The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has acquired general currency
with the violent conflicts between communities in the contemporary
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
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.
Reincorporated into
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.