[{"id":"hittite-deportations","title":"Hittite Deportation and Resettlement of Conquered Populations","startYear":-1600,"endYear":-1180,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Hittite kings from Hattusili I and Mursili I to Suppiluliuma I and Mursili II moved captured civilian populations from Syria, Anatolia and the Aegean fringe to the Hittite homeland as agricultural and temple labour","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.02,"lon":34.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.2,"fromLon":37.16,"toLat":40.02,"toLon":34.62,"label":"Aleppo and northern Syria → Hattusa and the Hittite homeland","people":null},{"fromLat":38.5,"fromLon":30,"toLat":40.02,"toLon":34.62,"label":"Western Anatolia (Arzawa lands) → Hittite core territory","people":null}],"summary":"Deportation was an institutionalised instrument of Hittite statecraft from the Old Kingdom to the collapse of the empire around 1180 BCE. The Telipinu Proclamation records that Mursili I carried the deportees and goods of Aleppo, and then of Babylon, back to Hattusa; the annals of Suppiluliuma I and Mursili II record the transfer of populations from Arzawa and other western Anatolian lands to the Hittite core. Transportees were designated NAM.RA / arnuwala-, a defined legal status rather than simple captivity, and were assigned to royal and temple estates, to depopulated farmland and to military settlements, with their labour serving to repair the chronic manpower shortage of the Hittite heartland. The numbers survive only in royal campaign narratives written to display the king's success; scholars accept the practice as systematic and large-scale while treating the specific totals, especially those above ten thousand, as unverifiable.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Syria"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the deportations spanned four centuries and the whole of Anatolia, Syria and the Aegean fringe, none of it enumerated","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"egypt-new-kingdom-nubia-colonisation","title":"Egyptian Conquest and Colonisation of Nubia","startYear":-1550,"endYear":-1070,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Successive Egyptian New Kingdom pharaohs destroyed the Kushite kingdom of Kerma, annexed Nubia as far as the Fourth Cataract, planted Egyptian temple towns and garrisons, and removed Nubian elite children to Egypt","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Nubia from the First to the Fourth Cataract, roughly 1,000 km of the Nile valley in present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan, administered as an Egyptian province under a viceroy titled King's Son of Kush.","lat":19.6,"lon":30.41,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.6,"fromLon":30.41,"toLat":25.72,"toLon":32.61,"label":"Nubia → Egypt (captives, tribute-bearers, elite children)","people":null},{"fromLat":25.72,"fromLon":32.61,"toLat":19.6,"toLon":30.41,"label":"Egypt → Nubia (garrisons, officials, temple-town settlers)","people":null}],"summary":"Beginning with Ahmose I and completed under Thutmose I and Thutmose III, Egypt destroyed the Kushite capital at Kerma and annexed Nubia as far upstream as the Fourth Cataract, holding it as a colony for roughly five hundred years. Rule was exercised through a viceroy, garrisons and a network of new temple towns — Soleb, Sesebi, Amara, Sedeinga and above all the Amun sanctuary at Gebel Barkal — which drew in Egyptian settlers and reorganised local society around Egyptian gods and Egyptian administration. Nubians were taken to Egypt as captives and labourers, and the children of Nubian chiefs were brought to the Egyptian court to be educated and returned as loyal local rulers, the same device applied in Canaan. Archaeologists differ over how much of the resulting 'Egyptianisation' reflects coercion, elite emulation or the gradual blending of populations, and no reliable figures exist for how many people were moved in either direction.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Sudan","Egypt"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of Lower and Upper Nubia under Egyptian New Kingdom rule","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"hyksos-expulsion-avaris","title":"Expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt","startYear":-1550,"endYear":-1530,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Theban rulers Kamose and Ahmose I made war on the West Asian ('Hyksos') Fifteenth Dynasty ruling the eastern Nile Delta from Avaris, and later Egyptian tradition recorded the expulsion of its population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The eastern Nile Delta and the Hyksos-controlled territory of Lower Egypt were absorbed into a reunified Egyptian state under the Eighteenth Dynasty.","lat":30.79,"lon":31.83,"flows":[],"summary":"Around 1550 BCE the Theban Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Dynasty kings, Kamose and then Ahmose I, ended the rule of the West Asian Fifteenth Dynasty that had governed the eastern Nile Delta from Avaris for roughly a century, and pursued its forces into southern Canaan at Sharuhen. New Kingdom Egyptian texts present this as the violent expulsion of foreign occupiers, and Manetho's much later account gives a treaty departure of 240,000 people. Archaeology at Tell el-Dab'a, however, indicates that the Hyksos rulers emerged from a West Asian community that had been settling the Delta gradually for centuries rather than from an invasion, that no destruction horizon marks the transition, and that people of West Asian material culture went on living at the site afterwards. The episode is included here because a state ended a rival polity and Egyptian sources describe a forced removal, but the scale of any actual population transfer is not established, and the 'expulsion' narrative served the legitimising purposes of the New Kingdom monarchy.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Egypt"],"baselinePop":3000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Egypt at the end of the Second Intermediate Period","baselineYear":-1550,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"egypt-new-kingdom-canaan-deportations","title":"Egyptian New Kingdom Deportations from Canaan and Syria","startYear":-1457,"endYear":-1350,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Thutmose III and his New Kingdom successors campaigned annually in Canaan and Syria, deporting captives to Egypt as temple and estate labour and removing the sons of local rulers to be raised at the Egyptian court","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.585,"lon":35.184,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.585,"fromLon":35.184,"toLat":25.72,"toLon":32.61,"label":"Canaan and Syria → Thebes and Egyptian temple estates","people":null}],"summary":"From the campaign that ended at Megiddo in about 1457 BCE, Thutmose III conducted some seventeen campaigns into Canaan and Syria and instituted a durable imperial system there. Captives were carried to Egypt and assigned to temple estates, royal workshops and agricultural labour, and the annals inscribed at Karnak record them alongside cattle, chariots and metal as part of the spoils dedicated to Amun. A distinct and systematic element was the removal of the sons of Syro-Canaanite rulers to Egypt, where they were raised at court and later returned to govern their inheritances as Egyptianised vassals; Egyptologists read this both as hostage-taking and as a device for producing a loyal client elite. The scale of the transfers is known only from Egyptian royal inscriptions, which enumerate captives in the hundreds and low thousands per campaign but were composed to glorify the king and the god rather than to record numbers accurately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Israel","Egypt"],"baselinePop":140000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Late Bronze Age Canaan, the region from which New Kingdom Egypt deported captives","baselineYear":-1400,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"neo-assyrian-deportation-programme","title":"The Neo-Assyrian Mass Deportation Programme","startYear":-744,"endYear":-627,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Neo-Assyrian kings from Tiglath-pileser III through Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal systematically uprooted conquered populations across the Near East and resettled them in distant provinces of the empire","peopleDisplaced":4500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.1,"lon":43.33,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.28,"fromLon":35.19,"toLat":36.83,"toLon":40.05,"label":"Levant → the Habur region and Assyrian heartland","people":null},{"fromLat":32.19,"fromLon":48.26,"toLat":36.35,"toLon":43.15,"label":"Elam (Susa) → Assyria","people":null},{"fromLat":36.1,"fromLon":43.33,"toLat":35.7,"toLon":51.4,"label":"Assyrian core → the Zagros and Median frontier","people":null}],"summary":"From the accession of Tiglath-pileser III in 744 BCE the Assyrian state made two-way mass deportation a standing instrument of rule, moving whole communities out of conquered or rebellious territories and settling other deported groups in their place. The purposes recorded in the inscriptions and reconstructed by modern scholarship were to break political cohesion in annexed provinces, to supply skilled craftsmen, scribes and soldiers to the imperial centre, to repopulate the Assyrian heartland and its new capitals, and to bring marginal land under cultivation. Deportees were normally moved as family units under military escort, given land and obligations at their destination, and absorbed into the imperial population; palace reliefs at Nineveh and Nimrud depict them travelling with carts, animals and children. The commonly quoted total of some 4.5 million derives from Oded's compilation of the royal inscriptions themselves, which are victory texts, and the practice is better documented than any of its individual numbers.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Iraq","Palestine","Syria","Iran"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the empire's conquered territories changed with every reign across 120 years and were never enumerated","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"fall-of-samaria-israelite-deportation","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":27290,"note":"The deportation from Samaria was one operation within the Neo-Assyrian mass deportation programme, and its 27,290 deportees are included in the programme's 4.5 million total."}]},{"id":"fall-of-samaria-israelite-deportation","title":"Assyrian Destruction of the Kingdom of Israel and Deportation from Samaria","startYear":-724,"endYear":-715,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Shalmaneser V besieged and Sargon II claimed the capture of Samaria, ending the northern Israelite kingdom, deporting its population eastwards and settling deportees from Babylonia and Syria in its place","peopleDisplaced":27290,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The northern kingdom of Israel was annexed and reorganised as the Assyrian province of Samerina.","lat":32.28,"lon":35.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.28,"fromLon":35.19,"toLat":36.83,"toLon":40.05,"label":"Samaria → Halah and the Habur river region","people":27290},{"fromLat":32.54,"fromLon":44.42,"toLat":32.28,"toLon":35.19,"label":"Babylonia, Cuthah, Hamath → resettlement in Samerina","people":null}],"summary":"After a siege begun under Shalmaneser V, Samaria fell in about 722 BCE and the northern Israelite kingdom was annexed as the Assyrian province of Samerina. Sargon II's annals at Khorsabad claim the deportation of 27,290 of its inhabitants, the incorporation of fifty of their chariots into his army, and the resettlement of the province with populations brought from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim — a two-way exchange typical of Assyrian imperial practice and echoed in 2 Kings 17. Which king actually took the city is disputed, since the biblical account credits Shalmaneser V and the Assyrian annals credit Sargon II, who may have been claiming his predecessor's success or suppressing a later revolt in 720. Archaeological survey of the Samarian hills indicates severe but partial depopulation, and excavations at sites such as Tel Hadid have identified communities of deportees brought in from Mesopotamia. The later tradition of 'ten lost tribes' overstates what the evidence shows: a substantial Israelite population remained in place under Assyrian administration.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":27290,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Palestine","Syria","Iraq"],"baselinePop":350000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the northern kingdom of Israel in the second half of the eighth century BCE","baselineYear":-730,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.07797142857142857,"related":[{"id":"neo-assyrian-deportation-programme","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":27290,"note":"The deportation from Samaria was one operation within the Neo-Assyrian mass deportation programme, and its 27,290 deportees are included in the programme's 4.5 million total."}]},{"id":"sennacherib-judah-701","title":"Sennacherib's Campaign in Judah","startYear":-701,"endYear":-701,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Sennacherib of Assyria invaded Judah, stormed Lachish and other fortified towns, deported their populations and stripped Hezekiah of most of his territory","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Sennacherib records detaching the Shephelah and much of Judah's western territory and transferring it to the Philistine kings of Ashdod, Ekron and Gaza, leaving Hezekiah a rump kingdom around Jerusalem.","lat":31.565,"lon":34.849,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.565,"fromLon":34.849,"toLat":36.35,"toLon":43.15,"label":"Lachish and the Judaean Shephelah → Assyria","people":null}],"summary":"In 701 BCE Sennacherib campaigned in the Levant against a coalition that included Hezekiah of Judah, storming the fortified town of Lachish and reducing the Judaean lowlands before blockading Jerusalem, which he did not take. His annals claim 46 conquered cities and 200,150 people driven out, together with the transfer of Judaean territory to neighbouring Philistine rulers and a heavy tribute from Hezekiah. The campaign is exceptionally well documented for an ancient event: the Assyrian prisms, the biblical narrative in 2 Kings 18–19, and the great relief cycle Sennacherib installed in his palace at Nineveh showing the siege of Lachish and the deportation of its inhabitants. Excavation at Lachish has confirmed the siege ramp, the destruction layer and mass burials. The 200,150 figure is the king's own and sits awkwardly with modern estimates of Judah's total population; the scale of the deportation is therefore disputed even though the fact of it is not.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Israel","Iraq"],"baselinePop":110000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the kingdom of Judah at the time of Sennacherib's invasion","baselineYear":-701,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"spartan-helot-system","title":"The Spartan Helot System","startYear":-700,"endYear":-369,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Spartan state held the conquered populations of Laconia and Messenia as helots — unfree agricultural labourers bound to the land and owned collectively by the community rather than by individuals","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Laconia and, from the Messenian Wars of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the whole of Messenia in the southwestern Peloponnese were held as Spartan territory worked by helots.","lat":37.075,"lon":22.43,"flows":[],"summary":"Sparta's conquest of neighbouring Laconia and then of Messenia reduced their populations to the status of helots: unfree cultivators tied to allotments, obliged to hand over a fixed share of their produce to Spartan citizen landholders, and owned by the state rather than by private masters. Unlike chattel slaves elsewhere in Greece, helots lived in their own families and communities and retained a collective identity, which is why Messenian helots could be constituted as a free polity when Thebes liberated Messenia in 369 BCE and founded the city of Messene. Ancient sources report that the Spartan ephors declared war on the helots every year so that killing one carried no religious pollution, and that a body of young Spartans, the krypteia, was sent into the countryside to intimidate and kill helots judged dangerous; Thucydides records the disappearance of some 2,000 helots who had been invited to claim their freedom. The system is included here as a case of a population held in place by state coercion over centuries rather than moved, and almost everything known about it comes from non-Spartan Greek authors.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greece"],"baselinePop":170000,"baselineWhat":"The helot population of Laconia and Messenia at the height of the Spartan system in the fifth century BCE","baselineYear":-450,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"babylonian-exile-of-judah","title":"The Babylonian Exile of Judah","startYear":-597,"endYear":-539,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon deposed the Judaean monarchy in successive campaigns, destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and deported the kingdom's ruling, priestly and artisan classes to Babylonia","peopleDisplaced":15000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The kingdom of Judah was abolished and its territory administered from Mizpah as a Babylonian province.","lat":31.778,"lon":35.235,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.778,"fromLon":35.235,"toLat":32.54,"toLon":44.42,"label":"Jerusalem and Judah → Babylonia (Babylon, Nippur, Al-Yahudu)","people":15000},{"fromLat":32.54,"fromLon":44.42,"toLat":31.778,"toLon":35.235,"label":"Return from Babylonia under Persian rule, from 538 BCE","people":null}],"summary":"Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem in 597 BCE and deported King Jehoiachin with the court, military and skilled classes; after a revolt he returned in 587/586, destroyed the city and the temple, and carried off a second group, with a third deportation following in 582. Those removed were settled in the Babylonian countryside, especially around Nippur, in villages named for their places of origin — the cuneiform archives from Al-Yahudu, 'the town of Judah', show deportee families holding land in exchange for taxes, labour and military service over some 160 years. A substantial population remained in Judah under a Babylonian-appointed administration at Mizpah, and others fled to Egypt. After Cyrus II took Babylon in 539 BCE, Persian policy permitted return and the rebuilding of the temple, and part of the community went back while a large and permanent Jewish population remained in Mesopotamia. The numbers are contested because the two biblical tallies disagree by a factor of three or more, and archaeology measures overall population collapse rather than deportation specifically.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":15000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Palestine","Iraq"],"baselinePop":110000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the kingdom of Judah on the eve of the Babylonian conquest","baselineYear":-597,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.13636363636363635},{"id":"achaemenid-deportations","title":"Achaemenid Persian Deportations of Conquered Cities","startYear":-525,"endYear":-490,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Achaemenid kings from Cambyses to Darius I deported the populations of defeated cities — Barca in Cyrenaica, Miletus in Ionia, Eretria in Euboea and groups of Egyptians — and resettled them in the Iranian and Central Asian interior","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.53,"lon":27.28,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.53,"fromLon":27.28,"toLat":30.9,"toLon":47.9,"label":"Miletus → Ampe at the mouth of the Tigris (494 BCE)","people":null},{"fromLat":38.4,"fromLon":23.79,"toLat":32.19,"toLon":48.26,"label":"Eretria → Ardericca in Elam (490 BCE)","people":null},{"fromLat":32.5,"fromLon":20.87,"toLat":36.75,"toLon":66.9,"label":"Barca (Cyrenaica) → Bactria","people":null}],"summary":"The Achaemenid empire used deportation selectively, as a punishment for rebellion and a means of placing useful populations where the crown wanted them. Herodotus records that after crushing the Ionian revolt in 494 BCE the Persians killed or enslaved the Milesians and settled the survivors at Ampe near the mouth of the Tigris; that in 490 BCE the Eretrians, who had aided the revolt, were carried off to Ardericca in Elam, where a distinct community was still recognisable centuries later; that the Barcaeans of Cyrenaica were resettled in a Bactrian village; and that Cambyses removed 6,000 Egyptians with their king and many artisans to Susa. Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that Achaemenid deportees were given land, kept their languages and religions, and were subject to taxation and restrictions on movement rather than being enslaved outright. The Persepolis administrative tablets record large multi-ethnic labour forces in the imperial heartland, consistent with the practice, though the Greek narrative sources remain the only origin for the individual episodes and figures.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Iraq","Greece","Iran","Libya","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The populations of the cities the Achaemenid kings deported — Barca, Miletus, Eretria and others","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"athenian-destruction-of-melos","title":"Athenian Destruction of Melos","startYear":-416,"endYear":-415,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Athens besieged the neutral island city of Melos, executed the adult male population, sold the women and children into slavery and planted 500 Athenian colonists on the island","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":151,"territoryDesc":"The Cycladic island of Melos, roughly 151 km², was cleared of its population and settled by Athenian colonists until they were expelled by Lysander in 405 BCE.","lat":36.69,"lon":24.42,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.98,"fromLon":23.73,"toLat":36.69,"toLon":24.42,"label":"Athens → Melos (500 colonists)","people":500}],"summary":"In 416 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War, Athens demanded the submission of Melos, a Dorian island that had stayed neutral, and besieged it when the Melians refused. Thucydides frames the episode with the Melian Dialogue, in which the Athenian envoys argue that 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must', and then records the outcome in a single sentence: on surrender the Athenians killed every adult man they captured, sold the women and children into slavery, and sent out 500 settlers of their own. The population was not merely subjugated but eliminated as a community and replaced. Melian survivors were restored to the island by the Spartan commander Lysander after Athens's defeat in 405 BCE. The event is treated in the modern literature as one of the clearest ancient cases in which killing and enslavement were the deliberate instrument of policy rather than an accompaniment to conquest, though whether the modern term genocide is appropriate is debated.","deathsLow":500,"deathsHigh":1500,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":906,"_deaths":1000,"countries":["Greece"],"baselinePop":3000,"baselineWhat":"The free population of the island city of Melos at the time of the Athenian siege","baselineYear":-416,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"alexander-destruction-of-thebes","title":"Alexander's Destruction of Thebes","startYear":-335,"endYear":-335,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Alexander III of Macedon stormed Thebes after its revolt, and the allied Greek council he chaired voted to raze the city, kill its defenders and sell the surviving population into slavery","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The city of Thebes was demolished apart from its temples and the house of Pindar, and its territory was divided among neighbouring Boeotian cities until Cassander refounded it in 316 BCE.","lat":38.32,"lon":23.32,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.32,"fromLon":23.32,"toLat":38,"toLon":23.7,"label":"Thebes → slave markets of Greece and the Aegean","people":30000}],"summary":"When Thebes revolted on a rumour of Alexander's death in 335 BCE, he marched south, took the city by assault, and referred its fate to the council of his Greek allies, which voted for destruction. Diodorus records more than 6,000 Thebans killed and more than 30,000 taken and sold into slavery; the city was demolished except for its sanctuaries and, by tradition, the house of the poet Pindar, and its land was distributed to neighbouring Boeotian communities. The decision was framed as a collective Greek judgement on Thebes for medism and treachery, which allowed Alexander to present the annihilation of a major Greek city as lawful punishment rather than Macedonian terror, and contemporaries understood it as a deterrent that secured Greece for the duration of the Asian campaign. Thebes was refounded in 316 BCE by Cassander, with surviving Thebans and their descendants returning. The numbers come from historians writing long after the event and using now-lost sources.","deathsLow":6000,"deathsHigh":6000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":6000,"countries":["Greece"],"baselinePop":35000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Thebes and its immediate territory in Boeotia","baselineYear":-335,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8571428571428571},{"id":"alexander-tyre-and-gaza","title":"Alexander's Sieges of Tyre and Gaza","startYear":-332,"endYear":-332,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Alexander III of Macedon took the island city of Tyre after a seven-month siege and then Gaza, killing and enslaving their populations and repopulating the sites","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Tyre was repopulated with settlers and made a Macedonian possession; the causeway Alexander built to reach the island permanently joined it to the mainland.","lat":33.27,"lon":35.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.27,"fromLon":35.2,"toLat":34,"toLon":35.65,"label":"Tyre → slave markets of the eastern Mediterranean","people":30000}],"summary":"Tyre refused Alexander entry in 332 BCE and he besieged it for roughly seven months, building a causeway from the mainland to the island city. When it fell, the ancient historians record about 6,000 defenders killed in the assault, some 2,000 men crucified along the shore as an exemplary punishment, and about 30,000 of the remaining inhabitants and resident foreigners sold into slavery, with those who had taken refuge in the temple of Heracles spared. Gaza, which also resisted, was stormed shortly afterwards; its male population was killed and the women and children enslaved, and the site was resettled with people from the surrounding country. Both cities were repopulated and continued to function, so the outcome was the replacement rather than the permanent erasure of an urban population. All the figures derive from Roman-era authors using earlier campaign histories that no longer survive.","deathsLow":6000,"deathsHigh":8000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":7000,"countries":["Lebanon"],"baselinePop":45000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Tyre and Gaza at the time of the sieges","baselineYear":-332,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.6666666666666666},{"id":"hellenistic-foundations-and-transplantation","title":"Hellenistic City Foundations and Forced Transplantation of Populations","startYear":-331,"endYear":-187,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Alexander's successors, above all the Seleucid kings, founded and repopulated cities across the Near East by compulsory synoecism of existing communities and by transplanting settler groups from one part of the empire to another","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.2,"lon":36.16,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.54,"fromLon":44.42,"toLat":33.1,"toLon":44.52,"label":"Babylon → Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (compulsory transfer of population)","people":null},{"fromLat":33,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":38.5,"toLon":29.5,"label":"Mesopotamia and Babylonia → Lydia and Phrygia (2,000 Jewish military-colonist families under Antiochus III)","people":null}],"summary":"The Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander built their power on new cities, and populating those cities frequently meant moving people who had no choice in the matter. Seleucus I's foundation of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris drew off much of the population of Babylon, and Antioch, Apamea, Laodicea and dozens of other foundations absorbed existing villages and towns by synoecism, the compulsory merging of communities into a single new civic centre. Settler groups were also transplanted deliberately across the empire for security reasons: Josephus preserves a letter of Antiochus III instructing his viceroy Zeuxis to move 2,000 Jewish families from Mesopotamia and Babylonia to garrison points in Lydia and Phrygia, granting them land, their own laws and a decade's tax relief in return for holding disturbed territory. The policy reshaped the demography of the Near East and created the Greek-speaking urban networks of the region, but it was executed by royal command and the numbers involved are almost never recorded.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Iraq"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"alexander-bactria-sogdiana","title":"Alexander's Campaign and Colonisation in Bactria and Sogdiana","startYear":-329,"endYear":-327,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Alexander III of Macedon suppressed the Bactrian–Sogdian revolt with mass killings and enforced resettlement, and planted garrison cities settled with Greek and Macedonian troops and local populations","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Bactria and Sogdiana, roughly present-day northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, were incorporated into the Macedonian empire and garrisoned with new colonial foundations.","lat":39.65,"lon":66.96,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.9,"fromLon":22.5,"toLat":39.65,"toLon":66.96,"label":"Greece and Macedon → garrison colonies in Bactria–Sogdiana","people":23000}],"summary":"Alexander's two-year campaign in Bactria and Sogdiana was the most destructive phase of his eastern conquest. The ancient accounts describe the systematic devastation of rebel districts, the storming of fortified rocks with the crucifixion of leaders and enslavement of the population, and the annihilation of the Branchidae, a community of Greek descent accused of an ancestral sacrilege. Alexander then concentrated populations in new fortified foundations, the best known being Alexandria Eschate on the Jaxartes, settling them with Greek and Macedonian veterans, mercenaries and local inhabitants — a policy of forced urban synoecism intended to hold the country. The settlers themselves regarded the posting as a form of exile: Greek colonists in the upper satrapies revolted around 326 BCE and, after Alexander's death, some 23,000 of them attempted to march back west. The reported casualty figures come from Curtius and Diodorus, writing centuries later, and are widely doubted; the pattern of destruction and forced settlement, by contrast, is supported by the archaeology of Hellenistic Central Asia.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Uzbekistan","Greece"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the population of Bactria and Sogdiana in 329 BCE","baselineYear":-329,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"roman-war-captive-enslavement","title":"Mass Enslavement as a Consequence of Roman Conquest","startYear":-264,"endYear":180,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Roman state and its commanders systematically enslaved the populations of conquered and rebellious communities across the Mediterranean and moved them to Italy and the provinces","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":41.89,"lon":12.49,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.67,"fromLon":20.85,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Greece and the Balkans → Italy","people":null},{"fromLat":47.54,"fromLon":4.5,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Gaul → Italy","people":null},{"fromLat":31.78,"fromLon":35.24,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Judaea → Italy and the provinces","people":null}],"summary":"From the First Punic War to the high empire, enslavement of defeated populations was a standing and legally normal outcome of Roman warfare: commanders sold captives on the spot through dealers who followed the armies, and the proceeds went to the soldiers and the treasury. Named operations give the scale — 150,000 Epirotes in 167 BCE, some 50,000 survivors of Carthage in 146, 53,000 Aduatuci in Gaul, tens of thousands from Judaea after 70 CE, and captives from Dacia after 106 — and the aggregate enslaved population of the early empire is usually estimated at five to ten million, or 10 to 20 per cent of the total. Modern demographic work has changed how this is understood: Scheidel argues that reproduction within the enslaved population, not conquest, was the dominant source of supply, which means that mass enslavement should be read as a recurrent catastrophe for specific conquered communities rather than as the engine of Roman slavery overall. It is treated here as a single systemic entry because the individual episodes are scattered across the record and no aggregate count exists.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Italy","Greece","France","Palestine"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"roman-plundering-of-epirus-167","rel":"includes","note":"The enslavement of 150,000 Epirotes in 167 BCE is one of the named operations within Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."},{"id":"roman-destruction-of-carthage","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The roughly 50,000 Carthaginian survivors sold into slavery in 146 BCE are among the named cases in the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."},{"id":"roman-destruction-of-corinth","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The women and children of Corinth sold in 146 BCE fall within the scope of the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."},{"id":"first-jewish-roman-war-and-fall-of-jerusalem","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Judaean captives enslaved after 70 CE are cited among the cases in the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."}]},{"id":"mauryan-conquest-of-kalinga","title":"The Mauryan Conquest of Kalinga","startYear":-262,"endYear":-261,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Mauryan emperor Ashoka conquered and annexed the eastern Indian kingdom of Kalinga, and his own inscriptions record the deportation of 150,000 people","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kalinga, corresponding broadly to coastal Odisha and northern Andhra Pradesh, was annexed to the Mauryan empire and administered from Tosali and Samapa.","lat":20.19,"lon":85.84,"flows":[{"fromLat":20.19,"fromLon":85.84,"toLat":25.6,"toLon":85.2,"label":"Kalinga → the Mauryan interior","people":150000}],"summary":"In about 261 BCE, eight years into his reign, Ashoka conquered Kalinga, the last major independent kingdom on the eastern seaboard of the subcontinent. His Major Rock Edict 13 states that 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed and many times that number died of other causes, and presents the emperor's remorse at this suffering as the turning point that led him to renounce conquest by arms in favour of 'conquest by dharma'. The edict is the earliest surviving self-reported deportation figure in South Asian history and one of the very few ancient texts in which a ruler records the human cost of his own campaign as a reproach to himself. Because the numbers exist only in Ashoka's own inscriptions and no other account of the war survives, they cannot be verified; historians differ over whether the remorseful framing makes them more credible than a typical victory monument or simply gives them a different rhetorical purpose. Kalinga remained part of the Mauryan empire, and Ashoka's separate Kalinga edicts address the administration of the conquered province.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":100000,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the kingdom of Kalinga at the time of Ashoka's conquest","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"qin-forced-resettlement","title":"Qin Unification: Forced Resettlement of Elites and Frontier Colonisation","startYear":-221,"endYear":-210,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Qin state, having conquered the warring kingdoms, deported the wealthy and aristocratic households of the eastern states to the capital region and drove convicts, conscripts and settlers to the northern and southern frontiers","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.33,"lon":108.71,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.7,"fromLon":117,"toLat":34.33,"toLon":108.71,"label":"Conquered eastern states (Qi, Chu and others) → Xianyang and the Guanzhong metropolitan region","people":500000},{"fromLat":34.33,"fromLon":108.71,"toLat":40.5,"toLon":108.9,"label":"Interior → military-agricultural colonies in the Ordos loop","people":null},{"fromLat":34.33,"fromLon":108.71,"toLat":23.13,"toLon":113.26,"label":"Interior → Lingnan garrison colonies after the Baiyue campaigns","people":null}],"summary":"Immediately after unifying China in 221 BCE, the First Emperor moved the aristocratic and wealthy households of the conquered eastern kingdoms — 120,000 households according to the Shiji — to the new imperial capital region around Xianyang, disarming them and melting their weapons into bronze statues. The purpose was to sever the old elites from their regional power bases and to concentrate wealth and manpower where the throne could control them. In parallel, the Qin drove convicts, conscripted commoners and other coerced settlers north into the Ordos loop taken from the Xiongnu and south into Lingnan after the campaigns against the Baiyue, founding garrison colonies that were to hold newly annexed frontiers and feed the armies there. Recent scholarship prefers the term 'state-induced migration' because these flows mixed outright coercion with land grants, tax incentives and subsequent voluntary movement, but the largest transfers were compulsory. The figures are those of Han historians writing later and hostile to the Qin.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":20000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Qin empire after the unification of 221 BCE","baselineYear":-221,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.03},{"id":"roman-deportation-and-colonisation-italy","title":"Roman Deportation and Colonisation within Italy","startYear":-180,"endYear":-41,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Roman Republic uprooted whole peoples within Italy — most notably the Ligurian Apuani in 180 BCE — and repeatedly confiscated the land of Italian communities to settle citizen colonists and discharged soldiers","peopleDisplaced":47000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Ligurian mountain territory in the northern Apennines was cleared and annexed; over the following century the land of numerous Italian communities was confiscated for veteran colonies, most extensively in the settlements of the 80s and of 41 BCE.","lat":41.3,"lon":14.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.2,"fromLon":10.1,"toLat":41.3,"toLon":14.8,"label":"Apuani Ligurians of the Apennines → Samnium (180–179 BCE)","people":47000}],"summary":"Rome's consolidation of Italy involved both the removal of populations and the implantation of new ones. In 180 BCE the consuls Publius Cornelius Cethegus and Marcus Baebius Tamphilus removed the Apuani Ligurians from their mountain territory and transported some 40,000 of them, with a further 7,000 the next year, to public land in Samnium several hundred kilometres to the south, where they were resettled at state expense — an operation Livy describes in the language of an administrative undertaking and which left a community known for centuries afterwards as the Ligures Baebiani. Confiscation and redistribution of Italian land for citizen colonies and, from Sulla onward, for discharged soldiers, dispossessed many further communities; the triumviral settlements of 41 BCE stripped the territory of around eighteen Italian towns to provide farms for veterans, an episode remembered in the poetry of Virgil and Propertius. The Ligurian figures come from Livy and are corroborated by the later attestation of the resettled community; the civil-war confiscations are described qualitatively rather than counted.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":47000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Italy"],"baselinePop":5000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of peninsular Italy in the mid-second century BCE","baselineYear":-150,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0094},{"id":"xiongnu-expulsion-of-the-yuezhi","title":"Xiongnu Expulsion of the Yuezhi","startYear":-176,"endYear":-130,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Xiongnu confederation under Modu Chanyu and his successors defeated the Yuezhi of the Gansu corridor and drove them west, setting off a chain of displacements that ended with the Yuezhi conquest of Bactria","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.14,"lon":94.66,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.14,"fromLon":94.66,"toLat":43.9,"toLon":81.3,"label":"Gansu corridor → Ili valley and Dzungaria","people":null},{"fromLat":43.9,"fromLon":81.3,"toLat":36.75,"toLon":66.9,"label":"Ili valley → Sogdiana and Bactria, after displacement by the Wusun","people":null}],"summary":"The Yuezhi, a pastoral confederation occupying the Gansu corridor, were defeated by the Xiongnu under Modu Chanyu around 176 BCE and again under his successor, who according to the Chinese sources killed their king and made his skull into a drinking vessel. The main body fled west into Dzungaria and the Ili valley, displacing the Sai (Saka) peoples in their turn; then, pushed again by the Wusun with Xiongnu backing, they moved south to the Syr Darya and by about 130 BCE crossed into Bactria, where they overthrew the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and eventually gave rise to the Kushan empire. A remnant, the 'Lesser Yuezhi', stayed behind and was absorbed. The episode is the best-documented ancient instance of a steppe state driving an entire people across a continent, and it is known almost entirely from Han Chinese records made because the Han were seeking the Yuezhi as allies against the Xiongnu; no numbers of any kind survive.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Yuezhi confederation of the Gansu corridor before its expulsion","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"roman-plundering-of-epirus-167","title":"Roman Enslavement of Epirus","startYear":-167,"endYear":-167,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"On the Senate's instruction, Lucius Aemilius Paullus sacked seventy towns of the Molossians in Epirus in a single coordinated operation and enslaved their inhabitants","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Molossian territory of Epirus in northwestern Greece was stripped of population and its towns destroyed; the region did not recover its urban life for generations.","lat":39.67,"lon":20.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.67,"fromLon":20.85,"toLat":40.63,"toLon":17.94,"label":"Epirus → the slave markets and estates of Italy via Brundisium and Tarentum","people":150000}],"summary":"After the defeat of Macedon at Pydna, the Roman Senate ordered the punishment of the Molossians of Epirus, who had sided with King Perseus. Lucius Aemilius Paullus placed garrisons in seventy towns on a single day and gave the signal for a simultaneous sack, enslaving their populations — 150,000 people according to Polybius, Livy and Strabo. The operation was conducted with the machinery of a state, not as opportunistic plunder: the towns were secured in advance, the timing was coordinated to prevent flight, and the captives were moved to the Adriatic ports on the army's route home. Ziolkowski's study argues that the primary motive was economic, to replenish an Italian slave supply depleted by the plague of 175–174 BCE, rather than punitive. Archaeological survey in Epirus shows a long collapse of settlement afterwards, consistent with severe depopulation. The 150,000 figure is a literary one, but it comes from a contemporary and is generally accepted in outline.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greece","Italy"],"baselinePop":250000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Epirus, and principally of the Molossian territory sacked in 167 BCE","baselineYear":-167,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6,"related":[{"id":"roman-war-captive-enslavement","rel":"part-of","note":"The enslavement of 150,000 Epirotes in 167 BCE is one of the named operations within Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."}]},{"id":"roman-destruction-of-carthage","title":"The Roman Destruction of Carthage","startYear":-149,"endYear":-146,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Rome besieged Carthage for three years under Scipio Aemilianus, destroyed the city, killed most of its population and sold the survivors into slavery, annexing its territory as the province of Africa","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Carthaginian territory in what is now northern Tunisia was annexed as the Roman province of Africa; the city site was cursed and left largely unoccupied until Rome refounded a colony there a century later.","lat":36.853,"lon":10.323,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.853,"fromLon":10.323,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Carthage → the slave markets of Italy and the Mediterranean","people":50000}],"summary":"The Third Punic War began with Roman demands that Carthage abandon and destroy its city; when the Carthaginians refused, Rome besieged it from 149 to 146 BCE. The final assault involved days of street fighting through the residential quarters, and the city was burned and systematically demolished on the Senate's instruction. Ancient accounts report tens of thousands killed and roughly 50,000 survivors sold into slavery; the territory became the Roman province of Africa. Because the object was explicitly the elimination of the city rather than its subjugation — Cato's repeated demand that Carthage must be destroyed, and the Senate's decree of demolition — the historian Ben Kiernan, writing for the Yale Genocide Studies Program, argues that the episode meets the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention while acknowledging it was neither a racial extermination nor a war on Carthaginian culture as such. Other historians reject applying the modern category. The story that Rome sowed the site with salt is a nineteenth-century invention with no ancient authority.","deathsLow":70000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":50000,"_deaths":110000,"countries":["Tunisia","Italy"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Carthage at the start of the Third Punic War","baselineYear":-149,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16666666666666666,"related":[{"id":"roman-war-captive-enslavement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The roughly 50,000 Carthaginian survivors sold into slavery in 146 BCE are among the named cases in the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."}]},{"id":"roman-destruction-of-corinth","title":"The Roman Destruction of Corinth","startYear":-146,"endYear":-146,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth at the end of the Achaean War, killed its male citizens, sold the women and children into slavery and confiscated its territory for the Roman state","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Corinthian territory was confiscated as Roman public land, surveyed and partly leased out, then centuriated and distributed to settlers when Julius Caesar founded a Roman colony on the site in 44 BCE.","lat":37.906,"lon":22.879,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.906,"fromLon":22.879,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Corinth → slave markets and Italy","people":null},{"fromLat":41.89,"fromLon":12.49,"toLat":37.906,"toLon":22.879,"label":"Rome → Caesarian colonists at Corinth, 44 BCE","people":null}],"summary":"In the same year as the destruction of Carthage, Rome ended the Achaean War by storming Corinth, the league's leading city. The later sources record that Mummius had the male citizens killed and the women, children and freed slaves sold into slavery, that the city's art and treasure were shipped to Italy, and that the site was left desolate; Greece was brought under Roman supervision. Archaeological work has complicated that account: the destruction of buildings appears to have been partial and selective, occupation continued among the ruins, and an inscription of 111 BCE shows Roman officials measuring and selling Corinthian public land in the interval. Julius Caesar refounded Corinth as a Roman colony in 44 BCE, laying out the confiscated territory in a centuriated grid for settlers, and the city became the administrative capital of Roman Greece. No population figures survive for either the destruction or the refoundation.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greece","Italy"],"baselinePop":50000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Corinth and its territory at the time of the sack","baselineYear":-146,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"roman-war-captive-enslavement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The women and children of Corinth sold in 146 BCE fall within the scope of the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."}]},{"id":"han-frontier-colonisation","title":"Han Frontier Colonisation and the Xiongnu Wars","startYear":-133,"endYear":-60,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Emperor Wu of Han drove the Xiongnu from the Ordos and the Hexi corridor and settled hundreds of thousands of state-directed migrants, convicts and garrison farmers in the newly annexed frontier commanderies","peopleDisplaced":725000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Ordos loop and the Hexi corridor were annexed and organised into the frontier commanderies of Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan and Dunhuang, extending Han control roughly 1,000 km northwest toward the Tarim basin.","lat":38.93,"lon":100.45,"flows":[{"fromLat":35,"fromLon":115,"toLat":38.93,"toLon":100.45,"label":"North China plain → Hexi corridor colonies","people":725000},{"fromLat":40.5,"fromLon":108.9,"toLat":45,"toLon":105,"label":"Xiongnu and allied groups displaced from the Ordos and Hexi northward","people":null}],"summary":"From 133 BCE Emperor Wu abandoned the Han policy of appeasing the Xiongnu and launched decades of offensive campaigns that took the Ordos loop and then the Hexi corridor, expelling the Xiongnu and their subordinate confederations from pasture they had held for generations. The conquered ground was held by settlement: the imperial histories record repeated state operations moving hundreds of thousands of people — disaster refugees, convicts, amnestied criminals, freed slaves and poor peasants — into new frontier commanderies, supported by military-agricultural colonies whose settlers depended on the state for land, tools, seed grain and protection. Han administrative documents recovered from the Juyan and Dunhuang garrisons give an unusually direct picture of these colonies. The result was a permanent demographic transformation of the northwest, the opening of the corridor toward Central Asia, and the displacement of steppe populations whose numbers no source records. The Chinese figures are better grounded than most ancient numbers because they derive partly from real fiscal and census administration, but they still reach us through court historiography.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":725000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China","Mongolia"],"baselinePop":50000000,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of the Han empire during Emperor Wu's frontier wars","baselineYear":-100,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0145},{"id":"han-conquest-of-nanyue","title":"Han Conquest and Annexation of Nanyue","startYear":-112,"endYear":-111,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Emperor Wu of Han destroyed the kingdom of Nanyue and annexed its territory, dividing it into commanderies and opening the region to Chinese settlement","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The kingdom of Nanyue — present-day Guangdong, Guangxi and northern Vietnam — was annexed and reorganised into Han commanderies including Nanhai, Cangwu, Jiaozhi, Jiuzhen and Rinan.","lat":23.13,"lon":113.26,"flows":[{"fromLat":32,"fromLon":112,"toLat":23.13,"toLon":113.26,"label":"Han interior → officials, garrisons and settlers in the southern commanderies","people":null}],"summary":"Nanyue, founded by a former Qin commander after the collapse of the Qin, ruled the far south and northern Vietnam for about a century until Emperor Wu of Han sent an expedition that took its capital at Panyu in 111 BCE and abolished the kingdom. Its territory was divided into commanderies under direct imperial administration, and the region became a target for sustained Chinese settlement, which over the following centuries brought the sinicisation of Guangdong and Guangxi and introduced Chinese administration and culture into northern Vietnam, beginning a period of northern rule that Vietnamese historiography treats as the first era of Chinese domination. The conquest is recorded as a territorial annexation rather than a mass deportation; the demographic consequences accumulated over generations through settlement, garrisoning and the imposition of Han administration, and no contemporary source quantifies them.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":1400000,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of the Lingnan and Red River commanderies created out of Nanyue","baselineYear":2,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"han-conquest-of-gojoseon","title":"Han Conquest of Gojoseon and the Four Commanderies","startYear":-109,"endYear":-108,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Emperor Wu of Han destroyed Wiman Joseon in northern Korea and replaced it with four directly administered Chinese commanderies","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Northern Korea and part of Liaodong were organised into four Han commanderies — Lelang, Lintun, Xuantu and Zhenfan — of which Lelang, centred near modern Pyongyang, endured until 313 CE.","lat":39.02,"lon":125.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.02,"fromLon":125.75,"toLat":36.5,"toLon":127.5,"label":"Refugees from Wiman Joseon → the southern Korean peninsula","people":null}],"summary":"Emperor Wu, having secured his northern and western frontiers, sent an army and fleet against Wiman Joseon in 109 BCE; after a siege the capital Wanggeom fell in 108 BCE and the kingdom was abolished. Four commanderies were established in its place, the most durable being Lelang near modern Pyongyang, which functioned as a Chinese administrative and commercial enclave on the peninsula for four centuries and left a rich archaeological record of Han-style tombs and artefacts. The Han motive recorded in the sources was strategic and economic — removing a state that obstructed contact with the peoples further south, and gaining access to iron and salt. Displaced elites and commoners from the destroyed kingdom moved south, contributing to the formation of the later Korean polities. The extent of Chinese settlement, and how far Lelang was a colony of immigrants rather than an administration imposed on a local population, remain matters of scholarly and nationalist dispute.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["North Korea","South Korea"],"baselinePop":628000,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of the Han commanderies established in the former territory of Wiman Joseon, as recorded in the Han census of 2 CE","baselineYear":2,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"caesar-gallic-war","title":"Caesar's Conquest of Gaul","startYear":-58,"endYear":-50,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Julius Caesar conquered Gaul over eight campaigning seasons, annexing it to Rome and enslaving or killing large parts of several Gallic and Germanic peoples","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Gaul between the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic — roughly 500,000 km² — was annexed to the Roman empire.","lat":47.54,"lon":4.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.54,"fromLon":4.5,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Gaul → the slave markets of Italy","people":null},{"fromLat":46.8,"fromLon":7.15,"toLat":47.2,"toLon":6,"label":"Attempted Helvetian migration turned back by Caesar in 58 BCE","people":null}],"summary":"Caesar's eight campaigns from 58 to 50 BCE brought all of Gaul under Roman rule and made his political career. His own account records the forcible return of the migrating Helvetii to their homeland, the destruction of the Usipetes and Tencteri at the Rhine, the sale of 53,000 Aduatuci in one transaction, the massacre at Avaricum, the execution of the Veneti leadership and the sale of their people, and the distribution of the captives of Alesia to his soldiers. Later Roman writers summarised the war as a million killed and a million enslaved, figures that have shaped the modern debate over whether the conquest amounted to genocide. Recent scholarship treats those totals as unreliable and argues that mass enslavement, while real and devastating where it occurred, was used selectively as an exemplary punishment rather than as a routine practice, and that Caesar's Commentaries are a work of self-justification rather than a record. What is not in dispute is that a large territory was annexed, that several peoples were destroyed as political communities, and that captives from Gaul entered the Roman slave supply in very large numbers.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["France","Italy","Switzerland"],"baselinePop":6000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Gaul on the eve of Caesar's campaigns","baselineYear":-58,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"first-jewish-roman-war-and-fall-of-jerusalem","title":"The First Jewish–Roman War and the Destruction of Jerusalem","startYear":66,"endYear":73,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Roman armies under Vespasian and Titus suppressed the Judaean revolt, destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple, and enslaved and dispersed large numbers of the population","peopleDisplaced":97000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Judaea was placed under a permanent legionary garrison and imperial governor, temple land was made imperial property, and the Temple tax was converted into the fiscus Judaicus payable to Jupiter Capitolinus.","lat":31.778,"lon":35.235,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.778,"fromLon":35.235,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Judaean captives → Rome, the Egyptian mines and the provinces","people":97000}],"summary":"The revolt that began in Judaea in 66 CE was suppressed over seven years, culminating in Titus's five-month siege of Jerusalem in 70, the burning of the Second Temple and the demolition of most of the city, with the final reduction of Masada in 73. Josephus, the principal source and an eyewitness to much of the war, gives 1,100,000 dead in the siege and 97,000 prisoners taken over the whole conflict, distributed to the arena, the Egyptian mines and provincial slave markets; the temple treasures paraded in Titus's triumph are depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The Roman state converted the annual Temple tax into a poll tax on Jews throughout the empire, the fiscus Judaicus. Josephus's numbers cannot be reconciled with modern estimates of Jerusalem's population and are treated as rhetorical, but the destruction of the temple, the ending of the sacrificial cult, and the enslavement and dispersal of a large part of the Judaean population are not in question. The war did not by itself produce a general exile: Jewish settlement continued in Judaea and especially in Galilee.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":1100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":97000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Palestine","Italy"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Roman Judaea and Galilee on the eve of the revolt","baselineYear":66,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.097,"related":[{"id":"roman-war-captive-enslavement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Judaean captives enslaved after 70 CE are cited among the cases in the entry on Rome's mass enslavement of conquered populations."}]},{"id":"trajan-conquest-of-dacia","title":"Trajan's Conquest and Colonisation of Dacia","startYear":101,"endYear":106,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The emperor Trajan destroyed the Dacian kingdom in two wars, annexed its core as a Roman province, and repopulated it with colonists brought in from across the empire","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The core of the Dacian kingdom — much of present-day Transylvania, Oltenia and the Banat — was annexed as the province of Dacia, held until Aurelian's withdrawal in the 270s.","lat":45.62,"lon":23.31,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.62,"fromLon":23.31,"toLat":41.89,"toLon":12.49,"label":"Dacian captives → Italy and the empire","people":null},{"fromLat":45,"fromLon":17,"toLat":45.62,"toLon":23.31,"label":"Pannonia, Noricum, Dalmatia and the eastern provinces → colonists in Dacia","people":null}],"summary":"Trajan fought two wars against Decebalus, in 101–102 and 105–106, ending with the storming of the Dacian capital Sarmizegetusa Regia, the king's suicide and the annexation of the Dacian heartland. The conquest is commemorated in the reliefs of Trajan's Column in Rome, which show fighting, the deportation of Dacian families and the burning of settlements. Ancient sources describe a country left short of people — through deaths, enslavement, flight beyond the new frontier and the drafting of Dacian men into auxiliary regiments posted far away — and Eutropius records that Trajan deliberately imported settlers from across the empire to repopulate it. Epigraphy confirms a colonist population of very mixed origin: Italians, Pannonians, Dalmatians, Thracians, Syrians and Galatians. The scale of the Dacian losses is the subject of a long and politically charged argument in Romanian historiography about continuity of population, and the ancient figures, including the reported 500,000 captives, are not credible as counts.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Romania","Italy","Bosnia and Herz."],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the population of the Dacian kingdom in 101 CE","baselineYear":101,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"bar-kokhba-revolt-aftermath","title":"The Bar Kokhba Revolt and Its Aftermath","startYear":132,"endYear":136,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Roman forces under Hadrian crushed the Judaean revolt led by Simon bar Kosiba, depopulated much of Judaea, barred Jews from Jerusalem and renamed the province","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The province of Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina, Jerusalem was refounded as the colony of Aelia Capitolina with a temple to Jupiter on the temple mount, and Jews were forbidden to enter it.","lat":31.72,"lon":35.14,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.72,"fromLon":35.14,"toLat":32.79,"toLon":35.53,"label":"Judaea → Galilee (surviving Jewish population)","people":null},{"fromLat":31.72,"fromLon":35.14,"toLat":31.5,"toLon":34.47,"label":"Judaean captives → slave markets at Gaza and Hebron","people":null}],"summary":"The revolt led by Simon bar Kosiba from 132 to 136 CE briefly established an independent administration in Judaea, documented by its own coinage and by letters recovered from caves in the Judaean desert. Rome committed a very large force and reduced the rebels stronghold by stronghold, ending at Betar. Cassius Dio records the destruction of 985 villages and 50 fortified places and 580,000 killed in action, with many more dead from famine and disease. Afterwards Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from entering it, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina; observance of Jewish law was restricted for a period. Archaeological survey confirms that Jewish settlement in Judaea proper collapsed and did not recover, while Galilee became the centre of Jewish life and of rabbinic activity. Dio's figures are literary and cannot be verified, and the general expulsion of Jews from the whole land often attached to this event in later tradition is not supported by the evidence.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":580000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Palestine","Israel"],"baselinePop":600000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Judaea on the eve of the Bar Kokhba revolt","baselineYear":130,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"sasanian-deportations-of-roman-populations","title":"Sasanian Deportation of Roman Populations to Iran","startYear":241,"endYear":379,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Sasanian kings, above all Shapur I and later Shapur II, carried off the populations of captured Roman cities in Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia and settled them in new and existing cities of the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":29.78,"lon":51.57,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.2,"fromLon":36.16,"toLat":32.33,"toLon":48.4,"label":"Antioch and Syria → Gundeshapur and Khuzistan","people":null},{"fromLat":37.58,"fromLon":36.93,"toLat":29.78,"toLon":51.57,"label":"Cappadocia and Cilicia → Bishapur and Persis","people":null}],"summary":"Sasanian Persia used deportation as a standing instrument of imperial development. Shapur I's campaigns against Rome — culminating in the capture of Antioch and the defeat and capture of the emperor Valerian in 260 CE — produced very large numbers of prisoners and civilians whom he settled across his empire, as his own inscription at Naqsh-e Rustam records. Roman captives were used to build and populate new royal foundations, including Bishapur in Fars and Gundeshapur in Khuzistan, and to construct bridges and dams; deportees were given agricultural land and housing, kept their Christianity, and formed the nucleus of the Christian communities of Sasanian Iran, a point stressed in the Syriac Chronicle of Seert. Shapur II continued the practice in the fourth century. Iranian policy resembled the Assyrian and Achaemenid pattern in aiming at productive resettlement rather than destruction, and the deportees' skills — masonry, engineering, weaving — were the point. No source gives usable totals.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Iran","Turkey"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The populations of the Roman cities of Syria, Cilicia and Cappadocia captured by Sasanian armies","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"hunnic-invasions-and-displacement","title":"The Hunnic Invasions and the Displacement of Peoples in Europe","startYear":370,"endYear":453,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Huns conquered and subordinated the peoples of the Pontic steppe and central Europe, driving Alans, Goths and others into and across the Roman frontier, and under Attila destroyed cities and carried off captives from the Balkans and Gaul","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"At its height the Hunnic hegemony extended from the Pontic steppe across the Carpathian basin into central Europe, ruling a mosaic of subject Germanic and Iranian-speaking peoples; it fragmented within two decades of Attila's death in 453.","lat":47,"lon":20,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":40,"toLat":47,"toLon":20,"label":"Pontic steppe → Carpathian basin (Huns and subject peoples)","people":null},{"fromLat":47,"fromLon":26,"toLat":42.7,"toLon":23.3,"label":"Peoples displaced across the Danube into the Roman Balkans","people":null},{"fromLat":44,"fromLon":22,"toLat":47,"toLon":20,"label":"Balkan captives carried to the Hunnic heartland","people":null}],"summary":"The arrival of the Huns on the western steppe around 370 CE set off the chain of movements that historians call the Migration Period: the Alans were defeated and partly absorbed, the Goths were pushed onto the Danube and into the Roman empire, and further groups were driven west and south. Under Attila from the 440s the Huns extracted enormous tribute from Constantinople, destroyed Balkan cities including Naissus — which Priscus found still littered with bones years later — and campaigned into Gaul and Italy before Attila's death in 453 and the rapid collapse of his empire. Captives were a central object of Hunnic warfare: prisoners were incorporated into Hunnic forces and households, and treaties with Rome specified ransom rates and the surrender of fugitives. The Huns are included here because an organised steppe power displaced whole peoples and carried off populations, but no ancient source gives numbers, and the extent to which the Huns caused rather than accelerated the movements of the period is debated.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Hungary","Russia","Romania","Bulgaria","Serbia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The peoples of the Pontic steppe and central Europe subordinated or displaced by the Huns","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"gothic-crossing-of-the-danube","title":"The Gothic Crossing of the Danube and the Gothic War","startYear":376,"endYear":382,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Tervingi and Greuthungi Goths, displaced by the Hunnic advance, crossed the Danube into the Roman empire and, after exploitation and starvation at the hands of Roman officials, revolted and devastated the Balkan provinces","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"By the treaty of 382 the Goths were settled inside the empire in Thrace and Lower Moesia as federates under their own leaders, the first such settlement of an intact barbarian people on Roman soil.","lat":41.68,"lon":26.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.5,"fromLon":28.5,"toLat":43.9,"toLon":25.4,"label":"Gothic lands north of the Danube → Roman Thrace and Moesia (376 CE)","people":null}],"summary":"In 376 CE Gothic groups pressed westward by the Huns appeared on the north bank of the lower Danube asking for admission to the Roman empire. The Tervingi were permitted to cross and settle as federates; the Greuthungi were refused and crossed anyway. The Roman officials responsible for provisioning them exploited the refugees severely — Ammianus records famine conditions and the sale of food at ruinous prices, including the reported exchange of children for dogmeat — and in 377 the Goths rose in revolt. The war culminated at Adrianople on 9 August 378, where the eastern field army was destroyed and the emperor Valens killed, with losses conventionally put at around two-thirds of the army present. Six further years of fighting and devastation across the Balkans ended in the treaty of 382, under which the Goths were settled inside the empire as a coherent group under their own leadership. The numbers who crossed are not recorded; Eunapius's 200,000 is rejected, and modern reconstructions are inferences from military logistics.