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Ethnic cleansing



Ethnic cleansing



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Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism referring to the persecution through imprisonment, expulsion, or killing of members of an ethnic minority by a majority to achieve ethnic homogeneity in majority-controlled territory.[1] It is sometimes used interchangeably with the more connotatively severe term genocide. The term entered English and international media usage in the early 1990s to describe war events in the former Yugoslavia.


Synonyms include ethnic purification .[2]







Contents

[hide]



[edit] Definitions


The term ethnic cleansing has been variously defined. 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.[3]

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"[4]


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 nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration and genocide.[5]


In reviewing the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Bosnian Genocide Case in the judgement of Jorgic v. Germany on 12 July 2007 the European Court of Human Rights selectively quoted from the ICJ ruling on the Bosnian Genocide Case to explain that ethnic cleansing was not enough on its own to establish that a genocide had occurred:



The term 'ethnic cleansing' has frequently been employed to refer to the events in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are the subject of this case ... General Assembly resolution 47/121 referred in its Preamble to 'the abhorrent policy of 'ethnic cleansing', which is a form of genocide', as being carried on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ... It [i.e. ethnic cleansing] can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the [Genocide] Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area “ethnically homogeneous”, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterizes genocide is “to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement. This is not to say that acts described as 'ethnic cleansing' may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region. As the ICTY has observed, while 'there are obvious similarities between a genocidal policy and the policy commonly known as 'ethnic cleansing' ' (Krstić, IT-98-33-T, Trial Chamber Judgment, 2 August 2001, para. 562), yet '[a] clear distinction must be drawn between physical destruction and mere dissolution of a group. The expulsion of a group or part of a group does not in itself suffice for genocide.


– ECHR quoting the ICJ[6]



[edit] Origins of the term


The term "ethnic cleansing" entered the English lexicon as a loan translation of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian/Montenegrin phrase etničko čišćenje (IPA: [ětnitʃkoː tʃîʃʨeːɲe]).[dubious – discuss]. 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, IPA: [tʃîʃʨeːɲe terěːna]) 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.


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 Belgrade when the city was captured by the Karadjordje's forces in 1806[7]. Konstantin Nenadović wrote in his biography of famous Serbian leader published in 1883 that after the fighting "the Serbs, in their bitterness (after 500 of Turkish occupation), slit the throats of the Turks everywhere they found them, sparing neither the wounded, nor the woman, nor the Turkish children".[8]


Later attestation 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 [čišćenje] our Croatia of unwanted elements [...].[9][unreliable source?] 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.[10].


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 [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 Croatia, the Muslims to Turkey or perhaps Albania - while the vacated territory is settled with Serb refugees now located in Serbia.[11]


The term "cleansing", more specifically the Russian term "cleansing of borders", ochistka granits (очистка границ), was used in Soviet Union 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.[5]


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).



[edit] Ethnic cleansing as a military and political tactic





The 12th anniversary of ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia which was held in Tbilisi in 2005. One of the visitors of the gallery recognized her dead son on the photograph

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[12] and Croat[13] 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.[14]


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. [15]


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 Abkhazia. [16] 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) [17] [18] This was recognized as ethnic cleansing by OSCE conventions and was also mentioned in UN General Assembly Resolution GA/10708. [19]


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 Germany after 1945, it can contribute to long-term stability.[20] Some individuals of the large German population in Czechoslovakia and prewar Poland had encouraged Nazi jingoism before the Second World War, but this was forcibly resolved[21]. 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.





Armenian civilians, being cleansed from their homeland during the Armenian Genocide


[edit] Ethnic cleansing as a crime under international law


There is no formal legal definition of ethnic cleansing.[22] 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).[23] 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.[24]


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.[25]


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.[26]





[edit] 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. [27]


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 Ireland's recent conflict, 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 is still used.



[edit] 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.



[edit] Early instances



  • 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.




  • 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.








  • 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.




  • The conquest of Prussia was accomplished with much bloodshed over more than 50 years, during which native Prussians who remained unbaptised were subjugated, killed, or exiled. To replace the partially exterminated native population, the Teutonic Order encouraged the immigration of German colonists.


