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This article lists incidents that have been termed ethnic cleansing by some academic or legal experts. Not all experts agree on every case, particularly since there are a variety of definitions of the term ethnic cleansing. Definitions cluster around the forced removal of all or a large number of an ethnic population from an area, or rendering an area ethnically homogenous. See the main article for further information. When claims of ethnic cleansing are made by non-experts (e.g. journalists or politicians) they are noted.
There is significant scholarly disagreement around the definition of ethnic cleansing and which events fall under this classification. [1]
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The campaign of ethnic cleansing appears to have been a devastating success. A gap in the extant evidence for Jews in Cyrenaica confirms that the area was essentially emptied of Jews by their migration into Egypt and the subsequent Gentile massacres of stragglers. Few if any Jews survived anywhere in Cyprus. Papyri and inscriptions testify to the annihilation of entire Jewish communities in many parts of Egypt.50 Only in remote areas on the fringes of Roman control could any Jews have remained alive in the affected regions. It is unlikely that any Jews remained in Alexandria after the war ended in the late summer of 117.
In the end, Hadrian's forces had to resort to the most ruthless form of ethnic cleansing, constructive starvation and mass slaughter of the enemy that went far beyond the casualties inflicted by the Jews.
[The Act of Settlement of Ireland], and the parliamentary legislation which succeeded it the following year, is the nearest thing on paper in the English, and more broadly British, domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people. The fact that it did not include 'total' genocide in its remit, or that it failed to put into practice the vast majority of its proposed expulsions, ultimately, however, says less about the lethal determination of its makers and more about the political, structural and financial weakness of the early modern English state.
In the 1860s Russia killed 1.5 million Circassians, half of their population, and expelled the other half from their lands.
As these Niš refugees waited for acknowledgment from locals, they took measures to ensure that they were properly accommodated by often confiscating food stored in towns. They also simply appropriated lands and began to build shelter on them. A number of cases also point to banditry in the form of livestock raiding and 'illegal' hunting in communal forests, all parts of refugees' repertoire ... At this early stage of the crisis, such actions overwhelmed the Ottoman state, with the institution least capable of addressing these issues being the newly created Muhacirin Müdüriyeti ... Ignored in the scholarship, these acts of survival by desperate refugees constituted a serious threat to the established Kosovar communities. The leaders of these communities thus spent considerable efforts lobbying the Sultan to do something about the refugees. While these Niš muhacirs would in some ways integrate into the larger regional context, as evidenced later, they, and a number of other Albanian-speaking refugees streaming in for the next 20 years from Montenegro and Serbia, constituted a strong opposition block to the Sultan's rule."; p.53. "One can observe that in strategically important areas, the new Serbian state purposefully left the old Ottoman laws intact. More important, when the state wished to enforce its authority, officials felt it necessary to seek the assistance of those with some experience, using the old Ottoman administrative codes to assist judges make rulings. There still remained, however, the problem of the region being largely depopulated as a consequence of the wars... Belgrade needed these people, mostly the landowners of the productive farmlands surrounding these towns, back. In subsequent attempts to lure these economically vital people back, while paying lip-service to the nationalist calls for 'purification', Belgrade officials adopted a compromise position that satisfied both economic rationalists who argued that Serbia needed these people and those who wanted to separate 'Albanians' from 'Serbs'. Instead of returning to their 'mixed' villages and towns of the previous Ottoman era, these 'Albanians', 'Pomaks', and 'Turks' were encouraged to move into concentrated clusters of villages in Masurica, and Gornja Jablanica that the Serbian state set up for them. For this 'repatriation' to work, however, authorities needed the cooperation of local leaders to help persuade members of their community who were refugees in Ottoman territories to 'return'. In this regard, the collaboration between Shahid Pasha and the Serbian regime stands out. An Albanian who commanded the Sofia barracks during the war, Shahid Pasha negotiated directly with the future king of Serbia, Prince Milan Obrenović, to secure the safety of those returnees who would settle in the many villages of Gornja Jablanica. To help facilitate such collaborative ventures, laws were needed that would guarantee the safety of these communities likely to be targeted by the rising nationalist elements infiltrating the Serbian army at the time. Indeed, throughout the 1880s, efforts were made to regulate the interaction between exiled Muslim landowners and those local and newly immigrant farmers working their lands. Furthermore, laws passed in early 1880 began a process of managing the resettlement of the region that accommodated those refugees who came from Austrian-controlled Herzegovina and from Bulgaria. Cooperation, in other words, was the preferred form of exchange within the borderland, not violent confrontation.
based on the national secret files, in the period 1918-40 around 80,000 Albanians were exterminated, between 1944 and 1950, 49,000 Albanians were killed by the communist Yugoslav forces, and in the period 1981-97, 221 Albanians were killed by the Serbian police and military forces. During these periods hundred of thousands of Albanians have been forcibly displaced towards Turkey and Western European countries.
Most of the Christian irregulars were involved in the ethnic cleansing of the Gemlik–Yalova–İzmit region.
Although the estimates of the number of Serbs murdered by the regime vary, even the most conservative figures suggest that out of a pre-war population of 1.9 million, at least 200,000 and possibly as many as 500,000 died at the hands of Ustasha death squads, were executed, or perished in the state's concentration camps.
In all, approximately 30,000 Jews (between 75-80 percent of the Jews within the NDH) died during the Holocaust, the majority at the hands of the Ustasha, although the NDH also transferred some 7,000 Jews to the Nazis to be deported to Auschwitz... The NDH also killed an estimated 25,000 or more Roma men, women, and children, the vast majority of the Roma population under its control.
The outcome, akin to what today is called 'ethnic cleansing', produced an Indian Punjab 60 per cent Hindu and 35 per cent Sikh, while the Pakistan Punjab became almost wholly Muslim.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)I don't accept the definition 'ethnic cleansing' for what the Jews in prestate Israel did in 1948. (If you consider Lod and Ramle, maybe we can talk about partial ethnic cleansing.)
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: CS1 maint: location (link)The Turkish army engaged in an exercise of 'ethnic cleansing' and expulsed more or less all Greek Cypriots from the North with brute force.
The occupied area was ethnically cleansed of its Greek Cypriot population: about 142,000 people – 23 per cent of the island's population – were driven from their homes and became refugees in their own country.
From March to September 1991, about 200,000 Palestinians were expelled from the emirate in a systematic campaign of terror, violence, and economic pressure while another 200,000 who fled during the Iraqi occupation were denied return.
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: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)The government eventually settled on 'more than a million', a claim which few outside Rwanda have taken seriously.
... by 1995 the Croat army had driven out the Serb forces and population from ... Krajina (Operation Oluja [Storm]) ... This was the single largest ethnic cleansing of the wars of the 1990s.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Other displaced people from Eastern Ghouta are being moved into houses from which their Kurdish inhabitants have fled and are not being allowed to return according to SOHR. It says that refugees from Eastern Ghouta object to what is happening, saying they do not want to settle in Afrin, 'where the Turkish forces provide them with houses owned by people displaced from Afrin'. The Eastern Ghouta refugees say they resent being the instrument of 'an organised demographic change' at the behest of Turkey which would, in effect, replace Kurds with Arabs in Afrin.
... [O]pposition to China's Uyghur genocide is gaining momentum in Norway, where some politicians are fearful of jeopardizing ties with Beijing.
It appears to be the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust.