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Ethnic cleansing refers to various policies or practices aimed at the displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory in order to create a supposedly ethnically "pure" society. The term entered English and international usage in the early 1990s to describe certain events in the former Yugoslavia. Its typical usage was developed in the Balkans, to be a less objectionable code-word meaning genocide, but its intent was to best avoid the obvious pitfalls of longstanding international treaty laws prohibiting war crimes. This Orwellian term has since become still more Orwellian, because it is occasionally used as a claim of war crimes, when no war crimes actually exist. For example, ethnic cleansing has become improperly used to describe a situation wherein poorer ethnic groups are being displaced economically, by other, generally more affluent ethnic groups.

Synonyms include sectarian revenge and ethnic purification and (in the French versions of some UN documents) nettoyage ethnique and épuration ethnique.

Definitions

The term ethnic cleansing has been variously defined. In the many words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:

thnic cleansing defies easy definition. At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.

Drazen Petrovic has distinguished between broad and narrow definitions. Broader definitions focus on the fact of expulsion based on ethnic criteria, while narrower definitions include additional criteria: for example, that expulsions are systematic, illegal, involve gross human-rights abuses, or are connected with an ongoing internal or international war. According to Petrovic:

thnic cleansing is a well-defined policy of a particular group of persons to systematically eliminate another group from a given territory on the basis of religious, ethnic or national origin. Such a policy involves violence and is very often connected with military operations. It is to be achieved by all possible means, from discrimination to extermination, and entails violations of human rights and international humanitarian law."

The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group"

However, ethnic cleansing rarely aims at complete ethnic homogeneity. The common practice is the removal of stigmatized ethnic groups, and thus can be defined as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory", occupying the middle part of a somewhat fuzzy continuum between nonviolet pressured ethnic emigration and genocide.

Origins of the term

The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a loan translation of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian phrase etničko čišćenje (IPA: [etnitʃko tʃiʃtʃʲeɲe]). During the 1990s it was used extensively by the media in the former Yugoslavia in relation to the Yugoslav wars, and appears to have been popularised by the international media some time around 1992. The term may have originated some time before the 1990s in the military doctrine of the former Yugoslav People's Army, which spoke of "cleansing the field" (čišćenje terena, ) of enemies to take total control of a conquered area. The origins of this doctrine are unclear, but may have been a legacy of the Partizan era.

This originally applied purely to military enemies, but came to be applied to ethnic groups as well. It was used in this context in Yugoslavia as early as 1982, in relation to the policies of the Kosovo Albanian administration creating an "ethnically clean" territory (i.e. "cleanly" Albanian) in the province. However, this usage had antecedents.

One of the earliest usages of the term cleansing can be found on May 16, 1941, during the Second World War, by one Viktor Gutić, a commander in the Croatian fascist faction, the Ustaše: Every Croat who today solicits for our enemies not only is not a good Croat, but also an opponent and disrupter of the prearranged, well-calculated plan for cleansing our Croatia of unwanted elements . The Ustaše did carry out large-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide of Serbs in Croatia during the Second World War and sometimes used the term "cleansing" to describe it.

Some time later, on 30 June, 1941, Stevan Moljević, a lawyer from Banja Luka who was an ideologue of the Chetniks, published a booklet with the title On Our State and Its Borders. Moljević assessed the circumstances in the following manner: One must take the opportunity of the war conditions and at a suitable moment take hold of the territory marked on the map, cleanse it before anybody notices and with strong battalions occupy the key places (...) and the territory surrounding these cities, freed of non-Serb elements. The guilty must be promptly punished and the others deported - the Croats to Croatia, the Muslims to Turkey or perhaps Albania - while the vacated territory is settled with Serb refugees now located in Serbia.

The term "cleansing" ("cleansing of borders", очистка границ) was used in Soviet documents of early 1930s in reference to the resettlement of Poles from the 22-km border zone in Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR. The process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941, involving many other ethnicities with cross-border ties to foreign nation-states, see Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union and Population transfer in the Soviet Union.

