House demolition is primarily a military tactic which has been used in many conflicts for a variety of purposes. It has been employed as a scorched earth tactic to deprive the advancing enemy of food and shelter, or to wreck the enemy's economy and infrastructure. It has also been used for purposes of counter-insurgency and ethnic cleansing. Systematic house demolition has been a notable factor in a number of recent or ongoing conflicts including the Darfur conflict in Sudan, the Iraq War, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam War, and the Yugoslav wars.
The tactic has often been extremely controversial. Its use in warfare is governed by the Fourth Geneva Convention and other instruments of international law, and international war crimes courts have prosecuted the misuse of house demolition on a number of occasions as a violation of the laws of war. Historically, it has also been widely used by a variety of states and peoples as a civil punishment for criminal offences ranging from treason to public intoxication.
Uses
Military uses
A distinction needs to be made between the destruction of houses as an incidental effect of military necessity, the wanton destruction of houses during a military advance, and the deliberate targeting of houses during a military occupation. In the former case, it is commonplace for civilian homes to be used by armed forces as places of shelter or as firing positions. As a result, civilian dwellings become a legitimate military target and property damage is often inevitable as forces seek to expel their opponents from buildings. This can result in the destruction of houses on a massive scale as a side-effect of urban warfare. Following World War II, for instance, the United States occupation authorities in Germany found that 81 percent of all houses in the American Zone had been destroyed or damaged in the fighting.Jennifer Leaning, "War and the Environment", in Michael McCally, Life Support: Environment Human Health, p. 276. MIT Press, 2002.
The question of under what circumstances the destruction of civilian dwellings becomes a legitimate military tactic remains controversial, and recent international conventions have agreed that civilian houses, dwellings, and installations shall not be made the object of attack, except if they are used mainly in support of the military effort.International Humanitarian Law - Treaties & Documents, International Committee of the Red Cross website
However, there are also many non-combat situations in which house demolition has been used. It has served a variety of purposes, depending on the nature and context of the conflict.
Scorched earth
As a strictly military tactic, house demolition is useful as a defensive means of denying supplies and shelter to an enemy or, when used as an offensive measure, to break an enemy's power by destroying his economy and dispersing his population. It has been used both defensively and offensively in numerous conflicts throughout history. In classical antiquity, there were frequent examples of cities being razed in order to destroy individual city-states. Notably, Xerxes I of Persia razed Athens in 480 BC during the Greco-Persian Wars; Carthage razed Selinus in modern Sicily around 250 BC; and in turn, Carthage was itself utterly destroyed by Rome in 146 BC, ending the Punic Wars. In many instances (Selinus and Carthage being cases in point) the city's inhabitants were enslaved and not permitted to return to their destroyed homes.
In more recent times, the burning of homes was used to devastating effect in the War of the Grand Alliance in the 17th century, during which Louis XIV of France ordered the systematic destruction of the German cities of Bingen, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Oppenheim, Spier and Worms (while sparing the cathedrals). Germany had suffered even more extensively in the earlier Thirty Years' War, in which as much as two-thirds of German real estate is estimated to have been destroyed and reconstruction took as long as fifty years."Depredations", André Corvisier, in A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, pp. 189–190 During the American Civil War, the burning of Atlanta, Georgia and Sherman's March to the Sea in 1864 provided large-scale examples of the use of house demolition as a means of wrecking the enemy's economy.
In World War II, civilian homes were deliberately destroyed on a massive scale, particularly on the Eastern Front following the orders of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin to raze houses, farms and fields to deny their use to the advancing forces of Nazi Germany. Belarus was one of the worst affected regions, suffering the systematic destruction of about 75% of urban housing and many villages.Helen Fedor, Belarus and Moldova: Country Studies, p. 44. Library of Congress, 1995. Both sides also engaged in the deliberate large-scale targeting of civilian homes in their respective strategic bombing campaigns. The Germans repeatedly carried out indiscriminate bombing attacks against civilian areas, such as the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 and the Baedeker Blitz against England in 1942, and the Allies sought to demoralize the German workforce through the destruction of their homes—a policy known euphemistically as dehousing. Around 25% of Germany's housing stock was destroyed or heavily damaged in the subsequent Allied bombing campaigns, with some cities suffering the loss of up to 97% of civilian homes.Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities After World War II, p. 126. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Ethnic cleansing
In the former Yugoslavia, the tactic of home demolition was used by all sides in the conflict as a means of ethnic cleansing to change the ethnic composition of particular areas. It had particularly devastating effects in the rural areas of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo where the tactic was most prevalent, because the building of new homes was a life project for which families worked for many years. A house often symbolized the social worth of a family, demonstrating its hard work, commitment to future well-being and standing in the community. The systematic burning of homes was therefore deliberately intended to impoverish the home owners, reduce their social status and permanently prevent them from returning to their places of origins.Marie-Janine Calic, in Farimah Daftary, Stefan Troebst, Radical Ethnic Movements in Contemporary Europe, p. 118. Berghahn Books, 2003. By the end of the Bosnian War in 1995, over 60% of the country's housing stock had been destroyed.Swanee Hunt, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian women reclaiming the peace, p. 158. Duke University Press, 2004.
