Better than genocide: ethnic cleansing in human affairs.

ETHNIC cleansing is evil. It can never be condoned. Yet our repugnance at the act leaves us with a dilemma: What are we supposed to do in cases where ethnic cleansing may be impossible to prevent--cases in which well-intentioned efforts to interrupt ethnic cleansing actually make a conflict deadlier?

One problem we face is a muddle in terminology, employing "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" interchangeably; in fact, there is a profound difference between these two human habits. Genocide is the attempt to exterminate a minority. Ethnic cleansing seeks to expel a minority. At its less serious end, ethnic cleansing may aim only at the separation of populations deemed incompatible by at least one side, with psychological, legalistic, or financial machinations brought to bear to achieve the desired end. At the other extreme, ethnic cleansing can involve deadly violence and widespread abuse. In the worst cases, ethnic-cleansing efforts may harden into genocide.

It must never become the policy of the United States to abet ethnic cleansing. Yet our all-or-nothing reaction when confronted with this common human phenomenon has proven to be consistently ineffective, from the Balkans to Iraq. Until we make an honest attempt to understand the age-old human impulse to rid a troubled society of those who are different in ethnicity or religion, we will continue to fail in our efforts to pacify and repair war-ravaged territories. If our conflicts over the past decade and a half offer any lesson, it's that the rest of the world refuses to conform to our idealized notions of how human beings are designed to behave. We never stop insisting that the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, the tribes of Somalia, the ethnic groups of Afghanistan, and, most painfully, the religious and ethnic factions of Iraq learn to live in harmony. Those we hope to convince ignore us.

If ethnic cleansing can be prevented and the society rejuvenated, that's an admirable accomplishment. But not all enraged passions can be calmed, no matter how vociferously we insist otherwise. Once ignited, some human infernos must burn themselves out; and you had best position any fire-breaks correctly. To date, our reactions to situations in which ethnic cleansing cannot be arrested have been inept; in Iraq, for example, well-intentioned attempts to stymie neighborhood ethnic-cleansing efforts may have led to the targets' being murdered as opposed to merely forcibly removed. We struggle to keep families in their homes; in response, the families are massacred in those homes. We pretend that embedded hatreds are transient misunderstandings, but we're not the victims who pay the price for our fantasies.

As uncomfortable as it may be to face the facts, ethnic cleansing has been a deeply ingrained response of human collectives since the dawn of history, and it's preferable to uncompromising genocide.

A LONG HISTORY

Why do human collectives feel compelled to expel neighbors with whom they may have lived in relative peace for generations, or even centuries? It's a difficult question. The Western model of studying the individual and then extrapolating our findings to the society prevents us from understanding mass behavior, which is far more complex (and murky) than the sum of individual actions. In much of the world--not least, in the Middle East--a more incisive approach is to examine the mass first, then extrapolate to the individual. We're astonished when foreign actors we know as affable individuals are swept up in mob behavior, but the mob may be their natural element and the reasonable character we encountered on a personal level a fragile aberration: Even in our own society, the mass remains more powerful than the man.

A related obstacle to understanding the insidious appeal of ethnic cleansing is that our leaders and opinion-makers interact disproportionately with foreign urban residents who have a higher education level, a greater English-language ability, and a more cosmopolitan outlook than the rest of their society. As a result, we're instructed that a given society doesn't support ethnic cleansing, since there are mixed marriages in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Weimar Germany. But the impulse to expel those who are visibly or behaviorally different--or who are merely accused of being different--is deeply rooted in the human soil. The man in the mansion may tell you one thing, but the unemployed citizen out on the street may bring to bear a very different psychology--along with an inchoate desire for vengeance inseparable from the human condition.

