1/8 A bit of historical context on Trump's endorsement of Turkish ethnic cleansing in Northern Syria. After WWI, the victorious allied powers endorsed ethnic cleansing in remnants of Ottoman Empire, including Turkey. The Armenian genocide was the result. press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
2/8 After WWII, the victorious Allied powers, including the US, supported the forced expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia: chronicle.com/article/The-Eu…
3/8 Human rights scholars and historians have documented ethnic cleansing as an "instrument of nation-state creation," as one scholar put it, and until the 1990s it was widely accepted. muse.jhu.edu/article/13640
4/8 The Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian Wars finally forced the international community, including the Clinton Administration, to confront ethnic cleansing. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia rendered the first verdicts in 2000. latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
5/8 As two leading scholars have put it: "Ethnic cleansing is related to genocide, but ethnic cleansing is focused more closely than genocide on geography and on forced removal of ethnic or related groups from particular areas." oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/o…
6/8 The US since the 1990s has accepted legal norms declaring ethnic cleansing a crime against humanity, subject to prosecution in international and domestic courts. The Trump Admin declared Myanmar's campaign against ethnic Rohinga to be such in 2017: washingtonpost.com/world/us-decla…
7/8 In fact, less than two months ago the US State Department called for international action against Myanmar's campaign of ethnic cleansing, after sanctioning leading generals . npr.org/2019/07/17/742…
8/8 The Trump Admin has crossed many bright lines in international law that scholars and policy observers had previously considered unthinkable. Trump's endorsement of a Turkish campaign of ethnic cleansing in Northern Syria represents an extraordinarily dangerous new precedent.
