'Population transfer' is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
Banishment or
exile is a similar process, but is forcibly applied to individuals and groups.
Often the affected population is transferred by force to a distant region, perhaps not suited to their way of life, causing them substantial harm. In addition, the loss of all immovable property and, when forced, the loss of substantial amounts of movable property, is implied.
'Population exchange' is the transfer of two populations in opposite directions at about the same time. Such exchanges have taken place several times in the 20th century, such as between
post-Ottoman Turkey and Greece, and during the
partition of India and Pakistan.
Issues arising from population transfer
According to political scientist
Norman Finkelstein ''transfer'' was considered as an acceptable solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around
World War II and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but "often necessary" means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic
civil war.
[1] The feasibility of population transfer was hugely increased by the creation of
railroad networks from the mid-19th century.
Population transfer differs more than simply technically from individually-motivated
migration, though at times of
war, the act of fleeing from danger or
famine often blurs the differences. If a state can preserve the fiction that migrations are the result of innumerable "personal" decisions, then the state may be able to justify its stand that it has not been culpably involved.
Jews who had actually signed over properties in Germany and Austria during
Nazism found it nearly impossible to be reimbursed after World War II.
Changing status in international law
The view of international law on population transfer underwent considerable evolution during the 20th century. Prior to
World War II, a number of major population transfers were the result of bilateral treaties and had the support of international bodies such as the
League of Nations. Even the
expulsion of Germans from central and eastern Europe after World War II was sanctioned by the
Potsdam Agreement. The tide started to turn when the Charter of the
Nuremberg Trials of German Nazi leaders declared forced deportation of civilian populations to be both a war crime and a crime against humanity, and this opinion was progressively adopted and extended through the remainder of the century. Underlying the change was the trend to assign rights to individuals, thereby limiting the rights of states to make agreements which adversely affect them.
There is now little debate about the general legal status of involuntary population transfers: ''Where population transfers used to be accepted as a means to settle ethnic conflict, today, forced population transfers are considered violations of international law.''
[2] No legal distinction is made between one-way and two-transfers, since the rights of each individual are regarded as independent of the experience of others.
An interim report of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1993) says:
[3]
:''Historical cases reflect a now-foregone belief that population transfer may serve as an option for resolving various types of conflict, within a country or between countries. The agreement of recognized States may provide one criterion for the authorization of the final terms of conflict resolution. However, the cardinal principle of "voluntariness" is seldom satisfied, regardless of the objective of the transfer. For the transfer to comply with human rights standards as developed, prospective transferees must have an option to remain in their homes if they prefer.''
The same report warned of the difficulty of ensuring true voluntariness: ''some historical transfers did not call for forced or compulsory transfers, but included options for the affected populations. Nonetheless, the conditions attending the relevant treaties created strong moral, psychological and economic pressures to move.''
The final report of the Sub-Commission (1997)
[4] invoked a large number of legal conventions and treaties to support the position that population transfers contravene international law unless they have the consent of both the moved population and the host population; moreover, that consent must be given free of direct or indirect negative pressure.
"Deportation or forcible transfer of population" is defined as a
crime against humanity by the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 7).
[5] The
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has put on trial, and in some cases has convicted, a number of politicians and military commanders indicted for forced deportations in that region.
Given the logistics of a forced "transfer," it is widely thought of as a euphemism for
ethnic cleansing. In its most idealistic connotation, "transfer" is the mildest form of ethnic cleansing — a peaceful relocation of a compliant people from one area to another.
Nationalist agitation and its supportive
propaganda are typical political tools by which public support is cultivated in favor of population transfer as a solution to conflict.
Timothy V. Waters argues in ''"On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing"'' that the expulsions of the German population east of the
Oder-Neisse line the
Sudetenland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe without legal redress has set a legal precedent that can permit future ethnic cleansing of other populations under international law.
[6]
Cases of population transfer
Ancient world
In the ancient world, population transfer was the more humane alternative to putting all the males of a conquered territory to death and enslaving the women and children. The
Babylonian captivity of the elite of Jerusalem on three occasions in the
6th century BCE was a population transfer.
Expulsion of Jews and Gypsies
Expulsions of
Jews and of
Roma people have been a tool of state control for centuries. The most famous such event was the
expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain in
1492. See
Jewish refugees,
History of anti-Semitism, and jewishgates.com
[7] for more details.
Another event, in
1609, was the final transfer of 300,000 Muslims out of Spain, after more than a century of Catholic trials, segregation, and religious restrictions. Most of the Spanish Muslims went to North Africa and to areas of
Ottoman Empire control.
[8]
France
Two famous transfers connected with the
history of France are the expulsion of the Jews, 1308, and of the
Huguenots who were declared illegal by the
Edict of Fontainebleau,
1685. In both cases, the population was not forced out but rather their religion was declared illegal.
United States: Native American relocations
In the nineteenth century, the
United States government removed a number of
Native American nations to federally owned and designated
Indian reservations. Starting in the 1830s with the
Choctaw people, the policy known as
Indian Removal relocated many nations living east of the
Mississippi River to the
Indian Territory in the west, a process that resulted in the "
Trail of Tears" for the
Cherokees. Resistance to Indian Removal led to several violent conflicts, including the
Second Seminole War in
Florida. Later in the century, the establishment of reservations for the
Plains Indians led to numerous
Indian Wars.
Ottoman Empire
Population transfers in the classical period, 1300-1600
The early
Ottoman state utilized forced population transfers as a tool to reorder the ethnic and economic landscape of its territories. The term used in Ottoman documents and modern Turkish is surgun, from the verb surmek, to drive, as in to drive a flock of sheep.
Ottoman population transfers through the reign of
Mehmet I (d. 1421) shuttled tribal Turkmen and Tatar groups from the state's Asiatic territories to the Balkans (Rumeli). Many of these groups were supported as paramilitary forces along the frontier with Christian Europe. Simultaneously, Christian communities were transported from newly conquered lands in the Balkans into Thrace and Anatolia. While these general flows back and forth across the Dardanelles continued, the reigns of
Murad II (d. 1451) and
Mehmet II (d. 1481) focused heavily on the demographic reorganization of the empire's urban centers. Murad II's conquest of Salonika was followed by its state-enforced settlement by Muslims from Yenice Vardar and Anatolia. Mehmet II's transfers focused on the re-population of the city of Istanbul following its conquest in 1453, transporting Christians, Muslims, and Jews into the new capital from across the empire.
Beginning in the reign of
Bayezid II (d. 1512), transfers were used to manage the Ottoman state's difficulty with the heterodox kizilbas movement in eastern Anatolia. Forced relocation of the kizilbas continued until at least the end of the 16th century. Merchants, artisans, and scholars were transported to Istanbul from Tabriz and Cairo under
Selim I (d. 1520). The state mandated Muslim immigration to Rhodes and Cyprus following their conquests in 1522 and 1571, respectively, and resettled
Greek Cypriots on the Anatolia coast.
Knowledge of the Ottoman usage of surgun from the 17th through the 19th century is sketchy. It appears that the state did not utilize forced population transfers during this time to the extent that it did during its expansionist period.
[9]
Balkan population exchanges, 1913
After the exchanges in the
Balkans, forced population transfer was used by the Great Powers and later the
League of Nations as a mechanism for increasing homogeneity in post-Ottoman Balkan states. A Norwegian diplomat working with the
League of Nations as a
High Commissioner for refugees beginning 1919, proposed the idea of a forced population transfer modeled on the earlier post Balkan-war Greek-Bulgarian mandatory population transfer of
Greeks in Bulgaria to Greece, and
Bulgarians in Greece to Bulgaria.
Armenian population
The event known as the
Armenian Genocide involved large scale one way population transfer, thus it must be mentioned here, but it involved and culminated in
ethnic cleansing and
Genocide. For more information see
Armenian Genocide.
The
Armenian population of the
Ottoman Empire was deported and transferred in the years from 1915-1919. It was organised by the
Young Turk Ottoman government and officially called ''
tehcir'' (meaning "forced relocation", but it was translated into English as deportation or banishment—effectively what "tehcir" was in this context). These
deportations led to the death of approximately 1.5 million Armenians, many of whom were deported to the Syrian deserts in inhumane death marches with
atrocious conditions. Consequently the Transfer of the Armenian population and associated events are considered
Genocide. Thus the "population transfer" was not the actual goal of the deportations (this was the elimination of the Armenians), but it was the means of achieving this goal.
Republic of Turkey
Greece and Turkey: population exchanges, 1923
Main articles: Population exchange between Greece and Turkey
The League of Nations moving the defined those to be mutually expelled as the "
Muslim inhabitants of Greece" to Turkey and moving "the
Greek inhabitants of Turkey" to Greece. The plan met with fierce opposition in both countries and was condemned vigorously by a large number of countries. Undeterred, Nansen worked with both Greece and Turkey to gain their acceptance of the proposed population exchange. About 1.5 million Greeks and half a million Muslims were moved from one side of the international border to the other.
Population transfer prevented further attacks on minorities in the respective states while Nansen was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace. As a result of the transfers, the Muslim minority in Greece and the Greek minority in Turkey were much reduced. Cyprus was not included in the Greco-Turkish population transfer of 1923 because it was under direct British control.
Central Europe
After the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divided
Poland during
World War II, Germans deported Poles and Jews from
Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany, while the
Soviet Union deported Germans and Poles from areas of Eastern Poland,
Kresy.
From 1940 on Hitler tried to get resettle Germans from the areas where they constituted a minority (the Baltics, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe) into the
Warthegau - the region around Poznan in present day Poland. For this reason he expelled the
Poles and
Jews who formed there the majority of the population. Before the war the
Germans constituted 16% of the population in the area.
The
Nazis initially tried to press Jews to emigration. In Austria they succeeded in driving out most of the Jewish population. But increasing foreign resistance brought this plan to a virtual halt. Later on Jews were transferred to
ghettoes and eventually to
death camps.
After World War II, when the
Curzon line was implemented, members of all ethnic groups were transferred to their respective new territories (Poles to Poland, Ukrainians to Ukraine). The same applied to the
Oder-Neisse line, where German citizens were transferred to Germany.
Germans were expelled from areas annexed by the
Soviet Union as well as territories such as the so-called
Sudetenland of
Czechoslovakia and
Hungary.
Soviet Union
Main articles: Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Shortly before, during and immediately after
World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Over 1.5 million people were deported to
Siberia and the
Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the
invading Germans were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations, although an ambition to
ethnically cleanse the regions may have also been a factor. After the
WWII, the population of
East Prussia was replaced by the Soviet one, mainly by
Russians.
South East Europe
In September 1940 with the return of Southern
Dobruja (the
Cadrilater) by
Romania to
Bulgaria under the
Treaty of Craiova, 80,000 Romanians were compelled to move north of the border, while 65,000 Bulgarians living in Northern
Dobruja moved into Bulgaria.
During the
Yugoslav wars of the
1990s, the breakup of
Yugoslavia caused large population transfers, mostly involuntary. Because it was a conflict fueled by
ethnic nationalism, people of minority ethnicity generally fled towards regions where their ethnicity was in a majority.
The phenomenon of "
ethnic cleansing" was first seen in
Croatia but soon spread to
Bosnia. Since the
Bosnian Muslims had no immediate refuge, they were arguably hardest hit by the ethnic violence. United Nations tried to create ''safe areas'' for Muslim populations of eastern Bosnia but in cases such as the
Srebrenica massacre, the peacekeeping troops failed to protect the ''safe areas'' resulting in the massacre of thousands of Muslims.
The
Dayton Accords ended the war in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, fixating the borders between the two warring parties roughly to the ones established by the autumn of 1995. One immediate result of the population transfer following the peace deal was a sharp decline in ethnic violence in the region.
See
Washington Post Balkan Report for a summary of the conflict, and
FAS analysis of former Yugoslavia for population ethnic distribution maps.
A massive and systematic deportation of
Serbia's
Albanians took place during the
Kosovo War of
1999, with around 800,000 Albanians (out of a population of about 1.5 million) forced to flee
Kosovo. This was quickly reversed at the war's end, but thousands of Serbs were in turn forced to flee into
Serbia proper.
A number of commanders and politicians, notably Serbia and Yugoslavia's former president
Slobodan Milošević, were put on trial by the
United Nations'
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for a variety of
war crimes, including deportations and genocide.
Caucasia
In the
Caucasian region of the
former Soviet Union the phenomenon of population transfer along ethnic lines has affected many thousands of individuals in
Armenia,
Nagorno-Karabakh and
Azerbaijan proper; from
Abkhazia,
South Ossetia and
Georgia proper; as well as from
Chechnya and adjacent areas within
Russia.
South Asia
When
British India became independent after the
Second World War its
Muslim inhabitants formed their own state consisting of two non-contiguous territorial entities:
East and
West Pakistan. In order to facilitate the creation of new states along
religious lines (as opposed to
racial or
linguistic lines)
population exchanges between India and Pakistan were implemented, at the expense of significant human suffering in the process. More than 5 million
Hindus moved from present-day Pakistan into present-day India, and more than 6 million
Muslims moved in the other direction. A large number of people (more than a million by some estimates) died in the accompanying violence.
On the
Indian Ocean island of
Diego Garcia between
1967 and
1973 the British Government forcibly removed 2000
Chagossian islanders to make way for a military base. Despite court judgments in their favour, they have not been allowed to return from their exile in
Mauritius, although there are signs that financial compensation along with an official apology is being considered by the British government.
