Ethnic cleansing: Encyclopedia II - Ethnic cleansing - Modern-age ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing - Modern-age ethnic cleansing

The term "ethnic cleansing" has come to mean the displacement or expulsion from a territory of one ethnic group by another. The displacement is usually forcible, though there are examples of voluntary or compensated ethnic cleansing. The 20th century has seen numerous cases, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.

During more recent times, ethnic cleansing has often been used during colonisation projects. In North America, British and American settlers ethnically cleansed millions ^{[citation needed]} of Native Americans, forcibly relocating them to remote and often inhospitable reservation land. In southern Africa and Australia, native tribes were removed from their lands so that they could be replaced by white farmers and settlers.

• The colonization of the Americas by European powers, particularly Spain and Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in the 15th century and continuing into the 20th.
• The colonization of Australia by Britain. This led to population removals and massacres of the indigenous population, starting in 1788. It is important to note that the Maori were not ethnically cleansed in New Zealand. Many Maori were dispossessed of ownership of their land, but few were ever forcibly removed, and when this did happen it was mostly as a result of punishment for fighting and losing against colonial troops during the New Zealand Wars.
• The invasion of Gibraltar by Britain in 1704 led to an ethnic cleansing of the local Andalusian population, who were expelled from the territory in 1704
• The removals and massacres of native populations in the African colonies of various European powers.
• The concentration of Boers by Britain during the Second Boer War
• Carib Expulsion in the Lesser Antilles
• In Canada the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 from their ancestral lands in Nova Scotia or Acadia by the British military because of the French and Indian War.
• In the United States in the 19th century there were numerous instances of relocation of Native American peoples from their traditional areas to often remote reservations elsewhere in the country, such as the Long Walk of the Navajo and the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe that led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 people.
• Expulsion and cleansing of Turkish, Muslim, and Jewish populations from Balkans following the independence of Balkan countries (e.g., Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria) from Ottoman Empire from early 1800s to early 1900.
• Cleansing of Muslim populations in Northern Caucasus by imperial Russia throughout 19th century. Particularly, expulsion of Circassians to Anatolia in 1864.

The American and South Pacific instances were disastrous. The native populations fell from millions to thousands in only a few centuries, a combined result of colonization policies and epidemics of foreign disease.

Ethnic cleansing - 20th-century instances

• The 1913 Convention of Adrianople, annexed to the Peace Treaty between Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, provided for an exchange of ethnic Turks and Bulgarians in a 15 kilometer strip.
• The Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Pontian Greeks perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922.
• The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly provided for the reciprocal emigration of ethnic minorities between Greece and Bulgaria.
• In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne which ended the First World War in the East, as well as post-war hostilities between Greece and the newly-formed Republic of Turkey, provided for a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.
• in 1941-1945 the Croatian Ustaša regime of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II executed over 400,000 Serbs, Jews, Romas and others and indirectly caused a hundreds of thousands more exiled, killed etc.
• The expulsions of Jews from Austria after the Anschluss, and deportations of Poles and Jews from Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany.
• Nazi Germany wiped out entire populations of Jews and Gypsies during World War II (see also the Holocaust).
• Generalplan Ost, in which the Nazis planned to kill or expel most or all ethnic Slavs from large regions of Eastern Europe and replace them with German settlers.
• The German exodus from Eastern Europe. Although the exact numbers may never be known, some estimates claim that more than 16 million people had to leave their homes, and that approximately 2 million of those lost their lives during the process.
• The exodus of Italian people from Istria and Dalmatia after World War II
• Systematic deportations of numerous nationalities in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
• The relocation of 110,000 ethnic Japanese from the Pacific Coast of USA to concentration camps in 1942.
• The ethnic cleansing of Volhynia by Ukrainian guerrilla groups.
• The expulsion of Poles from Zamość Voivodship by Germans in 1944.
• The expulsion of 800,000 Poles from Warsaw to concentration camps after defeat of Warsaw Uprising 1944, caused 200,000 deaths. The city of Warsaw, population of one million, was ordered to be completely demolished on the personal order of Hitler. Approximately 80% of the city was demolished.
• Finns evacuated from Finnish Karelia and other parts occupied by Soviet Union during World War II, leaving behind ethnically clean area. This was voluntary, but they evacuated fearing the Soviet rule and deportations to Siberia that happened in Soviet Union before to many nationalities, including Finns, see Population transfer in the Soviet Union.
• Mass expulsions of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India, resulting in the complete ethnic cleansing of former West-Pakistan (current Republic of Pakistan), and the mass expulsions of Muslims from India to Pakistan, both following the partition of British India in 1947.
• Since 1947 expulsions of Hindus from both the Pakistani and Indian ruled regions of the disputed territory of Kashmir by Islamist militant groups.
• The Nakba, or Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Palestinians (600,000-900,000) in the areas of Palestine that became part of Israel fled or were forcibly deported by Jewish forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• The flight of Jews from the areas of Palestine occupied by Jordan and Egypt during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• The Jewish exodus from Arab lands - Yemen, Morocco and Iraq during 1948-1950, as well as flights which took place over the following 20 years from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and other Arab countries.
• The forced resettlement of some 9,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank by the Israeli government as part of the unilateral disengagement plan is compared to ethnic cleansing both by the extreme opposition to the act and by more neutral observers.
• The mass deportation of ethnic minorities from their homelands, including East Timor and Papua, by the Indonesian government, beginning with Indonesian independence in 1949 (and subsequent occupation and annexation of Papua until the present day and of East Timor until 1999).
• The mass expulsions of Greek Cypriots from northern Cyprus and of Turkish Cypriots from southern Cyprus in 1974-1975.
• The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, of which the most significant examples occurred in eastern Croatia and Krajina (1991-1995), in most of Bosnia (1992-1995), and in the Albanian-dominated breakaway Kosovo province (of Serbia) (1999). Large numbers of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians were forced to flee their homes and expelled.
• The forced displacement of some 800,000 Azeris and 300,000 Armenians during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the Armenian invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas from 1988 to 1994.
• The forced displacement of some 300,000 Georgians and other non-Abkhazians from Abkhazia in 1993.
• The 1994 massacres of Tutsis by Hutus, known as the Rwandan Genocide
• Attacks by the Janjaweed Arabic-speaking African Muslim militias of Sudan on the non-Arab African Muslim population of Darfur, a region of western Sudan.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Modern-age ethnic cleansing", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki