Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (review)

The term “ethnic cleansing” came into vogue in 1992 following Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina to describe the policy of forcibly expelling an ethnic group—by terror and massacre if necessary—from a territory claimed by the state. This study examines five cases in twentieth century European history where ethnic cleansing was the principal policy of the state or part of a wider program of genocide: 1) “The Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia,” 2) “The Nazi Attack on the Jews,” 3) “Soviet Deportations of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars,” 4) “The Expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia,” and 5) “The Wars of Yugoslav Succession.” Although he depends heavily on secondary sources—as he must, given the scope of this work—Naimark punctuates his research and documentation with some well-chosen primary sources. As might be expected from the work of a distinguished professor of history at Stanford, each case study is a model of insight, clarity, and brevity. However, this work also raises some conceptual and moral issues that are not easily resolved.

In three of the cases, Yugoslavia, Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars, and Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the term “ethnic cleansing” seems appropriate, but in the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, where a policy of genocide and extermination superseded expulsion, the concept is misleading.

For example, in Yugoslavia, the Milosevic regime practiced ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Albanians. Its main goal was driving out minor ities by terror, including mass rape if necessary, out of areas that the leadership claimed to be part of historical Serbia. Towns like Vukovar were carpet-bombed to drive out the Croats, and villages in Bosnia and Kosovo were burned to the ground, their people terrorized by para-militaries, to expel Muslims. In time Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians copied the Serb strategy, hoping to create ethnically or religiously “pure” enclaves in areas where at one time Serbs, Croats, and Muslims mixed freely. Notably in the Krajina region of Croatia, some 200,000 Serbs were expelled in August 1995. The result was a more homogeneous Serbia and Croatia, and a nearly partitioned Bosnia and Kosovo.

Although in the final count some 250,000 Yugoslavs were killed or died as a result of ethnic cleansing, and millions became refugees, extermination of minorities was not the primary purpose of the belligerents. The goal was an ethnically “pure” state, and the method was driving people across the borders of the areas that the nationalists held sacred. Yugoslav—especially Serbian nationalists—could be indicted for crimes against humanity and even genocide; however, their policies fell short of the Young Turks in the Armenian Genocide and the Nazis in the Holocaust whose aim was the physical and cultural destruction of the Armenians as a nation and the Jews as a so called “race.”

Part of the conceptual confusion derives from the fact that acts of ethnic cleansing can shade off into mass-murder, and the United Nations (1948) definition of genocide on which most writers, including Naimark, rely does not clearly distinguish between massacre, or the destruction of part of a group, and extermination, the destruction of the whole group, calling each “genocide.” The UN defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in part or in whole a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.”⁴ Although by implication the UN does differentiate between destruction of a group in part and in whole, some writers tend to equate the two and subsume each under the rubric of “genocide.” Thus when in July 1995, Bosnian Serb troops under the leadership of General Mladic rounded up some ten thousand Bosnian Muslims in Srbrenica and killed them, they were rightly accused of genocide (of part of a group), but their mass-murder fell short of extermination.

In parts of his work Naimark is well aware of the distinctions between ethnic cleansing, genocide, and extermination, but in others he slides over the...