The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has acquired general currency with the violent conflicts between communities in the contemporary Balkans. It is often seen as a hateful yet characteristically modern process, the outcome of fanatical chauvinism or warped attempts to create a uniform nation-state. In fact, it is in no way a new phenomenon, and did not require the emergence of nationalism to spring to life. How else did the Anglo-Saxons empty most of England of Celts, banishing them to the western extremities of the island? Or Latins move north into once German lands? Invasion is rarely a matter simply of imposing a new elite; the fate it reserves for earlier inhabitants is usually more drastic. Such was the pattern through Antiquity and the Middle Ages. From the sixteenth century onwards, European expansion involved the constant transfer, confinement or destruction of ‘primitive’ peoples throughout the Americas, in Australia, South Africa, or the Antilles. Again and again, autochthonous populations were reduced—in today’s sanitized vocabulary—to mere ‘ethnic minorities’. Since the Second World War, three spectacular operations of ethnic cleansing have marked the Mediterranean, Middle East and Subcontinent: the partition of India, the creation of Israel and the division of Cyprus.

This trio may have more to teach us than meets the eye. To see why, it is instructive to look at the Balkans themselves. There the conflict between Serbs and Albanians, which led first to massive expulsions from Kosovo of the latter by the former, followed—after NATO intervention—by no less thorough extrusion of the former by the latter, is only to be understood in its regional context. Historically, Kosovo was the core of the Serbian kingdom carved out from the Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century by the Nemanjid dynasty, whose borders extended to what are now Montenegro and Albania. In the thirteenth century, Pec became the seat of the Archbishop of the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Serbia, while the silver and other mines of Kosovo provided much of the wealth of the mediaeval Serbian kingdom. It was there that a—now enlarged—Serbian Empire was destroyed in June 1389 by the Turks at Kosovo Polje, ‘the Field of the Blackbirds’, near Priština, leaving the Ottomans masters of most of Southeast Europe. The Turkish advance into Europe was only finally halted with the relief of Vienna in 1683. Five years later an Austrian counterattack took Belgrade, and the Serbs in Kosovo rose up against their rulers. But when the Habsburg armies were forced to withdraw, they took with them the Patriarch of Pec and 37,000 Serb families, who were resettled in present-day Vojvodina. In 1737 a further Austrian advance, followed by another retreat, led to a Second Migration of Serbs from the Priština region.

In these struggles, religion was at the centre of mutual warfare. As Noel Malcolm writes, in the two decades after 1690 the Turkish authorities—now under threat of eviction—tightened confessional screws on their subject populations: ‘a new wave of Islamicization seems to have taken place’, he notes, ‘using conversion as a pacification measure’, as well as heavier taxation to compel abandonment of Orthodoxy, and slaughter of the local priesthood.footnote¹ Although towns did not recover in size for another two hundred years, the Muslim proportion of the urban population grew steadily, as conversion to Islam meant automatic tax reduction. In these conditions, Kosovo—once the centre of the Serbian empire—became a magnet for Albanian immigration, and in due course even of some colon­ization by Turks, as well as Circassians from the Caucasus. Dervish orders expanded their activities in the region. By the nineteenth century Kosovo was a largely Muslim province of the Ottoman Empire, with some Catholic clans in the mountains. When much of the rest of the Balkans was aflame with revolt against Turkish rule in the epoch after the Napoleonic Wars, its Albanian population remained loyal to the Ottomans, and when the Young Turks took power in Istanbul in the early twentieth century, the provincial elites resisted the replacement of the old Arabic script by the ‘alien’ Roman newcomer, and stood firm for the maintenance of the shari‘a. Serbia finally regained the province only through the Balkan wars of 1912–13.

