Racial Hygiene

Cleaning or ethnic cleansing is a term for a variety of hostile policies toward ethnic group. It could refer to the forced emigration, the population transfer that the deportation or the genocide of an ethnic group for discriminatory reasons, religious, ideological, strategic or a combination thereof.

Origin of the term

The expression is the literal translation of the Croatian etniko ienje appeared on 16 May 1941 in a newspaper article quoting Viktor Gutic Hrvatska Krajina "Every Croatian who sympathizes with our enemies is not only not good but is also a Croatian opponent opponent of the project planned and calculated cleanup History

The forced displacement of population have been much practiced in antiquity. We find relations in the Old Testament. The great empires, Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, practiced the deportation of conquered peoples.

In Europe, Jews were expelled from England (1290), France (1306, 1322 and 1394), Hungary (1349-1360), Occitan (1394 and 1490), Austria (1421), of Spain after the Reconquista (1492), Portugal (1497), Russia in 1724, and parts of Germany at different times. Spain expelled its Muslim community in 1502, then the Moors were Muslims who converted to Catholicism from 1609. France expelled the Protestants, we can speak here of a religious cleansing.

The settlement had its share of ethnic cleansing in America (Native Americans, Acadians), Australia, South Africa (see also the " great upheaval "of the Acadians in 1755).

The 1920s saw the expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor and, symmetrically, Turks or Muslims in the Greek islands. The phenomenon is repeated in Cyprus after 1974.

The modern age is marked by ethnic cleansing as the Armenian genocide , the Holocaust , the Rwandan genocide , the wars of Yugoslavia , the civil war in Darfur , the Congo atrocities , the persecution of the Tamils in Sri Lanka ...

From 1935 to 1938, Stalin deported the Polish eastern Volhynia. This is the first ethnic deportation in the history of the USSR , although such actions have already been made repeatedly at the time of the czars. Other nations will follow, the Volga Germans to the Chechens through the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetians who were deported to Kazakhstan and were allowed to return to their home areas after the death of Stalin ( see in ).

In 1945 the Soviets decided to carry large numbers of people of German language and culture living in Central and Eastern Europe within the borders of post-Hitler Germany, reduced to four zones of occupation, arguing that the existence of these minorities had been the pretext for Nazi Germany to justify its policy of expansion. Extending westward from the Soviet Union was reflected also by the deportation to Siberia and Kazakhstan many populations Estonian , Letona , Lithuanian Baltic countries, Poland to Belarus and Ukraine , Romania to Bessarabia and Bukovina and Greek of the Black Sea , for a total 2.8 million people, three million Poles were displaced from the eastern regions of Poland annexed by the USSR towards the western regions of Poland annexed by Germany on .

An alternative to ethnic cleansing is the " population exchange ", for example in 1923 between Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria ( Treaty of Lausanne ), with the approval of the major powers of the time and the League of Nations.

References

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