This series analyses the social, political and historical conditions that make ethnic cleansing possible. This episode begins with the persecution of Jews throughout history and then looks at the colonisers in Africa, Australia, South and North America, who justified brutal expansion in the name of 'civilising' the native peoples; then considers ethnic cleansing for political ends (Stalin's Great Purge, Nazi genocide, the American Indian exterminations) and concludes with why neighbour turned on neighbour as in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.
This episode focuses on the Colonisers, who turned land into property, clearing the indigenous people, establishing Europeans as the new owners. This clear and settle policy was first tried out by the English in Ireland but was also used later in North America and Australia. Human greed knows no bounds. In the name of exploration, countless lives have been taken with the mindset of superiority. What we may have thought was assimilation was, in reality, mass slaughter.
Looks at Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries when the great empires were crumbling and the peoples of Europe turned to nationhood to instil security and a sense of belonging. Ethnic nationalism was beginning to get dangerous, especially along the eastern edge of Europe, and the crumbling Ottoman Empire, which had lasted almost 600 years. In Turkey, the reign of the tyrannical sultans was swept away, and replaced in 1908 by a group known as the Young Turks, a group of military men who no longer saw the empire as a priority.
This episode looks at genocides in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These campaigns of mass murder were conducted by people who felt that they were part of a group that had suffered in the past, and wanted to right the wrongs of history. In the history of genocide, the perpetrators have always needed a powerful and convincing story to enable them to kill and justify their actions.