Cultural cleansing

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) describes cultural cleansing as a purposeful effort to remove markers of a particular culture’s presence and heritage from a geographic region. Cultural cleansing is usually associated with war and other forms of violent conflict. It can also take place under political regimes seeking to remove the presence of one or more cultural traditions in a multicultural society or supplant the dominance of an established culture with an ascendant one.

Cultural cleansing is often, but not always, part of a wider program of ethnic cleansing, which describes efforts to establish ethnic and/or racial homogeneity in a geographic region through campaigns of intimidation, force, or both. Links between cultural and ethnic cleansing are evident in the interchangeable use of the two terms, which is common but not technically accurate. According to experts, cultural cleansing primarily operates in the intellectual realm while ethnic cleansing is rooted in the physical presence of an undesired population in an area.

Background

Human history contains countless examples of expansionist civilizations seeking to assert their dominance and control over geographic territory by purging the presence of racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious minority groups. Numerous such events took place on large scales during the twentieth century. During World War I (1914–1918), the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire waged a systematic campaign of destruction against the empire’s Armenian population in what has been alternately described as an ethnic cleansing and a genocide. The most infamous modern example of such an effort occurred during World War II (1939–1945) when Nazi Germany sought to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population alongside other groups that the regime’s leadership considered socially undesirable. The Holocaust, as the event is known, resulted in an estimated eleven million deaths. The legacies of these tragic events have prompted United Nations (UN) officials and other human rights experts to draw links between cultural cleaning, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. While distinct from one another, the three concepts share multiple points of contact.

Genocide was first recognized as a criminal act under international law in 1946, during the immediate aftermath of World War II. The UN’s Genocide Convention defines the act as an intentional effort to partially or fully destroy a specific national, racial, ethnic, or religious group. While such efforts frequently involve the systematic slaughter of targeted victims, genocide can also include inflicting severe physical or psychological harm on a population, deliberately exposing the targeted population to living conditions that will destroy it, preventing members of the targeted group from having children, or forcibly removing children from the targeted group and resettling them with members of another population.

The UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect notes that international law does not formally recognize ethnic cleansing as a specific crime. However, the UN and many other governments and human rights groups acknowledge the gravity of ethnic cleansing and the severe harm it inflicts on victimized populations. While no universally agreed-upon definition of ethnic cleansing exists, the concept is generally understood to describe the violent removal of a specific civilian ethnic population from a particular geographic region in favor of a competing civilian population. The term entered the international human rights lexicon in the context of the brutal divisions that occurred as Yugoslavia violently devolved toward dissolution during the 1990s.

Topic Today

Cultural cleansing can occur independently or as an offshoot of a wider ethnic cleaning or genocidal campaign. Numerous examples of cultural cleansing have occurred during the early decades of the twenty-first century and have mainly occurred in the context of international political and military conflict.

In 2003, the United States led a coalition invasion of Iraq, justifying the actions by claiming that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had to be neutralized in keeping with US antiterrorism objectives. No WMD were found, and the invasion was later revealed to have been initiated under false pretenses, prompting commentators to opine on subsequent events that saw cultural sites destroyed, intellectuals and academics executed, and libraries and museums looted and burned. While Iraq’s internal unrest was widely described as a natural and predictable phenomenon tied to democratic change, some experts believe that it was perpetrated by design and carried out to demolish the country’s existing institutions and remake oil-rich Iraq as a compliant satellite state to better serve Western economic interests.

Against the chaotic backdrop of the Syrian Civil War (2011– ), the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or ISIL) terrorist organization waged an ongoing campaign to establish a caliphate of religious extremism in war-torn areas of the Middle East. In 2015, the group captured the historic Syrian city of Palmyra and proceeded to systematically destroy culturally significant architectural artifacts including the two-thousand-year-old Temple of Baalshamin to the consternation of a shocked international community. Commentators widely described the destructive acts as an example of cultural cleansing designed to demoralize the native population and create more favorable conditions for ISIS to impose its radical ideology on residents.

In February 2022, Russia staged an unprovoked military invasion of neighboring Ukraine in what has been widely interpreted as a contemporary revival of historical Russian imperialism. Within weeks, UNESCO had issued warnings stating that Russian forces had apparently engaged in deliberate attempts to target Ukrainian cultural sites, including heritage buildings and museums. UNESCO officials stated that the ongoing conflict had the potential to evolve into an existential threat to Ukrainian culture, noting that the targeted destruction of important cultural sites has emerged as a relatively common military tactic. Commentators widely believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has an objective of assimilating some or all of Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

Bibliography

Baker, Raymond W. (ed.). Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned, and Academics Murdered. Pluto Press, 2010.

Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew. “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): pp. 110–121.

Bellamy, Daniel. “’Cultural Cleansing:’ Ukraine’s Heritage Is in Danger, UNESCO Warns.” Associated Press, 12 Mar. 2022, www.euronews.com/culture/2022/03/12/ukraine-s-cultural-heritage-is-in-danger-unesco-warns. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Boyle, Virginia. “What Is Ethnic Cleansing?” The Borgen Project, 2023, borgenproject.org/ethnic-cleansing/. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“Ethnic Cleaning.” United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, 2023, www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.shtml. Accessed 18 June 2023.

“Genocide.” United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, 2023, www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Quran, Layla. “What’s the Difference Between Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing?” PBS, 24 Oct. 2017, www.pbs.org/newshour/world/whats-the-difference-between-genocide-and-ethnic-cleansing. Accessed 18 June 2023.

Weiss, Thomas G. and Nina Connelly. Cultural Cleansing and Mass Atrocities: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Armed Conflict Zones. Getty Publications, 2020.