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Moldova","Romania"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Tervingi and Greuthungi Gothic groups who crossed the Danube in 376","baselineYear":376,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"vandal-conquest-of-roman-africa","title":"The Vandal Conquest of Roman Africa","startYear":429,"endYear":442,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Gaiseric led the Vandals and Alans from Spain into Roman North Africa, seized Carthage and the richest African provinces, expropriated the Roman landowning class and exiled Catholic clergy","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Africa Proconsularis, Byzacena and part of Numidia — the grain-producing heart of the western empire, in present-day Tunisia and eastern Algeria — passed to the Vandal kingdom, recognised by treaty in 442.","lat":36.853,"lon":10.323,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.14,"fromLon":-5.35,"toLat":35.9,"toLon":-5.3,"label":"Baetica (southern Spain) → North Africa, 429 CE","people":80000},{"fromLat":36.853,"fromLon":10.323,"toLat":35.5,"toLon":6.5,"label":"Expropriated Roman landowners and exiled clergy driven from the Proconsular province","people":null}],"summary":"In 429 CE Gaiseric moved the Vandals and Alans across the strait from Spain to Africa — 80,000 people according to Victor of Vita — and over the next decade took the western African provinces, capturing Hippo Regius after a siege during which Augustine died and seizing Carthage in 439. A treaty in 442 recognised Vandal possession of the richest provinces. The conquest was followed by systematic expropriation: across much of northern Tunisia Roman landowners were driven off and their estates handed to Vandal settlers as sortes Vandalorum, and imperial legislation cutting the African tax assessment to an eighth for the affected districts registers the scale of the disruption. As Arian Christians ruling a strongly Nicene population, the Vandal kings exiled and imprisoned Catholic bishops and clergy and confiscated churches; the extent of this persecution is disputed because the fullest account, Victor of Vita's History of the Vandal Persecution, was written to denounce it. The loss of the African grain supply was a decisive blow to the western Roman state.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Tunisia","Spain","Morocco","Algeria"],"baselinePop":4000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Roman provinces of North Africa","baselineYear":429,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.02},{"id":"justinian-gothic-war-italy","title":"Justinian's Gothic War and the Depopulation of Italy","startYear":535,"endYear":554,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"East Roman armies under Belisarius and Narses and Ostrogothic forces under Witigis and Totila fought a twenty-year war across Italy, repeatedly besieging, sacking and emptying its cities","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Italy, Sicily, Sardinia and Dalmatia passed from the Ostrogothic kingdom to East Roman rule; the Lombard invasion of 568 undid most of the conquest within a generation.","lat":41.9,"lon":12.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.9,"fromLon":12.5,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Roman senatorial families and captives to Constantinople","people":null}],"summary":"Between 535 and 554 the East Roman emperor Justinian sought to reconquer Italy from the Ostrogothic kingdom, producing a war that ran for two decades over the whole peninsula. Cities changed hands repeatedly: Milan was destroyed in 539 with its male population reportedly killed and its women handed to Burgundian allies; Rome was besieged and taken four times, and in 546 Totila expelled its inhabitants entirely, leaving the city briefly empty. The fighting coincided with the plague pandemic of 541-543 and with famines described by Procopius in Picenum and Aemilia, so mortality cannot be attributed to the war alone. The conquest was completed in 554 but collapsed almost immediately when the Lombards invaded in 568. The episode fills a long silence in the atlas between the Hunnic invasions and the Umayyad conquest of Iberia, and is the clearest case of state-directed urban emptying in early medieval western Europe.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Italy","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":4000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Italian peninsula at the start of the Gothic War","baselineYear":535,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"khosrow-i-sack-of-antioch-540","title":"Khosrow I's Sack of Antioch and the Deportation to Weh Antiok Khosrow","startYear":540,"endYear":542,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Sasanian king Khosrow I stormed and burned Antioch during his invasion of Roman Syria and carried its surviving inhabitants, with captives from other Syrian and Osrhoene towns, to a new city he built near Ctesiphon","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.2,"lon":36.16,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.2,"fromLon":36.16,"toLat":33.09,"toLon":44.58,"label":"Antioch → Weh Antiok Khosrow, near Ctesiphon","people":null}],"summary":"In 540 Khosrow I broke what Procopius calls the 'endless peace', invaded Roman Syria and took Antioch, the capital of the diocese of the East, after the Roman garrison fled. Procopius (Wars II.8–10) describes Persian troops killing indiscriminately in the streets, Khosrow ordering the survivors captured and enslaved, the treasures of the churches removed and the whole city burned except the main church, which Roman envoys begged him to spare. Khosrow then built a new city a day's journey from Ctesiphon, known in Middle Persian as Weh Antiok Khosrow ('Khosrow's better Antioch') and later as Rumagan or al-Rumiya, settled the Antiochene captives there with a bath and hippodrome, provisioned them at royal expense and placed them directly under the king (Wars II.14). Geoffrey Greatrex, reviewing Henning Börm's study of Procopius, notes that eastern sources confirm Procopius' account of the deportation. The episode continues the Sasanian practice of productive resettlement of Roman captives; the third- and fourth-century deportations under Shapur I and Shapur II are covered separately in 'Sasanian Deportation of Roman Populations to Iran', and this entry counts only the deportations of Khosrow I's 540 campaign and the later arrivals at the same city.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Iraq"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"slav-settlement-of-the-balkans","title":"Slav and Avar Settlement of the Balkans","startYear":580,"endYear":630,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Avar khaganate armies and Slavic groups raided, occupied and settled the Roman Balkan provinces while imperial administration and much of the provincial population withdrew to coastal cities and fortified sites","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Most of the Roman Balkan interior between the Danube and the Peloponnese passed out of imperial control; Byzantine authority contracted to Thessalonica, the Aegean and Adriatic coasts and a few fortified enclaves, and was only rebuilt piecemeal from the ninth century.","lat":41.99,"lon":21.43,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.2,"fromLon":20.4,"toLat":40.64,"toLon":22.94,"label":"Danube frontier → Macedonia and Greece","people":null},{"fromLat":42.7,"fromLon":23.3,"toLat":40.64,"toLon":22.94,"label":"Provincial populations → fortified coastal cities","people":null}],"summary":"Between roughly 580 and 630 the Roman Balkan provinces ceased to function as an imperial space. Avar and Slavic raiding, the collapse of the Danube frontier after 602, and the withdrawal of field armies to the eastern front left the interior open to permanent settlement by Slavic-speaking groups, while surviving provincial populations concentrated in coastal cities, offshore islands and mountain refuges. Byzantine writers describe sacked cities, mass captive-taking and depopulation; archaeology shows the abandonment of Danubian forts and a break in urban life across the interior. The scale is unquantifiable: the chronicles give no reliable totals, and modern scholarship is divided between models of large-scale folk migration and models in which a smaller intrusive population catalysed a change of identity among people already there. The episode is included because the collapse of imperial control was accompanied by documented forcible movement of populations, not because a mass expulsion can be demonstrated.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Macedonia","Serbia","Greece","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The provincial Roman population of the Balkan provinces around 580 CE","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"expulsion-of-the-jewish-tribes-of-medina","title":"Expulsion and Killing of the Jewish Tribes of Medina","startYear":624,"endYear":627,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The early Muslim community under Muhammad expelled the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir from Medina and, after the Battle of the Trench, executed the adult males of the Banu Qurayza and enslaved their women and children","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The date palms, fortresses and lands of the three tribes in and around Medina passed to the Muslim community; the Nadir's estates became the basis of important early property settlements.","lat":24.47,"lon":39.61,"flows":[{"fromLat":24.47,"fromLon":39.61,"toLat":25.7,"toLon":39.29,"label":"Banu Nadir → Khaybar","people":null},{"fromLat":24.47,"fromLon":39.61,"toLat":32.5,"toLon":36,"label":"Banu Qaynuqa → Syria","people":null}],"summary":"Between 624 and 627 the three principal Jewish tribes of Medina were removed from the settlement. The Banu Qaynuqa were besieged and expelled in 624, the Banu Nadir besieged and expelled in 625 with permission to take movable goods, and after the siege of Medina in 627 the Banu Qurayza surrendered and were judged by Sa'd ibn Mu'adh, who sentenced the adult males to death and the women and children to enslavement. Ibn Ishaq's account, the fullest, gives the executed as between 600 and 900. The episode rests entirely on the Muslim biographical tradition recorded well over a century later; W. N. Arafat argued in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1976 that the Qurayza massacre account is a late accretion of doubtful reliability, while M. J. Kister and most subsequent specialists have defended the tradition's substance while treating the numbers as conventional. There is no independent documentary or archaeological evidence either way.","deathsLow":400,"deathsHigh":900,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":520,"_deaths":650,"countries":["Saudi Arabia","Jordan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"arab-conquests-and-the-dhimma","title":"The Arab Conquests and the Dhimmi Settlement Regime","startYear":633,"endYear":750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Rashidun and Umayyad armies conquered Sasanian Iran, the Byzantine Levant, Egypt and North Africa, founded garrison towns for Arab settlers, and placed conquered non-Muslims under a tributary 'dhimma' regime","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Within roughly a century the caliphate absorbed the entire Sasanian empire and the Byzantine provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, together with Transoxiana, Sind and most of the Iberian peninsula.","lat":33.51,"lon":36.29,"flows":[{"fromLat":24.47,"fromLon":39.61,"toLat":32.03,"toLon":44.4,"label":"Arabian tribal settlers → the garrison town of Kufa","people":null},{"fromLat":24.47,"fromLon":39.61,"toLat":30.01,"toLon":31.23,"label":"Arabian tribal settlers → Fustat","people":null}],"summary":"Between the 630s and the 740s Arab-Muslim armies destroyed the Sasanian empire and stripped Byzantium of its southern provinces, creating a single polity from the Atlantic to Central Asia. The characteristic instrument of rule was not expulsion but the dhimma: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and later others retained their communities, law and worship in exchange for tribute, principally the jizya poll tax, together with legal subordination that hardened into formal disabilities from the eighth century onward. Conquering forces were settled in purpose-built garrison towns rather than dispersed among the conquered, which limited displacement but created a durable structure of separate and unequal populations. Later Islamic tradition also records the removal of Christians and Jews from the Hijaz under Umar I. The demographic effect was gradual: conversion and Arabisation took centuries, and Egypt and Syria retained Christian majorities long after the conquest. The entry records a change of sovereignty and a legal regime of subordination, not a mass deportation.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Syria","Saudi Arabia","Iraq","Egypt"],"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the lands conquered between 633 and 750: Sasanian Iraq and Iran, Byzantine Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and North Africa","baselineYear":650,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"trans-saharan-slave-trade-medieval","title":"The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 7th–15th Centuries","startYear":650,"endYear":1450,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Merchants and states on both sides of the Sahara — the Maghribi and Egyptian markets, and the Sahelian polities of Ghana, Mali, Kanem-Bornu and the Hausa states — moved enslaved Africans northward across the desert over eight centuries","peopleDisplaced":4000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.77,"lon":-3.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.51,"fromLon":2.11,"toLat":32.89,"toLon":13.18,"label":"Central Sudan → Tripoli and the Fezzan","people":null},{"fromLat":16.77,"fromLon":-3.01,"toLat":31.63,"toLon":-7.99,"label":"Western Sudan → Morocco","people":null},{"fromLat":13,"fromLon":22,"toLat":30.01,"toLon":31.23,"label":"Darfur and Kanem → Egypt via the Forty Days Road","people":null}],"summary":"From the Arab conquest of North Africa onward, an organised long-distance trade carried enslaved Africans north across the Sahara to markets in the Maghrib, Egypt and the wider Islamic world, where they were used as domestic servants, concubines, soldiers, miners and agricultural labourers. The trade was sustained by Sahelian states that raided their southern neighbours and by caravan networks tied to the gold and salt trades. Nothing resembling a register survives; the volume is reconstructed by extrapolation, principally by Ralph Austen, whose census gives an average of a few thousand a year and totals in the low millions for the medieval centuries, with Paul Lovejoy putting the whole period 650–1600 at roughly 4.3 to 4.8 million. Mortality on the desert crossings was high and is not separately measurable. Because most of those taken were women and children, and because male captives were frequently castrated for the eunuch trade with very high death rates, the demographic effect on source regions is thought to have been severe, but it too cannot be quantified.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali","Niger","Libya","Morocco","Sudan","Egypt"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The populations of the Sahelian and sub-Saharan regions that supplied captives to the trans-Saharan trade","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"byzantine-population-transfers","title":"Byzantine Population Transfers: Slavs to Anatolia, Armenians and Syrians to Thrace","startYear":688,"endYear":830,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Byzantine emperors — notably Justinian II, Constantine V and their successors — moved whole populations across the empire to garrison frontiers, repopulate devastated provinces and break up communities judged unreliable","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.19,"lon":29.06,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.2,"fromLon":22.5,"toLat":40.19,"toLon":29.06,"label":"Slavs from Macedonia → the Opsikion theme, Bithynia","people":30000},{"fromLat":38.5,"fromLon":39,"toLat":42.15,"toLon":24.75,"label":"Armenians and Syrians → Thrace under Constantine V","people":null}],"summary":"From the late seventh century the Byzantine state used compulsory population transfer as a standing instrument of policy. Justinian II moved Slavic groups from Macedonia into Bithynia in Asia Minor, forming from them a military corps that Theophanes numbers at 30,000; when much of it defected to the Arabs in 692 the emperor is said to have had the settlers' families killed. Constantine V moved Armenians and Syrians from the eastern frontier into depopulated Thrace in the 750s and moved others in the reverse direction, using transfer at once to repopulate, to garrison and to dilute communities regarded as religiously or politically suspect. Peter Charanis's 1961 study established transfer as a continuous policy rather than a set of emergencies. The figures are almost entirely absent, and where present are round chronicle numbers; the practice is nonetheless securely documented across two centuries.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Macedonia","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":7000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Byzantine Empire during the period of the transfers","baselineYear":780,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"indian-ocean-red-sea-slave-trade-medieval","title":"The Red Sea and Indian Ocean Slave Trades, 7th–15th Centuries","startYear":700,"endYear":1450,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Merchants operating from the Swahili coast, the Horn and the Red Sea ports carried enslaved East Africans and Ethiopians to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and India, in a trade organised through Islamic commercial networks","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.16,"lon":39.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.16,"fromLon":39.19,"toLat":30.51,"toLon":47.81,"label":"Swahili coast → the Persian Gulf and Basra","people":null},{"fromLat":15.6,"fromLon":39.45,"toLat":21.49,"toLon":39.19,"label":"Red Sea ports → the Hijaz and Arabia","people":null},{"fromLat":-6.16,"fromLon":39.19,"toLat":19.08,"toLon":72.88,"label":"East Africa → western India","people":null}],"summary":"Alongside the Saharan routes, a maritime trade carried enslaved people from the East African coast, the Horn and the Nilotic Sudan across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean into Arabia, the Gulf, Iraq and India, where they served as domestic and agricultural labour, concubines and soldiers. The trade is visible in Arabic and Persian geographies, in the presence of East Africans in Abbasid Iraq — the Zanj of the ninth-century revolt were its product — and in the African-descended Habshi and Siddi communities that later held political power in parts of India. Estimates of volume for the medieval centuries are extrapolations rather than counts; the commonly cited totals of one to three million rest on Austen's censuses and Lovejoy's synthesis and are acknowledged by their authors to be provisional. The trade continued and expanded into the nineteenth century, so figures quoted for 'the Indian Ocean slave trade' often cover a far longer span than the medieval period treated here.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Tanzania","Iraq","Eritrea","Saudi Arabia","India"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"umayyad-conquest-of-iberia","title":"Umayyad Conquest and Settlement of Iberia","startYear":711,"endYear":756,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"An Umayyad army of largely Berber troops under Tariq ibn Ziyad, followed by Musa ibn Nusayr, destroyed the Visigothic kingdom and settled Arab and Berber groups across the peninsula under a tributary regime for Christians and Jews","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Almost the whole Iberian peninsula was absorbed into the Umayyad caliphate as al-Andalus, later an independent emirate at Córdoba; Christian polities survived only in the Cantabrian mountains and the Pyrenees.","lat":39.86,"lon":-4.03,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.79,"fromLon":-5.81,"toLat":37.89,"toLon":-4.78,"label":"Berber and Arab forces → the Guadalquivir valley","people":null},{"fromLat":39.86,"fromLon":-4.03,"toLat":43.36,"toLon":-5.85,"label":"Christian flight → the Cantabrian north","people":null}],"summary":"In 711 a force crossing from North Africa under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visigothic king Roderic, and within a decade most of the Iberian peninsula was under Umayyad rule. Conquest was accomplished as much by treaty as by battle: local lords who submitted kept their lands and their subjects kept their religion under tribute, as the surviving Pact of Tudmir shows. Arab and, in far greater numbers, Berber groups settled across the peninsula in a hierarchy that placed Arabs above Berbers above native converts, and the resulting tensions produced the Berber revolt of 740. Native Christians and Jews continued under dhimmi status, and conversion to Islam proceeded gradually over more than two centuries rather than as an immediate consequence of conquest. There is no evidence of mass expulsion of the indigenous population; the measurable displacement is the movement of some Christians into the northern mountains, which cannot be quantified.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Morocco"],"baselinePop":4000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Iberian peninsula under the Visigothic kingdom","baselineYear":711,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"an-lushan-rebellion","title":"The An Lushan Rebellion and the Tang Census Collapse","startYear":755,"endYear":763,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The rebel armies of An Lushan and Shi Siming, Tang loyalist forces and their Uyghur and Central Asian auxiliaries fought across the Tang heartland, sacking both capitals and destroying the empire's household registration","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.34,"lon":108.94,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.75,"fromLon":113.63,"toLat":30.59,"toLon":114.31,"label":"North China Plain → the Yangtze basin and the south","people":null}],"summary":"An Lushan's revolt in 755 broke the Tang state's control of its own territory for eight years, saw Chang'an and Luoyang sacked more than once, and left the northeast in the hands of semi-independent military governors. Its most cited consequence is demographic: the registers give about 52.9 million people in some 9 million households in 754 and about 16.9 million in fewer than 3 million households in 764, a gap of roughly 36 million that has been repeated in popular accounts as a death toll and used to rank the rebellion among the deadliest events in history. Specialists reject that reading. The Tang registers counted taxable households the government could reach; the war destroyed the registration apparatus, put whole provinces beyond central control, and gave both households and provincial governors strong reasons not to be counted. Denis Twitchett and the Cambridge History of China, and demographic work going back to John Durand, attribute most of the gap to administrative collapse and tax evasion rather than mortality, while accepting that deaths from fighting, famine and epidemic were severe and are not separately recoverable.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":36000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":52919309,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of Tang China in the census immediately before the rebellion","baselineYear":755,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"charlemagne-saxon-wars","title":"Charlemagne's Saxon Wars, Forced Conversion and Deportations","startYear":772,"endYear":804,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Charlemagne's Frankish armies conquered the Saxon lands between the Rhine and the Elbe, imposed Christianity by capital law, and deported Saxon populations into Francia while settling others in their place","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Saxony between the lower Rhine, the Elbe and the Eider was annexed to the Frankish realm, organised into counties and bishoprics, and its pagan cult sites suppressed.","lat":52.92,"lon":9.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.92,"fromLon":9.23,"toLat":49.5,"toLon":7.5,"label":"Deported Saxons → Frankish interior","people":null},{"fromLat":53.9,"fromLon":11.4,"toLat":53.5,"toLon":10.5,"label":"Abodrite Slavs settled on vacated Saxon land","people":null}],"summary":"From 772 to 804 Charlemagne fought a series of campaigns to subjugate the Saxons, combining military conquest with the forcible imposition of Christianity. The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae prescribed death for refusing baptism, for cremating the dead in pagan fashion and for eating meat in Lent; the pagan sanctuary at the Irminsul was destroyed in 772. The Royal Frankish Annals record the beheading of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in 782 after a revolt, and repeated deportations of Saxon populations into Francia, culminating in 804 with the removal of the Saxons beyond the Elbe and the settlement of Abodrite Slavs in their place. All the figures come from Frankish court annals written to justify the conquest; the Verden number in particular has been questioned, including an argument that the manuscript verb meant 'deported' rather than 'beheaded', which most specialists now reject while still doubting the round figure. What is not in doubt is that deportation and forced conversion were declared policy.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":4500,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Germany"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"viking-slave-raiding","title":"Viking Slave Raiding and the Northern Slave Trade","startYear":793,"endYear":1100,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Scandinavian raiders and traders took captives from Ireland, Britain, Francia and the Slavic east and sold them through Dublin, Hedeby and the Volga route into Byzantium and the Islamic world","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":53.35,"lon":-6.26,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.35,"fromLon":-6.26,"toLat":64.15,"toLon":-21.94,"label":"Ireland → Iceland and the Norse North Atlantic","people":null},{"fromLat":56.5,"fromLon":38,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Eastern Europe → Constantinople via the Rus river routes","people":null},{"fromLat":54.49,"fromLon":9.56,"toLat":37.89,"toLon":-4.78,"label":"Hedeby and the Baltic → al-Andalus","people":null}],"summary":"Slave-taking was a structural feature of Viking-age raiding rather than a by-product of it. Captives seized in Ireland, Britain, Frankia and the Slavic lands were held for ransom, kept as thralls in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic colonies, or sold on: Dublin functioned as one of Europe's principal slave markets, and the Rus river routes carried captives to Constantinople and the Islamic markets, where the silver that flows back into Scandinavian hoards is the trade's clearest surviving trace. Genetic and place-name evidence from Iceland indicates a substantial proportion of the founding female population came from Ireland and Britain. No total can be reconstructed: the annals record particular raids and not aggregates, and the trade left no registers. The practice declined in the eleventh and twelfth centuries with Christianisation and with church campaigns against the sale of Christians.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ireland","Iceland","Russia","Bulgaria","Germany","Spain"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the raids and the trade ran for three centuries across Ireland, Britain, Francia, the Baltic and the Slavic east","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"saqaliba-slave-trade","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Viking and Rus traders supplied some of the Slavic captives sold into the Islamic world as saqaliba, so the two trades overlap in part."}]},{"id":"saqaliba-slave-trade","title":"The Saqaliba Trade: Slavic Captives to al-Andalus and the Islamic World","startYear":800,"endYear":1100,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Frankish, Ottonian and Jewish long-distance merchants bought captives taken in wars on the Slavic frontier and sold them through Prague, Verdun and Mediterranean ports into al-Andalus, North Africa and the eastern Islamic world","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.09,"lon":14.42,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.4,"fromLon":16.9,"toLat":50.09,"toLon":14.42,"label":"Slavic frontier → the Prague market","people":null},{"fromLat":50.09,"fromLon":14.42,"toLat":49.16,"toLon":5.38,"label":"Prague → Verdun, a centre of castration and transit","people":null},{"fromLat":49.16,"fromLon":5.38,"toLat":37.89,"toLon":-4.78,"label":"Verdun → Córdoba and al-Andalus","people":null}],"summary":"Between the ninth and eleventh centuries a long-distance trade moved captives from the Slavic-speaking lands of central and eastern Europe into the Islamic Mediterranean, where they were known collectively as saqaliba. Captives taken in Ottonian and Frankish wars on the eastern frontier, and by Slavic rulers on each other, were bought by merchants and moved west and south through Prague and Verdun — the latter notorious in the Arabic and Latin sources as a place where boys were castrated for the eunuch market, an operation with very high mortality — and thence to al-Andalus, Ifriqiya and the eastern caliphate. In Umayyad Córdoba the saqaliba became a distinct military and administrative corps and, after 1009, a political force in the taifa period. The trade declined as the Slavic lands Christianised and their rulers stopped selling co-religionists. No quantities can be recovered; the evidence is Arabic geography, Latin toll records and the distribution of Islamic silver in northern hoards.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Czechia","Poland","France","Spain"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No single population can serve as a denominator for three centuries of captive-taking across the Slavic frontier","baselineYear":900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"viking-slave-raiding","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Viking and Rus traders supplied some of the Slavic captives sold into the Islamic world as saqaliba, so the two trades overlap in part."}]},{"id":"paulician-persecution-and-deportations","title":"Byzantine Persecution and Deportation of the Paulicians","startYear":843,"endYear":975,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Byzantine emperors suppressed the Paulician communities of eastern Anatolia by persecution and campaign, destroyed their state at Tephrike in 872, and transplanted surviving Paulicians to Thrace as frontier settlers","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The independent Paulician principality centred on Tephrike in eastern Anatolia was destroyed in 872 and its territory reabsorbed into the empire.","lat":39.37,"lon":38.12,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.37,"fromLon":38.12,"toLat":42.15,"toLon":24.75,"label":"Paulicians → Thrace and the Philippopolis frontier","people":null}],"summary":"The Paulicians were a dualist Christian movement on the Byzantine eastern frontier whom the imperial church treated as heretics. Persecution under the empress Theodora in the 840s drove survivors into Arab-held territory, where they built an armed principality at Tephrike that raided deep into Anatolia until Basil I destroyed it in 872. Alongside repression the empire used transplantation: Paulician communities were moved to Thrace, in the eighth century under Constantine V and most substantially in the 970s under John Tzimiskes, who settled them near Philippopolis as a military frontier population, where their descendants remained for centuries. The chronicle figure of about 100,000 killed under Theodora is a hostile estimate with no evidentiary support; Carl Dixon's recent study of the movement treats the Byzantine accounts as polemical constructions that need to be read against their purpose. What is well established is that the imperial state combined killing, confiscation and forced resettlement against a religious minority over more than a century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"zanj-enslavement-and-revolt","title":"Zanj Enslavement in the Iraqi Salt Marshes and the Zanj Revolt","startYear":869,"endYear":883,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Abbasid-era landowners imported East African ('Zanj') enslaved labourers to clear the salt flats of lower Iraq; the labourers rose in 869 under Ali ibn Muhammad and held the region for fourteen years before Abbasid forces crushed them","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"At its height the revolt controlled much of lower Iraq and Khuzestan from a capital at al-Mukhtara, taking Basra in 871 and threatening Baghdad's food supply.","lat":30.51,"lon":47.81,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.16,"fromLon":39.19,"toLat":30.51,"toLon":47.81,"label":"East African coast → the salt marshes of lower Iraq","people":null}],"summary":"Landowners in ninth-century lower Iraq used enslaved East Africans, known collectively as Zanj, to strip the salt crust from the marshland flats south of Basra so the land could be cultivated — heavy gang labour under harsh conditions. In 869 a preacher, Ali ibn Muhammad, mobilised these work gangs into a revolt that captured Basra in 871, established a capital at al-Mukhtara, and controlled much of lower Iraq and Khuzestan until the Abbasid regent al-Muwaffaq destroyed it in 883. Al-Tabari's history is the principal source and gives the movement's course in detail while attaching enormous casualty claims to it, running from hundreds of thousands to well over a million. Alexandre Popovic's study, the standard modern treatment, regards these as impossible. The revolt was not a general slave rebellion — the rebels themselves took captives and slaves — and modern historians debate how far it was defined by servile status as against regional and religious grievance.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Iraq","Tanzania"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the number of enslaved East Africans held in the salt flats of lower Iraq","baselineYear":869,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"ghaznavid-raids-northern-india","title":"Mahmud of Ghazni's Raids into Northern India and the Ghaznavid Slave Trade","startYear":1000,"endYear":1030,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Ghaznavid armies raided the Punjab, the Ganges plain and Gujarat, carrying captives and plunder back to Afghanistan","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Punjab annexed to the Ghaznavid empire with Lahore as its Indian capital; the rest of the raided territory was plundered rather than held","lat":20.888,"lon":70.4013,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.9,"fromLon":73.9,"toLat":33.5533,"toLon":68.4228,"label":"Captives from the Punjab and Ganges plain to Ghazna","people":null}],"summary":"Between about 1000 and 1027 Mahmud of Ghazni led some seventeen campaigns into northern India, sacking Kannauj, Mathura, Thanesar and the temple of Somnath, and annexing the Punjab, where Lahore became the Ghaznavid Indian capital. Ghaznavid court chronicles present the campaigns as jihad and record enormous quantities of plunder and enormous numbers of captives, describing slave markets in Ghazna, Khurasan and beyond glutted with Indian captives; the numbers are conventional and propagandistic, and modern historians treat them as unusable while accepting that enslavement occurred at scale. Temples were destroyed at several of the sacked cities, an element that has since become central to competing modern Indian narratives about the period. The raids did not attempt to hold most of the territory they crossed, but the annexation of the Punjab established a permanent Muslim political presence in northern India and the routes and precedents used by the later Ghurid conquest and Delhi Sultanate. Assessment of the campaigns is politically charged in South Asia, with Hindu nationalist historiography treating them as a foundational trauma and other historians emphasising plunder economics over religious motive.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Punjab, the Ganges plain and Gujarat raided by Ghaznavid armies","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"harrying-of-the-north","title":"The Harrying of the North","startYear":1069,"endYear":1070,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"William I's Norman army systematically destroyed settlements, crops, livestock and food stores across Yorkshire and the north of England to suppress rebellion and Danish intervention","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The northern shires were brought under Norman control and redistributed to Norman tenants-in-chief; large areas remained recorded as waste or heavily devalued in the Domesday survey of 1086.","lat":53.96,"lon":-1.08,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.96,"fromLon":-1.08,"toLat":55.95,"toLon":-3.19,"label":"Refugees → Scotland","people":null}],"summary":"In the winter of 1069–70, after repeated northern risings and a Danish landing, William I's army moved through Yorkshire and the surrounding shires destroying villages, food stores, farm implements and livestock. Orderic Vitalis, writing two generations later and generally sympathetic to William, condemned the campaign and stated that more than 100,000 people died of the resulting famine. Simeon of Durham and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describe the same devastation. Modern historians accept that a deliberate scorched-earth campaign took place and that famine followed, but reject Orderic's figure as far larger than the region's likely population; they also divide over the Domesday 'waste' entries, which David Palliser and others have argued reflect administrative and fiscal categories as much as physical destruction, while Paul Dalton and others read them as evidence of real and lasting depopulation. The episode is treated in the Cambridge World History of Genocide as a case study in deliberate destruction of a civilian resource base.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":150000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Yorkshire and the northern shires before the Norman devastation","baselineYear":1069,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"seljuk-settlement-of-anatolia","title":"Turkmen Settlement of Anatolia after Manzikert","startYear":1071,"endYear":1180,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Seljuk and independent Turkmen groups occupied the Anatolian plateau after the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert, displacing or absorbing the Greek- and Armenian-speaking Christian population over the following century","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Most of the Anatolian plateau passed permanently out of Byzantine control, organised from the 1080s as the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum with its capital eventually at Konya; Byzantium retained the western river valleys and the coasts.","lat":38.73,"lon":35.49,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.73,"fromLon":35.49,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Christian flight from the plateau → Constantinople and the coasts","people":null},{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":45,"toLat":38.73,"toLon":35.49,"label":"Turkmen groups → the Anatolian plateau","people":null}],"summary":"The Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071 did not itself lose Anatolia, but the civil wars that followed opened the plateau to Turkmen groups who settled it over the next generation, and by the 1080s a Seljuk sultanate was established in the interior. What happened to the existing Christian population is one of the sharper disputes in medieval history. Speros Vryonis's 'The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor' (1971) argued for large-scale disruption, flight and the destruction of the Christian ecclesiastical structure, producing eventual Islamisation. Claude Cahen and, more recently, A. C. S. Peacock and Alexander Beihammer have emphasised continuity, negotiated accommodation, intermarriage and gradual conversion, with Christian communities persisting for centuries. Both readings work from the same thin body of chronicles; no demographic reconstruction is possible. The entry records a securely documented transfer of sovereignty over a very large territory accompanied by undocumented but real displacement.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Bulgaria","Armenia"],"baselinePop":8000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Byzantine Anatolia on the eve of Manzikert","baselineYear":1071,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"rhineland-massacres-1096","title":"The Rhineland Massacres of 1096","startYear":1096,"endYear":1096,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Bands accompanying the People's Crusade, chiefly under Count Emicho of Flonheim, attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhineland and the Danube while local bishops and burghers variously sheltered or abandoned them","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":49.99,"lon":8.27,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.99,"fromLon":8.27,"toLat":50.94,"toLon":6.96,"label":"Jewish refugees from Mainz → Cologne and its surrounding villages","people":null}],"summary":"In the spring and early summer of 1096, as contingents assembled for the First Crusade, armed bands attacked Jewish communities along the Rhine and into the Danube valley — Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg and Prague — demanding conversion and killing those who refused. The Hebrew chronicles composed within a generation, together with Latin annals and the German memorial books, record the killings community by community and describe many Jews killing themselves and their families rather than accept baptism. Robert Chazan's reconstruction from these sources puts the total dead in the low thousands rather than the higher figures sometimes quoted. Church and imperial authorities did not sanction the attacks — several bishops attempted to shelter Jews and Henry IV afterwards allowed forced converts to revert — but no perpetrators were punished. The events are treated in modern scholarship as a decisive turning point in the position of Jews in Latin Christendom.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":8000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4000,"_deaths":5000,"countries":["Germany"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Rhineland and Danube communities attacked in 1096","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"capture-of-jerusalem-1099","title":"The Crusader Capture of Jerusalem and the Massacre of 1099","startYear":1099,"endYear":1099,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The armies of the First Crusade stormed Fatimid-held Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 and killed or enslaved much of its Muslim and Jewish population before establishing a Latin kingdom","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Jerusalem and its hinterland became the capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which held the city until 1187.","lat":31.78,"lon":35.22,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.78,"fromLon":35.22,"toLat":31.42,"toLon":31.81,"label":"Ransomed and expelled survivors → Egypt","people":null},{"fromLat":31.78,"fromLon":35.22,"toLat":33.51,"toLon":36.29,"label":"Muslim refugees → Damascus","people":null}],"summary":"The First Crusade took Jerusalem by storm on 15 July 1099 after a five-week siege, and the killing that followed was extensive enough to shock even sympathetic Latin writers: the Gesta Francorum and Raymond of Aguilers describe streets filled with the dead, and Ibn al-Athir, writing much later, gives seventy thousand killed in the al-Aqsa mosque alone. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue were burned there according to Ibn al-Qalanisi. Benjamin Kedar's study of the whole source tradition shows the highest Arabic figures exceed any plausible estimate of the city's population, and Geniza letters from Egypt document Jewish captives being ransomed and Christian sources record survivors expelled or ransomed rather than killed to a man. The massacre was nonetheless a large-scale killing of a civilian population and became a fixed point in both Latin triumphalism and later Muslim memory of the crusades.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":13200,"_deaths":16500,"countries":["Palestine","Egypt","Syria"],"baselinePop":25000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Jerusalem at the time of the Crusader siege","baselineYear":1099,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"jingkang-incident-song-southward-migration","title":"The Jingkang Incident and the Southward Flight of the Song","startYear":1125,"endYear":1142,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Jurchen Jin armies conquered northern China, sacked the Song capital and deported the imperial house, driving a mass migration south","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Jin dynasty took all of north China to the Huai River; the Song court re-established itself at Lin'an (Hangzhou) as the Southern Song","lat":34.7986,"lon":114.3074,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.7986,"fromLon":114.3074,"toLat":45.5,"toLon":126.6,"label":"Song imperial house and court deported to Manchuria","people":15000},{"fromLat":34.8,"fromLon":114.3,"toLat":30.2741,"toLon":120.1551,"label":"Northern refugees to the Yangzi delta and Lin'an","people":3000000}],"summary":"In 1126-27 Jurchen armies of the Jin dynasty besieged and sacked Bianjing (Kaifeng), capital of the Northern Song, and carried the retired emperor Huizong, the reigning emperor Qinzong, the imperial clan, court women, officials and skilled artisans north into captivity in what Chinese historiography calls the Jingkang Incident. Song accounts describe the seizure of thousands of women of the palace and elite households and their distribution among Jin commanders; these accounts are partly recorded in captivity narratives whose detail is disputed. A surviving prince re-founded the dynasty at Lin'an as the Southern Song, and continued warfare until the treaty of 1142 fixed the frontier at the Huai River. Behind the court came one of the largest population movements in Chinese history, as northern gentry, officials and peasants crossed into the Yangzi valley and the south-east; historians reconstruct this from Song household registers rather than from any contemporary count, and estimates range from about one million to five million. The migration permanently shifted China's demographic and economic centre of gravity to the south.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["sexual violence","forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":100000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Northern Song empire on the eve of the Jurchen conquest","baselineYear":1125,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05},{"id":"almohad-persecution-of-dhimmis","title":"Almohad Forced Conversion and the Flight of Andalusi Jews and Christians","startYear":1146,"endYear":1212,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Almohad caliphate abolished dhimmi status across the Maghrib and al-Andalus, requiring conversion to Islam, and Jewish and Christian communities converted, fled or were destroyed","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.89,"lon":-4.78,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.89,"fromLon":-4.78,"toLat":41.65,"toLon":-0.88,"label":"Andalusi Jews → the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia","people":null},{"fromLat":34.03,"fromLon":-5,"toLat":31.2,"toLon":29.92,"label":"Maghribi Jews → Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean","people":null}],"summary":"The Almohad movement that took Marrakesh in 1147 and crossed into al-Andalus rejected the dhimma arrangement under which Jews and Christians had lived under Muslim rule, and required conversion to Islam. Jewish communities across the Maghrib and al-Andalus responded by outward conversion, by flight to the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia, to Provence or to Egypt, or were destroyed; the Mozarabic Christian communities of al-Andalus, already reduced, effectively disappeared, with many deported to North Africa. Maimonides' family left Córdoba and eventually settled in Fustat, and his Epistle on Forced Conversion is addressed to Jews living outwardly as Muslims. The episode ended the long period in which al-Andalus sustained large protected non-Muslim communities. Numbers cannot be recovered; recent scholarship, including the Brill volume on forced conversion, has also debated how systematic and how sustained Almohad enforcement actually was, as against its representation in later Jewish memory.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Morocco","Egypt"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish and Christian populations of al-Andalus and the Maghrib under Almohad rule","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"baltic-crusades-prussia-livonia","title":"The Baltic Crusades: Conquest of Livonia and Prussia","startYear":1198,"endYear":1290,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Sword Brothers and then the Teutonic Order, with crusader contingents and German and Polish settlers, conquered the pagan Livs, Estonians, Latgalians and Old Prussians and built a monastic state over their lands","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Livonia and Prussia — approximately modern Latvia, Estonia, the Kaliningrad oblast and parts of northern Poland — were organised as the monastic state of the Teutonic Order, with German towns founded under Kulm and Lübeck law and the land distributed to Order officials, bishops and settlers.","lat":54.04,"lon":19.03,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.4,"fromLon":13,"toLat":54.04,"toLon":19.03,"label":"German settlers → Prussia","people":null},{"fromLat":54.7,"fromLon":21.2,"toLat":54.35,"toLon":18.65,"label":"Submitted Prussian groups resettled by the Order","people":null}],"summary":"From the mission and crusade in Livonia around 1200 to the final suppression of Prussian resistance in the 1270s and 1280s, the Baltic crusades conquered the last pagan peoples of the southern and eastern Baltic and replaced their societies with a monastic state. Henry of Livonia's chronicle and Peter of Dusburg's Chronicon terrae Prussiae, both written from inside the enterprise, record campaigns of devastation, the killing and enslavement of populations, forced baptism and the razing of strongholds; the Great Prussian Uprising of 1260–1274 and its suppression were especially destructive. Conquest was followed by systematic colonisation: German and Polish settlers were brought in under charter, towns were founded, and the surviving Prussian population was reduced to a subordinate rural stratum whose language died out by about 1700. No population figures survive from the conquest itself, and modern estimates of the pre-conquest Prussian population and of losses are extrapolations from later records.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Poland","Germany","Russia"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The pagan Baltic and Finnic population of Livonia and Prussia at the start of the crusades","baselineYear":1200,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"sack-of-constantinople-1204","title":"The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople","startYear":1203,"endYear":1204,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"A Venetian-transported crusade army diverted to Constantinople, stormed and sacked the city in April 1204, and partitioned the Byzantine empire among Latin rulers","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Byzantine empire was dismembered under the Partitio Romaniae: a Latin Empire at Constantinople, a Venetian maritime domain, and crusader lordships in Greece, with Byzantine successor states at Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond.","lat":41.01,"lon":28.98,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":40.43,"toLon":29.72,"label":"Byzantine refugees → Nicaea","people":null},{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":41,"toLon":39.72,"label":"Byzantine refugees → Trebizond","people":null},{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":39.66,"toLon":20.85,"label":"Byzantine refugees → Epirus","people":null}],"summary":"The Fourth Crusade, unable to pay Venice for its transport, was diverted first to Zara and then to Constantinople, where after intervening in a Byzantine succession dispute it stormed the city on 12–13 April 1204 and sacked it for three days. Niketas Choniates, an eyewitness, records systematic plunder, killings, rape and the desecration of churches including Hagia Sophia; Villehardouin, on the crusader side, records the scale of the booty without demur. Britannica's summary gives approximate campaign losses of about 20,000 on the crusader side and 30,000 on the Byzantine, with civilian deaths unknown; no contemporary source provides a civilian toll. The empire was partitioned among the victors, its relics and treasures dispersed to Latin churches, and although Byzantine rule was restored at Constantinople in 1261 the state never recovered its former reach. Pope John Paul II expressed regret for the sack in 2001; that is a statement of contrition, not a formal legal finding.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bulgaria","Turkey","Greece"],"baselinePop":400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Constantinople on the eve of the Fourth Crusade's assault","baselineYear":1203,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"albigensian-crusade","title":"The Albigensian Crusade and the Conquest of Languedoc","startYear":1209,"endYear":1229,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"A papally proclaimed crusade of northern French lords under Simon de Montfort, later the French crown, made war on the counts of Toulouse and their subjects to suppress Cathar heresy, ending with the annexation of Languedoc","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The county of Toulouse and much of Languedoc passed under the control of the French crown by the Treaty of Paris of 1229, ending the region's political autonomy.","lat":43.34,"lon":3.22,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.6,"fromLon":1.44,"toLat":45.46,"toLon":9.19,"label":"Cathar believers and exiles → Lombardy","people":null},{"fromLat":43.6,"fromLon":1.44,"toLat":41.39,"toLon":2.17,"label":"Exiles → Catalonia","people":null}],"summary":"Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against heresy in Languedoc in 1208, and the twenty-year war that followed transferred the region to northern control. Its notorious moment came at Béziers on 22 July 1209, when the town was stormed and its population killed; the papal legate Arnaud Amalric reported to Rome that nearly twenty thousand had been killed regardless of rank, age or sex, a figure that exceeds most estimates of the town's population and that Britannica notes alongside the caution that chroniclers' figures from this period are often exaggerated. Mass burnings of identified heretics followed at Minerve in 1210 and Lavaur in 1211. The war ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1229, which brought Languedoc under the French crown, and was followed by the papal inquisition established in the 1230s. Mark Gregory Pegg has argued the crusade should be read as genocidal in intent; other specialists, including R. I. Moore, dispute that reading and question whether an organised 'Cathar church' existed as the crusaders described it.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10000,"_deaths":12500,"countries":["France","Italy","Spain"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mongol-conquest-of-china","title":"The Mongol Conquest of China and the Census Collapse","startYear":1211,"endYear":1279,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Mongol armies under Chinggis Khan, Ögedei and Khubilai destroyed the Jin empire in northern China and then the Southern Song, killing, deporting artisans and reordering the population under the Yuan dynasty","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"All of China was brought under a single non-Chinese dynasty for the first time: the Jin empire fell in 1234, the Southern Song in 1279, and the Yuan ruled from Dadu (Beijing).","lat":39.9,"lon":116.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":116.4,"toLat":30.26,"toLon":120.15,"label":"Flight from north China → the Southern Song","people":null},{"fromLat":34.75,"fromLon":113.63,"toLat":47.2,"toLon":102.2,"label":"Deported artisans → Mongolia and the Mongol heartland","people":null}],"summary":"The Mongol wars in China ran for nearly seventy years, from the first attacks on the Jin in 1211 to the destruction of the Southern Song in 1279. The demographic evidence is a registration record with an enormous gap: the Jin census of 1207 recorded roughly 7.6 million households and about 45 million people in north China, while the Mongol registration of north China in the 1230s recorded under two million households. That collapse has often been read directly as tens of millions of deaths. Specialists are more cautious. Yuan registration was far less thorough than Jin registration, much of the population escaped enrolment or was assigned to Mongol nobles as bondservants and so left the ordinary registers, and there was heavy flight to the south. The Cambridge Economic History of China and the demographic work of Ho Ping-ti treat much of the apparent loss as administrative. Real mortality in the north from warfare, famine and epidemic was nonetheless severe, and the conquest of the Song, achieved partly by negotiated surrenders, was less destructive than the northern wars.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":30000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China","Mongolia"],"baselinePop":110000000,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of Jin northern China and Southern Song China on the eve of the Mongol conquest","baselineYear":1200,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mongol-conquest-of-khwarazm","title":"The Mongol Conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire","startYear":1219,"endYear":1221,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Chinggis Khan's armies destroyed the Khwarazmian empire, sacked Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv, Nishapur, Herat and Urgench, killed or deported their populations and drove captive levies ahead of their assaults","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Transoxiana, Khwarazm and Khurasan were absorbed into the Mongol empire; the irrigation systems of the Merv oasis and Khwarazm were wrecked and several major cities never regained their former size.","lat":37.66,"lon":62.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.65,"fromLon":66.96,"toLat":47.2,"toLon":102.2,"label":"Deported craftsmen → Mongolia and the Mongol heartland","people":null},{"fromLat":37.66,"fromLon":62.19,"toLat":34.53,"toLon":69.17,"label":"Refugees → Afghanistan and northern India","people":null}],"summary":"Chinggis Khan's invasion of the Khwarazmian empire in 1219, provoked by the killing of a Mongol trade mission, destroyed the largest Islamic state of its day in two years. Bukhara and Samarkand fell in 1220, Urgench, Merv, Nishapur and Herat in 1221; where cities resisted, the Mongols expelled the population, separated out artisans for deportation, and killed the remainder. The Persian chroniclers give figures that dominate the event's reputation: Juvayni reports 1.3 million killed at Merv and Ibn al-Athir gives comparable totals elsewhere, with claims for Nishapur and Herat above a million. Modern specialists reject these. John Masson Smith's work on the logistics of Mongol siege warfare, and David Morgan's assessment of the Persian sources, argue that the cities concerned could not have contained such populations and that the numbers function as expressions of catastrophe rather than counts. That the campaign killed on a very large scale, wrecked the irrigation agriculture of Khurasan and Khwarazm, and permanently reduced several great cities is not disputed; the arithmetic is.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":2000000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":920000,"_deaths":1150000,"countries":["Turkmenistan","Uzbekistan","Mongolia","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"lucera-deportation-of-sicilian-muslims","title":"Deportation of Sicily's Muslims to Lucera and the Colony's Destruction","startYear":1223,"endYear":1300,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Emperor Frederick II deported the remaining Muslim population of western Sicily to a segregated colony at Lucera in Apulia; in 1300 the Angevin king Charles II destroyed the colony and enslaved or dispersed its inhabitants","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Muslim landholding in western Sicily was extinguished and the lands redistributed; the site of Lucera in Apulia became a royal colony, and after 1300 was repopulated with Christians and renamed Civitas Sanctae Mariae.","lat":41.51,"lon":15.33,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.65,"fromLon":13.1,"toLat":41.51,"toLon":15.33,"label":"Muslims of western Sicily → Lucera, Apulia","people":20000}],"summary":"After suppressing a long Muslim revolt in the mountains of western Sicily, Frederick II from 1223 deported the island's remaining Muslim population to Lucera in Apulia on the mainland, where they were settled as a royal colony — taxed directly by the crown, permitted their mosques and law, and supplying the emperor with archers and craftsmen. The transfer removed Islam from Sicily after three and a half centuries and created an isolated Muslim community of perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand in the middle of Latin Christendom. The colony survived Frederick's death and the Angevin conquest until 1300, when Charles II, under pressure from the papacy and needing money, had it destroyed: the inhabitants were seized, enslaved and sold, some killed, the mosques demolished, and the town repopulated with Christians. Julie Taylor's study of the community is the standard modern account. The episode is unusually well documented for a medieval forced transfer because the crown taxed the colony directly and left records.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Italy"],"baselinePop":25000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim community of Sicily deported to Lucera, which is also the only population for this event that was ever counted","baselineYear":1223,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"mongol-invasions-of-korea","title":"The Mongol Invasions of Korea and the Deportation of Captives","startYear":1231,"endYear":1259,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Mongol armies invaded Goryeo Korea repeatedly over three decades, taking captives on a large scale, while the Goryeo court sheltered on Ganghwa Island until it submitted in 1259","peopleDisplaced":206800,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Goryeo survived as a kingdom but became a subordinate son-in-law state of the Yuan, with northern territories detached into Mongol commanderies and the court obliged to intermarry with the imperial house.","lat":37.75,"lon":126.48,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.57,"fromLon":126.98,"toLat":37.75,"toLon":126.48,"label":"Goryeo court and population → refuge on Ganghwa Island","people":null},{"fromLat":37.57,"fromLon":126.98,"toLat":41.8,"toLon":123.43,"label":"Korean captives → Liaodong and the Mongol territories","people":206800}],"summary":"Between 1231 and 1259 Mongol armies invaded Korea six times. The Goryeo military government moved the court to Ganghwa Island, out of reach of an army without a navy, and left the mainland population to absorb the invasions. The Goryeosa records that the 1254 campaign alone carried off 206,800 captives, and describes the burning of settlements and the killing of those who resisted; the nine-storey wooden pagoda of Hwangnyongsa, one of the great monuments of Korean Buddhism, was destroyed in the invasion of 1238. Goryeo submitted in 1259 and was drawn into the Yuan orbit as a subordinate kingdom whose rulers married Mongol princesses, and was subsequently made to build and man the fleets for the failed invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. The captive figure is one of the few precise numbers in any thirteenth-century account of Mongol warfare, though it covers a single campaign.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":206800,"_deaths":null,"countries":["South Korea","China"],"baselinePop":3000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Goryeo Korea at the time of the first Mongol invasion","baselineYear":1231,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.06893333333333333},{"id":"reconquista-mudejar-displacement","title":"Reconquista Conquests and the Displacement of Andalusi Muslims","startYear":1236,"endYear":1300,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The crowns of Castile and Aragon conquered Córdoba, Valencia, Seville and Murcia, expelled or subordinated their Muslim inhabitants, and redistributed the land to Christian settlers under repartimiento","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Guadalquivir valley, the kingdom of Valencia and Murcia were annexed to Castile and Aragon between 1236 and 1266, leaving Granada as the sole Muslim polity in Iberia.","lat":39.47,"lon":-0.38,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.47,"fromLon":-0.38,"toLat":37.18,"toLon":-3.6,"label":"Muslims of Valencia and Murcia → the emirate of Granada","people":null},{"fromLat":37.39,"fromLon":-5.99,"toLat":35.76,"toLon":-5.83,"label":"Muslims of Seville → North Africa","people":null}],"summary":"The Christian conquests of the mid-thirteenth century — Córdoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248, Murcia definitively in 1266 — transferred the greater part of al-Andalus to Castile and Aragon and were followed by systematic redistribution of urban property and farmland to Christian settlers recorded in the repartimiento books. Muslim populations were treated differently from place to place: some, particularly rural communities in Valencia and Aragon, remained as Mudéjars under charters guaranteeing religion and custom; others were expelled outright, as at Seville, or left under surrender terms, as James I records for the city of Valencia. The Mudéjar revolt of 1264–1266 in Andalusia and Murcia was followed by further expulsions and a second wave of Christian settlement. The result over two generations was a substantial movement of Muslims to Granada and North Africa and a repopulation of the conquered south by settlers from the north. The 1492 conquest of Granada and the expulsion of Spain's Jews in the same year fall outside this entry's window.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Morocco"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible aggregate exists for the Muslim population of the territories conquered between 1236 and 1300","baselineYear":1250,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mongol-invasion-of-rus","title":"The Mongol Invasion of the Rus Principalities","startYear":1237,"endYear":1241,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Batu's Mongol army destroyed the Rus principalities city by city, sacked Kyiv in December 1240, and imposed tributary rule through the Golden Horde","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Rus principalities became tributaries of the Golden Horde, their princes required to obtain patents of rule from the khan; the arrangement lasted formally until 1480.","lat":50.45,"lon":30.52,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.62,"fromLon":39.72,"toLat":56.13,"toLon":40.4,"label":"Flight from the sacked towns of the north-east","people":null},{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":49.84,"toLon":24.03,"label":"Refugees from Kyiv → Galicia-Volhynia","people":null}],"summary":"Batu's campaign of 1237–1241 destroyed the political order of the Rus lands. Ryazan fell in December 1237, Vladimir in February 1238, and Kyiv in December 1240 after a short siege; the chronicles record the storming and burning of dozens of towns. John of Plano Carpini, passing through in 1246, described bones and skulls lying in the fields and reported that Kyiv had been reduced to some two hundred houses whose inhabitants lived in servitude. Archaeology corroborates destruction layers and mass graves at several sites, and a marked decline in urban crafts. The princes who survived became tributaries of the Golden Horde, travelling to Sarai for patents to rule and collecting tribute for the khan. No population or casualty figures exist: the chronicles record which towns were taken and burned, not how many died, and Carpini's observations are impressionistic. Modern Russian, Ukrainian and Mongolist historiographies differ sharply over how devastating and how lasting the effects were.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ukraine","Russia"],"baselinePop":6000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Rus principalities on the eve of the Mongol invasion","baselineYear":1237,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mongol-invasion-of-hungary","title":"The Mongol Invasion of Hungary","startYear":1241,"endYear":1242,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Batu's and Subutai's Mongol armies destroyed the Hungarian royal army at Mohi and devastated the kingdom for a year before withdrawing on the death of the Great Khan Ögedei","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The kingdom was not annexed: the Mongols withdrew in 1242 without establishing rule, and Hungary was reconstituted under Béla IV with a new programme of fortification and resettlement.","lat":48.03,"lon":20.94,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":20.5,"toLat":43.51,"toLon":16.44,"label":"Flight from the Great Plain → the Dalmatian coast","people":null},{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":20.5,"toLat":47.1,"toLon":17.9,"label":"Flight to fortified Transdanubia","people":null}],"summary":"In April 1241 the Mongol army destroyed Béla IV's forces at Mohi and spent the following year systematically ravaging Hungary, crossing the frozen Danube in the winter to reach Transdanubia before withdrawing in spring 1242 after Ögedei's death. Master Roger's Carmen miserabile, written by a survivor, describes massacre, the burning of settlements and a famine in which the surviving population starved. The scale of loss is disputed. Britannica's summary reports that Hungary lost about half its population, with roughly sixty per cent losses on the Great Plain — locally total — and about twenty per cent in Transdanubia, figures derived from settlement archaeology and the disappearance of villages from later charters. Other Hungarian historians argue for a considerably lower overall loss, in the range of fifteen to twenty per cent, holding that many settlements recorded as abandoned were re-established and that the charter evidence overstates permanent depopulation. Hungary's population before the invasion is usually put at around two million.