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Ethnic cleansing is a term that has come to be used broadly to describe all forms of ethnically-motivated violence, ranging from murder, rape, and torture to the forcible removal of populations. A 1993 United Nations Commission defined it more specifically as, "the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous." The term entered English and international media usage in the early 1990s to describe war events in the former Yugoslaviamarker.

The term ethnic cleansing is not to be confused with genocide. These terms are not synonymous, yet the academic discourse considers both as existing in a spectrum of assaults on nations or religio-ethnic groups. Simply put, ethnic cleansing is similar to forced deportation or 'population transfer' whereas genocide is the "intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group." The idea in ethnic cleansing is "to get people to move, and the means used to this end range from the legal to the semi-legal." Some academics consider genocide as a subset of "murderous ethnic cleansing." Thus, these concepts are different, but related,"literally and figuratively, ethnic cleansing bleeds into genocide, as mass murder is committed in order to rid the land of a people."

Synonyms include ethnic purification.

Definitions

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"

The term ethnic cleansing has been defined as a spectrum, or continuum by some historians. In the words of Andrew Bell-Fialkoff:

[E]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 a population from a given territory.


Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as "the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory" and as "occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end."

In reviewing the International Court of Justicemarker (ICJ) Bosnian Genocide Case in the judgement of Jorgic v. Germany on 12 July 2007 the European Court of Human Rightsmarker quoted from the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian Genocide Case to draw a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Origins of the term

The term, ethnic cleansing, appears to have been popularised by the international media some time around 1992. It 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.

During the 1990s the term was used extensively by the media in the former Yugoslaviamarker in relation to the Croatian War of Independence, since Serb paramilitary forces and JNA engaged in forcible removal of Croats and other non-Serbs from areas of Croatia occupied by rebel Serbs. Rebel Serbs and JNA have committed widespread and systematic acts of persecution (murder, violence, detention, intimidation) against non-Serb population creating a such coercive atmosphere, atmosphere of fear, that targeted population had no option but to flee or to be deported by force. These acts were carried out from at least August 1991. The displacement of non-Serb population which followed these attacks was not merely the consequence of military action, but in fact its primary objective.

A Carnegie Endowment report on the Balkan Wars in 1914 points out that village-burning and ethnic cleansing have traditionally accompanied Balkan wars, regardless of ethnicities involved. In probably the earliest attestation of the term, Vuk Karadžić makes use of the word cleanse to describe what happened to the Turks in Belgrademarker when the city was captured by the Karadjordje's forces in 1806. Konstantin Nenadović wrote in his biography of famous Serbian leader published in 1883 that after the fighting "the Serbs, in their bitterness (after 500 years of Turkish occupation), slit the throats of the Turks everywhere they found them, sparing neither the wounded, nor the woman, nor the Turkish children".

Later attestation of the term cleansing can be found on 16 May 1941, during the Second World War, by one Viktor Gutić, a commander in the Croatian extremist 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 [čišćenje] our Croatiamarker of unwanted elements [...]. The Ustaše carried 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 Lukamarker 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 [očistiti] 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 (significantly amputated) Croatia, the Muslims to Turkeymarker or perhaps Albaniamarker - while the vacated territory is settled with Serb refugees now located in Serbia.

The term "cleansing", more specifically the Russian term "cleansing of borders", ochistka granits (очистка границ), was used in Soviet Unionmarker documents of the 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 Germanymarker 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).

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, 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.

Ethnic cleansing was a common phenomenon in the Bosnian war. This typically entailed intimidation, forced expulsion and/or killing of the undesired ethnic group as well as the destruction or removal of the physical vestiges of the ethnic group, such as places of worship, cemeteries and cultural and historical buildings. According to numerous ICTY verdicts, Serb and Croat forces performed ethnic cleansing of their territories planned by their political leadership in order to create ethnically pure states (Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia). Furthermore, Serb forces committed genocide in Srebrenica at the end of the war.

Based on the evidence of numerous Croat forces attacks against Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), the ICTY Trial Chamber concluded in the Kordić and Čerkez case that by April 1993 Croat leadership from Bosnia and Herzegovina had a common design or plan conceived and executed to ethnically cleanse Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley in Central Bosnia. Dario Kordić, as the local political leader, was found to be the planner and instigator of this plan.

In 1993, during the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, armed Abkhaz separatist insurgency, confronted with large population of ethnic Georgians, implemented a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the ethnic Georgians (Georgians formed the single largest ethnic group in pre-war Abkhazia, with a 45.7% plurality as of 1989) of Abkhaziamarker. 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) This was recognized as ethnic cleansing by OSCE conventions and was also mentioned in UN General Assembly Resolution GA/10708.

As a tactic, ethnic cleansing has a number of significant impacts. 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 removes the fish by draining the water. When enforced as part of a political settlement, as happened with the forced resettlement of ethnic Germans to the new Germany after 1945, it can contribute to long-term stability. Some individuals of the large German population in Czechoslovakiamarker and prewar Polandmarker had encouraged Nazi jingoism 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.

For the most part, 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 Yugoslaviamarker (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 Irelandmarker's recent conflict, and 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 is still used. The United States practiced this during the Indian Wars of the 19th century.

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.

In early modern history

  • After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Act of Settlement in 1652, the whole post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterised by historians such as Mark Levene and Alan Axelrod as ethnic cleansing, in that it sought to remove Irish Catholics from the eastern part of the country, others such as the historical writer Tim Pat Coogan have describe the actions of Cromwell and his subordinates as genocide.
  • Albert Breton (Editor, 1995). Nationalism and Rationality. Cambridge University Press 1995. Page 248. "Oliver Cromwell offered Irish Catholics a choice between genocide and forced mass population transfer"
  • Ukrainian Quarterly. Ukrainian Society of America 1944. "Therefore, we are entitled to accuse the England of Oliver Cromwell of the genocide of the Irish civilian population.."
  • David Norbrook (2000).Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660. Cambridge University Press. 2000. In interpreting Andrew Marvell's contemporarily expressed views on Cromwell Norbrook says; "He (Cromwell) laid the foundation for a ruthless programme of resettling the Irish Catholics which amounted to large scale ethnic cleansing.."
  • Frances Stewart (2000). War and Underdevelopment: Economic and Social Consequences of Conflict v. 1 (Queen Elizabeth House Series in Development Studies), Oxford University Press. 2000. p. 51 "Faced with the prospect of an Irish alliance with Charles II, Cromwell carried out a series of massacres to subdue the Irish. Then, once Cromwell had returned to England, the English Commissary, General Henry Ireton, adopted a deliberate policy of crop burning and starvation, which was responsible for the majority of an estimated 600,000 deaths out of a total Irish population of 1,400,000."
  • Alan Axelrod (2002). Profiles in Leadership, Prentice-Hall. 2002. Page 122. "As a leader Cromwell was entirely unyielding. He was willing to act on his beliefs, even if this meant killing the king and perpetrating, against the Irish, something very nearly approaching genocide"
  • Tim Pat Coogan (2002). The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal and the Search for Peace. ISBN 9780312294182. p 6. "The massacres by Catholics of Protestants, which occurred in the religious wars of the 1640s, were magnified for propagandist purposes to justify Cromwell's subsequent genocide."
  • Peter Berresford Ellis (2002). Eyewitness to Irish History, John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 9780471266334. p. 108 "It was to be the justification for Cromwell's genocidal campaign and settlement."
  • John Morrill (2003). Rewriting Cromwell - A Case of Deafening Silences, Canadian Journal of History. Dec 2003. "Of course, this has never been the Irish view of Cromwell.


    Most Irish remember him as the man responsible for the mass slaughter of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford and as the agent of the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever attempted in Western Europe as, within a decade, the percentage of land possessed by Catholics born in Ireland dropped from sixty to twenty.

    In a decade, the ownership of two-fifths of the land mass was transferred from several thousand Irish Catholic landowners to British Protestants.

    The gap between Irish and the English views of the seventeenth-century conquest remains unbridgeable and is governed by G.K.

    Chesterton's mirthless epigram of 1917, that "it was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it."
  • James M Lutz, Brenda J Lutz, (2004). Global Terrorism, Routledge:London, p.193: "The draconian laws applied by Oliver Cromwell in Ireland were an early version of ethnic cleansing. The Catholic Irish were to be expelled to the northwestern areas of the island. Relocation rather than extermination was the goal."
  • Mark Levene (2005). Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 2. ISBN 978-1845110574 Page 55, 56 & 57. A sample quote describes the Cromwellian campaign and settlement as "a conscious attempt to reduce a distinct ethnic population".
  • Mark Levene (2005). Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, I.B.Tauris: London:
    [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.


