Ethnic Cleansing - Could it Work?

Now, before anyone thinks the worst, this is purely hypothetical. I recently watched a documentary on the Herero and Nama massacres in German Sudwestafrika, and it got me thinking; is there a point where ethnically cleansing an area could actually succeed without drawing the ire of the international community?

Africa is the obvious choice, because Africans have always suffered at the hands of European colonists, and it wasn't just the Germans that had some iffy policies regarding racial science. But could Germany have gotten away with it, if, say, WWI hadn't interrupted the process? The doco I watched suggested that the German Empire succeeded in their efforts, but I'm thinking about total annhiliation. I know German public opinion at the time wasn't really in favour of it, even if it did take a lot of public pressure for the Kaiser to finally get the colonial military to bring the Herero back from the desert (at which point they were stuffed into concentration camps, a la the British model only worse).

The Herero were then enslaved, and later the Nama were too after their attempted rebellion, but the impression I got was that the initiation of WWI and the eventual occupation of Sudwestafrika by South Africa sort of put a stop to this.

If WWI had somehow been avoided, could the Germans have succeeded in eventually wiping out the Herero and Nama peoples, to a point where the colony was a white nation?

Could this have happened for any other nation in the world (not just Africa)?

I know the Third Reich is going to be the obvious go-to. If the Nazis win, they'll rid Europe of the Jews and other undesiribles, right? But in reality, could they have actually done it, assuming everything else goes right?
 
It already did in OTL, it's the exact reason why East Prussia is cut in two and now ethnically Russian in the North and Polish in the former South, it is why Pomerania and Silesia are Polish, why the Sudetenland is Czech, why Crimea is Russian and so on.
 
I believe quite a few Hungarians left Transylvania after it was given to Rumania after WWI, whether they left voluntarily (as voluntarily as they could) or were forced out might be an example.

Theoretically, if a nation is deadset on clearing out an area, they could do it as long as they don't care about the international response, if there is one, and they have the resources.
 
It did in OTL; no hypotheticals are necessary. The entirety of the USA sure as hell wasn't always populated by white English-speakers; in some places such as California there was even entirely deliberate state-orchestrated genocide, and there was certainly deliberate expulsions of Native Americans from their land and resettlement with white people all over the country, which by any reasonable definition qualifies as ethnic cleansing. No-one important complained about the British genocide in Tasmania either. For that matter, the Herero genocide committed by Imperial Germany wasn't something great powers at the time cared much about, and no-one seemed to mind much when the Boer republics were driving black people out of land they wanted. Ethnic cleansing isn't a purely modern phenomenon either; go back two-thousand years and the Roman Empire went to war with a people called the Dacians and utterly defeated them, and now the land once named Dacia is known as Romania. Alternatively, for a somewhat later example, England hasn't always been populated by largely Germanic people.

The idea that ethnic cleansing is necessarily going to draw the ire of the 'international community' is a modern idea. There was plenty of ethnic cleansing in OTL, and no-one important objected as long as it was done against people who were considered uncivilised. (Funny definition of 'civilisation' they had: it's OK for civilised people to kill uncivilised people!) It drew so much ire when the Nazis did it because lots of their victims were white. The Nazis treated white people as imperialist powers had treated non-white people for generations; they were just more efficient at mass murder than the old imperialist powers were, and they were doing it in an age when most of the imperialist powers had relented in it somewhat. If the Nazis had been doing what they did to people who weren't white a century or two earlier, no-one would have batted an eyelid. Treating a conquered province with mass murder, expulsion and assimilation to make it yours is hardly a uniquely Nazi trait; lots and lots of states have done it with great success.

Of course ethnic cleansing can work. It has worked—many, many, many times.
 
It also worked in former Yugoslavia, after a fashion. Some areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. Have completely changed their ethnic composition going from mixed population to virtually 100% of one, the other or the third... And without any or very slim prospect of ever returning to previous state of affairs
 
Germany expelled over a million Poles from the areas it occupied in 1939. The lesson: if you do even worse things at the same time, nobody will even notice your ethnic cleansing, let alone react to it.
 
The Taliban did this in Afghanistan in the 1990s and no one cared.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/140.html

Reports of ethnic killing by the Taliban in Afghanistan
Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan (WAPHA), 2 September 1998

Women's Alliance for Peace and Human Rights in Afghanistan (WAPHA) condemns the Taliban for the detention, torture, and killing of the ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan. Although the Taliban have not allowed Journalists or independent human rights agencies into the area, there have been many reports of mass executions and mass arrests of Afghan ethnics. They have especially targeted the Hazara communities.

According to various news sources the Hazara are singled out by the Taliban and men, women, and children are either placed in camps, killed, imprisoned, or they have disappeared. According to the BBC news on 9/1/98, the BBC correspondent in the region has stated that there are reports that around 4, 000 people had been killed in the capture of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. The BBC further reports that anyone found on the streets on the first day after the city was captured, had been shot. On the following days after the Taliban's occupation of the northern areas, they have carried out systematic house searches. In these searches, they have killed people in whose houses they have found weapons. The BBC also reports that in one family several male members of the family were shot to death. The women of the family kept the decomposing bodies inside the house for several days because they were too afraid to go outside to bury their dead.

Reports have been made to WAPHA by several individuals that ethnic women and children are kept in camps near the border of Pakistan, while the men are either killed or transported to unknown areas. The same individuals also have reported to WAPHA that Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara women and girls are being sold in Pakistan by the Taliban militia.

