1900s–1910s • The
Herero and Namaqua genocide was a campaign of racial extermination and
collective punishment that the German Empire undertook in
German South West Africa (modern-day
Namibia) against the Herero, Nama and San people. It is considered the first
genocide of the 20th century.Germany Acknowledges Genocide in Namibia but Stops Short of Reparations • During the
Balkan Wars,
ethnic cleansings were carried out in
Kosovo,
Macedonia,
Sandžak and
Thrace. At first, they were committed against the Muslim population, but later, they were also committed against Christians. Villages were burned and people were massacred. The
Bulgarians,
Serbs and
Greeks burned villages and massacred Turkish civilians. Roughly 632,000 Muslims (27% of the pre-war population in Ottoman Europe) were killed or died of starvation and disease during the conflict. Over 812,000 became refugees; in total, an estimated 1,5 Million Ottoman Muslims were either killed or forcibly exiled by the end of the wars. The Turks massacred Bulgarian and Greek as revenge killis, but they did not massacre any Greeks during the
Second Balkan War. The women and children were also raped and frequently slaughtered during each massacre. In Kilkish, Doiran, and Ghevgheli, almost all leading Muslim citizens were executed and their property destroyed. During the
Second Balkan War, an ethnic cleansing campaign was carried out by the
Ottoman Army and Turkish
Bashi-bazouks exterminated the whole Bulgarian population of the
Ottoman Adrianople Vilayet (an estimated 300,000 people before the war) and displacing the survivors of the massacres (60,000). Under Greek occupation,
Bulgarian Macedonians were persecuted, expelled from their homes and forced to move north of the border with Bulgaria. The Bulgarians had expelled 100,000 Greeks from Macedonia and
West Thrace before the territories were returned to Greece. In addition to the dead, the aftermath of the war counts 890,000 people who permanently left their homes, of whom 400,000 fled to Turkey, 170,000 fled to Greece, 150,000 or 280,000 fled to Bulgaria. The population size of Bulgarians in
Macedonia was mostly reduced by forceful assimilation campaigns through terror, following the ban of the use of the Bulgarian language and declarations which are named "Declare yourself a Serb or die"; signers were required to renounce their Bulgarian identity on paper in Serbia and Greece. • During the
Bulgarian occupation of Serbia in WWI, the civilian population was exposed to various measures of repression, including mass internment,
forced labor, and a
Bulgarisation policy. Bulgarian policy in Macedonia, and to some degree in occupied Serbia, was motivated by what historian Alan Kramer has termed a 'dynamic of destruction' a desire not just to defeat the enemy militarily, but also to erase all traces of its culture and destroy any evidence that it had ever been there at all. Academic
Paul Mojzes writes that "ethnic cleansing (at a minimum)" took place during 1915-1918. and
Armenian refugee children near Athens, Greece, in 1923, following their expulsion from Turkey. • The
Armenian genocide and the
Greek genocide which occurred in Anatolia (Turkey) both during and after
World War I was implemented in two phases:
Turks committed the wholesale killing of the entire able-bodied male population through massacres and forced labor, this killing was followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and the infirm to the
Syrian Desert on
death marches. Between 2 and 3 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians were killed during this period. In addition to being described as a genocide, it is often described as an ethnic cleansing campaign in academic literature. Considered a
single event by some historians, this genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century and it was also the largest genocide in terms of the number of victims until the
Holocaust. • The
Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000
Don Cossacks during the
Russian Civil War, in 1919–1920.
Geoffrey Hosking stated "It could be argued that the
Red policy towards the Don Cossacks amounted to ethnic cleansing. It was short-lived, however, and soon abandoned because it did not fit with normal Leninist theory and practice". • Through the
Interwar period, between 90,000 and 300,000 Albanians were deported from the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia and up to 80,000 were killed during the
Yugoslav colonization of Kosovo.
