Introduction
This paper concerns the matter of ethnic cleansing, a relatively new concept. It was introduced in 1992, when Serbs removed non-Serbs from ‘their’ territory in the former republic of Yugoslavia. The following quote, derived from the Washington Post on the 5th of August 1992, denotes the introduction of the term:
‘The 20th century taught us that far-out political ideas can have fateful consequences. Our vocabulary has been enriched with new words to denote these political innovations. Fascism and Leninism, gulag and concentration camp, KGB and Gestapo are all words that one cannot find in a 19th century dictionary. One more term has now been added to this list – ethnic cleansing. This antiseptic-sounding label denotes a cunning strategy of territorial aggrandizement that today is being perfected in Bosnia, right before our eyes and in front of the world's television cameras’ (Ikle, 1992).
The author of the news article thus compares ethnic cleansing with other political concepts that were introduced in the 20th century. The concept, though, goes not really without saying. When thinking about the cleansing of a group of humans, most people think of mass murder and genocide. But is this a right connotation? What is exactly meant by ethnic cleansing? And what is ethnicity or an ethnic group? This is one of the matters that will be paid attention to in this writing. Furthermore, this essay will particularly shed light on the relation between ethnic cleansing and nation-state building. It aims to discuss and analyse several questions, including: Is ethnic cleansing really a necessary outcome of the state-building process? What role does national identity play regarding ethnic cleansing and nation-state building? And what...
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The last two decades of the twentieth century gave rise to turbulent times for constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, eventually leading them to split apart. There were a number of damaging aspects of past history and of the political and economic circumstances that contributed to the breakup and eventually caused the situation to snowball into a deadly series of inter-ethnic conflicts. Yugoslavia was reunified at the end of the war when the communist forces of Josip Broz Tito liberated the country. Under Tito, Yugoslavia adopted a relatively liberal form of government in comparison to other East European communist states at the time and experienced a period of relative economic and political stability until Tito’s death in 1980. In addition to internal power struggles following the loss of their longtime leader, Yugoslavia faced an unprecedented economic crisis in the 1980’s. As other communist states began to fall in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, some former Communist leaders abandoned communism and founded or supported ethno-national parties, blaming the economic suffering on the flaws of communism and other ethnic groups. The ethnic violence that followed would not have been possible without the willingness of politicians from every side to promote ethno-nationalist symbols and myths through media blitzes, which were especially effective due to low levels of education in the former Yugoslavia. Shadows of the events of World War II gave these politicians, especially the Serbs, an opportunity to encourage the discussion and exaggeration of past atrocities later in the century. The ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia can be traced back to a series of linked damaging factors such as the de...
Rethinking Violence: States and Non-state Actors in Conflict. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 22, 2014).
When a group feels as if their existence is threatened by another group, the only solution to their problem is the extermination of the opposing group. Genocide is also used to carry out systematic efforts in destroying enemies which will send out warning to other potential enemies. Acquiring economic wealth by destroying a group which stands in the way of that benefit is also another reason genocide is carried out. Finally, to create a “pure race” which means everyone practices the same way, follows the same culture, and the group who does not fit the guidelines, will be exterminated. The Center on Law and Globalization is a charitable organization which presents news about devastating problems in countries across the world. Its authors are reporters and journalist who experience firsthand the problems these countries are facing. In the article, Why Do Genocides Occur? Published by the Center on Law and Globalization, the conditions under which genocide usually occurs includes: when the victims are excluded, which means they have lost their citizenship and denied their rights, in crisis, when their government is in ruins, or in a dictatorial
The violence, societal collapse, and state failure are successfully demonstrated throughout the work through the numerous examples of ethnic groups being targeted. Whether he is describing the military using ethnopolitics for allies or discussing how refugees were deported based upon their ethnic group to the culmination that Sanborn describes the situation as forced migration or cleansing. The ethnic groups’ experiences varied with the failure of the state demonstrated by the Armenian genocide and targeted violence throughout the war targeted at Germans and Jews. Ultimately Sanborn shows that the experiences of some ethnic groups results in state-building like Poland and to an extent Ukraine. The argument for decolonization is the strongest when examining the experiences of various ethnic groups because their experiences reveal the process of state failure and social
The crime of genocide is one of the most devastating human tragedies throughout the history. And the word genocide refers to an organised destruction to a specific group of people who belongs to the same culture, ethnic, racial, religious, or national group often in a war situation. Similar to mass killing, where anyone who is related to the particular group regardless their age, gender and ethnic background becomes the killing targets, genocide involves in more depth towards destroying people’s identity and it usually consists a fine thorough plan prearranged in order to demolish the unwanted group due to political reasons mostly. While the term genocide had only been created recently in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, from the ancient Greek word “genos” meaning race and the Latin word “cide” meaning killing , there are many examples of genocide like events that occurred before the twentieth century. And this new term brings up the question as whether genocide is a contemporary description defined through current perspectives towards the crime act or is it just a part of the inevitable human evolutionary progress caused by modernity.
