A Quiet Case Of Ethnic Cleansing

"Ethnic Cleansing" has become one of the key terms of the fin-de-siècle. In the former territory of Yugoslavia, along the fringes of the old Soviet Empire, and in Africa, whole populations are being murdered or forced from lands they have lived on for centuries. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff explains the history of this obscene practice, tracing it from antiquity to the present and showing how, in different times and places, the most varied criteria have been used to isolate and destroy previously accepted or even completely unnoticed groups. "Cleansing" has been based on race, gender, class, sexual preference, and religion and has been a constant evil in world history. The need to understand its reemergence in the wake of communism's collapse is at the center of this important book.

This book traces the history of India’s struggle for freedom from circa 1915 to present day. Salient events from the 17th to 19th century are included to provide context to later events. The account narrated here is evidence-based, covering the four decades after M. K. Gandhi’s return from Africa. This is a historical narrative based on the facts and events that happened, backed by public domain records. These are further corroborated by Gandhi’s speeches, articles and letters written to the British authorities, with the ultimate aim of demystifying Gandhi’s Mahatmaship. The book highlights the series of missed opportunities and poor decisions made by the Indian leadership (primarily Gandhi and Nehru) during the course of independence and thereafter. These events and decisions have already affected the four generations of people. While there were several noteworthy freedom fighters who tried to steer things in more opportune directions, they were stymied by Gandhi’s authoritarian stance and his often-obstinate stand on social, economic, and political developments. This book looks critically at the decisions Gandhi made and their impact on modern-day India. Divided in seven sections, the first four sections discuss Gandhi’s leadership and his actions during the freedom struggle; the fifth section gives a detailed analysis of the 60 years of post-independence Congress regimes, during which Nehru and his dynasty’s policies destroyed the five pillars of democracy. Finally, the epilogue suggests a road map for the way forward.

The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT

South and Southeast Asia continue to be extremely critical regions, deeply intertwined and bound in many ways by centuries of intersecting histories. As the recent experiences of rapid and transformative political and economic changes in several countries in these two regions illustrate, these changes have significant bearing on and are simultaneously affected by the legacy and continued dynamic of dominant-minority group relations. To be sure, while the dynamics of dominant-minority relations in each country are distinct and often mitigated by distinct historical conditions, the phenomenon of these dominant-minority relations, especially along ethnic and religious fault lines, are deeply consequential to many of the nations in these regions. This book, featuring eight case studies, provides a multidisciplinary and multi-layered assessment of the salience of the ethnic and religious realities in shaping various South and Southeast Asian nations. Featuring chapters on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this volume provides a deep appreciation of the challenges that these societies confront in integrating and/or responding to specific ethnic and/or religious based conflicts and tensions.