1920s–1930s , 1922 • In 1920–21, the Greek army on the
Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula burned dozens of Turkish/Muslim villages, engaging in large-scale violence and ethnic cleansing. • The
population exchange between Greece and Turkey has been described as an ethnic cleansing. Over 1.2 million ethnic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1922-1924 while Greece expelled 400,000 Muslims. In 1928, 1,104,216 Ottoman Greek refugees were still living in Greece. •
Pacification of Libya, Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing in the
Cyrenaica region of
Libya by forcibly removing and relocating 100,000 members of the Cyrenaican indigenous population from their valuable land and property that was slated to be given to Italian settlers. • The Chinese
Kuomintang Generals
Ma Qi and
Ma Bufang launched campaigns of expulsion in
Qinghai and
Tibet against ethnic Tibetans. The actions of these Generals have been called Genocidal by some authors. • Authors Uradyn Erden Bulag called the events that follow as a Genocide while David Goodman named them ethnic cleansing: The
Republic of China supported
Ma Bufang when he launched seven extermination expeditions into
Golog, eliminating thousands of Tibetans. Some Tibetans counted the number of times he attacked them, remembering the seventh attack which made their lives impossible. Ma was highly
anti-communist, and he and his army wiped out many Tibetans in the northeast and eastern Qinghai, and they also destroyed
Tibetan Buddhist Temples. • The
Mexican Repatriation from 1929 to 1939 in which mass deportations and repatriations of
Mexicans and
Mexican Americans occurred in response to poverty and
nativist fears which were triggered by the
Great Depression in the United States has been called ethnic cleansing. An estimated forty to sixty percent of the 355,000 to 2 million people who were repatriated were birthright U.S. citizens – an overwhelming number of them were children. Voluntary repatriations were much more common than deportations. Legal scholar Kevin Johnson states that it meets modern legal standards for ethnic cleansing, arguing it involved the forced removal of an ethnic minority by the government. • The
Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian famine, was a massive man-made
famine in
Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of
Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider
Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the
Soviet Union. As of January 2026, 33 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide. • The
Simele massacre of 1933 was carried out by the
Royal Iraqi Army under the command of
Bakr Sidqi, as well as with the participation of Arab and Kurdish tribes. It's estimated that nearly 6,000 Assyrians perished as a result of the massacre, with 100s of villages flattened. • The
deportation of 172,000 Soviet Koreans by the Soviet government in September 1937, in which Koreans were moved away from the Korean border and deported to Central Asia, where they were made to do
forced labor.
1940s . 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. ,
German, and
Ukrainian populations were expelled, or ethnically cleansed by the Soviet Union and
Poland. in 1943. Most Poles of Volhynia (now in Ukraine) had either been murdered or had fled the area. •
Nazi Germany carried out the
Romani genocide or the Porajmos from 1936-1945: the killing of an estimated 130,565 Romani people by
Nazi Germany, with some estimates ranging from 220,000 to 500,000. • Nazi Germany carried out the
Holocaust from 1938-1945: The murder of an estimated 6 million Jews both inside Germany and throughout
German occupied territories, and some of its independent allies such as the governments of Romania,
Hungary, and
Bulgaria (outside Bulgarian core territories). • Nazi Germany carried out the murder of an estimated 1.795 million non-Jewish Poles. • Nazi Germany carried out the murder of an estimated 3,000,000 Ukrainians. • Nazi Germany carried out the murder of an estimated 1,593,000 Russians. Between 200,000-500,000 Serbs, and approximately 25,000 Roma and 30,000 Jews were killed in the NDH. •
Chetnik atrocities against Bosniaks and Croats in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1941 to 1945 have been characterised as organised
ethnic cleansing. It is estimated that around 32,000 Croats (20,000 from Croatia, and 12,000 from Bosnia) and 33,000 Bosniaks were killed. •
Population transfers in the Soviet Union during and after World War II on the orders of
Joseph Stalin, including the
deportation of the Karachays,
deportation of the Balkars,
deportation of the Chechens and Ingush,
deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, deportation of Romanians from Bucovina and Hertsa and the
deportation of the Kalmyks. Nearly 3.5 million ethnic minorities were resettled during 1940–1952. • Towards the end of World War II, over 16,600
ethnic Albanian Muslims were expelled from the coastal region of Epirus in northwestern Greece by the
EDES paramilitary organization, supported by the state. • The
