THIS CONSTANT EVIL – On the Origins of Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic Cleansing has been a constant evil in world history. It can even be argued that this abhorrent practice shaped the world we know today … and from Israel to Myanmar, Syria to Ukraine and Burundi to Sudan, is shaping it still.

As a term, however, it only came to the public’s attention in the Spring of 1992 in the build-up to the wars in former-Yugoslavia. It has been gaining universal recognition ever since, but, despite the constant references, no-one knows what the term really means.

Partly, this is because there is no precise legal definition of what it entails. As a result, and despite it being used euphemistically in UN Security Council Resolutions and ICTY judgments over the years since 1992, ‘ethnic cleansing’ has never been recognised as an independent crime under international humanitarian or human rights law.

Even today, the United Nations’ Office on Genocide Prevention[1] cannot provide a definition, stating that “The precise roots of the term or who started using it and why are still uncertain.”[2]

Such lack of definition has hindered legal attempts to prosecute and hold war criminals to account, and obscures wider public understanding of the political underpinnings of this obscenity.

This is unfortunate given that the practice does not appear to have gone away. If anything, it has gained traction around the world, and not just in Kosovo. One of the more recent and most egregious examples has been taking place in Myanmar where the country’s military have been systematically killing members of the country’s Rohingya minority since late 2017. As in Rwanda, Syria and elsewhere, a shocked world expressed its moral outrage, with the UN’s top human rights official at the time describing it as “a classic example of ethnic cleansing” and the US House of Representatives passing a resolution a few months later condemning “the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.”

Despite many of its practices falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention[3], it is time ‘ethnic cleansing’ be formally adopted as a war crime in its own right. For this to happen, the genesis of the term, if not the practice, must be clarified once and for all, and a definition provided.

Thus far in the history of international humanitarian and human rights law, the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been applied more for emotional and political reasons than legal. That the international community has employed the term as an excuse not to comply with duties laid down by their obligations under the Genocide Convention as some observers suggest can no longer be a valid reason for not providing such a definition. It is only, after all, by providing clear definition that we can make sense of a rules-based world in which politicians and perpetrators can be fully brought to account[4].

There is precedent for this. Like the word ‘genocide’, the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is an invention; an artificial construct describing – and, at the same time, sometimes masking – the complex and brutal reality it so blandly descibes. And, as with ‘genocide’, it has its own story[5].

The story of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in post-War Europe started in the Croatian province of East Slavonia, the easternmost of four ‘UN protected areas’ (UNPAs) lying along Croatia’s 550-mile-long southern border … a zone referred to locally as ‘Krajina’[6]. It was March 1992 and the war in Bosnia was still weeks away. Serbs and Croats had been engaged in bitter fighting over control of these disputed areas (see the tinted areas in the map opposite) through the Winter, mostly notably in Vukovar, a provincial Croat town at the edge of the Great Panonian Plain and whose remains I could sometimes see smouldering on the horizon. In scenes reminiscent of the First World War, front lines had become entrenched, with the two sides sniping and shelling each other across cratered no-man’s lands sometimes no more than 80 metres wide. Internationally-brokered ceasefire agreements were being broken almost every night.

In a brave – some would say, foolhardy – attempt to prevent Yugoslavia from spiralling into a vortex of its own self-destruction, the European Community (as it was then known) established a monitoring mission[7] to do what it could to maintain the ceasefire. I was one of two ‘humanitarian advisers’ within this mission.

Following a couple of months brokering local ceasefire agreements with recalcitrant Serb and Croat commanders – most of whom seemed to be former workmates, if not actually related – in various locations along the Krajina it had already become quite apparent that what my colleagues and I were monitoring was a war, not a ceasefire.

In the early hours of the morning, while trying to snatch some sleep between intermittent artillery barrages in the freezing basement gym of Vinkovci’s only habitable hotel metres from what the Croats referred to as ‘The Eastern Front’, I was woken by my interpreter, Dünya, hissing into my ear for me to come quickly. With whispered apologies from our Croatian liaison officer, Major Matić, we were bundled into a camouflaged Mercedes jeep and driven off, no lights showing, into the night. A light snow was beginning to settle on the piles of rubble and blackened beams piled up along the roadside, all that remained of Vinkovci’s blasted suburbs.