A similar term with the same intent was used by the Nazi administration in Germany under Adolf Hitler. When an area under Nazi control had its entire Jewish population removed, whether by driving the population out, by deportation to Concentration Camps, and/or murder, the area was declared judenrein, (lit. "Jew Clean"): "cleansed of Jews".(cf. racial hygiene). (refer to Robert Brinkman aka b dub's novel "ethnic cleansing"

Ethnic cleansing as a military and political tactic

The purpose of ethnic cleansing is to remove the conditions for potential and actual opposition, whether political, terrorist, guerrilla or military, by physically removing any potentially or actually hostile ethnic communities. Although it has sometimes been motivated by a doctrine that claim an ethnic group is literally "unclean" (as in the case of the Jews of medieval Europe), more usually it has been a rational (if brutal) way of ensuring that total control can be asserted over an area. The campaign in Bosnia in early 1992 was a case in point. The tactic was used by Bosnian Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Serb forces. Ethnic cleansing is often also accompanied by efforts to eradicate all physical traces of the expelled ethnic group, such as by the destruction of cultural artifacts, religious sites and physical records.

In 1993, during the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, armed Abkhaz separatist insurgency confronted with large population of ethnic Georgians implemented the tactic of ethnic cleansing directed against ethnic Georgians (which made the majority of the population) of Abkhazia. As the results, more than 250,000 ethnic Georgians were forced to flee and approximately 30,000 people were killed during separate incidents involving massacres and expulsion. (see Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia)

As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant advantages and disadvantages. It enables a force to eliminate civilian support for resistance by eliminating the civilians — recognizing Mao Zedong's dictum that guerrillas among a civilian population are fish in water, it disables the fish by draining the water. When enforced as part of a political settlement, as happened with the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans to Germany after 1945, it can contribute to long-term stability. Some individuals of the large German population in Czechoslovakia and prewar Poland had been sources of friction before the Second World War, but this was forcibly resolved. It thus establishes "facts on the ground" - radical demographic changes which can be very hard to reverse. But this does not concern the treatment of the inhabitants of Historical Eastern Germany.

On the other hand, ethnic cleansing is such a brutal tactic and so often accompanied by large-scale bloodshed that it is widely reviled. It is generally regarded as lying somewhere between population transfers and genocide on a scale of odiousness, and is treated by international law as a war crime.

Ethnic cleansing as a crime under international law

There is no formal legal definition of ethnic cleansing. However, ethnic cleansing in the broad sense - the forcible deportation of a population - is defined as a crime against humanity under the statutes of both International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The gross human-rights violations integral to stricter definitions of ethnic cleansing are treated as separate crimes falling under the definitions for genocide or crimes against humanity of the statutes.

The UN Commission of Experts (established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780) held that the practices associated with ethnic cleansing "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore ... such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." The UN General Assembly condemned "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution.

There are however situations, such as the Expulsion of Germans after World War II, where ethnic cleansing has taken place without legal redress. Timothy V. Waters argues that if similar circumstances arise in the future, this precedent would allow the ethnic cleansing of other populations under international law.

Silent ethnic cleansing

Silent ethnic cleansing is a term coined in the mid-1990s by some observers of the Yugoslav wars. Apparently concerned with Western-media representations of atrocities committed in the conflict — which generally focused on those perpetrated by the Serbs — atrocities committed against Serbs were dubbed "silent", on the grounds that they were not receiving adequate coverage.

Since that time, the term has been used by other ethnically oriented groups for situations that they perceive to be similar — examples include both sides in Northern Ireland's continuing troubles, and those who object to the expulsion of ethnic Germans from former German territories during and after World War II.

Some observers, however, assert that the term should only be used to denote population changes that do not occur as the result of overt violent action, or at least not from more or less organized aggression - the absence of such stressors being the very factor that makes it "silent" (although some form of coercion must logically exist).

Instances of ethnic cleansing

This section lists incidents that have been termed "ethnic cleansing" by some academic or legal experts. Not all experts agree on every case; nor do all the claims necessarily follow definitions given in this article. Where claims of ethnic cleansing originate from non-experts (e.g., journalists or politicians) this is noted.