Middle East
As the focus of all three of the major
Abrahamic religions —
Judaism,
Christianity, and
Islam — which have frequently been mutually antagonistic, the
Middle East has suffered periodic population transfers motivated by religious beliefs.
Kuwait expelled 500,000
Palestinian Arabs during the
Gulf War because of their support for Saddam Hussein's invasion.
Israel/Palestine
Main articles: Palestinian exodus,
Jewish exodus from Arab lands
Although not part of an officially orchestrated population transfer, a parallel of population movements in opposite directions occurred at the time of the
1948 Arab-Israeli War and during the following years. The majority of the
Arab population of the area of what is now the
State of Israel fled or was forced to leave in 1948-50. After the war, there was a large influx of
Jewish refugees as well as a smaller number of voluntary
Zionist immigrants into the newly established state. The
Palestinian exodus of between 420,000 and 910,000 during the
1948 Arab-Israeli war, was subsequently followed by the
Jewish exodus from Arab lands numbering between 758,000 and 866,000. While two thirds of these "
Arab Jewish" refugees settled in Israel, the bulk of the Palestinian Arab refugees from the former
British Mandate of Palestine ended up in the
Gaza strip,
[10] Cisjordan,
[11] Jordan,
Syria and
Lebanon. The cause of these population movements is hotly debated.
Although an actual population transfer between the Jews and the Arabs only took place around the period of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the idea of the transfer of Arabs from Palestine, usually to Iraq, had been on both the Zionist and non-Jewish agenda for about half a century beforehand.
Zionist leaders such as
Theodor Herzl,
David Ben-Gurion,
Chaim Weizmann and many others would repeatedly put forward such transfer proposals, and they were often of a compulsory nature. The American Presidents
Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Herbert Hoover likewise made such proposals. Even Arab leaders and pro-Arab personalities came out in favour of such a transfer. One of the recommendations in the Report of the British
Peel Commission in 1937 was for a transfer of Arabs from the area of the proposed Jewish state, and this even included a compulsory transfer from the Plains of Palestine. This recommendation was initially not objected to by the British Government.
[12]
During August 2005, Israel unilaterally evacuated all its
settlers (10,000) from the
Gaza Strip and northern
West Bank, areas occupied by Israel
[13][14][15][16], as part of the
disengagement plan.
Other kinds of transfer
A
penal colony such as
Georgia,
Botany Bay or
Devil's Island is a case-by-case transfer that may finally add up to a sizable population, but does not come under this heading. The movement of military POWs can be a case of transfer in cases where the numbers are large. (See
forced march,
Bataan Death March.)
See also
★
Ethnic cleansing
★
Deportation
★
Slave trade
★
Displaced person
★
Political migration
★
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
★
Refugee
★
Korematsu
References
1. Finkelstein, Norman ''Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd Ed'' (Verso, 2003) p.xiv - ''also'' An Introduction to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
2. ''Denver Journal of International Law and Policy'', Spring 2001, p116.
3. http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/0/683f547c28ac785880256766004ecdef?OpenDocument
4. http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/E.CN.4.Sub.2.1997.23.En?OpenDocument
5. http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/icc/statute/part-a.htm
6. Timothy V. Waters, ''On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing'', Paper 951, 2006, University of Mississippi School of Law. Retrieved on 2006, 12-13
7. http://www.jewishgates.com/file.asp?File_ID=68
8. http://www.webislam.com/numeros/2000/00_5/Articulos%2000_5/Andalusian_Reflections.htm
9. http://www.unm.edu/~phooper/thesis_condensed.pdf
10. Between 1949 and 1967, the Gaza strip was under Egypt's rule
11. Between 1949 and 1967, Cisjordan was under Jordan's rule
12. Morris (2003), ''The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited'', chapter : The Idea of Transfer in Zionist Thinking
13. Resolution 446, Resolution 465, Resolution 484, among others
14. Applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Jerusalem, and the other occupied Arab territories
15. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
16. Conference of High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention: statement by the International Committee of the Red Cross
★
A Brief History of Islam, Sonn, Tamara, , , Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2004, ISBN 1-4051-0900-9
★ A. De Zayas, International Law and Mass Population Transfers, Harvard International Law Journal 207 (1975).
External links
★
UN Report giving many details of historical population transfers and exchanges (continues at bottom of page)
★
Freedom of Movement - Human rights and population transfer - UN report on legal status of population transfers
★
Medieval Jewish expulsions from French territories
★
conceptwizard.com "History in a Nutshell", the source of population transfer statistics in the Middle East
★
Forced population transfers in early Ottoman imperial strategy, a comparative thesis that treats the subject in some detail, and includes a general evaluation of the use of population transfers by states in the pre-modern period
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