Humanities - The 20th Century - Human Rights - Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic Cleansing – Genocide Ethnic cleansing refers to various military policies or military practices aimed at achieving security during war through displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory. The term entered English and international media in the early 1990s to describe civil war events in the former Yugoslavia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

Genocide While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστον (holókauston): holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: ‫)השואה‬, Churben (Yiddish: ‫)חורבן‬, is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust The country has garnered international attention most markedly for the infamous Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Rwanda has applied to become a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and a decision on its application is expected in 2009 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda

The Khmer Rouge judicial process, for minor or political crimes, began with a warning from the Angkar, the government of Cambodia under the regime. People receiving more than two warnings were sent for "reeducation", which meant near-certain death. People were often encouraged to confess to Angkar their "pre-revolutionary lifestyles and crimes" (which usually included some kind of free-market activity, or having had contact with a foreign source, such as a US missionary, or international relief or government agency, or contact with any foreigner or with the outside world at all), being told that Angkar would forgive them and "wipe the slate clean". This meant being taken away to a place such as Tuol Sleng or Choeung Ek for torture and/or execution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields The threat from Saddam Hussein's biological weapons is real. He has actually used them, both against the Kurds and the Iranians. With the creation of the Iraqi State, the Kurds of the former Ottoman Vilayet of Mosul had rejected incorporation, fearing that an Arab majority would dominate them and crush national aspiration. In 1919, a year before the mandatory state of Iraq was created, a prominent Kurdish leader, Mahmoud Barzanji, proclaimed himself King of an independent Kurdish state and took over the city and area of Suleimanieh. This experiment soon collapsed and the British quickly removed him. A second attempt by Mahmoud, in 1922, also failed. When a referendum was held in 1921 to approve the appointment of Faisal as King of Iraq, in Kirkuk the Kurdish majority there voted against him, whilein the Kurdish heartland city of Suleimanieh, the referendum was totally boycotted. http://www.jafi.org.il/education/actual/iraq/4.html More than two hundred thousands civilians have been killed in Bosnia and Croatia since the beginning of the war. Tens of thousands of women were raped, some of them more than a hundred times, while their sons and husbands were beaten and tortured in concentration camps like Omarska and Manjaca. Millions lost their homes due to a process called "ethnic cleansing."

Ethnic Cleansing is a process in which advancing army of one ethnic group expels civilians of other ethnic groups from towns and villages it conquers in order to create

ethnically pure enclaves for members of their ethnic group. Serbian military commander in Bosnia, a war criminal sought by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Ratko Mladic, sometimes issued specific orders (.wav file in Serbian, 1'30", 1 MB) to his subordinates to shell a particular village more than others, because there is less Serbs and more Muslims living there. Often, refugees of one ethnic group previously "cleansed" from their homes by other ethnic group are made to live in freshly "cleansed" teritory of that other ethnic group. The vengeance they feel explains some of unusual cruelties this war brought to us. Without possibility to get feedback on their actions from the world outside, their perpetuated hatred serves their leaders purposes by providing reasons for continuation of the war.Ethnic Cleansing created more than two million refugees and displaced persons in former Yugoslavia during the war in Bosnia. This number increased with the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia and with the ferocious atrocities committed by Serbs against the Albanian majority in Kosovo, prior and during (in spite of) NATO air strikes. http://www.balkansnet.org/ethnicl.html