Identity Cleansing

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"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings" - German poet Heinrich Heine.

Identity cleansing is defined as "confiscation of personal identification, passports, and other such documents in order to make it difficult or impossible for those driven out to return.

From a very informative and devastating report by UNESCO - "Continuing acts of terrorism, ethnic cleansing and related archival cleansing and other acts of barbarism will add many more record groups to the list. Some of the disasters resulted from brutal violence by agents of the dominant political system, others from similar action by their opponents. To give a few recent examples, so far repositories and archives have been completely destroyed in Liberia, Burundi and Rwanda."

From Wikipedia: "Expelled Kosovar Albanians were systematically stripped of identity and property documents including passports, land titles, automobile license plates, identity cards and other documents. In conjunction with the policy of expelling ethnic Albanians from the province — "Operation Horseshoe," as it came to be known — the Serbian forces would confiscate all documents that indicated the identity of those being expelled. Physicians for Human Rights reports that nearly 60 percent of respondents to its survey observed Serbian forces removing or destroying personal identification documents. Human Rights Watch also documented the common practice of "identity cleansing": refugees expelled toward Albania were frequently stripped of their identity documents and forced to remove the license plates from their vehicles. This criminal practice suggesting the government was trying to block their return.

In addition to confiscating the relevant documents from their holders, efforts were also made to destroy any actual birth records (and other archives) which were maintained by governmental agencies, so as to make the "cleansing" complete (this latter tactic sometimes being referred to as archival cleansing)."


See also