Reincorporated into Yugoslavia after the First World War, Kosovo became the object of determined efforts by the Serbian monarchy to reverse the demographic tide. With the help of Anglo-American charities, Serbian farmers and soldiers were resettled in the ‘Holy Land’, while many Albanians left for Turkey. Significantly, their interests were represented by the ‘Islamic Association for the Defence of Justice’, which sought not only to preserve the shari‘a but also the waqf, the beys’ feudal estates as well as the maternal language. So successful, however, was recolonization from Belgrade that by 1929 Serbs and Montenegrins constituted 61 per cent of the population of Kosovo. When the Second World War broke out the tables were turned again, as the Albanian population welcomed the Italian invasion of April 1939 and Mussolini integrated Kosovo into a Greater Albania under his rule. Some 100,000 Serbs fled northwards to Serbia, where a vigorous struggle against the Axis forces continued. After 1945, the province was granted autonomy within a Federal Yugoslavia by Tito—though not republican status—but the demographic balance could not be shifted. By 1971 Albanians comprised 73.7 per cent of the population; by 1991 Serbs amounted to only 11 per cent. In 1989 Serbia suppressed the autonomy of the province, ultimately goading the Albanian population into guerrilla warfare against Belgrade. The Kosovan Liberation Army, once inspired by Maoism and listed as a ‘terrorist’ organization by Washington, was soon transmuted into a NATO ally, and victor on the ground after a massive aerial bombardment of Serbia by the Western powers.

This is a conflict widely described as triggered by, and issuing into, ‘ethnic cleansing’. The term is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. The first is the implicit notion that such ‘cleansing’ is an outrage peculiar to nationalist dementia or totalitarian power, which it is the mission of Western democracies to prevent or reverse. In fact, there is virtually no modern state whose emergence has not involved similar processes of—putting it euphemistically—‘national consolidation’, offering scant chance of reparation, let alone reversal. Who imagines that the fate of the Australian aborigines or native Americans is going to be cancelled by retrospective justice? What democracy is more toasted in Western capitals than Israel, founded on mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land, and long engaged in yet further expropriations of territory in the West Bank? ‘Cleansing’ has always been with us; its reception has less to do with ethical sensibilities than with the power of the respective parties at issue in the conflict.

But there is a second, and for our purposes more significant, short­coming to the notion of ethnic cleansing. It concerns the adjective rather than the noun. The term ‘ethnic’ has become a cant word in the social sciences and often in everyday speech, where it is frequently used in a blanket fashion to refer to any collective grouping with a semblance of homogeneity, in situations of conflict or positions of subordination. The concept of ethnicity has been so widely taken up because it gets around the problem of defining what it is that makes a people—that is, an ethnos—distinctive. Is the unity it possesses based on language, faith, descent, or culture in some vague sense? Ethnicity covers all as well as covering up all. It conveys, moreover, the suggestion of primordial differences that would be difficult in any circumstances to shake off. In Kosovo, Serbs and Albanians were divided by language and descent, but the depth of the conflict between them had its roots in a history in which religion loomed much larger than either of these markers. Ottoman rule in the Balkans rested on the claims of Islam, to which any linguistic or genetic group could accede, not on criteria of speech or blood. Serb resistance to it was inseparable from Orthodoxy. The religious antagonism between the two communities has persisted down to recent years, which have seen the wholesale destruction of mosques on one side and of churches on the other, in a climate of mutual fear and detestation. Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke of the danger of ‘genocide’ in Kosovo, warning that Albanians were trying to create an ‘ethnically pure’ state in the province. In Belgrade, Serb intellectuals did not hesitate to talk of the imminent ‘crucifixion’ of the Serb nation.

An even clearer example of these tensions can be seen in neighbouring Bosnia. There, Michael Sells remarks, ‘the word “ethnic” in “ethnic cleansing” is a euphemism. Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and Muslims all speak the same language—they are divided only by religious criteria’. Describing the activities of Serb paramilitaries, he writes: ‘Those organizing the persecution identified themselves through explicit religious symbols, such as the three-fingered hand gestures representing the Christian Trinity, the images of sacred figures of Serbian religious mythology on their uniform insignia, the songs they memorized and forced their victims to sing, the priest’s ring they kissed before and after their acts of persecution, and the formal religious ceremonies’.footnote² Attacks on Muslims in Bosnia were not, of course, confined to Orthodox Serbs. Catholic Croats were often equally brutal, in pursuit of what was at one time a common aim of splitting Bosnia between them and eliminating the Muslim population—a programme Tudjman described as ‘Europeanization’. For their part, some Muslims sought to establish an Islamic Republic, and the later recruitment of mujaheddin fighters from Afghanistan to aid the Bosniak cause gave some colour to this notion.