The Difference Between Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
Until recently it seemed almost commonplace that the United States and other U.N. Security Council members would refer to violence in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as “ethnic cleansing.” This term has been widely used since 1992. It allows the perpetrators of these atrocities to avoid labeling them as genocide, which triggers mandatory international intervention under international law. It is important to distinguish between ethnic cleansing and genocide, but it is difficult to do so without engaging in a long and contentious debate.
The exact legal definition of ethnic cleansing has been a subject of fierce controversy within and among international bodies, particularly the two ad hoc international tribunals established in the 1990s to prosecute violations of international humanitarian law in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as the International Criminal Court, which began sitting in 2002. Nevertheless, it now seems generally accepted that the concept of ethnic cleansing is rather broad, and encompasses not only actions that aim to systematically purge groups defined by ethnicity but also those that involve other distinct criteria such as religion, class, nationality, linguistic minorities or indigenous peoples.
This broader interpretation is supported by the fact that in the early 2000s the International Court of Justice (ICJ) used the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to a variety of acts that may be forbidden under international law, including the forced expulsion of civilians from their homes on the basis of racial or religious criteria, and that it was interpreted as an autonomous category separate from genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity (Croatia v Serbia, Blagojevic [Trial Judgment] paras 138-39). More recently, the inclusion of ethnic cleansing alongside genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in the definition of the “responsibility to protect” has strengthened this argument.