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":520000,"_deaths":650000,"countries":["Hungary","Bosnia and Herz."],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Kingdom of Hungary on the eve of the Mongol invasion","baselineYear":1241,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mongol-sack-of-baghdad-1258","title":"The Mongol Sack of Baghdad and the End of the Abbasid Caliphate","startYear":1258,"endYear":1258,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Hülegü's Mongol army besieged and stormed Baghdad, executed the last Abbasid caliph al-Musta'sim, and killed or dispersed much of the city's population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Abbasid caliphate as a political institution was extinguished and Iraq was incorporated into the Ilkhanate, ruled from Tabriz; Baghdad ceased to be an imperial capital.","lat":33.32,"lon":44.42,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.32,"fromLon":44.42,"toLat":33.51,"toLon":36.29,"label":"Refugees → Syria","people":null}],"summary":"Hülegü, sent west by his brother the Great Khan Möngke, besieged Baghdad in January 1258; the city surrendered on 10 February and was given over to a week or more of killing and plunder. The caliph al-Musta'sim was executed, reportedly rolled in a carpet and trampled to avoid spilling royal blood, ending five centuries of Abbasid caliphate. Figures for the dead vary wildly across the sources: Hülegü's own report to Louis IX gives about two hundred thousand, later Persian writers such as Wassaf give two million, and the intermediate tradition often gives eight hundred thousand. Modern assessments, including John Masson Smith's work on Mongol logistics, put the plausible toll far lower, in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands, constrained by estimates of the city's population and the practicalities of killing over a limited period. Recent work in Medical History has also reassessed whether epidemic disease, rather than the sack alone, accounts for part of the mortality reported in the sources. The destruction of Baghdad's libraries is widely reported but its extent is debated.","deathsLow":90000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":356000,"_deaths":445000,"countries":["Iraq","Syria"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Baghdad at the time of the Mongol siege","baselineYear":1258,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"expulsions-of-jews-from-england-and-france","title":"The Expulsions of the Jews from England and France","startYear":1290,"endYear":1394,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Edward I expelled the Jews of England in 1290; Philip IV expelled those of France in 1306 and seized their property; after readmission, Charles VI expelled them again and definitively in 1394","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":51.51,"lon":-0.09,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.51,"fromLon":-0.09,"toLat":50.85,"toLon":2.88,"label":"England 1290 → Flanders and northern France","people":2500},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":45.44,"toLon":4.39,"label":"France 1306 → Provence, Savoy and the Empire","people":100000},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":45.07,"toLon":7.69,"label":"France 1394 → Italy and the Rhineland","people":null}],"summary":"England and France were the first major European kingdoms to expel their Jewish populations outright. Edward I's edict of 18 July 1290 gave the Jews of England until 1 November to leave, following decades of punitive taxation that had exhausted the community's wealth, the Statute of the Jewry of 1275 banning lending at interest, and the executions of 1278–1279 over coin-clipping charges; the crown took the outstanding debts and the property. Philip IV of France ordered mass arrests on 22 July 1306, confiscated the property and expelled the community, recalling them in 1315 under fiscal pressure; further expulsions followed in 1322 and, definitively, in 1394 under Charles VI. In each case the expulsion was accompanied by confiscation, and in each case fiscal motive is visible in the record. England's Jews did not return in organised form until the seventeenth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United Kingdom","Belgium","France","Italy"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of England and of France on the eve of the expulsions","baselineYear":1290,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1},{"id":"muhammad-bin-tughluq-daulatabad-transfer","title":"Muhammad bin Tughluq's Transfer of Delhi to Daulatabad","startYear":1327,"endYear":1335,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Delhi sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq ordered the transfer of his capital and its population from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan, some 1,100 kilometres south, and reversed the decision within a few years","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Daulatabad, the former Yadava capital of Devagiri, was rebuilt as a second capital to govern the newly annexed Deccan; the project was abandoned and Delhi resumed its role.","lat":28.61,"lon":77.21,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.61,"fromLon":77.21,"toLat":19.94,"toLon":75.22,"label":"Delhi → Daulatabad (Devagiri)","people":null},{"fromLat":19.94,"fromLon":75.22,"toLat":28.61,"toLon":77.21,"label":"Return to Delhi after the project was abandoned","people":null}],"summary":"Around 1327 Muhammad bin Tughluq, having extended Delhi Sultanate authority deep into the Deccan, ordered his capital moved to Daulatabad and required the population of Delhi to move with it. The march of more than a thousand kilometres, described by Ibn Battuta and by the court historian Barani, killed an unrecorded number on the road; within a few years the sultan reversed the policy and ordered a return, and Delhi took years to recover. The episode became the standard example of the sultan's reputation for grand schemes badly executed, a reputation established by hostile contemporaries. Britannica's account of the Tughluq reign describes the aim as settling Muslim nobles in the south and holding them under the sultan's control. Modern scholarship qualifies the picture further: the compulsion is not in doubt and is documented by an eyewitness, but historians read the transfer as directed at the court, administration, ulama and their dependants rather than at every inhabitant, and note that Daulatabad functioned as a genuine second capital and remained an important city afterwards.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Delhi at the time of the ordered transfer of the capital to Daulatabad","baselineYear":1327,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"black-death-massacres-of-jews","title":"The Black Death Massacres and Expulsions of Jewish Communities","startYear":1348,"endYear":1351,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Town councils, guilds, flagellant bands and local lords across the Holy Roman Empire, the Rhineland, Alsace, Switzerland, Aragon and Provence killed, burned or expelled Jewish communities accused of poisoning wells during the plague","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.57,"lon":7.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.57,"fromLon":7.75,"toLat":50.06,"toLon":19.94,"label":"Survivors → Poland and Lithuania","people":null}],"summary":"As plague spread through Europe in 1348 and 1349, Jewish communities were accused of causing it by poisoning wells. Confessions extracted under torture at Chillon on Lake Geneva in September 1348 were circulated to towns along the Rhine and became the template for the accusation. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls condemning the charge and pointing out that Jews were dying of the plague as well, without effect. At Basel in January 1349 the community was burned in a wooden house built for the purpose; at Strasbourg on 14 February 1349, before the plague had even reached the city, several hundred to two thousand Jews were burned and the survivors expelled, after a coup by the guilds against a council that had protected them. Similar destructions followed at Mainz, Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Brussels and hundreds of smaller places. Municipal debt to Jewish lenders was extinguished along with the lenders in many cases. Surviving communities were expelled and moved east, reshaping the geography of Ashkenazi Jewry.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["France","Poland"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Holy Roman Empire and neighbouring lands attacked during the Black Death, around 1348","baselineYear":1348,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"ottoman-surgun-and-devsirme","title":"Ottoman Sürgün Resettlement and the Devşirme Child Levy","startYear":1354,"endYear":1450,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Ottoman state compulsorily resettled Anatolian Muslim and nomadic populations into the conquered Balkans, moved Balkan populations into Anatolia, and levied Christian boys from Balkan villages for conversion and service to the sultan","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Ottoman rule was extended across Thrace, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece between the crossing to Gallipoli in 1354 and the middle of the fifteenth century, with Edirne as capital from the 1360s.","lat":41.67,"lon":26.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.75,"fromLon":30.5,"toLat":41.67,"toLon":26.56,"label":"Anatolian Turkmen and yörük settlers → Thrace and the Balkans","people":null},{"fromLat":42.7,"fromLon":23.32,"toLat":40.19,"toLon":29.06,"label":"Devşirme recruits → Anatolia and the sultan's household","people":null}],"summary":"Ottoman expansion into the Balkans was accompanied by two systematic instruments of population policy. Sürgün was the compulsory transfer of populations by imperial decree: Turkmen and nomadic groups from Anatolia were moved into newly conquered Balkan districts to secure them, and Balkan populations were moved in the other direction; the practice was later used on a large scale to repopulate Istanbul after 1453. The devşirme was a periodic levy of Christian boys, chiefly from Balkan villages, who were taken from their families, converted to Islam, and trained for the Janissary corps or the palace service, from which the highest offices of the empire were filled. The characterisation of the devşirme is disputed: Ottoman-centred scholarship, notably Halil İnalcık's, presents it as a recruitment mechanism that gave peasant boys access to the empire's highest positions, while Balkan and much Western scholarship treats it as a tribute in children taken by force from subject communities; both descriptions rest on the same evidence of compulsion and of subsequent careers.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Anatolian and Balkan populations subject to Ottoman forced resettlement and the child levy","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"hongwu-ming-resettlements","title":"Early Ming State-Organised Resettlement under the Hongwu Emperor","startYear":1368,"endYear":1398,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Hongwu emperor's government moved peasant households from densely settled Shanxi and the Yangtze delta into war-devastated north China, transferred wealthy families to the capital, and settled hereditary military households in frontier colonies","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.06,"lon":118.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.27,"fromLon":111.72,"toLat":36.07,"toLon":114.4,"label":"Shanxi households → the depopulated North China Plain","people":null},{"fromLat":31.3,"fromLon":120.6,"toLat":32.06,"toLon":118.8,"label":"Wealthy Jiangnan households → Nanjing","people":null},{"fromLat":34,"fromLon":113,"toLat":40.8,"toLon":111.65,"label":"Military colonists → the northern frontier garrisons","people":null}],"summary":"The wars that ended Mongol rule left large parts of the North China Plain and the Huai region depopulated. The Hongwu emperor's response was compulsory resettlement on a scale that reshaped the demography of northern China: households were moved from crowded Shanxi and from the lower Yangtze into the emptied prefectures of Hebei, Henan and Shandong, given land, tools and tax remissions, and forbidden to return; wealthy and potentially troublesome families from the Yangtze delta were transferred to the new capital at Nanjing, 5,300 households in a single order in 1391; and hereditary military households were settled in self-supporting agricultural colonies along the northern and southwestern frontiers. The policy was administrative rather than punitive in intent, but it was compulsory and enforced. The totals are reconstructions: the edicts survive, the migration itself was never counted, and the folk tradition of the Hongdong pagoda tree, from which millions of north Chinese families trace descent, is a memory of the process rather than evidence of its scale.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":3000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":60000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ming China at the census of 1393","baselineYear":1393,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.05},{"id":"timur-campaigns","title":"Timur's Campaigns: Isfahan, Delhi and Baghdad","startYear":1370,"endYear":1405,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Timur (Tamerlane), ruling from Samarkand, campaigned across Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, India and the Levant, storming cities, massacring populations and deporting craftsmen to his capital","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Timur built an empire from Anatolia and the Levant to the Indus and the Syr Darya, ruled from Samarkand; it fragmented within a generation of his death.","lat":39.65,"lon":66.96,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.61,"fromLon":77.21,"toLat":39.65,"toLon":66.96,"label":"Deported craftsmen from Delhi → Samarkand","people":null},{"fromLat":33.32,"fromLon":44.42,"toLat":39.65,"toLon":66.96,"label":"Deported artisans from Iraq and Syria → Samarkand","people":null}],"summary":"Timur's campaigns between 1370 and his death in 1405 produced a series of city massacres that are among the best-known of the period. At Isfahan in 1387, after the killing of his tax collectors, his troops are reported by the Persian sources to have killed some seventy thousand people and to have built towers of skulls. At Delhi in December 1398 he sacked the city for several days after, according to his own memoirs and the Zafarnama tradition, ordering the execution of about a hundred thousand prisoners taken before the battle. At Baghdad in 1401 the Persian sources report ninety thousand heads built into towers. Every one of these figures comes from a chronicle tradition — much of it commissioned by Timur himself, for whom the reputation for terror was an instrument of war — and the round numbers are conventional. The other consistent feature of the campaigns, the systematic deportation of craftsmen to Samarkand, is corroborated independently by Clavijo's embassy account.","deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":480000,"_deaths":600000,"countries":["Uzbekistan","India","Iraq"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the campaigns ran from Anatolia to Delhi across 35 years and a dozen distinct polities","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"timurid-invasions-georgia","rel":"includes","note":"Timur's eight invasions of Georgia were part of his wider campaigns, though the death range for those campaigns covers only the Iranian, Indian and Mesopotamian massacres."}]},{"id":"timurid-invasions-georgia","title":"Timur's Invasions of Georgia and the Depopulation of the Kartli Lowlands","startYear":1386,"endYear":1403,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Timur's armies repeatedly invaded the Christian kingdom of Georgia, sacking towns and carrying off captives","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kartli and Kakheti reduced to tributary status; Georgian kingdom fragmented in the following decades","lat":41.7151,"lon":44.8271,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.7151,"fromLon":44.8271,"toLat":39.6548,"toLon":66.9597,"label":"Captives from Tbilisi and Kartli to Samarkand and Transoxiana","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1386 and 1403 Timur invaded Georgia eight times, taking Tbilisi in 1386 and capturing King Bagrat V, and returning repeatedly to devastate Kartli and Kakheti when Georgian rulers renounced tribute. Persian chronicles written for Timur's court describe cities stormed, populations enslaved, vineyards and churches destroyed and captives marched to Transoxiana, while Georgian chronicles record flight into the mountains and into western Georgia. The scale is not recoverable: chronicle numbers are rhetorical, and archaeologists and historians instead infer heavy depopulation of the eastern lowlands from abandoned settlements and from the weakened, fragmented kingdom of the fifteenth century. Georgia survived as a Christian tributary state but never recovered its earlier position, and the invasions are conventionally treated as the end of the Georgian golden age.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","cultural or religious destruction","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Georgia","Uzbekistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the kingdom of Georgia before Timur's campaigns","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"timur-campaigns","rel":"part-of","note":"Timur's eight invasions of Georgia were part of his wider campaigns, though the death range for those campaigns covers only the Iranian, Indian and Mesopotamian massacres."}]},{"id":"ming-occupation-of-dai-viet","title":"The Ming Occupation of Đại Việt and the Deportation of Its Elites","startYear":1407,"endYear":1427,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Ming Yongle emperor annexed Đại Việt as the province of Jiaozhi, deported its ruling house, officials, scholars and craftsmen to China, and imposed Ming law, dress and ritual until a twenty-year insurgency expelled the occupation","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Đại Việt was annexed outright as the Ming province of Jiaozhi, administered by Ming prefectures and counties for twenty years, before independence was restored under Lê Lợi and recognised by the Ming in 1428.","lat":21.03,"lon":105.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.03,"fromLon":105.85,"toLat":32.06,"toLon":118.8,"label":"Deported Vietnamese elites, scholars and craftsmen → Nanjing","people":null}],"summary":"The Ming invaded Đại Việt in 1406 on the pretext of restoring the deposed Trần dynasty, and in 1407 annexed it outright as the province of Jiaozhi. The Hồ rulers and their officials were deported to China, and further levies removed scholars, physicians and skilled craftsmen north over the following years. The occupation imposed Ming administrative structures, taxation, dress and ritual, and its officials collected and removed or destroyed Vietnamese books and records — an act that Vietnamese tradition regards as an attempt to erase the country's separate cultural existence and that modern scholarship treats as a deliberate, if partly rationalised, programme of assimilation. Resistance culminated in Lê Lợi's insurgency from 1418; the Ming withdrew in 1427 and recognised Vietnamese independence in 1428. Nguyễn Trãi's Bình Ngô đại cáo, the proclamation of victory, is the classic Vietnamese account of the occupation and is a work of political rhetoric as well as a record.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Vietnam","China"],"baselinePop":3120000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Đại Việt registered by the Ming administration of Jiaozhi province after the conquest of 1407","baselineYear":1408,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"aztec-triple-alliance-conquest-tribute","title":"The Aztec Triple Alliance: Conquest, Tribute Resettlement and Mass Sacrifice","startYear":1428,"endYear":1519,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan subjugated city-states across central Mesoamerica, planted colonists in frontier provinces, and took war captives for sacrifice at the imperial temples","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"An imperial tribute domain covering much of central and southern Mexico from the Gulf coast to the Pacific, excluding the Tlaxcalan and Tarascan states.","lat":19.43,"lon":-99.13,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.43,"fromLon":-99.13,"toLat":18.2,"toLon":-100.1,"label":"Nahua military colonists settled at the Tarascan frontier garrisons","people":null}],"summary":"From the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1428 the Mexica of Tenochtitlan and their allies conquered a tribute empire across central Mesoamerica, imposing tribute recorded in pictorial registers, installing governors and garrisons, and settling Nahua colonists in frontier provinces after the removal or destruction of local populations. Warfare was structured partly around the taking of captives: prisoners from campaigns and from the ritualised xochiyaoyotl or flower wars with Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco were sacrificed at the Templo Mayor and provincial temples. Sources on the scale of sacrifice are unreliable in a specific way: the dedication of the rebuilt Templo Mayor in 1487 is reported in colonial-era annals as involving 20,000 to 80,400 victims, figures modern scholars treat as ideological rather than countable, while excavation of the Huei Tzompantli skull rack beneath Mexico City from 2015 has recovered hundreds of skulls and confirms institutionalised display of sacrificial dead. The empire's structure — tribute, garrison colonies and captive-taking — is what the Spanish conquest of 1519-1521, already in the atlas, dismantled and partly reused.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":12000000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of central Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest, the area over which the Triple Alliance exercised conquest and tribute","baselineYear":1519,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"fall-of-angkor-1431","title":"The Ayutthayan Capture of Angkor and the Removal of the Khmer Court","startYear":1430,"endYear":1440,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Ayutthaya kingdom captured the Khmer capital and, by Thai chronicle accounts, carried off its court, artisans and population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Angkor region passed under Ayutthayan control; the Khmer political centre moved south-east to the Phnom Penh-Longvek region","lat":13.4125,"lon":103.867,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.4125,"fromLon":103.867,"toLat":14.3532,"toLon":100.5689,"label":"Khmer court, Brahmans and artisans deported to Ayutthaya","people":null}],"summary":"Thai chronicle traditions describe a siege of Angkor Thom of some seven months ending with the city's capture by Ayutthaya, conventionally dated to 1431, after which the Khmer king was killed or fled and an Ayutthayan prince was installed. The same chronicles say the victors removed the Khmer royal family, Brahman ritual specialists, court dancers, artisans and a mass of ordinary people to Ayutthaya, a practice consistent with the wider Southeast Asian pattern in which war was fought for manpower rather than territory, and Khmer court culture is generally held to have entered Siamese royal practice through this transfer. The Khmer political centre subsequently shifted to the Phnom Penh and later Longvek region, though the reasons - military pressure, trade, hydraulic decline - are debated. Modern scholarship, particularly Michael Vickery's, treats the chronicle accounts as late and unreliable, questions the 1431 date, and rejects the older narrative of a sudden and total abandonment of Angkor; archaeological work shows continued occupation of the Angkor region for generations afterwards. The episode is included here for the deportation of population it is recorded as involving, while noting that its scale cannot be established.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Cambodia","Thailand"],"baselinePop":750000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Greater Angkor, the low-density urban complex and its hinterland, at its height","baselineYear":1300,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"inca-mitma-resettlement","title":"The Inca Mitma: State Resettlement across Tawantinsuyu","startYear":1438,"endYear":1532,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Inca state uprooted conquered communities and moved them across the empire as mitmaqkuna colonists, replacing them with loyal populations","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Population transfers spanned Tawantinsuyu from present-day Ecuador and southern Colombia to central Chile and north-western Argentina.","lat":-13.53,"lon":-71.97,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.84,"fromLon":-69.34,"toLat":-17.39,"toLon":-66.16,"label":"Aymara and other highland colonists resettled into the Cochabamba maize valleys","people":null},{"fromLat":-8.11,"fromLon":-79.07,"toLat":-13.53,"toLon":-71.97,"label":"Chimu craftsmen from Chan Chan transferred to Cusco after the conquest of the north coast","people":null}],"summary":"The Inca state used compulsory resettlement, mitma, as a routine instrument of rule: communities judged rebellious were moved far from their homelands and replaced by populations of proven loyalty, while colonists were planted to open new agricultural land, garrison frontiers or supply specialised crafts. Transferred groups, the mitmaqkuna, retained their dress and ethnic identity but owed labour and allegiance to the state and were registered in the census system recorded on khipu. The most fully documented case is the Cochabamba valley, converted into a state maize estate worked by colonists drawn from a long list of highland groups, itemised in a Spanish inspection of 1556. Craft specialists were also relocated wholesale, including metalworkers and weavers from the defeated Chimu kingdom brought to Cusco. The Spanish conquest inherited a landscape of displaced populations and layered its own reducciones on top of it — a system the atlas already covers. Mitma is probably the largest state-organised population transfer in the pre-Columbian Americas and its absence from the atlas was a substantial gap.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Peru","Bolivia"],"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, on the eve of the Spanish invasion","baselineYear":1520,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.1},{"id":"indian-ocean-and-red-sea-slave-trades-1450-1750","title":"The Indian Ocean and Red Sea Slave Trades, 1450–1750","startYear":1450,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Swahili coast, Omani, Yemeni, Indian and later Portuguese, Dutch and French merchants shipped enslaved Africans, Malagasy, Indians and Southeast Asians across the Indian Ocean to Arabia, Persia, India and the European colonies of the Indies and the Mascarenes","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.165,"lon":39.199,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.04,"fromLon":40.73,"toLat":15.35,"toLon":44.21,"label":"Mozambique and the Swahili coast → Arabia","people":null},{"fromLat":-18.88,"fromLon":47.51,"toLat":-6.18,"toLon":106.83,"label":"Madagascar → Batavia and the Dutch East Indies","people":null},{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":-6.18,"toLon":106.83,"label":"Bengal and Arakan → Batavia","people":null},{"fromLat":-15.04,"fromLon":40.73,"toLat":-33.92,"toLon":18.42,"label":"Mozambique → the Cape Colony","people":null}],"summary":"The Indian Ocean carried an old and continuous traffic in enslaved people that the arrival of European companies redirected rather than created. East Africans and Malagasy were shipped north to Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India; Portuguese Goa, Dutch Batavia and Ceylon, and later French Mauritius and Bourbon drew enslaved labour from Madagascar, Mozambique, Bengal, Arakan, Sulawesi and Bali; the Dutch East India Company both bought slaves and took them as war captives, as at Banda. The Arakanese and Portuguese raiding of Bengal in the seventeenth century, which supplied thousands of captives a year to Chittagong and Batavia, is among the better-documented episodes. Volumes are poorly recorded because much of the traffic was carried in small vessels by merchants who kept no registers surviving today, and because European company records document only part of it. Modern estimates come from Austen for the African trades and from Richard Allen for European slave trading within the ocean, and both authors present their figures as provisional.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Tanzania","Comoros","Yemen","Madagascar","Indonesia","India","South Africa"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"trans-saharan-slave-trade-1450-1750","title":"The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1450–1750","startYear":1450,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Saharan and North African merchants, and the Moroccan and Ottoman states that taxed and used them, moved enslaved people north across the desert from the Sahel and the Sudan to Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Egypt","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.773,"lon":-3.008,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.51,"fromLon":2.11,"toLat":32.89,"toLon":13.19,"label":"Central Sudan → Fezzan and Tripoli","people":null},{"fromLat":16.77,"fromLon":-3.01,"toLat":31.63,"toLon":-7.99,"label":"Niger bend → Marrakesh and Morocco","people":null},{"fromLat":12,"fromLon":30,"toLat":30.05,"toLon":31.23,"label":"Darfur and Kordofan → Egypt along the Forty Days Road","people":null}],"summary":"The desert trade in enslaved people, already centuries old by 1450, continued and in places intensified through the early modern period. Captives were taken in raiding and warfare in the Sahel and the savanna belt, marched to desert-edge markets such as Timbuktu, Agades, Kano and Kobbei, and carried north by caravan to Morocco, the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, and Egypt, where they were absorbed into domestic service, agriculture, the military and the harem. The Moroccan conquest of Songhay in 1591 and the later creation by Mawlay Isma'il of a standing army of enslaved black soldiers, the Abid al-Bukhari, are the clearest instances of state organisation of the traffic. Women and children formed a much larger share of this trade than of the Atlantic trade, and mortality on the desert crossing was high. The volume is genuinely unknown: the figures in circulation derive from Austen's reconstructions and later syntheses and should be read as orders of magnitude rather than counts.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali","Niger","Libya","Morocco","Sudan","Egypt"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the trade drew captives from the whole Sahel and Sudanic belt over three centuries and dozens of polities","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"fall-of-constantinople-and-the-ottoman-repopulation","title":"The Fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman Repopulation of the City","startYear":1453,"endYear":1478,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Mehmed II took Constantinople, allowed a three-day sack in which the surviving inhabitants were enslaved, then repopulated the city by compulsory transfer of families from across the empire","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The last territory of the Roman/Byzantine state passed to the Ottomans, who made the city their capital; the remaining Byzantine successor states at Mistra (1460) and Trebizond (1461) followed within a decade, the latter's population also subject to deportation and resettlement.","lat":41.008,"lon":28.978,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":39.93,"toLon":32.86,"label":"Enslaved inhabitants dispersed into Anatolia","people":null},{"fromLat":38.42,"fromLon":27.14,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Surgun transfers from Anatolia → Istanbul","people":null},{"fromLat":40.64,"fromLon":22.94,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Surgun transfers from Rumelia → Istanbul","people":null}],"summary":"Constantinople fell on 29 May 1453 after a seven-week siege, and by the custom of the day a city taken by storm was given over to plunder; the chroniclers describe three days of sack in which churches were stripped, thousands were killed and the bulk of the surviving population was enslaved, with the wealthier ransomed. Mehmed II then set about restoring the city as an imperial capital, issuing orders that brought settlers from all over the empire, some by inducement and many by surgun, the compulsory transfer of designated households. Muslims from Anatolia, Orthodox Christians from Rumelia and the Aegean, Armenians and Jews were installed by quarter, a pattern repeated at Trebizond, Karaman and elsewhere as new territories were absorbed. The 1477-78 survey shows a city of roughly 16,300 households, restored in size but wholly recomposed. The killing and enslavement figures rest on partisan narrative accounts and are not verifiable; the transfer policy is documented in Ottoman administrative records and surveys.","deathsLow":4000,"deathsHigh":4000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":4000,"countries":["Bulgaria","Turkey","Greece"],"baselinePop":45000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Constantinople on the eve of the Ottoman siege","baselineYear":1453,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1.3333333333333333},{"id":"dai-viet-conquest-of-champa-1471","title":"The Đại Việt Conquest of Champa and the Sack of Vijaya","startYear":1471,"endYear":1471,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Lê Thánh Tông of Đại Việt invaded Champa, stormed its capital Vijaya, and reduced the kingdom to a small southern remnant, opening central Vietnam to Vietnamese settlement","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Cham territories from the Hải Vân pass south to Cape Varella were annexed and organised as the province of Quảng Nam; Champa survived only as the small principality of Panduranga in the far south, itself finally absorbed in 1832.","lat":13.88,"lon":109.11,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.88,"fromLon":109.11,"toLat":11.56,"toLon":108.99,"label":"Cham survivors → Panduranga","people":null},{"fromLat":13.88,"fromLon":109.11,"toLat":11.55,"toLon":104.92,"label":"Cham refugees → Cambodia","people":null},{"fromLat":21.03,"fromLon":105.85,"toLat":15.88,"toLon":108.34,"label":"Vietnamese military colonists → the annexed Cham lands","people":null}],"summary":"In 1470-71 Lê Thánh Tông led a large invasion of Champa in response to Cham raids on the Vietnamese south, and in March 1471 stormed the Cham capital of Vijaya. The Vietnamese annals claim 60,000 Cham killed and 30,000 captured, among them the king; the city was destroyed and the kingdom's northern and central territories annexed and settled with Vietnamese military colonists. Champa, which had existed as a Hindu and later partly Muslim polity on the central Vietnamese coast for more than a millennium, was reduced to the small southern principality of Panduranga and never recovered; Cham communities dispersed to Cambodia, the Malay world and Hainan, where their descendants remain. The conquest is the decisive episode in the nam tiến, the long southward movement of Vietnamese settlement that would eventually reach the Mekong delta. Its numbers rest entirely on the annals of the victors and are not independently corroborated by Cham inscriptions or external sources.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":60000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Vietnam","Cambodia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the population of Champa in 1471","baselineYear":1471,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"crimean-and-nogai-slave-raiding-in-eastern-europe","title":"Crimean and Nogai Slave Raiding in Eastern Europe","startYear":1475,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Crimean Khanate and allied Nogai hordes, as Ottoman vassals, raided Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ukrainian lands for captives who were sold through Crimean ports into the Ottoman world","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":45.031,"lon":35.382,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":45.03,"toLon":35.38,"label":"Ukrainian lands → Kefe (Caffa) slave market","people":null},{"fromLat":54.19,"fromLon":37.62,"toLat":45.03,"toLon":35.38,"label":"Muscovite frontier → Crimea","people":null},{"fromLat":45.03,"fromLon":35.38,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Crimea → Istanbul and the Ottoman markets","people":null}],"summary":"For nearly three centuries the steppe frontier of Eastern Europe was subject to organised raiding for captives, conducted by the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai hordes and feeding a slave market centred on the Ottoman port of Kefe. Raiding parties, sometimes numbering tens of thousands of horsemen, struck deep into Muscovy, Ukraine, Podolia and Volhynia, burning settlements and driving off people and livestock; the great raid of 1571 reached and burned Moscow itself. The captives were marched to the Crimea, sold, and dispersed across the Ottoman world as domestic slaves, concubines, agricultural workers and galley rowers. Both Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth built defensive lines and raised dedicated ransom taxes, and the Cossack hosts emerged in part as a response. Estimates of the total taken run between about one and a half and three million; Kizilov's work shows how they are assembled from customs, ransom and market records and why they remain provisional. The traffic declined as Russian power advanced into the steppe and ended with the Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783, outside this era.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":16000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the raided lands - Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ukrainian steppe frontier - around the midpoint of the raiding era","baselineYear":1600,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.125},{"id":"muscovy-novgorod-deportations","title":"Muscovy's Subjugation of Novgorod: The Deportations of 1478-1489 and the Sack of 1570","startYear":1478,"endYear":1570,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Grand Prince Ivan III and later Tsar Ivan IV annexed the Novgorod Republic, deported its landholding and merchant families to central Muscovy and settled Muscovite servitors on their estates","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Novgorod Republic's territories, extending from the Baltic hinterland to the White Sea and the northern Urals, were absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Moscow.","lat":58.52,"lon":31.27,"flows":[{"fromLat":58.52,"fromLon":31.27,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Novgorod boyar and merchant families deported to Moscow and the central provinces","people":30000}],"summary":"Ivan III ended the independence of the Novgorod Republic in 1478, and over the following decade his government deported the city's landowning, merchant and clerical elites into central Muscovy, confiscating their estates and replacing them with Muscovite service gentry — one of the earliest systematic elite transfers in Russian state practice. The veche bell, the symbol of the city's self-government, was removed to Moscow. In January 1570 Ivan IV, alleging a treasonous conspiracy with Poland-Lithuania, brought his oprichnina troops to Novgorod and conducted a sack lasting several weeks. Estimates of those killed vary by more than an order of magnitude: the tsar's own synodikon lists about 1,500 names, while the Novgorod chronicles and foreign observers such as Heinrich von Staden give figures in the tens of thousands. The city never regained its former commercial position. The entry fills a gap in the atlas between the Mongol invasion of Rus and Russia's eastward expansion after 1552.","deathsLow":1500,"deathsHigh":27000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":14250,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the population of Novgorod and its lands across the 1478-1570 span","baselineYear":1478,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"conquest-of-granada-and-the-forced-conversion-of-the-mudejars","title":"The Conquest of Granada and the Forced Conversion of Its Muslims","startYear":1482,"endYear":1502,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Castile and Aragon conquered the Nasrid emirate of Granada, then set aside the surrender terms and required its Muslim population to convert to Christianity or leave","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":30000,"territoryDesc":"The Nasrid emirate of Granada, the last Muslim polity in the Iberian peninsula, roughly the modern provinces of Granada, Malaga and Almeria, was annexed to the Crown of Castile; its ruling family went into exile in Morocco and its lands were redistributed to Castilian settlers, nobles and the Church.","lat":37.176,"lon":-3.598,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.18,"fromLon":-3.6,"toLat":34.03,"toLon":-5,"label":"Granada → Fez and the Maghreb","people":null},{"fromLat":36.72,"fromLon":-4.42,"toLat":35.18,"toLon":-3.9,"label":"Malaga coast → North Africa","people":null}],"summary":"The war of 1482-92 ended eight centuries of Muslim rule in Iberia when Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492. The Capitulations of Santa Fe guaranteed the inhabitants their religion, law, property and the right to emigrate; the population of Malaga, taken by storm in 1487, had already been enslaved en masse, and thousands were sold or ransomed. From 1499 Archbishop Cisneros pressed mass baptisms in Granada, provoking the revolt of the Albaicin and the Alpujarras in 1499-1501; its defeat was followed by a Castilian pragmatic of February 1502 requiring all Muslims in Castile to convert or leave, extended to Navarre in 1515 and to the Crown of Aragon in 1525-26. Most converted rather than emigrate, creating the Morisco population expelled a century later. Numbers are poorly recorded: the emirate's population is reconstructed from later Castilian fiscal surveys rather than counted, and the volume of emigration is not documented.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":180000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Morocco"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim population of the Nasrid emirate of Granada at the start of the war of conquest","baselineYear":1482,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"demographic-collapse-of-the-indigenous-americas","title":"The Demographic Collapse of the Indigenous Americas","startYear":1492,"endYear":1650,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"European colonisation of the Americas was followed by a population collapse whose causes — imported epidemics, war, enslavement, forced labour and the destruction of subsistence systems — are weighted differently by different scholars","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.433,"lon":-99.133,"flows":[],"summary":"Between 1492 and the mid-seventeenth century the indigenous population of the Americas fell catastrophically, and the size of that fall depends almost entirely on an unobservable starting figure. The published estimates for 1492 span more than an order of magnitude, from Kroeber's 8.4 million and Rosenblat's 13.4 million at one end to Dobyns's 90-112 million at the other, with Denevan's roughly 54 million and Koch and colleagues' roughly 60 million occupying the middle. Nearly all specialists agree that imported epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza — was the largest single killer, because it struck populations with no prior exposure and repeatedly, but Newson and others argue that disease cannot be treated as an independent variable: mortality was highest where conquest, enslavement, forced labour in mines and fields, tribute exaction, forced resettlement and the destruction of food systems left populations unable to care for the sick, and falling fertility then prevented recovery. Some regions were emptied within a generation, others declined slowly, and a few populations stabilised and grew again. Because the figure has become politically charged, this atlas gives the range and the scholars attached to each end rather than adopting a single number.","deathsLow":10000000,"deathsHigh":100000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":44000000,"_deaths":55000000,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":54000000,"baselineWhat":"The Indigenous population of the Americas on the eve of European contact in 1492","baselineYear":1492,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"spanish-conquest-of-mexico","rel":"includes","sharedDeaths":[1100000,24000000],"note":"The depopulation of central Mexico is one regional part of the demographic collapse of the indigenous Americas, so its deaths are already included in the hemispheric range."}]},{"id":"expulsion-of-the-jews-from-spain-1492","title":"The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain","startYear":1492,"endYear":1492,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews who would not convert to Christianity to leave Castile and Aragon within four months","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.416,"lon":-3.703,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.42,"fromLon":-3.7,"toLat":38.72,"toLon":-9.14,"label":"Castile → Portugal","people":null},{"fromLat":41.38,"fromLon":2.17,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Aragon → Ottoman lands","people":null},{"fromLat":37.18,"fromLon":-3.6,"toLat":35.79,"toLon":-5.81,"label":"Andalusia → North Africa","people":null}],"summary":"The edict issued at Granada on 31 March 1492 gave the Jews of Castile and Aragon until the end of July to accept baptism or leave, forbidding them to take gold, silver or coined money. Many converted; the rest dispersed to Portugal, Navarre, North Africa, Italy and above all the Ottoman Empire, where Bayezid II received them and where the Jewish population of Istanbul and Salonica grew sharply. A substantial minority returned within a few years and were baptised, which is one reason the figures are so hard to pin down. The scale is genuinely disputed: traditional totals of several hundred thousand rest on chroniclers rather than records, and archival work since the 1980s has produced figures around a tenth of those. What is not disputed is that a Jewish communal presence that had existed in Iberia for over a millennium was ended by state order.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":50000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Portugal","Bulgaria","Morocco"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Castile and Aragon at the time of the Alhambra Decree","baselineYear":1492,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.5},{"id":"spanish-conquest-of-the-caribbean-and-the-taino-collapse","title":"The Spanish Conquest of the Caribbean and the Collapse of the Taíno","startYear":1492,"endYear":1550,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Spanish settlers on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba seized land and distributed the indigenous population in encomiendas, raided neighbouring islands for slaves, and within two generations the Taíno had all but disappeared as a distinct population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Greater Antilles and the Bahamas passed under Spanish rule; land was distributed to settlers and the surviving indigenous population was resettled around mines, farms and mission villages, with the Bahamas depopulated entirely by slave raiding.","lat":18.486,"lon":-69.931,"flows":[{"fromLat":24.25,"fromLon":-76,"toLat":18.49,"toLon":-69.93,"label":"Lucayans seized from the Bahamas → Hispaniola","people":null},{"fromLat":18.49,"fromLon":-69.93,"toLat":19.1,"toLon":-70.7,"label":"Taíno redistributed to mines and encomienda estates","people":null},{"fromLat":10.97,"fromLon":-63.86,"toLat":18.49,"toLon":-69.93,"label":"Captives from the pearl coast → Hispaniola","people":null}],"summary":"Within a generation of 1492 the indigenous societies of the Greater Antilles were destroyed. Settlers were granted encomiendas entitling them to the labour and tribute of named indigenous communities; villages were broken up and relocated to serve gold placers and estates, and when local labour ran short, raiding parties emptied the Bahamas and the coasts of Venezuela and Central America. Old World epidemics, above all the smallpox outbreak of 1518-19, arrived on top of forced labour, famine and the dislocation of subsistence agriculture, and the compounding of these causes is why the collapse was so fast. The scale of the loss is disputed by more than an order of magnitude, with high estimates from Las Casas and from Cook and Borah, minimal estimates from Rosenblat, and Livi Bacci arguing that even a few hundred thousand starting population implies near-total destruction. The Spanish crown's own investigations, the Laws of Burgos of 1512-13 and the New Laws of 1542 were responses to reports of the collapse, and failed to stop it.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Dominican Rep.","Bahamas","Venezuela"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous (Taíno and neighbouring) population of the Greater Antilles in 1492","baselineYear":1492,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"forced-conversion-of-the-jews-of-portugal","title":"The Forced Conversion of the Jews of Portugal and the Lisbon Massacre","startYear":1496,"endYear":1506,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"King Manuel I of Portugal decreed expulsion, then blocked departure and had the Jewish population forcibly baptised; a Lisbon crowd later massacred the converts","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":38.722,"lon":-9.139,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.72,"fromLon":-9.14,"toLat":0.34,"toLon":6.73,"label":"Jewish children → São Tomé (1493)","people":2000},{"fromLat":38.72,"fromLon":-9.14,"toLat":51.92,"toLon":4.48,"label":"New Christian emigration → the Low Countries and beyond","people":null}],"summary":"John II had already, in 1493, seized some two thousand children of Castilian Jewish refugees and shipped them to the newly settled island of São Tomé, where most died. His successor Manuel I decreed the expulsion of Jews and Muslims on 5 December 1496 as a condition of his marriage to a Spanish princess, but did not want to lose the community: he restricted departure to a single port, and in October 1497 had the Jews gathered at Lisbon baptised en masse. Conversion by force created a large New Christian population that was legally Catholic and socially marked, and in April 1506 a Lisbon crowd, incited by friars during plague and famine, killed converts in the streets over roughly three days; the toll is usually given as between one and four thousand and rests on contemporary accounts rather than a count. Emigration was formally barred until 1507 and restricted repeatedly thereafter. The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536, pursued the descendants of these forced converts for two centuries.","deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":4000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000,"_deaths":2500,"countries":["Portugal","São Tomé and Principe","Netherlands"],"baselinePop":60000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Portugal after the arrival of refugees from Castile and Aragon","baselineYear":1496,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"barbary-corsair-captive-taking-in-the-mediterranean","title":"Barbary Corsair Captive-Taking in the Mediterranean","startYear":1500,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Corsairs operating from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Salé, under Ottoman or Moroccan authority, seized European ships and raided coastal villages, holding captives for ransom or forced labour; European corsairs from Malta, Livorno and Spain did the same to Muslim shipping and coasts","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.753,"lon":3.059,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.85,"fromLon":14.27,"toLat":36.75,"toLon":3.06,"label":"Raids on the Italian coast → Algiers","people":null},{"fromLat":37.19,"fromLon":-3.6,"toLat":34.05,"toLon":-6.8,"label":"Raids on the Spanish coast → Salé","people":null},{"fromLat":63.42,"fromLon":-20.28,"toLat":36.8,"toLon":10.18,"label":"The 1627 raid on Iceland → Algiers and Tunis","people":400},{"fromLat":35.9,"fromLon":14.51,"toLat":35.9,"toLon":14.51,"label":"Muslim captives taken by Maltese corsairs held at Valletta","people":null}],"summary":"For three centuries the western Mediterranean was a zone of reciprocal captive-taking. Corsairs sailing from the Ottoman regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli and from Moroccan Salé took merchant ships and landed on the coasts of Italy, Spain, the Balearics, Corsica and occasionally as far as Ireland and Iceland, carrying off villagers to be ransomed, put to the oars or set to labour; Christian corsairs from Malta, Livorno and the Spanish presidios raided Muslim shipping and coasts in the same way. Redemptionist religious orders such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians raised money to ransom Christian captives and kept records that survive; the 1627 raid that took some four hundred people from Iceland and the sacking of Italian coastal villages are among the best-documented episodes. Robert Davis's estimate of a million or more European captives between 1500 and 1800 brought the subject wide attention and is contested on method: it is a model-based reconstruction from estimated standing slave populations, not a count. The trade in both directions collapsed only with European naval dominance in the nineteenth century, and the topic is now frequently mobilised in polemics about the comparative history of slavery.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Algeria","Italy","Spain","Morocco","Iceland","Tunisia","Malta"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"khiva-bukhara-slave-trade","title":"The Khivan and Bukharan Slave Trade and Turkmen Raiding of Persia and Russia","startYear":1500,"endYear":1873,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Turkmen and Kazakh raiders captured Persians, Russians and others for sale in the slave markets of Khiva and Bukhara","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":41.3775,"lon":60.3639,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.5,"fromLon":57.5,"toLat":41.3775,"toLon":60.3639,"label":"Captives from Khorasan and northern Persia to the Khiva slave market","people":null},{"fromLat":51.2,"fromLon":51.4,"toLat":39.7747,"toLon":64.4286,"label":"Russian and Volga captives to Bukhara","people":null}],"summary":"For centuries the khanates of Khiva and Bukhara were the principal slave markets of Central Asia, supplied chiefly by Turkmen raiders of the Yomut and Tekke tribes who took captives from Shia Persian Khorasan - religious opinion in the Sunni khanates treating Shia Persians as lawfully enslavable - and also by raids on Russian settlements, shipping on the Caspian and caravans. Slaves worked as agricultural labourers on irrigated estates, as artisans and in households; the trade was central to the economies of the oasis khanates. Captured Russians became a recurring pretext for Russian intervention, from the disastrous Khivan expedition of 1839-40 to the conquest of 1873, when General Kaufman's forces occupied Khiva and the khan was compelled to abolish slavery; Russian officers recorded the emancipation of tens of thousands, most of them Persian. Bukhara's slavery was formally abolished in 1873 as well, and finally with the fall of the emirate in 1920. Cumulative totals across the early modern period are extrapolations from traveller and diplomatic accounts, not counts.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Uzbekistan","Iran","Kazakhstan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No single population can serve as a denominator for nearly four centuries of raiding across Persia, the Russian steppe frontier and Central Asia","baselineYear":1800,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"trans-atlantic-slave-trade-to-1750","title":"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to 1750","startYear":1501,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, French and Danish merchants, licensed by their states and supplied by African polities and traders, shipped captive Africans across the Atlantic to American plantations and mines","peopleDisplaced":4800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":5.084,"lon":-1.348,"flows":[{"fromLat":-8.84,"fromLon":13.23,"toLat":-12.97,"toLon":-38.5,"label":"West Central Africa → Brazil","people":null},{"fromLat":5.08,"fromLon":-1.35,"toLat":13.19,"toLon":-59.54,"label":"Gold Coast → the Caribbean","people":null},{"fromLat":6.34,"fromLon":2.43,"toLat":18.04,"toLon":-76.8,"label":"Bight of Benin → Jamaica and Saint-Domingue","people":null},{"fromLat":4.75,"fromLon":8,"toLat":32.08,"toLon":-81.09,"label":"Bight of Biafra → mainland North America","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1501 and 1750 something on the order of five million people were carried from Africa across the Atlantic as slaves, part of a traffic that reached 12.5 million embarkations before it ended. The trade grew slowly in the sixteenth century, when Portuguese and Spanish shipping predominated, then expanded sharply from the 1640s as Dutch, English and French planters developed sugar in the Caribbean and as Brazil's plantation economy grew; by the first half of the eighteenth century well over a million people were being shipped every twenty-five years. Captives were obtained through warfare, raiding, judicial enslavement and debt within Africa and sold at coastal factories to European carriers; the largest single source region was West Central Africa. Mortality on the Atlantic crossing averaged in the region of twelve to fifteen per cent over the period, falling over time, and further deaths occurred during capture, the march to the coast and confinement in barracoons, none of which appear in the shipping records. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which underlies all modern figures, is explicit that its totals are estimates extrapolated from documented voyages rather than a census.","deathsLow":600000,"deathsHigh":1800000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4800000,"_deaths":1200000,"countries":["Ghana","Angola","Barbados","Togo","Jamaica","Nigeria","United States of America"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No single population can serve as a denominator for two and a half centuries of embarkations from the whole Atlantic coast of Africa","baselineYear":1700,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"kongo-civil-wars-and-the-fall-of-mbanza-kongo","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":200000,"note":"The Kongo entry's ~200,000 is explicitly an estimate of Kongo-origin captives within the 500,000-600,000 embarked from the Loango-Congo coast in 1660-1740, taken from the same slave-voyages database. All of these embarkations fall before 1750, so they are inside the trans-Atlantic entry's 4.8 million. Kongo's internal displacement (the abandonment of Mbanza Kongo, 1678-1709) is not quantified and is not shared. Deaths are not shared: the Kongo entry has none, and its note already assigns deaths in captivity and at sea to the slave-trade entries."}]},{"id":"portuguese-conquest-of-malacca-and-goa","title":"The Portuguese Conquest of Goa and Malacca","startYear":1510,"endYear":1560,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa and Malacca for the Portuguese crown, killing or expelling their Muslim populations and installing a garrisoned trading empire across the Indian Ocean","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Goa became the capital of the Estado da Índia and Malacca its eastern anchor, giving Portugal control of the straits through which the spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea passed; the sultanate of Malacca was destroyed and its successor state established at Johor.","lat":2.196,"lon":102.249,"flows":[{"fromLat":2.2,"fromLon":102.25,"toLat":1.08,"toLon":104.03,"label":"Sultan's court and followers → Bintan and Johor","people":null},{"fromLat":2.2,"fromLon":102.25,"toLat":-6.18,"toLon":106.83,"label":"Muslim merchants relocate trade to Aceh, Banten and Java","people":null},{"fromLat":15.5,"fromLon":73.83,"toLat":15.5,"toLon":73.83,"label":"Goa: Muslim population killed or expelled, city resettled","people":null}],"summary":"Portugal's seaborne empire in Asia was founded on the seizure of two entrepôts. Goa was taken in 1510 and, after being lost and retaken, its Muslim inhabitants were massacred on Albuquerque's orders; the city became the capital of the Estado da Índia and the seat of a Portuguese settler and mixed-descent population. Malacca, the greatest emporium of Southeast Asia, fell in August 1511 after a short campaign; Albuquerque's letters describe the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population and the deliberate sparing of Hindu, Chinese and other merchants whose trade Portugal wished to keep. The sultanate re-formed at Bintan and then at Johor, and much of the Muslim commercial network shifted to Aceh, Banten and Brunei, so that Portuguese Malacca never recovered the traffic it had captured. The scale of killing and expulsion is known only from Portuguese narrative sources; there are no independent counts, and the figures they give are contested.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Malaysia","Indonesia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The populations of Goa and Malacca at the time of the Portuguese conquests","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"spanish-conquest-of-mexico","title":"The Spanish Conquest of Mexico and the Depopulation of the Central Highlands","startYear":1519,"endYear":1600,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Cortés and his indigenous allies destroyed the Mexica capital and the Spanish crown replaced the Aztec tributary state with a colonial regime of encomienda, tribute and congregación resettlement","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Aztec tributary empire and its neighbours became the Viceroyalty of New Spain; land and labour rights were granted to Spanish encomenderos, and surviving indigenous communities were regrouped into nucleated towns under Spanish and ecclesiastical supervision.","lat":19.433,"lon":-99.133,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.43,"fromLon":-99.13,"toLat":19.7,"toLon":-98.9,"label":"Survivors expelled from Tenochtitlán after the siege","people":null},{"fromLat":18.85,"fromLon":-97.1,"toLat":19.2,"toLon":-98.2,"label":"Congregación: dispersed villages regrouped into planned towns","people":null}],"summary":"The siege of Tenochtitlán ended in August 1521 with the city starved, largely destroyed and its surviving inhabitants driven out; the campaign was fought by a few hundred Spaniards alongside tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec and other indigenous allies, and a smallpox epidemic swept the city during the siege. The conquest state that followed rested on the encomienda, on tribute assessments inherited from the Mexica, and from the 1550s on congregación, the compulsory regrouping of dispersed settlements into towns to make labour and tithes easier to extract. Central Mexico then suffered the steepest recorded demographic collapse in the hemisphere, driven principally by successive epidemics — smallpox in 1520, measles in 1531, and the cocoliztli outbreaks of 1545 and 1576 that killed millions — compounded by forced labour, tribute demands, the disruption of agriculture and forced resettlement. The size of that collapse is disputed by a factor of five: the range of published estimates for 1519 runs from Rosenblat's 4.5 million to Cook and Borah's 25.2 million, and the choice of baseline determines whether the loss is counted in millions or tens of millions. McCaa notes that war mortality was of decidedly secondary importance beside epidemic disease, while stressing that overwork, ecological damage and forced relocation shaped who survived.","deathsLow":1100000,"deathsHigh":24000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10040000,"_deaths":12550000,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":15000000,"baselineWhat":"The Indigenous population of central Mexico on the eve of the Spanish invasion in 1519","baselineYear":1519,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"demographic-collapse-of-the-indigenous-americas","rel":"part-of","sharedDeaths":[1100000,24000000],"note":"The depopulation of central Mexico is one regional part of the demographic collapse of the indigenous Americas, so its deaths are already included in the hemispheric range."}]},{"id":"adal-conquest-of-christian-ethiopia","title":"The Adal Sultanate's Conquest of Christian Ethiopia","startYear":1529,"endYear":1543,"dateApprox":true,"type":"territory","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The armies of the Barr Sa'd ad-Din (Adal) sultanate under Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi overran most of the Christian Ethiopian kingdom, placing it under Muslim governors until Ethiopian and Portuguese forces defeated and killed the Imam in 1543","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Most of the Christian highland kingdom, including northern Shewa, Amhara, Lasta and Tigray, which the Library of Congress country study says was placed 'under the rule of Muslim governors'; the conquest was reversed after 1543","lat":10.5,"lon":39.3,"flows":[],"summary":"After victory at Shimbra Kure in 1529, the armies of the Adal (Barr Sa'd ad-Din) sultanate led by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known in Christian Ethiopian tradition by the pejorative 'Grañ' ('left-handed'), advanced into the Christian kingdom and in the early 1530s brought northern Shewa, Amhara and Tigray under Muslim governors; the Library of Congress country study records that his forces burned churches, took prisoners and collected booty, and quotes Taddesse Tamrat that Shimbra Kure 'broke the backbone of Christian resistance'. Amélie Chekroun's 2023 study, reviewed by Anaïs Wion and Alain Gascon, dates the shift from raiding to a deliberate war of conquest to 1531 and describes a systematic occupation in which, according to Gascon's summary, Christians in the southern provinces converted to Islam while those in the north became tributary dhimmi, with a poll tax levied on those who did not convert. Emperor Lebna Dengel's appeal to Portugal brought a small Portuguese force; Emperor Galawdewos, with its survivors, defeated the Imam at Wayna Daga near Lake Tana, where he was killed in February 1543, and his army disintegrated. Fighting continued intermittently until a definitive Muslim defeat in the early 1560s, and the exhaustion of both states is widely cited as opening the way for the Oromo expansion. The country study says Ethiopians suffered 'extraordinary material and moral losses'.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction"],"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ethiopia"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"spanish-conquest-of-peru","title":"The Spanish Conquest of Peru and the End of Tawantinsuyu","startYear":1532,"endYear":1572,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Pizarro's expedition seized and executed the Inca Atahualpa, took Cusco and destroyed the Inca state, and Spanish rule was consolidated by the execution of the last Inca at Vilcabamba in 1572","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Tawantinsuyu, the largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas, spanning modern Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and parts of Chile, Argentina and Colombia, was absorbed into the Viceroyalty of Peru; its lands, herds and labour obligations were reassigned to Spanish encomenderos and the crown.","lat":-13.532,"lon":-71.967,"flows":[{"fromLat":-13.53,"fromLon":-71.97,"toLat":-12.05,"toLon":-77.04,"label":"Political centre shifts from Cusco to the new Spanish capital at Lima","people":null},{"fromLat":-13.16,"fromLon":-72.55,"toLat":-13.53,"toLon":-71.97,"label":"Neo-Inca state at Vilcabamba dispersed after 1572","people":null}],"summary":"Francisco Pizarro's small force arrived during a war of succession between Atahualpa and Huáscar and in November 1532 seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca, killing much of his entourage; he was ransomed and then executed in 1533. Cusco was taken the same year, and after the failed siege of 1536-37 and decades of civil war among the conquerors, the rump Inca state at Vilcabamba was destroyed and Túpac Amaru executed in 1572. Epidemics preceded the Spaniards: smallpox is generally held to have reached the Andes around 1524-27, killing the Inca Huayna Capac and precipitating the succession war. The demographic decline that followed was severe but is documented only through colonial tribute inspections, which count taxable adults rather than people, and the pre-conquest baseline is disputed between roughly three and fourteen million. What the conquest added to disease was the seizure of land and herds, the encomienda, and from 1569 the systematic resettlement and labour drafts described separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Peru"],"baselinePop":9000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, on the eve of the Spanish invasion","baselineYear":1532,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"toungoo-burma-deportation-wars-16th-century","title":"Toungoo Burma's Wars of Conquest and the Deportation of Ayutthaya, Lan Na and Lan Xang","startYear":1548,"endYear":1600,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Toungoo kings of Burma conquered the Tai states and Siam and carried their populations back to Pegu as labour and soldiers","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"At its height under Bayinnaung the Toungoo empire held Lower and Upper Burma, the Shan states, Lan Na, Lan Xang and Siam, the largest state in mainland Southeast Asian history to that date","lat":14.35,"lon":100.57,"flows":[{"fromLat":14.35,"fromLon":100.57,"toLat":17.34,"toLon":96.48,"label":"Captives from Ayutthaya to Pegu","people":null},{"fromLat":18.79,"fromLon":98.99,"toLat":17.34,"toLon":96.48,"label":"Captives from Chiang Mai to Pegu","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1548 and 1569 the Toungoo kings Tabinshwehti and Bayinnaung conquered the Shan states, Lan Na, Lan Xang and Siam, and made deportation a standard instrument of rule: skilled artisans, monks, soldiers and whole village populations were marched to the capital at Pegu, where they supplied labour and manpower for the next campaign, and defeated royal families were resettled at the Burmese court. Ayutthaya was taken in 1564 and again in August 1569, when the Siamese royal house and a large part of the city's population were carried north. The empire could not hold together after Bayinnaung's death in 1581: Siam broke away under Naresuan, and in 1599 Pegu itself was sacked by an Arakanese and Toungoo coalition and its own population dispersed, an inversion of what it had done to others. Everything known about the numbers comes from chronicle traditions written for later courts, Burmese and Thai, which differ from each other and use figures for effect. The atlas already covers the later phase of these wars, including the 1767 sack of Ayutthaya, in its entry on deportation warfare between Burma and Siam in 1759-1828.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Thailand","Myanmar"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Ayutthaya, Lan Na and Lan Xang in the mid-sixteenth century","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"russian-eastward-expansion-kazan-astrakhan-and-siberia","title":"Russian Eastward Expansion: Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia and the Yasak","startYear":1552,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Muscovy and then the Russian Empire conquered the Volga khanates and Siberia, imposed a fur tribute enforced by hostage-taking, and settled Russian colonists on indigenous land","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":13000000,"territoryDesc":"The khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) brought the whole Volga to the Caspian under Moscow; the Siberian khanate fell after 1582 and Russian ostrogs reached the Pacific at Okhotsk in 1639 and the Kamchatka peninsula by the 1700s, adding roughly thirteen million square kilometres and its indigenous peoples to the Russian state.","lat":58.196,"lon":68.254,"flows":[{"fromLat":55.79,"fromLon":49.12,"toLat":55.3,"toLon":50.5,"label":"Tatars expelled from Kazan to outlying settlements","people":null},{"fromLat":56.83,"fromLon":60.6,"toLat":62.03,"toLon":129.73,"label":"Russian servitors and settlers → eastern Siberia","people":null}],"summary":"Ivan IV's storm of Kazan in October 1552 and the annexation of Astrakhan in 1556 removed the successor khanates of the Golden Horde and opened the Volga and the Urals to Russian settlement; Tatars were expelled from Kazan itself and lands were granted to monasteries and servicemen, with episodes of forced baptism through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. East of the Urals, expansion was carried out by Cossack bands and merchant companies building fortified ostrogs along the river systems, and was financed by the yasak, a fur tribute levied on indigenous households and enforced by taking hostages, the amanaty, from each clan. Resistance, notably by the Koryak and Chukchi and in the Kamchatka risings of 1731 and 1741, was met with punitive expeditions; smallpox epidemics from the 1630s onwards killed a very large share of Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir and Itelmen populations, in some districts most of them. Russian historiography traditionally described this as the peaceful 'joining' of Siberia; a competing literature, and some indigenous organisations, describe it as conquest with genocidal effects. The documentary base is overwhelmingly the tribute registers of the conquering state.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":78000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":227000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of Siberia at the time of the Russian conquest, as reconstructed from the yasak tribute registers","baselineYear":1600,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"french-wars-of-religion-and-huguenot-flight","title":"The French Wars of Religion, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the Flight of the Huguenots","startYear":1562,"endYear":1598,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The French crown, Catholic and Protestant nobles and urban militias killed, besieged and drove out confessional opponents across France","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.8566,"lon":2.3522,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.8566,"fromLon":2.3522,"toLat":46.2044,"toLon":6.1432,"label":"French Protestants to Geneva","people":null},{"fromLat":45.764,"fromLon":4.8357,"toLat":51.5074,"toLon":-0.1278,"label":"Huguenot refugees to England","people":null},{"fromLat":43.6047,"fromLon":1.4442,"toLat":52.3676,"toLon":4.9041,"label":"Huguenot refugees to the Dutch provinces","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1562 and 1598 France went through eight civil wars fought along confessional lines, punctuated by urban massacres, sieges and the expulsion of minority communities from towns that changed hands. The best known episode began in Paris on 24 August 1572, when the killing of Protestant leaders gathered for a royal wedding spread to the city's Huguenot population and then to at least a dozen provincial cities over the following weeks; historians generally estimate about 2,000 killed in Paris and perhaps 10,000 in total, against older accounts that ranged from 5,000 to 30,000. The massacres produced conversions, abjurations and a wave of emigration to Geneva, the Rhineland, England and the Dutch provinces, and they hardened the Huguenot 'places of safety' in the south and west. The wars ended with the Edict of Nantes of April 1598, which granted the Huguenots limited worship rights and fortified towns; the settlement held until Louis XIV revoked it in 1685, producing the far larger exodus recorded separately in this atlas. Estimates of total mortality from all causes over the whole period range widely, from about two to four million, and include famine and epidemic deaths as well as killing.