The sanitization of genocide
The term’s history is complex, as is the use of “ethnic cleansing.”
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
It might not seem like it sometimes, but we journalists care about words. A lot. We think about what we should call a group that commits terror, or how we should refer to disputed lands, or whether we use a government’s name for a place vs. a historical or indigenous one (see: Myanmar vs. Burma).
When I worked at The New York Times on the 2020 live election coverage, the word came down from the standards desk that we were not to use the words “riot” or “insurrection” after Jan. 6, despite the videos of men beating police at the Capitol as they overran the seat of government. “Mob” was okay. This edict jibed with the main public criticism I’d been hearing about the paper — that the Times wouldn’t call things what they actually were. (See: not calling Trump’s lies “lies.”)
Words used carefully convey intent. They are often political, if not politicized.
These days, the words “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” are being thrown around with abandon when talking about the war in Israel/Gaza. Oddly, they’ve been used less publicly when talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but I’ve argued and will continue to argue that there is a genocide under way there.
Words like these are some of the most serious in our language. It’s important to distinguish between these two terms, to choose them with care. There are a few reasons for this.
A couple weeks ago, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, released a statement warning that “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza is a component of the new conflict: “Israel has already carried out mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war,” Albanese said. “Again, in the name of self-defense, Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing. Any continued military operations by Israel have gone well beyond the limits of international law.”
Regardless of what you or I believe is happening in Israel/Gaza, the special rapporteur’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” is, to put it bluntly but not sardonically, potentially sanitizing — even dangerous. The term specifically refers to the forcible removal (by terror or violence) of a particular group from a geographic area — not the intent to wipe away an entire ethnic or other group. It seems, at least in our modern consciousnesses, to fall a step below actual genocide.
Critically, ethnic cleansing is a crime that has no viable legal avenues. “No prosecutor can charge anyone for committing it,” writes the U.S.-based nonprofit Genocide Watch. “The term is a license for impunity.”
You may be surprised to learn that “ethnic cleansing” is a term invented by Slobodan Milosevic, the genocidal president of Serbia during the war in the Balkans in the early 1990s. According to a 2012 article in the journal The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies:
Ethnic cleansing is often a policy carried out by strong states to mold the population map, especially of border zones, but the breakup of such states also generates power struggles that can lead to ethnic cleansing. Another paradox is that partition or division of ethnically or religiously mixed states has been identified both as a cause of ethnic cleansing and as a possible remedy for ethnic cleansing.
Milosevic and his mouthpieces used the term as a euphemism for genocide, or, as Genocide Watch puts it, “genocide denial.”
“‘Ethnic cleansing’ has become the dominant euphemism used to deny genocide,” the group writes, pointing to media outlets that use the term in order to avoid the legal complications that come with the word “genocide.”
“Genocide,” alternatively, was a term created by a Polish lawyer in 1944, partly in reference to the actions of the Nazis. The lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, would go on to advocate to make genocide an international crime. The term would be codified as a crime in 1948 under the U.N. General Assembly’s ratification of the Genocide Convention.
Genocidal acts, writes the U.S. Holocaust Museum, fall into five categories (examples mine):
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (such as the concentration camps of World War II, or even the Russian filtration camps in Ukraine)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (or even forcing pregnancy at the hands of the enemy to alter bloodlines, as happened in Bosnia)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (such as what Russia has been doing to Ukrainian children)
Some argue that using “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” interchangeably is actually harmful to the very people under attack.
“Bystanders’ use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ signals the lack of will to stop genocide, resulting in huge increases in deaths, and undermines international legal obligations to acknowledge genocide,” academics wrote in a 2008 article in the European Journal of Public Health. “The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ corrupts observation, interpretation, ethical judgment and decision-making, thereby undermining the aim of public health.”
There is a long history of like-minded verbal obfuscation among fascists and killers.
In Nazi Germany, the fascists used terms like “racial hygiene” and “Judenrein,” which basically translates to mean places “cleansed of Jews,” implying that Jews were less than human, a kind of infection, something to be wiped out, like rats. This verbal sanitization accompanied multiple Nazi attempts to cover up their mass murder of Jews and others such as Roma, political prisoners and gay men. For instance, the SS commissioned paintings from talented concentration camp prisoners and forced them to depict slave laborers (at least at Auschwitz, from what I saw a couple weeks ago in the collections) who built the camp’s infrastructure as though they were simply workers doing this of their own free will. Workmen were painted wearing regular clothes instead of wearing the unwashed striped, threadbare uniforms they were required to wear as slaves.
Words that ordered murder were forbidden to be used in writing. Instead, forms were filled with codes about “special” transfers, etc. While at Auschwitz recently, my tour guide told our group about an officer who messed up, using the actual term for the killing on a form somewhere. He duly received punishment from the powers that be.
As the horrors in Israel and Gaza unfolded two weeks ago, I stood in the main guard tower over the train tracks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, feeling queasy knowing that I was standing in the same place that SS murderers once had. Rain smudged the view and mud swamped the land. Stretching endlessly into the horizon were the remains of long barracks meant for horses but used for humans. Starving, sick, exhausted humans. The tracks were where people tumbled off airless freight cars into the hands of the Nazis, who then chose who would live (for the moment) and who would die an immediate agonizing death in the gas chambers.
In my hotel room after hours of touring and seminars, I would turn on the news and see the terrifying scenes of Palestinians running for their lives from Israeli airstrikes as well as the nightmare attack Hamas inflicted upon the Israelis. Both made my stomach turn.
Both involve eliminating people and getting them off particular lands. The attempts to destroy entire peoples are fraught with not only horrors, but opinions. Either way, if we are planning to label something a genocide, then let’s not talk about the non-actionable label of “ethnic cleansing.” Not right now, when the stakes are this high.
Chills is self-funded, without ads. If you want to be a part of this effort, of revealing how difficult reporting is made — of sending me to places like Ukraine to report for you — I hope you will consider subscribing for $50/year or $7/month.
More powerful writing, and thank you for the distinctions and etymology of “ethnic cleansing.” Where it was birthed is enlightening in the worst way.
"Raphael Lemkin learned about the Ottoman destruction of the Armenians during World War I (known today as the Armenian Genocide)...[which] inspired his belief that there should be an international law." Again today Armenians are being killed or driven from their ancient land of Artsakh.