  • Michael Mann, basing his figures on those provided by Justin McCarthy, whom he calls "a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate", states that between 1821 and 1922, a large number of Muslims were expelled from south-eastern Europe as Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Mann describes these events as "murderous ethnic cleansing on a stupendous scale not previously seen in Europe, ...". These countries sought to expand their territory against the Ottoman Empire, which culminated in the Balkan wars of the early 20th century.


20th century





  • The German government's persecutions and expulsions of Jews in Germanymarker, Austriamarker and other Nazi-controlled areas prior to the initiation of mass genocide. Estimated number of those who died in the process is approximately 6 million Jews.




  • At least 330,000 Serbs, 30,000 Jews and 30,000 Roma were killed during the NDHmarker (see Jasenovacmarker) (today Croatia and Bosna and Herzegovina) and the same number of Serbs were forced out of the NDH , in may 1941 - may 1945. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed there goes up to 700,000.


  • During WWII, in Kosovo & Metohijamarker, some 10,000 Serbs lost their lives, and about 80 to 100,000 or more were ethnically cleansed.After WWII new communist authorities banned to Serbian and Montenegrin, who had been expelled during the war, from returning to their abandoned estates.






  • During the four years of occupation 1941 - 1944, the Axis (German, Hungarian and Croatian) forces committed numerous war crimes against civilian population (Serbs, Roma and Jews): about 50,000 people in Vojvodinamarker (north Serbiamarker) (see Occupation of Vojvodina, 1941-1944) were murdered and about 280,000 were arrested, raped or tortured. The total number of the killed people in Bačka was 19,573 (under Hungarian occupation), in Banat 7,513 (under German occupation) and in Syrmia 28,199 (under Croatian occupation).




  • During Axis occupation in Albania (1943-1944), Albanian collaborationist organization Balli Kombëtar with Nazi German support mounted a major offensive in southern Albania (Northern Epirus) with devastating results: over 200 Greek populated towns and villages were burned or destroyed, 2,000 ethnic Greeks were killed, 5,000 imprisoned and 2,000 taken hostages to concentration camps. Moreover, 30,000 people had to find refuge in nearby Greece during and after that period.


  • At the end of World War II many Germans were expelled from eastern Europe, it is described as ethic cleansing by Thomas Kamusella, which he links to the development of ethnic nationalism in central and eastern Europe. Piotr Pikle describes the expulsion of Germans at the end of World War II from Czechoslovakia as ethnic cleansing, and Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees describe the simultaneous expulsion of Germans from Poland as ethnic cleansing.


  • During the Partition of India 5 million Hindus and Sikhs fled from what became Pakistan into India and more than 6 million Muslims fled from what became India into Pakistan. The events which occurred during this time period have been described as ethnic cleansing.






  • After the Republic of Indonesiamarker achieved independence from the Netherlandsmarker in 1949, around 300.000 people, predominantly Indo or Dutch Indonesians (people of mixed Indonesian and European descent), fled or were expelled.


  • In the aftermath of the 1949 Durban Riots (an inter-racial conflict between Zulus and Asians in South Africa), hundreds of Indians fled Cato Manor.


  • On 5 and 6 September 1955 the Istanbul Pogrom or "Septembrianá"/"Σεπτεμβριανά", secretly backed by the Turkish government, was launched against the Greek population of Constantinoplemarker. The mob also attacked some Jews and Armenians of the city. The event contributed greatly to the gradual extinction of the Greek minority in the city and country, which numbered 100,000 in 1924 after the Turko-Greek population exchange treaty. By 2007 there were only 5000 Greeks. The Turkish government further forced expulsion of the Greek minority in the Imbrosmarker and Tenedosmarker islands in the period 1923-1993.




  • On 5 July 1960, five days after the Congomarker gained independence from Belgium, the Force Publique garrison near Léopoldvillemarker 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 led to their mass exodus from the country.