Brenda Katten who is the chairman of the Zionist Federation said that, “As Jews, we are quite horrified at what is going on: we lost a lot of our people in the 1930s because the gates were closed on us- What is sad, is that we don’t learn from our history.” (3) This seems to be the recurring theme about genocides: They happen and are an immense tragedy but yet they continue to happen throughout time and all over the world. In the Bosnian genocide in 1992-1998, another group was was exterminate by a group for specific reasons. In this case, an estimated 200,000 Bosnian civilians were killed (2) by Serbians. But all of this conflict can be traced back to the resolutions which transpired at the end of the second world war. (1) After Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia became apart of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, when the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito died in 1980, the union between the several countries under the Yugoslav power seemed to be threatened to separate. When a Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic provoked a dissatisfaction between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Bosnian and Croatian neighbors, lead to an insuming war. When Milosevic was elected president of the republic of Serbia in 1989, an oncoming movement violent uprisings of several Serb nationalist political parties in neighboring Croatia. These events frightened the other members of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, which lead to their uncertainty towards the future of the republic that had just recently been established. As fears engulfed many civilians, a large population of non Bosnian Serbians began to not only boycott the voting of Milosevic, but urge others to take similar measures in March of 1992. These actions lead to the sec...
Paradigms of Genocide: The Holocaust, The Armenian genocide, and Contemporary Mass Destructions, 156-168. Sage Publications Inc., 1996. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1048550
Israel successfully fought off the pan-Arab army while other Israeli combatants terrorized and depopulated the countryside. Ilan Pappe termed the depopulation of Palestinians as “ethnic cleansing” but can this phrase be properly used when discussing the events of 1947-1948? To answer this question one must determine if there is a well-established definition of the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ and also establish that this was the intent of the Zionists, both initially and subsequently. This can be determined by examining Zionist policy and action previous to the U.N partition plan and after, which will demonstrate that the term is appropriately applied to the situation by Pappe.
Gagnon, V. P. (2004). The myth of ethnic war: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
4 The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was denoted to the acts of violence and armed conflict spurred on by President Slobodan Miloševic who was in pursuit to create an ‘ethnically pure Greater Serbia’; after the western condemnation of the bombing of Dubrovnik and Vukovar in Croatia, western governments although late to action declared in 1992 ‘a deliberate policy of genocide as “ethnic cleansing”’ which led to the deployment of peacekeeping forces. Jane M. O. Sharp, ‘Dayton Report Card’, International Security, 22 (Winter, 1997-1998), 101-137 (pp. 101-02).
As the international shift towards nationalism and self-determination gained momentum in the years after World War II as a result to imperialism’s dangerous influence on the world during the war, decolonization becomes the inevitable truth for nations on both sides of the colonial relationship between an occupying country and a subjugated
Most war victims during the Kosovo War were considered victims of ethnic cleansing, which is the internationally condemned practice of driving out members of other nationalities from territories that had been part of the SFRY (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) . All of this began with the presidency of Slobodan Milosevic in 1988 who was president of the Serbian League of Communists and also Serbia a year later. He began a campaign to reassert communist dominance as well as Serb dominance. He purged into countries such as Croatia and transformed its army from one that wanted to preserve Yugoslavia to one that wanted unification of all Serb populated territories and eventually create a Greater Serbia. A way that Milosevic felt he could achieve that task was through a strategy of ethnic cleansing and the expulsion and massacres of the non-Serbs.
Nationalism has played a crucial role in world history over the past centuries. It continues to do so today. For many, nationalism is indelibly associated with some of the worst aspects of modern history, such as the destructive confidence of the Napoleon’s army and the murderous pride of Nazi Germany. Large numbers of people, descent in their hearts, have carried out unbelievable atrocities for no better reason than their nation required them to. Authoritarian and totalitarian regime have crushed dissent, eliminated opposition, and trampled on civil liberties in the name of the nation.
...gue that the Bosnian crisis is a prime example of why humanitarian intervention is a flawed and unsuccessful option. Critics argue that, even though the UN prevented hundreds of thousands of Bosnians in besieged towns from starvation, it did little or nothing to stop Bosnian Serbs from shelling these areas and ethnically cleansing them of Muslims. Furthermore, others claim that NATO’S degrading of Serb military capability from the air did nothing to save those civilians trapped in UN-created safe areas. In 1995 at least 7,414 Muslim men were rounded up in a Screbrenica enclave and systematically killed in the worst war crime of the whole war. However, while such examples may indicate that humanitarian interventions are not a legitimate option, there are also positive aspects that in some cases, compensate for, and override these negative flaws.
In order to answer the question concerning the formation of states, it is necessary to clarify what constitutes a state; the Oxford English Dictionary defines a state as ‘a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government’. There are a number of ways and processes in which to analyse what state formation is, why they have formed and the way in which this has occurred. State emergence can be traced back to the creation of territorial boundaries in medieval Europe, such as the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and its transition to a modern state can be attributed to the introduction of gunpowder in war (Hague & Harrop, 2010: 64). The formations of states have also been influenced by the growth of bureaucracy, administration and organisations. There are different theories as to the reason why states form, a certain few of which can be divided into the categories of rationalist, culturalist and structuralist perspectives. In this essay, these perspectives shall enter the debate in trying to justify the reason for state formation and the way in which it occurs. The most prominent feature in the formation of states appears to be the prevention and engagement of a state in war and its following consequences.