After half-an-hour or so of jolting along icy country tracks, we drew up behind a row of buses each of which had their headlights on and pointing towards the Serb frontline. In front of me a bright red and yellow sign swung from a single strand of barbed wire. ‘Achtung! Minen!’ it declared. We were standing on the edge of a front-line minefield, fully exposed to Serb snipers lurking unseen in the darkness.

I turned to Major Matić in search of some explanation. All he did was point across No-Man’s land.  

Emerging into the pool of light, a dozen dim shapes stumbled into view.

There was no sound. No sound at all. The sort of muffled silence one hears only when it is snowing. I observed this macabre spectacle from a safe distance as if it were a scene in a grainy black and white film from the 1950’s with the sound turned off.

As the huddled figures drew closer, I began to make out details. There were no men. Only children, mothers and grandmothers. Every single one had bloodstained ears. I learned later this was because they had just had their gold ear-rings ripped out. Not taken out. Ripped out.

There was no crying, no sobbing. In fact, not a word was spoken. From their blank, hollow-eyed expressions they were in shock. Through the swirling snow, more figures emerged. And in one’s and two’s they kept on coming.

I didn’t know it then, but I was witnessing the first recorded act of a new policy not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War, ‘Ethnic Cleansing.’ It was shocking in its brutality. And it defied everything I thought I knew about the human condition, something that became much clearer to me when Dünya and I were driven to the local gymnasium to see these pathetic shivering victims of Serb atrocity being processed.

Dünya translated some of their testimonies. Most were too awful to repeat but included stories of grandmothers being beheaded with rusty saws and the gang-rape of young girls.

Still in shock myself, I sat on the floor and wrote a hurried report to ECMM headquarters in Zagreb describing what I had witnessed.

A few hours later, numb and exhausted from seeing and hearing what was going on around me, I received a phone call from my boss at ECMM headquarters in Zagreb telling me to return at once. Since this involved an eight-hour drive via Hungary and Slovenia, I made my excuses, went back to the hotel in Vinkovci to collect my equipment, and set off.

Thinking that the reason for my recall was connected with the sordid details outlined in my report, I made good time, arriving at the Hotel-i on the south bank of the Sava river outside Zagreb in my canvas-sided, mud-spattered white Jeep just as the sun was setting. It didn’t take long for me to realise that my report had not even been read, far less acted upon. I had been recalled for more mundane reasons. As one of only five native English-speakers in the entire mission, I had to replace the duty analyst who had been taken ill. No mention was made of my report, despite having sent it as a ‘flash update’ approximately eight hours earlier. I tried to raise the issue with the UK delegate, but was waved away. After a quick shower and even quicker briefing, I was shown to a small room above the front door in what used to be the hotel’s travel bureau where I was to spend the night collating, interpreting and summarising the daily situation reports (SitReps) from each of the 42 ECMM monitoring teams stationed along the 528 km-long demarcation line between Croatia and its Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian neighbours.

Although interesting, this long and tedious job meant working through the night in order to provide a written and oral briefing to the ECMM’s assembled heads of mission at 07:30 the next morning. Given that I’d only had a few hours’ sleep the night before – much of it interrupted by sporadic artillery fire – the traumas of my early morning spent bearing witness in the frozen wastelands of East Slavonia, and the long bumpy journey, I was not in the most energetic frame of mind. But I was under no illusion as to how important the job was.

Almost immediately the messages started coming through on the CapSat[8]. One of the first was my own sent earlier that morning. It seemed a lifetime ago, and I had to read it twice to be reminded of the full horror of what the dry words rather dispassionately described.

As the night wore on, the roll of incoming messages being spewed out from the printer grew longer and longer. They arrived in no particular order which meant that I had to locate the team sending it on the wall-map behind me before I could make sense of the places they were referring to. As I read through each one, it became increasingly clear that I had not been alone in witnessing the aftermath of true barbarity just over 24 hours before; each SitRep outlined similarly gruesome stories from towns and villages all along the cease-fire line. Each case involved Croats being forcibly expelled from disputed areas by Serb or Bosnian Serb regular and irregular forces.