Similar tactics have been used in a variety of other ethnic conflicts. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, there were a number of major incidents of the deliberate destruction of Arab villages by Israeli forces. The Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that in the later stages of the 1948 war, "[Israeli] commanders were clearly bent on driving out the population in the area they were conquering".Morris, Benny (2003). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The inhabitants of Iraqi Kurdistan experienced one of the more extreme recent examples of the mass use of home demolitions to expedite ethnic cleansing during the Al-Anfal Campaign of 1986–1989. The campaign was mounted ostensibly to eliminate the peshmerga rebels of northern Iraq but quickly acquired a genocidal character. The Kurdish opposition estimated that of the approximately 5,000 villages existing in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1975, 3,479 had been deliberately destroyed by 1988. Upwards of 100,000 Kurds were killed and tens of thousands more fled Iraq to escape the campaign. Saddam Hussein's government adopted a policy of "Arabization" in which it systematically replaced the displaced Kurds with Iraqi Arabs in strategic areas such as Kirkuk.Cited by Martin Bruinessen in "Genocide of the Kurds", in Israel W. Charny, Alan L. Berger, Genocide: a critical bibliographic review vol. 3, p. 186. Transaction Publishers, 1994.
In the conflicts in Abkhazia, North Ossetia and South Ossetia during the early 1990s, scores of villages were destroyed in a systematic effort to expel the native Georgian and Ingush populations from those regions.Roberta Cohen, Francis Mading Deng, The Forsaken People: Case Studies of the Internally Displaced, pp. 245, 289. Brookings Institution Press, 1998. In Darfur, the Janjaweed militia has made house demolition a central part of its strategy to expel the population of the region, causing 2.5 million people to be displaced as of October 2006.
Counter-insurgency and collective punishment
Governments facing insurgencies have often used home demolition as a counterinsurgency technique, as a means of eroding popular support for guerrillas and denying insurgents the use of villages as "safe havens". Mao Zedong, leader of the insurgent Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War, famously observed that "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."Dana R. Dillon. Insurgency Has Its Limits. National Review online. November 25, 2003 Mao advocated the forced migration of large populations of civilians by means of house demolition to "drain the sea" and deprive insurgents of cover.Greenhill, Kelly. "Draining the Sea, or Feeding the Fire?: The Use of Forced Migration in Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency Operations Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, March 17, 2004
This principle was, however, widely recognized well before it was encapsulated in Mao's famous dictum. William the Conqueror engaged in the harrying of the North from 1069 to 1070, during which Norman troops under his command systematically laid waste to rebellious areas in Northern England, can be considered an early example of the use of house demolitions to deprive enemy forces of civilian support. Similarly, during the Second Boer War, British forces under Lord Kitchener systematically destroyed Boer-owned farmsteads in order to prevent them from supplying food and equipment to Boer guerrillas still active in the field. Comparable tactics were used by the United States military during the Philippine–American War and again during the Vietnam War, when numerous villages were burned by U.S. troops and local allies. General Colin Powell later recalled how he had personally participated in the destruction of Montagnard homes when he was serving in Vietnam as a U.S. Army officer:
We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters. Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam.... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?" Colin Powell, My American Journey, p. 87. Random House, 1995
Soviet forces used home destruction tactics indiscriminately during the Soviet–Afghan War when it sought to depopulate the countryside by attacking civilians in the villages in which they lived. Soviet troops would seize a settlement, expel the villagers and raze homes and other buildings before withdrawing. Sometimes the Soviets simply carpet-bombed villages to destroy them outright.Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A New History, p. 161. Routledge, 2002.