GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING OR ABOUT DISPOSITION RELATION BETWEEN ONE INTERNATIONAL-CRIMINAL ACT AND ONE SOCIOLOGICAL-POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCEPT

Abstract

Genocide is the most severe criminal act in the international law that is determined by the Genocide Convention; there is no criminal act that is legally codified as ethnic cleansing, but it is a media and sociological-political science concept that, starting from the ‘80s of the 20th century, collectively implicate large number of individually codified crimes that are determined in the international criminal legislation as crimes against humanity and war crimes. According to Lemkin, the concept of genocide is significantly wider even in regard to the concept of ethnic cleansing, since it implicates a wide scale of measures committed against a national minority, with intent to destroy it, considering not only biological and physical destruction, but including them also. In any case, there must be a dolus specialis, which according to Lemkin consists of destroying one national group in various aspects of its identity, while according to the Genocide Convention it consists exclusively of physical and biological extermination of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
 Ethnic cleansing, as comprehended in sociological-political science interpretations, primarily denotes forced actions with the aim of creating ethnical monolithic territories. The actions are not directed to physical and biological extermination of an “undesirable ethnic group” in a territory, but as forced actions are directed to the leaving of the territory and may implicate also war crimes and crimes against humanity, but cannot be reduced only to them. In that sense, dolus specialis would be creation of an ethnically homogenous territory and this would make a difference from the genocide if this concept were legally codified. Besides, ethnic cleansing must be connected with the concept of ethnic group.