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":10000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4800,"_deaths":6000,"countries":["France","Switzerland","United Kingdom","Netherlands"],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The Protestant (Huguenot) population of France at the outbreak of the wars","baselineYear":1562,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"dutch-revolt-southern-netherlands-exodus","title":"The Dutch Revolt and the Exodus from the Southern Netherlands","startYear":1567,"endYear":1590,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Spanish Habsburg armies reconquered the southern Netherlands, expelling or driving out Protestant townspeople to the northern provinces and abroad","peopleDisplaced":120000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":51.2194,"lon":4.4025,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.2194,"fromLon":4.4025,"toLat":52.3676,"toLon":4.9041,"label":"Antwerp merchants and artisans to Amsterdam","people":null},{"fromLat":51.0543,"fromLon":3.7174,"toLat":52.1601,"toLon":4.497,"label":"Ghent and Flemish textile workers to Leiden and Haarlem","people":null},{"fromLat":51.2093,"fromLon":3.2247,"toLat":51.5074,"toLon":-0.1278,"label":"Flemish and Walloon refugees to London and East Anglia","people":null}],"summary":"The revolt against Philip II's rule in the Low Countries, opened by the Duke of Alba's repression from 1567, was fought city by city, and the Spanish reconquest of the south between 1579 and 1585 emptied its Protestant communities. Sacks by unpaid Spanish troops set the pattern: Mechelen and Zutphen in 1572, Naarden the same year, the 'Spanish Fury' at Antwerp in November 1576, in which contemporaries claimed as many as 17,000 dead and a thousand buildings burned, and Maastricht in 1579. When Antwerp capitulated on 17 August 1585, Alexander Farnese allowed its Protestants four years to wind up their affairs and depart rather than expelling them outright, and the city lost some 60,000 of its 100,000 people. The northern provinces, England and the Rhineland absorbed the emigrants, and the transfer of Antwerp's merchants, printers and textile workers to Amsterdam, Leiden and Haarlem is treated in the standard economic histories as a foundation of the Dutch Golden Age. Casualty figures reported by sixteenth-century chroniclers for the sacks, particularly Antwerp 1576 and Maastricht 1579, are generally regarded as inflated.","deathsLow":8000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":120000,"_deaths":14000,"countries":["Belgium","Netherlands","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the southern provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands at the start of the revolt","baselineYear":1567,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.06},{"id":"toledo-reducciones-and-the-potosi-mita","title":"The Toledo Reducciones and the Potosí Mita","startYear":1569,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Viceroy Francisco de Toledo forcibly regrouped the Andean rural population into planned towns and instituted a rotating forced-labour draft to supply the silver mines of Potosí","peopleDisplaced":1400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The rural settlement pattern of the central Andes, based on dispersed hamlets exploiting several ecological tiers, was replaced by grid-plan towns; vacated lands were declared surplus and passed to Spanish estates, and the mita drew labour from an arc of provinces stretching from Cusco to southern Bolivia.","lat":-19.589,"lon":-65.753,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.84,"fromLon":-70.03,"toLat":-19.59,"toLon":-65.75,"label":"Mita conscripts from the Collao → Potosí","people":13500},{"fromLat":-13.53,"fromLon":-71.97,"toLat":-19.59,"toLon":-65.75,"label":"Mita conscripts from Cusco province → Potosí","people":null},{"fromLat":-16.5,"fromLon":-68.15,"toLat":-16.55,"toLon":-68.2,"label":"Dispersed hamlets regrouped into reducción towns","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1569 and 1581 Viceroy Francisco de Toledo carried out the largest programme of compulsory resettlement in the colonial Americas, uprooting the dispersed Andean settlement pattern and concentrating the rural population into new grid-plan towns, the reducciones, where tribute could be assessed, doctrine taught and labour drafted. In parallel he adapted the Inca institution of the mita into a rotating conscription that sent roughly 13,500 men a year, with their households, from sixteen provinces to the silver mines of Potosí and the mercury mine at Huancavelica. Conditions in the mines and refineries were lethal, though no reliable mortality series exists; the surviving records show sustained flight from mita provinces, the growth of a class of permanent migrants who had abandoned their home communities to escape the draft, and the passage of vacated community land into Spanish hands. Colonial administrators themselves recorded that the reducciones did not hold: by the end of the sixteenth century officials complained that taxpaying Indians were fleeing in growing numbers. Modern economic research has traced measurable long-run disadvantage in districts that were subject to the mita compared with adjacent districts that were not.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1400000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bolivia","Peru"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of the Viceroyalty of Peru enumerated in Viceroy Toledo's general inspection of 1570-1575","baselineYear":1570,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9333333333333333},{"id":"spanish-reduccion-philippines","title":"The Spanish Reduccion and Resettlement of the Philippine Lowlands","startYear":1570,"endYear":1700,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Spanish colonial authorities and missionary orders concentrated dispersed Philippine populations into mission towns and imposed tribute and forced labour","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Lowland Luzon and the Visayas reorganised into pueblos, encomiendas and later provinces under the Spanish crown","lat":14.5995,"lon":120.9842,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.6,"fromLon":123.2,"toLat":13.14,"toLon":123.74,"label":"Dispersed barangay settlements gathered into mission pueblos","people":null}],"summary":"From the 1570s Spanish colonial administrators and the Augustinian, Franciscan, Jesuit and Dominican orders pursued a policy of reduccion in the Philippines, gathering populations that had lived in scattered kin-based settlements into nucleated towns built around a church, in order to convert, tax and levy labour from them. Residents were subject to tribute, to the polo y servicios corvee that supplied labour for shipyards, fortifications and the Manila galleon trade, and to compulsory sale of produce; missionary and administrative records treat the concentration as largely complete in the Christianised lowlands of Luzon and the Visayas by the seventeenth century. Substantial numbers escaped by moving to the uplands or to unpacified areas, becoming the remontados and the still-independent peoples of the Cordillera and the Muslim south, whom Spain never subdued. Revolts against tribute and labour drafts recurred through the period. Linda Newson's reconstruction from tribute records finds significant population decline in the resettled lowlands from disease, labour drafts and disruption, though on nothing like the scale of Spanish America.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Philippines"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Philippine archipelago at the time of Spanish conquest","baselineYear":1570,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4},{"id":"portuguese-angola-and-the-west-central-african-slaving-wars","title":"Portuguese Angola and the West Central African Slaving Wars","startYear":1575,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Portugal established colonies at Luanda and Benguela and waged and financed wars against Ndongo, Kongo and their neighbours, exporting captives on a scale that made West Central Africa the largest single source of the Atlantic trade","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Portuguese authority extended from Luanda (founded 1575) and Benguela (1617) up the Kwanza valley through a chain of forts and allied chieftaincies; the kingdom of Ndongo was broken, the kingdom of Kongo defeated at Mbwila in 1665 and fragmented, and the interior was reorganised around slaving polities such as Kasanje and Matamba.","lat":-8.839,"lon":13.234,"flows":[{"fromLat":-9.6,"fromLon":15.2,"toLat":-8.84,"toLon":13.23,"label":"Captives from the Kwanza interior → Luanda","people":null},{"fromLat":-8.84,"fromLon":13.23,"toLat":-12.97,"toLon":-38.5,"label":"Luanda → Bahia and Pernambuco","people":null},{"fromLat":-12.58,"fromLon":13.41,"toLat":-22.91,"toLon":-43.17,"label":"Benguela → Rio de Janeiro","people":null}],"summary":"From the foundation of Luanda in 1575 the Portuguese presence in West Central Africa was organised around the acquisition of captives, through direct campaigning up the Kwanza, through alliance with the Imbangala warrior bands, and through the purchase of people taken in wars fought by African states. Ndongo was progressively destroyed, its ruler Njinga waging a long resistance from Matamba; Kongo, a Christian kingdom that had dealt with Portugal on treaty terms since 1491, was defeated at Mbwila in 1665 and dissolved into civil war that itself generated captives. The Dutch occupation of Luanda in 1641-48 interrupted but did not end the traffic. The consequence was that this stretch of coast became the single largest source region of the Atlantic slave trade, and Brazil its principal destination. The scale of the internal disruption — populations moved out of raiding zones, states reorganised around the supply of captives, the depopulation of some districts and the fortification of others — is described in Portuguese and missionary sources and in African oral tradition, but has never been quantified.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Angola"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of West Central Africa during the Portuguese slaving wars","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"kongo-civil-wars-and-the-fall-of-mbanza-kongo","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The Angola entry covers Mbwila and the Kongo civil wars as part of West Central Africa's slaving wars, so the two entries describe overlapping captives."}]},{"id":"bandeirante-slaving-and-the-guarani-missions","title":"Bandeirante Slave Raiding and the Destruction of the Guairá Missions","startYear":1580,"endYear":1720,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Slave-raiding expeditions from São Paulo, the bandeiras, seized indigenous people across the Brazilian interior, destroying the Jesuit Guaraní missions of Guairá and extending Portuguese claims deep into Spanish territory","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Bandeira expeditions carried Portuguese presence west and south beyond the line of Tordesillas, destroying the Spanish Jesuit mission province of Guairá in what is now Paraná and helping fix the eventual boundaries of Brazil; they later opened the interior to the gold rushes of Minas Gerais and Goiás.","lat":-23.55,"lon":-46.633,"flows":[{"fromLat":-24.05,"fromLon":-54.26,"toLat":-23.55,"toLon":-46.63,"label":"Guaraní captives from Guairá → São Paulo","people":null},{"fromLat":-24.05,"fromLon":-54.26,"toLat":-27.36,"toLon":-55.9,"label":"Mission Guaraní evacuated south down the Paraná","people":null}],"summary":"From the late sixteenth century, expeditions from the frontier town of São Paulo ranged over the Brazilian interior in search of indigenous captives to work the sugar and wheat farms of the south, and later in search of gold. Between 1628 and 1632 large bandeiras under Antônio Raposo Tavares and others attacked the Spanish Jesuit reductions of Guairá, west of the Paraná, destroying the mission towns and driving their Guaraní inhabitants back to São Paulo in coffles; the Jesuits evacuated what remained of the population downriver in 1631 and resettled it further south. Raiding continued against the missions of Itatín and Tape until the Guaraní, permitted firearms by the Spanish crown, defeated a bandeira at Mbororé in 1641. Portuguese law repeatedly restricted and then permitted indigenous enslavement — the crown prohibited it in principle in 1570, 1609 and 1680 while allowing capture in 'just war' and the ransom of captives from other Indians — and the traffic continued under those exceptions. Brazilian nationalist historiography long celebrated the bandeirantes as pioneers of the nation's territory; that commemoration is now contested in Brazil precisely because of the slaving.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Brazil","Paraguay","Argentina"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the bandeiras ranged over the whole Brazilian interior for 140 years, and only the mission populations were ever counted","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"moroccan-conquest-of-songhay","title":"Morocco's Conquest of Songhay and the Exile of Timbuktu's Scholars","startYear":1591,"endYear":1612,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"A Sa'did Moroccan expeditionary army of musketeers sent by Ahmad al-Mansur destroyed the Songhay empire, occupied the Niger bend and deported Timbuktu's leading scholars to Morocco","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Niger bend heartland of the Songhay empire, from around Kukiya to Djenné, including Gao and Timbuktu, held by Moroccan garrisons (the Arma) who ceased to be effectively controlled from Marrakesh by about 1612–1618","lat":16.77,"lon":-3.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.77,"fromLon":-3.01,"toLat":31.63,"toLon":-7.99,"label":"Timbuktu → Marrakesh (deported scholars)","people":null}],"summary":"In 1590 the Sa'did sultan Ahmad al-Mansur sent an army of a few thousand men, built around musketeers and led by Judar Pasha, across the Sahara against Songhay, the dominant power of the Niger bend; its firearms routed the Songhay army at Tondibi in March 1591, after which Gao and Timbuktu were occupied. Lansiné Kaba's study in the Journal of African History links the invasion to Mediterranean rivalries and Sa'did ambitions to control the gold trade, and shows the occupiers bogged down in a long resistance led by Askiya Nuh in the southern swamps. Urban and rural revolts brought repression: in Timbuktu Pasha Mahmud ibn Zarqun had merchants and scholars arrested in late 1593, their houses ransacked and some prisoners killed, and in 1594 the qadi 'Umar, Ahmad Baba and other scholars were deported to Marrakesh, where much of Ahmad Baba's library was lost. By 1612, Kaba writes, the musketeers refused to fight the Songhay archers and Morocco was losing control of its troops; the Arma garrison became a self-governing pashalik. The occupation also organised the despatch of gold and captives to Morocco; that traffic is counted in 'The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1450–1750', and this entry covers the conquest, occupation and the deportation of the scholars.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","summary execution","cultural or religious destruction"],"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali","Morocco"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"japanese-invasions-of-korea-1592-1598","title":"The Japanese Invasions of Korea (Imjin War)","startYear":1592,"endYear":1598,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Toyotomi Hideyoshi's armies invaded Chosŏn Korea twice, devastating the peninsula and carrying tens of thousands of Koreans to Japan as captives before withdrawing after his death","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Japanese forces occupied most of the peninsula in 1592 and the southern provinces again in 1597-98, building coastal fortresses; no territory was permanently transferred, and Japanese forces withdrew entirely in 1598.","lat":37.566,"lon":126.978,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.18,"fromLon":129.08,"toLat":31.6,"toLon":130.56,"label":"Korean captives, including potters, → Satsuma and Kyushu","people":null},{"fromLat":37.57,"fromLon":126.98,"toLat":40.1,"toLon":124.39,"label":"Court and population flee north to Uiju on the Yalu","people":null},{"fromLat":35.18,"fromLon":128.08,"toLat":36.8,"toLon":127.15,"label":"Flight from the southern provinces inland","people":null}],"summary":"Hideyoshi launched some 158,000 troops against Korea in 1592, took Seoul within three weeks and Pyongyang soon after, and was checked by Korean naval victories under Yi Sun-sin, by local righteous armies and by Ming intervention; a second invasion in 1597 was confined to the southern provinces and ended with his death in 1598. The war was fought largely on Korean soil and its effects on the population were severe: cities and palaces burned, agriculture ruined and famine and epidemic following the armies. Japanese commanders sent home noses and ears taken from the dead as proof of service, interred at the Mimizuka mound in Kyoto, and carried off Korean captives in large numbers, some sold on to Portuguese traders, others settled in Japan as artisans; between 20,000 and 100,000 are estimated to have been taken. Korean sources describe massacres of civilians at Jinju in 1593 and in the southern provinces in 1597-98. No reliable death toll exists for either side; figures of a million or more Korean dead appear in popular accounts without a documentary basis.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["South Korea","Japan","North Korea"],"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Chosŏn Korea on the eve of the Japanese invasion of 1592","baselineYear":1592,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"shah-abbas-deportations-and-the-founding-of-new-julfa","title":"Shah Abbas's Deportations and the Founding of New Julfa","startYear":1603,"endYear":1620,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Shah Abbas I of Safavid Iran, retreating before Ottoman armies, applied a scorched-earth policy to the Armenian and Georgian borderlands and deported their populations into the Iranian interior","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Armenian districts of Nakhichevan, Julfa and the Ararat plain, and later parts of Kakheti in eastern Georgia, were deliberately laid waste to deny supplies to advancing Ottoman armies, leaving a depopulated buffer along the frontier.","lat":32.637,"lon":51.646,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.96,"fromLon":45.63,"toLat":32.64,"toLon":51.65,"label":"Julfa on the Aras → New Julfa, Isfahan","people":null},{"fromLat":40.18,"fromLon":44.51,"toLat":37.28,"toLon":49.58,"label":"Ararat plain → Gilan and Mazandaran","people":null},{"fromLat":41.92,"fromLon":45.47,"toLat":36.3,"toLon":50,"label":"Kakheti, eastern Georgia → the Iranian interior","people":null}],"summary":"In the winter of 1603-05, as Ottoman armies advanced into the Caucasus, Shah Abbas I ordered the destruction of crops and pastures across the frontier districts and the removal of their inhabitants into Iran. The Armenian population of Julfa on the Aras, a wealthy merchant town, was resettled at Isfahan in a purpose-built suburb, New Julfa, where the shah granted its merchants privileges and a monopoly of the Iranian silk export trade, making the community central to Eurasian commerce for a century. The mass of the deportees fared very differently: driven in autumn rains and cold across a river that many drowned in, wintered in the mountain districts of Azerbaijan and then scattered across the interior, they suffered heavy losses that contemporaries describe but do not count. Abbas repeated the policy in Georgia in 1614-17, deporting Kakhetian Georgians and settling Turkic tribes in their place; Georgian tradition treats these campaigns as a national catastrophe and the figures it gives are not independently attested. The events are documented above all by Arakel of Tabriz, an Armenian eyewitness, alongside Persian court chronicles.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Iran","Armenia","Georgia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: no register exists for the Armenian and Georgian borderlands the campaign emptied","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"beaver-wars-iroquois-dispersals","title":"The Beaver Wars and the Dispersal of the Wendat, Neutral and Erie","startYear":1609,"endYear":1701,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) confederacy, armed by Dutch and English traders, destroyed or absorbed neighbouring nations and emptied large areas of the eastern Great Lakes; French and Algonquian allies fought back","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Southern Ontario, the Niagara peninsula, the Ohio country and much of the lower Michigan peninsula were largely emptied of settled villages for decades and held as Haudenosaunee hunting territory.","lat":43.05,"lon":-76.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.55,"fromLon":-79.75,"toLat":46.75,"toLon":-71.25,"label":"Wendat survivors fleeing to the French settlement at Quebec (Wendake)","people":null},{"fromLat":44.55,"fromLon":-79.75,"toLat":43.05,"toLon":-76.15,"label":"Wendat and Neutral captives adopted into Haudenosaunee towns","people":null}],"summary":"Competition over the fur trade and over captives to replace population lost to epidemics drove a long series of wars in which the Haudenosaunee confederacy attacked and dispersed its neighbours. The Wendat confederacy, already halved by smallpox in the 1630s, was broken in 1649-1650 when its principal towns were destroyed; the Petun, Neutral, Erie and later the Susquehannock followed. Survivors were killed, fled westward and northward, or were adopted into Haudenosaunee communities in numbers large enough that Jesuit observers reported adoptees outnumbering the original population of some towns. The wars emptied southern Ontario and the Ohio country of settled villages for a generation and reshaped the map of the eastern Great Lakes before the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. The atlas covered New England's Pequot and King Philip's wars but nothing of the interior; this is the largest Indigenous-driven displacement in seventeenth-century North America.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":50000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000,"_deaths":30000,"countries":["United States of America","Canada"],"baselinePop":90000,"baselineWhat":"The Iroquoian-speaking nations of the lower Great Lakes destroyed or dispersed in the wars - Wendat (Huron), Tionontate (Petun), Neutral, Erie and Susquehannock - around 1600","baselineYear":1600,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.4444444444444444},{"id":"dutch-conquest-of-the-banda-islands","title":"The Dutch Conquest and Depopulation of the Banda Islands","startYear":1609,"endYear":1621,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Dutch East India Company under Jan Pieterszoon Coen destroyed the population of the Banda Islands to secure a monopoly of nutmeg and mace, and repopulated the islands with company planters and enslaved labourers","peopleDisplaced":14000,"territoryKm2":180,"territoryDesc":"The Banda archipelago, then the world's only source of nutmeg and mace, was taken into direct company ownership; its land was divided into perken, plantation blocks granted to company servants who worked them with enslaved labour imported from elsewhere in the archipelago.","lat":-4.525,"lon":129.897,"flows":[{"fromLat":-4.53,"fromLon":129.9,"toLat":-6.18,"toLon":106.83,"label":"Bandanese deported as slaves → Batavia","people":800},{"fromLat":-4.53,"fromLon":129.9,"toLat":-5.75,"toLon":132.73,"label":"Refugees → Kei and Aru islands","people":null},{"fromLat":-4.53,"fromLon":129.9,"toLat":-3.32,"toLon":128.97,"label":"Refugees → Seram and Ambon","people":null}],"summary":"The Dutch East India Company had sought a monopoly of the Banda spice trade since 1609, when a Bandanese ambush killed a company admiral and much of his party. In 1621 Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen arrived with a large force, occupied Lonthor, and in the campaign that followed the islands' population was killed, starved on the slopes to which it had fled, deported or driven overseas; forty-four leading orang kaya were tortured and executed by Japanese mercenaries in company service after a summary process. Contemporary reports describe roughly a thousand people remaining on islands that had held on the order of fifteen thousand. The company then divided the nutmeg groves into perken worked by imported enslaved labour under Dutch planters, an arrangement that lasted until the nineteenth century. A body of scholarship, including work published as 'Genocide in the Spice Islands', argues the destruction meets the definition of genocide; the Dutch government has not made any formal determination on the events of 1621.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","starvation & siege","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":14000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":15000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Banda Islands before the Dutch East India Company's campaign","baselineYear":1609,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9333333333333333},{"id":"expulsion-of-the-moriscos-from-spain","title":"The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain","startYear":1609,"endYear":1614,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Philip III and the Duke of Lerma ordered the deportation of Spain's Morisco population, the baptised descendants of its Muslims, to North Africa and beyond","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.47,"lon":-0.377,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.47,"fromLon":-0.38,"toLat":36.79,"toLon":3.06,"label":"Valencia → Algiers and the Maghreb","people":120000},{"fromLat":37.99,"fromLon":-1.13,"toLat":36.81,"toLon":10.18,"label":"Murcia and Andalusia → Tunis","people":null},{"fromLat":41.65,"fromLon":-0.88,"toLat":43.6,"toLon":1.44,"label":"Aragon → France (mostly onward to North Africa)","people":null}],"summary":"Between September 1609 and 1614 the Spanish monarchy deported the Moriscos, the descendants of Muslims forcibly converted a century earlier, on the grounds that their conversion was insincere and that they were a security risk in a Mediterranean contested with the Ottomans and the Barbary regencies. Expulsion proceeded kingdom by kingdom, beginning with Valencia, where it triggered armed resistance in the Muela de Cortes and the Vall de Laguar. Most were shipped to North Africa, where many were robbed or killed on arrival; others reached Constantinople, Tunis, France and Italy. Estimates of the number deported cluster around 272,000 to 300,000, drawn from embarkation and payment records rather than chronicles, making this one of the better-counted forced migrations before the nineteenth century. Valencia's rural economy was severely damaged and its seigneurial landlords opposed the measure. Some children were retained in Spain, and a minority of Moriscos evaded expulsion or returned.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Spain","Tunisia","France"],"baselinePop":325000,"baselineWhat":"The Morisco population of Spain immediately before the expulsion decrees","baselineYear":1609,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9230769230769231},{"id":"plantation-of-ulster","title":"The Plantation of Ulster","startYear":1609,"endYear":1641,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The English Crown confiscated the lands of the Gaelic lords of Ulster after their flight and granted them to English and Scottish settlers, requiring the removal of the Irish tenantry from most of the granted land","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Roughly half a million profitable acres across the six escheated counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine (renamed Londonderry), Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone were confiscated from Gaelic lordships and regranted, mostly to English and Scottish undertakers and to the London livery companies, with further private plantation in Antrim and Down.","lat":54.6,"lon":-7.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":55.86,"fromLon":-4.25,"toLat":54.6,"toLon":-6.6,"label":"Lowland Scotland → Ulster","people":null},{"fromLat":52.48,"fromLon":-1.9,"toLat":54.6,"toLon":-7.3,"label":"England → Ulster","people":null}],"summary":"After the Nine Years War and the departure of the earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607, the Crown declared their lands forfeit and organised the systematic settlement of six Ulster counties. Grants to English and Scottish undertakers carried an obligation to plant British Protestant tenants and, on most estates, to remove the existing Irish occupiers to land set aside for them, a condition that was widely evaded because settlers were scarce and Irish tenants paid higher rents. Alongside the official scheme, private plantation in Antrim and Down brought in large numbers of Lowland Scots. The result was not a clearance but a layered settlement in which a substantial British Protestant population was established over a dispossessed Gaelic landowning class and a partly displaced tenantry, a configuration that shaped the 1641 rising and Ulster's subsequent history. Contemporary records document land transfers and settler musters far better than they document the movement of the displaced.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The Gaelic Irish population of Ulster at the start of the plantation","baselineYear":1600,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"tokugawa-suppression-of-christianity-and-shimabara","title":"The Tokugawa Suppression of Christianity and the Shimabara Rebellion","startYear":1614,"endYear":1650,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity, expelled missionaries and prominent converts, compelled apostasy through registration and testing, and destroyed the Shimabara rising of 1637-38","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.75,"lon":129.877,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.75,"fromLon":129.88,"toLat":14.6,"toLon":120.98,"label":"Missionaries and Japanese Christians deported → Manila","people":null},{"fromLat":32.75,"fromLon":129.88,"toLat":22.2,"toLon":113.54,"label":"Missionaries and Japanese Christians deported → Macao","people":null}],"summary":"Christianity, introduced by the Jesuits in 1549, was proscribed by Hideyoshi in 1587 and comprehensively banned by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1614, on the argument that it was a subversive foreign allegiance. Missionaries and prominent converts were expelled to Macao and Manila; those who remained or returned were hunted, and executions by crucifixion, burning and the pit followed through the 1620s and 1630s, with the numbers of martyrs recorded in mission accounts and in later Catholic canonisation processes. In 1637-38 an uprising in the Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands, driven by taxation and famine as well as by religion, drew tens of thousands of peasants into the ruined castle of Hara; Britannica notes that an army of 100,000 was unable to dislodge them quickly, and when the castle fell in April 1638 the defenders were killed almost to a man, in numbers usually given as between 27,000 and 37,000. Afterwards the shogunate imposed temple registration on the whole population, required suspects to tread on Christian images, expelled the Portuguese and closed the country to most foreign contact. Christian communities survived in secret around Nagasaki and the offshore islands until the nineteenth century.","deathsLow":27000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":26800,"_deaths":33500,"countries":["Japan","Philippines","Macao"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The Japanese Christian (Kirishitan) population at the 1614 expulsion edict","baselineYear":1614,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"thirty-years-war-and-the-german-demographic-collapse","title":"The Thirty Years War and the Depopulation of the German Lands","startYear":1618,"endYear":1648,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Habsburg, Bavarian, Saxon, Danish, Swedish, French and mercenary armies fought across the Holy Roman Empire, living off the country and destroying, expelling and starving its civilian population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 redrew the Empire's internal religious and territorial settlement, confirmed Swedish and French gains on the Baltic and Rhine, and recognised the effective sovereignty of the imperial princes.","lat":52.128,"lon":11.629,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.08,"fromLon":14.44,"toLat":51.34,"toLon":12.37,"label":"Protestant exiles: Bohemia → Saxony","people":null},{"fromLat":49.45,"fromLon":8.47,"toLat":51.92,"toLon":4.48,"label":"Palatinate → the Dutch Republic","people":null}],"summary":"The war that began with the Bohemian revolt of 1618 and ended at Westphalia in 1648 was fought largely by armies that supported themselves by requisition, contribution and plunder in the territories they occupied. Its demographic effect was the worst in German history until the twentieth century: the standard modern reconstructions, including Peter H. Wilson's, put the population of the Empire's German lands as falling by roughly a fifth to a third, from about 18-20 million to about 12-16 million, with the great majority of deaths caused by typhus, plague, dysentery and hunger rather than by combat. Losses were extremely uneven, exceeding half the population in parts of the south-west, Mecklenburg and Pomerania while some north-western regions were barely touched. The sack of Magdeburg in May 1631 killed most of a city of around 20,000-25,000 and became the war's emblematic atrocity. Confessional expulsions, notably of Protestants from Bohemia and Austria after 1620 and the Habsburg re-Catholicisation programme, added a deliberate displacement to the general flight.","deathsLow":4500000,"deathsHigh":8000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5000000,"_deaths":6250000,"countries":["Germany","Czechia","Netherlands"],"baselinePop":20000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire in 1618","baselineYear":1618,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"dutch-pacification-of-formosa-and-the-lamey-island-massacre","title":"The Dutch Pacification of Formosa and the Lamey Island Massacre","startYear":1635,"endYear":1645,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Dutch East India Company subjugated the indigenous villages of southwestern Taiwan by punitive expedition, and cleared the inhabitants of Lamey Island from their home entirely","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The company extended control from its fort at Tayouan over the villages of the southwestern Taiwan plain and outlying islands, the first sustained external rule over any part of Taiwan; it ended with the Zheng conquest of 1662.","lat":22.343,"lon":120.371,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.34,"fromLon":120.37,"toLat":22.99,"toLon":120.16,"label":"Lamey islanders deported → Tayouan","people":null},{"fromLat":22.34,"fromLon":120.37,"toLat":-6.18,"toLon":106.83,"label":"Lamey captives shipped → Batavia","people":null}],"summary":"After a decade of weakness on Taiwan the Dutch East India Company received reinforcements from Batavia in 1634 and used them to subdue the villages around its fort at Tayouan, burning Mattau in 1635 and compelling its neighbours to submit; Tonio Andrade describes the resulting settlement as a pax hollandica maintained by annual assemblies of village headmen holding company staves of office. The company also acted against the inhabitants of Lamey Island, who had killed the crews of two shipwrecked Dutch vessels; from 1636 successive expeditions drove the islanders into limestone caves, where large numbers died when the entrances were sealed and fires lit, and removed the survivors from the island altogether, distributing them among households at Tayouan and shipping others to Batavia. The island was subsequently leased out for cultivation. These campaigns are documented in unusual detail because the company kept daily registers at Fort Zeelandia, and they are among the best-recorded instances of a European trading company clearing an indigenous population in the seventeenth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Taiwan","Indonesia"],"baselinePop":68000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of the villages of south-western Taiwan under Dutch East India Company administration","baselineYear":1650,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"new-england-colonial-wars-and-native-enslavement","title":"The Pequot War, King Philip's War and the Enslavement of Native New Englanders","startYear":1636,"endYear":1677,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"New England colonial governments and their Native allies destroyed the Pequot and then the Wampanoag-led alliance, seizing their lands and selling captives into slavery in the Caribbean, Bermuda and beyond","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Pequot country in southeastern Connecticut was divided among the colonies and their Mohegan and Narragansett allies after 1638; after 1676 most remaining Native land in southern New England passed to the colonies, and the surviving communities were confined to small reserved tracts.","lat":41.354,"lon":-71.966,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.35,"fromLon":-71.97,"toLat":32.31,"toLon":-64.75,"label":"Native captives sold to Bermuda","people":null},{"fromLat":41.82,"fromLon":-71.41,"toLat":13.19,"toLon":-59.54,"label":"Native captives sold to the West Indies","people":null},{"fromLat":42.36,"fromLon":-71.06,"toLat":45.5,"toLon":-73.57,"label":"Refugees north to Canada and the Abenaki country","people":null}],"summary":"Two wars broke Native political independence in southern New England. In May 1637 a Connecticut and Massachusetts force with Mohegan and Narragansett allies surrounded and burned the Pequot fort at Mystic, killing several hundred people, mostly non-combatants, in an attack that shocked even the colonists' Native allies; the survivors were hunted, enslaved and distributed, and the Treaty of Hartford of 1638 declared the Pequot nation dissolved. Forty years later Metacom, called King Philip by the English, led a broad alliance against colonial expansion; the war of 1675-76 destroyed or damaged dozens of towns on both sides and is among the deadliest per capita conflicts in the region's history. Colonial governments responded to victory by selling captives: Margaret Ellen Newell's research in the colonial court records shows that thousands of Native people were enslaved, including many who surrendered under promise of clemency, and that Indian slavery was an established institution in New England rather than an incident of war. Metacom was killed in August 1676 and his wife and son were among those sold overseas. The surviving Native population was left on small reserved tracts under colonial supervision.","deathsLow":4000,"deathsHigh":9000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5200,"_deaths":6500,"countries":["United States of America","Bermuda","Barbados","Canada"],"baselinePop":15000,"baselineWhat":"The Native population of southern New England on the eve of King Philip's War","baselineYear":1675,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"manchu-conquest-of-ming-china","title":"The Manchu Conquest of Ming China: Yangzhou, Jiading and the Queue Order","startYear":1644,"endYear":1662,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Qing armies conquered Ming China, sacked cities that resisted, and imposed the shaving of the forehead and the wearing of the queue on all adult men on pain of death","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Ming empire, with the later addition of Taiwan in 1683, passed to the Qing; Beijing's inner city was cleared of its Chinese population for banner garrisons, and similar garrison quarters were established in provincial capitals.","lat":32.394,"lon":119.413,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.8,"fromLon":123.43,"toLat":39.91,"toLon":116.4,"label":"Manchu banner population → Beijing and provincial garrisons","people":null},{"fromLat":32.39,"fromLon":119.41,"toLat":30.26,"toLon":120.19,"label":"Flight from the Jiangnan cities during the conquest","people":null}],"summary":"Qing forces entered Beijing in 1644 after the fall of the Ming to rebel armies, and spent the following two decades subduing the south. Where cities resisted they were stormed and sacked: Yangzhou fell in May 1645 after a short siege and was given over to a massacre that a survivor, Wang Xiuchu, described in a memoir that became one of the most reproduced texts in Chinese history; Britannica reports the traditional figure of 800,000 dead while noting it is 'probably quite exaggerated'. Jiading and Jiangyin were similarly treated later that year, in both cases after resistance provoked by the order of July 1645 requiring every adult man to shave the front of his head and wear the Manchu queue, enforced with the slogan that one might keep one's hair or one's head. The conquest was accompanied by the collapse of the registered population, the devastation of Sichuan in the wars associated with the rebel Zhang Xianzhong and the Qing campaigns that followed, and famine and epidemic across large areas. Aggregate mortality for the Ming-Qing transition is often given in the tens of millions, but those figures are derived from fiscal registers that undercounted before the wars and were not restored for decades, and specialists treat them as unreliable.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":150000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ming China on the eve of the Qing conquest","baselineYear":1644,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"khmelnytsky-uprising-massacres","title":"The Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Massacres of 1648-49","startYear":1648,"endYear":1657,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Cossack forces under Bohdan Khmelnytsky, allied with Crimean Tatars and joined by Ukrainian peasants, destroyed Jewish and Polish Catholic communities across the eastern Commonwealth; Polish forces killed Ukrainians in reprisal","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The uprising detached much of Ukraine from direct Polish-Lithuanian control and, after the Pereiaslav agreement of 1654, brought the Cossack Hetmanate under Muscovite protection, beginning the partition of Ukraine between Poland and Russia confirmed in 1667.","lat":48.978,"lon":28.844,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.44,"fromLon":26.99,"toLat":52.23,"toLon":21.01,"label":"Jewish refugees → Poland proper and central Europe","people":null},{"fromLat":49.84,"fromLon":24.03,"toLat":44.95,"toLon":34.11,"label":"Captives sold to Crimean Tatar allies → Crimea","people":null}],"summary":"The Cossack rebellion that began in 1648 destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian order in Ukraine and, with it, the network of Jewish communities that had grown up under noble patronage as estate managers, tax farmers and leaseholders. Jewish and Polish Catholic townspeople were killed at Nemyriv, Tulchyn, Polonne and elsewhere; the Tatar allies took large numbers as captives for the slave market rather than killing them. Nathan Hannover's chronicle Yeven Metsulah and other Hebrew accounts gave figures of 100,000 dead or more, and these passed into standard histories. Shaul Stampfer's demographic reassessment, working from the pre-1648 Jewish population of the region, concludes that around 18,000-20,000 Jews died, out of a population of roughly 40,000 in the affected area, a proportion that is catastrophic even though the absolute number is far below the traditional one. Ukrainian villagers were in turn killed in large numbers by Polish forces, and the wars that followed to 1657 and beyond devastated the region.","deathsLow":18000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":47200,"_deaths":59000,"countries":["Ukraine","Poland","Russia"],"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Ukrainian palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the eve of the uprising in 1648","baselineYear":1648,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"cromwellian-conquest-of-ireland-and-the-transplantation-to-connacht","title":"The Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland and the Transplantation to Connacht","startYear":1649,"endYear":1660,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The English Commonwealth reconquered Ireland, confiscated most Catholic-owned land, ordered Catholic landowners to move west of the Shannon, and transported thousands of Irish to the Caribbean colonies","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Under the Act for the Settlement of Ireland (1652) and the Act of Satisfaction (1653), land in the other three provinces was confiscated to pay the army and the 'Adventurers' who had funded the war; Catholic landownership fell from roughly three-fifths of the profitable land of Ireland before 1641 to under a fifth by the 1660s and under a tenth by 1703.","lat":53.349,"lon":-6.26,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.35,"fromLon":-6.26,"toLat":53.27,"toLon":-9.05,"label":"Catholic proprietors → Connacht and Clare","people":null},{"fromLat":51.9,"fromLon":-8.47,"toLat":13.19,"toLon":-59.54,"label":"Transportation → Barbados and the Leeward Islands","people":null}],"summary":"Cromwell landed in August 1649 and the reconquest was completed by 1653 after storms of Drogheda and Wexford in which garrisons and numbers of townspeople were killed, and a long attritional campaign against guerrilla resistance in which crops were burned and civilians moved or starved. The settlement that followed transferred most Catholic-owned land to soldiers and creditors and ordered Catholic proprietors to remove themselves and their households across the Shannon into Connacht and Clare by May 1654 on pain of death. Thousands of prisoners of war and others were shipped to the West Indies as indentured labour. Ireland's population fell steeply between 1641 and 1652; William Petty's contemporary estimate of 616,000 deaths, mostly from plague and famine, is the source of the often-repeated claim of a loss of a third or more, and modern historians such as Toby Barnard, John Cunningham and Micheal O Siochru accept a very large loss while treating Petty's arithmetic as unreliable. The scale, the intent and the appropriate label for these events remain among the most contested questions in Irish historiography.","deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":620000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","starvation & siege","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":328000,"_deaths":410000,"countries":["Ireland","Barbados"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ireland on the eve of the 1641 rising and the Cromwellian reconquest","baselineYear":1641,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"the-deluge-poland-lithuania","title":"The Deluge: Swedish and Russian Invasion and the Depopulation of Poland-Lithuania","startYear":1655,"endYear":1660,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Swedish and Muscovite armies invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, sacking its cities and, in the Russian case, carrying off large numbers of Lithuanian and Belarusian captives and craftsmen","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Sweden occupied most of the Crown lands and Muscovy most of Lithuania; almost all was recovered at Oliwa in 1660, but the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 confirmed Muscovite possession of Smolensk and left-bank Ukraine.","lat":52.23,"lon":21.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.69,"fromLon":25.28,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Craftsmen and captives deported from Vilnius and Lithuanian towns to Muscovy","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1655 and 1660 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was invaded simultaneously by Sweden and Muscovy, in a catastrophe Polish historiography calls the Deluge. Warsaw, Krakow and Vilnius were captured and systematically plundered; Vilnius burned for days in 1655 and Warsaw was stripped of its libraries, archives and building materials. Muscovite forces deported captives from the Lithuanian towns, with skilled craftsmen resettled in Moscow. Jewish communities suffered heavily, both in the earlier Cossack uprising and at the hands of Polish irregulars who accused them of collaborating with the Swedes. Modern demographic reconstructions put the Commonwealth's overall population loss across 1648-1660 at around a third, comparable in proportion to the Thirty Years War in Germany, though war, famine and plague cannot be disentangled.","deathsLow":3000000,"deathsHigh":4000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2800000,"_deaths":3500000,"countries":["Poland","Lithuania","Russia"],"baselinePop":11000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the eve of the Swedish and Muscovite invasions","baselineYear":1650,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"qing-great-clearance-coastal-evacuation","title":"The Qing Great Clearance: Evacuation of the Southern Seaboard","startYear":1661,"endYear":1683,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Qing state ordered the entire coastal population of the southeastern provinces moved inland and their villages destroyed, to starve the Zheng regime on Taiwan of supplies and recruits","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A continuous strip of coastline from Shandong to Guangdong, in places tens of kilometres deep, was emptied and declared prohibited; boundary walls, ditches and guard posts were built to enforce it, and the zone was resettled only after the policy was lifted in stages from 1669 and finally in 1683.","lat":24.479,"lon":118.089,"flows":[{"fromLat":24.48,"fromLon":118.09,"toLat":25.6,"toLon":117.5,"label":"Fujian coast → interior prefectures","people":null},{"fromLat":22.55,"fromLon":114.06,"toLat":23.4,"toLon":113.6,"label":"Guangdong coast → inland Guangdong","people":null},{"fromLat":24.48,"fromLon":118.09,"toLat":23,"toLon":120.2,"label":"Refugees → Taiwan and Southeast Asia","people":null}],"summary":"Unable to defeat the Zheng maritime regime at sea, the Qing court adopted in 1661 the most drastic internal displacement policy of the early modern world: the removal of the entire population of the southeastern seaboard behind an inland boundary, and the destruction of everything left behind. Villages, fishing fleets, salt pans and port towns were burned; people who crossed back over the line were liable to execution; and the evacuated population, dispossessed of the only livelihoods it knew, was largely left to fend for itself in already crowded interior districts. Contemporaries and later gazetteers describe famine, banditry and mass death among the evacuees, and substantial flight to Taiwan and to Southeast Asia. The policy was relaxed from 1669 in places and formally ended after the Qing conquest of Taiwan in 1683, after which the coast was resettled, in part by people from elsewhere. Dahpon David Ho, whose study of the Fujian coast is the fullest English-language treatment, describes it as one of the most devastating and sustained scorched-earth campaigns of its era, with hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more uprooted.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Taiwan","China"],"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null},{"id":"kongo-civil-wars-and-the-fall-of-mbanza-kongo","title":"The Battle of Mbwila, the Kongo Civil Wars and the Emptying of the Kingdom","startYear":1665,"endYear":1740,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Portuguese Angola and rival Kongo royal houses fought wars that broke up the kingdom and fed captives into the Atlantic trade","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The kingdom's core between the Congo river and the Angolan highlands fragmented into competing polities based on Kibangu, Mbula and Soyo; the capital Mbanza Kongo (Sao Salvador) was abandoned from 1678 to 1709","lat":-6.27,"lon":14.25,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.27,"fromLon":14.25,"toLat":-8.81,"toLon":13.23,"label":"Kongo captives to Luanda and the Atlantic ships","people":null}],"summary":"At Mbwila (Ulanga) in October 1665 a Portuguese-Angolan force with African allies defeated and killed King Antonio I of Kongo, an outcome that removed the kingdom's central authority. Rival branches of the royal family then fought for the throne for two generations; the capital Mbanza Kongo was abandoned in 1678 and only reoccupied under Pedro IV in 1709, after the Antonian movement of Beatriz Kimpa Vita was suppressed and its leader burned in 1706. Prisoners taken in these wars were sold to Portuguese and Dutch traders at Luanda, Cabinda and Soyo, and the region became one of the largest sources of captives in the Atlantic trade. Historians differ on whether the wars drove the slave trade or the trade drove the wars: John Thornton emphasises internal dynastic politics with slaving as a consequence, while other scholars stress European demand as the motor. Kongo survived as a title and a set of provinces but never recovered its former reach.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Angola"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Kingdom of Kongo on the eve of the Battle of Mbwila","baselineYear":1665,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4,"related":[{"id":"portuguese-angola-and-the-west-central-african-slaving-wars","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The Angola entry covers Mbwila and the Kongo civil wars as part of West Central Africa's slaving wars, so the two entries describe overlapping captives."},{"id":"trans-atlantic-slave-trade-to-1750","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":200000,"note":"The Kongo entry's ~200,000 is explicitly an estimate of Kongo-origin captives within the 500,000-600,000 embarked from the Loango-Congo coast in 1660-1740, taken from the same slave-voyages database. All of these embarkations fall before 1750, so they are inside the trans-Atlantic entry's 4.8 million. Kongo's internal displacement (the abandonment of Mbanza Kongo, 1678-1709) is not quantified and is not shared. Deaths are not shared: the Kongo entry has none, and its note already assigns deaths in captivity and at sea to the slave-trade entries."}]},{"id":"spanish-chamorro-wars-and-marianas-reduccion","title":"The Spanish-Chamorro Wars and the Reduccion of the Mariana Islands","startYear":1668,"endYear":1700,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"Spanish forces with Filipino auxiliaries fought the CHamoru of the Marianas and removed the surviving northern islanders to Guam","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The northern Mariana Islands were emptied of settled population for most of the following century and administered from Guam","lat":13.44,"lon":144.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.19,"fromLon":145.75,"toLat":13.44,"toLon":144.75,"label":"Northern Marianas islanders removed to Guam","people":null}],"summary":"A Jesuit mission established on Guam in 1668 under Spanish protection provoked three decades of intermittent war with the CHamoru, whose canoes and villages were destroyed by Spanish soldiers and Filipino auxiliaries in repeated campaigns. Between 1698 and 1700 the surviving inhabitants of Rota, Tinian, Saipan and the northern islands were removed to Guam and settled in mission villages under the policy of reduccion, so that they could be catechised, taxed and controlled; the northern islands were left largely uninhabited for a century. The CHamoru population collapsed to a small fraction of its pre-contact level. Guampedia and CHamoru scholars set out the debate over causation: introduced smallpox, influenza and other epidemics account for most of the deaths in nearly all accounts, but the wars, the destruction of the seafaring economy and forced concentration compounded them, and some CHamoru writers apply the term genocide while others emphasise disease and reject it. Spanish records are the principal source and were produced by the colonising power.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Guam","N. Mariana Is."],"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The CHamoru population of the Mariana Islands when Spanish mission and military operations began in 1668","baselineYear":1668,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"carolina-indian-slave-trade","title":"The Indian Slave Trade of the English Southeast","startYear":1670,"endYear":1717,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Carolina traders armed Indigenous allies to raid for captives, who were enslaved on southern plantations or shipped to the Caribbean and the northern colonies","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Spanish mission chain across Apalachee and Timucua in northern Florida was destroyed and the region depopulated of settled Indigenous towns.","lat":32.78,"lon":-79.93,"flows":[{"fromLat":30.45,"fromLon":-84.28,"toLat":32.78,"toLon":-79.93,"label":"Apalachee and Timucua captives taken from the Florida missions to Charles Town","people":11000},{"fromLat":32.78,"fromLon":-79.93,"toLat":18,"toLon":-76.8,"label":"Native captives shipped from Charles Town to the West Indies","people":null}],"summary":"From the founding of Charles Town in 1670 the Carolina colony built a trade in Indigenous captives, supplying guns and goods to allied nations — the Westo, later the Yamasee, Creek and Chickasaw — in exchange for people taken in raids. The largest single campaign, led by Governor James Moore against the Spanish mission provinces of Florida in 1702-1706, destroyed the Apalachee missions and carried off many thousands. Captives were held on Carolina plantations or shipped to the West Indies, Virginia and New England, where escape was harder. Alan Gallay's reconstruction puts the total enslaved at 24,000-51,000, exceeding the colony's African imports of the same period. The system helped depopulate the interior Southeast, drove the coalescence of refugee peoples into new confederacies, and collapsed with the Yamasee War of 1715-1717, when the colony's principal suppliers turned on it. The atlas had no entry for Indigenous enslavement in colonial North America outside New England.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America","Jamaica"],"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The Indigenous population of the English colonial Southeast — the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida and the lower Mississippi — in the late seventeenth century","baselineYear":1685,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2},{"id":"huguenot-exodus-after-the-revocation-of-the-edict-of-nantes","title":"The Huguenot Exodus after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes","startYear":1681,"endYear":1700,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France, quartered dragoons on Protestant households to force conversion, and banned emigration; between one in five and one in three Huguenots fled anyway","peopleDisplaced":180000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.857,"lon":2.352,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.75,"fromLon":4.85,"toLat":46.2,"toLon":6.14,"label":"France → Geneva and the Swiss cantons","people":null},{"fromLat":46.16,"fromLon":-1.15,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"La Rochelle and the west → England and Ireland","people":50000},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":52.37,"toLon":4.9,"label":"France → the Dutch Republic","people":60000},{"fromLat":48.58,"fromLon":7.75,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"France → Brandenburg-Prussia","people":20000},{"fromLat":46.16,"fromLon":-1.15,"toLat":-33.85,"toLon":18.85,"label":"France → the Cape of Good Hope","people":200}],"summary":"From the late 1670s the French Crown escalated pressure on the Protestant minority protected since 1598 by the Edict of Nantes: churches were demolished, professions closed, and from 1681 dragoons were billeted on Protestant households with licence to coerce conversions. The Edict of Fontainebleau of October 1685 revoked toleration entirely, ordered ministers into exile within a fortnight and forbade lay Protestants to leave the kingdom. Perhaps 140,000-200,000 left in defiance of that ban, most to the Dutch Republic, England, the Swiss cantons and Brandenburg-Prussia, whose Edict of Potsdam invited them; smaller groups reached Ireland, Scandinavia, North America and the Dutch Cape Colony. The refugees were disproportionately urban, skilled and literate, and the receiving states competed for them, which is why their arrival is comparatively well recorded. Those who stayed were legally Catholic; clandestine worship in the Cevennes and elsewhere led to the Camisard war of 1702-10.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["torture","arbitrary detention","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":180000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["France","Switzerland","Jersey","United Kingdom","Netherlands","Germany","South Africa"],"baselinePop":850000,"baselineWhat":"The Protestant population of France before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes","baselineYear":1681,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.21176470588235294},{"id":"mughal-deccan-wars-under-aurangzeb","title":"Aurangzeb's Deccan Wars and the Maratha Conflict","startYear":1681,"endYear":1707,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Aurangzeb moved the Mughal court and army to the Deccan for a quarter-century, annexing Bijapur and Golconda and campaigning against the Marathas, at enormous cost to the region's population","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The sultanates of Bijapur (annexed 1686) and Golconda (1687) were extinguished and their territories added to the Mughal empire, which reached its greatest extent; Maratha territory was overrun repeatedly but never held, and the Mughal position in the Deccan collapsed after Aurangzeb's death in 1707.","lat":19.876,"lon":75.343,"flows":[{"fromLat":18.52,"fromLon":73.86,"toLat":17.36,"toLon":78.47,"label":"Populations displaced by campaigning across the Deccan plateau","people":null}],"summary":"Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-five years of his reign in the Deccan, annexing the Muslim sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda and attempting to destroy the Maratha polity founded by Shivaji; he captured and executed Shivaji's son Sambhaji in 1689 but, as Britannica notes, even after nearly two decades of struggle he failed to subdue the Marathas. The war was fought as a series of sieges and scorched-earth raids across a wide plateau, with both sides living off the country; contemporary chroniclers describe deserted villages, abandoned cultivation and famine, and a severe famine and plague in the Deccan in the opening years of the eighteenth century that court chronicle attributes with a death toll around two million — a figure from a single chronicle tradition that cannot be verified. Aurangzeb also reversed his predecessors' policy towards non-Muslims, reimposing the jizya in 1679, prohibiting the building and repair of Hindu temples and ordering demolitions. His religious policy is the subject of sharp modern dispute: it is central to Hindu nationalist accounts of Mughal rule, while historians including Audrey Truschke argue that temple destruction was targeted and political rather than systematic, a reading that is itself contested. The demographic cost of the Deccan wars has never been reconstructed.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Deccan sultanates and the Maratha lands during Aurangzeb's campaigns","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"great-migrations-of-the-serbs","title":"The Great Migrations of the Serbs from Ottoman Territory to Habsburg Lands","startYear":1690,"endYear":1739,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Serb populations fled Ottoman reprisals after failed Habsburg offensives, moving north under their patriarchs into Habsburg Hungary","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":42.6593,"lon":20.2883,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.6593,"fromLon":20.2883,"toLat":45.2671,"toLon":19.8335,"label":"Kosovo and Old Serbia to the Habsburg military frontier and Vojvodina","people":60000},{"fromLat":42.66,"fromLon":20.29,"toLat":47.67,"toLon":19.08,"label":"Kosovo, the Morava valley and Belgrade → Szentendre, Buda and southern Hungary","people":null}],"summary":"In 1689-90 a Habsburg army advanced deep into Ottoman Rumelia with Serb and Albanian support; when it was thrown back, Ottoman and Tatar forces conducted reprisals and Patriarch Arsenije III Carnojevic led a large body of Serbs north across the Danube and Sava under privileges granted by Emperor Leopold I in 1690-1691, which recognised the patriarch as head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Monarchy and granted the migrants ecclesiastical and communal autonomy until their abolition in 1912. A second movement followed the failed Habsburg campaign of 1737-39 under Patriarch Arsenije IV. The migrants of 1690 settled in southern Hungary, including Szentendre and Buda, and in Srem, Banat and along the military frontier, where they formed the demographic basis of later Vojvodina and of the Serbian Orthodox metropolitanate of Karlovci. The size of the 1690 movement is disputed, with sources giving 30,000-40,000 people or 37,000 families; the demographic effect on Kosovo and Old Serbia, and whether it opened the way for Albanian settlement there, is one of the most politically contested questions in Balkan historiography, argued differently by Serbian and Albanian historians.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Kosovo","Serbia","Hungary"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Serb Orthodox population of the Ottoman territories the migration came from","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"ottoman-iskan-settlement-of-nomads","title":"The Ottoman Iskan: Forced Settlement of Nomadic Tribes","startYear":1691,"endYear":1750,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Ottoman state ordered Turkmen, Yoruk and Kurdish tribal confederations to settle in designated villages, chiefly in the Raqqa region and Cukurova","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35.95,"lon":39.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.87,"fromLon":36.94,"toLat":35.95,"toLon":39.01,"label":"Turkmen confederations ordered from Anatolian pastures to Raqqa","people":null}],"summary":"From 1691 the Ottoman government made the settlement of pastoral tribes a systematic policy, ordering named confederations to occupy fixed villages on depopulated land, above all along the Euphrates around Raqqa, and holding tribal leaders responsible for keeping their people there. The stated aims were to end raiding on caravan routes and settled villages, to bring nomads onto the tax registers, and to repopulate abandoned districts. Enforcement was uneven: many tribes fled back to their highland pastures and were ordered south again in successive decrees through the eighteenth century, and settlement in the malarial Euphrates lands carried heavy mortality. A parallel and better-documented campaign, the Firka-i Islahiye of 1865, used a reform army to settle tribes in Cukurova and the Amanus. The policy is one of the clearest early-modern instances of a state moving populations to make them legible and taxable rather than to punish them.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Syria","Turkey"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible figure exists for the nomadic population of the Ottoman provinces subject to the settlement decrees","baselineYear":1691,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"mawlay-ismail-abid-al-bukhari-enslavement","title":"Mawlay Isma'il's Enslavement of Black Moroccans for the 'Abid al-Bukhari","startYear":1699,"endYear":1708,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The 'Alawi sultan Mawlay Isma'il ordered his officials to seize, buy or register as slaves black Moroccans, including legally free Haratin, to form a hereditary slave army bound to him by oath on al-Bukhari's hadith collection","peopleDisplaced":221000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.9,"lon":-5.55,"flows":[],"summary":"From the 1670s Mawlay Isma'il (r. 1672–1727) built a standing army of black soldiers loyal only to himself, the 'Abid al-Bukhari, so called because they swore allegiance on a copy of al-Bukhari's Sahih. In the late 1690s, as Chouki El Hamel shows in the Journal of African History (2010), he ordered his officials to enslave all black people in Morocco: slaves were to be bought compulsorily from their owners, and free black Muslims, including the Haratin, were registered as slaves under an invented hierarchy of slave categories. El Hamel argues that this violated the central rules of Islamic law on slavery, which forbade enslaving free Muslims, and that the project constructed a slave status for all black people; it provoked open conflict with the 'ulama of Fez, some of whom protested in writing, until the sultan forced them to endorse the register in 1708. Soldiers' families were settled in camps where boys were trained from about age ten in masonry, horsemanship and musketry and enlisted around sixteen. The army became a political force that made and unmade sultans until the nineteenth century. Captives brought across the Sahara into Morocco are counted in 'The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1450–1750'; this entry concerns the enslavement and registration of people already living in Morocco.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"_mag":221000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Morocco"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"dahomey-asante-war-captive-systems","title":"War Captives, Tribute and Sacrifice in Dahomey and Asante","startYear":1700,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The kingdoms of Dahomey and Asante raided neighbours for captives, sold most into the Atlantic trade and held or killed the rest","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":7.19,"lon":1.99,"flows":[{"fromLat":7.19,"fromLon":1.99,"toLat":6.36,"toLon":2.09,"label":"Dahomean captives to Ouidah","people":null},{"fromLat":6.69,"fromLon":-1.62,"toLat":5.1,"toLon":-1.25,"label":"Asante captives to Cape Coast and Elmina","people":null}],"summary":"From the early eighteenth century Dahomey, based at Abomey, and Asante, based at Kumasi, organised warfare in part around the capture of people: campaigns against neighbouring states produced prisoners who were sold at the coast, settled as unfree labour on royal plantations, or held for the annual ceremonies. Dahomey took the coastal ports of Allada and Ouidah in the 1720s and thereafter traded directly with European ships; Asante expanded over the Akan states and northern savanna polities and took tribute in people as well as gold. Both kingdoms continued taking captives after the Atlantic trade was suppressed, redirecting them into domestic slavery and, in Dahomey's case, into palm-oil production. European observers described human sacrifice at Dahomey's annual customs on a large scale, but Robin Law and other historians argue that visitors' numbers were inflated and that the ceremonies were smaller and more political than the accounts suggest. British conquest of Asante (1896-1901) and French conquest of Dahomey (1892-94) ended both systems, and both powers cited slaving and sacrifice as justification for their own conquests.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Benin","Ghana"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"trans-atlantic-slave-trade-1750-1867","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Captives sold at the coast by Dahomey and Asante are among those counted in the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1750."