Early instances

• Most of the Old Testament contains passages of genocidal intent and ethnic cleansing ordered by God such as 1 SAMUEL 15.19
• The ancient Assyria began to utilize mass-deportation as a punishment for rebellions since the 13th century BC. By the 9th century BC the Assyrians made it a habit of regularly deporting thousands of restless subjects to other lands.

• The Carthage was completely destroyed by Rome in the Third Punic War (149-146 BC). 50,000 Carthaginians (perhaps a tenth of the original pre-war population) were sold into slavery.

• After conquering western Anatolia in 88 BC, Mithridates VI reportedly ordered the killing of all Romans living there. The massacre of Roman men, women and children is known as the Asiatic Vespers.

• Julius Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii, the Celtic inhabitants of modern Switzerland: approximately 60% of the tribe was killed, and another 20% was taken into slavery. The remainder of the Helvetii were driven back into their old lands.

• The ethnic cleansing and massacres of Roman population of Roman Britain by Celtic Britons during the Boudica's revolt, in 60-61 AD.

• The Germanic Vandals were enslaved and deported from North Africa after the Vandal kingdom in North Africa was defeated by a Byzantine army during a Vandalic War in 533 and 534.

• St. Brice's Day massacre of 1002. The Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred the Unready ordered the death of all the Danes living in the Kingdom of England.

• The ethnic cleansing of sedentary Greek population of Anatolia by nomadic Seljuk Turks after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

• The Pechenegs, nomadic Turkic people from the steppe, were nearly annihilated at the Battle of Levounion by a combined Byzantine and Cuman army in 1091. Attacked again in 1094 by the Cumans, many Pechenegs were slain or absorbed.

• Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed; see German Crusade, 1096. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in, 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France. According to James Carroll, "Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million."

• Jews and Christians expelled from Morocco and Islamic Spain during the reign of Berber dynasty of Almohads in the 12th century. Almohads gave a choice of either death or conversion to Islam, or exile. Some, such the family of Maimonides, fled east to the more tolerant Muslim lands, while others went northward to settle in the growing Christian kingdoms.

• At the beginning of the 13th century the eastern part of the Islamic world experienced the terrifying holocaust of the Mongol invasion, which turned northern and eastern Iran into a desert. Over much of Central Asia speakers of Iranian languages were replaced by speakers of Turkic languages.

• In 1270, the Jews of Tunisia were required either to leave or to embrace Islam.

• The ethnic cleansing of the French from Sicily during the Sicilian Vespers in 1282.

• The Crow Creek Massacre in 1325 was part of the ethnic cleansing of the Initial Coalescent people by the Middle Missouri villagers.

• Northern Iraq remained predominantly Assyrian Christian until the destructions of Tamerlane, an Islamic conqueror of Turco-Mongol descent, at the end of the 14th century.

• Between the 11th and 18th centuries, the Vietnamese expanded southward in a process known as nam tiến (southward expansion). In 1471 the kingdom of Champa suffered a massive defeat by the Vietnamese, in which 120,000 Cham people were either captured or killed, and the kingdom was reduced to a small enclave near Nha Trang.

• Spain's large Muslim and Jewish minorities, inherited from that country's former Islamic kingdoms, were expelled following a Alhambra decree in 1492, while converts to Catholicism, called Moriscos or Marranos, were expelled between 1609 and 1614.

• The deportations of the Armenians by Persian Safavids, which begun in the 1530s under Tahmasp I. Between 1604 and 1605 Shah Abbas relocated some 150,000 Armenians to an area of Isfahan called New Julfa.

• In 1622, the tribal chief of the Powhatan Confederacy of what is now Virginia in the United States planned the destruction of the English settlers. During the Jamestown Massacre, the Powhatans killed 347 English settlers throughout the Virginia colony, almost one-third of the English population of first permanent English colony in the New World.

• Hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews had been wiped out or driven from the lands of present-day Ukraine by Zaporozhian Cossacks during the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648-1654). As a result of events during The Deluge, population of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dropped by one-third.

• After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Act of Settlement in 1652, Irish Catholics had most of their lands confiscated and were banned from living in towns for a short period. As many as 100,000 Irish men, women and children were forcibly taken to the colonies in the West Indies and North America as indentured servants.

