Introduction Ethnic Cleansing in History STEVEN BÉLA VÁRDY and T. HUNT TOOLEY
As pointed out by José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) in his epoch-making work The Revolt of the Masses (1929)1 , during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Western World had witnessed the emergence of the common populace to a position of economic and political influence in human society. Being essentially of republican sympathies, and sympathizing with the exploited underclasses of Western Civilization, Ortega readily recognized the positive implications of this mass phenomenon for the people in general. At the same time, however, he feared that this ascendance of the uncouth, boorish, and unwashed masses might lead to civilization's relapse into a new form of barbarism. He was convinced of the "essential inequality of human beings," and consequently he believed in the unique role of the "intellectual elites" in the shaping of history.2
As a disciple of the Geistesgeschichte view of human evolution, Ortega was convinced of the primacy of spiritual and intellectual factors over economic and material forces in historical evolution. Given these convictions, he feared that the emergence of a mass society—dominated, as it was, by economic and material considerations—would result in the reemergence of barbarism on a mass scale.
That Ortega's fears were partially justified can hardly be doubted in light of the mass exterminations witnessed by several twentieth-century generations of human beings. As we all know, in the second quarter of the past century six million Jews and many thousands of non-Jewish people were exterminated at the orders of a lowly corporal turned into the unquestioned leader of Germany (Hitler). At the same time, forty to fifty million innocent human beings fell victim to the twisted mind of a Caucasian brigand turned into the "infallible leader" of the homeland of socialism (Stalin). Moreover, since the end of World War II, the world has also stood witness to mass killings, expulsions, and genocides in such widely scattered regions of the world as Cambodia in Southeast Asia, Rwanda in Central Africa, and in Bosnia in former Yugoslavia.
In looking at these terror actions against an ethnic group, religious denomination, or nationality—be these mass expulsions, partial exterminations, or genocides—we are often confused how to categorize them. Scholars and publicists are particularly confounded at the distinctions or alleged distinctions between "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing." The first of these terms came into common use in conjunction with the Jewish Holocaust of the World War II period, while the second term gained currency in the inter-ethnic struggles of Bosnia during the early 1990s.
This obfuscation and bewilderment became even more pronounced recently, particularly in consequence of the belated application of one or another of these terms to such earlier events as the so-called "Armenian
Holocaust" of 1915,3 and the various "ethnic cleansings" that took place in wake of the two world wars and the simultaneous changes in political borders. We know that most ethnic cleansings involve some physical abuse and some number of intended or unintended deaths. We also know that none of these so-called Holocausts were able to exterminate all members of a particular group. Consequently, in actual practice or application, the meaning of these two terms often tend to merge. At times it is really difficult to differentiate between the two, particularly in light of the fact that the application of violence in some ethnic cleansings often reaches the point of mass killings, thus turning that event into a potential genocide.
While we recognized the difficulty of distinguishing between these two phenomena, in the conference upon which this book is based we tried to limit our attention to the historical events that could clearly be classified as „ethnic cleansing." We were able to do this, because we equated "genocide" with the Jewish Holocaust, which was definitely a case of ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, but which was also more. We tried to start with a definition of "genocide" as "the planned, directed, and systematic extermination of a national or ethnic group." At the same time our working definition of "ethnic cleansing" was more focused on the process of removing people from a given territory: "the mass removal of a targeted population from a given territory, including forced population exchanges of peoples from their original homelands as well as other means." We did this in part because had we included "genocide" as a topic of our conference, in the sense of the National Socialist war against the Jews, much of the attention of the participants would have been taken up by the Holocaust. There is, of course, hardly a more significant twentieth-century historical topic than Hitler's efforts to exterminate the Jews. But precisely for that reason, during the past half a century, it has been in the focus and awareness of hundreds of scholars, who have produced thousands of volumes on this topic. Not so the topic of "ethnic cleansing," which has largely been ignored until the Bosnian crisis of the 1990s.4 In any event, most of the presentations at the Conference on Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth–Century Europe at Duquesne University, as will be seen, worked to examine and refine the definition of the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing. At the conference itself, the participants devoted much time and energy to discussions of definitions. The results will be seen in the expanded and refined conference papers which make up the chapters of this book.
Although the term "ethnic cleansing" has come into common usage only since the Bosnian conflict, the practice itself is almost as old as humanity itself. It reaches back to ancient times. An early example of such an ethnic cleansing was the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Jews in the sixth century B.C. (from 586 to 538 B.C.). After capturing Jerusalem in 586 B.C., King Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605-561 B.C.) of Babylonia proceeded to deport the Judeans to his own kingdom, and in this way he "cleansed" the future Holy Land of most of its native inhabitants.
Similar ethnic cleansings took place in the period of the so-called "barbarian invasions" of the fourth through the sixth centuries, when large, nation-like tribes—Germans, Slavs, and various Turkic peoples—
3 The ex post facto application of the term “Holocaust” or “genocide” to the forced transfer of many of Ottoman Turkey’s Armenian population from Turkish Armenia in the north to Cilicia or Lesser Armenia in the south is a hotly debated issue. Many scholars view it as a population transfer that should be called “ethnic cleansing.” Others, emphasizing the large percentage of the transferees who died, prefer to classify it as a “Holocaust.” For the Armenian side of the story see Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust (Chicago, London, 1992); Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, Oxford, 1995); and Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (Autumn 1986): 169-192. For the Turkish and American side of that story see Mim Kemal Öke, The Armenian Question, 1914-1923 (Oxford, 1988) and Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge, 1976-1977), 2: 314-317. See also Ronald Suny, “Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an Understanding of the Armenian Genocide,” in Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 94-115. 4 On ethnic cleansing in general see Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993):110-120; Andrew BellFialkoff, Ethnic Cleansing (New York, 1996); Dražen Petrović, “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of International Law 5 (1994): 342-359; Robert M. Hayden, “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfer,” Slavic Review 55 (Winter 1996): 727-748; Jennifer Jackson Preece, ”Ethnic Cleansing as an Instrument of Nation-State Creation: Changing State Practices and Evolving Legal Norms,” Human Rights Quarterly, 20 (1998): 817-842; Norman M. Naimark, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe [The Donald W. Treadgold Papers, no. 19] (Seattle, 2000); and Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth–Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 11
moved back and forth between Western and Eastern Europe, and even Central Asia. They forcibly displaced one another, and in this way reshaped the ethnic map of the European continent. This so-called Völkerwanderung ("wandering of nations")—which, in some instances, stretched into the late Middle Ages—brought such peoples as the Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Cumans into the very heart of Europe. Its aftereffects were felt as late as the thirteenth century, when the Mongols or Tatars invaded Europe, conquered the eastern half of the continent, and then settled down there to rule over the East Slavs for several centuries.
Although this process of forcible relocations has been practiced for millennia, ethnic cleansing as an official policy did not come into being until more recent times. In the Western world, large-scale forcible relocation of a specified "people' was introduced in the early nineteenth century United States, as the official policy of the United State government. Informally, scores of Indian tribes had "emigrated" from their lands as a result of European pressure, at times escaping from direct violence by European settlers, at times looking for food, at times being pushed by other native groups reacting to direct pressure from European settlers. The process of removal bec