}]},{"id":"kazakh-great-disaster-dzungar","title":"The Dzungar Invasions of the Kazakh Steppe and the 'Great Disaster'","startYear":1723,"endYear":1730,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Dzungar Khanate invaded the Kazakh jüzes, driving nomadic populations west and south in mass flight","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Dzungar control extended over the Kazakh eastern pastures and Semirechye; the Junior jüz accepted Russian protection in 1731","lat":43.2973,"lon":68.2517,"flows":[{"fromLat":45,"fromLon":78,"toLat":43.2973,"toLon":68.2517,"label":"Kazakh flight from Semirechye towards the Syr Darya and Transoxiana","people":null},{"fromLat":48,"fromLon":68,"toLat":48.7,"toLon":58.5,"label":"Junior jüz flight west towards the Ural and Volga","people":null}],"summary":"In 1723 the Dzungar Khanate launched a large campaign against the Kazakh jüzes at a moment when they were weakened by winter losses and internal division, seizing pastures and towns in Semirechye and along the Syr Darya. Kazakh tradition calls the ensuing years the Aqtaban shubyryndy, the 'barefoot flight' or Great Disaster, remembering mass movement of whole clans westward and southward with heavy loss of livestock and people, conflict with the Khivan, Bukharan and Kalmyk populations into whose lands they moved, and famine. Kazakh forces under Abulkhair and others won the counter-battles remembered as Bulanty and Anyrakay in the late 1720s, but the disaster led the Junior jüz to accept Russian protection in 1731, beginning the process that ended in Russian annexation over the following century. The claim that a third of the Kazakh population died rests on oral tradition and later national historiography, not on records; the Dzungar Khanate itself was destroyed by the Qing in 1755-58, an event recorded separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Kazakhstan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Kazakh population of the three jüzes before the Dzungar invasions","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"expulsion-of-the-salzburg-protestants","title":"The Expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants","startYear":1731,"endYear":1732,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Prince-Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian expelled the Protestant peasantry of the archbishopric of Salzburg; Prussia and other Protestant states organised their reception","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":47.809,"lon":13.055,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.81,"fromLon":13.06,"toLat":54.6,"toLon":22.2,"label":"Salzburg → East Prussia (Gumbinnen district)","people":17000},{"fromLat":47.81,"fromLon":13.06,"toLat":32.35,"toLon":-81.15,"label":"Salzburg → Ebenezer, Georgia","people":300}],"summary":"Protestantism had survived clandestinely among the mountain peasantry of the prince-archbishopric of Salzburg long after the Counter-Reformation. After Protestant villagers organised and appealed to the Corpus Evangelicorum, Archbishop Firmian issued an emigration patent in October 1731 requiring unpropertied Protestants to leave within eight days and property-holders within one to three months, in midwinter and in breach, the Protestant powers argued, of the Peace of Westphalia. Around 20,000 left. Frederick William I of Prussia offered them land in the depopulated Gumbinnen district of East Prussia and organised their transport; most of the emigrants walked north across Germany in publicised columns that became a European media event, and a small party was settled at Ebenezer in Georgia. Children below a certain age were initially retained by the Salzburg authorities to be raised Catholic, and their release was a principal demand of the Protestant states negotiating on the emigrants' behalf.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Austria","Russia","United States of America"],"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg","baselineYear":1731,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.1},{"id":"nader-shahs-sack-of-delhi","title":"Nader Shah's Sack of Delhi","startYear":1739,"endYear":1739,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Nader Shah of Iran defeated the Mughal army at Karnal, occupied Delhi, and ordered a general massacre of the city's inhabitants after a riot against his troops","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Mughal territory west of the Indus, including Kabul, Ghazni, Peshawar, Sindh and the western Punjab, was ceded to Iran; the Mughal emperor was restored to a throne with its prestige and treasury destroyed.","lat":28.656,"lon":77.241,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.66,"fromLon":77.24,"toLat":36.3,"toLon":59.6,"label":"Craftsmen and captives carried off with Nader's army → Khorasan","people":null}],"summary":"Nader Shah, having seized power in Iran and driven out the Afghans and Ottomans, invaded the Mughal empire in 1738-39, destroyed Muhammad Shah's far larger army at Karnal in February 1739, and entered Delhi in March. A rumour of Nader's death provoked a riot in which several hundred of his soldiers were killed; on 22 March he ordered a general massacre, which continued through the day until the Mughal emperor's plea induced him to stop. Contemporary Persian and Mughal accounts put the dead variously between twenty and thirty thousand, with some later sources giving far higher figures; the killing was accompanied by looting, burning of quarters of the city and mass rape, and by the systematic extraction of the imperial treasure. Nader restored Muhammad Shah to a throne stripped of its wealth and of the territories west of the Indus, and withdrew with a plunder train that included the Peacock Throne. The blow is generally regarded as decisive in the disintegration of Mughal authority, opening the way to Maratha, Afghan and eventually British power in northern India.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":25000,"countries":["India","Iran"],"baselinePop":400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Delhi (Shahjahanabad) at the time of the sack","baselineYear":1739,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"durrani-invasions-and-the-sikh-ghallugharas","title":"Ahmad Shah Durrani's Invasions of Northern India and the Sikh Ghallugharas","startYear":1747,"endYear":1772,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Afghan Durrani empire repeatedly invaded the Punjab and the Ganges plain, sacking cities, enslaving captives and attacking Sikh communities","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Durrani rule was asserted over the Punjab, Kashmir, Sindh and, briefly, Delhi; the Punjab passed to Sikh misls by the 1760s-70s","lat":28.66,"lon":77.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.39,"fromLon":76.97,"toLat":34.53,"toLon":69.17,"label":"Captives taken from Panipat and Delhi towards Afghanistan","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1747 and 1767 Ahmad Shah Durrani invaded India eight times from Kandahar, sacking Delhi in 1757 and plundering Mathura and Vrindavan on the same campaign, and in January 1761 destroying the Maratha army at Panipat in one of the bloodiest battles of the century. Maratha accounts describe tens of thousands killed in the battle and its aftermath, and large numbers of camp followers, chiefly women and children, taken north as slaves. Durrani forces also attacked the Sikh communities of the Punjab in two episodes remembered as the Ghallugharas: the smaller in 1746 and the Vadda Ghallughara of February 1762, in which Sikh tradition records between 10,000 and 30,000 killed, many of them families travelling with the fighting bands, followed by the demolition of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar. The evidence is uneven: Persian chronicles written for the Durrani court, Maratha letters written in defeat and Sikh accounts compiled later each have their own purposes, and modern historians treat all of the figures as approximate. By the 1770s the Sikh misls had taken the Punjab and Durrani power had receded.","deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":100000,"countries":["India","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"east-african-and-indian-ocean-slave-trade-and-zanzibar","title":"The East African and Indian Ocean Slave Trade and the Zanzibar Plantations","startYear":1750,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Omani and Swahili merchants and the Sultanate of Zanzibar organised slave raiding and trading from the East African interior for plantations on the coast and for markets across the Indian Ocean","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.165,"lon":39.199,"flows":[{"fromLat":-9.3,"fromLon":33,"toLat":-6.82,"toLon":39.28,"label":"Lake Nyasa and the interior -> Kilwa and Bagamoyo","people":null},{"fromLat":-6.82,"fromLon":39.28,"toLat":-6.16,"toLon":39.2,"label":"Mainland ports -> Zanzibar clove plantations","people":null},{"fromLat":-6.16,"fromLon":39.2,"toLat":23.61,"toLon":58.59,"label":"Zanzibar -> Oman, the Gulf and western India","people":null}],"summary":"From the late eighteenth century the Omani sultanate, which moved its capital to Zanzibar in 1840, built a plantation economy on the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba growing cloves with enslaved labour, and financed caravans that reached the Great Lakes and the eastern Congo. Captives taken in the interior were marched to Kilwa and Bagamoyo, sold in the Zanzibar market and either retained on the islands and the Swahili coast or shipped to Oman, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and western India. EBSCO records approximately 600,000 people sold at Zanzibar between 1830 and 1873. British pressure produced Sultan Barghash's decree of 1873 prohibiting the seaborne slave trade, the further decree of 1890 under Sultan Ali bin Said and the abolition decree of 6 April 1897; Michelle Liebst's study in the Law and History Review argues that the sultans' own reformist motives have been understated and British agents too readily credited as abolitionists. Abolition was slow in effect: only about a tenth of those eligible completed the required paperwork in the first year, since freedom had to be applied for and housing and income proved.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Tanzania","Oman"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"highland-clearances","title":"The Highland Clearances","startYear":1750,"endYear":1860,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Scottish landowners, backed by the courts and sheriff officers, evicted tenant communities from the Highlands and Islands to make way for sheep farming and later for deer forests","peopleDisplaced":70000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Interior straths and glens across Sutherland, Ross, Inverness-shire and the Hebrides were converted from mixed township agriculture to large sheep walks and, later, sporting estates; the evicted were resettled on coastal crofts too small to live on, or emigrated. The Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886 finally gave security of tenure to those who remained.","lat":58.383,"lon":-4.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":58.38,"fromLon":-4.3,"toLat":58.2,"toLon":-3.9,"label":"Strathnaver -> coastal crofting townships, Sutherland","people":null},{"fromLat":57.6,"fromLon":-6.5,"toLat":44.65,"toLon":-63.57,"label":"Hebrides and west Highlands -> Nova Scotia and British North America","people":null},{"fromLat":57,"fromLon":-5,"toLat":-33.87,"toLon":151.21,"label":"Highland emigration -> Australia","people":null}],"summary":"Over roughly a century, landowners in the Scottish Highlands and Islands replaced tenant townships with commercial sheep farming. Britannica describes the process as the forced eviction of inhabitants primarily to introduce sheep, running from the mid-eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth. The Sutherland clearances of 1811-21, in which Historic UK records about 15,000 people removed, became the notorious case: houses were unroofed and burned to prevent return, and in Strathnaver in 1814 two elderly people died in a burning cottage. Many of the displaced were resettled on coastal crofts and kelp shores that could not support them; others emigrated to British North America and Australia, sometimes under landlord-assisted schemes and, in cases such as Barra in 1851, under outright coercion. Emigrant ships carried typhus. The Crofters Act of 1886 ended the legal basis of the removals.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":70000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United Kingdom","Isle of Man","Australia"],"baselinePop":340000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Scottish Highlands and Islands at Webster's enumeration of 1755, near the start of the clearances","baselineYear":1755,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.20588235294117646},{"id":"trans-atlantic-slave-trade-1750-1867","title":"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade at its Peak and its Suppression","startYear":1750,"endYear":1867,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian, Cuban and North American traders, in partnership with African states and merchants, shipped captives across the Atlantic until the trade was suppressed","peopleDisplaced":7700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":6.363,"lon":2.086,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.36,"fromLon":2.09,"toLat":-12.97,"toLon":-38.5,"label":"Bight of Benin -> Bahia and Brazil","people":null},{"fromLat":-8.84,"fromLon":13.23,"toLat":-22.9,"toLon":-43.2,"label":"West Central Africa -> Rio de Janeiro","people":null},{"fromLat":5.08,"fromLon":-1.35,"toLat":18.02,"toLon":-76.8,"label":"Gold Coast -> the British Caribbean","people":null},{"fromLat":8.5,"fromLon":-13.23,"toLat":23.13,"toLon":-82.38,"label":"Upper Guinea -> Cuba","people":null}],"summary":"The Atlantic trade reached its greatest volume in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued illegally for decades after abolition. Britain and the United States outlawed the traffic in 1807-08 and the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron intercepted vessels thereafter, but Brazilian and Cuban demand kept the trade running until Brazil suppressed it in 1850-51 and the last documented crossing reached Cuba in 1866-67. Slavery itself outlasted the trade: emancipation came in the British colonies in 1833-38, the French in 1848, the United States in 1865, Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database gives 12.52 million embarked and 10.7 million disembarked over the whole trade, with roughly 7.7 million of those embarkations falling after 1750. The gap between the two totals is the mortality of the Middle Passage.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":1400000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence","torture","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":7700000,"_deaths":1200000,"countries":["Benin","Angola","Ghana","Jamaica","Sierra Leone","Cuba"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the captives came from a coastal belt stretching from Senegambia to Angola and from societies far inland, none of them enumerated","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"dahomey-asante-war-captive-systems","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Captives sold at the coast by Dahomey and Asante are among those counted in the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1750."}]},{"id":"trans-saharan-slave-trade-1750-1900","title":"The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1750-1900","startYear":1750,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Saharan and Sahelian states, merchant networks and raiding polities carried enslaved people north across the desert to North African and Ottoman markets","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.773,"lon":-3.008,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.5,"fromLon":2.1,"toLat":32.88,"toLon":13.19,"label":"Central Sudan (Bornu, Sokoto) -> Fezzan and Tripoli","people":null},{"fromLat":16.77,"fromLon":-3.01,"toLat":31.63,"toLon":-8.01,"label":"Timbuktu and the Niger bend -> Morocco","people":null},{"fromLat":12,"fromLon":22,"toLat":30.05,"toLon":31.24,"label":"Darfur and Wadai -> Egypt by the Forty Days Road","people":null}],"summary":"While the Atlantic trade was being suppressed, the desert routes remained active and in some decades expanded. Slaving states of the central Sudan such as Sokoto and Bornu, and the Nilotic raiding frontier in Darfur and the Bahr al-Ghazal, supplied captives who were marched north to Fezzan, Ghadames, Ghat and Tripoli, to Morocco, and along the Forty Days Road to Egypt, for sale into domestic service, concubinage, military slavery and agricultural labour in North Africa and the Ottoman lands. Women and children predominated, in contrast to the Atlantic trade, and castration for the eunuch market was practised at a small number of centres with very high mortality. Ottoman prohibitions from the 1850s, French and British pressure on the Saharan termini, and eventually colonial occupation of the Sahel reduced the traffic, but caravans were still being intercepted at the end of the century and slavery persisted in law in parts of the region into the twentieth. Volume estimates rest on entrepot records and travellers' counts, not on registers of any kind.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali","Niger","Libya","Morocco","Chad","Egypt"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No single population can serve as a denominator for 150 years of captive-taking across the Sahel and Sahara","baselineYear":1800,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"muhammad-ali-egypt-conquest-conscription-corvee","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Sudanese captives taken north to Egypt under Muhammad Ali may also be counted in the estimates for the slave trade from the Sudan to Egypt."}]},{"id":"acadian-expulsion","title":"The Expulsion of the Acadians (le Grand Derangement)","startYear":1755,"endYear":1764,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"British colonial authorities in Nova Scotia deported the French-speaking Catholic Acadian population and dispersed it among the Thirteen Colonies, Britain and France","peopleDisplaced":10000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The diked farmland of the Bay of Fundy marshlands, built up by Acadian settlers over a century, was confiscated and from 1759 granted to New England Planters and other British settlers; Acadians who returned in the 1780s and 1790s found their lands occupied and resettled on poorer ground in western Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, eastern New Brunswick and the Gaspe.","lat":45.123,"lon":-64.309,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.12,"fromLon":-64.31,"toLat":42.36,"toLon":-71.06,"label":"Grand-Pre and Minas Basin -> Massachusetts and the Thirteen Colonies","people":null},{"fromLat":46.4,"fromLon":-63.2,"toLat":48.65,"toLon":-2.02,"label":"Ile Saint-Jean -> France (Saint-Malo)","people":null},{"fromLat":42.36,"fromLon":-71.06,"toLat":30.22,"toLon":-91.99,"label":"Colonial exile -> Louisiana (the Cajun settlement)","people":null}],"summary":"After the fall of Fort Beausejour in June 1755 the Nova Scotia Council, judging the Acadians' refusal of an unqualified oath of allegiance a security risk in the approaching war with France, ordered their deportation on 28 July 1755. Troops burned settlements, seized livestock and loaded families onto transports for the British seaboard colonies, England and France; Parks Canada puts the removals of 1755-62 at 6,000-7,000 people, with about 2,000 escaping to Canada, Ile Saint-Jean or the Miramichi. A second phase followed the capture of Ile Royale and Ile Saint-Jean in 1758. Families were separated at embarkation, several transports were lost at sea, and colonies that received deportees frequently refused to settle them. Many later moved again to French Louisiana, where their descendants became the Cajuns; those who returned after 1763 found their diked farmland granted to New England Planters.","deathsLow":1600,"deathsHigh":5000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10000,"_deaths":3300,"countries":["Canada","United States of America","Jersey"],"baselinePop":14100,"baselineWhat":"The Acadian population of Nova Scotia and the surrounding French settlements in 1755","baselineYear":1755,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.7092198581560284},{"id":"qing-destruction-of-the-dzungars","title":"The Qing Destruction of the Dzungars","startYear":1755,"endYear":1758,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Qianlong emperor's armies destroyed the Dzungar (Zunghar) Mongol confederation and repopulated its lands","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":700000,"territoryDesc":"Dzungaria and the Tarim basin were annexed and administered as the 'New Frontier', Xinjiang, garrisoned from Ili and repopulated with settlers; Britannica records that the Qing consolidated control of the region and constituted it a formal province in 1884.","lat":43.917,"lon":81.317,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.92,"fromLon":81.32,"toLat":48,"toLon":85,"label":"Dzungar survivors -> flight to the Kazakh steppe and Russian territory","people":null},{"fromLat":39.47,"fromLon":75.99,"toLat":43.92,"toLon":81.32,"label":"Turkic cultivators resettled from the southern oases -> the Ili valley","people":null}],"summary":"Qianlong exploited a Dzungar civil war to conquer Dzungaria in 1755 in alliance with the pretender Amursana, withdrawing after a rapid campaign. When Amursana revolted at being denied full authority, the emperor returned with overwhelming force and, in the words of the Encyclopedia.com account, set about the universal destruction of the Oirat population, issuing edicts for the killing of adult males and the distribution of women and children. Smallpox swept the survivors. The Dzungars, a people of about 600,000, ceased to exist as a political and largely as an ethnic entity within three years; their genealogies and records were destroyed, their settlements eliminated, and the Ili valley resettled with populations brought in from elsewhere. Scholars disagree on the proportions: Encyclopedia.com summarises Owen Lattimore as putting 50 per cent exterminated, 20 per cent dead of smallpox and 30 per cent surviving, Peter Perdue as 30 per cent exterminated, 40 per cent dead of smallpox and 30 per cent surviving, and Ilya Zlatkin as holding that only 7 per cent survived. The conquest brought the whole of Xinjiang under Qing rule.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":560000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4200000,"_deaths":430000,"countries":["China","Kazakhstan"],"baselinePop":600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Dzungar Khanate immediately before the Qing campaigns of 1755-1758","baselineYear":1755,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"burmese-siamese-deportation-warfare","title":"Deportation Warfare between Burma, Siam and their Neighbours","startYear":1759,"endYear":1828,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Konbaung Burmese and Siamese armies fought wars whose object was the capture and forced resettlement of populations, alongside Manipuri, Arakanese, Mon and Lao victims","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":14.3532,"lon":100.5689,"flows":[{"fromLat":14.3532,"fromLon":100.5689,"toLat":21.9588,"toLon":96.0891,"label":"Captives from Ayutthaya to Upper Burma","people":30000},{"fromLat":20.145,"fromLon":92.899,"toLat":22.3569,"toLon":91.7832,"label":"Arakanese refugees to British Chittagong","people":200000},{"fromLat":17.9757,"fromLon":102.6331,"toLat":15.23,"toLon":104.85,"label":"Vientiane Lao resettled on the Khorat plateau by Siam","people":100000}],"summary":"In mainland Southeast Asia in this period war was fought principally for people rather than land, and both the Konbaung dynasty of Burma and the Siamese kingdoms of Ayutthaya and Bangkok systematically deported the populations of defeated states to repopulate their own core regions. Burmese armies sacked Ayutthaya in 1767 and marched captives, including royalty, monks and artisans, to Upper Burma; the Manipur valley was repeatedly raided in the campaigns Manipuris remember as the Seven Years' Devastation; and the conquest of Arakan in 1784-85 was followed by deportations to Burma and by a large refugee flight into British-held Chittagong, which East India Company officials put at around 200,000 by the late 1790s and which became a source of Anglo-Burmese friction. Siam did the same in the other direction, resettling Mon, Lao, Khmer and Malay communities in its own provinces, most drastically after the destruction of Vientiane in 1827-28, when much of the Lao population of the middle Mekong was moved to the Khorat plateau. Numbers rest on royal chronicles, which use conventional figures, and on East India Company correspondence; they should be read as orders of magnitude. The transfers reshaped the ethnic map of Burma, Thailand and Laos in ways still visible.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Thailand","Myanmar","Bangladesh","Laos"],"baselinePop":8000000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the mainland Southeast Asian polities that fought and were raided in these wars: Burma, Siam, the Lao states, Arakan, Manipur and the Mon and Shan lands","baselineYear":1800,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0625},{"id":"alta-california-mission-system","title":"The Alta California Mission System","startYear":1769,"endYear":1834,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"Franciscan missionaries backed by Spanish and then Mexican soldiers congregated coastal Native Californians at twenty-one missions, where baptised people were not free to leave","peopleDisplaced":87787,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Twenty-one mission establishments with attached ranch lands running from San Diego to Sonoma, controlling most of the productive coastal zone; the lands were secularised by Mexico from 1833-1834 and largely passed to private grantees rather than to Indigenous communities.","lat":36.54,"lon":-121.92,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.42,"fromLon":-119.7,"toLat":36.54,"toLon":-121.92,"label":"Chumash and other coastal peoples congregated at the missions","people":null}],"summary":"Beginning at San Diego in 1769, Franciscan missionaries established twenty-one missions along the Alta California coast, drawing surrounding Indigenous communities into settlements organised around compulsory labour, religious instruction and residential segregation of unmarried women and girls. Once baptised, a neophyte was not free to leave: departure was treated as flight, and soldiers were sent to retrieve runaways, a practice documented in mission and presidio correspondence. Mortality was extreme — the registers record 63,789 deaths against 87,787 baptisms — driven by introduced disease, crowded dormitories, poor nutrition and high infant and maternal death rates, so that the system depended on continuous new recruitment from further inland. Resistance included the Chumash revolt of 1824. Mexican secularisation from 1833 dispersed the mission populations without restoring their land, leaving survivors as labourers on the ranchos. Historians and Native Californian communities disagree sharply over whether the missions are best described as coercive confinement or as religious congregation, a dispute that surfaced publicly around the 2015 canonisation of Junipero Serra. The atlas began its California coverage only in 1846.","deathsLow":63789,"deathsHigh":63789,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","cultural or religious destruction","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":87787,"_deaths":63789,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":72000,"baselineWhat":"The Native Californian population of the coastal strip between San Diego and San Francisco Bay from which the missions drew converts, in 1769","baselineYear":1769,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":1.219263888888889},{"id":"great-bengal-famine-1770","title":"The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 under East India Company Rule","startYear":1769,"endYear":1771,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The English East India Company held the revenue rights of Bengal and continued collection through a catastrophic harvest failure","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":24.1833,"lon":88.2667,"flows":[],"summary":"After a failed monsoon in 1768 and a worse one in 1769, famine struck Bengal and Bihar in 1769-71 in the period of dual government, when the East India Company held the diwani or right to collect land revenue while nominal administration remained with the Nawab. The Company maintained and in some districts increased revenue collection through the famine, its servants engaged in private grain trading, and relief was minimal; contemporary critics in Britain, including Edmund Burke and the Company's own later reviewers, condemned the conduct of its servants, and Warren Hastings reported in 1772 that about a third of the population had died. Modern historians dispute that figure: Rajat Datta's work on Bengal's grain markets argues that the famine was primarily a subsistence crisis driven by harvest failure and market fragmentation and that the one-third figure is unsupportable, while others emphasise the Company's revenue extraction and the absence of the customary relief obligations of Indian rulers. Large districts were depopulated, cultivation reverted to jungle, and the disaster contributed directly to the Regulating Act of 1773 and to the permanent settlement debate. It remains one of the largest mortality events attributed in part to a colonial administration's policy.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":10000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4400000,"_deaths":5500000,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Bengal Presidency territories under East India Company revenue administration","baselineYear":1769,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"partitions-of-poland-lithuania","title":"The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania","startYear":1772,"endYear":1795,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in three stages and abolished the state","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":733000,"territoryDesc":"The entire territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, about 733,000 km2 at its 1772 extent, divided between the Russian Empire (roughly 62 per cent), the Kingdom of Prussia (about 20 per cent) and the Habsburg Monarchy (about 18 per cent). Poland did not reappear as a state until 1918.","lat":52.23,"lon":21.01,"flows":[],"summary":"In three partitions in 1772, 1793 and 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed the whole of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in central Europe, and erased it from the map for 123 years. The final partition followed the defeat of the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1794; the three powers agreed in 1797 to suppress the name of the kingdom entirely. Roughly 12-14 million people passed under new sovereigns. Partition was not accompanied by mass expulsion, but it created the political conditions for later coercive population measures in the atlas — the confinement of Jews to the Pale of Settlement in the annexed Russian provinces, the Siberian exile of insurgents after 1831 and 1863, and Prussian settlement policy in Poznania. It is the largest single act of territorial extinction in modern European history and its absence from the atlas would be conspicuous.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":4398000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Poland"],"baselinePop":12000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the first partition","baselineYear":1772,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"crimean-khanate-annexation-and-sich","title":"Russia's Annexation of the Crimean Khanate, the 1778 Deportation of Crimea's Christians and the Destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich","startYear":1775,"endYear":1783,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Catherine II's government destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, deported Crimea's Greek and Armenian population to the Azov coast, and annexed the Crimean Khanate","peopleDisplaced":130000,"territoryKm2":27000,"territoryDesc":"The Crimean Khanate — the Crimean peninsula (about 26,100 km2) together with the Kuban and the steppe north of the Black Sea — was annexed by the Russian Empire in April 1783; the Zaporozhian lands were absorbed into New Russia and granted to Russian and foreign colonists.","lat":44.75,"lon":33.86,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.75,"fromLon":33.86,"toLat":47.1,"toLon":37.55,"label":"Crimean Greeks and Armenians deported to Mariupol and the Azov coast","people":31000},{"fromLat":47.85,"fromLon":34.6,"toLat":45.2,"toLon":29.65,"label":"Zaporozhian Cossacks fleeing to the Ottoman Danube delta","people":null}],"summary":"In June 1775 Russian troops surrounded and razed the Zaporozhian Sich, the fortified centre of the Cossack host on the lower Dnieper, dissolving its autonomy and opening the steppe to state-directed colonisation; part of the host fled to Ottoman territory. In 1778-1779 the government removed the Khanate's Christian population — some 31,000 Greeks and Armenians — to the Azov coast, where they founded Mariupol and Nakhichevan-on-Don, a measure intended both to protect co-religionists and to strip the khan of his tax base. The Khanate, nominally independent since 1774, was annexed outright in April 1783. Emigration of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire followed in waves; the much larger exodus of 1856-1866 is treated separately in the atlas. The episode fills the gap between the atlas's Russian eastward expansion entry, which ends around 1750, and the nineteenth-century Caucasus and Crimean entries.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":162000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine","Romania"],"baselinePop":400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Crimean Khanate on the eve of Russian annexation, together with the Zaporozhian Host","baselineYear":1783,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.325},{"id":"loyalist-exodus-american-revolution","title":"The Loyalist Exodus from the United States","startYear":1775,"endYear":1785,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Revolutionary state governments confiscated Loyalist property and banished Loyalists by statute; some 60,000 white Loyalists, 15,000 enslaved and free Black people and thousands of Haudenosaunee allies left for British territory","peopleDisplaced":75000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Loyalist settlement led to the creation of New Brunswick in 1784 and of Upper Canada in 1791, and to the Haldimand Grant on the Grand River for the Six Nations.","lat":40.71,"lon":-74.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.71,"fromLon":-74.01,"toLat":45.27,"toLon":-66.06,"label":"Loyalist evacuation from New York to the Bay of Fundy and Nova Scotia","people":35000},{"fromLat":44.65,"fromLon":-63.57,"toLat":8.48,"toLon":-13.23,"label":"Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, 1792","people":1200},{"fromLat":42.98,"fromLon":-74.6,"toLat":43.14,"toLon":-80.26,"label":"Mohawk and other Six Nations allies to the Grand River","people":2000}],"summary":"During and after the American Revolutionary War, the revolutionary states passed confiscation and banishment acts against those who remained loyal to the Crown, seizing estates and in several states making return a capital offence. Around 60,000 white Loyalists left, together with some 15,000 Black people: enslaved people carried out by their owners, and about 3,000 who had been promised freedom for reaching British lines and were evacuated from New York in 1783 on the strength of the Book of Negroes, over American objections. Most went to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec, some to Britain, the Bahamas and Jamaica; about 1,200 Black Loyalists, disappointed by conditions in Nova Scotia, sailed on to Sierra Leone in 1792. Britain's Haudenosaunee allies, whose villages had been destroyed by the Sullivan expedition of 1779, resettled on the Grand River. The 1783 Treaty of Paris recommended restitution of confiscated property; the states largely ignored it. The atlas had almost nothing for North America between the Acadian expulsion and Indian Removal.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":75000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Sierra Leone","United States of America","Canada"],"baselinePop":2500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Thirteen Colonies at the outbreak of the Revolution","baselineYear":1775,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.03},{"id":"mysore-deportations-mangalorean-catholics-and-kodavas","title":"The Mysore Deportations of the Mangalorean Catholics and the Kodavas","startYear":1784,"endYear":1799,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Tipu Sultan's Mysore state deported the Catholic population of the Kanara coast and the Kodavas of Coorg to Seringapatam","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":12.87,"lon":74.84,"flows":[{"fromLat":12.87,"fromLon":74.84,"toLat":12.42,"toLon":76.69,"label":"Mangalorean Catholics marched to Seringapatam","people":60000},{"fromLat":12.42,"fromLon":75.74,"toLat":12.42,"toLon":76.69,"label":"Kodavas deported from Coorg","people":null}],"summary":"Following the Treaty of Mangalore in 1784, Tipu Sultan ordered the seizure of the Catholic population of South Kanara, whom he regarded as having sided with the British and the Portuguese, and their march inland to Seringapatam, where they were held, put to labour and in many cases forcibly converted; church records describe the episode as the Captivity, lasting until Tipu's death at Seringapatam in 1799. A parallel deportation removed Kodavas from Coorg in 1785 after a revolt, again with forced conversion. The scale is disputed: the surviving figures come from missionary and British sources with strong reasons to indict Tipu, and Indian historians have argued that the deportations were punitive and political rather than religious, and smaller than the church accounts claim. Tipu is a politically charged figure in present-day India, celebrated as an anti-colonial ruler in some accounts and denounced as a persecutor in others, and this episode is central to that argument. The atlas records it as a documented mass deportation whose numbers rest on contested sources.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":80000,"baselineWhat":"The Catholic population of the Kanara coast on the eve of Tipu Sultan's 1784 deportation","baselineYear":1784,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.75},{"id":"australian-frontier-wars","title":"The Australian Frontier Wars and Aboriginal Dispossession","startYear":1788,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"British colonists, native police and colonial governments dispossessed Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent, killing them in massacres and confining survivors on reserves and missions","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":7600000,"territoryDesc":"The whole of the Australian continent, some 7.6 million square km, was taken into British and then colonial possession without treaty and without recognition of prior ownership; the doctrine that the land had belonged to no one was overturned by the High Court of Australia only in 1992.","lat":-20,"lon":143,"flows":[{"fromLat":-20,"fromLon":143,"toLat":-23.7,"toLon":133.88,"label":"Retreat before the pastoral frontier in Queensland and central Australia","people":null},{"fromLat":-36,"fromLon":146,"toLat":-38.05,"toLon":141.6,"label":"Survivors gathered onto reserves and mission stations","people":null}],"summary":"From the first British settlement in 1788 to the end of the nineteenth century, the occupation of Australia proceeded through a series of local frontier conflicts as pastoralists took land and water and Aboriginal groups resisted. The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project, which defines a massacre as the deliberate killing of six or more relatively undefended people in a single operation, has documented 438 massacre sites across the continent between 1788 and 1930, with approximately 10,657 people killed, a figure the project describes as indicative rather than definitive and deliberately conservative. The Yoorrook Justice Commission's presentation of the Victorian data records 50 massacres there between 1834 and 1860, with 978 Aboriginal people and 10 colonists killed, and 47 of the 50 carried out by colonists. Alongside the killing, introduced disease, the destruction of food resources and the confinement of survivors on reserves and missions under protection legislation transformed Aboriginal society. Systematic removal of Aboriginal children, which became large-scale in the twentieth century and was investigated in the 1997 Bringing Them Home inquiry, has its legislative origins in the protection acts of this period.","deathsLow":10657,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":45600000,"_deaths":20328.5,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The Aboriginal population of the Australian continent at the beginning of British colonisation","baselineYear":1788,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"black-war-and-the-removal-of-the-tasmanian-aboriginal-people","rel":"includes","sharedDeaths":[600,1000],"note":"The Black War in Tasmania was part of the Australian frontier wars, and its deaths fall within the continental frontier-violence range."},{"id":"australia-protection-acts-reserves","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"From the 1860s, survivors of the frontier wars were gathered onto the reserves and missions run under the protection acts."}]},{"id":"convict-transportation-to-australia","title":"Convict Transportation to Australia and the Norfolk Island Penal Settlements","startYear":1788,"endYear":1868,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The British state transported convicted prisoners from Britain and Ireland to penal colonies in Australia and secondary punishment stations","peopleDisplaced":162000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-33.86,"lon":151.21,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.51,"fromLon":-0.13,"toLat":-33.86,"toLon":151.21,"label":"Convicts transported from Britain and Ireland to New South Wales","people":162000},{"fromLat":-33.86,"fromLon":151.21,"toLat":-29.04,"toLon":167.95,"label":"Reoffenders sent to Norfolk Island","people":null}],"summary":"From the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788 until the last transport reached Western Australia in 1868, Britain sent more than 162,000 convicted men, women and children to Australia, a sentence of exile that in most cases was permanent because few could afford the return passage. Convicts were assigned as unpaid labour to settlers and to public works, and their labour underwrote the colonial economy. Reoffenders and those convicted in the colonies were sent to secondary punishment stations, chief among them Norfolk Island, occupied as a penal settlement from 1788 to 1814 and again from 1825 to 1855, along with Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur, where conditions were deliberately severe and prompted parliamentary inquiry in Britain. Irish political prisoners from the rebellion of 1798 and the Young Ireland movement, and Canadian and Chartist prisoners, were transported alongside those convicted of theft. Eleven of the sites are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as evidence of the global convict system. The dispossession of Aboriginal peoples that the settlement caused is covered elsewhere in the atlas.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":162000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia","United Kingdom","Norfolk Island"],"baselinePop":14500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Great Britain and Ireland at the start of transportation to New South Wales","baselineYear":1788,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.011172413793103448},{"id":"united-states-domestic-slave-trade","title":"The Domestic Slave Trade of the United States","startYear":1790,"endYear":1865,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Slaveholders and professional traders in the Upper South sold and marched roughly a million enslaved people to the cotton and sugar districts of the Deep South and Southwest","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.541,"lon":-77.436,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.54,"fromLon":-77.44,"toLat":32.3,"toLon":-90.18,"label":"Richmond and the Chesapeake -> Mississippi","people":null},{"fromLat":38.8,"fromLon":-77.05,"toLat":29.95,"toLon":-90.07,"label":"Alexandria and Baltimore -> New Orleans","people":null},{"fromLat":35.78,"fromLon":-78.64,"toLat":32.37,"toLon":-86.3,"label":"North Carolina -> the Alabama Black Belt","people":null}],"summary":"When Congress closed the Atlantic trade to the United States in 1808, the enslaved population of the Chesapeake and the Carolinas was already growing by natural increase while the cotton frontier of the Gulf states was opening. The result was an internal traffic that moved roughly a million people south and west over seven decades, by coastwise vessel, by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi after 1811, on foot in chained coffles, and from the 1830s by rail. Slave-trading firms maintained pens and auction houses in Richmond, Alexandria, Baltimore, Charleston and above all New Orleans. The trade is documented in bills of sale, trader ledgers, newspaper advertisements, court records and the federal censuses, and its scale is inferred from interstate population differentials. Its most-cited social consequence is the routine breaking of families: on standard reconstructions more than half of enslaved people in the exporting states lost a parent or child to sale.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":3953760,"baselineWhat":"The enslaved population of the United States at the 1860 census, at the end of the interstate trade","baselineYear":1860,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2529237991178018},{"id":"haitian-revolution-expulsion","title":"The Haitian Revolution, the War of Extermination and the Expulsion of the French","startYear":1791,"endYear":1804,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Enslaved insurgents overthrew the plantation regime of Saint-Domingue; French forces under Leclerc and Rochambeau waged a campaign of extermination; after independence Dessalines ordered the killing or expulsion of the remaining French","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":27750,"territoryDesc":"Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean, became the independent state of Haiti on 1 January 1804; its 27,750 km2 passed out of French control and plantation property was confiscated.","lat":18.59,"lon":-72.31,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.76,"fromLon":-72.2,"toLat":20.02,"toLon":-75.83,"label":"Colonists and free people of colour fleeing to Santiago de Cuba","people":null},{"fromLat":20.02,"fromLon":-75.83,"toLat":29.95,"toLon":-90.07,"label":"Refugees expelled from Cuba to New Orleans, 1809","people":9000}],"summary":"The rising of enslaved people in the northern plain of Saint-Domingue in August 1791 began a thirteen-year war that ended slavery in the colony and produced the second independent state in the Americas. Napoleon's expedition of 1802 under Leclerc, and after his death under Rochambeau, attempted to restore slavery and conducted what French officers themselves described as a war of extermination, including mass drownings and the use of dogs against prisoners; the insurgents responded in kind. After independence was declared on 1 January 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the killing of the remaining French population, and between February and April 1804 an estimated 3,000-5,000 people were killed, with priests, foreign nationals and skilled workers largely exempted. Tens of thousands of colonists and free people of colour had already fled to Cuba, Jamaica, the United States and France, reshaping the population of New Orleans and other port cities. The atlas covered the Caribbean's Indigenous collapse and the slave trade but not the revolution that ended slavery there.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":5000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":166500,"_deaths":4000,"countries":["Haiti","Cuba","United States of America"],"baselinePop":556000,"baselineWhat":"The total population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the eve of the revolution","baselineYear":1789,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.08992805755395683},{"id":"pale-of-settlement","title":"The Pale of Settlement: Residence Restriction of Russia's Jews","startYear":1791,"endYear":1917,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Russian imperial state confined its Jewish subjects to a designated western zone of residence and periodically expelled them from cities and villages within and beyond it","peopleDisplaced":4900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A zone of about 25 western provinces of the Russian Empire, covering much of present-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and eastern Poland, within which Jews were required to reside.","lat":52,"lon":27,"flows":[{"fromLat":55.75,"fromLon":37.62,"toLat":52,"toLon":27,"label":"Expulsion of Jews from Moscow into the Pale, 1891-1892","people":25000}],"summary":"From decrees of 1791 and 1794 onward, the Russian Empire required its Jewish subjects — acquired chiefly through the partitions of Poland — to live within a defined western zone, the Pale of Settlement, with exemptions for narrow categories such as merchants of the first guild, university graduates and certain artisans. The system was a legal confinement rather than a camp: it restricted where people could live, trade, own land and attend school, and was tightened by the May Laws of 1882, which barred Jews from villages within the Pale, and by quotas on secondary and higher education. Expulsions were periodically enforced, most visibly from Moscow in 1891-1892. The Pale held nearly five million people at the 1897 census and was abolished only in 1917. The atlas already covers the pogroms and emigration of the 1880s and 1890s; the residence regime that framed them is a distinct and larger confinement system.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4900000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Belarus","Russia"],"baselinePop":5189000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Russian Empire at the 1897 imperial census","baselineYear":1897,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.944305261129312},{"id":"war-in-the-vendee","title":"The War in the Vendee and the Republican Repression","startYear":1793,"endYear":1796,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"French Republican armies suppressed a royalist and Catholic peasant insurrection in western France, burning villages and conducting mass executions and punitive sweeps","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":46.67,"lon":-1.43,"flows":[],"summary":"A peasant and royalist rising against conscription and the civil constitution of the clergy broke out in the Vendee and neighbouring departments in March 1793 and was suppressed by Republican forces over the following three years. After the insurgent defeat at Savenay in December 1793 the Convention ordered the region devastated; General Turreau's colonnes infernales burned farms, crops and villages, and mass executions were carried out at Nantes under Jean-Baptiste Carrier, including the drownings in the Loire. Estimates of the dead range from about 117,000 to 200,000 out of a pre-war population of around 800,000, with the Hussenet team's figure of roughly 170,000 the most widely cited. Since Reynald Secher's 1986 book the question of whether the repression constituted a genocide has been fiercely argued in France; most academic historians of the Revolution, including Jean-Clement Martin, reject the term while accepting that the Convention ordered exterminatory measures. The event is the largest instance of state mass killing in western Europe between the Wars of Religion and the twentieth century.","deathsLow":117000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":126800,"_deaths":158500,"countries":["France"],"baselinePop":800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the insurgent region — the 'Vendée militaire' spanning parts of four western departments","baselineYear":1793,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"sokoto-caliphate-jihad-and-slavery","title":"The Sokoto Caliphate: Jihad, Slave Raiding and the Plantation Economy","startYear":1804,"endYear":1903,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Sokoto Caliphate conquered the Hausa states and raided the non-Muslim Middle Belt for captives held as agricultural slaves","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A caliphate covering much of present-day northern Nigeria and parts of Niger, Cameroon and Burkina Faso, organised in some thirty emirates","lat":13.0622,"lon":5.2339,"flows":[{"fromLat":9,"fromLon":8.5,"toLat":12.0022,"toLon":8.592,"label":"Captives from the Middle Belt to the plantations of Kano and Zaria","people":null}],"summary":"The jihad proclaimed by Usman dan Fodio in 1804 overthrew the Hausa city-states and created the Sokoto Caliphate, which by the 1830s governed a population estimated in the millions across some thirty emirates. Warfare with non-Muslim polities on its southern and eastern frontiers - in the Middle Belt, Adamawa and around Lake Chad - was a continuing source of captives, since Islamic law as applied in the caliphate permitted enslavement of non-Muslims taken in jihad; captives were settled on plantations producing grain, cotton and indigo for the caliphate's cities, and were also sold into the trans-Saharan trade. Historians including Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn estimate the enslaved population at one to two and a half million by 1900, a share of total population comparable to the American South before abolition. Frontier populations fled to hill refuges and defensible sites, a settlement pattern colonial officials later recorded across the Jos plateau and the Middle Belt. Britain conquered the caliphate in 1900-1903 and abolished the legal status of slavery gradually, in a way designed to avoid disrupting the emirate economy, with slavery persisting in practice well into the twentieth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Nigeria"],"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Sokoto Caliphate at its height","baselineYear":1837,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"musket-wars-and-chatham-islands","title":"The Musket Wars and the Invasion of the Chatham Islands","startYear":1806,"endYear":1863,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"Maori iwi armed with muskets acquired through European trade conquered and displaced rival iwi across New Zealand; Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invaded the Chatham Islands and subjugated the Moriori","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Large-scale redrawing of iwi territory across the North Island, the northern South Island and the Chatham Islands, with consequences for later Native Land Court and Treaty of Waitangi determinations of customary ownership.","lat":-38.14,"lon":175.24,"flows":[{"fromLat":-38.07,"fromLon":174.82,"toLat":-40.85,"toLon":174.92,"label":"Ngati Toa migration from Kawhia to Kapiti and the Cook Strait","people":null},{"fromLat":-41.29,"fromLon":174.78,"toLat":-43.95,"toLon":-176.56,"label":"Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama invasion of the Chatham Islands, 1835","people":900}],"summary":"From about 1806 the spread of muskets through the Bay of Islands trade set off four decades of intertribal warfare across New Zealand, in which as many as 3,000 battles and raids were fought, an estimated 20,000-40,000 people died and around 30,000 were enslaved or driven from their lands. Whole iwi relocated hundreds of kilometres, permanently altering the map of customary territory before British annexation in 1840. In November 1835 about 900 Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama, themselves displaced from Taranaki, seized a European vessel to reach Rekohu, the Chatham Islands, where they killed a proportion of the Moriori — whose tradition of non-violence, Nunuku's law, led them to submit rather than fight — and enslaved the remainder, prohibiting marriage and taking their land. The Moriori population fell from roughly 1,600 to 101 by 1862. In 2001 the Waitangi Tribunal's Rekohu report found on both Moriori and Ngati Mutunga claims and recorded the killings and enslavement; the New Zealand Crown apologised to Moriori in a 2020 settlement. The atlas covered the New Zealand Wars and the raupatu but not the preceding intertribal upheaval.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":30000,"countries":["New Zealand"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Maori population of New Zealand at the start of the musket wars, together with the Moriori of the Chatham Islands","baselineYear":1815,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3},{"id":"merina-expansion-and-fanompoana-madagascar","title":"Merina Expansion, Forced Labour and the Wars of Unification in Madagascar","startYear":1810,"endYear":1861,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Merina monarchy of Antananarivo conquered most of Madagascar and imposed unpaid state labour (fanompoana) and military levies on its subjects","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Merina authority extended from the central highlands over roughly two-thirds of Madagascar by the 1830s, including the Betsileo, Sakalava and Betsimisaraka lands","lat":-18.91,"lon":47.54,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.72,"fromLon":46.32,"toLat":-18.91,"toLon":47.54,"label":"Captives from the coastal provinces to Imerina","people":null}],"summary":"From about 1810 Radama I, armed and trained under an agreement with the British governor of Mauritius, conquered the Betsileo, Sakalava and eastern coastal kingdoms and brought most of Madagascar under Merina rule. Conquest was financed and staffed by fanompoana, an unpaid labour obligation owed to the sovereign that was extended into military service, porterage, mining and construction, and by the enslavement of captured populations, who were moved to the highlands. Under Ranavalona I (1828-61) campaigns against the Sakalava and Bara continued and fanompoana was extended further; Gwyn Campbell's work on the period argues that campaign mortality, disease and the labour regime together produced a demographic decline in both the conquered provinces and Imerina itself. The queen's persecution of Christian converts and the 1835 ban on Christianity are better known in European accounts than the labour system, which historians now regard as the more consequential. Merina rule was itself ended by the French conquest of 1895.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Madagascar"],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Madagascar at the beginning of Merina expansion under Radama I","baselineYear":1810,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mfecane","title":"The Mfecane / Difaqane in Southern Africa","startYear":1815,"endYear":1840,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Warfare and state formation among Nguni and Sotho-Tswana chiefdoms, in a period of drought and expanding slave and ivory trading, displaced populations across the southern African interior","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The upheavals produced the Zulu kingdom under Shaka and the Sotho, Swazi, Ndebele and Gaza states, redistributed control of the highveld and the Natal coastlands, and left tracts of country temporarily emptied - a fact later used by settler and apartheid-era historiography to support an 'empty land' claim to the interior.","lat":-28.5,"lon":31.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":-28.5,"fromLon":31.4,"toLat":-20.15,"toLon":28.58,"label":"Ndebele under Mzilikazi -> the highveld and Matabeleland","people":null},{"fromLat":-28,"fromLon":30.5,"toLat":-11,"toLon":34,"label":"Ngoni migrations -> Malawi and Tanzania","people":null},{"fromLat":-27.5,"fromLon":28,"toLat":-15.4,"toLon":23.1,"label":"Kololo -> the upper Zambezi","people":null}],"summary":"Between roughly 1815 and 1840 a period of intense warfare, state formation and migration reshaped the interior of southern Africa. South African History Online sets out the causes now generally accepted: severe drought from about 1800 to 1820, intensified by the Tambora eruption of 1815 and remembered in oral tradition as the time of eating up everything; competition among chiefdoms for the ivory and slave trade through Delagoa Bay; the military and political consolidation associated with Shaka's Zulu kingdom; and the destabilising pressure of the Cape Colony frontier, the arms trade and slave raiding from the south and east. The consequences were the formation of the Zulu, Sotho, Swazi, Ndebele and Gaza states, the movement of Ngoni and Kololo groups as far as Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia, and depopulation of parts of the highveld into which Boer trekkers moved from 1836. Julian Cobbing's intervention in 1988 argued that the whole concept had been constructed by colonial and apartheid historiography to present black-on-black destruction and to justify white land claims.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["South Africa","Zimbabwe","Malawi","Zambia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"burmese-occupation-assam-manipur","title":"The Burmese Invasions of Assam and Manipur and the Depopulation of the Brahmaputra Valley","startYear":1817,"endYear":1826,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Konbaung Burmese armies occupied the Ahom kingdom of Assam and the Manipur valley, causing mass killing, enslavement and flight","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Assam and Manipur passed from Burmese occupation to British control under the Treaty of Yandabo, 1826","lat":26.7509,"lon":94.2037,"flows":[{"fromLat":26.75,"fromLon":94.2,"toLat":26.17,"toLon":90.62,"label":"Assamese flight west to Goalpara and British Bengal","people":null},{"fromLat":24.817,"fromLon":93.9368,"toLat":24.8333,"toLon":92.7789,"label":"Manipuris fleeing to Cachar","people":null}],"summary":"Invited in by rival Assamese factions, Burmese armies invaded Assam three times between 1817 and 1821 and then occupied the Ahom kingdom until 1825, while separately devastating the Manipur valley from 1819. Assamese chronicles and early British reports describe systematic killing, mutilation, enslavement and the removal of captives to Burma, with the population fleeing into the hills, into Cachar and westwards into British territory; the period is remembered in Assam as the manor din, the time of the Burmese. Manipur's parallel experience, the Seven Years' Devastation, emptied much of the valley and drove a large refugee population into Cachar under Gambhir Singh. The refugee pressure and Burmese activity on the Bengal frontier were a proximate cause of the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26, after which the Treaty of Yandabo transferred Assam, Manipur, Arakan and Tenasserim to British control, ending the Ahom kingdom. No enumeration of the losses exists; the evidence is chronicle testimony and the observations of British officers who found abandoned settlements and jungle-covered fields.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Brahmaputra valley and the Manipur valley before the Burmese invasions","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"russian-conquest-of-the-caucasus-and-the-circassian-expulsion","title":"The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus and the Circassian Expulsion","startYear":1817,"endYear":1867,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Russian Empire conquered the North Caucasus and expelled the Circassian (Adyghe), Ubykh and Abaza populations of the north-western Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The mountain and coastal districts of the north-western Caucasus - the Kuban valley, the Black Sea littoral around Sochi and the Ubykh lands - were emptied of their inhabitants and settled with Cossacks and Russian and other colonists; the Caucasus as a whole was incorporated into the empire.","lat":43.585,"lon":39.723,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.59,"fromLon":39.72,"toLat":41.29,"toLon":36.33,"label":"Black Sea coast (Sochi, Tuapse) -> Samsun and Ottoman Anatolia","people":null},{"fromLat":44.6,"fromLon":38.1,"toLat":40.6,"toLon":29.3,"label":"Kuban and Circassia -> Ottoman Rumelia and the Marmara provinces","people":null},{"fromLat":43.3,"fromLon":41,"toLat":36.2,"toLon":37.15,"label":"North Caucasus -> Ottoman Syria (Aleppo and the Golan)","people":null}],"summary":"The Russian campaign to subdue the North Caucasus ran from the early nineteenth century to the surrender of Imam Shamil in 1859 in the east and the defeat of the western Circassians in 1864. In the north-west, where resistance had been sustained by a mountain population Russia could not garrison, the army adopted a policy of clearance: villages and crops were destroyed and the inhabitants offered relocation to the plains under Russian administration or emigration to the Ottoman Empire. Britannica records that from 1860 the population was pressed eastward toward the Kuban and that nearly all chose emigration instead, about 400,000 people, with many thousands dying of starvation and disease on the way. Embarkation on the Black Sea coast in overcrowded vessels, and reception in Ottoman ports without adequate provision, produced very high mortality. Circassians today form large diasporas in Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Israel. On 20 May 2011 the Parliament of Georgia became the first legislature to recognise the events as genocide; the Russian Federation rejects that characterisation, treating the emigration as a wartime consequence rather than a policy of destruction.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":600000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":700000,"_deaths":375000,"countries":["Russia","Turkey","Georgia","Syria"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The Circassian, Ubykh and Abaza population of the north-western Caucasus before the expulsion","baselineYear":1860,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4666666666666667},{"id":"seminole-wars-and-removal","title":"The Seminole Wars and the Removal of the Seminole from Florida","startYear":1817,"endYear":1858,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States fought three wars in Florida to take Seminole land and deport the Seminole and Black Seminoles to Indian Territory","peopleDisplaced":4500,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Seminole were confined to a central Florida reservation by the 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek and then required by the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing to leave Florida entirely; the survivors' refuge in the Everglades became the basis of the modern Florida reservations.","lat":27.9,"lon":-81.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":27.9,"fromLon":-81.5,"toLat":35.4676,"toLon":-97.5164,"label":"Seminole and Black Seminole deportation to Indian Territory","people":3612},{"fromLat":30.4383,"fromLon":-84.2807,"toLat":27.2,"toLon":-81,"label":"Removal from the Florida panhandle to the central peninsula reservation, 1823","people":null}],"summary":"The atlas records Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears; the Florida wars were its longest and costliest theatre and are usually treated separately. The first conflict began in 1817-18 when Andrew Jackson led forces into Spanish Florida in pursuit of Seminoles and of people who had escaped slavery in Georgia, destroying Seminole, Mikasuki and Black Seminole towns. After the United States acquired Florida in 1821, the Treaty of Moultrie Creek confined the Seminole to a central reservation, and the 1832 Treaty of Payne's Landing, whose validity the Seminole disputed, required them to move to Indian Territory. Resistance produced the Second Seminole War of 1835-1842, in which fewer than 2,000 Seminole fighters held off a force that grew beyond 30,000; when pursuit failed, American commanders turned to destroying villages and crops to force surrender by starvation. By 1842, 3,612 Seminoles had been deported west; a Third war from 1855 to 1858 pushed most of the remainder out, leaving a few hundred in the Everglades. The Seminole Tribe of Florida regards the three conflicts as a single war and its members as never having surrendered.","deathsLow":1500,"deathsHigh":4000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4500,"_deaths":2750,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":5000,"baselineWhat":"The Seminole and Black Seminole population of Florida at the start of the First Seminole War","baselineYear":1820,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9},{"id":"massina-and-umarian-jihads-western-sudan","title":"The Massina and Umarian Jihads in the Western Sudan","startYear":1818,"endYear":1864,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Fulani jihad states under Seku Amadu and later Umar Tal conquered the middle Niger, settled nomads and enslaved captured non-Muslim populations","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Massina Empire controlled the inland Niger delta from Hamdullahi; the Umarian state at its height ran from the upper Senegal across Kaarta and Segu to Massina","lat":14.49,"lon":-4.18,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.44,"fromLon":-6.26,"toLat":14.49,"toLon":-4.18,"label":"Captives from Segu and Kaarta to the jihad states","people":null}],"summary":"In 1818 Seku Amadu, drawing on the example of Usman dan Fodio's Sokoto jihad, defeated the Bambara of Segu and founded the Massina Empire, building a new capital at Hamdullahi and requiring nomadic Fulbe to settle in supervised villages under a strict religious code. In 1852 Umar Tal, a Tijani cleric returning from Mecca and Sokoto, launched a second jihad from the upper Senegal, taking Kaarta in 1855 and Segu in 1861 and then turning on the fellow-Muslim state of Massina, sacking Hamdullahi in 1862; he died in 1864 during the revolt that followed. Both movements combined religious reform with conquest: non-Muslim populations, chiefly Bambara, were enslaved in large numbers, and pastoral groups were compelled to settle. The Umarian state's wars depopulated parts of the middle Niger shortly before the French advance of the 1880s and 1890s, which used the disorder as a justification for conquest. Coverage of the Sokoto jihad already exists in this atlas; these two jihads to its west were separate states with separate systems.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"muhammad-ali-egypt-conquest-conscription-corvee","title":"Muhammad Ali's Egypt: The Conquest of Sudan, Slave Levies, Conscription and Corvee","startYear":1820,"endYear":1848,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Muhammad Ali's Egyptian state invaded Sudan for slaves and gold, conscripted Egyptian peasants by force and requisitioned mass corvee labour","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Egyptian rule was extended over Sennar, Kordofan and much of the Nile Sudan, later reaching Khartoum, founded as the provincial capital in 1821","lat":30.04,"lon":31.24,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.55,"fromLon":33.63,"toLat":24.09,"toLon":32.9,"label":"Sudanese captives marched to the Aswan and Manfalut camps","people":20000},{"fromLat":26.56,"fromLon":31.7,"toLat":31.2,"toLon":29.92,"label":"Egyptian peasants requisitioned for the Mahmudiyya canal","people":null}],"summary":"In 1820 Muhammad Ali sent an army under his son Ismail into Sudan, explicitly to secure gold and slaves for a new conscript army; Sennar and Kordofan were taken, Khartoum founded, and captives were marched north, most of whom died of dysentery and other diseases in the camps before they could be trained. When the resistance leader Nimr of Shendi killed Ismail in 1822, the Daftardar's reprisal campaign devastated the Ja'aliyyin districts. Unable to fill the ranks with Sudanese, the state turned to conscripting Egyptian peasants, who fled villages, mutilated themselves and hid to avoid the levy, and to the corvee, which assembled vast unpaid work gangs for the Mahmudiyya canal, the barrages and the cotton estates; European consuls and Egyptian chroniclers report very high mortality on the canal works. Historiography is divided between accounts that treat the reign as the foundation of a modern state and those that emphasise the coercion on which it rested. Al-Jabarti and later Egyptian historians recorded both.","deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":125000,"countries":["Egypt","Sudan"],"baselinePop":4500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Egypt during Muhammad Ali's rule","baselineYear":1820,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.06666666666666667,"related":[{"id":"trans-saharan-slave-trade-1750-1900","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Sudanese captives taken north to Egypt under Muhammad Ali may also be counted in the estimates for the slave trade from the Sudan to Egypt."