In the Old Testament, you can search fruitlessly through book after book for an example of disparate populations living happily side by side as equals. Ethnic cleansing and genocide appear early and continuously; and it is the differences between the various nationalities and tribes, not the commonalities, that are stressed in the foundational text of our civilization. We read not of a multicultural, tolerant society, but of a chosen people charged to conquer. Tribal genocides erupted throughout history when competition for scarce resources intensified; genocide is fundamentally Darwinian, as one group seeks to annihilate another for its own safety or other perceived benefits. Above the tribal level, though, full-scale genocides have been relatively rare; the more common practice, even in the case of the ever-cited Mongols, was selective mass-murder to instill fear--the slaughter of a city's population to persuade other cities not to resist.

The Romans knew how to punish convincingly, but had little taste for outright genocide. Their preference was for forms of ethnic cleansing that resettled troublesome tribes or dispersed rebellious populations--such as the Jews, following the rebellions of the first century A.D. (The Greeks, whose "civilized" behavior was a myth, had been more apt to slaughter rivals, whether in the poetry of Homer or the reportage of Thucydides.) From the Babylonian captivity, down to Stalin's practice of uprooting restive groups (such as the Chechens), ethnic cleansing as a tool of statecraft has a long, if hardly proud, tradition, with genocide reserved as the fail-safe answer.

Further confounding our preconceptions, state-organized programs of ethnic cleansing, for all their heartlessness, look relatively humane compared with the countless outbreaks of ethnic or religious cleansing inspired by roving demagogues, agents provocateurs, or simply rumors. While state genocide is the most potent form, state-backed ethnic cleansing tends to be less lethal than popular pogroms, since the state seeks to solve a perceived problem, while the mob wants blood (the horrific genocide perpetrated against the Armenians fatally combined state policy and popular bigotry in a muddle of genocide and ethnic cleansing). Once the people of a troubled society get it into their heads that their neighbors who look or sound or worship differently are enemies bent on subversion, outbursts of extraordinary savagery are the norm.

In this context, ethnic cleansing might be the least horrific of the alternatives. Which atrocity was worse, the French massacre of Protestant Huguenots in the 16th century, or Louis XIV's expulsion of them in the 17th (a process that harmed the French economy, while benefiting German-speaking states)? The Spanish expulsions of the Jews and then the Moors were a vast human tragedy that ravaged Iberian civilization--but weren't those forced exiles preferable to Hitler's attempt to exterminate European Jewry? Even at the extremes of man-wrought evil, there are gradations of cruelty.

The historical evidence is troubling, since it suggests that ethnic cleansing can lead to peace. For example, the German presence amid Slavic populations in northeastern Europe lasted for eight oppressive centuries before all ethnic Germans were expelled in the wake of the Nazi collapse; after almost a millennium of torment, the region now enjoys an unprecedented level of peace and social justice. Certainly, other factors influenced this new calm--but the subtraction of Baltic, Ukrainian, Pomeranian, Silesian, and Sudeten Germans from the social and political equations appears to have been decisive.

In the wake of World War I, Greece and the Turkish rump of the Ottoman Empire exchanged millions of ethnic Turks and Greeks, under miserable conditions. The ethnic cleansing was harsh on both sides and the suffering of these hereditary enemies was immense. Yet, despite their history of violent antagonism, Greeks and Turks have remained at peace for more than eight decades since those mass expulsions, with the conflict over Cyprus confined to that unhappy island.

Meanwhile, trouble spots in which populations remain intermingled continue to erupt in violence, from West Africa through the Middle East to the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia (where anti-Chinese pogroms are almost as predictable as the monsoon season).

Nor can we Americans claim perfect innocence when it comes to ethnic cleansing. Our treatment of Native Americans remains, along with slavery and its consequences, one of the two great stains upon our history. And our present situation goes unexamined: On one hand, the unprecedented degree of ethnic and religious integration we have achieved (largely in the last half-century) blinds us to the depth and operative power of hatreds elsewhere in the world; on the other, our own society has devised innovative, relatively benign forms of achieving ethnic separation. The "gentrification" of neighborhoods in cities such as Washington, D.C., is a soft form of ethnic cleansing by checkbook and mortgage.