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



  • The Crow Creek Massacre in 1325 was part of the ethnic cleansing of the Initial Coalescent people by the Middle Missouri villagers.[42]



  • 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.[44][45]





  • 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 or slaves.[48] The contemporary commentator Prendergast reported that four fifths of Ireland's population was removed or killed and that whole counties were empty. Many were forcibly removed to poorer agricultural land in Connacht. Several thousand Irish soldiers were sold to the King of Spain, the Dutch and a Polish privateer. The death toll could have been over 1 million.


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


[edit] 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.[49][50]



  • In 18th century, the Dzungars were annihilated by Qianlong Emperor in several campaigns. About 80% of the Dzungar population, or around 500.000 to 800.000 people, were killed during or after the Chinese conquest in 1755-1757.[51] The Qing Dynasty filled in the depopulated area with immigrants from many parts of their empire, but a century later the Muslim Rebellion ravaged the same region.





  • 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.


  • In the immediate aftermath of Dom Pedro’s abdication in 1831, the poor people of color, including slaves, staged anti-Portuguese riots in the streets of Brazil's larger cities.[54]


  • Choctaw Trail of Tears, On February 25, 1831, U.S. President Andrew Jackson began the forced marched of 15,000 Choctaw out of their ancestral lands, 2500 died of starvation and exposure along the way.


  • 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.[55]


  • Cherokee trail of tears: 16,000 Cherokee who had adopted colonial white cultural norms of housing, clothes, business and language were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and placed into internment camps where 2000 to 3000 would die from disease. The Survivors were then force marched 1200 miles to tribal reservation lands, 2000 to 3000 more died of disease, exposure, and starvation in these marches.


  • 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.[56][57][4]


  • 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.[58] 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.[59] This conflict is a subject of the Australian history wars.


  • The ethnic cleansing of the white Spanish and light-skinnedMestizo 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.


  • 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.






[edit] 20th century



  • Treaty of Neuilly (1919); Greece and Bulgaria exchange minority populations, with some exceptions.





  • Negro Wall Street was burned to the ground by thousands of armed whites. The Tulsa Race Riot, one of the USA's costliest acts of racial violence and civil disorder.[70] Sixteen hours of rioting on May 31 and June 1, 1921 resulted in over 800 people admitted to local hospitals with injuries, an estimated 10,000 left homeless, 35 city blocks composed of 1,256 residences destroyed by fire, and $1.8 million in property damage.[70] Twenty-three black and 16 white citizens were reported killed, but estimates suggest as many as 300, mostly blacks, died.[70]


  • Rosewood massacre In January 1923, Mobs of "whites" attacked a small Black community of 350 people, murdered more then 20 "negros" and burned the every house and church to the ground. Rosewood, Florida, just outside of Gainesville was never repopulated.




  • The Great Repatriation of an estimated half million Mexican Americans from the Southwestern United States to Mexico by American INS officials during the Great Depression. Approximately 60% of those hastenily deported are naturalized citizens who lived in the US for over 10 years, and their families, including US-born children of Mexican parents. Mexican-Americans whose ancestry dated back to the 19th century pre-annexation period are racially and ethnically harassed by INS officials out of nativism and fears of a "Mexican takeover" of the American Southwest.








  • During WWII, in Kosovo & Metohija, some 10,000 Serbs lost their lives[75][76], and about 80[75] to 100,000[75][77] or more[76] were ethnically cleansed. Hundreds of thousands more Serbs would be ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by coercion in the decades from 1945 to 1991.




  • The ethnic cleansing of Hungarians, or the massacres in Bačka by titoist partisans during the winter of 1944-45, about 40.000 massacred.[79] Afterwards, between 45-48, internation camps were set which led directly to the death of 70.000 more, of famine, frost, plagues, tortures and executions.


  • 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.


  • The ethnic cleansing of Cham Albanians from Southern Epirus by Greeks which took place in 1944 and 1945, circa 18,000-35000[80] fled to Albania, and from several hundred to 2,800 killed.


  • 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, making this the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history. Estimated number of those who died in the process is being debated by historians and estimated between 500,000 and 3,000,000.[81]






  • Mass expulsions of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India, and of Muslims from India to Pakistan. The controversy surrounding the partition of British India in 1947[82], resulted in the killings of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in riots. Well over 10 million people were violently displaced, and up to 500,000 lost their lives. However, unlike most other instances, no government agencies actively took part in the bloodshed, although reportedly a limited number of Indian and Pakistani troops and police posted along the border were partisan in their sympathies and abetted the rioters. Those that did not (as well as the last remaining British officers) were simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the violence and could do little to stop it.





