There have been many cases of depression and other forms of psychological anguish as a result of it. Communities built by refugees are plagued with sadness, and the numbers of those living beneath the poverty line continue to increase.
Shortages of food, clean water and housing become more apparent as these numbers continue to rise. Finding a solution to ethnic cleansing is too difficult due to the vast differences between various ethnic groups and members of society. The only help that can be given is to the victims of it. This can be done through the donation of resources, to help communities that are struggling as a result of brutal situations.
Photo: Flickr. This violence culminated in the massacre of as many as 8, Bosniak men and boys at the town of Srebrenica in July Using this definition, Bell-Fialkoff and many observers of history consider the aggressive displacement of Native Americans by European settlers in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries to be ethnic cleansing. By contrast, the removal of thousands of Africans from their native lands for the purpose of slavery would not be classified as ethnic cleansing, as the intent of these actions was not to expel a particular group.
According to Bell-Fialkoff and others, the Assyrian Empire practiced ethnic cleansing when it forced millions of people in conquered lands to resettle between the ninth and seventh centuries B. Groups such as the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans continued this practice, though not always on such a large scale and often to procure slave labor. During the Middle Ages , religion rather than ethnicity was a main source of persecution; episodes of religious cleansing tended to target Jews, often the largest minority in European countries.
In Spain, which had a large population of Jews and of Muslims, Jews were expelled in and Muslims in ; those who remained were forced to convert to Christianity , though all Muslim converts called Moriscos were expelled in the early 17th century. In North America, most Native Americans in North America were forced to resettle in territory allotted to them by the midth century; when the Homestead Act of opened up most of the remaining lands to white settlers, those tribes who resisted—such as the Sioux, Comanche and Arapaho—were brutally crushed.
Despite these examples, some scholars argue that ethnic cleansing in its strictest sense is a 20th-century phenomenon.
This was the case in the s, both in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, where members of the majority Hutu ethnic group massacred hundreds of thousands of people, mostly minority Tutsis, from April to July The term ethnic cleansing has also been used to refer to the treatment of Chechens who fled Grozny and other areas of Chechnya after Russia began military operations against separatists there during the s, as well as the killing or forcible removal from their homes of refugees from East Timor by Indonesian militants after a vote for independence in Most recently, it has been applied to the events that occurred beginning in in the Darfur region of Sudan, where brutal clashes between rebel groups and Sudanese military forces left hundreds of thousands dead and more than 2 million displaced many of whom, like the rebels, are members of the Fur, Zaghawa and Masaalit ethnic groups.
Recent Russian attempts to expel Georgians from Moscow have been classified as the preliminaries to ethnic cleansing. The case of Darfur in Sudan represents a particularly deadly case of ethnic cleansing in contemporary world politics. In refugee camps in Chad and western Darfur, members of the Fur and other native peoples of the region suffer and die in the tens of thousands from disease, exposure, and malnutrition.
Forces of the African Union have been deployed to try to control the situation. From the outset of the war in the former Yugoslavia, some analysts and human rights activists challenged and continue to challenge the validity of the term ethnic cleansing as a euphemism for genocide.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, , and upheld in the International Courts formed for the purposes of trying criminals from the wars in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, focuses on the intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group Schabas, ch.
The purpose of ethnic cleansing 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 fundamentally different kind of criminal action against an ethnic, religious, or national group.
The transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia ICTY frequently mention ethnic cleansing, but subsume it under the category of forced deportation, a crime against humanity that was widespread particularly in Bosnia. The courts have not clearly established ethnic cleansing as a category of criminal offense, leaving room for ambiguity about its precise judicial meaning. Genocide, on the other hand, has a juridical status going back to Raphael Lemkin's mostly unsuccessful attempt to have it inserted in the Nuremberg indictments in Power, There is now a substantial and growing body of case law that provides definitions of genocide and its meaning for international law.
In the ICTY, the bar for genocide has been placed so high that it has been extremely difficult to prove that particular individuals committed genocide. At the same time, the mass murder of roughly 7, Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica has been designated at the courts as genocide.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing occupy adjacent positions on a spectrum of attacks on nations or on religious and ethnic groups Naimark, ; Semelin, 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.
Only in the rarest cases do people leave their homes peacefully. Their families have deep roots there, and their elders are buried in local graveyards. Their cultures are tied to the land that they or their forbears cultivated and to the physical geography in which they live. The result is that forced deportation, even in times of peace, can quickly turn to violence, as native inhabitants are ripped from their home villages and towns, and killed when they try to stay.
Ethnic cleansing sometimes takes on genocidal overtones at the initial point of deportation. But victims also often die in transit or in refugee camps at their eventual 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 buses causes severe deprivation, hunger, starvation, and death by disease. Hunger and disease-ridden refugee camps similarly contribute to the high mortality of people forced not just from their normal domiciles, but from their work places, their ties to the land, and their traditional sources of food and medical care. When international or state organizations are allowed to step in to help, they are often late and erratic in providing relief, as well as insensitive to the cultural needs of refugee populations.
In short, the victimization of the ethnically cleansed cannot be said to cease once they have been chased from their homes. The terrible death toll in Darfur — now estimated at nearly , — is due less to the immediate violence of the Janjaweed militias than it is to the horrendous conditions of life forced on the refugees. The medieval and early modern world saw countless examples of such expulsions -- of the Jews, the Albigensians, the Huguenots, and the Incas and Aztecs in the Americas.
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