expulsion of 14 million ethnic Germans from the Central and Eastern European countries of
Czechoslovakia,
Hungary,
Poland (including former German territories annexed to it),
Romania, and Yugoslavia after World War II. This policy was sanctioned by the Allies at the
Potsdam Conference (though not for Romania or Yugoslavia). • The 1945-1947 Czechoslovak
deportations of ethnic Hungarians from Slovakia to Czech lands. • In 1945, Dutch minister of Justice
Hans Kolfschoten planned to forcibly deport all Germans living in the Netherlands. Ultimately, about 15% of German residents were deported. • During the
Partition of India 6 million Muslims fled ethnic violence taking place in India to settle in what became Pakistan (and by 1971,
Bangladesh) and 5 million Hindus and Sikhs fled from what became Pakistan and Bangladesh, to settle in India. The events which occurred during this time period have been described as ethnic cleansing by Ishtiaq Ahmed and by
Barbara and
Thomas R. Metcalf. • In 1947, the
Istrian–Dalmatian exodus took place. It was an ethnic cleansing operated by
Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavian communist partisans against
Istrian Italians and
Dalmatian Italians which forced 230,000-350,000 Italians to flee the former territories of the
Kingdom of Italy towards
Italy, and in smaller numbers, towards the
Americas,
Australia and
South Africa. From 1947, after the war, they were subject by Yugoslav authorities to less violent forms of intimidation, such as nationalization, expropriation, and discriminatory taxation, which gave them little option other than emigration. In 1953, there were 36,000 declared Italians in Yugoslavia, just about 16% of the original Italian population before World War II. The type of attack was
state terrorism and ethnic cleansing against
Italians. • In 1947, the
Jammu Massacre took place. The event has been described as ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the
Jammu region of
Jammu and Kashmir. from what is now Israel in an event called the
Nakba. • The
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, part of the
Nakba and the
1948 Palestine war, was the expulsion of much of the native Arab population of
Palestine. It has been considered to be ethnic cleansing by many scholars, including
Ilan Pappé,
Mark Levene,
Ronit Lentin,
Derek Penslar,
Yair Auron,
Alon Confino and others. For more information see
list of towns and villages depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war,
list of estimates of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, and
causes of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight.
1950s of two young
Yemenite Jews in
Ma'abarot refugee camps. • In
1950–1951 over 150,000 Turks were forcefully evicted from
Bulgaria. • From 5–6 September 1955, the
Istanbul pogrom or "Septembrianá"/"Σεπτεμβριανά", secretly backed by the Turkish government, was launched against the Greek population of
Istanbul. The mob also attacked some
Jewish and
Armenian residents of the city. The event contributed greatly to the gradual extinction of the Greek minority in the city and throughout the entire country, which numbered 100,000 in 1924 after the Turko-Greek population exchange treaty. By 2006 there were only 2,500 Greeks living in Istanbul. • The
Jewish exodus from Muslim countries, the flight of over 1 million
Jews of the Islamic world, mainly
Mizrahi and
Sephardic. Many Arab governments, such as
Gaddafi's Libya,
Nasserist Egypt, and
Hafez al-Assad's Syria, confiscated Jewish bank accounts and property of Jews who had departed, in addition to placing laws restricting Jewish business. The episode is sometimes labelled one of ethnic cleansing.
1960s • 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 fear among the approximately 100,000
whites still resident in the Congo and led to their mass exodus from the country. •
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. They migrated to escape racial discrimination and wholesale nationalisation of private enterprises a few years later in 1964. • The
1962 Rajshahi massacres in
East Pakistan (modern-day
Bangladesh) witnessed the killing of minorities, mostly
Buddhists and
Hindus, by
Muslims. More than 3,000
non-Muslims were killed. In 1958,
Ayub Khan came to power in
Pakistan, and from the beginning the policy of the Ayub Regime was to cleanse East Pakistan of
Bengali Hindus and other
minorities. There was also arson, rapes, and
looting. This ethnic cleansing campaign resulted in the migration of 11,000
Santhals and
Rajbanshis to India. • In 1964, the
1964 East Pakistan riots occurred which resulted in more than 10,000
Bengali Hindus being targeted and systematically killed by
Bengali Muslims. In the village of Mainam near Nagaon in
Rajshahi District all
Hindus except 2 little girls were massacred. This resulted in more than 135,000 refugees. This left more than 100,000 Hindus homeless. 95% of the ruined houses belonged to Hindus who lived in
Old Dhaka. • The
expulsion of the Chagossians from the
Chagos Archipelago by the United Kingdom, at the request of the United States to establish a military base, started in 1968 and concluded in 1973.
