Ethnic Cleansing in Southeast Europe

The scale of ethnic cleansing in Europe during World War II has not been repeated, but ethnic cleansing has occurred more recently in Europe in the Balkans.

Multiethnic Yugoslavia

The Balkans, about the size of Texas, is a region named for the Balkan Mountains (known in Slavic languages as Stara Planina), which extend east–west across the region. The region includes Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania as well as several countries that once comprised Yugoslavia. A complex assemblage of ethnicities has long made the Balkans a hotbed of unrest. Most profoundly for the rest of the world, the incident that sparked World War I occurred in the Balkans. In June 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb who sought independence for Bosnia.

The Balkans in 1914

Pause & Reflect 7.4.2

What is another example of a country that is inhabited primarily by ethnic Slavs?

After World War I, the Allies created a new country, Yugoslavia, to unite several Balkan ethnicities that spoke similar South Slavic languages. The prefix “Yugo” in the country’s name derived from the Slavic word for “south.” Longtime leader Josip Broz Tito (prime minister 1943–1963 and president 1953–1980) was instrumental in forging a Yugoslav nationality. Central to Tito’s vision of a Yugoslav nationality was acceptance of ethnic diversity in language and religion. Individuals from the five most numerous ethnicities—Croat, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serb, and Slovene—were allowed to exercise considerable control over the areas they inhabited within Yugoslavia.

Rivalries among ethnicities resurfaced in Yugoslavia during the 1980s after Tito’s death, leading ultimately to its breakup into several small countries (Figure 7-53). Because the boundaries of the new countries did not match the distribution of ethnicities, the breakup of Yugoslavia did not happen peacefully. Several episodes of ethnic cleansing ensued.

Breakup of Yugoslavia

Until its breakup in 1992, the country of Yugoslavia consisted of six republics—Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. These republics exercised considerable control over their local affairs. Kosovo and Vojvodina were considered autonomous regions within Serbia.

Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo

At the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, 82 percent of the population of Kosovo were ethnic Albanians and 10 percent were Serbs. Nonetheless, Kosovo was controlled by Serbia. Serbia had a historical claim to Kosovo, having controlled it between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Serbs fought an important—though losing—battle in Kosovo against the Ottoman Empire in 1389. In recognition of its role in forming the Serb ethnicity, Serbia was given control of Kosovo when Yugoslavia was created in the early twentieth century.

With the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia took direct control of Kosovo and launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Albanian majority. At its peak in 1999, Serb ethnic cleansing forced more than 800,000 of Kosovo’s 2 million ethnic Albanian residents from their homes, mostly to camps in Albania (see Sustainability & Our Environment feature). Outraged by the ethnic cleansing, the United States and Western European countries, operating through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), launched an air attack against Serbia. The bombing campaign ended when Serbia agreed to withdraw all of its soldiers and police from Kosovo.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008. Around 115 countries, including the United States, recognize Kosovo as an independent country, but Serbia, Russia, China, and their allies oppose it. However, the declaration of independence induced nearly 90 percent of the country’s Serbs to leave.

Geographic Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing

According to the social pillar of sustainability (see this section in Chapter 1), humans need material resources, such as shelter and food, to survive. Ethnic cleansing denies people these basic needs. And a landscape cannot be sustained environmentally and economically if no people are left living there to farm or provide services.

Ethnic cleansing often follows these steps:

1. Move a large amount of military equipment and personnel into a village that has no strategic value.

2. Round up all the people in the village. Segregate men from women, children, and old people. Place men in detention camps or kill them.

3. Force the rest of the people to leave the village. March them in a convoy to a place outside the territory being ethnically cleansed.

4. Destroy the vacated village, such as by setting it on fire.

A series of three photographs taken by NATO air reconnaissance over the village of Glodane, in western Kosovo, illustrated the four steps in ethnic cleansing. Below is the first of the three photos:

• Illustrating step 1, the red circles show the location of Serb armored vehicles along the main street of the village. Figure 7-54 shows the village’s houses and farm buildings clustered on the left side, with fields on the outskirts of the village, including the center and right portions of the photograph. As discussed in Chapter 12, rural settlements in most of the world have houses and farm buildings clustered together and surrounded by fields rather than in isolated, individual farms typical of North America.

• Illustrating step 2, the farm field immediately to the east of the main north–south road is filled with the villagers. At the scale that the photographed is reproduced in this book, the people appear as a dark mass inside the blue lines labeled “internally displaced persons.”The white rectangles to the north of the people are civilian cars and trucks.

• Illustrating step 3, the second photograph of the sequence (not included here) showed the same location a short time later, with one major change: The people and vehicles massed in the field in the first photograph are gone—no people and no vehicles.

• Illustrating step 4, the third photograph (not included here) showed that the buildings in the village had been set on fire.

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Evidence of Ethnic Cleansing

Ethnic cleansing by Serbs forced Albanians living in Kosovo to flee in 1999.

Aerial photographs such as these not only “proved” that ethnic cleansing was occurring but also provided critical evidence to prosecute Serb leaders for war crimes.

1. In addition to air photos, what other geographic tools might be useful in documenting examples of ethnic cleansing?

2. How might geographic tools be used in the future to help stop ethnic cleansing before it starts?