There is also an enduring self-segregation of various groups within our society. Many individuals prefer the familiarity and sense of security delivered by a collective identity, by the codes and symbols of belonging, whether displayed in a barrio or in the economic segregation of a suburban gated community. Even in our remarkable multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society, there are still race riots--in the course of which interlopers whose skin is the wrong color end up beaten beyond recognition or dead.

Human collectives are still, essentially, warrior bands protective of their turf (even in those gated communities--just attend a homeowners' association meeting). Group competition is powerfully embedded in our psyches. Successful societies channel such impulses constructively, but struggling societies and those that have already succumbed to anarchy revert to narrow (and safe) identities--race, tribe, faith, cult--and respond to perceived threats with assertive group behavior: The individual is lost once the group is awakened. We can deny it as often as we like, but the historical pattern is timeless and enduring: When the majority feels threatened, it lashes out at minorities in its midst. When a minority's ethnicity and religion both differ from the mainstream of a traditional society, that minority is living on borrowed time. The span of imagined safety may last for centuries, but then, one day, the zealots appear on the street corner, whether in brown shirts or wearing Islamist robes.

THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

It cannot be stressed too often or too forcefully that ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity that cannot be excused. The purpose of this essay is to try to understand it--not to condone it--and to consider the implications for our military and diplomatic missions abroad.

Given that we would prefer to prevent any ethnic cleansing, what do we do when it cannot be prevented, when the hatred is too intense and the process already has gone too far? While there will never be a universal answer, given the complexity of each specific case, it can be argued as a case study that ethnic separation at an earlier stage might have prevented the massacre at Srebrenica (of course, no such separations will ever be fully just). Indeed, U.S. diplomats gave tacit approval to the Croatian cleansing of Serbs during the endgame in Croatia and Bosnia. Later, in Kosovo, we sought to persuade Serbs not to drive ethnic Albanians from their homes, but, as soon as victory was delivered to the Kosovars, they set about ethnically cleansing Serbs with high-testosterone vigor. The dynamic in play was such that none of our pleas, lectures, or scoldings were going to alter the hardened attitudes prevailing in either camp. What if the only hope for peace in the territory some still pretend is a unified Kosovo is ethnic separation and partition?

Meanwhile, in Iraq, ethnic-cleansing efforts have been savage. They still fall short of genocide: Confessional murders to date have aimed at intimidation and expulsion, at punishment and advantage, not at annihilation. What if the best hope for social peace is the establishment of exclusive Shiite or Sunni (or Kurdish) neighborhoods--or towns and cities and provinces? We aren't alarmed by the existence of various ethnic quarters in Singapore or, for that matter, Brooklyn, and we accept that Saudi Arabia would not welcome an influx of Christian settlers to Riyadh. What if the last chance for Iraq to survive as a unified state is for its citizens to live in religiously or ethnically separate communities? What if efforts to prevent ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, for example, not only are doomed to fail, but exacerbate the ultimate intensity of the violence? Would we really prefer that a family die in its home, rather than be driven from it? Our principles are noble, but it's shabby to expect Iraqis to die for them.

There are no easy answers to these questions. But it should be absolutely clear by now that ethnic cleansing is an issue we will face again and again in the decades ahead, and it may not always be possible or even helpful to stop its march. We must face the unsettling question as to whether it's always desirable to force a halt to such purges, instead of acting to ameliorate the suffering of those displaced.

Idealists will continue to insist that Arabs and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Turks, Tajiks and Pashtuns, Sudanese blacks and Arabs, or Nigerian Muslims and Christians can all get along. Would that it were so. But to decline to study the possibility that they might refuse to get along, that the individuals we think we know may be consumed by mass passions that reasonable arguments won't tame, is folly. The old military maxim applies: You may hope for the best, but you prepare for the worst.

There is nothing welcome about ethnic or religious cleansing. But if we do not recognize its insistent reemergence in human affairs, and the fact that--in contrast to full-scale genocide--it remains the lesser evil, we will continue to act ineffectually as the innocent suffer.

Mr. Peters, a retired Army officer, is a columnist and strategist, and the author of the new book Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century.