Can you imagine a stranger coming to your home that your family lived in for generations and the stranger squats right there in your abode, as if it were their home all along, waiting for you to pack up and leave because the state gave him or her the right to do so? A government that has unfailingly discriminated against you and your people of a certain ethnicity, race, or religion for generations?
Who could be so cruel?
People who don’t like another group of people. And willing to use violence if need be.
I can NOT even fathom such a scenario of being forced from my home for no other reason than because of who I am, what I look like, or what I believe (or don’t believe). But it has been the painful reality for too many around the globe. For centuries.
It’s called ethnic cleansing.
Political leaders have long made up excuses to “soften” their actions toward those they oppress – like expelling people as a supposed “punishment” for war crimes, although though the ones being displaced are only “guilty” for being of the same ethnic background as the actual persons who committed crimes against humanity – as was done in December 1944 when Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced to a startled House of Commons that the Allies had decided to carry out the largest forced population transfer – what is nowadays referred to as “ethnic cleansing”, in human history. Millions of civilians living in the eastern German provinces that were to be turned over to Poland after the war were to be driven out and deposited among the ruins of the former Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could.
What was planned, he forthrightly declared, was “the total expulsion of the Germans… For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”
Greed (or revenge) for land or other resources is another excuse, such as in 146 B.C. during the Battle of Carthage the Romans broke through the city wall of Carthage – now modern day Tunisia – the city was leveled and after its citizens surrendered, they were sold into slavery. And the land surrounding Carthage was eventually declared ager publicus (public land), and it was shared between local farmers, and Roman and Italian ones.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
But at the end of the day, a primary objective was and still is to get rid of a group of people.
According to Wikipedia:
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal or extermination of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given area, often with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal (deportation, population transfer), it also includes indirect methods aimed at coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
Although many instances of ethnic cleansing have occurred throughout history, the term was first used by the perpetrators as a euphemism during the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Since then it has gained widespread acceptance due to journalism and the media’s heightened use of the term in its generic meaning.
The Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 defined ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.
The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group”.
There are too many examples (unfortunately) of ethnic cleansing in human history to include here, but I’ll give you some glaring examples:
China
c. 350 AD: Ancient Chinese texts record that General Ran Min ordered the extermination of the Wu Hu, especially the Jie people, during the Wei–Jie war in the fourth century AD. The Wu Hu, or The Five Barbarians, refers to five ancient non-Han peoples who immigrated to northern China in the Eastern Han dynasty, and then overthrew the Western Jin dynasty and established their own kingdoms in the 4th–5th centuries.
People with racial characteristics such as high-bridged noses and bushy beards were killed; in total, 200,000 were reportedly massacred.
Europe
c. 1250–1500 AD: Many European countries expelled from their respective territories the Jews on at least 15 occasions. Spain was preceded by England, France and some German states, among many others, and succeeded by at least five more expulsions.
Nova Scotia
1755–1764: During the French and Indian War, the Nova Scotian colonial government, aided by New England troops, instituted a systematic removal of the French Catholic Acadian population of Nova Scotia – eventually removing thousands of settlers from the region and relocating them to areas in the Thirteen Colonies, Britain, and France. Many eventually moved and settled in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns. Many scholars have described the subsequent deaths of over 50% of the deported Acadian population as an ethnic cleansing.
United States of America
1830-1850: The Trail of Tears was part of a series of forced displacements of approximately 60,000 Native Americans by the United States government known as the Federal Indian Removal Act of 1830. Members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves) were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated ‘Indian Territory’.
The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and signed by President Andrew Jackson.
The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated reserve. Thousands died before reaching their destinations or shortly after from disease.
Ottoman Empire
1894–1896: in an effort to Islamize the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered the killing of ethnic Armenians (along with other Christian minorities) living in the Ottoman Empire, based on their religion. These killings later became known as the Hamidian massacres, named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It has been estimated that the total number of people killed ranges from 80,000 to 300,000.
Canada
You’re familiar with the horrific treatment of thousands of Japanese Americans by the United States government during WWII, yes? Forced from their homes and shipped to faraway concentration camps? Did you know that Canada not only did the same thing, but at the end of the war, they forced many of their own citizens back to Japan, a war-torn country that many of them had never even seen before?
After Canada declared war on Japan, Major General Ken Stuart stated, “From the Army point of view, I cannot see that Japanese Canadians constitute the slightest bit of menace to national security.” Sadly, his words didn’t matter at all, and by February 1942, orders were given to evacuate all Japanese Canadians and relocate them into what were deemed “protective areas.”