Since the Taliban invasion of the country, they have continued to commit ethnic genocide in Afghanistan; they have continued to displace internally and externally hundreds of thousands of ethnic people from their homes, villages and cities. Thousands of other ethnic people are either in the Taliban's concentration camps, or havedisappeared.

The Taliban have implemented gender apartheid policies in Afghanistan that have lead to starvation,malnutrition and disease among women and children. There are reports that women and children in Kabulare suffering from severe forms psychological disorder and depression. There are reports that some women in Kabul commitsuicide either to escape witnessing their children starve to death or to escape living under the Taliban rule. Since the Taliban have banned women from work, and their are 50 to 60 thousands widows in the city of Kabul alone, children have become the only bread earners for their families. Boys and girls as young as eight and nine years old, beg and/or sell their bodies in the street in order to provide food for their families. There are forced marriages of young girls ages eight to nine to the Taliban militia. Young boys are forced by the Taliban militia to fight in the Afghan internal arm conflict.

The Taliban have turned Afghanistan into the center for international illegal drug and arms trafficking. The sacred Afghan soil has become soiled by Taliban and Pakistan by turning it into training camps for theinternational terrorists. The terrorists are unleashed to inflict terror and death not only on the people of Afghanistan but on the people of the world as well.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban's tyranny of terror in Afghanistan must be stopped. The Taliban's brutal regime, who has no conception of the Islamic and international laws, who has no respect for human dignity and rights, must not be recognized by the international body. The Taliban oppressive regime who commits genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression against the people of Afghanistan must not be recognized by the United Nations.

We appeal to the United Nations to start an immediate investigation of the Taliban's crimes in the north ofAfghanistan. We appeal to the United Nations and the United States to urge the Taliban to allow independent human rights agencies to investigate and monitor human rights violations in all areas under the Taliban's occupation. The United Nations, The United States and the International community must hold the Taliban accountable for all the crimes they have committed and continue to commit in Afghanistan.

[There follows an appeal for support in the form of a letter writing campaign]
 
Its happened many times

Was there not an 'Aboriginal' tribes people in Tasmania that were effectively wiped out in the 1700s and 1800s?

The North American natives where nearly completely "ethnically cleansed" during the 1600s to end of 1800s

Again in both cases a lot of it (individuals aside) was not planned as such by the Europeans - and regarding the East Coast Indian tribes there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that a great plague wiped out 96% of them several years prior to the Mayflower arriving!

Now examples where it was planned and they didn't away with it'

One comes to mind - the Ottomans vs the Armenians it was known about at the time but the 'Western' powers could neither prevent it or appeal to the 'Young Turks' to stop it as they were at war with them.
 

nastle

Banned
It did in OTL; no hypotheticals are necessary. The entirety of the USA sure as hell wasn't always populated by white English-speakers; in some places such as California there was even entirely deliberate state-orchestrated genocide, and there was certainly deliberate expulsions of Native Americans from their land and resettlement with white people all over the country, which by any reasonable definition qualifies as ethnic cleansing. No-one important complained about the British genocide in Tasmania either. For that matter, the Herero genocide committed by Imperial Germany wasn't something great powers at the time cared much about, and no-one seemed to mind much when the Boer republics were driving black people out of land they wanted. Ethnic cleansing isn't a purely modern phenomenon either; go back two-thousand years and the Roman Empire went to war with a people called the Dacians and utterly defeated them, and now the land once named Dacia is known as Romania. Alternatively, for a somewhat later example, England hasn't always been populated by largely Germanic people.

The idea that ethnic cleansing is necessarily going to draw the ire of the 'international community' is a modern idea. There was plenty of ethnic cleansing in OTL, and no-one important objected as long as it was done against people who were considered uncivilised. (Funny definition of 'civilisation' they had: it's OK for civilised people to kill uncivilised people!) It drew so much ire when the Nazis did it because lots of their victims were white. The Nazis treated white people as imperialist powers had treated non-white people for generations; they were just more efficient at mass murder than the old imperialist powers were, and they were doing it in an age when most of the imperialist powers had relented in it somewhat. If the Nazis had been doing what they did to people who weren't white a century or two earlier, no-one would have batted an eyelid. Treating a conquered province with mass murder, expulsion and assimilation to make it yours is hardly a uniquely Nazi trait; lots and lots of states have done it with great success.

Of course ethnic cleansing can work. It has worked—many, many, many times.

Agreed , and so have the nonwhites treated whites the same way when they had the chance
e.g
Moor invasions of Europe and the white slavery
Mongol invasions of Europe
Humans of all colors are worse than beasts given sufficient motivation
 
The 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange would undoubtedly be considered ethnic cleansing today, and not only was there no condemnation - the whole thing was orchestrated by the League of Nations and international community largely approved! Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian who arranged the whole thing, received a Nobel Peace Prize.
 
well, not an ethnic cleansing. But Indonesia's anti communist purge in 1965 killed more than 500.000 people and no one give a damn about it.

the case might be different as it is communist who were dead, not a specific ethnicity. but, the point is, during the cold war, as long as you're on the right side, people will not give a damn if you kill a lot of people.
 
Yeah ethnic cleansing and genocide is an extremely common historical occurrence.

Still going on today, a la Darfur, among other places.

Only difference today is some people in some parts of the world (besides the victims) care about it and want to stop it.

The European imperial powers refined the art and the Nazis (and arguably, Soviets) perfected it. But it has worked long before they came on the scene and will be around for a long time yet.
 
Colonisation and ethnic cleansing do share a lot of similarities, although often the former lacks the focus of totality. That being said, most of the dominions managed to push the indigenous peoples out of the best lands, off into the far beyond.
 
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