• On August 10, 1680, the Pueblo Indians rose in revolt against Spanish rule. By the time the Pueblo Revolt succeeded, the Pueblo warriors killed 380 Spanish settlers and drove the surviving Europeans from New Mexico. By 1690s, certain Pueblo groups wanted the Spanish to come back to protect them against Apache and Navajo raiders.

• Kosovo was taken temporarily by the Austrian forces during the Great Turkish War with help of Serbs. After the Austrians retreated in 1690, hundreds of thousands of Serbs had to flee from Kosovo and Serbia to Bosnia and Vojvodina to evade Ottoman reprisals.

Colonial period

• Conflict between Miao groups and newly arrived Han settlers increased during the 18th century under repressive economic and cultural reforms imposed by the Qing Dynasty. This led to armed conflict and large-scale migrations continuing into the late 19th century, the period during which most Hmong people emigrated to Southeast Asia.

• In the Great Expulsion of 1755, around 4000 to 5000 French Acadians were deported from Acadia by the British; many later settled in Louisiana, where they became known as Cajuns.

• Expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the St. Domingue’s 40,000 white French settlers during the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, first ruler of an independent Haiti, declared Haiti an all black nation, slaughtered all the remaining whites on the island and forbade Caucasians from ever again owning property or land there.

• Expulsion of more than a million Crimean Tatars, Crimean Goths and Nogais of the Kuban and Budjak steppes to Ottoman Empire after the Crimean Khanate was annexed by Russia in 1783.

• During the Chios Massacre in 1822 about 42,000 Greek islanders of Chios were massacred; 45,000 were enslaved; and 23,000 were exiled. Less than 2,000 Greeks managed to survive on the island.

• On November 19, 1835, the Chatham Islands were invaded by mainland Māori. Some 300 Moriori men, women and children were massacred and the remaining 1,300 survivors were enslaved. By 1862, only 101 Morioris were left alive. Modern inhabitants are descendants of those who invaded and conquered the archipelago in 1835.

• The ethnic cleansing of the light-skinned Spanish and Mestizo people by the Mayas from the eastern Yucatan and the territory of Quintana Roo during the Caste War of Yucatán. The greatest success of the Maya revolt was reached in the spring of 1848, with the Europeans and Mestizos driven from most of the peninsula other than the walled cities of Campeche and Mérida and the south-west coast.

• 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, particularly in the Indian Removal policy of the 1830s. The Trail of Tears, which led to the deaths of about 2,000 to 8,000 Cherokees from disease, and the Long Walk of the Navajo are well-known examples.

• The Tasmanians, estimated at 8,000 people in 1803, were reduced to a population of around 300 by 1833, although much of this has been attributed to the effect of diseases to which they had no natural immunity (including smallpox and syphilis) and alcoholism. Estimates of the total number of Tasmanian deaths at the hands of European settlers vary, with some controversial estimates ranging as low as 118 in the period from 1803 until 1847. This conflict is a subject of the Australian history wars.

• Ainu people are an ethnic group indigenous to Hokkaidō, northern Honshū, the Kuril Islands, much of Sakhalin, and the southernmost third of the Kamchatka peninsula. As Japanese settlement expanded, the Ainu were pushed northward, until by the Meiji period they were confined by the government to a small area in Hokkaidō, in a manner similar to the placing of Native Americans on reservations.

• The ethnic cleansing of the Assyrian Christian population from Eastern Anatolia by Kurdish tribes, in 1842-1847.

