Jingkang incident In 1127, during the
Jin–Song wars, the forces of the
Jurchen-led
Jin dynasty besieged and sacked the Imperial palaces in Bianjing (present-day
Kaifeng), the capital of the
Han-led
Song dynasty. The Jin forces captured the Song ruler,
Emperor Qinzong, along with his father, the
retired Emperor
Huizong, as well as many members of the
imperial family and officials of the Song imperial court. According to
The Accounts of Jingkang, Jin troops looted the imperial library and palace. Jin troops also abducted all the female servants and imperial musicians. The imperial family was abducted and their residences were looted. Facing the prospect of captivity and enslavement by the Jurchens, numerous palace women chose to take their own lives. The remaining captives, over 14,000 people, were forced to march alongside the seized assets towards the Jin capital. Their entourage – almost all the ministers and generals of the Northern Song dynasty – suffered from illness, dehydration, and exhaustion, and many never made it. Upon arrival, each person had to go through a ritual where the person had to be naked and wearing only sheep skins.
African slave trade and their captives on the
Ruvuma River Forced marches were utilized against slaves who were bought or captured by slave traders in
Africa. They were shipped to other lands as part of the
East African slave trade with
Zanzibar and the
Atlantic slave trade. Sometimes, the merchants shackled the slaves and provided insufficient food. Slaves who became too weak to walk were frequently killed or left to die.
David Livingstone wrote of the East African slave trade:
Forced displacement of Native Americans |left As part of Native American removal in the United States, approximately 6,000
Choctaw were forced to leave
Mississippi and move to the newly forming
Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) in 1831. Only about 4,000 Choctaw arrived in 1832. In 1836, after the
Creek War, the
United States Army deported 2,500
Muskogee from
Alabama in chains as prisoners of war. The rest of the tribe (12,000) followed, deported by the Army. Upon arrival to Indian Territory, 3,500 died of infection. In 1838, the
Cherokee Nation was forced by order of President
Andrew Jackson to march westward towards Indian Territory. This march became known as the
Trail of Tears. An estimated 4,000 men, women, and children died during relocation. When the
Round Valley Indian Reservation was established, the
Yuki people (as they came to be called) of Round Valley were forced into a difficult and unusual situation. Their traditional homeland was not completely taken over by settlers as in other parts of California. Instead, a small part of it was reserved especially for their use as well as the use of other Indians, many of whom were enemies of the Yuki. The Yuki had to share their home with strangers who spoke other languages, lived with other beliefs, and used the land and its products differently. Indians came to Round Valley as they did to other reservations– by force. The word "drive," widely used at the time, is descriptive of the practice of "rounding up" Indians and "driving" them like cattle to the reservation where they were "corralled" by high picket fences. Such drives took place in all weathers and seasons, and the elderly and sick often did not survive. During the
Long Walk of the Navajo 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. Any Indians remaining in the area were to be shot. Maidu were rounded up and marched under guard west out of the Sacramento Valley and through to the Coastal Range. 461 Native Americans started the trek, 277 finished. They reached Round Valley on 18 September 1863. After the
Yavapai Wars, 375
Yavapai perished during deportations out of 1,400 remaining Yavapai.
Congo Free State King Leopold II sanctioned the creation of "child colonies" in his
Congo Free State which had orphaned Congolese kidnapped and sent to schools operated by Catholic missionaries in which they would learn to work or be soldiers; these were the only schools funded by the state. More than 50% of the children sent to the schools died of disease, and thousands more died in the forced marches into the colonies. In one such march, 108 boys were sent over to a mission school and only 62 survived, eight of whom died a week later.
Dungan Revolt (1862–1877) During the
Dungan Revolt (1862–1877), 700,000 to 800,000
Hui Muslims from
Shaanxi were deported to
Gansu in China, in a process in which most were killed along the way from thirst, starvation, and massacres by the militia escorting them, with only a few thousand surviving.
Armenian genocide The
Armenian genocide resulted in the death of up to 1,500,000 people from 1915 to 1918. Under the cover of
World WarI, the
Young Turks sought to cleanse
Turkey of its Armenian population. As a result, much of the Armenian population was exiled from large parts of
Western Armenia and forced to march to the Syrian desert. Many were
raped, tortured, and killed on their way to the 25 concentration camps set up in the Syrian desert. The most infamous camps were the
Deir ez-Zor camps, where an estimated 150,000 Armenians were killed.
World War I Grand Duke Nicolas, who was still commander-in-chief of the Western forces, after suffering serious defeats at the hands of the German army, decided to implement the decrees for the German Russians living under his army's control, principally in the
Volhynia province. The lands were to be expropriated, and the owners deported to Siberia. The land was to be given to Russian war veterans once the war was over. In July 1915, without prior warning, 150,000 German settlers from Volhynia were arrested and shipped to internal exile in Siberia and Central Asia. (Some sources indicate that the number of deportees reached 200,000). Ukrainian peasants took over their lands. While precise figures remain elusive, estimates suggest that the mortality rate associated with these deportations ranged from 30% to 50%, translating to a death toll between 63,000 and 100,000 individuals. In the eastern part of
Russian Turkestan, after the suppression of the
Urkun uprising against the
Russian Empire tens of thousands of surviving
Kyrgyz and
Kazakhs fled toward China. In the
Tien-Shan mountains, thousands died in mountain passes over 3,000 meters high.
