Annihilation of racial and ethnic groups

SIGNIFICANCE: Annihilation and expulsion are two of six basic patterns of intergroup relations; the others are assimilation, pluralism, legal protection of minorities, and subjugation of one group by another. Annihilation and expulsion have been studied primarily since the 1960s, and scholars continue to debate how to define the concepts.

Annihilation of racial or ethnic groups is also called genocide , although other types of mass killing are sometimes included under that term; the expulsion of racial or ethnic groups is also called population transfer. Although these two phenomena are distinct, one can fade into the other. A government determined to expel a particular ethnic group at any cost may resort to genocide if expulsion becomes impractical, and the process of ethnic expulsion can lead to massive deaths from heat, cold, or hunger when it is carried out too abruptly. In approximately the decade of the 1990s, the term "ethnic cleansing" emerged as a new euphemism to describe these types of activities. This term coincided with Serbian government efforts to displace Muslim and Croat populations following the breakup of the former government of Yugoslavia (1991–2001).

Expulsion of an ethnic minority can assume three variants. One is the unilateral expulsion of an ethnic minority group across an international frontier. Classic examples are the expulsion of ethnic Finns from the part of Karelia annexed by the Soviet Union after the 1939–1940 Russo-Finnish War and the forcible transfer of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after World War II. 

In another variant, called the exchange of populations, two states agree to accept the minorities expelled by each other. The classic example is the expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Turkey and of ethnic Turks from Greece following the Greco-Turkish War of 1922–1923. When British India was partitioned in 1947, violence forced many Muslims to flee what became India and many Hindus to flee what became Pakistan. This process, too, could be called exchange of populations, although many Muslims remained in the new Republic of India. 

In still another variant of ethnic expulsion, a government forcibly uproots a minority ethnic group and resettles it within the same state, but far from the group’s homeland. Examples from American history are the deportation of the Five Civilized Tribes from Georgia to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s and the rounding up of Japanese Americans of the Pacific Coast states into internment camps during World War II. Under Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1953, many Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians, from the Baltic states acquired by Stalin in 1940, were deported eastward to Siberia. 

Often times, population displacements are caused by national disasters. On these occasions, harmful actions, policies, or inactivity undertaken by the national government may lead to the same "ethnic cleaning" effects as when the ruling government pursued a program of genocide. An example was the depopulation of Ireland following the advent of the infamous Potato Famine (1845–1852). Prior to 1845 the population of Ireland was estimated at 8 million people. Following the 1845 emergence of a pathogen which destroyed Ireland's main subsistence crop, the potato, the ruling British government refused to halt the export of other food crops which could have alleviated the worst effects of food shortages. In addition, many landowners used the occasion of the failed potato harvest to evict native tenant farmers and to destroy their domiciles. The result was an estimated million Irish deaths of starvation and the immigration of up to 2 million inhabitants. In many Irish provinces, the rate of depopulation reached upwards of 60 percent. By the mid-1850s, Ireland’s population was approximately 5 million. Many saw the governmental actions as a deliberate policy to reduce a native population that had historically chafed under British rule.  

The Holocaust

During World War II, nearly six million Jews (German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, and French) were murdered by the Nazi regime. This mass extermination, called the Holocaust, differed from other acts labeled genocide: It aimed not merely to purify a single nation-state ethnically, as did the Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915–1923, but to eliminate an entire people, wherever in the world they lived. Reputable scholars agree that Nazi Germany was trying to exterminate all the Jews. The Nazis also targeted other groups for destruction; among them were the Roma, or Gypsies.  

Defining Genocide

Social scientists do not always agree about which incidents can be called genocide. It is difficult both to define genocide and to determine when it has occurred. The massive death toll among the Armenians of Turkey between 1915 and 1923, which reduced their numbers from a million to a little less than fifty thousand, is regarded as genocide by Armenians throughout the world and by many American social scientists (including sociologists Leo Kuper and Helen Fein and political scientist Robert Melson). The Turkish government vehemently rejects the categorization of its actions as genocide. Kuper also regards as genocide the bloody repression in Bangladesh during that country’s 1971 struggle for freedom from Pakistan and the mutual killings of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi in the early 1970s; Melson, however, sees both events as examples of massacre rather than genocide. 

