Population transfer
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 security or disastrous environmental or economic conditions that require relocation.
Population transfers can also be imposed to further economic development, for instance China relocated 1.3 million residents in order to construct the Three Gorges Dam.
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.
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.
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" (written during the World War II evacuation and expulsions in Europe), observed: 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 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.
"Deportation or forcible transfer of population" is defined as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 7).
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.
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 Statistisches Bundesamt (federal statistics office) estimates the loss of life at 2.1 million [28] Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted population exchanges.
[38] A number of commanders and politicians, notably Serbia and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, were put on trial by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for a variety of war crimes, including deportations and genocide.
[44] Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Joseph Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale, which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.
Much of the current knowledge of Inca population transfers comes from their description by the Spanish chroniclers Pedro Cieza de León and Bernabé Cobo.
The Spanish conquerors continued these Inca policies settling for example thousands of indigenous yanakuna from what is today Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru in the newly conquered central Chile.
The Canadian Indian residential school system and the Indian reserve system (which forced Indigenous peoples off traditional territories and into small parcels of crown land in order to establish agricultural and industrial developments, and to begin the process of settler colonialism) are key to this history and have been seen by many scholars as evidence of the government's intent to "extinguish Aboriginal title through administrative and bureaucratic means".
The relocation has been a source of controversy, and is an understudied aspect of forced migration instigated by the Canadian federal government to assert its sovereignty in the Far North against the Soviet Union.
Until 1949, four years after World War II had ended, all persons of Japanese heritage were systematically removed from their homes and businesses and sent to internment camps.
During and after the American Revolutionary War, many Loyalists were deprived of life, liberty or property or suffered lesser physical harm, sometimes under acts of attainder and sometimes by main force.
As a result, many chose or were forced to leave their former homes in what became the United States, often going to Canada, where the Crown promised them land in an effort at compensation and resettlement.
[citation needed] As part of the California Genocide, in August 1863, all Konkow Maidu were to be sent to the Bidwell Ranch in Chico and then be taken to the Round Valley Reservation at Covelo in Mendocino County.
11 is the title of a Union Army decree which was issued during the American Civil War on 25 August 1863, forcing the evacuation of rural areas in four counties in western Missouri.
The Ottoman Empire colonized newly conquered territories by deportation (sürgün) and resettlement, often to populate empty lands and establish settlements in logistically useful places.
[53] This type of resettlement primarily aimed to support daily governance of the Empire, but sometimes population transfers had ethnic or political concerns.
The Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, working with the League of Nations as a High Commissioner for Refugees in 1919, proposed the idea of a forced population transfer.
Under Tahmasp I the Safavids deported a huge portion of the Kurdish population in Anatolia to Khorasan, creating the modern Khorasani Kurds.
Some Kurdish tribes were deported farther east, into Gharjistan in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, about 1500 miles away from their former homes in western Kurdistan.
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.
Despite court judgments in their favour, they have not been allowed to return from their exile in Mauritius, but there are signs that financial compensation and an official apology are being considered by the British government.
The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agricultural communes.