World War II . . During
World War II, death marches of POWs occurred in both
German-occupied Europe and the
Japanese colonial empire.
Death marches of those held in
Nazi concentration camps were common in the later stages of
the Holocaust as
Allied forces closed in on the camps. One infamous death march occurred in January 1945, as the Soviet
Red Army advanced on German-occupied Poland. Nine days before the Red Army arrived at the
Auschwitz concentration camp, the
Schutzstaffel marched nearly 60,000 prisoners out of the camp towards
Wodzisław Śląski, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Approximately 15,000 prisoners died on the way. The death marches were judged during the
Nuremberg trials to be a
crime against humanity. On the
Eastern Front, death marches were amongst the forms of
German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war. During the
NKVD prisoner massacres in 1941,
NKVD personnel led prisoners on death marches to various locations in
Eastern Europe; upon arriving to pre-designated execution sites, the survivors were
summarily executed. After the
Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, numerous
German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union were subject to death marches; after enduring a period of captivity near Stalingrad, they were sent by the Soviet authorities on a "death march across the frozen steppe" to
labor camps elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The
Brno death march during the
expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia occurred in May 1945. The
Bleiburg repatriations also occurred in May 1945 (during the last days of World War II and after), a total of 280,000
Croats, were involved in the
Independent State of Croatia evacuation to Austria. Mostly
Ustaše and the
Croatian Home Guard, but also civilians and refugees, tried to flee the
Yugoslav Partisans and the
Red Army, and marched northwards through
Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia and
Slovenia to
Allied-occupied Austria. However, the British refused to accept their surrender and directed them to surrender to Yugoslav forces, who subjected them to death marches back to Yugoslavia, resulting in the death of 70–80,000 people. In the
Pacific theatre, the
Imperial Japanese Armed Forces conducted death marches of Allied POWs, including the 1942
Bataan Death March and the 1945
Sandakan Death Marches. The former forcibly transferred 60–80,000 POWs to Balanga, resulting in the deaths of 2,500–10,000 Filipino and 100–650 American POWs, while the latter caused the deaths of 2,345 Australian and British POWs, of which only 6 survived. Lieutenant-General
Masaharu Homma was charged with
failure to control his troops in 1945 in connection with the Bataan Death March. Both the Bataan and Sandakan death marches were judged by the
International Military Tribunal for the Far East to be
war crimes.
Population transfer in the Soviet Union Population transfer in the Soviet Union refers to the forced transfer of various groups from the 1930s up to the 1950s ordered by Joseph Stalin and may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of workers"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill the ethnically cleansed territories. Soviet archives documented 390,000 deaths during
kulak forced resettlement and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported to
forced settlements in the Soviet Union during the 1940s; however Steven Rosefield and Norman Naimark put overall deaths closer to some 1 to 1.5 million perishing as a result of the deportations — of those deaths, the
deportation of Crimean Tatars and the
deportation of Chechens were recognized as
genocides by
Ukraine and the
European Parliament respectively.
Lydda Death March During the
1948 Palestine war, 50,000-70,000
Palestinians were expelled from the cities of
Lydda (also spelled Lod) and
Ramla by the
Israeli military. Occurring as a part of the broader
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and the
Nakba, the operation is widely considered to have been an instance of
ethnic cleansing. Ramla'a residents were expelled by bus, but Lydda's residents had to walk to meet up with the lines of the
Arab Legion. Many people died from the heat, thirst, and exhaustion on the journey and the event has come to be known as the
Lydda Death March. Reports vary regarding how many died. Palestinian historian
Aref al-Aref estimated 500 died in the expulsion from Lydda, and that 350 of that number died from thirst and exhaustion.
Nur Masalha estimated 350 deaths in the "expulsion and forced march" from Lydda. Israeli historian
Benny Morris has written that it was a "handful and perhaps dozens."
John Bagot Glubb wrote that "nobody will ever know how many children died."
Nimr al-Khatib estimated that 335 people died. Morris calls this number "certainly an exaggeration", while historian Michael Palumbo called Khatib's estimate "a very conservative figure."
Korean War In 1950, prisoners who were held by the
North Koreans underwent what became known as the "Tiger Death March". The march occurred while
North Korea was being overrun by
United Nations forces. As North Korean forces retreated to the
Yalu River on the border with
China, they evacuated their prisoners with them. On 31 October 1950, some 845 prisoners, including about eighty non-combatants, left
Manpo and went upriver, arriving in
Chunggang on 8 November 1950. A year later, fewer than 300 of the prisoners were still alive. The march was named after the brutal North Korean colonel who presided over it, his nickname was "The Tiger". Among the prisoners was war correspondont
Philippe Gigantès and
George Blake, an
MI6 officer who had been stationed in
Seoul. While he was being held as a prisoner, he became a
KGB double agent. In the winter of 1951, 200,000
South Korean National Defense Corps soldiers were forcibly marched by their commanders, with 50,000 to 90,000 soldiers starving to death or dying of disease during the march or in training camps. This incident is known as the
National Defense Corps incident.
Phnom Penh The
Khmer Rouge marked the beginning of their rule with the
forced evacuation of various cities including
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia. == See also ==