ABSTRACT
It is often remarked that the twentieth century was a “dark century” of European history, blighted by total war, authoritarianisms, totalitarianisms, genocide and ethnic cleansing. A nuancing caveat comes in the form of the recently developed notion of “Bloodlands” for the large swath of Central Europe where both Hitler’s and Stalin’s murderous regimes subsequently expelled and killed on a mass scale ethnic non-Germans and ethnic non-Russians during World War Two. Hence, the popular tendency is to identify ethnic cleansing and genocide with this war and its immediate aftermath. Although the former phenomenon typically evokes the brutal images of the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s. This association is deepened by the fact that the term “ethnic cleansing” is a translation from Serbo-Croatian that entered the international vocabulary of international relations and international law only in the mid-1990s. Similarly, the term “genocide” is a neologism, coined in 1943 by the Polish Jewish jurist, Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin, before it became part of international law in 1948 when the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