1970s • The
Arab Belt program was an ethnic cleansing campaign which was waged by the
Ba'athist Syrian government of
Hafez al-Assad between 1973 and 1976. By implementing its Arab Belt programme, the Syrian government sought to change the demographics of the northern parts of the
Al-Hasakah region by sending Arab settlers, and changing the ethnic composition of the population in favor of
Arabs to the detriment of other
ethnic groups, particularly the
Syrian Kurds. • There was an ethnic cleansing of the
Greek population of the areas under Turkish military occupation in
Cyprus in 1974–76 during and after the
Turkish invasion of Cyprus. This has been the subject of litigation in the
European Court of Human Rights in cases including
Loizidou v. Turkey and the European Court of Justice in cases like
Apostolides v Orams. • Following the U.S. withdrawal from
South Vietnam in 1973 and the
communist victory two years later, the
Kingdom of Laos's coalition government was overthrown by the
communists. The
Hmong people, who had actively supported Laos's
anti-communist government, were targeted for
retaliation and
persecution. The government that replaced the monarchy in Laos has been accused of committing a
Genocide against the Hmong, in which as many as 100,000 Hmong have been killed. • The
Communist Khmer Rouge government in
Cambodia disproportionately targeted ethnic minority groups, including ethnic
Chinese,
Vietnamese and
Thais. In the late 1960s, an estimated 425,000 ethnic
Chinese lived in Cambodia; by 1984, as a result of
Khmer Rouge genocide and emigration, only about 61,400 Chinese remained in the country. The small Thai minority along the border was almost completely exterminated, with only a few thousand managing to reach safety in Thailand. The Muslim
Cham Minority was subjected to intense
purges in which as many as 80% of the Chams were exterminated. The Khmer Rouge's racial supremacist ideology was the motive for this ethnic purge. 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). • Subsequent waves of hundreds of thousands of
Rohingya fled
Burma and many refugees inundated neighbouring Bangladesh including 250,000 in 1978 as a result of the
Operation Dragon King in Arakan.
1980s •
The forced assimilation campaign during 1984–1985 directed against ethnic
Turks by the Bulgarian State resulted in the
mass emigration of some 360,000
Bulgarian Turks to Turkey in 1989 has been characterized as ethnic cleansing. • In
May 1985, following an armed incident near the Niger-Libya border, all non-Nigerien
Tuaregs were expelled from the
country. • In 1989 Uzbek nationalists attacked Meskhetian Turkish minority causing
Fergana Valley massacre. 112 people were killed, 1032 injured, 17,000 Meskhetian Turks were evacuated immediately by Soviet troops and 60,000
Meskhetian Turks left
Uzbekistan. • The
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has resulted in the displacement of populations from both sides. Among the displaced are 700,000
Azerbaijanis and several Kurds from ethnic Armenian-controlled territories including
Armenia and areas of
Nagorno-Karabakh, more than 353,000
Armenians were forced to flee from territories controlled by
Azerbaijan plus some 80,000 had to flee Armenian border territories.
