IV.

“Ethnic Cleansing”

There were two rationales given for so-called “ethnic cleansing”. One was ethno-nationalist ideology (see Ethnic Conflict). The other was the strategic imperative of ensuring that the territories of a new entity would be free from political disruption, guerrilla warfare, or terrorism: by removing a population, the basis for resistance was also removed. Ethnic cleansing did not rely on direct combat with opponents, but on the demonstrative capacity of the violence that could be brought to bear and the example that was set by partial elimination of a population to induce mass migration. The intended result of this was a contiguous set of ethnically pure territories. In the first months of the conflict in Bosnia over 100,000 people were killed and up to 3 million were forced to leave their homes, or were put under pressure to leave. Similar tactics, albeit on a significantly lesser scale, featured in the Croat and Bosnian governments’ operations, and Muslim paramilitary ones, in the war in Bosnia.

The most blatant act of atrocity in the four years of conflict occurred near Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia towards the end of the war. In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army, dominated by the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić, overcame the Srebrenica “safe area” (see below), expelling over 40,000 Muslims, most of them already refugees, and murdering thousands of men of military age. Several thousand were ambushed as they tried to escape from the town, while international estimates of 5,000 to 8,000 others were taken to sites outside Srebrenica and shot.