Just like their Japanese American counterparts, thousands of Japanese Canadians were given a matter of hours to collect what they could before being loaded onto trains and taken to ghost towns. With no running water or electricity, the ghost towns of British Columbia became holding centers for thousands of men, women, and children. About 20,800 people were moved, and of those, more than 13,000 were Canadian citizens who were born in the country. Their property was seized and much of it sold to finance the cost of moving them.
When the war ended, those who were moved to internment camps were given two choices, and neither was good. In order to prove their loyalty to their new nation (which was the only country that many had ever known), they were told that they needed to move to the eastern part of Canada. Those who didn’t want to leave their homes in British Columbia were given only one other choice – repatriation to Japan.
What a raw deal, to put it mildly.
Palestine
The 1948 Palestinian exodus occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Palestine’s Arab population – fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war.
The exodus was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba (Arabic: al-Nakbah, literally “disaster”, “catastrophe”, or “cataclysm”) in which between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed and Palestinian history erased, and also refers to the wider period of war itself and the subsequent oppression up to the present day.
The precise number of refugees, many of whom settled in refugee camps in neighboring states, is a matter of dispute but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (half of the Arab total of British-created Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes. About 250,000–300,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled before the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, a fact which was named as a casus belli (“occasion for war” – an act or event that provokes or is used to justify war.) for the entry of the Arab League into the country, sparking the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
I regret to tell you that there are SO many more ethnic cleansing events throughout history to the present day. You may be aware of some of them, as I am, particularly the more notorious ones in during the 20th century, including the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I; the Nazis’ annihilation of some 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust; the forced displacement and mass killings carried out in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda during the 1990s.
But I didn’t know about the many lesser known ones and thought they were just as notable to share with you; however, I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much detail and historical facts, important as they are. But if you’ve read this far, you’ve got an idea of what horrors humans can inflict on one another.
Regarding Palestine, you’ve no doubt heard of the horrible conflict now raging between Israel and Palestine if you’ve been watching the news. What’s not being covered, at least on broadcast news as far as I can tell (even on liberal-leaning MSNBC), is what lies at reason for the confrontations: the likely Israeli takeover of Palestinian homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem.
This sort of thing between Israeli settlers and Palestinians has been going on for decades, but intensified yet again over the last weeks. The New York Times reports that since the start of the May, the prospect of the evictions has prompted daily protests, arrests, and confrontations between Palestinians and the Israeli police and Jewish extremists.
Tensions reached a peak at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound – Islam’s third holiest site – in Jerusalem on Friday night, May 7th, where police officers threw stun grenades and fired rubber-coated bullets as worshipers attempted to pray, and worshipers threw bottles and stones. Some of the stun grenades landed in the mosque. Injuries, deaths, and destruction continue as I write this.
To pour salt on the wound, the upsurge in violence came during the last week of Ramadan as Israel celebrated “Jerusalem Day“, marking its capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
I won’t attempt to describe the fear and pain felt by Palestinians threatened by the loss of the only homes they’ve known for generations, so I will just share the link to a video made by a Palestinian writer describing what is going on:
On Sunday, May 9th, the Israeli Supreme Court delayed a decision on whether to expel six Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem after the attorney general requested more time, in part because of the tensions the case has stirred. The court was to decide on Monday, May 10th, whether to uphold an expulsion order for the families in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, in a hearing that many feared would set off a wave of unrest.
Instead, the case has been delayed by up to 30 days to allow the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, to review it. The Israeli government has argued that the Sheikh Jarrah case is a private real-estate dispute between the Palestinian families and a secretive Jewish settler group, which bought the land two decades ago on which the Palestinians’ homes were built in the 1950s.
This is the present day: The New York Times notes that for many Palestinians, the families’ plight has become emblematic of a wider effort to remove Palestinians from parts of East Jerusalem and of the past displacements of Arabs in the occupied territories and within Israel – the only home they’ve known for centuries.
Getting rid of people. Because of who they are. Threatened with losing their homes, their livelihoods (or worse), just as many of their forbears lost their homes over the past decades. Because for any number of reasons, one group of people feels they can and will dispose of another group of people.
It is the 21st century and we are still witnessing ethnic cleansing.
Let that sink in.
Sources
Alternet
Wikipedia – List of ethnic cleansing campaigns
Wikipedia – Ethnic Cleansing
History.com – Ethnic Cleansing
Wikipedia – Trail of Tears
History.com – Trail of Tears
Britannica
HuffPost
Listverse
The New York Times
Wikipedia – 1948 Palestinian exodus
MSN
AlJazeera