Ethnic cleansing is an organized behavior motivated by hate for a group with a different language, customs, and social views.  It's born out of fear that seeing ourselves in others will lead to our undoing.  It is promoted by the need for uniformity as embodied in genealogy.  Propaganda is offered by the ethnic cleanser to defend his right to do what he does;  if it's contested, he quickly dons victim's clothing.  An ethnic cleanser cannot share goals with other members of humanity.  He doesn't care about anyone who's different;  he loves only himself.

Those on whom he vents his self-righteous energy are uprooted.  Their program for life is vaporized,  their wealth expropriated.  The cleansing leaves you nothing you can count on.  There are of course personal abilities, but these must bend to the employment situation in the land that eventually shelters you--if you're an engineer, expect to carry bricks.  Nothing reassuring comes your way until you master your new society, and understand the special ways by which your hosts achieve success.  Decades can go by.  If you don't have heart, and head, and push, you'll walk on a lonely beach one day and think of blowing your brains out.

An adult who escapes ethnic cleansing can scratch to make a life of it.  Keeping the family is important.  Eating is important. Having a roof.  Most important of all is employment--and banking every dollar--so the program for life can straighten out down the line.  There are desperate days when you remember the sun hot on your skull, when you hear the chickens squawk in a town you can't go back to.  Nothing's as simple any more as the life you used to know.  In the meanwhile the injustice of what happened tempts your good-will, and you wonder if revenge can bring things back the way they were.  However, you sacrifice your ego thoughts for the happiness of your kids, who now are sinking tender roots in a new environment.

The children of ethnic cleansing are like putty.  They see, feel, and record everything.  They are innocents, so the injustice plays big-time within them.  As they can't help the adults, their self-worth is lessened.  As they're impotent against aggression,   they are beset by rage.  As they see in themselves the family's only hope in exile, they develop a strict sense of personal responsibility! They become doctors, teachers, military officers, clergymen.  There are locals who scoff at their inability to lighten up, but the seriousness protects these children's vulnerability.  They keep emotions close to the vest, and only the sight of other innocents ethnically cleansed in other places, and other times, loosens their log-jams and move them to tears.  They cry about themselves, and what they've been testomony to.

I was reading about Terry Anderson in the paper a while back;  he was one of our hostages in Lebanon.  The reporter was giving the psychological profile of surviving captives like him.  As I read it, I realized the ethnically-cleansed share it.  It was about shame for not protecting yourself on your own, the dislike of people who help only after wasteful debate, the resolve never to live under the control of anyone again.  If there's a bright side to the atrocity of ethnic cleansing, it's that it leaves you one beautiful escape:  the life of the spirit.  If you want, you can create a powerful inner world where the program for life matures in the company of the Almighty.  From this perspective, healing the pain of ethnic cleansing is a pleasure.

These reflections are born of personal experience.  I'm from an ethnic group of 370,000 that was forced to leave its land after World War Two.  I won't mention who we are, or where we're from, so as not to get in endless blame games with the heirs of those who dispossessed us.  Suffice it to say I've experienced a bit of Kosovo.  Today somebody sleeps in the bedroom that was meant for me, someone greets the sky and breathes the air that were my destiny.  I wish that person well.  I have memories I carry, and they are so precious I need do nothing but cherish them at every moment.  It's life enough.