}]},{"id":"greek-war-of-independence-and-its-massacres","title":"The Greek War of Independence and its Reciprocal Massacres","startYear":1821,"endYear":1832,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Greek insurgents and Ottoman and Egyptian forces destroyed and expelled each other's civilian communities during the war that created the Greek state","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":47000,"territoryDesc":"The London Protocol of 1830 and the settlement of 1832 detached the Peloponnese, Attica, Boeotia and the Cyclades from the Ottoman Empire as an independent Greek kingdom of roughly 47,000 square km, the first successful secession from Ottoman rule in the Balkans and the model for those that followed.","lat":37.51,"lon":22.379,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.37,"fromLon":26.14,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Chios captives -> Ottoman slave markets, 1822","people":null},{"fromLat":37.51,"fromLon":22.38,"toLat":40.6,"toLon":22.95,"label":"Muslim survivors of the Morea -> Ottoman Rumelia","people":null},{"fromLat":36.9,"fromLon":22,"toLat":31.2,"toLon":29.9,"label":"Deportations from the Morea under Ibrahim Pasha -> Egypt","people":null}],"summary":"The revolt that began in the Peloponnese in March 1821 was accompanied from the outset by the destruction of civilian communities on both sides. Insurgent forces killed much of the Muslim and Jewish population of the Morea, most notoriously at the capture of Tripolitsa in September 1821; Ottoman authorities executed the Ecumenical Patriarch and killed and imprisoned Greeks in Constantinople and elsewhere in reprisal, and in 1822 the punishment of Chios killed and enslaved the great bulk of an island population of about 100,000, an event that became a European cause through Delacroix's painting. Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian expedition of 1825-28 devastated the Morea and deported captives to Egypt. Intervention by Britain, France and Russia, and the destruction of the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet at Navarino in 1827, secured Greek independence, recognised in 1830 and settled in 1832. The war established the pattern of reciprocal expulsion that recurred through the Balkan secessions of the following century.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":282000,"_deaths":65000,"countries":["Greece","Bulgaria","Egypt"],"baselinePop":900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the regions that rose in 1821 and became the Greek state - the Peloponnese, eastern Rumeli and the Aegean islands","baselineYear":1821,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"black-war-and-the-removal-of-the-tasmanian-aboriginal-people","title":"The Black War and the Removal of the Tasmanian Aboriginal People","startYear":1824,"endYear":1847,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"British colonists and the colonial government of Van Diemen's Land fought and then removed the Aboriginal population of Tasmania to an island settlement","peopleDisplaced":220,"territoryKm2":68400,"territoryDesc":"The island of Tasmania, some 68,400 square km, passed entirely into colonial possession; the survivors were held on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, and the remnant was moved again to Oyster Cove on the Tasmanian mainland in 1847.","lat":-41.5,"lon":146.9,"flows":[{"fromLat":-41.5,"fromLon":146.9,"toLat":-40.05,"toLon":148.02,"label":"Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors -> Wybalenna, Flinders Island","people":200},{"fromLat":-40.05,"fromLon":148.02,"toLat":-43.13,"toLon":147.26,"label":"Wybalenna remnant -> Oyster Cove, 1847","people":null}],"summary":"Conflict between colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians escalated from about 1824 as pastoral settlement spread across the island's midlands. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law in 1828, which, as the National Museum of Australia records, designated Aboriginal Tasmanians open enemies of the state without legal protection. In October 1830 more than 2,200 settlers, soldiers, police and convicts - roughly a tenth of the colony's European population - formed the 'Black Line', a cordon dragged across the settled districts intended to drive the remaining Aboriginal people onto the Tasman Peninsula; it captured two people and killed two. Removal was then achieved by negotiation through George Augustus Robinson, and about 200 survivors were taken to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where the National Museum records that most died within a few years: forty remained by 1847, when the settlement was closed and the remnant moved to Oyster Cove, and by 1876 all but one had died. Aboriginal Tasmanian descent communities survive today through the Bass Strait islands.","deathsLow":600,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":410400,"_deaths":800,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":5000,"baselineWhat":"The Aboriginal population of Tasmania at the time of British settlement in 1803","baselineYear":1803,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.044,"related":[{"id":"australian-frontier-wars","rel":"part-of","sharedDeaths":[600,1000],"note":"The Black War in Tasmania was part of the Australian frontier wars, and its deaths fall within the continental frontier-violence range."}]},{"id":"java-war-and-cultivation-system","title":"The Java War and the Dutch Cultivation System","startYear":1825,"endYear":1870,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Dutch colonial state defeated Prince Diponegoro's revolt and then imposed compulsory export-crop cultivation on the Javanese peasantry","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Dutch direct rule extended over the Javanese principalities; the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta lost most remaining territory","lat":-7.7956,"lon":110.3695,"flows":[],"summary":"The Java War of 1825-30, fought between Prince Diponegoro and the Dutch colonial government with its Javanese allies, ended Javanese armed resistance to Dutch rule and left at least 200,000 Javanese dead, most from disease and starvation rather than combat, alongside some 15,000 dead on the Dutch side. To pay for the war and for the Netherlands' fiscal crisis, Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch introduced the Cultuurstelsel or Cultivation System in 1830, requiring villages to devote a share of land and labour to sugar, coffee and indigo delivered to the colonial state at fixed prices, enforced through Javanese headmen and the colonial bureaucracy. The system generated over 800 million guilders for the Dutch treasury before its dismantling in the 1860s and 1870s, and Indonesian historiography calls it tanam paksa, forced cultivation. Its critics, including the Dutch official Eduard Douwes Dekker writing as Multatuli in Max Havelaar and the parliamentarian Baron van Hoevell, blamed it for the famines of the 1840s in Cirebon and of 1849-50 in Demak and Grobogan, in which colonial records show district populations collapsing through death and flight. Economic historians continue to disagree about how far the famines were caused by the system itself as against harvest failure, rice-market disruption and local abuses.","deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":280000,"_deaths":350000,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":6000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Java at the end of the Java War, when the Cultivation System was imposed","baselineYear":1830,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"french-conquest-of-algeria","title":"The French Conquest of Algeria and the Dispossession of its Land","startYear":1830,"endYear":1875,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"France conquered Algeria, expropriated tribal and religious land for settler colonisation and confined the rural population to reduced holdings","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":2380000,"territoryDesc":"Algeria was annexed to France, with the northern departments administered as part of the metropole from 1848 and the Saharan territories brought under military administration later in the century; the whole comprised roughly 2.38 million square km, of which the productive Tell was the object of settler colonisation.","lat":36.753,"lon":3.06,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.2,"fromLon":1.3,"toLat":35.2,"toLon":2.2,"label":"Tribes of the Tell -> interior and highland reserves under cantonnement","people":null},{"fromLat":36.75,"fromLon":3.06,"toLat":36.9,"toLon":10.18,"label":"Exile of Algerian resistance leaders and communities -> Tunisia and the Levant","people":null}],"summary":"France invaded in June 1830 and took Algiers by 5 July; EBSCO's account records that the victorious troops pillaged the city and desecrated mosques and cemeteries, and that Marshal Clauzel then began the wholesale seizure of Algerian land and property, establishing settler colonisation. Resistance under Abd al-Qadir controlled two-thirds of the country by 1840 and was broken only by Marshal Bugeaud's campaigns of razzias - punitive raids that destroyed villages, crops, orchards and herds - culminating in his surrender in 1847; the Kabyle insurrection of 1871 was the last general rising. Legal instruments completed what the army began: cantonnement, the senatus-consulte of 1863 and the Warnier law of 1873 converted collective tribal land into alienable individual title, transferring the best land to European settlers. The Algerian population fell substantially between 1830 and the early 1870s, with the famine and typhus of 1867-68 the sharpest single episode.","deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":14280000,"_deaths":750000,"countries":["Algeria","Tunisia"],"baselinePop":3000000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim population of Algeria at the time of the French invasion in 1830","baselineYear":1830,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"indian-removal-act-and-the-trail-of-tears","title":"US Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears","startYear":1830,"endYear":1850,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States federal government, acting under the Indian Removal Act, forced the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole nations and others from the eastern states to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":100000,"territoryDesc":"Removal transferred roughly 25 million acres of homeland in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida and the Carolinas to the states and to white settlers, in exchange for land in Indian Territory (present Oklahoma) that was itself progressively reduced by later cessions and by the allotment policy after 1887.","lat":34.551,"lon":-84.938,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.55,"fromLon":-84.94,"toLat":35.92,"toLon":-94.97,"label":"New Echota (Cherokee) -> Tahlequah, Indian Territory","people":16000},{"fromLat":32.3,"fromLon":-89.5,"toLat":34.6,"toLon":-95.5,"label":"Choctaw homelands, Mississippi -> Indian Territory","people":null},{"fromLat":28.54,"fromLon":-81.38,"toLat":35.3,"toLon":-96.3,"label":"Seminole Florida -> Indian Territory","people":null}],"summary":"The Indian Removal Act of 28 May 1830 authorised the president to exchange western land for tribal territory within state boundaries, and the Supreme Court's ruling in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that Indian nations were domestic dependent nations without standing in federal court removed a legal obstacle to state pressure. Removal followed by treaty, coercion and force: the Choctaw from 1831, the Creek and Chickasaw through the 1830s, the Cherokee under the disputed Treaty of New Echota after May 1838, when troops under General Winfield Scott held families in stockades before marching them west, and the Seminole only after the seven-year Second Seminole War of 1835-42. The National Park Service records more than 16,000 Cherokee removed and more than a thousand deaths on the journey itself, with several thousand more attributed to its consequences; Britannica states that up to a quarter of those displaced died. The removals opened roughly 25 million acres to settlement and cotton.","deathsLow":6000,"deathsHigh":25000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":15500,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":125000,"baselineWhat":"The Native American population living east of the Mississippi when the Indian Removal Act was passed","baselineYear":1830,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"siberian-exile-polish-insurgents","title":"Siberian Exile after the Polish Uprisings of 1830 and 1863","startYear":1831,"endYear":1867,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Russian imperial authorities deported Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian insurgents, their families and declassed gentry to Siberia and the interior provinces as convicts and administrative exiles","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.29,"lon":104.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":52.29,"toLon":104.3,"label":"Polish insurgents deported from the Congress Kingdom and the western provinces to Irkutsk and eastern Siberia","people":22000}],"summary":"After the failed uprisings of 1830-31 and 1863-64 the Russian government deported large numbers of Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian insurgents and their sympathisers to Siberia, some to hard labour (katorga) in the Nerchinsk mines and at Lake Baikal, most to administrative exile as settlers in Siberian and Volga provinces. Estates were confiscated, families were permitted or compelled to follow, and returns were restricted for decades; a rising by Polish exiles near Lake Baikal in 1866 was suppressed and its leaders executed. The exiles left a lasting Polish presence in Siberian towns and contributed to the scientific exploration of the region. The Polish word sybirak entered the language for those deported, and was reused for the Soviet deportations of 1940-41 already in the atlas. The deportations sit within the wider imperial exile and katorga system, through which several hundred thousand people passed in the nineteenth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Poland"],"baselinePop":5000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Congress Kingdom of Poland at the time of the January Uprising","baselineYear":1863,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.008},{"id":"indian-indentured-labour-girmitiya","title":"Indian Indentured Labour: the Girmitiya System","startYear":1834,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"British colonial authorities and plantation interests recruited indentured labourers in India for sugar and other plantation colonies after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire","peopleDisplaced":1300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":22.572,"lon":88.363,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":-20.35,"toLon":57.55,"label":"Calcutta -> Mauritius","people":null},{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":6.42,"toLon":-58.16,"label":"Calcutta -> British Guiana and Trinidad","people":null},{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":-18.14,"toLon":178.44,"label":"Calcutta -> Fiji","people":null},{"fromLat":13.08,"fromLon":80.27,"toLat":-29.86,"toLon":31.02,"label":"Madras -> Natal","people":null}],"summary":"Emancipation in the British Empire in 1833-38 created a demand for plantation labour that was met by indenture: five-year contracts, called girmit by the labourers from the English word agreement, under which Indian workers were shipped to Mauritius from 1834 and then to the Caribbean, Natal, Fiji, East Africa and Malaya. The Striking Women project records recruitment concentrated in rural north India and the south, frequently by deception about destination and wages among people who could not read the contracts; voyages of ten to twenty weeks with mortality among Caribbean-bound migrants of around 17 per cent in the early decades; and annual mortality on the plantations of around 12 per cent. Labourers were subject to criminal sanctions for breach of contract, restricted movement under pass systems, and sex ratios heavily skewed towards men. Resistance took the form of petitions, desertion, sabotage and strikes, and the system - after a campaign in which Gandhi's South African career began - was formally abolished in 1917. The descendants of the girmitiyas form the Indian populations of Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname and South Africa.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India","Mauritius","Guyana","Fiji","South Africa"],"baselinePop":253900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of India at the 1881 census, near the midpoint of the indenture era","baselineYear":1881,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.005120126033871603},{"id":"irish-famine-clearances-and-emigration","title":"The Irish Famine: Clearances and Mass Emigration","startYear":1845,"endYear":1855,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Irish landlords, using powers created and enlarged by British poor-law legislation, cleared tenants from their estates during the potato failure, while some two million people emigrated","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Clearance consolidated smallholdings into larger farms and pasture, particularly in Clare, Tipperary, Cork and Mayo; Encyclopedia.com records that in Clare one person in ten was permanently expelled from house and holding between 1849 and 1854, and that eviction rates in Tipperary were twenty times those of Fermanagh.","lat":53.8,"lon":-9,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.8,"fromLon":-9,"toLat":42.36,"toLon":-71.06,"label":"Connacht and Munster -> Boston and the United States","people":null},{"fromLat":52.66,"fromLon":-8.63,"toLat":45.51,"toLon":-73.57,"label":"Limerick and Clare -> Quebec and Montreal","people":null},{"fromLat":53.35,"fromLon":-6.26,"toLat":53.41,"toLon":-2.98,"label":"Dublin -> Liverpool and Britain","people":null}],"summary":"Successive failures of the potato crop from 1845 destroyed the subsistence of Ireland's cottier and smallholding population. Britannica records approximately one million deaths from starvation and famine-related disease, the worst famine in nineteenth-century Europe. What makes the episode a clearance as well as a famine is the policy framework: the Gregory or quarter-acre clause of the Poor Law Amendment Act of June 1847 required tenants to surrender holdings over a quarter of an acre before qualifying for relief, and the new rating system made pauper tenants a direct cost to landlords. Evictions rose sharply from late 1847, peaked in 1850 and largely ended by 1854, carried out by 'crowbar brigades' that demolished houses to prevent return. Around two million people emigrated in the decade, some assisted by landlords clearing estates. Ireland's population had not recovered its pre-famine level a century and a half later.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":1500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":1250000,"countries":["Ireland","United States of America","Canada","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":8175124,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ireland at the census of 1841, before the famine","baselineYear":1841,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.06116115180638239},{"id":"new-zealand-wars-and-the-raupatu-confiscations","title":"The New Zealand Wars and the Raupatu Land Confiscations","startYear":1845,"endYear":1872,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"The British Crown and colonial government invaded the Waikato and Taranaki and confiscated Maori land under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":13000,"territoryDesc":"Te Ara and NZHistory record confiscations under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863 across the Waikato, Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and Hawke's Bay, commonly given as around 3.2 million acres, roughly 13,000 square km; some land was later returned or paid for, and the compensation court process was slow, partial and itself a source of grievance.","lat":-37.79,"lon":175.283,"flows":[{"fromLat":-37.79,"fromLon":175.28,"toLat":-38.35,"toLon":175.17,"label":"Waikato iwi -> the King Country after the 1863-64 invasion","people":null},{"fromLat":-39.06,"fromLon":174.08,"toLat":-39.5,"toLon":174.6,"label":"Taranaki hapu displaced from confiscated land","people":null}],"summary":"Conflict over land sales began in the north in 1845 and resumed in Taranaki in 1860. In July 1863 Governor George Grey's forces crossed the Mangatawhiri into the Waikato, and after the defeat of the Kingitanga forces the government confiscated land under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, justified as punishment of rebellion; Premier Alfred Domett had proposed the policy in a memorandum of 5 May 1863, and Te Ara records that what began as a limited proposal broadened considerably, taking land from tribes that had fought against the Crown and from tribes that had not. The Maori King Tawhiao responded by prohibiting surveying, land sales, Native Land Court sittings, road-building and gold prospecting in his territory and refusing to negotiate until the land was returned. In the Waikato Raupatu Claims Settlement Act 1995 the Crown formally acknowledged that it had acted unjustly and in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi in invading the Waikato and wrongly characterising Waikato as rebels, that the confiscations were wrongful, and that they had caused lasting damage - the first of the modern Treaty settlements.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":3000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":78000,"_deaths":2500,"countries":["New Zealand"],"baselinePop":56049,"baselineWhat":"The Maori population of New Zealand at the census closest to the wars","baselineYear":1858,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"california-indian-catastrophe","title":"The Killing and Dispossession of the California Indians","startYear":1846,"endYear":1873,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"State-funded California militias, federal troops and settler vigilantes killed, enslaved and dispossessed the Native peoples of California during and after the Gold Rush","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Effectively the whole of the newly created state of California passed into settler and federal hands: eighteen treaties negotiated with California tribes in 1851-52, which would have reserved about 7.5 million acres, were never ratified by the US Senate and were kept secret for half a century, leaving most Native Californians without recognised land title.","lat":40.802,"lon":-124.163,"flows":[],"summary":"Following the American conquest and the discovery of gold in 1848, Native Californians were subjected to a sustained campaign of killing, abduction and dispossession. Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide documents state and federal officials organising and paying for militia expeditions, and shows the Indian population falling from roughly 150,000 to about 30,000 between 1846 and 1873. California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians permitted the indenture of Native children and of adults convicted of vagrancy, producing a traffic in unfree labour. Eighteen treaties negotiated in 1851-52 were rejected by the Senate, leaving most survivors landless. On 18 June 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom issued a formal apology on behalf of the State of California, used the word genocide, cited roughly 16,000 Native people killed in organised massacres, and established a Truth and Healing Council.","deathsLow":9500,"deathsHigh":16000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10200,"_deaths":12750,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":150000,"baselineWhat":"The Native population of California at the start of the American period in 1846","baselineYear":1846,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"mexican-cession-treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo","title":"The Mexican Cession and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo","startYear":1846,"endYear":1848,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States invaded Mexico and annexed roughly half of its national territory by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":1360000,"territoryDesc":"Britannica records the cession of more than 525,000 square miles (about 1,360,000 square km), comprising present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, western Colorado and parts of Wyoming, together with US confirmation of the Texas annexation and the Rio Grande boundary. The Gadsden Purchase added a further strip in 1853.","lat":19.489,"lon":-99.126,"flows":[],"summary":"War began in 1846 over the annexation of Texas and the disputed boundary between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, and ended with the occupation of Mexico City and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848. Mexico ceded more than 525,000 square miles for fifteen million dollars and the assumption of over three million dollars in claims by American citizens. Mexicans remaining in the ceded territory were promised citizenship and protection of property; in practice land titles in California and New Mexico were widely lost through subsequent litigation and settlement. The acquisition transferred sovereignty over Native nations across the Southwest to the United States and precipitated the political crisis over the extension of slavery into the new territories that ran towards the Civil War.","deathsLow":25000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":8160000,"_deaths":32500,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Mexican citizens living in the territory ceded to the United States in 1848","baselineYear":1848,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"caste-war-of-yucatan","title":"The Caste War of Yucatan and the Sale of Maya Captives to Cuba","startYear":1847,"endYear":1901,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Maya insurgents rose against the Yucatecan state and held an independent territory at Chan Santa Cruz; Yucatecan and later Mexican forces suppressed them and sold captured Maya into labour in Cuba","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Maya rebels held the eastern forests of the peninsula around Chan Santa Cruz as a de facto independent state from the 1850s until the Mexican army took the capital in 1901; the area became the federal territory of Quintana Roo in 1902.","lat":19.58,"lon":-88.05,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.58,"fromLon":-88.05,"toLat":17.5,"toLon":-88.2,"label":"Maya refugees south into British Honduras","people":null},{"fromLat":21.62,"fromLon":-87.03,"toLat":23.11,"toLon":-82.37,"label":"Captured Maya shipped as contract labourers to Cuba","people":2000}],"summary":"In 1847 Maya communities in eastern Yucatan rose against the creole landowning order in a war over land, taxes and church fees that nearly drove the Yucatecan state into the sea. The rebellion stabilised around the oracular shrine of the Talking Cross at Chan Santa Cruz, which sustained an autonomous Maya polity trading with British Honduras for half a century until the Mexican army captured it in 1901. Estimates of the dead range from 40,000 to 50,000, and the peninsula's population fell by roughly half through killing, disease and flight, with substantial Maya migration into British Honduras and the Peten. From 1848 the Yucatecan authorities raised revenue by selling Maya prisoners into indentured labour in Cuba, a traffic denounced in the Mexican congress and suspended and revived several times before ending in the early 1860s. The atlas covered nineteenth-century Indigenous dispossession in the United States, Argentina and Chile but not Mexico's longest Indigenous war.","deathsLow":40000,"deathsHigh":50000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":45000,"countries":["Mexico","Belize","Cuba"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Yucatan peninsula on the eve of the rising in 1846, the large majority of it Maya","baselineYear":1846,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2},{"id":"hawaii-mahele-overthrow-annexation","title":"The Great Mahele, the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and United States Annexation","startYear":1848,"endYear":1898,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Oceania","actors":"Land division under settler pressure transferred most Hawaiian land out of commoner hands; American residents backed by United States Marines deposed Queen Liliuokalani and the United States annexed the islands","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":16635,"territoryDesc":"The Hawaiian archipelago, about 16,635 km2, was annexed by the United States by joint resolution in July 1898 after the deposition of the monarchy in 1893; approximately 1.8 million acres of Crown and government land passed to the United States without compensation to the Hawaiian Kingdom or its people.","lat":21.31,"lon":-157.86,"flows":[],"summary":"The Great Mahele of 1848 converted Hawaiian communal land tenure into private title, dividing land between the king, the chiefs and the government; the Kuleana Act of 1850 allowed commoners to claim the plots they cultivated, but only about 28,600 acres were awarded to them, and subsequent legislation permitted foreigners to buy land outright. Within a generation the sugar industry controlled most productive land. In January 1893 a committee of American and European residents, supported by the landing of United States Marines from the USS Boston, deposed Queen Liliuokalani; President Cleveland's investigator James Blount concluded the overthrow had been unlawful and that US forces had been decisive, but no restoration followed. The Republic of Hawaii was annexed by the United States in July 1898 by joint resolution rather than treaty. In 1993 Congress adopted Public Law 103-150, in which the United States apologised to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow and acknowledged that they had never directly relinquished their claims to their national lands. Hawaii was absent from the atlas.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":99810,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":88000,"baselineWhat":"The Native Hawaiian population of the Kingdom of Hawaii at the time of the Great Mahele","baselineYear":1848,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"norwegianization-sami-dispossession","title":"Norwegianization, Sami Land Dispossession and the Nordic Assimilation Regimes","startYear":1850,"endYear":1980,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish states pursued assimilation of the Sami and Kven through language bans, boarding schools, land laws and, in Sweden, the forced relocation of reindeer-herding families","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Sami customary lands across northern Norway, Sweden and Finland were progressively brought under state ownership and settler and industrial use, culminating for Norway in the Alta dam dispute of 1979-1982.","lat":69.01,"lon":23.04,"flows":[{"fromLat":68.44,"fromLon":22.49,"toLat":63.18,"toLon":14.64,"label":"Forced relocation of North Sami reindeer-herding families southwards within Sweden after 1919","people":null}],"summary":"From the mid-nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, Norway pursued a policy known as fornorsking — Norwegianization — that made Norwegian the sole language of school and church in Sami and Kven districts, tied land purchase to Norwegian language and names, and placed Sami children in state boarding schools. Sweden ran a parallel but differently structured system of segregated nomad schools for reindeer-herding Sami under the doctrine 'Lapp shall remain Lapp', and after the 1919 reindeer grazing convention with Norway compelled North Sami families to relocate south, breaking herding communities. Finland applied comparable schooling and land policies. In June 2023 a Truth and Reconciliation Commission appointed by the Norwegian parliament delivered a report finding that the assimilation policy had caused lasting harm to the Sami, Kven and Forest Finns, and the Storting has since debated redress; Sweden's Sami church and state processes have followed. The Nordic world was entirely absent from the atlas before this entry.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Norway","Sweden"],"baselinePop":35000,"baselineWhat":"The Sami population of Norway, Sweden and Finland around 1900, when the assimilation regimes were at their most systematic","baselineYear":1900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"taiping-rebellion","title":"The Taiping Rebellion","startYear":1850,"endYear":1864,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom under Hong Xiuquan fought the Qing state and its provincial armies across the Yangzi valley and south China","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Taiping held Nanjing as their capital from 1853 to 1864 and at their height controlled much of the lower and middle Yangzi valley; the suppression left the Qing dependent on provincially raised armies under figures such as Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, a decisive shift of military and fiscal power from the centre to the provinces.","lat":32.06,"lon":118.797,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.06,"fromLon":118.8,"toLat":31.23,"toLon":121.47,"label":"Refugees from the Yangzi delta -> Shanghai and the treaty ports","people":null},{"fromLat":30.6,"fromLon":114.3,"toLat":23.13,"toLon":113.26,"label":"Flight south from the war zone -> Guangdong and overseas emigration","people":null}],"summary":"Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, founded a movement in Guangxi that in 1850 became a rebellion, captured Nanjing in 1853 and held it as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom until 1864. Britannica describes it as probably the most important event in nineteenth-century China and puts the death toll at an estimated 20 million. The war combined ideological revolution - land redistribution, the prohibition of opium, foot-binding and the traditional cults - with conventional campaigning of extraordinary destructiveness: repeated sieges of great cities, the systematic devastation of the richest agricultural region in the empire, and massacres by both sides on the fall of towns. Suppression fell to provincial armies raised by Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, assisted late in the war by foreign-officered contingents including the force commanded by Charles George Gordon. Nanjing fell in July 1864.","deathsLow":20000000,"deathsHigh":30000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000000,"_deaths":25000000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":430000000,"baselineWhat":"The registered population of Qing China on the eve of the rebellion","baselineYear":1851,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"us-plains-wars-and-the-reservation-system","title":"The Plains Wars and the United States Reservation and Allotment System","startYear":1851,"endYear":1890,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States confined the Native nations of the Great Plains to reservations by treaty and war, destroyed the bison herds, and then broke up the reservations under the Dawes Act","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":364000,"territoryDesc":"Britannica records that of the 138 million acres held by tribes in 1887 when the Dawes General Allotment Act was passed, roughly two-thirds - about 90 million acres, or some 364,000 square km - had passed into white hands by 1932 through allotment, the sale of 'surplus' land and fraud. This is additional to the far larger areas ceded under the treaties of 1851-68 and to the seizure of the Black Hills after gold was found there in 1874.","lat":43.5,"lon":-103.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.74,"fromLon":-104.99,"toLat":35.47,"toLon":-98,"label":"Southern Plains nations -> Indian Territory under the Medicine Lodge treaties","people":null},{"fromLat":45.8,"fromLon":-108.5,"toLat":43.3,"toLon":-102.5,"label":"Northern Plains -> the Great Sioux Reservation and its successor agencies","people":null}],"summary":"Between the first Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the United States converted the Great Plains from Native territory into reservations and then into settler property. Treaties assigned bounded territories and then reduced them; the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty guaranteed the Black Hills to the Oceti Sakowin, and the guarantee was broken after the gold rush of 1874. Military campaigns, the near-extermination of the bison herds on which Plains subsistence depended, and the withholding of rations enforced confinement. The Dawes General Allotment Act of 8 February 1887 then divided reservations into individual holdings of 80 to 160 acres and opened the remainder to sale: Britannica records that about two-thirds of the 138 million acres held in 1887 had been lost by 1932. Britannica dates the Plains Wars from the early 1850s to the late 1870s and the reservation and allotment regime carried the process into the twentieth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2184000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":150000,"baselineWhat":"The Native population of the Great Plains at the opening of the treaty and reservation era","baselineYear":1850,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"us-indian-boarding-schools","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Children from the Plains reservations, including Lakota agencies, were among those sent to the boarding schools."}]},{"id":"new-caledonia-kanak-dispossession-evenements","title":"Kanak Dispossession, the Reserves and the Evenements in New Caledonia","startYear":1853,"endYear":1988,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"France annexed New Caledonia, used it as a penal colony, confined the Kanak to reserves under the cantonnement policy and the indigenat code, and suppressed revolts; conflict between Kanak independence forces and loyalists in the 1980s ended with the Matignon Agreements","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":18575,"territoryDesc":"New Caledonia, about 18,575 km2, annexed by France in 1853; most agricultural and pastoral land passed to settlers, the penal administration and mining companies, with Kanak reserves restricted to a small fraction until land reform from the 1970s began returning territory to clans.","lat":-22.28,"lon":166.46,"flows":[{"fromLat":-21.6,"fromLon":165.4,"toLat":-21.15,"toLon":165.3,"label":"Kanak clans removed from the west coast plains to interior and east coast reserves","people":null},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":-22.28,"toLon":166.46,"label":"Convicts and Communard deportees transported from France","people":26000}],"summary":"France annexed New Caledonia in 1853 and used it from 1864 as a penal colony, transporting some 22,000 convicts and about 4,000 political deportees, among them Paris Communards and Algerian insurgents. Kanak clans were progressively removed from the best land under the cantonnement policy and confined to reserves governed by the indigenat, a code of administrative penalties and movement restrictions that lasted until 1946; the Kanak population fell by roughly half between annexation and the 1920s, chiefly from introduced disease and dislocation. A major revolt led by the chief Atai in 1878 was suppressed with an estimated 1,000-1,200 Kanak killed, and a further rising in 1917 was put down in the north. Political conflict over independence intensified in the 1980s in the period known as les Evenements, marked by the ambush of Kanak activists at Hienghene in 1984, in which ten men were killed, and the hostage-taking and assault on the Ouvea cave in May 1988, in which nineteen Kanak and two gendarmes died. The Matignon Agreements of June 1988 and the Noumea Accord of 1998 established a decolonisation process and a series of referendums, the last of which, in 2021, was boycotted by the pro-independence movement. New Caledonia was absent from the atlas.","deathsLow":1200,"deathsHigh":2000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","forced labour","arbitrary detention","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":111450,"_deaths":1600,"countries":["New Caledonia","France"],"baselinePop":50000,"baselineWhat":"The Kanak population of New Caledonia at the time of French annexation","baselineYear":1853,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.6},{"id":"muslim-rebellions-in-qing-china-and-their-suppression","title":"The Muslim Rebellions in Qing China and their Suppression","startYear":1855,"endYear":1877,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Hui and other Muslim communities rose in Yunnan and in the north-west, and Qing armies under commanders including Zuo Zongtang suppressed the risings and resettled the surviving populations","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Yunnan was restored to Qing control in 1873 after the fall of the Dali sultanate; in the north-west, Zuo Zongtang's campaigns recovered Shaanxi and Gansu and then Xinjiang from Yaqub Beg, whose state had ruled Kashgaria from 1865, and in 1884 Xinjiang was constituted a regular province of the empire.","lat":25.607,"lon":100.267,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.27,"fromLon":108.95,"toLat":36.06,"toLon":103.79,"label":"Hui of the Wei valley, Shaanxi -> forced resettlement in Gansu","people":null},{"fromLat":39.47,"fromLon":75.99,"toLat":42.87,"toLon":74.59,"label":"Flight across the Russian frontier -> Semirechye (the Dungans of Central Asia)","people":null}],"summary":"Two great Muslim risings shook the Qing empire in the same decades as the Taiping. Britannica records that a clash between Chinese and Muslim miners in Yunnan in 1855 escalated into massacres around Kunming in 1856 and then into a general rising that lasted seventeen years, under Du Wenxiu at Dali, and that a second rising beginning in 1862 spread across Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang and lasted fifteen years, gaining momentum from Taiping and Nian pressure but never achieving unified leadership. Both were suppressed by dividing the rebel factions and by overwhelming military force, in the north-west under Zuo Zongtang, whose campaigns went on to destroy the state Yaqub Beg had established in Kashgaria and to restore Qing control of Xinjiang by 1877. Suppression was followed by the forced resettlement of surviving Hui populations away from their home districts and by the flight of communities across the Russian frontier. Britannica describes the damage and devastation caused by the rebellions as immeasurable and records that recovery was still incomplete in the early twentieth century.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China","Kyrgyzstan"],"baselinePop":3000000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim (Hui and Turkic) population of Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu and the north-west before the risings","baselineYear":1855,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"crimean-tatar-and-nogai-exodus","title":"The Crimean Tatar and Nogai Exodus to the Ottoman Empire","startYear":1856,"endYear":1866,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Crimean Tatars and Nogais left the Russian Empire for Ottoman territory after the Crimean War under official suspicion, land pressure and administrative encouragement","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Large districts of the Crimean interior and the Nogai steppe north of the peninsula were substantially depopulated, and their land redistributed to Russian, Ukrainian, German and Bulgarian settlers; the Muslim share of Crimea's population fell sharply and continued falling until the deportation of 1944.","lat":45.031,"lon":35.382,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.03,"fromLon":35.38,"toLat":41.29,"toLon":36.33,"label":"Crimea -> Samsun and the Ottoman Black Sea coast","people":null},{"fromLat":46.6,"fromLon":34.6,"toLat":41.65,"toLon":26.57,"label":"Nogai steppe -> Ottoman Rumelia (Edirne and the Dobruja)","people":null}],"summary":"During the Crimean War many Crimean Tatars were suspected by the Russian authorities of sympathy with the Ottoman and allied forces, and after the peace of 1856 a large emigration began. It was driven by a combination of official suspicion, the requisitioning and reallocation of land, rumours of forced conversion and conscription, and the willingness of the Ottoman state to receive and settle Muslim migrants; Russian administrators issued passports readily and in places encouraged departure. Somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 Crimean Tatars and Nogais crossed the Black Sea to Anatolia and Ottoman Rumelia in the decade after the war, mortality in transit and on arrival was high, and abandoned villages in the peninsula were resettled with Slavic and other colonists. The movement is the first of the great nineteenth-century Muslim migrations into Ottoman territory, and it merges with the Circassian expulsion of 1864 and the Balkan migrations of 1877-78 in Ottoman refugee administration.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Turkey","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The Crimean Tatar and Nogai population of Crimea and the adjoining Black Sea steppe before the post-Crimean War emigration","baselineYear":1856,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6666666666666666},{"id":"indian-rebellion-of-1857-and-the-reprisals","title":"The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the British Reprisals","startYear":1857,"endYear":1859,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Sepoys of the Bengal Army, princely states and rural populations rose against East India Company rule; British forces suppressed the revolt with mass executions and the punitive clearance of Delhi","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The rebellion ended the East India Company: by the Government of India Act of 1858 the Crown assumed direct rule, a Secretary of State for India was appointed, the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried and exiled to Rangoon, and the policy of annexing princely states by lapse was abandoned in favour of guaranteeing loyal rulers.","lat":28.656,"lon":77.241,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.66,"fromLon":77.24,"toLat":28.5,"toLon":77.1,"label":"Expulsion of the population of Delhi after September 1857","people":null},{"fromLat":28.66,"fromLon":77.24,"toLat":16.8,"toLon":96.15,"label":"Bahadur Shah Zafar and family -> exile in Rangoon","people":null}],"summary":"The revolt began at Meerut in May 1857, spread to Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow and much of the North-Western Provinces and Awadh, and combined a mutiny of the Bengal Army with rural and princely rebellion. Both sides killed civilians: the National Army Museum records the killing of about 120 British women and children at Kanpur after a surrender, an act that shaped the character of the British response. The reprisals that Indians called the Devil's Wind included summary hangings along the line of march, the execution of prisoners by being blown from guns, the burning of villages, and the expulsion and partial demolition of Delhi after its recapture in September 1857. The revolt was suppressed by mid-1858, Rani Lakshmi Bai was killed in June 1858, and the East India Company was abolished in favour of Crown rule. Even the name of the events is contested: mutiny in older British usage, first war of independence in Indian nationalist usage.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":360000,"_deaths":450000,"countries":["India","Myanmar"],"baselinePop":40000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the North-Western Provinces, Oudh and the other territories in revolt","baselineYear":1857,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"andaman-penal-colony-and-the-great-andamanese","title":"The Andaman Islands Penal Colony and the Great Andamanese","startYear":1858,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The British Indian government transported convicts to a penal colony at Port Blair, whose establishment also destroyed the indigenous Great Andamanese","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.67,"lon":92.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":11.67,"toLon":92.75,"label":"Convicts transported from India to Port Blair","people":null}],"summary":"After the rebellion of 1857 the British Indian government re-established a penal settlement in the Andaman Islands, landing its first 200 convicts at Port Blair in March 1858; escapes in the first months ended in recapture and mass hangings. Over eighty years the colony received roughly 80,000 transported convicts from India and Burma, who cleared forest, built the settlement and were subject to a labour and ticket-of-leave regime; the Cellular Jail, completed in 1906, held political prisoners in solitary confinement, among them Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and later Bengali and Punjabi revolutionaries, and became a centre of hunger strikes in the 1930s. The colony also destroyed the indigenous Great Andamanese, whose numbers fell from about 4,800 in 1858 to a few dozen, mainly through introduced pneumonia, measles and syphilis and through the 'Andaman Homes' in which children were gathered and died. Japanese forces occupied the islands from 1942 to 1945. Independent India closed the penal settlement and made the Cellular Jail a national memorial; how the colony and its political prisoners should be commemorated, and which prisoners, remains a live argument in Indian public life.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"conquest-of-the-desert-and-the-occupation-of-araucania","title":"The Conquest of the Desert and the Occupation of Araucania","startYear":1861,"endYear":1885,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Argentine and Chilean armies conquered the independent indigenous territories of the pampas, Patagonia and Araucania, killing, deporting and confining the Mapuche, Tehuelche, Ranquel and allied peoples","peopleDisplaced":25000,"territoryKm2":630000,"territoryDesc":"Encyclopedia.com records that the Argentine campaigns took over 225,000 square miles - roughly 583,000 square km - of the pampas and northern Patagonia for stock-raising and agriculture, much of it granted to officers and to those who had financed the campaign. In Chile, according to Harvard's ReVista, Mapuche landholding fell from about five million hectares to some 500,000 hectares, roughly 50,000 square km lost, with the remainder held as reducciones.","lat":-38.951,"lon":-68.059,"flows":[{"fromLat":-38.95,"fromLon":-68.06,"toLat":-34.19,"toLon":-58.25,"label":"Patagonian and pampas captives -> Martin Garcia island and Buenos Aires","people":null},{"fromLat":-38.74,"fromLon":-72.6,"toLat":-38.5,"toLon":-72.2,"label":"Mapuche of Araucania -> reducciones under titulos de merced","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1861 and 1885 the Argentine and Chilean states extinguished the independent indigenous polities that had held the southern cone frontier since the sixteenth century. Chile's occupation of Araucania, begun in 1861 and completed after the Mapuche rising of 1881, confined the Mapuche to reducciones granted by title deed; Harvard's ReVista records their landholding falling from roughly five million hectares to about 500,000. In Argentina, campaigns from the 1870s culminated in Roca's advance of 1878-79, which Encyclopedia.com records as taking over 225,000 square miles and destroying organised indigenous resistance; the minister's stated aim was to expel, subjugate or wipe out the Indians. Captured families were separated, prisoners were shipped to Martin Garcia island and to sugar estates in the north, and women and children were distributed as servants to households in Buenos Aires. The land was distributed to soldiers and to the financiers of the campaign and opened to European settlement.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":3780000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Argentina","Uruguay","Chile"],"baselinePop":150000,"baselineWhat":"The independent Indigenous population of the pampas, Patagonia and Araucanía before the Argentine and Chilean military campaigns","baselineYear":1861,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16666666666666666},{"id":"rapa-nui-slave-raids-and-confinement","title":"The Peruvian Slave Raids on Rapa Nui and the Confinement of the Islanders at Hanga Roa","startYear":1862,"endYear":1966,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"Peruvian slave ships carried off roughly half the population of Rapa Nui; Chile annexed the island in 1888 and leased it to a sheep-ranching company that confined the islanders to the village of Hanga Roa","peopleDisplaced":1500,"territoryKm2":164,"territoryDesc":"Rapa Nui, 164 km2, annexed by Chile in September 1888; most of the island was leased to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep station until 1953, with the islanders restricted to Hanga Roa and its immediate surroundings.","lat":-27.15,"lon":-109.43,"flows":[{"fromLat":-27.15,"fromLon":-109.43,"toLat":-12.05,"toLon":-77.04,"label":"Rapa Nui taken by Peruvian slave ships to Callao and the guano islands","people":1400}],"summary":"In December 1862 a fleet of Peruvian vessels raided Rapa Nui and carried off more than 1,400 people, roughly half the population, to labour in Peru; among them were the island's ariki and the men who could read the rongorongo script. International protest led to an order for repatriation, but by then most had died of tuberculosis, smallpox and dysentery, and the handful who returned brought smallpox to the island. The population fell to 111 by 1877. Chile annexed Rapa Nui in 1888 under an agreement signed by the chief Atamu Tekena, whose terms — whether sovereignty alone or land was ceded — remain disputed between the Rapa Nui and the Chilean state. From the 1890s the island was leased to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep ranch, and the islanders were prohibited from living or working outside Hanga Roa; the restriction lasted until 1966, when the island was reopened and Rapa Nui were granted Chilean citizenship. The episode is one of the most severe population collapses in Pacific history and the confinement is a long-running and well-documented one.","deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":1400,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500,"_deaths":1200,"countries":["Chile","Peru"],"baselinePop":3000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) immediately before the Peruvian slave raids of 1862-63","baselineYear":1862,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.5},{"id":"long-walk-of-the-navajo-and-bosque-redondo","title":"The Long Walk of the Navajo and the Bosque Redondo Reservation","startYear":1863,"endYear":1868,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States Army, under Brigadier General James Carleton and Colonel Kit Carson, destroyed Navajo (Dine) subsistence, marched the survivors to eastern New Mexico and interned them with the Mescalero Apache at Bosque Redondo","peopleDisplaced":9000,"territoryKm2":14000,"territoryDesc":"The Treaty of 1868, signed on 1 June, allowed the Dine to return to a reservation of about 3.5 million acres straddling the Arizona-New Mexico line, a fraction of their former range; the reservation was later enlarged to roughly 15 million acres. Bosque Redondo itself was abandoned.","lat":34.406,"lon":-104.194,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.13,"fromLon":-109.47,"toLat":34.41,"toLon":-104.19,"label":"Canyon de Chelly and Fort Canby -> Bosque Redondo (Fort Sumner)","people":8500},{"fromLat":33.2,"fromLon":-105.6,"toLat":34.41,"toLon":-104.19,"label":"Mescalero Apache country -> Bosque Redondo","people":500}],"summary":"In 1863 General Carleton ordered a campaign against the Navajo; Kit Carson's troops burned cornfields, orchards and hogans and killed livestock, most notoriously in Canyon de Chelly, forcing surrender by starvation. From 1863 to 1866 more than fifty groups were marched up to 300-350 miles east to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner, journeys of eighteen to forty days on eight days' rations; people who could not keep up were shot, and hundreds died on the road. At Fort Sumner more than 8,500 Dine and nearly 500 Mescalero Apache were held together on alkaline land with failed crops, insufficient rations and epidemic disease; the Mescalero left without permission in November 1865. The experiment was abandoned and the Treaty of 1868 permitted the Dine to return to a reservation within their homeland, the only such return in the history of United States removal policy.","deathsLow":1500,"deathsHigh":3000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":84000,"_deaths":2250,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":12000,"baselineWhat":"The estimated Dine (Navajo) population at the start of Carleton's campaign","baselineYear":1863,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.75},{"id":"pacific-labour-trade-and-blackbirding","title":"The Pacific Labour Trade and Blackbirding","startYear":1863,"endYear":1904,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Labour recruiters and planters took Pacific Islanders, by kidnapping, deception and contract, to work the sugar and cotton plantations of Queensland, Fiji and Samoa","peopleDisplaced":62000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-21.144,"lon":149.187,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.4,"fromLon":167,"toLat":-21.14,"toLon":149.19,"label":"Vanuatu (New Hebrides) -> the Queensland canefields","people":null},{"fromLat":-9.43,"fromLon":159.95,"toLat":-21.14,"toLon":149.19,"label":"Solomon Islands -> Queensland","people":null}],"summary":"The first 67 South Sea Islanders were landed at Brisbane in 1863 to work cotton and then sugar. Over the next four decades more than 62,000 people were brought to Queensland; the National Museum of Australia records that many were kidnapped - 'blackbirded' - or deceived about the length and conditions of their service. Queensland legislated repeatedly, in the Polynesian Labourers Act 1868 and the Pacific Labourers Act 1880, setting shipping standards and prohibiting forced recruitment, but enforcement was inconsistent and inspectors were sometimes bribed. Mortality among labourers in Queensland was several times that of the settler population. The trade ended not from concern for the labourers but from the White Australia policy: the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 provided for deportation, and between 1906 and 1908 over 7,500 people were removed, with about 2,500 permitted to remain. Queensland recognised Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct ethnic group in 2000. The activist Faith Bandler, whose father had been taken from Ambrym, maintained that it was a form of slavery, while noting that in later years some signed three-year contracts.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":62000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia","Vanuatu","Solomon Is."],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"queensland-deportation-of-pacific-islanders","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":7500,"note":"The roughly 7,500 people deported in 1906-08 had been brought to Queensland under the labour trade and are among its 62,000 arrivals; the deportation is a second, separate movement of the same people, recorded in its own entry."}]},{"id":"sand-creek-and-wounded-knee-massacres","title":"The Sand Creek and Wounded Knee Massacres","startYear":1864,"endYear":1890,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"United States volunteer and regular troops attacked and killed Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek in 1864 and Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":38.548,"lon":-102.512,"flows":[],"summary":"On 29 November 1864 about 675 Colorado volunteer troops under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp on Big Sandy Creek that was flying a white flag and a United States flag; the National Park Service records roughly 230 people killed over eight hours, most of them women, children and the elderly, with mutilation of the dead afterwards. Manuscript letters by Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, rediscovered in 2000, record that about a hundred soldiers refused the order. Chivington was initially acclaimed and then discredited when the character of the attack became known, and the massacre precipitated the Cheyenne and Arapaho war that followed. On 29 December 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, US Army troops disarming a Lakota band during the suppression of the Ghost Dance killed, by Britannica's estimate, between 150 and 300 Lakota; Britannica describes it as the climax of the army's efforts to repress the Plains Indians. Congress passed a resolution of deep regret for Wounded Knee on its centenary in 1990.","deathsLow":380,"deathsHigh":530,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":364,"_deaths":455,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"war-of-the-triple-alliance","title":"The War of the Triple Alliance and the Destruction of Paraguay","startYear":1864,"endYear":1870,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay fought Paraguay to the destruction of its army and government, occupied the country and annexed disputed territory","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":140000,"territoryDesc":"Paraguay ceded roughly 140,000 km2 to Brazil and Argentina under the postwar treaties, losing about a quarter of the territory it had claimed; it was occupied by allied troops until 1876.","lat":-25.28,"lon":-57.64,"flows":[{"fromLat":-25.28,"fromLon":-57.64,"toLat":-22.65,"toLon":-56,"label":"Civilian population retreating inland with the Paraguayan army","people":null}],"summary":"The war that began in late 1864 between Paraguay and the alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay ended in March 1870 with the death of Marshal Francisco Solano Lopez at Cerro Cora and the occupation of the country. It is generally regarded as the deadliest interstate war in Latin American history, and the scale of Paraguay's population loss is fiercely disputed: a 1999 study by Thomas Whigham and Barbara Potthast using a recovered 1870 census concluded the country lost around 60 per cent of its people, while Vera Blinn Reber had earlier argued for a far smaller loss, and both positions remain in print. Civilians were mobilised and evacuated inland, and mortality from disease, starvation and exposure during the long retreat exceeded battlefield deaths. Paraguay ceded about 140,000 km2 to its neighbours and was occupied until 1876. The atlas's Americas coverage jumped from the 1840s to the 1900s in South America outside the Southern Cone frontier wars; this fills the largest gap.","deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":840000,"_deaths":175000,"countries":["Paraguay"],"baselinePop":450000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Paraguay on the eve of the war","baselineYear":1864,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"russian-conquest-of-central-asia","title":"The Russian Conquest of Central Asia","startYear":1865,"endYear":1895,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Russian Empire conquered the Kazakh steppe, the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva and the Turkmen lands, and settled Slavic colonists on nomadic pasture","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":3000000,"territoryDesc":"Russian rule was extended over the Kazakh steppe, the Governorate-General of Turkestan created in 1867 with its capital at Tashkent, the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva reduced to protectorates in 1868 and 1873, the Khanate of Kokand abolished and annexed in 1876, and the Transcaspian province established by 1882 - together some three million square km of steppe, oasis and desert.","lat":41.311,"lon":69.28,"flows":[{"fromLat":50,"fromLon":72,"toLat":47,"toLon":69,"label":"Kazakh pastoralists pushed off winter pasture by Slavic settlement","people":null},{"fromLat":55,"fromLon":40,"toLat":51.16,"toLon":71.43,"label":"Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers -> the steppe provinces","people":null}],"summary":"Russian forces took Tashkent in 1865 and it became the seat of a Governorate-General in 1867 under Konstantin von Kaufman. Bukhara was defeated in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, both surviving as protectorates; Kokand was abolished and absorbed in 1876. The conquest of the Turkmen lands was the bloodiest phase: the Hamilton College survey records the storming of the Teke fortress of Geok Tepe in January 1881, in which approximately 14,000 Teke Turkmen were killed including those cut down in the pursuit, after which the Transcaspian province was organised with its centre at Ashkhabad. Kaufman's administration adopted a policy of non-interference in Muslim religious and customary life, on the assumption that exposure to Russian culture would produce assimilation on its own. The lasting demographic effect came later, through peasant settlement of the steppe after the Trans-Siberian Railway, which took pasture from nomadic communities and set the conditions for the revolt of 1916 and the famine of the early Soviet period.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":18000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Uzbekistan","Kazakhstan","Russia"],"baselinePop":9000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Central Asian territories conquered or made protectorates by Russia - the Kazakh steppe, Turkestan, Bukhara and Khiva","baselineYear":1897,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"kalaupapa-leprosy-settlement","title":"The Kalaupapa Leprosy Settlement","startYear":1866,"endYear":1969,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The Hawaiian Kingdom and its successor governments forcibly exiled people diagnosed with Hansen's disease to an isolated peninsula on Molokai under a compulsory segregation law","peopleDisplaced":8000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Kalaupapa peninsula on the north shore of Molokai, cut off from the rest of the island by sea cliffs, designated a leprosy settlement in 1865-66 and since 1980 a National Historical Park.","lat":21.19,"lon":-156.98,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.31,"fromLon":-157.86,"toLat":21.19,"toLon":-156.98,"label":"Patients shipped from Honolulu to the Kalaupapa peninsula","people":8000}],"summary":"Under the Hawaiian Kingdom's Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy of 1865, people diagnosed with Hansen's disease were arrested, examined and transported to the isolated Kalaupapa peninsula on Molokai, where they were landed — in the early years sometimes put over the side to swim ashore — and were not permitted to leave. The policy continued under the Republic, the Territory and the State of Hawaii, and was abolished only in 1969, more than two decades after sulfone drugs had made the disease treatable. Roughly 8,000 people were exiled over a century, about nine in ten of them Native Hawaiians, and families were broken up: children born at the settlement were taken from their parents. The settlement is best known outside Hawaii through Father Damien and Mother Marianne Cope, who worked there. A small number of former patients chose to remain after 1969 and the peninsula became a National Historical Park in 1980. It is one of the clearest and best-documented instances of compulsory confinement on medical grounds in the atlas.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":8000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":58765,"baselineWhat":"The Native Hawaiian population at the Kingdom of Hawaii census of 1866, the year the first patients were exiled to Kalaupapa","baselineYear":1866,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.1361354547775036},{"id":"australia-protection-acts-reserves","title":"Australia's Aboriginal Protection Acts, Missions and Reserves","startYear":1869,"endYear":1969,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Australian colonial and state governments confined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to missions and reserves under protection legislation, controlling their movement, employment, marriage and wages","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A national network of government settlements, church missions and gazetted reserves; the reserves were progressively revoked or converted to Aboriginal freehold and land trusts from the 1970s.","lat":-25.27,"lon":133.78,"flows":[{"fromLat":-23.7,"fromLon":133.88,"toLat":-26.29,"toLon":151.95,"label":"Removal of Aboriginal people to the Barambah/Cherbourg settlement, Queensland","people":null},{"fromLat":-19.26,"fromLon":146.82,"toLat":-18.74,"toLon":146.58,"label":"Removal of people deemed troublesome to the Palm Island settlement","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1869 and the 1960s every Australian colony and state enacted protection legislation placing Aboriginal people under the authority of a Protector or Board with power to order where they lived, whom they married, what work they did and how their wages were held. People were moved onto missions and government settlements — Coranderrk, Cherbourg, Palm Island, Moore River, Yarrabah among many — where passes were needed to leave, families were separated, languages were suppressed and earnings were controlled by the state, the basis of the later 'stolen wages' claims settled in Queensland and New South Wales in the 2000s and 2010s. Palm Island in Queensland served explicitly as a place of banishment for those deemed disruptive. The legislation also supplied the legal machinery for child removal, which the atlas covers separately as the Stolen Generations for 1945-1970; the confinement regime itself ran for a century and reached a far larger population. Protection statutes were repealed between the 1960s and 1970s, following the 1967 referendum.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":95000,"baselineWhat":"The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia around 1900, when the protection regime was being extended across the colonies","baselineYear":1901,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"australian-frontier-wars","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"From the 1860s, survivors of the frontier wars were gathered onto the reserves and missions run under the protection acts."},{"id":"australia-stolen-generations","rel":"same-population","note":"The protection acts that confined Aboriginal people to reserves also supplied the legal machinery for the child removals of the Stolen Generations, and both applied to the same communities from 1945 to 1969."}]},{"id":"hokkaido-colonisation-the-ainu-and-the-annexation-of-ryukyu","title":"The Colonisation of Hokkaido, Ainu Assimilation Policy and the Annexation of Ryukyu","startYear":1869,"endYear":1899,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Meiji state annexed Ezo as Hokkaido and settled it, imposed assimilation on the Ainu, and abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom, making it Okinawa prefecture","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":85700,"territoryDesc":"Ezo province was renamed Hokkaido in 1869 and placed under a Colonisation Office, and roughly 83,400 square km were surveyed, allotted and settled with mainland Japanese migrants and soldier-farmers. The Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary of both China and Satsuma, was reorganised as a Japanese domain in 1872 and abolished in 1879, its roughly 2,280 square km becoming Okinawa prefecture.","lat":43.062,"lon":141.354,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.7,"fromLon":141.15,"toLat":43.06,"toLon":141.35,"label":"Japanese settlers and soldier-farmers -> Hokkaido","people":null},{"fromLat":26.21,"fromLon":127.68,"toLat":35.68,"toLon":139.69,"label":"The Ryukyuan royal house -> removal to Tokyo, 1879","people":null}],"summary":"In 1869 the new Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido and established a Colonisation Office to survey, allot and settle it, an undertaking that brought hundreds of thousands of mainland Japanese migrants north over the following decades. Britannica records that the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuriles, were largely assimilated under the growing Japanese presence. Ainu land rights were not recognised in the allotment system, salmon fishing and deer hunting were restricted, and the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act of 1899 completed a policy of assimilation, granting small agricultural plots on conditions and promoting Japanese language and schooling in place of Ainu practice. In the south, the Ryukyu Kingdom, which had paid tribute to both China and Japan, was declared a Japanese domain in 1872 and abolished in 1879, its king removed to Tokyo and its territory made Okinawa prefecture over Chinese objection. Japan recognised the Ainu as an indigenous people by Diet resolution in 2008 and by statute in 2019.