• Expulsion 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.
• Expulsion of Muslim populations in Northern Caucasus by imperial Russia throughout 19th century. Particularly, expulsion of Circassians to Anatolia in 1864. (see Muhajir (Caucasus) for more details)

20th century

• The ethnic cleansing of the Thracian Bulgarians by the Young Turks in the Ottoman portion of Thrace in 1913.
• The Armenian/Assyrian Genocide, under the Three Pashas of the late Ottoman empire and the later Pontian Greek Genocide, both perpetrated by the Young Turks during 1914–1922.
• Massacres of the Turkish population by the Greek army of occupation and Greek scorched earth policy by Greek troops after their defeat in the Greco Turkish War. Massacre of Greek population and sack of Smyrna by Turkish troops.
• The Population exchange between Greece and Turkey of Greeks from Turkey and of Turks from Greece after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) as a consequence of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
• The Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Don Cossacks during the Russian Civil War, in 1919-1920.
• Deportation of Poles by the Soviet Union from Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia to Kazakhstan in 1934-1938.
• Deportation of Koreans by the Soviet Union from Russian Far East to Soviet Central Asia from September to October of 1937. More than 172,000 Koreans were deported.
• The persecutions and expulsions of Jews in Germany, Austria and other Nazi-controlled areas prior to the initiation of mass genocide in which 6 million Jews were killed.
• During the Finnish occupation of East Karelia during World War II the Russian speaking population of the city of Petrozavodsk was held in an concentration camp.
• Expulsion of Poles by Germany. During World War II, Nazis planned to ethnicly cleanse the whole Polish population. Eventually during Nazi occupation up to 1.6 to 2 million Poles were expelled, not counting milions of slave labourers deported from Poland.
• More than 250,000 Serbs were expelled from Croatia by the extreme nationalist Ustashe regime during the Serbian Genocide, in 1941-1945.
• During WWII, in Kosovo & Metohija, some 10,000 Serbs lost their lives, and about 80 to 100,000 or more were ethnically cleansed. Hundreds of thousands more would leave in the following decades, following the shift of power in Kosovo, resulting in non-violent ethnic cleansing of Serbs between 1945 and 1991.
• Deportation of Volga Germans by Soviet Union to Kazakhstan, Altai Krai, Siberia, and other remote areas, in 1941-1942.
• Deportation of Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks by Soviet Union to Central Asia and Siberia, 1943-1944.
• The ethnic cleansing and massacres of Poles in Volhynia by nationalist UPA which took place in 1943 and 1944, with the bulk of victims reported for summer and autumn 1944.
• Expulsion of Germans after World War II. From 1944 until 1948, between 13.5 and 16.5 million Germans were expelled, evacuated or fled from Central and Eastern Europe. Estimated number of those who died in the process is being debated by historians and estimated between 500,000 and 3,000,000.
• Istrian exodus during and after World War II. The diaspora of ethnic Italians from Istria, Fiume and dalmatian Zara lands, after the collapse of Italian fascist regime.
• The mass deportation of Ukrainian speaking ethnic minorities from the territory of Poland after World War II, culminating in 1947 with the start of Operation Wisla. Millions of Poles were simultaneously deported from the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union into the western territories, which Soviets transferred from Germany to Poland. By 1950, 5 million Poles had been settled in what the government called the Regained Territories.
• Mass expulsions of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India, and of Muslims from India to Pakistan. The controversy surrounding this move resulted in the killings of Hindus, Muslimss and Sikhs in riots. This was known as the partition of British India in 1947. Well over 10 million people were violently displaced, making it the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history.
• After the annexation of the Muslim-ruled state of Hyderabad by India in 1948, about 7,000 Hadrami Arabs were interned and deported from India.
• The Palestinian exodus, in which the substantial majority of Arab Palestinians (approximately 700,000) in the areas of British Mandate of Palestine that became part of Israel fled or were deported by Israeli forces following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
