Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and Exile

Introduction

In her book "The Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power recounts the story of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who was determined to find a word that would capture the barbarity of the Nazi agenda and also carry the moral implications of targeting a specific ethnic group. Lemkin finally settled on the term we commonly associate with the horrors of the Holocaust: genocide. It is a combination of the Greek geno, which means "race" or "tribe," and the Latin derivative cide, which means "to kill."

Many people consider the term "ethnic cleansing" to be synonymous with genocide. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, for example, Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan explain that "'ethnic cleansing' involves the 'purification' of a territory, not necessarily of a population. This means the deportation, usually threatening but not necessarily violent, of an ethnic group from the territory." The less violent result of ethnic cleansing can be exile; the most extreme is genocide. The literature of these horrors serves to bring the world's attention to events the perpetrators want to go unnoticed, to remember the humanity and individuality of the victims, and to improve the outlook for the future by bearing witness to the past.

Race and Religion

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) is not just a book about a young girl coming of age, though that is a key motif, but also a vivid illustration of the wretched conditions among a the Jewish population in Nazi Germay—a population deemed undesirable by those in power. Readers who identify with Anne, and even become emotionally involved with her struggles in the cramped quarters that she inhabits, are also mindful that beyond the inconvenience of the situation lies real danger. The truth of this is driven home by the fact that this young girl dies in a concentration camp less than a year after the diary ends. Elie Wiesel's memoir Night (1960) presents a different view of life in Nazi Germany. Wiesel—himself a survivor of the concentration camps—focuses his attention on the specific horrors that he experienced. Readers will find it difficult to remain unaffected by the inhuman treatment that Wiesel describes, whether it is the general mistreatment of the captives or the brutal, indiscriminant killings of men, women, and children. The fact that both of these works are autobiographical enhances their power.

In brutalizing the innocent, persecutors so cheapen human life as to lose their own humanity. Such seems to be the case with the SS medical officer Fritz Jemand von Niemand who, feeling his work is religiously justifiable, forces the title character of William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1976) to choose which of her two children will live—even though Sophie's incarceration has nothing to do with her religion. The memory haunts Sophie, and even though years have passed and she has since rediscovered freedom, friendship, and love, she opts to quiet her guilt with cyanide. Such is the aftermath of so terrible a trauma; Sophie seems unable to regain a sense of the humanity that was lost in this violent psychological oppression.

While the Holocaust is the most well-known case of genocide, sadly, the twentieth century saw numerous other instances of such atrocities. Just after the turn of the century, for example, the Turkish government experienced a growing nationalism. Predominantly Islamic Turkey had a checkered relationship with its Christian Armenian population, and the desire of the Turks to assert their cultural roots, including Islam, prompted acts of genocide. Turkey began deporting Armenians during Word War I, claiming they were an internal threat to their war effort. Deportations, however, often escalated into mass killings. In the end, around a million of the over two million Armenian Turks died. In A Summer Without Dawn: An Armenian Epic (2000), Agop J. Hacikyan follows the lives of Vartan Balian and his wife and son who, after being separated, experience different fates. What is significant about Hacikyan's book is that he portrays the humanity of members of both sides. Julia Pascal in the Independent (London) explains, "Hacikyan clearly blames the Ottoman Empire for the mass murder of the Armenians, but he avoids blanket condemnation of the Turks."

In his novel for young adults, Under the Sun (2004), Arthur Dorros portrays the events in Sarajevo in the early 1990s, where the dissolution of Yugoslavia has left a political void, and a power struggle along both ethnic and religious lines ensues. Christian Serbs, wanting an independent and culturally pure country of their own, begin the methodic expulsion of Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Dorros's book follows the thirteen-year-old Ehmet, whose father is a Muslim and whose mother is a Catholic Croat. Faced with the realities of war, he must flee his home. The book traces his progress to safety, which is found in an old village peacefully inhabited by the full ethnic and religious spectrum of the war's orphans, Dorros's final comment on the war.

Politics

An old tactic in politics is to win over the population by blaming a distinct group for some national hardship. The Nazis blamed Jews for Germany's financial ruin, while in Bosnia the violence stemmed from fears that the Muslims minority would hinder the Serbs' efforts to achieve independence. Gaining and keeping power serve as the driving forces behind such political maneuvering.

In 1937, the Dominican Republic dictator Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo tried to "whiten" the mixed-race country, partly by ridding his country of its darker-skinned Haitian immigrants. Near the border between the two countries, along the river that divided them, Trujillo had his soldiers kill tens of thousands of Haitians. This massacre forms the background for Haitian American Edwidge Danticat's 1998 novel The Farming of Bones. Danticat continued exploring the crimes against her forbears in her 2004 novel The Dew Breaker. The novel focuses on exiles from the tyrannical regime that ruled Haiti from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, that of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The personal stories center around a Haitian immigrant to New York who, it turns out, was not a victim, but a perpetrator of the crimes. As he explains to his daughter, "You see, Ka, your father was the hunter, he was not the prey."

Racial distinctions are arbitrary. They may be assigned by outsiders, such as colonizers who assert control by creating these artificial distinctions among the indigenous peoples. The conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, for example, can be traced back to distinctions made by the colonizing Belgians who singled out the taller, lighter-skinned natives (considered Tutsis) for office jobs while the stockier, darker people (considered Hutus) were relegated to manual labor. When Rwanda gained its independence in 1962, the Hutu majority gained power and retaliated by discriminating against the Tutsi. Hutu extremists, fearing a power shift, went on a hundred-day killing spree in 1994, murdering one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003) explores the tragedy caused by governmental inaction. In this book, Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire recounts his experience in the midst of the genocide. Dallaire focuses his frustrations on the larger political failures of the United Nations and other world powers, whom he believes could have stopped the massacre, but instead merely stood by as the killings continued.

Sometimes groups have been targeted for being of a particular socioeconomic class, rather than a religion or ethnicity. While most instances of crimes against humanity are tied to race and ethnicity, Eric Weitz explains in A Century of Genocide (2003) that, under Stalin, the Soviet Union worked hard to define the various levels of society based on economics. When it determined that a particular class became a threat, it strove to eliminate the entire social group, in most cases by sending them into exile to live in work camps where many of them died of cold and hunger. Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes a typical day in one of these camps, based on his own experience, in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Though it is only one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, it is "almost a happy day" that starts and ends with extra food:

[S]till clutching the hunk of bread, he drew his feet out of his valenki, deftly leaving inside them his foot rags and spoon, crawled barefoot up to his bunk, widened a little hole in the mattress, and there, amidst the sawdust, concealed his half-ration.

The United States is not without its own sordid past, and ethnic cleansing is among the crimes accrued during the drive to expand the borders of the nation "from sea to shining sea." The victims were the Native Americans who, because of westward expansion, were displaced to reservations and often became victims of violence. In Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), Dee Brown gives a historical account of the final years of the "Indian Wars." Brown describes a score of major incidents between different Native American tribes and the U.S. government between 1860 and 1890. In 1868, a Comanche chief named Tosawi surrendered to U.S. General Sheridan with the reassurance that he was a "good Indian." Sheridan's reply summed up the United States' attitude at the time: "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead."

Many authors who treat the subject of genocide focus on frustrations caused by governmental interference, particularly by a government attempting to cover up its involvement in ethnic killings. In his novel Anil's Ghost (2000), Michael Ondaatje dramatizes recent struggles in Sri Lanka, where Buddhist Sinhala and Hindu Tamils have been engaged in civil war since 1983. Here, the Sinhalese use their political power to cover up violence against the insurgent Tamils. While the protagonist's return to her native Sri Lanka is in part a personal quest, Rachel Cusk suggests in the New Statesman that "she quickly finds herself among people who live and die for their work, who labour in an atmosphere of political terror, bloodshed, and mortal danger." The climax of the novel occurs when the protagonist, a forensic anthropologist, discovers that a recently uncovered body was a person killed by the government. In her attempts to expose the results, she finds she is confounded by all sides.

Conclusion

Most instances of ethnic cleansing result in the displacement of many people who find themselves in new cultures. Some attempt to assimilate so not to draw attention to themselves, while others work to salvage their cultural identities. In either case, the descendants of the displaced will often wonder about their heritage. In Everything is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer makes his narrator his namesake, though one must remember that the account is fiction. He does, though, draw on his own search into his family's past to learn about a woman who may have saved his grandfather's life during World War II:

"We will search for Augustine, who you think saved your grandfather from the Nazis." "Yes…. And then," I said, "if we find her?" The hero was a pensive person. "I don't know what then. I suppose I'd thank her."

To understand himself, the fictional Foer must face his past.

In the same way, each account of genocide is an attempt to preserve such a remembrance, an attempt to piece back together what was torn asunder. The act of genocide is more than mass murder; it is an attempt to rid the world of a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group. Genocide kills cultures and traditions and, by extension, it destroys the heritage of many individuals. Each account of genocide, each recollection by the survivors of genocide, serves as an attempt to reconstruct what was lost. More importantly, though, each account insists that its readers open their eyes to the horrors of the past so that some day we can all truly say, "never again."

SOURCES

Brown, Dee, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Owl Books, 2001, originally published in 1971, p. 170.

Cusk, Rachel, "Sri Lankan Skeletons," in New Statesman, May 8, 2000, p. 55.

Danticat, Edwidge, The Dew Breaker, Random House, 2004.

Foer, Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated Harper Perennial, 2003, p. 60.

Gellately, Robert, and Ben Kiernan, "The Study of Mass Murder and Genocide," in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 20.

Pascal, Julia, "Friday Book: Tales from the Heart of a Forgotten Holocaust," in the Independent, August 11, 2000, enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article155254.ece (March 23, 2006).

Power, Samantha, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Perennial, 2002.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, translated by Ralph Parker, Signet Classics, 1993, p. 21.

Weitz, Eric D., A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation, Princeton University Press, 2003.

Wiesel, Elie, Night, Bantam Books, 1960, p. 32.