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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. 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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This section possibly contains original research .(May 2009) |
The Treaty of Lausanne is a peace treaty negotiated during the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923 and signed in the Palais de Rumine in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 24 July 1923. The treaty officially resolved the conflict that had initially arisen between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied French Republic, British Empire, Kingdom of Italy, Empire of Japan, Kingdom of Greece, Kingdom of Serbia, and the Kingdom of Romania since the outset of World War I. The original text of the treaty is in English and French. It emerged as a second attempt at peace after the failed and unratified Treaty of Sèvres, which had sought to partition Ottoman territories. The earlier treaty, signed in 1920, was later rejected by the Turkish National Movement which actively opposed its terms. As a result of Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, Turkish forces recaptured İzmir, and the Armistice of Mudanya was signed in October 1922. This armistice provided for the exchange of Greek-Turkish populations and allowed unrestricted civilian, non-military passage through the Turkish Straits.
Population transfer or resettlement is a type of mass migration that is often imposed by a state policy or international authority. Such mass migrations are most frequently spurred on the basis of ethnicity or religion, but they also occur due to economic development. Banishment or exile is a similar process, but is forcibly applied to individuals and groups. Population transfer differs more than simply technically from individually motivated migration, but at times of war, the act of fleeing from danger or famine often blurs the differences.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction. Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group.
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place from 1991 to 2001 in what had been the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries, which fueled the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
The phenomenon of large-scale migration of Christians is the main reason why Christians' share of the population has been declining in many countries. Many Muslim countries have witnessed disproportionately high emigration rates among their Christian minorities for several generations. Today, most Middle Eastern people in the United States are Christians, and the majority of Arabs living outside the Arab World are Arab Christians.
Muhacir are the estimated millions of Ottoman Muslim citizens and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Muhacirs are mostly Turks but also Albanians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarian Muslims, Macedonian Muslims, Greek Muslims, Serb Muslims, Georgian Muslims, and Muslim Roma who emigrated to East Thrace and Anatolia from the late 18th century until the end of the 20th century, mainly to escape ongoing persecution in their homelands.
Muhaxhir and Muhaxher are Ottoman Albanian communities that left their homes as refugees or were transferred, from Greece, Serbia and Montenegro to Albania, Kosovo and to a lesser extent North Macedonia during and following various wars.
The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people, most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.
Anti-Turkish sentiment, also known as Anti-Turkism, or Turkophobia is hostility, intolerance, or xenophobia against Turkish people, Turkish culture and the Turkish language.
The Greek genocide, which included the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia, which was carried out mainly during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922) – including the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923) – on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece. Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
Kurdification is a cultural change in which people, territory, or language become Kurdish. This can happen both naturally or as a deliberate government policy.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"". According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".
Mass deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia took place several times throughout the 20th century, and sometimes some of them have been described by some authors as acts of forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
Minorities in Turkey form a substantial part of the country's population, representing an estimated 25 to 28 percent of the population. Historically, in the Ottoman Empire, Islam was the official and dominant religion, with Muslims having more rights than non-Muslims, whose rights were restricted. Non-Muslim (dhimmi) ethno-religious groups were legally identified by different millet ("nations").
During the decline and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Muslim inhabitants living in Muslim-minority territories previously under Ottoman control often found themselves persecuted after borders were re-drawn. These populations were subject to genocide, expropriation, massacres, religious persecution, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing.
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced, refugees, asylum seekers or any other huge groups of migrants.
The expulsion of the Albanians (1877–1878) refers to events of forced migration of Albanian populations from areas that became incorporated into the Principality of Serbia and Principality of Montenegro in 1878 after their initial expulsion from 1830–1876. These wars, alongside the larger Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78) ended in defeat and substantial territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire which was formalised at the Congress of Berlin. This expulsion was part of the wider persecution of Muslims in the Balkans during the geopolitical and territorial decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Acts of violence were committed against ethnic Serbs, primarily by Albanians, during the final stages of the Ottoman Empire and their control of parts of the Balkans.
The 1914 Greek deportations was the forcible expulsion of around 150,000 to 300,000 Ottoman Greeks from Eastern Thrace and the Aegean coast of Anatolia by the Committee of Union and Progress that culminated in May and June 1914. The deportations almost caused war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire and were an important precursor to the Armenian genocide.
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 November 2024 (link)... 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.