  • Ne Win's rise to power in 1962 and his relentless persecution of "resident aliens" (immigrant groups not recognised as citizens of the Union of Burmamarker) led to an exodus of some 300,000 Burmese Indians. They migrated to escape racial discrimination and wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise a few years later in 1964.


  • The creation of the apartheid system in South Africa, which began in 1948 but reached full flower in the 1960s and 1970s, involved some ethnic cleansing, including the separation of blacks, Coloureds, and whites into separate residential areas and private spheres. The government created Bantustans, which involved forced removals of non-white populations to reserved lands. The governing minority forced relocation of the majority to different areas, as well as restricting their movement, education and social activities.


  • As Algeria fought for independence, it expelled the pied-noir population of European descent and Jews; most fled to Francemarker, where they had citizenship. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 of these European descendants and native Jewish people left the country.




  • Some 150,000 Italians settled in Libyamarker, constituting about 18% of the total population. In 1970, the government expelled all of Libya's ethnic Italians, a year after Muammar al-Gaddafi seized power (a "day of vengeance" on 7 October 1970).


  • Between 1967 and 1973, the British government expelled the entire population of Diego Garciamarker, a small island in the Indian Ocean. There are ongoing court cases as regards the rights of the population to return to the island.


  • By 1969, more than 350,000 Salvadorans were living in Hondurasmarker. In 1969, Honduras enacted a new land reform law. This law took land away from Salvadoran immigrants and redistributed this land to native-born Honduran peoples. Thousands of Salvadorans were displaced by this law (see Football War).




  • Idi Amin's regime forced the expulsion in 1972 of Uganda's entire ethnic Asian population, mostly of Indian descent.






  • The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodiamarker disproportionately targeted ethnic minority groups. These included ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai. In the late 1960s, an estimated 425,000 ethnic Chinese lived in Cambodia, but by 1984, as a result of Khmer Rouge genocide and emigration, only about 61,400 Chinese remained in the country. The Cham Muslims suffered serious purges with as much as half of their population exterminated. A Khmer Rouge order stated that henceforth “The Cham nation no longer exists on Kampuchean soil belonging to the Khmers” (U.N. Doc. A.34/569 at 9).




  • The Sino-Vietnamese War resulted in the discrimination and consequent migration of Vietnammarker's ethnic Chinese. Many of these people fled as "boat people". In 1978-79, some 450,000 ethnic Chinese left Vietnam by boat as refugees (many officially encouraged and assisted) or were expelled across the land border with China.


  • Aftermath of Indira Gandhi assassination in 1984, the ruling party Indian National Congress supporters formed large mobs and killed around 3000 Sikhs around Delhi which is known as the Anti Sikh Riots during the next four days. The mobs using the support of ruling party leaders used the Election voting list to identify Sikhs and kill them.
  • 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 population from both sides. 528,000 Azerbaijanis from Nagorno Karabakh Armenian controlled territories including Nagorno-Karabakh, and 185,000 to 220,000 Azeris, 18,000 Kurds and 3,500 Russians fled from Armeniamarker to Azerbaijan from 1988 to 1989. 280,000 to 304,000 persons—virtually all ethnic Armenians—fled Azerbaijanmarker 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—have been expelled from Mauritaniamarker by the Mauritanian government.




  • In 1991, following a crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmarmarker, 250,000 refugees took shelter in the Cox's Bazarmarker district of neighbouring Bangladesh.






  • The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Croatian War of Independence that was committed by rebel Serbs and Serb-led JNA on the occupied areas of Croatia (self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina) (1991-1995). Large number of Croats and non-Serbs were removed, either by murder, deportation or being forced to flee. The majority of Croatia's Serb population was ethnically cleansed by the Croatian army at the end of the war in Operation Storm. In few last days of august 1995, more than 250.000 Serb refugees fled out of Croatia.


  • The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), Large numbers of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks were forced to flee their homes and expelled. Beginning in 1991, political upheavals in the Balkans displaced about 2,700,000 people by mid-1992, of which over 700,000 of them sought asylum in Europe.


  • The widespread ethnic cleansing committed against Albanians on the Albanian-dominated breakaway Kosovomarker province (of Serbiamarker) (1999). Large numbers of 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 Abkhaziamarker during the conflict and after in 1993 and 1998.




  • The mass expulsion of southern Lhotshampas (Bhutanese of Nepalese origin) by the northern Druk majority of Bhutanmarker in 1990. The number of refugees is approximately 103,000.


  • An estimated 1,000 Tamil people were killed, tens of thousands of houses were destroyed by the Sinhalese-dominated government of Sri Lankamarker in what is commonly known as Black July.The murder, looting and general destruction of property was well organized. Mobs armed with petrol were seen stopping passing motorists at critical street junctions and, after ascertaining the ethnic identity of the driver and passengers, setting alight the vehicle with the driver and passengers trapped within it. Mobs were also seen stopping buses to identify Tamil passengers and subsequently these passengers were knifed, clubbed to death or burned alive.


  • In October 1990, the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), forcibly expelled the entire ethnic Muslim population (approx 75,000) from the Northern Province of Sri Lankamarker. The Muslims were given 48 hours to vacate the premises of their homes while their properties were subsequently looted by LTTE. Those who refused to leave were killed. This act of ethnic cleansing was carried out so the LTTE could facilitate their goal of creating a mono-ethnic Tamil state in Northern Sri Lanka.






  • More than 800,000 Kosovar Albanians fled their homes in Kosovomarker during the Kosovo War in 1998-9, after being expelled. Although on the contrary over 200,000 Serbs and other non-Albanian minorities were forced out of Kosovo during and after the war while most Albanians returned.


  • There have been serious outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence on the island of Kalimantan since 1997, involving the indigenous Dayak peoples and immigrants from the island of Maduramarker. In 2001 in the Central Kalimantan town of Sampit, at least 500 Madurese were killed and up to 100,000 Madurese were forced to flee. Some Madurese bodies were decapitated in a ritual reminiscent of the headhunting tradition of the Dayaks of old.


21st century



  • In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti Pygmies, told the UN's Indigenous People's Forum that during the Congo Civil War, his people were hunted down and eaten as though they were game animals. Both sides of the war regarded them as "subhuman" and some say their flesh can confer magical powers. Makelo asked the UN Security Council to recognise cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.




  • Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswanamarker has been trying to move Bushmen out of the Central Kalahari Game Reservemarker. 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 Kalaharimarker to resume their independent lifestyle. “How can we continue to have Stone Age creatures in an age of computers?“ asked Botswana’s president Festus Mogae.


  • Attacks by the Janjaweed, militias of Sudanmarker on the African population of Darfurmarker, a region of western Sudan. A 14 July 2007 article notes that in the past two months up to 75,000 Arabs from Chadmarker and Nigermarker 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 Baghdadmarker are being ethnically cleansed by Shia and Sunni militias. Some areas are being evacuated by every member of a particular group due to lack of security, moving into new areas because of fear of reprisal killings. As of 21 June 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.


  • The removal of around 8,500 Jews (including the forced removal of about half of them) from the Gaza Stripmarker, and around 660 from four small settlements in the West Bankmarker, in 2005 through the implementation of Israel's unilateral disengagement plan. This was the first instance in history of Jews forcibly resettling other Jews.


  • 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 allowed the growth of militant Islamism, 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 25 May 2007 article notes that in the past 7 months only 69 people from Iraq have been granted refugee status in the United Statesmarker.




  • In October 2006, Nigermarker 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.


  • In 1950, the Karen had become the largest of 20 minority groups participating in an insurgency against the military dictatorship in Burmamarker. The conflict continues as of 2008. In 2004, the BBC, citing aid agencies, estimates that up to 200,000 Karen have been driven from their homes during decades of war, with 120,000 more refugees from Burma, mostly Karen, living in refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. Many accuse the military government of Burma of ethnic cleansing. As a result of the ongoing war in minority group areas more than two million people have fled Burma to Thailandmarker.


  • Civil unrest in Kenya erupted in December 2007. By 28 January 2008, the death toll from the violence was at around 800. The United Nations estimated that as many as 600,000 people have been displaced. A government spokesman claimed that Odinga's supporters were "engaging in ethnic cleansing".






Criticism of the term

Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, has criticised the rise of the term and its use for events that he feels should be called "genocide": as "ethnic cleansing" is not a legal term, its media use can detract attention from events that should be prosecuted as genocide.

See also





References

Notes

Bibliography



External links




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