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Ethnic Cleansing in the
20th Century The 20th century has sometimes been called the Killing
Century. The latter half of that century saw more wanton
death and murder that many previous centuries combined. This
is due in large part to the massive world wars waged between the
superpowers.
Also, the 20th century also saw the advent of
large-scale
genocide, the mass murder of huge groups of
people. This is also referred to as ethnic cleansing. The term
ethnic cleansing literally
refers to the attempt to completely wipe out entire ethnicities.
An
ethnic group, or ethnicity, is defined as a large group of
people who share a distinctive racial, national, religious,
linguistic, or otherwise
cultural heritage. When borders were
redrawn at the close of
World War II, many ethnicities were grouped
together within the same nation. Conflicts arose and some
would escalate to mass murder. There are numerous examples of
ethnic cleansing ranging from the past to the present. Even
back into the 19th century, one could argue that the
Irish Potato
Famine was an attempt by England to ethnically cleanse the Irish
using
famine as a weapon. There was actually enough food being
grown in Ireland at the time to feed the population many times over,
but that food was being sent to England instead. The result
being the decimation of the Irish population by one-third. In
modern times, the nation of Iraq under the dictator
Saddam Hussein,
has committed genocide on the
Kurdish people. The weapon
typically used in this conflict is poison gas. The major
examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing follow. The Armenian Massacre In the late 1890s extreme nationalistic forces began to exert greater influence inside of the Ottoman Empire. Before, Islamic Turks and the minority Christian Armenians lived in relative peace, as each ethnic group remained separate. But, as nationalistic sentiment increased to fight off European imperialism, the peaceful co-existence ended. When the Armenians protested the stricter policies of the government, thousands were put to death. Over the course of twenty five years, more than a million people were massacred, the worst of it occurring during World War I. Many Armenians fled Turkey and settled in the United States. The Turkish government still maintains there was no organized effort at eliminating the Armenians. The Nazi Holocaust The first episode concerning the mass murder of an ethnic group in the 20th century was also the most devastating in its magnitude and utter evilness. The Holocaust saw the murder of over 12 million  people, 6 million of which were Jewish.
Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany following World War I.
In the interim period between the world wars, Hitler and his
Nazi
party used
anti-Semitism, or the organized hatred of Jewish
people, to call on the fears and problems faced by the German
people. Hitler provided a scapegoat by blaming the
Jews and other groups of what the Nazis considered undesirables. By removing these
groups, Hitler was promoting his Aryan Race, a pure German
race superior to all others.
Systematic and organized attacks
on the Jewish people were occurring by the early 1930's. An example
being
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. This
involved beatings, the burning of synagogues, and
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the deportment of
Jews into
was also
considered to be apart of the Balkans and peacefully split into the
Czech Republic and Slovakia in the 1990's. However, the end of
communism had created a large degree of instability in politics,
economics, and society, as is the case of Yugoslavia. In 1991,
ethnic tension resulted in a
in
the majority but Serbs and Croats were only minorities by slight
margins. Under the direction of Milosevic, Serbs began
receiving money and weapons from Serbia and entered into the
practice of ethnic cleansing. Serbs began forcibly
removing any non-Serbs from controlled areas. Many were
murdered, raped, and brutalized. The
exists because
European borders were made without any thought given to the
tribal system.
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