Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At the more general level it can be understood as the expulsion of any “undesirable” population from a given territory not only due to its ethnicity but also as a result of its religion, or for political, ideological, or strategic considerations, or a combination of these characteristics. The term entered the international vocabulary in connection with the Yugoslav wars. It comes from the Serbian/Croatian phrase etnicko ciscenje , whose literal translation is ethnic cleaning. In the Yugoslav media it started to be used in the early 1980s in relation to the alleged Kosovar Albanian policy of creating ethnically homogeneous territory in Kosovo by the expulsion of the Serbian population. The term itself was probably taken from the vocabulary of the former JNA (Yugoslav People's Army), which spoke of cleansing the territory ( ciscenje terena ) of enemies to take control of a conquered area. In the wars of Yugoslav succession, ethnic cleansing was a strategy used widely by all sides, starting with the expulsion of Croats from the areas in Croatia inhabited by Serbs. The main goal of these actions was to alter the demographic structure of the territory by getting rid of the unwanted ethnic groups. The origin and the extended usage of the term ethnic cleansing in the public discourse ... log in or subscribe to read full text