ما يحدُثُ في الخُرطُوم تَصْـفِيَة عِرقِيـّة والدِفَاع ُ عن العِرْضِ و المالِ حَق مَشْروع

Quote: Origins of the term The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a loan translation of the Serbian/Croatian phrase etničko čišćenje (SAMPA /etnitSko tSiStS'eJe/) (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, SAMPA "tSiStS'eJe terena") 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 other ethnic groups as well. It was used in this context by the Yugoslav 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. However, this usage had antecedents. The earliest known usage of it appears to have been in May 16 1941, in an article in the Hrvatska Krajina newspapers describing the visit of Croatian Ustase commander Viktor Gutić to the Franciscan monastery Petrićevac[1] (http://www.pavelicpapers.com/documents/ndhnews/ndhn0004.html. In the article, Gutić is quoted as saying: Every Croat who today solicits for our enemies not only is not a good Croat, but also an opponent and disrupter of the prearranged, well-calculated plan for cleansing [čišćenje] our Croatia of unwanted elements... It is possible that the revival of nationalism in the 1980s reintroduced ethnic cleansing - which was practiced by all sides in the Second World War - into Yugoslavia's political debate and language. A similar term with the same intent was used by the Nazi administration in Germany under Adolf Hitler 50 years earlier. When an area under Nazi control had its entire Jewish population removed, whether by driving the population out, by deportation to Concentration Camps, and/or murder, the area was declared judenrein (lit. Jew Clean): cleansed of jews. (cf. racial hygiene.) Ethnic cleansing in history Some narratives in the Torah and other books of the Old Testament in the Bible (also known as the Hebrew Bible or Tenakh) describing the Hebrew (or Israelite) conquest of Canaan (in ca. 13th century B.C.E. or before) would now be considered descriptions of ethnic cleansing or even genocide. In several places the Hebrew God, Yahweh 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. It was also standard practice at the time to murder or enslave prisoners of war and their families. For example, according to the biblical narative, the people of the Caananite village of Ai are massascred by Joshua's troops in Joshua 8:20-25. In one passage detailing "the holy war against Midian" (Numbers 31:1-24). In verses 13-24 Moses asks the victorious Hebrew troops why they have spared the lives of all the women who had "perverted the sons of Israel" into rejecting God. Moses then orders the Hebrew troops to kill all the male children and women who are not virgins. Today, since Midian was most likely a city-state, this act would constitute genocide and many war crimes. The Assyrian Empire regularly deported entire ethnic groups, as did the Babylonians; victims of this policy most famously include the Jews of Judah (see Babylonian captivity of Judah), and before them the Jews of Israel in 722 BC. In ancient times, the Roman Empire would often enslave or exile entire peoples, most famously the Jews following the revolt of 70 AD in Judea. After the expulsion, Jews became a nomadic nation without a homeland. During the Middle Ages, every country that hosted them felt entitled to expel them, if conditions changed. However, sometimes the expulsion of Jews had some features of ethnic cleansing, especially if it were accompanied by the violence and were enacted on the whole territory of the state. I.e. Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306), Hungary (1349–1360), Provence (1394 and 1490), Austria (1421), Spain after the Reconquista, Portugal (1497), Russia in 1724, and various parts of Germany at various times. Not all deportations of Jews affected an entire country or lasted for extended periods of time: Jews from Krakow (1494) were expelled to suburbs of the city, and Jews were expelled from Lithuania (1491) and allowed to return 10 years later. Expulsion of Jews in some cases can be compared to the expulsion of illegal immigrants, as is practised by modern countries from time to time. Spain's large Muslim minority, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609–1614. England expelled Gypsies, France expelled Huguenots. Russia forced Muslim Crimean Tatars to leave Crimea for the Ottoman Empire in a gradual and consistent process starting in 1783. Finally, Soviet Union deported the remaining Crimean Tatars from their homeland of Crimea 18 May 1944. The Tatars were replaced by slavic settlers from other parts of Russia. Colonization-related ethnic cleansing During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In North America, British and American settlers ethnically cleansed millions of Native Americans, 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 colonization of the Americas by European powers, particularly Spain and Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in the 15th century and continuing into the 20th. The colonization of Australia by Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in 1788. It is important to note that the Maori were not ethnically cleansed in New Zealand. Many Maori were dispossessed of ownership of their land, but few were ever forcibly removed, and when this did happen it was mostly as a result of punishment for fighting and losing against colonial troops during the Land Wars. The removals and massacres of native populations in the African colonies of various European powers. The concentration of Boers by Britain during the Second Boer War The American and South Pacific instances were disastrous. The native populations fell from from millions to thousands in only a few centuries, a combined result of colonization policies and epidemics of foreign disease. 