  • 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.[89]


  • Displacement of Kashmiri's who have fled the Indian military action in Kashmir, most have fled to Pakistan as well as to Britain, Canada and the USA.[90] 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.[91]



  • On 5 and 6 September 1955 the Istanbul Pogrom or "Septembrianá"/"Σεπτεμβριανά" was launched against the Greek population of Constantinople, it was secretly backed by the Turkish government ,some Jews and Armenians of the city were also attacked by the mob, 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 and only 5000 in 2007 and was followed by the Turkish government planned expulsion of the Greek minority in the Imbros and Tenedos islands in the period 1923-1993 (source needed).


  • 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.[93]


  • 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 Burma) led to an exodus of some 300,000 Burmese Indians from racial discrimination and particularly after wholesale nationalisation of private enterprise a few years later in 1964.[94][95]


  • 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, as well as the creation of Bantustans, which involved forced removals of non-white populations.[96][97]


  • 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.[98][99]



  • Some 150,000 Italians settled in Libya, constituting about 18% of the total population.[102] All of Libya's Italians were expelled from the North African country in 1970, a year after Muammar al-Gaddafi seized power (a "day of vengeance" on 7 October, 1970).[103]


  • By 1969, more than 350,000 Salvadorans were living in Honduras. 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).




  • The ethnic cleansing between 1963–1974 of Turkish Cypriots by Greek Cypriots and Greek military forces.[105]




  • The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia 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).[107][108][109]



  • The Sino-Vietnamese War resulted in the discrimination and consequent migration of Vietnam'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 Oct 31, 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.




aftermath of the halabja poison gas attack


  • Anfal:The al-Anfal Campaigne or Operation Anfal, was a genocidal campaign against Kurds led by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid. The campaign takes its name from Surat al-Anfal in the Qur'an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Baathist regime for a series of attacks against the kurdish armed forces or peshmerga and the mostly Kurdish civilian population of Kurdistan, conducted between 1986 and 1989 culminating in 1988,when in 16–17 of March 1988, Chemical weapons (CW) were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of Halabja,killing thousands of people, most of them civilians (4,000-5,000 dead on the spot and 7,000-10,000 injured[1]). Thousands more died of horrific complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.[2]

which Human Rights Watch (HRW) defined the encident as an act of genocide.


At least one million Kurds were displaced and an estimated 100,000-200,000 killed during the Al-Anfal Campaign (1986-1989). The Iraqi Special Tribunal announced that Saddam Hussein and six co-defendants would face trial on August 21, 2006, in relation to the Anfal campaign.[17] In December 2006 Saddam was put on trial for the genocide during Operation Anfal. The trial for the Anfal campaign was still underway on December 30, 2006, when Saddam Hussein was executed for his role in the unrelated Dujail massacre.[18]On 23 June 2007 Ali Hassan al-Majid, and two co-defendants Sultan Hashem Ahmed and Hussein Rashid Mohammed were convicted of genocide and related charges and sentenced to death by hanging.[7] Another two co-defendants (Farhan Jubouri and Saber Abdel Aziz al-Douri) were sentenced to life imprisonment, and one (Taher Tawfiq al-Ani) was acquitted on prosecution's demand.[19]





  • 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[110] to 220,000 Azeris, 18,000 Kurds and 3,500 Russians fled from Armenia to Azerbaijan from 1988 to 1989.[111] 280,000 to 304,000[110] persons—virtually all ethnic Armenians—fled Azerbaijan during the 1988–1993 war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.[112]









  • The mass expulsion of southern Lhotshampas (Bhutanese of Nepalese origin) by the northern Druk majority of Bhutan in 1990.[124] The number of refugees is approximately 103,000.[125]


  • An estimated 1,000 Tamil people were killed, tens of thousands of houses were destroyed by the Sinhalese-dominated government of Sri Lanka 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 Lanka. 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 Kosovo 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.[131][132]


  • 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 Madura. 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.[133]


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