By 2 o’clock in the morning it was very clear that these were no random acts of violence and that we were witnessing an ugly shift in policy, this time on the part of the Serbs. It was even pretty clear that there was an element of command and control which had hitherto been unseen, and that this could not have come from the capital of the self-proclaimed province of Republika Srpska in Banja Luka, but from the very top in Belgrade. If true, this was a game-changer. I rushed upstairs to wake my now seriously-ill colleague who was able to confirm that this was indeed something new.

As I painstakingly compiled the evidence in support of my analysis, my thoughts turned to how best to describe what was going on. Having been a marketing communications consultant after leaving the military, and so knowing how to construct a press release, I looked around for words that were rational yet emotive. This was not a report to be ignored. With less than an hour to go before briefing the assembled diplomats, I was left with just the executive summary to complete. I had already determined that the mass expulsions the monitoring teams had been witnessing over the past 24 hours did not constitute ‘genocide’ and, while not solely driven by ethnicity, the practice seemed to me to be determined more by this aspect than by religion, class, language or ideology. Either way, I needed a verb.

Huddled in the Hotel-i, one of the few forms of distraction was to read week-old copies of newspapers which various delegations left strewn about once they had read them themselves. Idly flicking through them just a few hours earlier, I had noticed that the UK tabloids were full of Princess Diana’s marriage problems and how she had taken to colonic irrigation as a form of therapy. This apparently involved inserting a tube into the rectum and flushing out excreta from the lower intestine with warm water, a process which seemed to me to be a rather dirty way of achieving a clean result and therefore a more apt description of what I had been witnessing these past few days in East Slavonia than ‘cleaning’, with its image of soft hands and clean dishes. So ‘cleansing’ it was.

I had enough evidence to determine that what was going on was systemic and centrally controlled. What I couldn’t deduce from the reports, though, was the underlying cause. Was this barbaric form of nationalism motivated by history or mythology? By politics or economics? Was it sectarian or racial? Or was it not driven by idealism at all, but by jealousy and a thirst for revenge? I couldn’t decide. Was it like Northern Ireland, where so much of what was painted as sectarian strife was in fact nothing more than low-level banditry based on theft, smuggling, and the settling of local grudges by various factions and criminal gangs.

These thoughts and many others raced through my mind as the clock ticked down. I was still agonising over which words to use when the first tendrils of dawn crept into the night sky over the Sava river flowing past my office window.

The briefing was designed to shock, and shock it did. Every one of the ambassadors representing their country’s contribution to the ECMM was present and understood full well the importance of what they had just heard. Had this been an act of genocide, I could hear them thinking, their countries would have been compelled to do more than monitor; they would have had to take preventive action, something the European Community was woefully ill-prepared for. After some discussion over whether or not the term was overly emotive – in which I argued that it was not hyperbole but a careful construction based on solid analysis of compelling evidence – my report was sent to the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels more or less as I had written it, from where it was more widely distributed (in the form of a COREU[9]) to the capitals of Europe. Less than 24 hours later it was used in an official briefing by the Croatian representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, José-Maria Mendiluce, with whom it had been shared, and the next morning it was plastered over the world’s front pages.

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[1] The United Nations’ Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, an office within the UN’s Department of Political Affairs in New York

[2]  http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.html (accessed 9 March 2018)

[3] In February 2015, the International Court of Justice ruled that atrocities committed in Vukovar and elsewhere in Croatia did not constitute genocide

[4] In this sense, it is essential that any new definition not be used to replace already existing definitions in international law.

[5] The story of ‘genocide’ is told by Philip Sands in his book East West Road

[6] Pronounced ‘Cry-eena’

[7] The European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM) was made of up of over 600 serving and retired diplomats and military personnel, mostly from European countries. Each country had their own Delegation. During the period March-April 1992, the Head of Mission was a serving Portuguese diplomat.

[8] At the time, ‘CapSat’ was a new, mobile, satellite-based system for transmitting encrypted written messages over long distances by radio.

[9] COREU – Correspondance Européenne – is a communication network of the European Council for diplomatic communications to and from foreign ministries of member states of the European Union.