1990s refugee in a tractor trailer leaving her home during
Operation Storm • In 1990, inter-ethnic tensions escalated in
Bhutan, resulting in the flight of many
Lhotshampa, or ethnic Nepalis, from Bhutan to Nepal, many of whom were expelled by the Bhutanese military. By 1996, over 100,000
Bhutanese refugees were living in refugee camps in Nepal. Many have since been resettled in Western nations. One reason for this expulsion was the desire of the Bhutanese government to remove a largely
Hindu population and preserve its
Buddhist culture and identity. • In 1991, as part of the
First Nagorno-Karabakh War, during
Operation Ring, Soviet troops and the predominantly
Azerbaijani soldiers in the
AzSSR OMON and army forcibly uprooted
Armenians living in the 24 villages strewn across
Shahumyan to leave their homes and settle elsewhere in Nagorno-Karabakh or in the neighboring
Armenian SSR. Human rights organizations documented a wide number of human rights violations and abuses committed by Soviet and Azerbaijani forces and many of them properly characterised them as ethnic cleansing. These violations and abuses included forced deportations of civilians, unlawful killings, torture, kidnapping harassment, rape and the wanton seizure or destruction of property. Despite fierce protests, no measures were taken either to prevent the human rights abuses or to punish the perpetrators. • In 1991, following a major crackdown on
Rohingya Muslims in
Burma, 250,000 refugees took shelter in the
Cox's Bazar district of neighboring
Bangladesh. • After the
Gulf War in 1991,
Kuwait conducted a
campaign of expulsion against the
Palestinians living in the country, who before the war had numbered 400,000. Some 200,000 who had fled during the Iraqi occupation were banned from returning, while the remaining 200,000 were pressured into leaving by the authorities, who conducted a campaign of terror, violence, and economic pressure to get them to leave. The
Kuwaiti Palestinians expelled from Kuwait moved to
Jordan, where they had citizenship. • As a result of the
1991–1992 South Ossetia War, about 100,000 ethnic
Ossetians fled
South Ossetia and Georgia proper, most across the border into North Ossetia. A further 23,000 ethnic
Georgians fled South Ossetia and settled in other parts of
Georgia. • According to
Helsinki Watch, the campaign of ethnic-cleansing was orchestrated by the Ossetian militants, during the events of the
Ossetian–Ingush conflict, which resulted in the
expulsion of approximately 60,000
Ingush inhabitants from Prigorodny District. • The widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the
Croatian War of Independence that was committed by Serb-led
Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and rebel militia in the occupied areas of Croatia (self-proclaimed
Republic of Serbian Krajina) (1991–1995). Large numbers of Croats and non-Serbs were removed, either by murder, deportation or by being forced to flee. According to the
ICTY indictment against
Slobodan Milošević, estimates of the total number of expelled Croats and other non-Serbs during the Croatian War of Independence range between 170,000 (ICTY), to 250,000 (
Human Rights Watch), in addition to an estimated 10,000 Croats who were also killed. Also,
around 10,000 or more Croats left Vojvodina in 1992 due to persecution by Serb nationalists.
Milan Martić,
Milan Babić,
Vojislav Šešelj,
Jovica Stanišić and
Franko Simatović were convicted by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or
Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) for persecution on racial, ethnic or religious ground,
deportation and/or
forcible displacement as a
crime against humanity. • In February 1992, hundreds of ethnic
Azeris and
Meskhetian Turks were
massacred as Armenian troops captured the city of
Khojaly in Nagorno-Karabakh. •
Widespread ethnic cleansing accompanied the
War in Bosnia (1992–1995). Large numbers of
Croats and
Bosniaks were forced to flee their homes by the
Army of the Republika Srpska, large numbers of
Serbs and
Bosniaks by the
Croatian Defence Council. Beginning in 1991, political upheavals in the
Balkans displaced about 2,700,000 people by mid-1992, of which over 700,000 sought asylum in other parts of Europe. In September 1994, UNHCR representatives estimated around 80,000 non-Serbs out of 837,000 who initially lived on the Serb-controlled territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war remained there; an estimated removal of 90% of the Bosniak and Croat inhabitants of Serb-coveted territory, almost all of whom were deliberately forced out of their homes. It also includes ethnic cleansing of non-Croats in the breakaway state the
Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. The ICTY convicted several officials for persecution, forced transfer and/or deportation, including
Momčilo Krajišnik,
Radoslav Brđanin,
Stojan Župljanin,
Mićo Stanišić,
Biljana Plavšić,
Jovica Stanišić.
Franko Simatović, • The
Rwandan genocide occurred from 7 April to 19 July 1994 during the
Rwandan Civil War.