[Opinion] Ethnic Cleansing

"Laundering," a word usually meaning washing clothes with water, refers to a white-collar crime when “money” is added in front of it. “Cleansing,” which means “getting rid of dirtiness or unpleasantness,” denotes a massacre targeting a certain people when the word “ethnic” is put in front of it. Seeing scenes of ethnic cleansing, from men being killed in battle to women being raped, is enough to conclude that humans are naturally evil beings, with vice hidden deep in their hearts.

Ethnic cleansing is organized murder of a certain people. The most infamous example was the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany killed six million Jews. The Nazi are no more, but ethnic cleansing remains alive and well in the 21st century. The most recent example has popped up in Kenya. The bloodshed there triggered by the presidential election in December last year has worsened. Attacks and acts of revenge continue to break out between the Kikuyu tribe, members of President Mwai Kibaki`s ethnic group, and the Luo tribe of opposition leader Raila Odinga. The violence has killed 1,000 Kenyans and forced 300,000 others to flee for safety.

Ethnic cleansing in neighboring Sudan is worse. When the Christian Africans living in Darfur demanded independence, the pro-government Arab militia corps Janjaweed initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing from 2003. More than 200,000 people have been killed as a result and another 2.5 million have fled their homeland. In Rwanda, tension between the Hutus and the Tutsis led to the deaths of nearly one million people in 1994.

Despite these atrocities, the international community has come up with no answers to the problem. The United Nations has moved to get tougher on crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, and impose penalties, but this has failed to prevent the massacres. Leaders of 53 African nations have begun emergency talks on the Kenyan crisis, unable to stand it any longer. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he earnestly hopes they will reach a solution to end the ethnic cleansing.

I certainly hope to reassure myself that our belief in the inherent good nature of the human race is not wrong.

Editorial writer Bang Hyeong-nam, hnbhang@donga.com