Circassians were a Muslim people living in the northwestern Caucasus, along the Black Sea coast. Imperial Russia wanted their land. Not their labor, not their resources—their land, cleared of its inhabitants.

Russian General Nikolay Yevdakimov, who supervised the operations, described Muslim Circassians as "a pestilence" to be expelled from their native territory. His word for the military operations was ochishchenie—cleansing. This was the first large-scale ethnic cleansing campaign launched by a modern industrial state.

The results were catastrophic. Russian forces burned villages, destroyed crops, and drove survivors toward the Black Sea coast. Those who survived the violence faced starvation and disease. Ships carried refugees to the Ottoman Empire, but many vessels were overcrowded deathtraps. Estimates suggest that between 500,000 and 1.5 million Circassians were expelled or killed. Today, most Circassians live in diaspora, scattered across Turkey and the Middle East, while their ancestral homeland hosts a different population entirely.

A Vocabulary of Violence

By the early twentieth century, variants of the term had emerged across Europe. The Czechs spoke of očista. The Poles used czystki etniczne. The French said épuration. The Germans employed Säuberung. Each word meant the same thing: making a territory pure by removing those deemed to not belong.

A 1913 report by the Carnegie Endowment documented the atrocities of the Balkan Wars, introducing new terminology to describe what all participants had done to each other's ethnic minorities. The report's authors struggled with language, trying to find words adequate to the horrors they were documenting.

Then came World War II, and the scale of ethnic cleansing expanded beyond anything previously imagined.

The Second World War's Overlapping Horrors

Nazi Germany's policies combined genocide and ethnic cleansing in ways that scholars still debate how to categorize. The regime sought to make Europe judenrein—cleaned of Jews. The Holocaust was genocide: the systematic murder of six million Jews with the intent to destroy the Jewish people entirely.

But Nazi plans extended further. The Generalplan Ost envisioned the genocide and ethnic cleansing of most Slavic peoples in central and eastern Europe, clearing living space—Lebensraum—for German settlers. Some Slavs would be killed outright. Others would be expelled eastward. Still others would be kept as slave labor. The plan imagined the demographic transformation of an entire continent.

In the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, the Ustaše regime used the euphemism čišćenje terena—cleansing the terrain—to describe the systematic murder and expulsion of Serbs, Jews, and Roma. Simultaneously, Serbian Chetniks committed their own genocidal massacres against Bosniaks and Croats, using similar language in their own directives.

The Soviet Union practiced ethnic cleansing of a different kind. In the early 1930s, Soviet documents spoke of ochistka granits—cleansing of borders—to describe the forced resettlement of Poles from a 22-kilometer zone along the border with the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics. Between 1939 and 1941, this expanded dramatically, targeting many other groups deemed potentially disloyal: Germans, Finns, Koreans, Greeks, and others.

After Germany's defeat, ethnic cleansing continued. Millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern European countries where their families had lived for generations. This happened with Allied approval and has never faced legal consequences. The expulsion of Germans after World War II stands as an example of ethnic cleansing that remains legally unaddressed—a reminder that international law is often applied selectively.

The Italian Exodus from Yugoslavia

One of the lesser-known ethnic cleansings of the twentieth century occurred along the eastern Adriatic coast. The foibe massacres—named after the deep natural sinkholes where bodies were dumped—targeted Italians and anti-communist Slavs in territories that had been Italian but were being absorbed into Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia.

During and immediately after World War II, Yugoslav Partisans and the Yugoslav secret police killed Italians and others perceived as fascist collaborators. But the violence extended beyond punishing wartime enemies. The goal was demographic transformation: replacing the Italian population with Slavic settlers loyal to the new communist state.

After the immediate violence subsided, Yugoslavia employed gentler but equally effective methods: nationalization of property, expropriation, and discriminatory taxation. These policies gave Italian residents little choice but to emigrate. Between 230,000 and 350,000 Italians fled to Italy or emigrated to the Americas, Australia, and South Africa.

The numbers tell the story. Before World War II, the region had a substantial Italian population. By 1953, only 36,000 declared Italians remained in Yugoslavia—about 16 percent of the pre-war population. Today, census data from Croatia and Slovenia counts fewer than 22,000 Italians in the former Yugoslav territories. An entire population was displaced within a single generation.

The Term Enters the Modern Lexicon

The phrase "ethnic cleansing" in its current English usage emerged from the Balkans. In the 1980s, Serbs used it to describe what they claimed Albanians were doing to Serbs in Kosovo. Then, in 1992, the term exploded into international consciousness during the Bosnian War.

Serbian forces besieged Sarajevo, established concentration camps, and systematically expelled or murdered Bosniak Muslims and Croats from territories they claimed for a Greater Serbia. Western journalists covering the conflict adopted the term "ethnic cleansing" from Serbian sources, and it spread rapidly through global media.

The term's first appearance in its complete form actually dates to 1941, in Romanian. Vice Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, told his cabinet: "I do not know when the Romanians will have such chance for ethnic cleansing." He was speaking of the opportunity to "purify" Romanian territory of Jews and other minorities. The phrase purificare etnică appeared in the official record.

But it was the Bosnian War that made ethnic cleansing a global term. Television brought images of concentration camps, mass graves, and refugees into living rooms worldwide. The phrase entered common usage because people needed words for what they were witnessing.

The Legal Gap

Here is a troubling truth: ethnic cleansing is not technically a crime under international law.

No treaty defines a specific crime called ethnic cleansing. The methods of ethnic cleansing—murder, torture, rape, forced deportation—are crimes against humanity. Some ethnic cleansing campaigns qualify as genocide under the Genocide Convention. But ethnic cleansing itself exists in a legal gray zone.

