Forced Resettlement

Population transfer or resettlement is a type of mass migration, often imposed by state policy or international authority and most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion but also due to economic development. Banishment or exile is a similar process, but is forcibly applied to individuals and groups. Population transfer differs more than simply technically from individually motivated migration, but 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, the state may be able to claim that it is not to blame for the displacement.

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 process implies the loss of immovable property and substantial amounts of movable property when rushed. This transfer may be motivated by the more powerful party's desire to make other uses of the land in question or, less often, by disastrous environmental or economic conditions that require relocation.

The first known population transfers date back to Ancient Assyria in the 13th century BCE. The single largest population transfer in history was the Partition of India in 1947 that involved up to 12 million people in Punjab Province with a total of up to 20 million people across British India, with the second largest being the flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II, which involved more than 12 million people.

The last major population transfer in Europe was the deportation of 800,000 ethnic Albanians, during the Kosovo war in 1999. Moreover, some of the largest population transfers in Europe have been attributed to the ethnic policies of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The best-known recent example caused by economic development is that resulting from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Historical background

The earliest known examples of population transfers took place in the context of war and empire. As part of Sennacherib's campaign against King Hezekiah of Jerusalem (701 BCE) "200,150 people great and small, male and female" were transferred to other lands in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Similar population transfers occurred under the Persian and Byzantine Empires. Population transfers are considered incompatible with the values of post-Enlightenment European societies, but this was usually limited to the home territory of the colonial power itself, and population transfers continued in European colonies during the 20th century.

Specific types of population transfer

Population exchange

Population exchange is the transfer of two populations in opposite directions at about the same time. In theory at least, the exchange is non-forcible, but the reality of the effects of these exchanges has always been unequal, and at least one half of the so-called "exchange" has usually been forced by the stronger or richer participant. Such exchanges have taken place several times in the 20th century:
* The partition of India and Pakistan
* The mass expulsion of Anatolian Greeks and Balkan Turks from Turkey and Greece, respectively, during their so-called Greek-Turkish population exchange. It involved approximately 1.3 million Anatolian Christians (majority Greek) and 354,000 Balkan Muslims (majority Turkish), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and ''de jure'' denaturalized from their homelands.

Ethnic dilution

Ethnic dilution is the practice of enacting immigration policies to relocate parts of an ethnically and/or culturally dominant population into a region populated by an ethnic minority or otherwise culturally different or non-mainstream group to dilute and eventually to transform the native ethnic population into the mainstream culture over time.

Changes in international law

According to the political scientist Norman Finkelstein, population transfer was considered as an acceptable solution to the problems of ethnic conflict until around World War II and even for a time afterward. Transfer was considered a drastic but "often necessary" means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war. The feasibility of population transfer was hugely increased by the creation of railroad networks from the mid-19th century. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" (written during the World War II evacuation and expulsions in Europe), observed:

:"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things... can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.... Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called ''transfer of population'' or ''rectification of frontiers''."

The view of international law on population transfer underwent considerable evolution during the 20th century. Prior to World War II, many major population transfers were the result of bilateral treaties and had the support of international bodies such as the League of Nations. The expulsion of Germans after World War II from Central and Eastern Europe after World War II was sanctioned by the Allies in Article 13 of the Potsdam communiqué, but research has shown that both the British and the American delegations at Potsdam strongly objected to the size of the population transfer that had already taken place and was accelerating in the summer of 1945. The principal drafter of the provision, Geoffrey Harrison, explained that the article was intended not to approve the expulsions but to find a way to transfer the competence to the Control Council in Berlin to regulate the flow.
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. That 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 that 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." No legal distinction is made between one-way and two-way transfers since the rights of each individual are regarded as independent of the experience of others.

Article 49 of Fourth Geneva Convention (adopted in 1949 and now part of customary international law) prohibits mass movement of people out of or into occupied territory under belligerent military occupation:

An interim report of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1993) says:

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) invoked numerous 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). The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has indicted and sometimes convicted a number of politicians and military commanders indicted for forced deportations in that region.

Ethnic cleansing encompasses "deportation or forcible transfer of population" and the force involved may involve other crimes, including crimes against humanity. Nationalist agitation can harden public support, one way or the other, for or against population transfer as a solution to current or possible future ethnic conflict, and attitudes can be cultivated by supporters of either plan of action with its supportive propaganda used as a typical political tool by which their goals can be achieved.

Timothy V. Waters argues, in "On the Legal Construction of Ethnic Cleansing," that the expulsions of the ethnic 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. His paper has, however, been rebutted by Jakob Cornides's study "The Sudeten German Question after EU Enlargement."

In Europe

France

Two famous transfers connected with the history of France are the banning of the religion of the Jews in 1308 and that of the Huguenots, French Protestants by the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. Religious warfare over the Protestants led to many seeking refuge in the Low Countries, England and Switzerland. In the early 18th century, some Huguenots emigrated to colonial America. In both cases, the population was not forced out but rather their religion was declared illegal and so many left the country.

According to Ivan Sertima, Louis XV ordered all blacks to be deported from France but was unsuccessful. At the time, they were mostly free people of color from the Caribbean and Louisiana colonies, usually descendants of French colonial men and African women. Some fathers sent their mixed-race sons to France to be educated or gave them property to be settled there. Others entered the military, as did Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of Alexandre Dumas.

Ireland

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Act of Settlement in 1652, most indigenous Irish Catholic land holders had their lands confiscated and were banned from living in planted towns. An unknown number, possibly as high as 100,000 Irish were removed to the colonies in the West Indies and North America as indentured servants.

In addition, the Crown supported a series of population transfers into Ireland to enlarge the loyal Protestant population of Ireland. Known as the plantations, they had migrants come chiefly from Scotland and the northern border counties of England. In the late eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish constituted the largest group of immigrants from the British Isles to enter the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolutionary War.

Scotland

The enclosures that depopulated rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started during the Middle Ages. Similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances.

The Highland Clearances were forced displacements of the populations of the Scottish Highlands and Scottish Islands in the 18th century. They led to mass emigration to the coast, the Scottish Lowlands and abroad, including to the Thirteen Colonies, Canada and the Caribbean.

Central Europe

Historically, expulsions of Jews and of Romani people reflect the power of state control that has been applied as a tool, in the form of expulsion edicts, laws, mandates etc., against them for centuries.

After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact divided Poland during World War II, Germans deported Poles and Jews from Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union deported Poles from areas of Eastern Poland, Kresy to Siberia and Kazakhstan. From 1940, Adolf Hitler tried to get Germans to resettle from the areas in which they were the minority (the Baltics, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe) to the Warthegau, the region around Poznań, German ''Posen''. He expelled the Poles and Jews who formed there the majority of the population. Before the war, the Germans were 16% of the population in the area.

The Nazis initially tried to press Jews to emigrate and in Austria succeeded in driving out most of the Jewish population. However, increasing foreign resistance brought the plan to a virtual halt. Later on, Jews were transferred to ghettoes and eventually to death camps. Use of forced labor in Nazi Germany during World War II occurred on a large scale. Jews who had signed over properties in Germany and Austria during Nazism, although coerced to do so, found it nearly impossible to be reimbursed after World War II, partly because of the ability of governments to make the "personal decision to leave" argument.

The Germans abducted about 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds of whom came from Eastern Europe.
After World War II, when the Curzon line, which had been proposed in 1919 by the Western Allies as Poland's eastern border, was implemented, members of all ethnic groups were transferred to their respective new territories ( Poles to Poland, Ukrainians to Soviet Ukraine). The same applied to the formerly-German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, where German citizens were transferred to Germany. Germans were expelled from areas annexed by the Soviet Union and Poland as well as territories of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. From 1944 until 1948, between 13.5 and 16.5 million Germans were expelled, evacuated or fled from Central and Eastern Europe. The Statistisches Bundesamt (federal statistics office) estimates the loss of life at 2.1 million

Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges. Poles residing east of the new Poland-Soviet border were deported to Poland (2,100,000 persons), and Ukrainians that resided west of the New border were deported to Soviet Ukraine. Population transfer to Soviet Ukraine occurred from September 1944 to May 1946 (450,000 persons). Some Ukrainians (200,000 persons) left southeast Poland more or less voluntarily (between 1944 and 1945). The second event occurred in 1947 under Operation Vistula.

Nearly 20 million people in Europe fled their homes or were expelled, transferred or exchanged during the process of sorting out ethnic groups between 1944 and 1951.

Spain

In 1492 the Jewish population of Spain was expelled through the Alhambra Decree. Some of the Jews went to North Africa; others east into Poland, France and Italy, and other Mediterranean countries.

In 1609, was the Expulsion of the Moriscos, 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.

Southeastern Europe

In September 1940, with the return of Southern Dobruja by Romania to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova, a population exchange was carried out. 103,711 Romanians, Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians were compelled to move north of the border, while 62,278 Bulgarians living in Northern Dobruja were forced to move into Bulgaria.

Around 360,000 Bulgarian Turks fled Bulgaria during the Revival Process.

During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, the breakup of Yugoslavia caused large population transfers, mostly involuntary. As it was a conflict fueled by ethnic nationalism, people of minority ethnicities generally fled towards regions that their ethnicity was the 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 the hardest hit by the ethnic violence. United Nations tried to create ''safe areas'' for Muslim populations of eastern Bosnia but in the Srebrenica massacre and elsewhere, the peacekeeping troops failed to protect the ''safe areas'', resulting in the massacre of thousands of Muslims.

The Dayton Accords ended the war in B