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. Older examples Expulsion of the Acadians in 1755. In the United States in the 19th Century there were numerous instances of relocation of Native American peoples from their traditional areas to often remote reservations elsewhere in the country. See Long Walk of the Navajo. The forced removal of the Cherokee Amerindian tribe at the behest of Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren, in violation of the ruling of John Marshall's Supreme Court, led to the deaths of 1/4—or about 4,000 to 8,000—of said tribe during the march from Georgia to Oklahoma. See Trail of Tears. Alleged 20th Century instances The 1913 Convention of Adrianople, annexed to the Peace Treaty between Bulgaria and Turkey, provided for an exchange of ethnic Turks and Bulgarians in a 15 kilometer strip. The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly-Sur-Seine provided for the reciprocal emigration of ethnic minorities between Greece and Bulgaria. In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne between the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, on the one part and Turkey on the other, which ended the First World War in the East, as well as post-War hostilities between Greece and the newly-formed Republic of Turkey. The treaty provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Pontian Greeks perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922. The expulsion of Poles from Belorussia and Ukraine 1932–1936 to Kazakhstan. The term includes the German Nazi government's treatment of the Jews (the Holocaust) and the Gypsies, in which the Nazis forcibly moved whole populations to death camps. The expulsions of Jews from Austria after the Anschluss, and deportations of Poles and Jews from Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany. Generalplan Ost, in which the Nazis planned to kill or expel most or all ethnic Slavs from large regions of Eastern Europe and replace them with German settlers. The German exodus from Eastern Europe. The deportations of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians from areas occupied by Soviet Union 1939–1941. The deportations of Karelians from East Karelia by Soviet Union in 1930s. The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia by Ukrainian guerrilla groups. The mass deportation and exile of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Balkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and other minorities living in the Soviet Union by Stalin in 1943–1944, under the pretext that they were collaborating with Nazi Germany The expulsion of Poles from Zamosc Voivodship by Germans in 1944. The expulsions of 800,000 Poles from Warsaw to concentration camps after defeat of Warsaw Uprising 1944, caused 200,000 deaths. The city of Warsaw, population of one million, was ordered to be completely demolished on the personal order of Hitler. Approximately 80% of the city was demolished. Himmler stated, that the aim, was to remove permanently the Polish population which the Nazis viewed as an obstacle to German Eastern expansion for the last 700 years. The evacuation and expulsion of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, notably from the Sudetenland and East Prussia. Begun as an evacuation by the German authorities, hastened by revenge attacks by Soviet troops and ultimately completed by USSR and its satellite states following the decisions at the Potsdam conference. Finnish evacueeded from Finnish Karelia and other parts occupied by Soviet Union after World War II. This was voluntary, and they evacuated because of fearing Soviet rule. The mass deportation of ethnic minorities from their homelands, including East Timor and Papua, by the Indonesian government, beginning with Indonesian independence in 1949 (and subsequent occupation and annexation of Papua until the present day and of East Timor until 1999). The Nakba, or so-called Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Palestinians in the areas of Arab Palestine that became part of Israel fled prior to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. The mass flight of large Jewish communities from Yemen and Iraq, and small ones from the West Bank during 1948–1950, as well as flights which took place later from Egypt and Libya. The mass expulsion of Turks and Greeks from each other's respective sections of the divided island of Cyprus during the 1974 civil war and Turkish invasion. The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, of which the most significant examples occurred in eastern Croatia and Krajina (1991-1995), in most of Bosnia (1992-1995), and in the Albanian-dominated breakaway province of Serbia called Kosovo (1999). Large numbers of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians were forced to flee their homes and expelled. In 2004, following an upsurge in violence, Serbs were forced to flee their homes in the province (now United Nations administered) by Albanian rioters. The forced exclusion since 1989 of Hindus from the Pakistani occupied region of the disputed territory of Kashmir by Islamic paramilitary groups, which the Indian government accuses the Pakistani governmnent of assisting. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of post-Soviet independent states witnessed out-migration of Russians, perceived as "colonizers" there because of the Soviet Union's politics of Russification. For example, after the inclusion of Latvia in the USSR, Latvians became a minority in their own country. Forced conversions and killings of Hindus and tribals in India's northeast by Christian militants since 1989. The 1994 massacres of Tutsis by Hutus known as the Rwandan Genocide Attacks by the Janjaweed Arab Muslim militias of Sudan on the non-Arab African Muslim population of Darfur, a region in western Sudan. 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 Serbian campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. As well as fighting a traditional war with the Bosnian Army, the Serbian forces sought to eradicate the entire non-Serb population of the areas they controlled, either through massacres (as the Srebrenica massacre) or more usually through terrorization of the civilian population to encourage them to flee to territory controlled by government forces. The tactic was also used by Croatian and Bosnian forces, and was repeated on a large scale during the Kosovo War in 1999. 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. 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 Germans from outside of Germans border 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 very widely reviled. It is generally regarded as lying somewhere between population transfers and genocide on a scale of odiousness, and is treated by international law as a war crime. It can also create political problems in the long term as "cleansed" communities campaign to be allowed to return home, as in the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. 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 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 cleansing" in the past doesn't fit in the modern definition of the crime against humanity. For example German expulsions were sanctioned by the international agreement at Potsdam conference. The agreement required the action to proceed in humane way. References and Links "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19930601faessay5199/andre...thnic-cleansing.html, Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (1993) 110 "Ethnic Cleansing — An Attempt at Methodology (http://www.ejil.org/journal/Vol5/No3/art3.html, Drazen Petrovic, European Journal of International Law, 5 EJIL (1994) 1-359 Photojournalist's Account (http://www.ryanspencerreed.com/) - Images of ethnic cleansing in Sudan