• Jewish exodus from Arab lands, in which 99 percent of Jews (approximately 800,000) from Arab countries were deported by Arab governments, or fled oppression and discrimination, between the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Six Day War in 1967. The major populations affected were in Iraq, Syria, History of the Jews in Yemen, History of the Jews in Egypt, History of the Jews in Libya, History of the Jews in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco.
• After Indonesia received independence from the Netherlands in 1949, around 300.000 people, predominantly Indos or Dutch Indonesians (people of mixed Indonesian and European descent), fled or were expulsed from Indonesia.
• 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).
• Displacement of Kashmiri Hindus living in Kashmir due to the ongoing and anti-Indian insurgency. Some 300,000 Hindus have been internally displaced from Kashmir due to the violence.
• On 5 July 1960, five days after the Congo gained independence from Belgium, the Force Publique garrison near Léopoldville mutinied against its white officers and attacked numerous European targets. This caused the fear amongst the approximately 100,000 whites still resident in the Congo and mass exodus from the country.
• Mass expulsion of the pied-noir population of European descent and Jews from Algeria to France. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 of these Europeans and native Jewish people left the country.
• The ethnic cleansing of the Arabs and Indians from Zanzibar in 1964.
• During the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971 around 10 million Bengalis fled the country to escape the killings and atrocites committed by the Pakistan Army.
• The forced expulsion of Uganda's entire Asian population by Idi Amin's regime.
• The ethnic cleansing between 1963-1974 of Turkish Cypriots by Greek Cypriots and Greek military forces.
• The ethnic cleansing in 1974-76 of the entire Greek population of the areas under Turkish military occupation in Cyprus during and after the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus.
• Forced removals of non-white populations in South Africa under Apartheid.
• At least one million Iraqi Kurds were displaced during the Al-Anfal Campaign (1986-1989).
• The forced assimilation campaign of the late 80s directed against ethnic Turks resulted in the emigration of some 300,000 Bulgarian Turks to Turkey.
• The Nagorno Karabakh conflict has resulted in the displacement of 528,000 (this figure does not include new born children of these IDPs) Azerbaijanis from Armenian occupied territories including Nagorno Karabakh, and 220,000 Azeris, 18,000 Kurds and 3,500 Russians fled from Armenia to Azerbaijan from 1988 to 1989. 280,000 persons—virtually all ethnic Armenians—fled Azerbaijan during the 1988–1993 war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
• Since April 1989, some 70,000 black Mauritanians -- members of the Peul, Wolof, Soninke and Bambara ethnic groups -- had been expelled from Mauritania by the Mauritanian government.
• In 1989, after bloody pogroms against the Meskhetian Turks by Uzbeks in Central Asia's Ferghana Valley, nearly 90,000 Meskhetian Turks left Uzbekistan.
• The expulsion of the Muslims from Jaffna was an act of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Tamil militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) organization in October 1990. In order to achieve their goal of creating an ethnically "pure" Tamil state in the North and East of Sri Lanka, the LTTE forcibly expelled the entire Muslim community - numbered at around 80,000 - from the northern Jaffna peninsular of the island. They were forced to leave within 48 hours of an LTTE warning and not permitted to take any of their belongings, which were subsequently looted by the LTTE.
• The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, of which the most significant examples occurred in eastern Croatia and self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian 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 and ethnic-cleansing of more than 250,000 people, mostly Georgians but some others too, from Abkhazia during the conflict and after in 1993 and 1998.
• The 1994 massacres of nearly one million Tutsis by Hutus, known as the Rwandan Genocide
• The mass expulsion of southern Lhotshampas (Bhutanese of Nepalese origin) by the northern Druk majority of Bhutan in 1990. The number of refugees is approximately 103,000.
• Displacement of more than 500,000 Chechen and ethnic Russian civilians living in Chechnya during the First Chechen War in 1994-1996.
• More than 800,000 Kosovo Albanians fled their homes in Kosovo during the Kosovo War in 1999. By November 1999, most of the Albanians had returned to Kosovo. Over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities fled or were expelled from Kosovo after the war.

