The landscape of Europe, from Turkey and Greece to Eastern Europe, is littered with the remnants of once vibrant ethnic and religious communities that had called these places home. Over the past two centuries ethnic cleansing has remade the map of Europe and the Middle East. In most cases, the history of the violence and expulsions is almost forgotten. The Holocaust is, of course, well-documented. There is also a growing literature on the Armenian genocide in which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Turks. The ethnic cleansing that took place in the 1990’s in Serbia, Kosovo, and Croatia attracted international condemnations. Each of these events, however, can also be seen as part of a much broader process of population removal that is less well understood and analyzed. In Terrible Fate, historian Benjamin Lieberman provides the first comprehensive history of this process that involved the killing and forced migration of millions of people over the past two centuries.
Today correctly seen as a horrendous expression of the misuse of state power, ethnic cleansing was viewed not too long ago as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. From the end of the 19th century throughout the 20th, forced population shifts were not uncommon as multi-cultural empires like the Russian, Ottoman, and Hapsburg empires collapsed and nationalism drove the formation of new, ethnically homogenous countries. In the process, millions of ethnic Germans, Jews, Poles, Bulgarians, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Ukrainians, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Palestinians, and Kurds were forced from their homes. By the end of the 20th century the ethnic and religious map of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Asia was remade with new borders between nation-states and homogeneity replacing diversity. Greeks now live without Turks, Turks without Greeks, Czechs and Poles without Germans and, in many countries, virtually no one lives with Jews. This important and complex story is presented with skill and detail in Terrible Fate.Weaving together a rich variety of sources including eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism, primary documents, and diplomatic records, Lieberman tells both the political history and the human toll of the phenomenon. Taking the reader on a tour of horrors from ethnic cleansing’s earliest beginnings in Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia in the 19th century, to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, he shows how nationalist ideology affected the lives of ordinary people as both victims and perpetrators. The narrative is a bit dry and uninspired, but the analysis and detail make this an important book on an uncharted topic.
