Totality
and Ethnic Cleansing
Naimark emphasizes
three aspects of ethnic cleansing that illustrate its totalizing nature. The
first of these is demonstrated by the authorities who are responsible for
moving populations in that they have tried to diminish all aspects of its
former inhabitants. This includes destroying all cultural and linguistic
characteristics, as well as all material objects which remain of the former
inhabitants.
The
second totalizing characteristic Naimark illustrates is the overtaking authority’s
criminal side of destroying and confiscating all of the refugees’ possessions.
This was accomplished by encouraging its supporters to steal, exploit, and
deceive the refugees out of their possessions. This dispossessing of the
refugees was in hopes to force them to leave, and to make sure if they did return,
that they would have no property to return to.
The third aspect
emphasized by Naimark is the use of systematic campaigns of rape as a “tool of
ethnic cleansing” (pp. 197). Chapter two points out that “both the Holocaust and
the Armenian case highlight the central place of women as important objects of
ethnic cleansing and genocide,” (pp. 83). Women were specifically targeted with
rape as a war weapon because they were easy targets that would terrorize the
entire desired population. The purpose of genocidal rape was to terrorize the
target population. During these periods of war rape camps were created for
soldiers to take women and girls to become their sexual slaves. The rape camps
used for these wars were dehumanizing by making the women suffer regularly from
the abuse and the severe sanitation conditions of which they were forced to
stay. However, the rape camps were strategic in that their presence
demonstrated the ineffectiveness of local authorities.
The totalistic quality
of ethnic cleansing is emphasized by Naimark through: destroying all cultural
and linguistic characteristics of refugees as well as material objects,
confiscating and destroying all possessions of refugees, and also by the use of
systematic campaigns of rape as a “tool of ethnic cleansing”.
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