ABSTRACT
The twentieth century was not only the century of the Holocaust and of the Gulag, but also a century of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Over the course of the twentieth century, about fifty million people have been forced to permanently leave their homelands within Europe alone, while many more encountered the same fate in Africa and Asia. Three major periods of ethnic cleansing in Europe can be distinguished. The first one lasted roughly one decade from 1913 until 1923 and mainly affected south-eastern Europe and Turkey. In 1938, Nazi Germany started the second round of ethnic cleansing that substantially changed Central and Eastern Europe and lasted until 1948. The third period of ethnic cleansing was a consequence of the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991 and has continued in south-eastern Europe through the end of the twentieth century.1