Gregory Stanton, founder of Genocide Watch, has criticized this situation. Because ethnic cleansing has no legal definition, he argues, its use in media coverage can actually distract from events that should be prosecuted as genocide. Calling something ethnic cleansing instead of genocide may let perpetrators escape the more serious charge.

Others have suggested that ethnic cleansing is itself a euphemism—a softer term that obscures what might more accurately be called genocide or cultural genocide. The academic Martin Shaw argues that forced deportation necessarily results in the destruction of a group as a coherent community, and perpetrators must foresee this outcome. If you scatter a people across the globe, destroy their villages, and make return impossible, have you not effectively destroyed them as a group, even if individuals survive?

Why Does Ethnic Cleansing Happen?

Early research focused on ancient hatreds—the idea that certain groups had always hated each other and were simply acting on deep-rooted animosities when given the chance. This explanation has largely been discredited. Ancient hatreds do not spontaneously combust into organized violence. Ethnic cleansing requires planning, coordination, and resources that only states or other powerful institutions can provide.

More recent scholarship points in different directions. Some researchers see ethnic cleansing as "a natural extension of the homogenizing tendencies of nation states." The nation-state, as a political concept, links citizenship to membership in a particular ethnic or national group. If the state belongs to one people, then other peoples are, by definition, outsiders. This logic can lead, under certain conditions, to the conclusion that outsiders must be removed.

Political scientist Michael Mann, in his book The Dark Side of Democracy, makes a provocative argument: murderous ethnic cleansing is strongly related to the creation of democracies. Not that stable democracies commit ethnic cleansing—minorities tend to have constitutional protections in established democratic states. Rather, ethnic cleansing occurs most often in states undergoing democratization, where old authoritarian structures are crumbling but new protections have not yet solidified.

The danger is greatest when two ethnic groups claim sovereignty over the same territory. If democracy means rule by "the people," then whichever group constitutes "the people" will rule, and the other group may have no place. Add security concerns—real or imagined threats that the minority might secede, collaborate with enemies, or dominate the majority—and conditions for ethnic cleansing emerge.

War is a potentiating factor. Most ethnic cleansing occurs during or immediately after armed conflict, when normal restraints have broken down, when enemies have been dehumanized, and when mass violence has become normalized. The fog of war provides cover. Atrocities can be disguised as military operations or blamed on chaos and disorder.

Mutual Ethnic Cleansing

Sometimes ethnic cleansing flows in both directions simultaneously.

In the 1920s, following the Greco-Turkish War, Turkey expelled its Greek minority while Greece expelled its Turkish minority. About 1.5 million Greeks left Turkey; about 500,000 Muslims left Greece. This was formalized in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne as a "population exchange"—a diplomatic euphemism for mutual ethnic cleansing. The League of Nations supervised the process as if it were a reasonable solution to ethnic conflict rather than a human catastrophe.

The First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the late 1980s and early 1990s saw Armenians and Azerbaijanis each cleanse territories under their control of the other group. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. The conflict remained frozen for decades before erupting again in 2020.

The post-World War II population transfers in Eastern Europe involved mutual cleansing among Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians, supervised by Soviet authorities who were themselves simultaneously deporting other ethnic groups to Siberia and Central Asia.

Mutual ethnic cleansing does not make either side's actions acceptable. It means only that victimhood and perpetration can coexist, that groups suffering ethnic cleansing in one place may be committing it in another, and that cycles of displacement and revenge can span generations.

The Lebanese Civil War

Lebanon's civil war, which raged from 1975 to 1990, demonstrated how ethnic cleansing could occur within an already diverse society.

The conflict was not simply religious or ethnic—it involved political factions, foreign interventions, and shifting alliances that defy easy categorization. But ethnic cleansing was common throughout. The Karantina massacre in 1976 saw Christian militias kill hundreds of Muslims and Palestinians in a Beirut neighborhood. Days later, Palestinians and leftist forces retaliated with the Damour massacre, killing Christians and destroying their town.

The siege of the Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp lasted months before falling in 1976, with survivors facing massacre or expulsion. The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Lebanese Maronite Christian militias killed hundreds or thousands of Palestinians while Israeli forces controlled the area, became one of the most notorious atrocities of the entire war.

By the war's end, Beirut and much of Lebanon had been demographically reorganized. Neighborhoods that had once been mixed were now homogeneous. The population had sorted itself—or been sorted—along sectarian lines that persist today.

Why This History Matters Now

Ethnic cleansing has not ended. It continues in various forms around the world, under various euphemisms, with various justifications. Understanding its history helps us recognize it when it happens again.

The patterns repeat: dehumanizing language that describes people as pollution to be cleansed; claims of security threats from minority populations; the conflation of ethnic identity with political loyalty; the use of war as cover for demographic engineering; the employment of terror to induce flight; the destruction of homes and livelihoods to prevent return.

The term ethnic cleansing itself poses a challenge. It sounds almost clinical, almost acceptable. Some argue we should always use stronger terms: genocide, mass atrocity, crimes against humanity. Others note that ethnic cleansing describes a distinct phenomenon that deserves its own name, even if that name is uncomfortable.

What remains undeniable is the human cost: millions of people across centuries, forced from homes where their families had lived for generations, scattered into diaspora, their communities destroyed even when they themselves survived. The land remembers differently than the people do. Maps are redrawn. New populations move in. The displaced often spend generations dreaming of return to places that no longer exist as they remember them.

The question is not whether ethnic cleansing will happen again. History suggests it will. The question is whether we will recognize it when it does, call it by its name—whatever name we choose—and respond before it is too late.