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":514200,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Japan"],"baselinePop":330000,"baselineWhat":"The Ainu population of Hokkaido together with the population of the Ryukyu Kingdom at annexation","baselineYear":1879,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"canadian-numbered-treaties-reserves-and-the-pass-system","title":"Canada's Numbered Treaties, the Reserve and Pass System, and the North-West Resistance","startYear":1871,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Dominion of Canada took title to the western interior by the Numbered Treaties, confined First Nations to reserves, restricted their movement by an extra-legal pass system and suppressed Metis and Cree resistance in 1885","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada records that the Numbered Treaties covered the territory between the Lake of the Woods, the Rocky Mountains and the Beaufort Sea - the present Prairie provinces, northern Ontario and the Northwest Territories - opening it to railway construction and settlement while reserving small allotments to the signatory nations.","lat":52.783,"lon":-106.133,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.78,"fromLon":-106.13,"toLat":52.9,"toLon":-106,"label":"Plains Cree bands -> reserves after the 1885 resistance","people":null},{"fromLat":49.9,"fromLon":-97.14,"toLat":53.5,"toLon":-113.5,"label":"Red River Metis -> dispersal westward after 1870","people":null}],"summary":"Canada acquired Rupert's Land in 1870 and secured title to the western interior through eleven Numbered Treaties beginning in 1871, negotiated as the bison herds collapsed and famine spread across the plains. First Nations were settled on reserves whose acreage was fixed per family, and the oral undertakings made at the negotiations, recorded in Indigenous accounts, differ in important respects from the written texts. The Red River Resistance of 1869-70 and the North-West Resistance of 1885 arose from Metis land insecurity and First Nations starvation; after the defeat at Batoche in May 1885 Louis Riel was hanged at Regina on 16 November 1885 and other leaders were imprisoned or executed, dispersing Metis leadership. In the same year the Department of Indian Affairs introduced the pass system, requiring an Indian agent's written permission to leave a reserve; the Canadian Encyclopedia records that its architect Hayter Reed acknowledged it had no basis in law, and it persisted in varying degrees of enforcement into the 1930s and in places the early 1940s. The residential school system, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described in 2015 as an instrument of cultural genocide, expanded in the same decades.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Canada"],"baselinePop":45000,"baselineWhat":"The First Nations and Metis population of the western interior - present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the North-West Territories - at the start of the treaty process","baselineYear":1871,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"criminal-tribes-act-settlements","title":"The Criminal Tribes Acts and the Settlement of India's 'Criminal Tribes'","startYear":1871,"endYear":1952,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The British Indian government designated whole communities as hereditary criminals and subjected them to registration, restricted movement and closed settlements","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":28.6139,"lon":77.209,"flows":[],"summary":"The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, extended and consolidated in 1911 and 1924, empowered provincial governments in British India to declare entire communities - typically nomadic, pastoral or itinerant groups such as the Sansi, Kanjar, Pardhi, Lodha, Yerukula and Chhara - as criminal by heredity. Members were required to register, to report at roll calls sometimes several times a night, to carry passes, and to remain within specified areas; those judged incorrigible could be confined in settlements, some of them fenced, where labour was compulsory and children could be separated from parents into reformatory schools. Provincial governments contracted the running of several settlements to the Salvation Army and to industrial employers, who obtained a captive workforce. The system rested on a theory of hereditary criminality drawn from contemporary European criminology and from colonial anxieties about mobile populations, and it criminalised occupation and movement rather than acts. India repealed the Acts in 1952 and the affected groups became the 'denotified tribes', but many were immediately brought under Habitual Offenders Acts, and their descendants continue to report police harassment and social stigma; the Indian government's own commissions, including the Renke Commission of 2008, have documented their continuing marginalisation.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":13000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the communities notified as 'criminal tribes' in British India at independence","baselineYear":1947,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"paris-commune-semaine-sanglante-and-deportations","title":"The Semaine Sanglante and the Deportation of the Communards","startYear":1871,"endYear":1880,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The French government at Versailles and its army retook Paris from the Commune, killing thousands of Communards in the fighting and in summary executions, then tried tens of thousands before courts-martial and deported several thousand to New Caledonia","peopleDisplaced":4000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.8566,"lon":2.3522,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.8566,"fromLon":2.3522,"toLat":-22.62,"toLon":167.48,"label":"Paris → New Caledonia (Île des Pins and Ducos peninsula)","people":3800}],"summary":"After the Paris Commune rose against the national government in March 1871, the Versailles army entered the city on 21 May and retook it street by street in the week to 28 May, known as la semaine sanglante. Communards were killed in the fighting and in large numbers after capture, shot at improvised courts ('cours prévôtales') and, in one well-known case, against the wall of Père-Lachaise cemetery; Commune forces executed about a hundred hostages during the same week. The death toll is disputed: older estimates of 15,000-40,000 and the figure of about 20,000 still used by the City of Paris contrast with Robert Tombs's 2012 archival revision in the Historical Journal, which puts the dead at about 5,700-7,400, roughly half of them killed after the fighting. About 43,000 people were then arrested, and some two dozen military courts sitting over four years convicted 10,137, deporting some 3,800-4,300 to New Caledonia, where Louise Michel was among those held, before partial amnesty in 1879 and full amnesty in 1880. The penal colony and the colonisation of New Caledonia are covered in the entry on Kanak dispossession, which counts these political deportees within its convict figures; this entry covers the killing in Paris and the deportation itself. In 2016 the French National Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming the rehabilitation of the victims of the repression.","deathsLow":5700,"deathsHigh":25000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution"],"_mag":4000,"_deaths":15350,"countries":["France","New Caledonia"],"ongoing":false,"weakSources":false},{"id":"aceh-war-dutch-conquest","title":"The Aceh War and the Dutch Conquest of Northern Sumatra","startYear":1873,"endYear":1914,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Netherlands invaded and subjugated the Sultanate of Aceh over four decades of counter-guerrilla warfare","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":58000,"territoryDesc":"The Sultanate of Aceh, roughly the area of the modern Indonesian province, annexed to the Netherlands East Indies","lat":5.5483,"lon":95.3238,"flows":[],"summary":"The Netherlands invaded Aceh in 1873 after failing to obtain its submission by treaty, killing the sultan and taking the capital, but faced four decades of guerrilla resistance led by the ulama and territorial chiefs. From 1884 the Dutch withdrew to a fortified line around Kutaraja, then from 1898 the campaigns of J. B. van Heutsz and his adviser Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje returned to mobile columns that pursued resistance leaders, burned villages and attacked fortified settlements, including assaults on Kuta Reh and other highland villages in which whole communities including women and children were killed. Dutch military records themselves describe these operations, and Dutch historians have since debated whether the highland assaults, notably at Kuta Reh in 1904 where several hundred villagers including women and children were killed, amounted to massacres. Acehnese deaths across the war are usually put at 60,000-100,000 and Dutch and auxiliary deaths at around 37,000. The sultanate was abolished, Aceh incorporated into the Netherlands East Indies, and grievances from the war fed into later Acehnese resistance to both Dutch and Indonesian rule.","deathsLow":60000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":348000,"_deaths":80000,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Sultanate of Aceh at the Dutch invasion of 1873","baselineYear":1873,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"april-uprising-russo-turkish-war-and-the-muhacir-migrations","title":"The April Uprising, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 and the Muhacir Migrations","startYear":1876,"endYear":1881,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Ottoman irregulars suppressed the Bulgarian April Uprising of 1876, and the Russian invasion and the creation of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania then drove the Muslim population of the Balkans into the Ottoman Empire","peopleDisplaced":1230000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Treaty of Berlin of July 1878 replaced the larger Bulgaria of San Stefano with an autonomous Principality of Bulgaria and the province of Eastern Rumelia, confirmed the independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania with enlarged borders, gave Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austro-Hungarian administration and Kars, Ardahan and Batum to Russia, removing most of the Ottoman Empire's remaining European territory.","lat":41.941,"lon":24.219,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.7,"fromLon":25.4,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Bulgarian provinces -> Istanbul and Anatolia (muhacirs)","people":null},{"fromLat":43.2,"fromLon":20.9,"toLat":42,"toLon":21.43,"label":"Nis and southern Serbia -> Kosovo and Macedonia (Albanian muhacirs)","people":71000},{"fromLat":42.5,"fromLon":27.47,"toLat":38.42,"toLon":27.14,"label":"Black Sea coast -> Izmir and western Anatolia","people":null}],"summary":"In April 1876 a Bulgarian rising was crushed by Ottoman regular and irregular forces. The Bulgarian News Agency's account records that estimates of Bulgarian deaths range from the 12,000 reported by the British diplomat Walter Baring and the 15,000 reported by the American consul Eugene Schuyler to later nineteenth-century figures of 25,000-40,000, with modern scholarship generally accepting 15,000-30,000; eighty settlements were burned, two hundred more sacked, and around 10,000 Bulgarians imprisoned. Gladstone's pamphlet on the 'Bulgarian horrors' and the European press campaign that followed made intervention politically possible, and Russia declared war in April 1877. The Russian advance and the establishment of Bulgaria, and the enlargement of Serbia and Montenegro, then produced the largest single displacement in Ottoman history: on Nedim Ipek's count the empire was hosting 1,230,000 Balkan Muslim refugees by 1879. Refugee property left behind was appropriated under land laws that the new Balkan states inherited from the Ottoman code of 1858.","deathsLow":15000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1230000,"_deaths":157500,"countries":["Bulgaria","Serbia","Macedonia","Turkey"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim population of the Ottoman Balkan territories that became Bulgaria, Eastern Rumelia and the enlarged Serbian, Montenegrin and Romanian states","baselineYear":1876,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.82},{"id":"indian-famines-under-british-administration","title":"The Famines of British India, 1876-1902","startYear":1876,"endYear":1902,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Successive monsoon failures in British India produced famines whose mortality is attributed by different historians to colonial revenue, trade and relief policy or to drought and limited state capacity","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":15.828,"lon":78.037,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.83,"fromLon":78.04,"toLat":13.08,"toLon":80.27,"label":"Deccan famine districts -> Madras relief works and city","people":null},{"fromLat":21.15,"fromLon":79.09,"toLat":30.9,"toLon":75.85,"label":"Central Provinces -> the Punjab canal colonies","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1876 and 1902 British India suffered a sequence of severe famines: the Great Famine of 1876-78 in the Madras Presidency, Bombay Deccan, Mysore and Hyderabad; the famine of 1896-97; and that of 1899-1900. Each followed monsoon failure associated with El Nino events, and each occurred in a colony with railways capable of moving grain, an export trade that continued through the crises, a land revenue demand that continued to be collected, and a relief doctrine shaped by the fear of encouraging dependence, which imposed wage and task tests on relief works. Famine Commissions reported in 1880, 1898 and 1901 and produced the Famine Codes. Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts argues that the deaths were the product of imperial economic and political decisions rather than of drought alone; Tirthankar Roy replies that famines resulted from geography and low state capacity, that pre-colonial famine data are too poor to support claims that famines became more frequent under British rule, and that railways, irrigation and administrative capacity ended famine mortality after about 1900. Both positions are held by serious scholars and neither is adjudicated here.","deathsLow":6000000,"deathsHigh":29000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":14000000,"_deaths":17500000,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":254000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of British India, including the princely states, at the 1881 census","baselineYear":1881,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"parihaka-ploughing-campaign-and-invasion","title":"The Ploughing Campaign and the Invasion of Parihaka","startYear":1879,"endYear":1881,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"The New Zealand government imprisoned Maori protesters without trial and invaded the pacifist settlement of Parihaka in Taranaki","peopleDisplaced":1600,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The invasion secured for settlement the Taranaki land confiscated after the wars of the 1860s, which Parihaka's residents had been ploughing and fencing in protest","lat":-39.29,"lon":173.79,"flows":[{"fromLat":-39.29,"fromLon":173.79,"toLat":-45.87,"toLon":170.5,"label":"Maori prisoners held without trial in Dunedin and other South Island gaols","people":null}],"summary":"At Parihaka in Taranaki, Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi built a community that resisted the survey and sale of confiscated land by non-violent means: from 1879 their followers ploughed settlers' paddocks and rebuilt fences across surveyed lines. The government responded by arresting several hundred men and holding them without trial in South Island prisons under successive Maori Prisoners Acts, where some died. On 5 November 1881 about 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers marched on the settlement, met by children singing and by people sitting silently on the marae; the leaders were arrested and tried, houses were demolished, crops and livestock destroyed and most residents were dispersed, with those permitted to return required to carry passes. Evidence presented to the Waitangi Tribunal's Taranaki inquiry, whose report was published in 1996, included accounts of rapes committed during the occupation. In 2017 the Crown signed Te Kawenata o Rongo with the people of Parihaka, apologising formally for the invasion and its consequences and providing a reconciliation package, later given legislative form.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1600,"_deaths":null,"countries":["New Zealand"],"baselinePop":2000,"baselineWhat":"The residents of Parihaka at the time of the November 1881 invasion","baselineYear":1881,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"putumayo-rubber-atrocities","title":"The Putumayo Rubber Atrocities","startYear":1879,"endYear":1913,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Peruvian Amazon Company under Julio Cesar Arana held Huitoto, Bora, Andoke, Ocaina and neighbouring peoples in debt bondage on rubber stations, enforced by armed overseers","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Putumayo basin, disputed between Peru and Colombia, was administered de facto by the company through a chain of rubber stations until the boundary settlement of 1922.","lat":-0.73,"lon":-73.02,"flows":[],"summary":"Between the 1880s and 1913 the rubber enterprise built by Julio Cesar Arana in the Putumayo basin, incorporated in London in 1907 as the Peruvian Amazon Company, extracted rubber through the compulsory labour of Huitoto, Bora, Andoke, Ocaina and related peoples, held by debt, hostage-taking of women and children, and armed overseers, many of them Barbadian labourers recruited by the company. The system was exposed by the American engineer Walter Hardenburg and the Iquitos newspaper La Sancion, and investigated in 1910-1911 by the British consul Roger Casement, who described it in his report to the Foreign Office — published as a parliamentary Blue Book in 1912 — as a system not merely of slavery but of extermination, documenting floggings, mutilation, starvation, rape and mass shootings. A House of Commons Select Committee on Putumayo reported in 1913. Estimates of Indigenous deaths across the period run to 30,000-40,000, with the Huitoto population reduced by around nine-tenths; the company was wound up but no perpetrator in Peru was convicted. The atlas had nothing on the Amazon rubber boom.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing","torture","sexual violence","starvation & siege","summary execution","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":28000,"_deaths":35000,"countries":["Colombia"],"baselinePop":50000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of the Putumayo–Caraparaná–Igaraparaná rubber district at the start of the boom","baselineYear":1900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"us-indian-boarding-schools","title":"The United States Indian Boarding School System","startYear":1879,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States federal government and church partners removed Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children from their families into distant boarding schools to eliminate their languages and cultures","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.203,"lon":-77.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.3,"fromLon":-102.5,"toLat":40.2,"toLon":-77.19,"label":"Lakota agencies, Dakota Territory -> Carlisle, Pennsylvania","people":null},{"fromLat":35,"fromLon":-110,"toLat":40.2,"toLon":-77.19,"label":"Southwest reservations -> eastern boarding schools","people":null}],"summary":"From 1879 the United States built a national system of off-reservation boarding schools on the model of Carlisle, founded by Richard Henry Pratt, whose stated aim was to 'kill the Indian, save the man'. Children were taken from their families, often under pressure or coercion, renamed, had their hair cut, were forbidden to speak their languages or practise their religions, and were set to manual labour that supported the institutions themselves. The Department of the Interior's Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, released in May 2022, identified 408 federal schools operating between 1819 and 1969 and marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 of them, with the number expected to rise; it was the first comprehensive federal inventory of the policy. The National Park Service records more than 7,800 children at Carlisle to 1918 and about 200 buried in its cemetery, whose remains the Army has since been returning to their communities.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction","forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":306543,"baselineWhat":"The American Indian and Alaska Native population of the United States as enumerated in the 1880 census","baselineYear":1880,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"us-plains-wars-and-the-reservation-system","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Children from the Plains reservations, including Lakota agencies, were among those sent to the boarding schools."}]},{"id":"menelik-southern-conquests-ethiopia","title":"Menelik II's Conquest of the Southern Lands and the Gabbar System","startYear":1880,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Shewan and then Ethiopian imperial armies of Menelik II conquered the Oromo, Sidama, Kafficho, Wolayta and other southern polities and imposed tribute, land alienation and servile labour","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Ethiopian empire roughly doubled in area, incorporating the Oromo lands, Kaffa, Wolayta, Sidama, the Ogaden and the southern peripheries into the borders of the modern state","lat":9.03,"lon":38.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":9.03,"fromLon":38.74,"toLat":7.6733,"toLon":36.8344,"label":"Northern soldier-settlers (naftanya) settled on conquered southern land","people":null}],"summary":"Between the 1870s and 1900 Menelik II, first as king of Shewa and from 1889 as emperor, conquered the Oromo, Gurage, Wolayta, Sidama, Kafficho, Konso and Somali lands to the south, west and east, roughly doubling the territory of the Ethiopian state and fixing the borders of modern Ethiopia in negotiations with the European colonial powers. Conquered populations were placed under the gabbar system, in which they owed labour, produce and tribute to naftanya soldier-settlers granted rights over their land, and slave-taking and slave trading, though formally restricted by Menelik's edicts, continued on a large scale. Contemporary European observers, including the Russian officer Alexander Bulatovich, described very heavy population loss in the conquered south, and Oromo nationalist historians have argued that the campaigns killed or displaced a large share of the southern peoples; Ethiopian historians such as Bahru Zewde treat the period primarily as state formation comparable to other nineteenth-century expansions and regard the highest claims as unsupportable. The campaigns coincided with the Great Ethiopian Famine of 1888-92, caused by a rinderpest panzootic that destroyed the cattle herds, which independently killed an estimated third of the population of the north. The historical assessment of Menelik's conquests remains one of the most contested questions in Ethiopian politics.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ethiopia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the conquered southern polities were never enumerated and the scale of their population is disputed as part of a live political argument","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"anti-jewish-pogroms-and-the-may-laws","title":"Anti-Jewish Pogroms, the May Laws and Emigration from the Russian Empire","startYear":1881,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Mobs attacked Jewish communities across the south-western Russian Empire while the imperial government restricted Jewish residence, trade and settlement, driving mass emigration","peopleDisplaced":750000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The May Laws of 1882 barred Jews from settling anew outside towns and shtetls within the Pale of Settlement, restricted their acquisition of rural property and their trading on Sundays and Christian holidays, tightening a residence regime that already confined most of the empire's five million Jews to the western provinces.","lat":50.45,"lon":30.523,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":40.71,"toLon":-74.01,"label":"Pale of Settlement -> New York and the United States","people":null},{"fromLat":55.75,"fromLon":37.62,"toLat":52.23,"toLon":21.01,"label":"Expulsion from Moscow (1891) -> the Pale of Settlement","people":null},{"fromLat":46.48,"fromLon":30.73,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"Odessa -> London's East End","people":null}],"summary":"After the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881, waves of anti-Jewish riots swept the south-western provinces of the Russian Empire, destroying homes, shops and synagogues. The government's response was restrictive rather than protective: the Temporary Regulations of May 1882, known as the May Laws, prohibited new Jewish settlement outside towns within the Pale of Settlement and curtailed Jewish landholding and trade, and were followed by quotas on secondary and higher education and, from 1891, the expulsion of most Jews from Moscow. The combination of periodic violence and legal disability produced the largest Jewish migration in history: hundreds of thousands left in the 1880s and 1890s, with the total passing two million by 1914. The killing associated with pogroms was limited in this period; the great lethal pogroms came after 1903 at Kishinev and during the revolutionary violence of 1905-06 and the civil war.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","sexual violence","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":750000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ukraine","Russia","Poland","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":5215805,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Russian Empire at the 1897 imperial census","baselineYear":1897,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.14379371928206672},{"id":"scramble-for-africa-and-the-berlin-conference","title":"The Scramble for Africa and the Berlin Conference","startYear":1884,"endYear":1900,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"European powers partitioned almost the entire African continent among themselves, formalising the rules of claim at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":25000000,"territoryDesc":"By 1900 the great majority of Africa's roughly 30 million square km was under European claim or control - British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, German, Italian and Spanish - with only Ethiopia and Liberia substantially outside it. Borders were drawn on maps in Europe with little reference to existing polities, and the doctrine of effective occupation adopted at Berlin obliged claimants to establish administration on the ground, driving the conquest campaigns of the following two decades.","lat":0,"lon":20,"flows":[],"summary":"The Berlin West Africa Conference, convened by Bismarck and sitting from November 1884 to February 1885, brought fourteen states together to settle rival claims in the Congo basin. Its General Act declared the Congo basin neutral, guaranteed free trade and navigation on the Congo and the Niger, prohibited the slave trade in the region, and set out the conditions on which European claims to African coasts would be recognised. Britannica records that although colonisation had already begun, its pace greatly accelerated after the conference. The partition that followed was carried out by treaty with African rulers, by concession company, and by military conquest - against the Asante, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Mahdist state in Sudan, the Ndebele, Dahomey, Samori Ture's empire and many others - and left almost the whole continent under European claim by 1900. The conference is often described as having divided Africa; more precisely, it set the rules by which the powers agreed to recognise each other's divisions.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Dem. Rep. Congo"],"baselinePop":130000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the African continent at the close of the partition","baselineYear":1900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"congo-free-state","title":"The Congo Free State and the Rubber Regime","startYear":1885,"endYear":1908,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Leopold II of Belgium held the Congo basin as a personal possession and extracted rubber and ivory through forced labour enforced by the Force Publique and concession company militias","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":2340000,"territoryDesc":"The Congo Free State covered almost the entire Congo river basin, coextensive with the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo, recognised at the Berlin Conference as Leopold's personal holding rather than a Belgian colony; from 1891-92 the state and its concession companies claimed ownership of all 'vacant' land and its produce, which in practice meant the wild rubber on which the population depended for nothing and the state for everything.","lat":-4.322,"lon":15.308,"flows":[{"fromLat":0.5,"fromLon":20.5,"toLat":-1,"toLon":18,"label":"Flight from rubber districts into the forest and across the river","people":null}],"summary":"Leopold II obtained international recognition of the Congo Free State in 1885 and from the early 1890s converted it into an extraction economy based on wild rubber. Quotas were imposed on villages and enforced by the Force Publique and by armed sentries employed by concession companies: hostages were taken, villages burned, and - as the CEPR summary of the economic-history literature records - sentries were required to produce a human hand for every cartridge fired, to prevent ammunition being used for hunting. Edmund Morel publicised the system from the shipping records, and Roger Casement's consular report of 1904 confirmed the accusations; the Congo Reform Association that the two founded is often described as the first mass human rights organisation. A commission of inquiry appointed by Leopold reported in 1905, and under pressure from Belgium, Britain, the United States, France and Germany the Belgian state annexed the territory in 1908, paying Leopold substantial compensation. The regime lasted about fourteen years in its most intense form and its effects on wealth, health and institutions in the former concession areas are measurable more than a century later.","deathsLow":1500000,"deathsHigh":10000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","mass killing","torture","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":14040000,"_deaths":5750000,"countries":["Dem. Rep. Congo"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Congo basin at the founding of the Congo Free State","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"belgian-congo-compulsory-cultivation-and-labour","rel":"continues-as","note":"The Free State's upper death bound (about ten million, Hochschild's figure) is a backward projection of population loss that some summaries date 1880-1920, so it may include early Belgian-rule years. The Belgian Congo entry carries no death figure, so nothing is double-counted now. If a 1908-20 mortality figure is ever added to the Belgian Congo entry, it must be reconciled with this bound."}]},{"id":"mahdist-state-sudan-omdurman-and-famine","title":"The Mahdist State in Sudan: Forced Migration to Omdurman and the Famine of 1889","startYear":1885,"endYear":1898,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Khalifa Abdallahi's Mahdist state moved western Sudanese tribes to the capital, deported opponents and requisitioned grain during a catastrophic famine","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Mahdist state held most of the former Turco-Egyptian Sudan from Dongola to the Ethiopian marches","lat":15.64,"lon":32.48,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.18,"fromLon":30.22,"toLat":15.64,"toLon":32.48,"label":"Baqqara of Kordofan and Darfur ordered to Omdurman","people":null}],"summary":"After the fall of Khartoum in 1885 and the Mahdi's death, the Khalifa Abdallahi consolidated power by ordering the migration (hijra) of his own Ta'aisha kinsmen and other western tribes to the new capital at Omdurman, moving whole communities several hundred miles and settling them as a garrison population. Tribes that resisted were attacked and deported, and grain was requisitioned for the capital and the armies. Between 1888 and 1892 Sudan suffered a famine remembered as sanat sitta, the year six, caused by drought, locusts, cattle disease and the disruption and requisitioning of agriculture; contemporaries described mass death and depopulated districts. Anglo-Egyptian writers after the reconquest claimed Sudan's population fell from around 8 million to 2 or 3 million under Mahdist rule, a claim later historians including Holt and Daly regard as propaganda built on invented baselines, though they accept the losses were severe. The state was destroyed by the Anglo-Egyptian campaign of 1896-98, in which some 11,000 Mahdist fighters were killed at Omdurman in a single morning.","deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":600000,"countries":["Sudan"],"baselinePop":7000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Sudan at the start of the Mahdist state","baselineYear":1885,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.02857142857142857},{"id":"abdur-rahman-hazarajat-and-northern-settlement","title":"Abdur Rahman Khan's Subjugation of the Hazarajat and the Pashtun Settlement of Northern Afghanistan","startYear":1888,"endYear":1901,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Afghan emir Abdur Rahman Khan conquered the Hazarajat and Kafiristan, enslaved and displaced their populations and moved Pashtun communities north","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Hazarajat and Kafiristan were brought under direct Kabul control; land in the Hazarajat and in the northern provinces was granted to Pashtun settlers and nomads","lat":34.82,"lon":67.82,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.82,"fromLon":67.82,"toLat":30.18,"toLon":66.98,"label":"Hazara refugees to Quetta in British India","people":null},{"fromLat":33.6,"fromLon":69.2,"toLat":36.71,"toLon":67.11,"label":"Ghilzai Pashtuns transferred to the northern provinces","people":null}],"summary":"Abdur Rahman Khan, installed as emir in 1880, spent two decades imposing central authority on regions that had governed themselves. Between 1891 and 1893 his forces, reinforced by tribal militias promised land and captives and operating under a declaration of jihad against the Shia Hazaras, fought a war in the Hazarajat in which villages were destroyed, men killed, women and children sold in slave markets, and land redistributed to Pashtun tribes; survivors fled to Quetta in British India and to Mashhad in Iran, where their descendants remain. In 1895-96 the emir conquered Kafiristan, converted its population by force and renamed it Nuristan. He also carried out the naqlin, the transfer of Ghilzai Pashtun families to the Uzbek and Turkmen lands north of the Hindu Kush, to hold the frontier and dilute non-Pashtun majorities, a policy whose effects still shape northern Afghanistan's demography. Hazara organisations describe the campaigns as genocide; the term is contested among historians, some of whom emphasise the campaigns' political and fiscal aims and the absence of measurable population data.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Afghanistan","Pakistan"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Hazara population of central Afghanistan before Abdur Rahman Khan's campaigns","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"hamidian-massacres","title":"The Hamidian Massacres of the Armenians","startYear":1894,"endYear":1896,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Ottoman troops, Hamidiye irregulars and urban mobs killed Armenians across the eastern Anatolian provinces and in Constantinople during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.159,"lon":38.792,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.75,"fromLon":41.28,"toLat":40.18,"toLon":44.51,"label":"Eastern Anatolia -> Russian Armenia and the Caucasus","people":null},{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":40.71,"toLon":-74.01,"label":"Constantinople -> emigration to the United States","people":null}],"summary":"The killings began in the Sasun district in the summer of 1894, when troops and Kurdish irregulars suppressed resistance to double taxation, and spread after Armenian political demonstrations in Constantinople in September 1895 were broken up with violence. Through the autumn of 1895 massacres moved south and east from Trebizond across the Armenian provinces; the worst single episode was at Urfa, where the Armenian National Institute records approximately 3,000 people burned in the cathedral. A further round followed the seizure of the Ottoman Bank by Armenian revolutionaries in August 1896, in which five to six thousand people were killed in Constantinople over three days. Estimates of the total dead range from about 80,000 to 300,000; the Armenian National Institute gives 100,000 to 300,000 and the EBSCO summary reports that Abdulhamid II is said to have killed more than 100,000. Plunder was systematic, forced conversions were widespread, and the events are widely treated in Armenian and Western scholarship as a precursor to the deportations and killings of 1915.","deathsLow":80000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","cultural or religious destruction","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":152000,"_deaths":190000,"countries":["Turkey","Armenia","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire before the massacres","baselineYear":1894,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"japanese-conquest-of-taiwan-1895-1896","title":"Japan's Conquest of Taiwan and the Yunlin Massacre","startYear":1895,"endYear":1896,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Imperial Japanese forces conquered Taiwan and Penghu after their cession by Qing China, crushing the Republic of Formosa and local militias and then suppressing rural resistance with village burnings and killings","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":36000,"territoryDesc":"Taiwan and the Penghu (Pescadores) Islands, ceded by the Qing under the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 17 April 1895 and occupied by Japanese forces between May and November 1895","lat":24.08,"lon":120.54,"flows":[],"summary":"Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki of April 1895, which ended the First Sino-Japanese War, Qing China ceded Taiwan and Penghu to Japan. Local elites proclaimed a Republic of Formosa on 23 May; Japanese troops landed on 29 May, took Taipei in early June and, against resistance borne largely by local volunteer militias, advanced south through Hsinchu, Changhua and Chiayi until Tainan fell on 21 October and the Governor-General declared the island pacified on 18 November (Japan Center for Asian Historical Records). Japan's own losses were overwhelmingly to disease: Takekoshi's 1907 account gives 164 killed in battle and 4,642 dead of disease in Formosa, and says about 7,000 Chinese and Formosan dead were found on the field. Armed resistance resumed almost at once: Takekoshi records some five or six hundred Hakka insurgents shot in the south in late 1895 and several thousand killed when risings in the north were put down in early 1896. In June 1896, after Japanese defeats at Dapingding in the Yunlin hills, troops and police burned villages and killed residents across the Douliu area without distinguishing civilians from fighters; the colonial gazetteer counts 4,947 households burned in 55 settlements. Reports in The China Mail, The Times and other papers brought international criticism, compensation was paid in the Emperor's name, and the Yunlin sub-prefect Matsumura Yūnoshin was dismissed, though reinstated the following year (Taipei Times). Japan held Taiwan until 1945.","deathsLow":7000,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"_mag":216000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Taiwan"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"weyler-reconcentracion-cuba","title":"Weyler's Reconcentracion in Cuba","startYear":1896,"endYear":1898,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Spanish captain-general Valeriano Weyler ordered the rural population of Cuba into fortified towns to deny support to the independence insurgency","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The order applied first to Pinar del Rio and later to most of the island; rural districts were declared free-fire zones and crops and livestock outside the fortified lines destroyed.","lat":23.11,"lon":-82.37,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.42,"fromLon":-83.7,"toLat":23.11,"toLon":-82.37,"label":"Rural population of Pinar del Rio concentrated into garrisoned towns","people":null}],"summary":"Appointed captain-general in February 1896 to suppress the Cuban war of independence, Valeriano Weyler issued a series of reconcentracion orders requiring the rural population to move into fortified towns within a fixed period, on pain of being treated as insurgents; crops and livestock outside the lines were destroyed to deny the rebels supply. The towns had no capacity to feed or house the influx, and the concentrated population died in very large numbers of hunger, dysentery, yellow fever and smallpox. Most estimates put deaths at 150,000-170,000, or roughly a tenth of the island's population, over about two years. American newspapers made the camps a central justification for intervention in 1898, and the policy became the template later applied by the British in South Africa and the United States in the Philippines — both already in the atlas, which had no entry for the Cuban original. Weyler was recalled in October 1897 and the orders rescinded; he was never prosecuted and remained a senior figure in Spain.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":170000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":160000,"countries":["Cuba"],"baselinePop":1800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cuba at the outbreak of the 1895 war of independence","baselineYear":1895,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.2222222222222222},{"id":"philippine-american-war-reconcentration","title":"Reconcentration in the Philippine-American War","startYear":1899,"endYear":1902,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"United States Army commanders, notably Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell in Batangas and Laguna, ordered rural populations into guarded 'protected zones' and destroyed crops, livestock and dwellings outside them","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Everything outside the zones in Batangas and Laguna was treated as hostile country: standing crops, rice stores, draft animals and houses were burned or confiscated to deny support to Filipino forces.","lat":13.756,"lon":121.058,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.95,"fromLon":121.16,"toLat":13.756,"toLon":121.058,"label":"Rural barrios of Batangas -> guarded zones in the town centres","people":300000}],"summary":"After conventional Filipino resistance collapsed, US commanders adopted the reconcentration method that Spain had used in Cuba, ordering rural inhabitants into guarded zones around garrison towns and treating the emptied countryside as a free-fire and free-forage area. The most systematic application was Bell's campaign in Batangas and Laguna from December 1901, which May estimates confined about 300,000 people. Crowding, poor sanitation and the destruction of food stocks produced epidemics of malaria, dysentery, typhoid and cholera; parish burial registers in Lipa and Batangas town show mortality several times the pre-concentration norm. The US Office of the Historian states that as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died in the war as a whole from fighting, epidemics and food shortages. The policy, together with the killings that followed the Balangiga attack on Samar, was the subject of a US Senate inquiry and of courts-martial in 1902.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","summary execution","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":150000,"countries":["Philippines"],"baselinePop":406321,"baselineWhat":"The population of Batangas and Laguna provinces, where General J. Franklin Bell's reconcentration order applied most systematically, at the 1903 census","baselineYear":1903,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.7383325006583464},{"id":"boxer-war-and-russian-occupation-of-manchuria","title":"The Boxer War, the Amur Massacres and the Russian Occupation of Manchuria","startYear":1900,"endYear":1905,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Russian troops and Cossacks expelled and drowned the Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk and the Amur left bank and occupied Manchuria; the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing and imposed the Boxer Protocol on the Qing","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Russia occupied the whole of Manchuria from 1900 and did not withdraw as promised, a refusal that precipitated the Russo-Japanese War; the Qing enclave of the Sixty-Four Villages on the left bank of the Amur, guaranteed by the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, was destroyed and its inhabitants expelled, ending Chinese habitation there.","lat":50.28,"lon":127.54,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.28,"fromLon":127.54,"toLat":49.83,"toLon":127.52,"label":"Blagoveshchensk and the Sixty-Four Villages -> forced crossing of the Amur into China","people":null}],"summary":"The Boxer rising and the Qing court's declaration of war on the powers in 1900 brought an Eight-Nation expedition to Beijing and a Russian invasion of Manchuria. In early July 1900 the military governor of the Amur province, General Gribskii, ordered the removal of the Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk; the Chinese were marched to the river and driven into it by Cossacks who fired on those who hesitated, and, as the Smith College study records, most drowned in three successive operations. Russian Cossacks and settlers then attacked and burned the villages of the Qing enclave on the left bank, ending Chinese settlement there. The Boxer Protocol of September 1901 imposed a vast indemnity on China, permitted foreign garrisons and required the execution or punishment of officials, and the occupying armies looted Beijing and its palaces. Russia retained Manchuria after the protocol, and the territory then became the battlefield of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, after which the southern part passed into Japanese control.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":7000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":5000,"countries":["Russia","China"],"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk and the Sixty-Four Villages East of the Amur, the communities cleared in July 1900","baselineYear":1900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.75},{"id":"french-africa-indigenat-and-travail-force","title":"The Indigenat, Forced Labour and Conscription in French West and Equatorial Africa","startYear":1900,"endYear":1946,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The French colonial administration conscripted African men for military service and public works and punished evasion under the indigenat code","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":14.69,"lon":-17.44,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.61,"fromLon":20.94,"toLat":-4.79,"toLon":11.85,"label":"Labour requisitioned from Oubangui-Chari and Chad to the Congo-Ocean railway","people":null},{"fromLat":12.37,"fromLon":-1.53,"toLat":48.86,"toLon":2.35,"label":"Tirailleurs conscripted for service in France","people":null}],"summary":"Across French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa the indigenat, a summary disciplinary code applied to colonial subjects, underpinned a system of unpaid prestation labour, forced crop cultivation and requisition for public works. The largest single project, the Congo-Ocean railway from Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire (1921-34), drew workers by force from across Equatorial Africa; Britannica records 15,000-20,000 African deaths and Stanford historian J. P. Daughton puts the toll at at least 20,000, from disease, exhaustion and violence. Military conscription for the two world wars removed roughly 200,000 men in each conflict, and recruitment drives helped provoke the Volta-Bani war of 1915-16, one of the largest anti-colonial revolts in French Africa, suppressed with heavy loss of life. Whole communities fled across borders to British territory to avoid recruiters, a movement colonial officials recorded with alarm. Forced labour was abolished in April 1946 by the law carried by Felix Houphouet-Boigny, and the indigenat was ended the same year.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":60000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":36000,"_deaths":45000,"countries":["Senegal","Central African Rep.","Congo","Burkina Faso","France"],"baselinePop":18000000,"baselineWhat":"The African population of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"second-boer-war-concentration-camps","title":"The Second Boer War: Farm Burning and the Concentration Camps","startYear":1900,"endYear":1902,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"British forces under Lords Roberts and Kitchener burned Boer farms and interned Boer civilians and African labourers in fenced camps in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cape Colony and Natal","peopleDisplaced":270000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kitchener's scorched-earth policy destroyed some 30,000 farmsteads and several small towns across the two Boer republics, together with crops and livestock, and the country was divided by blockhouse lines; the republics were annexed as the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies.","lat":-29.12,"lon":26.21,"flows":[{"fromLat":-26.2,"fromLon":28.05,"toLat":-29.12,"toLon":26.21,"label":"Burned farms of the Transvaal and Orange Free State -> camps at Bloemfontein and elsewhere","people":110000}],"summary":"From 1900 the British army answered Boer guerrilla warfare by burning farms and removing the civilian population that supported the commandos into fenced camps served by the railway lines. The National Archives records forty-five camps for Boer internees and sixty-four separate camps for black Africans, many of whom had worked on Boer farms and were held under worse conditions and set to labour. Overcrowding, poor rations, contaminated water and epidemics of measles, typhoid and dysentery killed tens of thousands, most of them children. Emily Hobhouse's 1901 report and the subsequent Fawcett Commission forced improvements and made the camps a scandal in Britain. The camps are widely treated as an early instance of the mass internment of a civilian population by a modern state, though they were not established with the purpose of killing.","deathsLow":34000,"deathsHigh":48000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":270000,"_deaths":41000,"countries":["South Africa"],"baselinePop":320000,"baselineWhat":"The white republican population of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State at the outbreak of war in 1899","baselineYear":1899,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.84375},{"id":"yaqui-deportations-to-yucatan","title":"The Deportation of the Yaqui to Yucatan","startYear":1900,"endYear":1910,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The government of Porfirio Diaz and the Sonoran state authorities deported Yaqui families from the Yaqui river valley to henequen plantations in Yucatan and to Oaxaca, and opened their land to settlers and irrigation companies","peopleDisplaced":10000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The fertile bottomlands of the Yaqui river in southern Sonora, which the Yaqui had defended against Spanish and Mexican claims since the seventeenth century, were surveyed, sold to companies and settlers and brought under irrigation as the population was removed; some land was returned when President Lazaro Cardenas created a Yaqui zone in 1937.","lat":27.64,"lon":-110.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":27.64,"fromLon":-110.3,"toLat":20.97,"toLon":-89.62,"label":"Yaqui valley, Sonora -> henequen plantations of Yucatan","people":null},{"fromLat":27.64,"fromLon":-110.3,"toLat":32.22,"toLon":-110.97,"label":"Flight north across the border to Arizona","people":null}],"summary":"After decades of war over the Yaqui river lands, the Diaz government adopted a policy of removing the Yaqui population altogether. Families were rounded up in Sonora, marched or shipped to San Marcos and Veracruz and sent on to Yucatan, where they were sold to henequen planters at a fixed price per head and worked under conditions that contemporaries described as slavery; smaller numbers went to sugar estates in Oaxaca and Morelos. Encyclopedia.com records approximately 8,000 to 15,000 of some 30,000 Yaqui deported between 1902 and 1908. Mortality on the journey and on the plantations was very high, and few returned. Others fled to Arizona, where refugee Yaqui communities were established, or continued armed resistance from the Bacatete mountains, which persisted into the 1920s. The traffic was exposed internationally by John Kenneth Turner in 1910 and was one of the abuses that discredited the Diaz regime; deportations ended with the revolution, and the survivors' descendants were among those who returned to Sonora in the following decades.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":8000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10000,"_deaths":5500,"countries":["Mexico","United States of America"],"baselinePop":30000,"baselineWhat":"The Yaqui population of the Yaqui river valley and the surrounding Sonoran towns around 1900","baselineYear":1900,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3333333333333333},{"id":"queensland-deportation-of-pacific-islanders","title":"The Deportation of Pacific Islanders from Queensland under the White Australia Policy","startYear":1901,"endYear":1908,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The new Commonwealth of Australia ended Pacific Islander labour recruitment and deported most of the Islanders living in Queensland","peopleDisplaced":7500,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-19.26,"lon":146.82,"flows":[{"fromLat":-19.26,"fromLon":146.82,"toLat":-17.74,"toLon":168.31,"label":"Deportations to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu)","people":null},{"fromLat":-19.26,"fromLon":146.82,"toLat":-9.43,"toLon":159.95,"label":"Deportations to the Solomon Islands","people":null}],"summary":"One of the first acts of the Australian federal parliament in 1901 was the Pacific Island Labourers Act, which prohibited further recruitment of Islanders after 1904 and required those in Australia to be deported after 1906, part of the legislative package known as the White Australia policy. Most of those affected were ni-Vanuatu and Solomon Islanders who had been recruited, sometimes by deception or force, for the Queensland sugar industry; some had lived in Australia for thirty years, had married and had children born in the colony. About 7,000 to 7,500 were removed on chartered ships between 1906 and 1908, in some cases landed on islands other than their own, where returnees without kin or language faced real danger; a campaign by churches and Islander petitioners secured exemptions for around 1,600-2,500. Those who stayed became the Australian South Sea Islander community, which the Commonwealth formally recognised as a distinct cultural group in 1994 and Queensland in 2000. The recruitment side of this history is covered by the atlas's entry on the Pacific labour trade; this entry concerns the state expulsion that ended it.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":7500,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia","Vanuatu","Solomon Is."],"baselinePop":9300,"baselineWhat":"The Pacific Islanders resident in Queensland at Federation","baselineYear":1901,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8064516129032258,"related":[{"id":"pacific-labour-trade-and-blackbirding","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":7500,"note":"The roughly 7,500 people deported in 1906-08 had been brought to Queensland under the labour trade and are among its 62,000 arrivals; the deportation is a second, separate movement of the same people, recorded in its own entry."}]},{"id":"herero-and-nama-genocide","title":"The Herero and Nama Genocide in German South West Africa","startYear":1904,"endYear":1908,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The German colonial army under Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha drove Herero communities into the Omaheke desert, issued an extermination proclamation, and held Herero and Nama survivors in labour and death camps while expropriating their land and cattle","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Herero and Nama land and cattle were confiscated by decree in 1905-07 and redistributed to German settlers and companies; the surviving population was barred from owning cattle or land and placed under pass laws, a dispossession whose effects on land ownership in Namibia persist.","lat":-20.52,"lon":17.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":-20.52,"fromLon":17.23,"toLat":-21.3,"toLon":21,"label":"Waterberg -> flight east into the Omaheke sandveld and Bechuanaland","people":null},{"fromLat":-22.57,"fromLon":17.08,"toLat":-26.65,"toLon":15.15,"label":"Nama prisoners -> Shark Island camp, Luederitz","people":null}],"summary":"After Herero communities rose against land seizure and settler abuses in January 1904, German forces defeated them at the Waterberg in August and pursued survivors into the waterless Omaheke, sealing the water holes. On 2 October 1904 von Trotha issued a proclamation ordering that Herero found in German territory be fired upon; a similar campaign followed against the Nama from 1905. Survivors were held in camps, the worst of them on Shark Island at Luederitz, where mortality was extreme, and were set to forced labour on railways, farms and in mines. On 28 May 2021 the German government, in a joint declaration with Namibia, stated that it would officially call the events 'what they were from today's perspective: a genocide', and pledged 1.1 billion euros over thirty years for reconstruction and development, while stating that legal claims to compensation cannot be derived from the declaration. Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities have rejected the declaration's terms and its exclusion of their representatives from the negotiations.","deathsLow":34000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","starvation & siege","forced labour","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":67000,"countries":["Namibia","Botswana"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Herero and Nama populations of German South West Africa before the 1904 war","baselineYear":1904,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"maji-maji-rebellion-suppression","title":"The Maji Maji Rebellion and its Suppression in German East Africa","startYear":1905,"endYear":1907,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"German colonial forces and their auxiliaries suppressed a mass rising in southern German East Africa by destroying villages, crops and food stores across the southern highlands and the Rufiji and Kilombero valleys","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The rising was provoked by forced cotton cultivation, head tax and labour demands; its defeat consolidated German control of the southern districts and was followed by administrative reforms under Governor Rechenberg, while much of the affected country lost its population and its cultivation for years.","lat":-10.68,"lon":35.65,"flows":[],"summary":"From July 1905 a broad rising spread across southern German East Africa, drawing together many peoples around the maji water medicine that fighters believed would turn bullets to water. German forces, heavily outgunned in weapons if not in numbers, met the rising with machine guns and then with a deliberate scorched-earth campaign that destroyed villages, standing crops and grain stores across the affected districts. The resulting famine, rather than combat, caused most of the deaths and continued after the fighting ended in August 1907. Encyclopedia.com summarises the death toll at roughly 250,000, and the campaign is generally treated as one of the deadliest colonial counter-insurgencies in Africa. Germany and Tanzania have since 2017 discussed the return of remains and objects taken during the period, but there has been no formal determination equivalent to the 2021 Namibian declaration.","deathsLow":75000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":187500,"countries":["Tanzania"],"baselinePop":7500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of German East Africa at the time of the rising, of which the southern districts affected held a substantial minority","baselineYear":1905,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"belgian-congo-compulsory-cultivation-and-labour","title":"Compulsory Cultivation, Portage and Labour Recruitment in the Belgian Congo","startYear":1908,"endYear":1960,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Belgian colonial state and concession companies compelled Congolese to grow set crops, work in mines and move their villages to roads and cordons","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-4.32,"lon":15.31,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.14,"fromLon":23.6,"toLat":-11.66,"toLon":27.48,"label":"Labour recruitment from Kasai to the Katanga mines","people":null}],"summary":"Belgium annexed the Congo Free State in 1908 after the rubber atrocities, but retained compulsion in altered form: the cultures obligatoires required peasants to plant fixed acreages of cotton, rice or palm; the head tax forced entry into the cash economy; and recruitment agencies supplied labour to the Katanga copper mines and Kasai diamond fields under penal contracts. Administrators regrouped villages along roads for tax collection and medical control, and the sleeping-sickness campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s created cordons, screening camps and lazarets that moved and confined populations. Resistance was punished by force, most severely in the Pende revolt of 1931 in Kwilu, suppressed with several hundred deaths. During the Second World War the effort de guerre intensified quotas for copper, rubber and palm oil and lengthened compulsory labour days. Belgium abolished most compulsory cultivation only in the 1950s; the system is far less studied than the Free State period that preceded it.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Dem. Rep. Congo"],"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Belgian Congo at the first colony-wide count","baselineYear":1924,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"congo-free-state","rel":"continues-from","note":"The Free State's upper death bound (about ten million, Hochschild's figure) is a backward projection of population loss that some summaries date 1880-1920, so it may include early Belgian-rule years. The Belgian Congo entry carries no death figure, so nothing is double-counted now. If a 1908-20 mortality figure is ever added to the Belgian Congo entry, it must be reconciled with this bound."}]},{"id":"japanese-annexation-of-korea","title":"Japan's Annexation of Korea and the Colonial Land Survey","startYear":1910,"endYear":1926,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Japan annexed Korea by treaty in August 1910 and its Government-General carried out a cadastral land survey that transferred large areas to the state, to the Oriental Development Company and to Japanese settlers, displacing Korean cultivators","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":220847,"territoryDesc":"The whole of Korea, about 220,000 square kilometres, was annexed and administered by a Government-General under military rule until 1919. The land-survey ordinance required registration of holdings and voided the rights of those who failed to register or whose title was customary or communal; village and clan lands were expropriated as no individual could claim them, and much of the confiscated land was sold cheaply to Japanese buyers and to the Oriental Development Company.","lat":37.57,"lon":126.98,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.16,"fromLon":128.07,"toLat":34.69,"toLon":135.5,"label":"Dispossessed Korean cultivators -> labour migration to Osaka and industrial Japan","people":null},{"fromLat":41.79,"fromLon":129.78,"toLat":42.91,"toLon":129.51,"label":"Northern Korea -> settlement in Manchuria (Jiandao)","people":null}],"summary":"Japan established a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it by the treaty of 22 August 1910, abolishing the Korean state and governing through a Government-General under a military governor. Between 1912 and 1918 a cadastral survey required all landholders to register title; customary, communal and clan holdings, and those of cultivators who did not or could not register, were voided, and Britannica records that many farmers were thereby deprived of their land, much of which was sold cheaply to Japanese purchasers. The dispossessed moved to marginal hill cultivation or emigrated to Manchuria and to industrial Japan, forming the communities from which the present Korean populations of those places descend. The March First Movement of 1919 was suppressed with several thousand deaths and mass arrests, after which Japan replaced military rule with a nominally civil 'cultural policy'. Rice was exported to Japan in growing quantities through the 1920s while Korean per capita consumption fell.","deathsLow":500,"deathsHigh":7500,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1325082,"_deaths":4000,"countries":["South Korea","Japan","North Korea","China"],"baselinePop":16000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Korea at the time of the Japanese annexation","baselineYear":1910,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0375},{"id":"mexican-revolution-displacement","title":"The Mexican Revolution: Displacement and Flight to the United States","startYear":1910,"endYear":1920,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The contending armies and factions of the Mexican Revolution, and the federal forces before them, drove civilians from the countryside and across the northern border; the United States admitted large numbers as refugees and briefly interned others","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.43,"lon":-99.13,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.63,"fromLon":-106.07,"toLat":31.76,"toLon":-106.49,"label":"Chihuahua -> El Paso and the United States border","people":null},{"fromLat":18.68,"fromLon":-99.1,"toLat":19.43,"toLon":-99.13,"label":"Morelos villages depopulated in the Zapatista war -> Mexico City and elsewhere","people":null}],"summary":"The decade of revolution that followed the fall of Porfirio Diaz in 1911 was fought largely in the countryside and destroyed the security of rural populations across northern and central Mexico. Federal and revolutionary armies alike conscripted men, requisitioned crops and livestock, burned villages and, in Morelos, concentrated the rural population under General Victoriano Huerta's commanders in an effort to deny support to the Zapatistas. Civilians left for the cities, for the mining towns and in very large numbers across the northern border, where United States immigration policy was permissive until the 1920s and where the Mexican-descended population of the south-west grew rapidly. McCaa's reconstruction puts the total demographic cost of the revolution at about 2.1 million, comprising roughly 1.4 million excess deaths, 550,000 lost births and under 400,000 net emigration; earlier writers had attributed a far larger share of the population shortfall to migration. The revolution also produced the 1917 constitution, whose Article 27 provided the legal basis for the agrarian redistribution of the following decades.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":2000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":1500000,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":15160369,"baselineWhat":"The population of Mexico at the 1910 census, the last before the Revolution","baselineYear":1910,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.026384582063932613},{"id":"italian-conquest-of-libya","title":"The Italian Conquest of Libya and the Deportation of Libyans to Italy","startYear":1911,"endYear":1926,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Italy invaded the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911, carried out mass reprisals at Tripoli, deported Libyan notables and captives to penal islands in Italy, and from 1923 fought a reconquest of the interior","peopleDisplaced":5000,"territoryKm2":1759540,"territoryDesc":"Italy annexed Tripolitania and Cyrenaica by decree in November 1911, a claim the Ottoman Empire conceded at Ouchy in 1912; effective Italian control was limited to the coast until the reconquest campaigns launched in 1923, which by 1926 had taken the Jebel and Fezzan and set the stage for the concentration camps of Cyrenaica after 1929.","lat":32.89,"lon":13.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.89,"fromLon":13.19,"toLat":38.71,"toLon":13.18,"label":"Tripoli -> deportation to the penal island of Ustica","people":900},{"fromLat":32.12,"fromLon":20.07,"toLat":42.12,"toLon":15.5,"label":"Cyrenaica -> deportation to the Tremiti islands","people":1366}],"summary":"Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire in September 1911 and landed at Tripoli, Benghazi and other coastal points. Rachel Simon, writing in 1914-1918-Online, records that after attacks on Italian forces on 23-26 October 1911 Italy punished the local population severely, killing over 4,000. Alongside the reprisals, Italy deported Libyan notables, suspected resisters and their families to penal islands off the Italian coast: Di Pasquale's study records 900 Libyans on Ustica of whom 127 died, about 17 percent, and 1,366 on the Tremiti islands of whom 437 died, about a third, from cholera, cold and overcrowding. Italian control was largely confined to the coastal towns until the Fascist government launched the reconquest of the interior from 1923, a campaign of columns, aerial bombing and the destruction of encampments that continued past 1926 and led to the mass internment of the Cyrenaican population in camps from 1929, outside the period covered here.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10557240,"_deaths":55000,"countries":["Libya","Malta","Vatican"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica at the Italian invasion","baselineYear":1911,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.005},{"id":"balkan-wars-1912-1913","title":"The Balkan Wars and their Reciprocal Expulsions","startYear":1912,"endYear":1913,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The armies of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, and Ottoman forces, drove out and killed civilians of the opposing religion or nationality across Macedonia, Thrace, Kosovo and Epirus as the frontiers moved","peopleDisplaced":540000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territory apart from eastern Thrace and Edirne; Macedonia was partitioned between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria, Albania became independent, and the new borders cut across settlement patterns that had been mixed for centuries.","lat":40.64,"lon":22.94,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.02,"fromLon":21.34,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Muslim refugees from Macedonia and Thrace -> Ottoman Istanbul and Anatolia","people":400000},{"fromLat":40.94,"fromLon":24.41,"toLat":42.7,"toLon":23.32,"label":"Bulgarians from Aegean Macedonia and Thrace -> Bulgaria","people":null}],"summary":"The Balkan League's victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and the allies' war among themselves in 1913 redrew the map of south-eastern Europe and were accompanied by systematic violence against civilians identified with the losing side. The Carnegie Endowment sent an international commission which reported in 1914 on massacres, village burning and forced conversion by all the belligerents. Pekesen records about 400,000 Muslim refugees moving into Ottoman territory after the first war and roughly 135,000 more after the second, while Christian populations moved in the opposite direction. A Bulgarian-Ottoman convention annexed to the 1913 Treaty of Constantinople provided for a limited exchange of populations along the new border, the first such instrument in the region. The wars established the practice of moving populations to match frontiers that would be applied on a far larger scale in 1923.