List of ethnic cleansing campaigns

This article lists incidents that have been termed ethnic cleansing by some academic or legal experts.

Not all experts agree on every case, particularly since there are a variety of definitions of the term ethnic cleansing.

There is significant scholarly disagreement around the definition of ethnic cleansing and which events fall under this classification.

[1] [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.

Judaean people being deported after the Siege of Lachish ; wall relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh
Expulsions of Jews in Europe from 1100 to 1600
After Cromwell 's conquest of Ireland, huge areas of land were confiscated and the Irish Catholics were banished to the lands of Connacht .
The Batak massacre , an example of ethnic cleansing by Ottoman irregular troops in Bulgaria in 1876.
Portrait of Circassian refugees evicted from their towns and villages during the Circassian genocide . According to some authors, the Russian Empire massacred and forcibly deported 95-97% of all Circassians through military campaigns designated by the Russian army as “ ochishchenie ” (cleansing). [ 19 ] [ 20 ]
Greek and Armenian refugee children near Athens, Greece, in 1923, following their expulsion from Turkey.
Greek refugees from Smyrna , 1922
Deportation of the Soviet Koreans in 1937
Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany . Poles are led to trains under German army escort, as part of the ethnic cleansing of western Poland annexed to the German Reich following the invasion .
The bodies of the dead lie awaiting burial in a mass grave at the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen
Emaciated corpses of Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto
Prisoners sort through shoes thought to belong to Hungarian Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers after arrival to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Post-World War II border changes of Poland. The respective Polish , German , and Ukrainian populations were expelled, or ethnically cleansed by the Soviet Union and Poland .
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943. Most Poles of Volhynia (now in Ukraine) had either been murdered or had fled the area.
Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes or made to flee from what is now Israel in an event called the Nakba . [ 117 ]
An old picture from 1950 showing Yemenite Jews in Ma'abarot, a series of refugee camps in Israel.
A colour photograph of two young Yemenite Jews in Ma'abarot refugee camps.
The cemetery at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery to Genocide Victims
Bhutanese refugees in Nepal
Ethnic cleansing of a Croatian home
An elderly Serb refugee in a tractor trailer leaving her home during Operation Storm
Kosovo Albanian refugees in 1999
Refugees of the fighting in the Central African Republic , 19 January 2014
Rohingya refugees from Myanmar , March 2017
Mass grave of civilians in Tigray
1,500 Ukrainian children from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia at Yevpatoria , Russian-occupied Crimea , October 2022
Flight of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians in September 2023