The Invention of Ethnic Cleansing

From Bosnia to Rwanda, Myanmar to China, and Ethiopia to Israel, the hideous practice of ‘ethnic cleansing remains a 'constant evil’ in world history to this day. Yet, nobody really knows where the term came from or what it means. As a result, nobody has ever been held to account for their part in such barbarity.

As a humanitarian affairs adviser to the UK’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office in Former-Yugoslavia in 1992 and later as a UN official in places such as Burundi, Rwanda and Sudan, James Shepherd-Barron has seen, heard and smelled ‘ethnic cleansing’ up close and personal. This is his account of what happens when whole peoples turn against those they consider to be ‘other’ and describes how the term came to be ‘invented’. The story has never been told before.