Many scholars regard as genocide only those mass killings undertaken by governments; many also argue that the intention to exterminate a group must exist. Such a definition would exclude many cases of the decimation of aboriginal peoples in North America; here, excess deaths often resulted from exposure to European diseases or from the violent acts of individual European settlers; governments did not always intend to exterminate the native peoples. All scholars agree that ethnocide—the deliberate destruction of aboriginal culture—was practiced. Melson carefully distinguishes between killings of members of a group with intent to intimidate and killings with intent to exterminate the group; the former, he argues, is not genocide. Scholars also argue about how innocent an ethnic group must be of secessionist aims or violent rebellious activity if it is to be seen as a victim of genocide rather than of arguably justifiable repression. Finally, some scholars, such as Judaic studies professor Steven Katz, insist that only the Holocaust deserves the label of genocide. 

It is also sometimes difficult to determine if a dominant group is expelling an ethnic minority. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–1949, many Arabs fled Israel, and many Jews emigrated from the Arab states to Israel. Israel and the Arab states each accused the other of ethnic expulsion. Another ambiguous case is the exodus of the ethnic Chinese boat people from Vietnam in 1979. Although the Vietnamese government outlawed their livelihood as traders, it never explicitly ordered them to leave the country. Hence, some foreign scholars deny that ethnic expulsion occurred. 

The causes of genocide are disputed. Kuper, who has studied ethnicity in Africa, sees the plural society, rigidly divided along ethnic lines, as a seedbed of genocide; it is difficult, however, to fit the German case into this theoretical framework. Sociologists of ethnicity Pierre Van den Berghe and Walter Zenner see so-called middleman (trader) minorities as especially likely victims of genocide; Kuper, seeing no utility in the middleman minority concept, disagrees. Political scientist Melson sees war and revolution as necessary preconditions for genocide. Political sociologist Irving Horowitz sees totalitarian regimes as the most likely to commit genocide; such a view, however, ignores all centuries prior to the twentieth. 

Restitution

Some countries have made some form of restitution for past acts of genocide or ethnic expulsion. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany, created in 1949, decided to offer reparations payments to surviving Jewish victims of Nazism; these payments, however, have been extremely modest. In the late 1980s, the United States Congress finally offered restitution payments to the survivors of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Once a genocidal regime is gone, those who helped perpetrate genocide can be punished; in the early 1960s, Israel kidnapped, tried, and executed Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann. 

Research

Although Americans first became aware of the Holocaust in 1945, serious research by sociologists on the subject of genocide did not begin until the 1970s. To many sociologists of the immediate post–World War II period, genocide must have seemed too emotionally charged an issue for objective social research; it may also have appeared to be an inexplicable aberration rather than a normal and recurrent social phenomenon. 

Sociologists experienced a reawakening of interest in genocide because of the recurrent ethnic conflicts in post–World War II Africa and Asia, which seemed to worsen as the decolonization process accelerated in the 1960s. Another stimulus to research on genocide, particularly for younger sociologists, was the social and political turbulence in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s, which shattered the illusion that violence and repression were faraway aberrations. Interest in the themes of ethnic conflict and the role of violence in politics was aroused by the Civil Rights movement, the urban riots, and the war in Vietnam. Among young Jews, the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 awoke both a new sense of ethnic pride and a new interest in the history of the Holocaust.  

Bibliography

"Irish Potato Famine." History.org, 9 Aug. 2022, www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Kuper, Leo. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, 1981.

Marrus, Michael Robert. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1985.

McGreevy, Ronan. "Great Famine’s Impact Illustrated by Interactive Map." The Irish Times, 16 Mar. 2018, www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/great-famine-s-impact-illustrated-by-interactive-map-1.3428848. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Quaran, Layla. "What’s the Difference between Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing?" PBS News, 24 Oct. 2017, www.pbs.org/newshour/world/whats-the-difference-between-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Wallimann, Isidor, and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds. Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. Greenwood, 1987.