مهلا استاذة سعاد ابراهيم احمد

Quote: The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these. Some political comentators avoid use of the term, which they see as a political euphemism which attempts to apply a word with positive connotations (cleansing) to a morally objectionable act (forced population movement usually achieved through violence). 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