21st century

• Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. As of October 2005, the government has resumed its policy of forcing all Bushmen off their lands in the Game Reserve, using armed police and threats of violence or death. Many of the involuntarily displaced Bushmen live in squalid resettlement camps and some have resorted to prostitution and alcoholism, while about 250 others remain or have surreptitiously returned to the Kalahari to resume their independent lifestyle. “How can you have a Stone Age creatures continue to exist in the age of computers?“ asked Botswana’s president Festus Mogae.

• Expulsion of white farmers by the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe in 2000. There were 270,000 whites in Zimbabwe (when the country was known as Rhodesia) in 1970. There are only a few thousand whites left in Zimbabwe today.

• The removal of around 8,500 Jews (including the forced removal of about half of them) from the Gaza Strip, and around 660 from four small settlements in the West Bank, in 2005 through the implementation of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan.

• Attacks by the Janjaweed Arabs, Muslim militias of Sudan on the African population of Darfur, a region of western Sudan. A July 14, 2007 article notes that in the past two months up to 75,000 Arabs from Chad and Niger crossed the border into Darfur. Most have been relocated by the Sudanese government to former villages of displaced non-Arab people. Some 2.5 million have now been forced to flee their homes after attacks by Sudanese troops and Janjaweed militia.

• Currently in the Iraq Civil War (2003 to present), entire neighborhoods in Baghdad are being ethnically cleansed by Shia and Sunni Militias. Some areas are being evacuated by every member of a particular secular group due to lack of security, moving into new areas because of fear of reprisal killings. As of June 21, 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 2 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.

• Although Iraqi Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, according to UNHCR. In the 16th century, Christians constituted half of Iraq's population. In 1987, the last Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians. But as the 2003 invasion has radicalized Islamic sensibilities, Christians' total numbers slumped to about 500,000, of whom 250,000 live in Baghdad. Furthermore, the Mandaean and Yazidi communities are at the risk of elimination due to the ongoing atrocities by Islamic extremists. A May 25, 2007 article notes that in the past 7 months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United States.

• The ethnic cleansing of African American population of some racially mixed Los Angeles neighborhoods by Mexican street gangs. According to gang experts and law enforcement agents the Mexican Mafia leaders, or shot callers, have issued a "green light" on all blacks.

• In October 2006, Niger announced that it would deport the Arabs living in the Diffa region of eastern Niger to Chad. This population numbered about 150,000. While the government was rounding Arabs in preparation for the deportation, two girls died, reportedly after fleeing government forces, and three women suffered miscarriages. Niger's government had eventually suspended a controversial decision to deport Arabs.

See also

• Ethnocide
• Population transfer
• Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
• Civilian casualties, civilian, non-combatant persons killed or injured by direct military action
• Command responsibility
• Crime against humanity
• Ethnic Cleansing, a computer game.
• German exodus from Eastern Europe
• List of massacres
• List of wars and disasters by death toll
• Caste War of Yucatán
• 1989 events
• Partition of India
• 1971 Bangladesh atrocities
• Persecution of Hindus
• Generalplan Ost
• Population transfer in the Soviet Union
• Polish minority in the Soviet Union
• Transmigration program
• Refugees of Iraq

Notes

1. Drazen Petrovic, "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology", European Journal of International Law, Vol. No. 3. Retrieved 20 May 2006.
2. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing", Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 110, Summer 1993. Retrieved 20 May 2006.
3. Petrovic, "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology" p.11 and quoted by Ilan Pappe "The Ethnic cleansing of Palestine" 2006, p.1
4. Hayden, Robert M. (1996) Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers. Slavic Review 55 (4), 727-48.
5. ^ Martin, Terry (1998). The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing. The Journal of Modern History 70 (4), 813-861.
6. Marvine Howe in the New York Times (July 12, 1982), quoting an Albanian official in Kosovo
7. Pavelicpapers.com
8. Pavelicpapers.com
9. The Moljevic Memorandum
10. US State Department, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1993, Abkhazia case
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References

• Bell-Fialkoff, Andrew (1993). "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing". Foreign Affairs. 72 (3): 110.
• Petrovic, Drazen (1994). "Ethnic Cleansing - An Attempt at Methodology". European Journal of International Law. 5 (1): 359.

External links

• Documents and Resources on War, War Crimes and Genocide
• Photojournalist's Account - Images of ethnic cleansing in Sudan
• Timothy V. Waters, On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing, Paper 951, 2006, University of Mississippi School of Law (PDF)
• Genocides and Ethnic Cleansings of Central and East Europe, the Former USSR, the Caucasus and Adjacent Middle East -- 1890 - 2007
• Dump the “ethnic cleansing” jargon, group implores May 31, 2007, World Science

• Ethnic cleansing
• Forced migration
• Human rights abuses
• Persecution
• Violence
• Racism
• Discrimination