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":650000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":540000,"_deaths":400000,"countries":["Greece","Macedonia","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":5500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Ottoman European provinces (Rumelia) lost in 1912-1913, across the vilayets of Salonica, Monastir, Kosovo, Scutari, Janina and Adrianople","baselineYear":1911,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.09818181818181818},{"id":"ikhwan-hijar-settlement-of-the-bedouin","title":"The Ikhwan Hijar: Saudi Settlement of the Bedouin","startYear":1912,"endYear":1930,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Abdulaziz Ibn Saud's state settled bedouin tribes in religious agricultural colonies and used them to conquer central and western Arabia","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Ikhwan forces were central to the Saudi conquest of Hail (1921), the Hijaz including Mecca, Medina and Jeddah (1924-25) and the Asir","lat":26.5,"lon":45.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":26.5,"fromLon":45.35,"toLat":21.29,"toLon":40.41,"label":"Ikhwan forces from the Najd hijar into the Hijaz","people":null}],"summary":"From 1912 Abdulaziz Ibn Saud encouraged and then organised the settlement of nomadic tribes in hijar, agricultural colonies built around wells and a mosque, where Wahhabi missionaries taught a strict doctrine and where the settlers, the Ikhwan, could be mobilised as a standing force. The first and largest was al-Artawiyah; over the following fifteen years between 120 and 200 such settlements were founded. Sedentarisation broke the tribes' seasonal migration and their autonomy, and the Ikhwan became the shock troops of Saudi expansion, taking Hail in 1921 and the Hijaz in 1924-25, where the sack of Taif in September 1924 killed several hundred civilians and prompted flight from Mecca. When Ibn Saud restrained raiding across the new borders with Iraq and Transjordan, the Ikhwan revolted and were defeated at Sabilla in March 1929, after which their leaders were imprisoned and their settlements disarmed. The hijar system nonetheless established the pattern of settled bedouin communities that persisted in the Saudi state.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Saudi Arabia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"greek-genocide-ottoman-greeks","title":"The Persecution and Deportation of the Ottoman Greeks (the Greek Genocide)","startYear":1913,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Ottoman and later Turkish nationalist authorities expelled Greek populations from eastern Thrace and the Aegean coast, deported Pontic and Anatolian Greeks into the interior and into labour battalions, and destroyed Greek communities in Pontus","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Greek communities that had lived on the Aegean coast, in Cappadocia, in Bithynia and along the Black Sea for millennia were removed; their churches, schools and property were confiscated or destroyed, and the process was completed by the compulsory exchange of 1923.","lat":41.29,"lon":36.33,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.29,"fromLon":36.33,"toLat":39.75,"toLon":37.02,"label":"Pontic Greeks -> deportation marches into the Anatolian interior","people":null},{"fromLat":38.42,"fromLon":27.13,"toLat":39.1,"toLon":26.55,"label":"Aegean littoral -> expulsion to Lesbos, Chios and mainland Greece, 1914","people":150000}],"summary":"From 1913 the Ottoman government pursued a policy of removing Greek populations from strategically sensitive coasts and border districts, beginning with a boycott and then expulsions from eastern Thrace and the Aegean littoral in 1914 in which about 150,000 people crossed to Greece. Greek men of military age were conscripted into unarmed labour battalions where, as Tigran Martirosyan records in 1914-1918-Online, conditions were frequently lethal. From 1916 Pontic Greeks were deported inland in columns comparable to the Armenian deportations, and the fighting of 1919-22 in Pontus and western Anatolia destroyed most of the remaining communities. Greek and diaspora institutions and the International Association of Genocide Scholars characterise the whole sequence as genocide; the Hellenic Parliament established 19 May as a day of remembrance for the genocide of the Greeks of Pontus by Law 2193/1994 and extended commemoration to all Greeks of Asia Minor by Law 2645/1998. Turkey rejects the characterisation and treats the events as part of a reciprocal war between states and communities.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":900000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":600000,"countries":["Turkey","Greece"],"baselinePop":1800000,"baselineWhat":"The Greek Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2777777777777778,"related":[{"id":"burning-of-smyrna-and-anatolian-greek-exodus","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"After the fix, the 1922 flight is counted only in the Smyrna entry, and the 1,000,000 displaced in the genocide entry is replaced by about 775,000 for 1913-18. The remaining overlap is in people, not in counts: survivors of the 1914-18 deportations who fled again in 1922 appear in both entries as two separate displacements. Deaths overlap for 1922 (the Smyrna massacre and the deportation of men inland fall within the genocide entry's 1914-23 death range); the size of that overlap is not separable."},{"id":"lausanne-population-exchange-1923","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The exchange entry's 1.2 million Orthodox Christians are mostly refugees of the 1922 flight, whom the convention retroactively brought under the exchange; per the Mixed Commission only about 189,916 were transferred from Turkey after it took effect. Once the genocide entry is restricted to the 1913-18 expulsions and deportations (see the Smyrna item), the 1922 flight is no longer in its displacement figure. The only remaining overlap is people deported in 1914-18 who later left in 1922-23, a repeat displacement of the same individuals and not a duplicated count."}]},{"id":"natives-land-act-1913","title":"The Natives Land Act of 1913 in South Africa","startYear":1913,"endYear":1926,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Parliament of the Union of South Africa barred Africans from buying or leasing land outside designated reserves and outlawed sharecropping, and white farmers evicted African tenant families across the Orange Free State and the Transvaal","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Act scheduled about 7 percent of the land area of the Union as areas in which Africans, then roughly two thirds of the population, could acquire land; the remainder was closed to African purchase or lease. The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 raised the scheduled share to about 13.5 percent. The 1913 line became the baseline for later restitution claims in post-apartheid South Africa.","lat":-25.75,"lon":28.19,"flows":[{"fromLat":-28.5,"fromLon":26.5,"toLat":-25.75,"toLon":28.19,"label":"Evicted sharecropping families of the Orange Free State -> reserves, towns and other provinces","people":null}],"summary":"The Natives Land Act, assented to in June 1913, prohibited Africans from buying or leasing land outside scheduled areas amounting to roughly 7 percent of the Union, and specifically outlawed the sharecropping and rent-tenancy arrangements by which many African families farmed on white-owned land. Its anti-squatting provisions were intended to convert independent African cultivators into wage labourers or servants on white farms. Evictions began immediately, most sharply in the Orange Free State, and Sol Plaatje's contemporary account records families and their livestock moving along the roads between provinces in midwinter. The Act did not immediately apply in the Cape, where it conflicted with the qualified franchise, and its full application was worked out over the following decades. It is generally treated as the legal foundation of the reserve system that apartheid later elaborated into the bantustans.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["South Africa"],"baselinePop":4019006,"baselineWhat":"The African population of the Union of South Africa at the 1911 census","baselineYear":1911,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"east-africa-campaign-carriers","title":"The East African Campaign: Conscripted Carriers and Civilian Famine","startYear":1914,"endYear":1918,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"British, German, Belgian and Portuguese forces conscripted African porters for the East African campaign and requisitioned food and livestock across British East Africa, German East Africa, Nyasaland and Mozambique","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"German East Africa was occupied by British, Belgian and Portuguese forces during the campaign and divided after the war under League of Nations mandates: Tanganyika to Britain, Ruanda-Urundi to Belgium, and the Kionga triangle to Portugal.","lat":-6.82,"lon":39.28,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.29,"fromLon":36.82,"toLat":-8.9,"toLon":36,"label":"Recruitment districts of British East Africa and Nyasaland -> campaign lines in German East Africa","people":null}],"summary":"The four-year campaign in East Africa was fought across country without roads or railways, so both sides moved supplies on the heads of conscripted African porters. Recruitment was formally voluntary in places and openly compulsory in others, and men were taken from their farms for long periods, often far from home. Murphy records that no fewer than 95,000 carriers died, about 10 percent of the manpower used, overwhelmingly from dysentery, malaria and exhaustion rather than combat, with the influenza pandemic that reached the region in October 1918 adding heavily to the toll. The removal of adult labour and the requisitioning of food and livestock produced serious famine in parts of German East Africa, Kenya and Nyasaland in 1917-18. Civilian mortality is not reliably known and is usually estimated at several hundred thousand across the region.","deathsLow":95000,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":297500,"countries":["Tanzania","Kenya"],"baselinePop":18000000,"baselineWhat":"The African population of the territories from which carriers were conscripted and food requisitioned","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05555555555555555},{"id":"first-world-war-civilian-internment","title":"The Internment of Enemy Aliens in the First World War","startYear":1914,"endYear":1920,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Canada, Australia, the United States and others interned resident civilians of enemy nationality and other groups judged suspect","peopleDisplaced":800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":54.17,"lon":-4.73,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.51,"fromLon":-0.13,"toLat":54.17,"toLon":-4.73,"label":"London and British cities -> Knockaloe camp, Isle of Man","people":23000},{"fromLat":49.9,"fromLon":-97.14,"toLat":51.18,"toLon":-115.57,"label":"Ukrainian and other Austro-Hungarian subjects in Canada -> internment camps including Castle Mountain and Spirit Lake","people":8579}],"summary":"The First World War produced the first systematic mass internment of civilians by modern states on grounds of nationality. Britain interned over 32,000 German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman civilians, the largest camp being Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, which held over 20,000 men; Germany's civilian detainee population rose to nearly 112,000 by October 1918, including deported Belgian and French civilians. Canada interned 8,579 people under the War Measures Act, the great majority of them Ukrainians and other subjects of Austria-Hungary, and required a further 80,000 to register and report; internees were set to labour in national parks and on railways. Australia interned about 6,890 and deported up to 6,150 in 1919. Naturalised citizens, women and children were caught up in the systems, and many internees lost businesses and homes, with property confiscated or sold under enemy-property legislation. Camps were generally not lethal, but prolonged confinement produced the condition contemporaries called barbed-wire disease. Canada formally acknowledged the injustice of its internment operations and in 2005 established a recognition fund.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":800000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Isle of Man","United Kingdom","Canada"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The resident enemy-alien civilian populations of the belligerent states in 1914","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"german-invasion-and-occupation-of-belgium","title":"The German Invasion and Occupation of Belgium and Northern France","startYear":1914,"endYear":1918,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The German army invaded neutral Belgium and northern France in August 1914, executed civilians during the advance, and from 1916 deported Belgian and French civilians to Germany and to labour battalions behind the front","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Almost all of Belgium and ten departments of northern France were placed under German military government for four years; the invasion route saw the deliberate destruction of Louvain's university library, Dinant, Aarschot and other towns, and the occupied zone was systematically stripped of machinery, livestock and raw materials.","lat":51.22,"lon":4.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.22,"fromLon":4.4,"toLat":51.44,"toLon":5.48,"label":"Antwerp and the Belgian interior -> the Netherlands, October 1914","people":1000000},{"fromLat":51.23,"fromLon":2.92,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"Belgian coast -> Britain","people":200000},{"fromLat":50.63,"fromLon":5.57,"toLat":51.34,"toLon":12.37,"label":"Deportation of Belgian workers to Germany, 1916-17","people":60000}],"summary":"The German invasion of neutral Belgium in August 1914 was accompanied by mass executions of civilians in reprisal for alleged franc-tireur resistance, and by the burning of Louvain, Dinant and other towns; roughly 6,000 Belgian and French civilians were killed in these episodes. More than 1.5 million Belgians fled, most crossing into the Netherlands during the siege of Antwerp in October 1914, and some 600,000 remained abroad for the duration. From October 1916 to February 1917, after voluntary recruitment failed, around 60,000 Belgians were deported to Germany to work in the war economy, a measure abandoned in early 1917 after international protest and practical failure; compulsory labour battalions continued in the occupied zones of France and Belgium. The occupation regime requisitioned food and industrial plant, and Belgium depended for its subsistence on the Commission for Relief in Belgium. The deportations and the 1914 killings were among the principal charges in Allied war-crimes lists at the end of the war.","deathsLow":6000,"deathsHigh":25000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":15500,"countries":["Belgium","Netherlands","United Kingdom","Germany"],"baselinePop":7600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Belgium in 1914","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.19736842105263158},{"id":"japanese-south-seas-mandate-micronesia","title":"Japan's South Seas Mandate and Wartime Displacement in Micronesia","startYear":1914,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"Japan seized Germany's Micronesian colonies, settled them heavily under a League of Nations mandate, and in wartime conscripted, relocated and interned islanders across the western Pacific","peopleDisplaced":1200,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Caroline, Marshall and Northern Mariana Islands, held by Japan from 1914 under a Class C League of Nations mandate from 1920 and administered as the Nan'yo-cho; after 1945 they passed to the United States as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. On Guam, the United States after 1944 condemned a large share of the island's land — by some accounts around two thirds at its peak — for military use.","lat":15.19,"lon":145.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":-0.52,"fromLon":166.93,"toLat":7.45,"toLon":151.85,"label":"Nauruans deported by Japan to Chuuk, 1943","people":1200}],"summary":"Japan occupied Germany's Micronesian possessions in 1914 and administered them from 1920 as a League of Nations mandate, developing sugar, phosphate and fisheries and settling so many Japanese, Okinawan and Korean migrants that by 1939 settlers outnumbered indigenous islanders across the mandate and made up nine tenths of the population of Saipan. Islander land was alienated to settlers and to the colonial administration. During the Pacific War the administration conscripted islanders for labour on airfields and fortifications, moved communities away from military installations, and in 1943 deported about 1,200 Nauruans to Chuuk, where roughly 460 died of starvation and bombing before the survivors were repatriated in January 1946. Neighbouring Guam, a United States territory, was occupied by Japan from December 1941 to 1944 but was never part of the mandate; its occupation, including the internment at Manenggon, is treated in a separate entry. Micronesia was absent from the atlas apart from the Marshall Islands nuclear relocations.","deathsLow":455,"deathsHigh":463,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","mass killing","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1200,"_deaths":459,"countries":["N. Mariana Is.","Nauru","Micronesia"],"baselinePop":50000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous Micronesian population of the islands Japan took over as the South Seas Mandate","baselineYear":1920,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.024},{"id":"russian-empire-wartime-deportations","title":"The Russian Empire's Wartime Deportation of Jews, Germans and Others","startYear":1914,"endYear":1917,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Russian army command deported Jews, ethnic Germans, Poles, Roma and others from the western borderlands and from occupied Galicia into the interior of the empire as suspect populations","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The deportations emptied strips of the western borderlands of populations judged unreliable, and were accompanied by scorched-earth destruction during the retreat of 1915; the Pale of Settlement was effectively broken as Jews expelled from the front zone were permitted to settle in the interior.","lat":52.23,"lon":21.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.69,"fromLon":25.28,"toLat":53.2,"toLon":50.15,"label":"Western borderlands -> deportation into the Russian interior","people":null},{"fromLat":49.84,"fromLon":24.03,"toLat":56.33,"toLon":44,"label":"Occupied Galicia -> deportation to the Volga provinces","people":120000}],"summary":"From the first months of the war the Russian high command treated whole categories of the population of the western borderlands as security risks and ordered their removal. Ethnic Germans were expelled from the Polish provinces in December 1914, Jews were driven from the front zone in large numbers in the spring and summer of 1915 amid hostage-taking and army pogroms, and the Russian occupation administration in Galicia and Bukovina deported civilians including Ukrainian Greek Catholic clergy and Jews into the interior. Gatrell puts German colonists expelled at about 420,000 and Jews displaced at about 600,000. The deportations were carried out at short notice, often with the destruction of property, and combined with voluntary flight to create a refugee population of nearly 5 million by January 1917, which strained the empire's administration and contributed to the political crisis of 1917. One consequence was the effective collapse of the Pale of Settlement, as expelled Jews were permitted to live in interior provinces previously closed to them.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Poland","Lithuania","Russia","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":8000000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish and ethnic German populations of the Russian Empire, concentrated in the western borderlands from which the army deported","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.125},{"id":"sayfo-assyrian-genocide","title":"The Sayfo: The Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Genocide","startYear":1914,"endYear":1920,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Ottoman forces, gendarmes and allied Kurdish tribal irregulars destroyed Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean communities in Hakkari, Tur Abdin, Diyarbekir, Urmia and the Bohtan valleys","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Assyrian tribal districts of Hakkari were emptied and never resettled by their inhabitants; survivors were resettled in British-administered Iraq and in Syria, and the historic monasteries and villages of Tur Abdin lost most of their population.","lat":37.58,"lon":43.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.58,"fromLon":43.74,"toLat":37.55,"toLon":45.07,"label":"Hakkari -> flight to Urmia in Persia, 1915","people":null},{"fromLat":37.55,"fromLon":45.07,"toLat":33.75,"toLon":44.64,"label":"Urmia -> retreat to British lines and the Baquba camp, 1918","people":50000}],"summary":"Alongside the deportation of the Armenians, Ottoman forces and allied tribal irregulars attacked the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of south-eastern Anatolia and north-western Persia from 1914, in events remembered in Syriac as the Sayfo, the sword. The mountain tribes of Hakkari were driven out in 1915 and took refuge around Urmia; the villages of Tur Abdin and the Diyarbekir province were attacked and their inhabitants killed or dispersed. When Russian forces withdrew in 1917-18 the surviving population made a long retreat southward under attack, and about 50,000 were placed by the British in the Baquba camp in Mesopotamia. Britannica states that upwards of 250,000 Assyrians were killed during the First World War. The International Association of Genocide Scholars resolved in December 2007, by 83 percent of voting members, that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks; Turkey rejects that characterisation.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":250000,"_deaths":225000,"countries":["Turkey","Iran","Iraq"],"baselinePop":550000,"baselineWhat":"The Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean population of the Ottoman Empire and the adjoining Persian border districts in 1914","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.45454545454545453},{"id":"armenian-genocide-1915","title":"The Armenian Genocide","startYear":1915,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Ottoman government under the Committee of Union and Progress arrested the Armenian leadership, deported the Armenian population of Anatolia into the Syrian desert, and confiscated its property; killings were carried out by gendarmes, the Special Organisation and irregulars","peopleDisplaced":1200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Armenian property, land, businesses and churches were confiscated under the 'abandoned properties' laws of 1915 and after and redistributed to Muslim settlers, refugees and the state; the historic Armenian population of Anatolia was effectively removed, and Armenian communal and religious buildings were destroyed or converted over the following decades.","lat":39.9,"lon":41.27,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":41.27,"toLat":35.33,"toLon":40.14,"label":"Erzurum and the eastern provinces -> death marches to Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates","people":null},{"fromLat":37.58,"fromLon":36.93,"toLat":36.2,"toLon":37.16,"label":"Cilicia and Maras -> Aleppo transit and the Syrian desert camps","people":null},{"fromLat":39.72,"fromLon":43.05,"toLat":40.18,"toLon":44.51,"label":"Van and Bitlis survivors -> Russian Armenia and Yerevan","people":null}],"summary":"On 24 April 1915 the Ottoman authorities arrested several hundred Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople, and from May the government ordered the deportation of the Armenian population of the eastern provinces, a policy given legal form by the Temporary Law of Deportation of 27 May 1915 and extended over the following months to almost the whole empire. Columns of deportees were marched south through Anatolia to holding camps along the Euphrates around Deir ez-Zor; convoys were robbed, women and children were abducted, and large numbers were killed outright or died of hunger, thirst and disease. Ronald Grigor Suny, writing in 1914-1918-Online, gives a conservative estimate of 600,000 to 1 million killed or dead on the marches; the USHMM states that at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died; the Armenian National Institute and many states use the figure of 1.5 million for the period 1915-1923. Postwar Ottoman courts-martial in 1919-20 convicted leading Unionists in absentia. The Republic of Turkey rejects the characterisation of the events as genocide, describing them as wartime relocation with heavy mortality on all sides, while more than thirty states, the European Parliament, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and, since 2019 and 2021, the United States Congress and President have recognised them as genocide.","deathsLow":600000,"deathsHigh":1500000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1200000,"_deaths":1050000,"countries":["Turkey","Syria","Armenia"],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the genocide","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6},{"id":"great-famine-of-mount-lebanon","title":"The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon and Ottoman Syria","startYear":1915,"endYear":1918,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Allied naval blockade of the eastern Mediterranean, Ottoman requisitioning and a land blockade imposed by the Fourth Army commander Cemal Pasha, and a locust invasion in 1915, together destroyed the food supply of Mount Lebanon and Syria","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.83,"lon":35.65,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.83,"fromLon":35.65,"toLat":33.89,"toLon":35.5,"label":"Mount Lebanon villages -> Beirut and emigration overseas","people":null}],"summary":"From 1915 the population of Mount Lebanon and the Syrian interior faced the combined effect of the Allied blockade of the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman army's requisitioning of grain, pack animals and transport for the Sinai and Palestine fronts, a land blockade of the largely Maronite mountain imposed by Cemal Pasha, and a locust plague that destroyed the 1915 crops across Syria and Palestine. Prices rose beyond reach, relief was obstructed, and mortality was extreme: contemporary and later estimates put deaths in Mount Lebanon at 150,000-200,000, roughly a third of its population, giving the district what is often described as the highest per capita wartime mortality of any bounded territory in the First World War, with a further large toll in the Syrian interior. Another third of the population emigrated. The famine is a central event in modern Lebanese memory and contributed to the case for a separate Lebanese entity under the French Mandate.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":325000,"countries":["Lebanon"],"baselinePop":414000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon on the eve of the First World War","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.4830917874396135},{"id":"serbian-retreat-and-occupation-1915","title":"The Serbian Retreat through Albania and the Occupation of Serbia","startYear":1915,"endYear":1918,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Austro-Hungarian, German and Bulgarian forces overran Serbia in autumn 1915; the Serbian army, government and large numbers of civilians retreated across the Albanian mountains to the Adriatic, and the occupiers interned civilians and requisitioned food","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Serbia was partitioned between Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian military administrations from late 1915 until 1918; the Bulgarian zone in Macedonia and the Morava valley pursued forcible assimilation, closing Serbian schools and churches and suppressing the 1917 Toplica rising with heavy civilian killing.","lat":42.21,"lon":20.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.66,"fromLon":21.16,"toLat":41.32,"toLon":19.82,"label":"Kosovo -> retreat through the Albanian mountains to Durres and Vlore","people":null},{"fromLat":41.32,"fromLon":19.82,"toLat":39.62,"toLon":19.92,"label":"Adriatic ports -> evacuation to Corfu","people":153000}],"summary":"The combined Austro-Hungarian, German and Bulgarian offensive of October 1915 broke the Serbian front, and rather than surrender the army, the government and a large body of civilians withdrew across the mountains of Albania and Montenegro in winter. Bjelajac describes an ordeal in snow without food, clothing or medical supplies which killed large numbers of soldiers and civilians before the survivors reached the Adriatic; about 169,828 people were evacuated by Allied shipping, most to Corfu, where many more died. Serbia itself was placed under Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupation, with internment of civilians in camps, requisitioning, and, in the Bulgarian zone, a campaign of forcible assimilation and the violent suppression of the Toplica rising in 1917. Bjelajac gives Serbian military losses including 79,000-81,000 dead in captivity, and states that civilian casualties of war and occupation have never been fully established, running to hundreds of thousands from epidemics, famine, camps and reprisals. The Serbian male population fell by between 17 and 30 percent across counties by the 1921 census.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":900000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":600000,"countries":["Kosovo","Albania"],"baselinePop":4500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Kingdom of Serbia in 1914, including the territories annexed in the Balkan Wars","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.08888888888888889},{"id":"central-asian-revolt-1916-urkun","title":"The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 and the Urkun","startYear":1916,"endYear":1917,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Russian imperial government conscripted Central Asians for rear labour service, and after the resulting revolt punitive detachments and Russian settlers killed Kyrgyz and Kazakh communities and drove survivors over the Tien Shan passes into Chinese Turkestan","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Land in the Semirechye had already been transferred to Slavic settlers before the revolt, and after its suppression further pasture was confiscated and Kyrgyz communities were pushed off the best land in the Issyk-Kul basin and the Chu valley.","lat":42.65,"lon":77.08,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.65,"fromLon":77.08,"toLat":43.83,"toLon":81.34,"label":"Issyk-Kul and Semirechye -> flight over the Tien Shan passes into Chinese Turkestan","people":null}],"summary":"On 25 June 1916 the Russian government, exempting Central Asians from military service but needing labour, decreed the conscription of men aged 19 to 43 from Turkestan and the Steppe for rear work on the front. The decree fell on populations already resentful at land seizures for Slavic settlement and at wartime requisitions, and revolt spread through Samarkand, Ferghana, the Semirechye and the Kazakh steppe, with attacks on officials and settlers. Punitive detachments and armed settlers responded with massacres, the burning of encampments and the confiscation of livestock. The Kyrgyz of the Issyk-Kul basin fled over the Tien Shan into Chinese territory in the autumn and winter, and large numbers died of cold, hunger and attack on the passes. The Institute for Security and Development Policy states that about 270,000 Central Asians were killed and that the Kyrgyz lost roughly 40 percent of their population. The revolt and the flight remain politically sensitive: Kyrgyzstan marked the centenary in 2016, and Russian commentators criticised the commemoration.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":270000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":185000,"countries":["Kyrgyzstan","China"],"baselinePop":7000000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous Muslim population of Russian Turkestan and the Steppe oblasts subject to the labour conscription decree","baselineYear":1916,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.04285714285714286},{"id":"ottoman-deportation-of-kurds-1916","title":"The Ottoman Deportation of Kurds from Eastern Anatolia","startYear":1916,"endYear":1918,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Ottoman government and army deported Kurdish tribal populations from the eastern provinces westward and southward and dispersed them among Turkish-speaking populations in central and western Anatolia","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The policy was part of a wider programme of demographic engineering in eastern Anatolia in which deported Kurds were to be settled in dispersed groups not exceeding a set proportion of the local Turkish population, while Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus were settled in the emptied districts.","lat":37.91,"lon":40.24,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.74,"fromLon":41.49,"toLat":37.87,"toLon":32.49,"label":"Bitlis, Mus and Erzurum -> deportation to Konya and central Anatolia","people":null}],"summary":"As the Russian army advanced into eastern Anatolia in 1916, the Ottoman government ordered the removal of Kurdish tribal populations from the frontier provinces and their resettlement in the Turkish-speaking interior, where they were to be dispersed in small groups so as to assimilate. The deportations were carried out in winter with little provision, and mortality from cold, hunger and epidemic was heavy; an early estimate by Safrastian held that half of those deported died. The policy formed part of a broader programme of population engineering in the region that also encompassed the Armenian deportations and the settlement of Muslim refugees, and it was resumed in a different form by the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. The episode is poorly documented compared with the Armenian deportations and remains little known outside specialist scholarship.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The Kurdish population of the eastern Ottoman provinces of Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbekir and Mamuretülaziz on the eve of the First World War","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3},{"id":"russian-civil-war-displacement-and-emigration","title":"Displacement and the Emigre Exodus of the Russian Civil War","startYear":1917,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Bolshevik government, the White armies and the intervening powers fought across the former Russian Empire; defeated forces and civilians evacuated from the Crimea, the Baltic and the Far East and were resettled abroad under League of Nations arrangements","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The war ended with the Bolshevik reconquest of most of the former empire, the loss of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Bessarabia, and the establishment of Soviet republics in Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asia.","lat":44.62,"lon":33.53,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.62,"fromLon":33.53,"toLat":41.01,"toLon":28.98,"label":"Evacuation of Wrangel's forces and civilians from the Crimea to Constantinople, November 1920","people":150000},{"fromLat":59.94,"fromLon":30.31,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"Petrograd and the north-west -> Berlin","people":200000},{"fromLat":43.12,"fromLon":131.89,"toLat":45.75,"toLon":126.63,"label":"Vladivostok and the Far East -> Harbin","people":null}],"summary":"The civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power drove the largest political emigration in Europe of the period. The evacuation of General Wrangel's army and accompanying civilians from the Crimea in November 1920 put some 150,000 people ashore at Constantinople; others left through the Baltic ports, through Poland and through Vladivostok and Harbin. Estimates of the number of former Russian subjects settled abroad by 1921 range from 1 to 3 million, concentrated in Berlin, Paris, Prague, Belgrade, Harbin and Constantinople. Soviet decrees of 1921-22 stripped most of them of citizenship, leaving them stateless, and the League of Nations responded by appointing Fridtjof Nansen High Commissioner for Refugees and creating the Nansen passport, an identity certificate that allowed stateless refugees to cross borders. The arrangement was the foundation of the modern international refugee regime, and Nansen received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for this and for his work on prisoner repatriation and Russian famine relief.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Bulgaria","Germany","China"],"baselinePop":165000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the former Russian Empire at the outbreak of revolution","baselineYear":1917,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.00909090909090909},{"id":"us-racial-massacres-and-expulsions-1917-1923","title":"Racial Massacres and Expulsions in the United States: East St Louis, Elaine, Tulsa and Rosewood","startYear":1917,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"White mobs, often with the participation or acquiescence of local police and, in Tulsa and Elaine, of National Guard and federal troops, killed African Americans and burned their neighbourhoods and towns across the United States","peopleDisplaced":15000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Greenwood district of Tulsa, an unusually prosperous Black commercial and residential quarter, was burned to the ground; the town of Rosewood, Florida, was destroyed and never rebuilt, and its land passed to others.","lat":36.16,"lon":-95.99,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.62,"fromLon":-90.16,"toLat":38.63,"toLon":-90.2,"label":"East St Louis -> flight across the Mississippi to St Louis, July 1917","people":6000},{"fromLat":29.24,"fromLon":-82.94,"toLat":29.65,"toLon":-82.32,"label":"Rosewood, Florida -> permanent flight of the surviving residents, January 1923","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1917 and 1923 a series of massacres destroyed African American communities in the United States, driven by competition over jobs and housing during the Great Migration, by the return of Black servicemen after the First World War, and by white resistance to Black economic independence and organisation. In East St Louis in July 1917 a mob killed dozens of people and burned Black neighbourhoods. In the Red Summer of 1919 violence struck Chicago, Washington and other cities; in Elaine, Arkansas, in October 1919, a Black sharecroppers' union meeting was attacked and posses and federal troops killed a number of people usually estimated between 100 and 240. At Tulsa on 31 May and 1 June 1921 a white mob, deputised by the authorities and joined by aircraft dropping incendiaries according to survivor testimony, destroyed the Greenwood district; the Oklahoma Historical Society records credible death estimates between fifty and three hundred, more than a thousand homes and businesses burned and thousands of Black Tulsans held under armed guard, and no white person was ever imprisoned for the killings or the arson. At Rosewood, Florida, in January 1923 the Black population of the town was killed or driven out and the settlement destroyed. Florida's legislature compensated Rosewood survivors in 1994, and Oklahoma's 1997-2001 commission recommended reparations for Tulsa survivors, which the legislature declined to pay.","deathsLow":250,"deathsHigh":800,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":15000,"_deaths":525,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":45000,"baselineWhat":"The combined Black population of the four communities attacked - East St Louis, Illinois; Tulsa's Greenwood district; Phillips County, Arkansas; and Rosewood, Florida - around 1920","baselineYear":1920,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3333333333333333},{"id":"armenian-azerbaijani-war-1918-1920","title":"The Armenian-Azerbaijani War and the Massacres of Baku, Shusha and Zangezur","startYear":1918,"endYear":1920,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Armenian, Azerbaijani and Ottoman forces and local militias killed and expelled each other's civilian populations across the contested South Caucasus","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Contested control of Karabakh, Zangezur, Nakhchivan and the Baku province, settled only by the Soviet delimitations of 1920-23","lat":40.4093,"lon":49.8671,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.7597,"fromLon":46.75,"toLat":40.1792,"toLon":44.4991,"label":"Armenians from Karabakh and Nakhchivan to Yerevan","people":150000},{"fromLat":39.2,"fromLon":46.4,"toLat":40.3,"toLon":48.3,"label":"Azerbaijanis from Zangezur eastward","people":100000}],"summary":"As the Russian imperial front dissolved, the newly declared republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhchivan while communal massacres consumed mixed districts. In Baku, fighting between Bolshevik-Dashnak forces and Azerbaijani Musavatists in the 'March Days' of 1918 left thousands of Muslim civilians dead, and in September 1918 Ottoman-backed forces of the Army of Islam entered the city and killed large numbers of Armenians; estimates for each episode run from several thousand to tens of thousands and are strongly contested along national lines. In March 1920 the Armenian quarter of Shusha was destroyed and its population killed or driven out, with death estimates ranging from about 500 to 20,000. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled in both directions, and the surviving refugee flows helped fix the ethnically separated map that Soviet delimitation formalised in 1921-23. Armenian and Azerbaijani historiographies differ sharply on sequence, responsibility and numbers for almost every episode in this period.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":65000,"countries":["Azerbaijan","Armenia"],"baselinePop":3300000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics in the contested South Caucasus","baselineYear":1919,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.12121212121212122},{"id":"basmachi-suppression-and-flight-from-soviet-central-asia","title":"The Soviet Reconquest of Central Asia, the Basmachi War and Flight to Afghanistan","startYear":1918,"endYear":1934,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Soviet forces suppressed the Kokand autonomy and the Basmachi insurgency, requisitioned grain and drove tens of thousands across the Afghan and Chinese frontiers","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Kokand autonomy, the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva were abolished and their territory incorporated into Soviet republics","lat":39.77,"lon":64.42,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.23,"fromLon":67.28,"toLat":36.71,"toLon":67.11,"label":"Flight across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1918 and the mid-1930s Soviet power was imposed on Central Asia by force. Red Army units sacked Kokand in February 1918, killing thousands and ending the short-lived Turkestan autonomy; Bukhara was bombarded and its emir driven into Afghanistan in 1920, and Khiva's khanate was abolished. The resulting insurgency, called basmachi (bandits) by the Soviet authorities, was fought across the Fergana valley and the eastern Bukharan mountains for more than a decade, with village burning and food requisitioning on both sides. Requisitioning and the collapse of the cotton-for-grain economy produced a severe famine in Turkestan in 1917-19 and again in the Kazakh steppe in 1919-22. Collectivisation and the campaign against nomadic pastoralism from 1929 renewed the fighting and pushed a further wave of Uzbeks, Tajiks and above all Turkmen across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan, where they formed lasting communities, before the frontier was sealed. The atlas already covers the Kazakh famine of 1930-33 and the 1916 revolt; this entry covers the intervening reconquest.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":1500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":250000,"_deaths":800000,"countries":["Uzbekistan","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":7500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Soviet Central Asia outside Kazakhstan — the Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik and Kirghiz territories — at the census of 1926","baselineYear":1926,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.03333333333333333},{"id":"finnish-civil-war-prison-camps","title":"The Finnish Civil War Prison Camps","startYear":1918,"endYear":1919,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The victorious Finnish White government interned captured Red Guards, their families and suspected supporters in prison camps and tried them before special treason courts","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":59.97,"lon":23.44,"flows":[{"fromLat":61.5,"fromLon":23.79,"toLat":59.97,"toLon":23.44,"label":"Captured Red Guards from Tampere and southern Finland -> Tammisaari and other camps","people":null}],"summary":"The Finnish Civil War of January to May 1918 ended with the defeat of the Red Guards, and roughly 80,000 prisoners were taken into camps while special treason courts processed their cases. Food was scarce in Finland that spring, rations in the camps were inadequate, and malnutrition combined with a summer epidemic to produce very high mortality: about 11,600 prisoners died in the camps, most of them between May and September 1918. The special courts issued 555 death sentences of which 113 were carried out, on top of several thousand summary executions during and immediately after the fighting, including roughly 290 in Tampere and 247 in Vyborg. Total deaths from the war and its aftermath came to about 36,000 in a country of some three million. Most prisoners were released under amnesties during 1918-19, but the camps and the terror left a division in Finnish society that lasted for decades; a state-funded national project later compiled a database of all those who died in the conflicts of 1914-22.","deathsLow":11600,"deathsHigh":13500,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000,"_deaths":12550,"countries":["Finland"],"baselinePop":3125000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Finland at the time of the civil war","baselineYear":1918,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0256},{"id":"pogroms-in-ukraine-1918-1921","title":"The Anti-Jewish Pogroms of the Russian Civil War","startYear":1918,"endYear":1921,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"White Volunteer Army units, Ukrainian People's Republic detachments, independent warlord bands and, in a smaller number of cases, Red Army units attacked Jewish towns and villages in Ukraine and Belarus","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":49.42,"lon":26.99,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.42,"fromLon":26.99,"toLat":52.23,"toLon":21.01,"label":"Jewish communities of Podolia and Volhynia -> flight westward into Poland and beyond","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1918 and 1921 more than a thousand pogroms were recorded across Ukraine and Belarus as authority collapsed and armies moved back and forth. Nicolas Werth, in the Sciences Po Mass Violence encyclopedia, records approximately 150,000 Jewish victims, 125,000 in Ukraine and 25,000 in Belarus, with 1919 the deadliest year; other counts of those killed outright are lower, in the range of 50,000-100,000, with the remainder dying of wounds, hunger and epidemic. The perpetrators included the White Volunteer Army, whose Ukrainian campaign of 1919 was accompanied by systematic pogroms, detachments nominally under the Ukrainian People's Republic, independent bands under warlords such as Hryhoriv, and, less often, Red Army units, some of whose members were shot for it. Communities were robbed, houses burned, women raped and entire shtetl populations killed. The violence was documented at the time by Jewish investigating commissions whose archives were later published, and it is widely regarded as the largest killing of Jews in Europe between the Chmielnicki massacres and the Holocaust.","deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":125000,"countries":["Ukraine","Poland"],"baselinePop":1600000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Ukrainian lands during the Russian Civil War","baselineYear":1918,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3125},{"id":"post-1918-borders-central-europe","title":"The New Borders of Central Europe: Refugees after Trianon, Versailles and Neuilly","startYear":1918,"endYear":1926,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The peace treaties of 1919-20 redrew the borders of Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the successor states and France expelled or pressured out officials, settlers and minorities while Bulgaria and Greece agreed a 'voluntary' exchange under the Treaty of Neuilly","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":189907,"territoryDesc":"Zeidler records that historic Hungary lost about 189,907 square kilometres and 10.6 million people at Trianon, retaining 92,963 square kilometres and 7.6 million people; Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France, Posen and West Prussia to Poland, and further territory by plebiscite, and Bulgaria lost western Thrace and its Aegean coastline under the Treaty of Neuilly.","lat":47.5,"lon":19.04,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.77,"fromLon":23.6,"toLat":47.5,"toLon":19.04,"label":"Hungarian officials and families from Transylvania and Slovakia -> rump Hungary","people":400000},{"fromLat":48.58,"fromLon":7.75,"toLat":49.45,"toLon":8.47,"label":"Germans leaving Alsace-Lorraine -> Germany","people":null},{"fromLat":41.14,"fromLon":24.89,"toLat":42.14,"toLon":24.75,"label":"Bulgarians of western Thrace and Macedonia -> Bulgaria under the Neuilly convention","people":92000}],"summary":"The peace settlements of 1919-20 moved borders across populations that had not moved, and produced a decade of departures, expulsions and negotiated transfers. Hungary, reduced by Trianon to less than a third of its former territory, received over 400,000 refugees from the successor states between 1918 and 1924, many of them officials, teachers and railwaymen dismissed or pressured out, some living for years in railway wagons at Budapest stations. France removed a large part of the German population that had settled in Alsace-Lorraine since 1871, sorting inhabitants by identity card into four categories. Germans left the territories ceded to Poland in large numbers under emigration and option provisions. In the Balkans the Convention respecting Reciprocal Emigration annexed to the Treaty of Neuilly of 27 November 1919 created a nominally voluntary but state-organised exchange between Greece and Bulgaria, supervised by a mixed commission under League of Nations auspices, which moved roughly 140,000 people in total and served as the immediate model for the compulsory exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1139442,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Hungary","Romania","France","Germany","Greece","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":18000000,"baselineWhat":"The population living in the territories transferred from Hungary, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria by the postwar peace treaties","baselineYear":1920,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05555555555555555},{"id":"red-terror-and-first-soviet-camps","title":"The Red Terror, the White Terror and the First Soviet Camps","startYear":1918,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Cheka and the Soviet government took hostages, carried out mass executions and created a network of concentration and forced-labour camps; White governments and armies conducted their own executions and reprisals","peopleDisplaced":120000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":55.75,"lon":37.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.72,"fromLon":41.45,"toLat":65.02,"toLon":35.71,"label":"Tambov and other rebel provinces -> northern camps and, from 1923, Solovki","people":null}],"summary":"Following the attempt on Lenin's life and the killing of the Petrograd Cheka chief, the Soviet government proclaimed the Red Terror in September 1918, authorising the execution of hostages drawn from former officers, clergy, landowners and the bourgeoisie and the confinement of class enemies in concentration camps. Werth estimates 10,000 to 15,000 people shot in the mass executions of September-October 1918 alone and observes that the Cheka executed more people in a few weeks than the tsarist regime had sentenced to death in ninety-two years. Camps established by decree in 1918 grew into a network that by 1921 held tens of thousands, and the suppression of the Tambov peasant rising in 1921 saw seven camps holding around 50,000 people, including hostage families, with monthly mortality of 15 to 20 percent in the autumn. White governments and armies carried out their own executions and reprisals, on a smaller scale but including mass shootings at Omsk, Ufa and elsewhere. The Solovki special-purpose camp, opened in 1923 in a confiscated monastery, became the model for the later Gulag.","deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","forced labour","starvation & siege","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":120000,"_deaths":150000,"countries":["Russia","Finland"],"baselinePop":130000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the territory under Soviet control during the civil war","baselineYear":1920,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0009230769230769231},{"id":"de-cossackization-1919","title":"De-Cossackization on the Don","startYear":1919,"endYear":1921,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Bolshevik Party's Orgburo and Red Army and Cheka units on the Don carried out executions, hostage-taking and deportations against the Don and Kuban Cossacks and confiscated their land","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Cossack land tenure, the legal basis of the Don and Kuban hosts, was abolished; stanitsa land was redistributed to incoming peasant settlers, and the Don and Kuban host territories were dissolved as administrative units.","lat":47.42,"lon":40.09,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.42,"fromLon":40.09,"toLat":48.02,"toLon":37.8,"label":"Don stanitsy -> deportation to forced labour in the Donbas mines","people":17000}],"summary":"On 24 January 1919 the Orgburo of the Bolshevik Central Committee issued a secret circular directing merciless mass terror against wealthy Cossacks and against all Cossacks who had taken any part in the struggle against Soviet power, together with the confiscation of grain and the resettlement of outsiders on Cossack land. Executions of hostages and of former officers followed in the Don stanitsy, provoking a major Cossack rising in March 1919. Werth records about 8,000 Cossacks executed in February and March 1919 and some 17,000 people deported from five stanitsy to forced labour in the mines in the autumn of 1920, and describes the campaign as an early instance of the Soviet state acting against a whole social category. The policy was suspended, resumed and formally moderated at different points, and the deportations of families continued into 1921. The Russian Federation's 1991 law on the rehabilitation of repressed peoples and a 1992 decree addressed the repression of the Cossacks.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":45000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","denationalization","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":27500,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The Cossack population of the Don Host territory in 1917","baselineYear":1917,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.04},{"id":"polish-soviet-war-and-peace-of-riga","title":"The Polish-Soviet War and the Peace of Riga","startYear":1919,"endYear":1924,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Poland and Soviet Russia fought for the borderlands of the former Russian Empire and divided Belarus and Ukraine between them at Riga in March 1921, leaving large minorities on each side and prompting option, repatriation and settlement programmes","peopleDisplaced":1100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Riga border ran far east of the Curzon Line, leaving Minsk on the Soviet side but placing western Belarus and western Volhynia and eastern Galicia within Poland. Poland subsequently settled military colonists on land in the eastern voivodeships, a policy that fed the conflicts of the following decades.","lat":56.95,"lon":24.11,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.9,"fromLon":27.57,"toLat":52.23,"toLon":21.01,"label":"Repatriation of Poles and returning wartime refugees from Soviet territory","people":null},{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Repatriation of Soviet prisoners and optants eastward","people":null}],"summary":"Fighting between Poland and Soviet Russia began in 1919 in the vacuum left by the collapse of the German and Russian empires, reached Kyiv in May 1920 and Warsaw in August, and ended in an armistice in October 1920 and the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921. Jerzy Borzecki records that the treaty fixed a border well east of the Curzon Line, leaving Poland a national state with large Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities, allowing former subjects of the Russian Empire on Polish territory to opt for Polish citizenship, and providing for the return of cultural property and a payment of 30 million gold rubles. Large repatriation and option movements followed on both sides, restoring wartime refugees to their homes and moving optants across the new line. The treaty also settled the fate of the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, whose forces had been Poland's allies and whose interned soldiers remained in Polish camps. Mortality among prisoners of war on both sides was heavy, and the numbers are a longstanding dispute between Polish and Russian historians.","deathsLow":80000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1100000,"_deaths":115000,"countries":["Latvia","Belarus","Poland","Russia"],"baselinePop":9500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the eastern borderlands assigned to Poland at Riga - the Wilno, Nowogrodek, Polesie, Wolyn, Lwow, Stanislawow and Tarnopol voivodeships","baselineYear":1921,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.11578947368421053},{"id":"volga-famine-1921-1922","title":"The Volga Famine","startYear":1921,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Drought struck a countryside already stripped by Soviet grain requisitioning, civil war and the collapse of transport; the Soviet government eventually admitted foreign relief agencies, principally the American Relief Administration and Nansen's International Committee","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":53.2,"lon":50.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.53,"fromLon":46.03,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Volga famine provinces -> flight to the cities and railway lines","people":null}],"summary":"A severe drought in 1921 fell on a peasantry whose seed grain and reserves had been taken by the forced requisitioning of war communism and whose transport and administration had broken down in the civil war. The famine that followed centred on the middle and lower Volga, the southern Urals, the Crimea and southern Ukraine. The Soviet government appealed for international help in July 1921 and admitted the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, Nansen's International Russian Relief Committee, the Save the Children Fund and others, whose kitchens at their peak fed some 10 million people. The Warwick University Modern Records Centre records the League of Nations describing it as the worst famine in Europe in modern times as regards both numbers affected and mortality, and gives estimates of victims from 1 million to 10 million with 5 million the most frequently quoted. Relief in Ukraine was delayed because Moscow initially declined to recognise the Ukrainian famine areas while grain was still being moved out of and exported from Ukraine.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":10000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4400000,"_deaths":5500000,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the famine-stricken provinces of the Volga, the Urals, southern Ukraine and Crimea","baselineYear":1921,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"burning-of-smyrna-and-anatolian-greek-exodus","title":"The Burning of Smyrna and the Exodus of the Anatolian Greeks","startYear":1922,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna in September 1922 after the collapse of the Greek army in Anatolia; the Greek and Armenian quarters burned and the surviving Christian population was evacuated or deported","peopleDisplaced":1200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna, one of the largest commercial cities of the eastern Mediterranean, were destroyed by fire; Greek and Armenian property throughout western Anatolia and eastern Thrace passed to the Turkish state and to Muslim refugees.","lat":38.42,"lon":27.13,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.42,"fromLon":27.13,"toLat":37.98,"toLon":23.73,"label":"Smyrna quayside -> evacuation to Piraeus and the Aegean islands","people":213480},{"fromLat":40.15,"fromLon":26.41,"toLat":40.94,"toLon":24.41,"label":"Eastern Thrace -> flight into Greek Macedonia and Thrace","people":null}],"summary":"The Greek army's front in Anatolia broke in August 1922 and Turkish forces entered Smyrna on 9 September. Massacres in the Armenian quarter were reported by foreign consuls and missionaries, and on 13 September a fire destroyed the Armenian and Greek quarters while the Turkish quarter was largely spared. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were driven onto the quayside and were eventually taken off by Allied and chartered shipping, about 213,000 according to American relief figures, while men of military age were separated and marched into the interior in labour columns from which few returned. The fire's origin is disputed: Greek, Armenian and several foreign eyewitnesses attributed it to Turkish troops, while Turkish accounts attribute it to retreating Greek and Armenian arsonists. The exodus from Smyrna was the largest single episode in a movement that brought about 1.2 million Orthodox refugees into Greece and was formalised by the compulsory exchange agreed at Lausanne in January 1923.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":125000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1200000,"_deaths":67500,"countries":["Turkey","Greece","Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":1700000,"baselineWhat":"The Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia and Ottoman Thrace before the First World War","baselineYear":1914,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.7058823529411765,"related":[{"id":"greek-genocide-ottoman-greeks","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"After the fix, the 1922 flight is counted only in the Smyrna entry, and the 1,000,000 displaced in the genocide entry is replaced by about 775,000 for 1913-18. The remaining overlap is in people, not in counts: survivors of the 1914-18 deportations who fled again in 1922 appear in both entries as two separate displacements. Deaths overlap for 1922 (the Smyrna massacre and the deportation of men inland fall within the genocide entry's 1914-23 death range); the size of that overlap is not separable."}]},{"id":"kanto-massacre-1923","title":"The Kanto Massacre of Koreans","startYear":1923,"endYear":1923,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Vigilante groups, police and army units killed Koreans, Chinese and Japanese leftists in Tokyo, Yokohama and the surrounding prefectures in the days after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1 September 1923","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35.69,"lon":139.69,"flows":[],"summary":"In the confusion after the earthquake of 1 September 1923, rumours that Koreans were poisoning wells, setting fires and preparing an uprising were spread and repeated by police and official channels, and martial law was declared. Vigilante groups formed and, together with police and soldiers, killed Koreans and some Chinese and Japanese who were mistaken for them, checking identity by pronunciation at street barricades; the anarchist Osugi Sakae and his partner and nephew were killed by a military police officer, and labour organisers were killed at Kameido. Estimates of Korean deaths range from the Japanese Home Ministry's contemporary figure of about 230 through independent Japanese investigations in the range of 2,600 to the roughly 6,000 recorded by Korean student investigators at the time and repeated in the Harvard-Yenching Institute's account of recent scholarship, which argues the state both induced the killings by spreading rumours and mobilising police and soldiers under martial law and then concealed its role through cursory prosecutions. A small number of vigilantes were tried and received light sentences. Successive Japanese governments have not issued a formal acknowledgement of state responsibility, and in recent years the national government has said it has found no records allowing it to establish the facts, while the governor of Tokyo has declined since 2017 to send the customary memorial message to the annual commemoration.","deathsLow":230,"deathsHigh":6600,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2732,"_deaths":3415,"countries":["Japan"],"baselinePop":80000,"baselineWhat":"The Korean population resident in Japan in 1923","baselineYear":1923,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"lausanne-population-exchange-1923","title":"The Greek-Turkish Population Exchange under the Treaty of Lausanne","startYear":1923,"endYear":1930,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Greece and Turkey, under a convention signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 and supervised by a Mixed Commission under League of Nations auspices, compulsorily exchanged their Orthodox Christian and Muslim populations","peopleDisplaced":1600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Property left behind on both sides was liquidated by the Mixed Commission and set against the property of the incoming population; villages and urban quarters changed occupants entirely, and the settlement of refugees in Greek Macedonia and Thrace changed the demography of northern Greece decisively.","lat":40.64,"lon":22.94,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.42,"fromLon":27.13,"toLat":40.64,"toLon":22.94,"label":"Orthodox Christians of Anatolia -> Greek Macedonia and Thrace","people":1200000},{"fromLat":40.64,"fromLon":22.94,"toLat":39.93,"toLon":32.86,"label":"Muslims of Greece -> Anatolia","people":400000}],"summary":"The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, provided in Article 1 for a compulsory exchange from 1 May 1923 of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkey and Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greece, exempting under Article 2 only the Greeks of Constantinople and the Muslims of western Thrace. Religion, not language or self-identification, was the criterion, so Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians of Cappadocia went to Greece and Greek-speaking Muslims of Crete and Epirus went to Turkey. Fridtjof Nansen, League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, had promoted the exchange as a means of resolving the refugee crisis created by the 1922 collapse, and a Mixed Commission supervised transfers and property liquidation. Much of the movement had already occurred as flight in 1922; the convention retroactively made it permanent and stripped those transferred of the right to return. The Permanent Court of International Justice was asked in 1925 to interpret 'established' in Article 2 and held that it meant residence of a lasting nature under the convention's own terms rather than under national law. It was the first compulsory exchange of populations codified in an international treaty and was cited as a precedent for later transfers.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1600000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greece","Turkey"],"baselinePop":1750000,"baselineWhat":"The two communities made subject to the compulsory exchange: the Orthodox Christians of Turkey and the Muslims of Greece","baselineYear":1923,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9142857142857143,"related":[{"id":"greek-genocide-ottoman-greeks","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The exchange entry's 1.2 million Orthodox Christians are mostly refugees of the 1922 flight, whom the convention retroactively brought under the exchange; per the Mixed Commission only about 189,916 were transferred from Turkey after it took effect. Once the genocide entry is restricted to the 1913-18 expulsions and deportations (see the Smyrna item), the 1922 flight is no longer in its displacement figure. The only remaining overlap is people deported in 1914-18 who later left in 1922-23, a repeat displacement of the same individuals and not a duplicated count."}]},{"id":"reza-shah-tribal-sedentarization","title":"Reza Shah's Forced Sedentarization of Iran's Nomadic Tribes","startYear":1925,"endYear":1941,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Pahlavi state disarmed Iran's nomadic confederations and compelled them to settle in fixed villages under army supervision","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":29.5918,"lon":52.5837,"flows":[{"fromLat":30.9,"fromLon":51.6,"toLat":29.5918,"toLon":52.5837,"label":"Qashqai pastoralists prevented from migrating and settled in the Fars lowlands","people":null}],"summary":"Reza Shah's programme of state centralisation in the 1920s and 1930s treated Iran's large nomadic confederations, which had their own armed forces and often their own external relations, as the principal obstacle to a unitary state. The army campaigned against the Lurs, Kurds, Baluch, Qashqai, Bakhtiari and Turkmen, executed or imprisoned tribal leaders including the Bakhtiari khans and the Qashqai ilkhani's family, disarmed the tribes, and from the early 1930s applied a policy known as takht-e qapu, forcing pastoral groups to abandon seasonal migration and settle in fixed villages, sometimes at the point of army guns and often in lowland areas unsuited to their herds. Anthropological and historical accounts, including Lois Beck's work on the Qashqai, describe mass loss of livestock, disease among people and animals kept in unsuitable climates, impoverishment and substantial mortality; forced dress reform and conscription accompanied the settlement. The policy collapsed almost immediately after the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran and Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, when large numbers of tribespeople resumed migration. No figures were compiled at the time, and the scale of mortality remains a matter of reconstruction from tribal memory and later fieldwork.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Iran"],"baselinePop":2500000,"baselineWhat":"The nomadic and semi-nomadic tribal population of Iran at the start of the Pahlavi sedentarisation campaign","baselineYear":1925,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.4},{"id":"new-zealand-rule-in-samoa-and-the-mau","title":"New Zealand Rule in Western Samoa: The Mau, Black Saturday and the Exiles","startYear":1926,"endYear":1936,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The New Zealand administration of the mandated territory of Western Samoa banned the Mau movement, deported its leaders and shot into a crowd in Apia","peopleDisplaced":1500,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-13.83,"lon":-171.77,"flows":[{"fromLat":-13.83,"fromLon":-171.77,"toLat":-41.29,"toLon":174.78,"label":"Mau leaders deported to New Zealand","people":null}],"summary":"New Zealand governed Western Samoa under a League of Nations mandate from 1920, after a period in which its failure to quarantine a ship had allowed an influenza epidemic to kill about a fifth of the population. Samoan opposition coalesced in the Mau, a movement for self-government that organised boycotts, refused taxes and maintained its own police; the administration responded by banning it, deporting its leaders and, on 28 December 1929, firing on a Mau parade in Apia, killing the paramount chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III and eight others along with one New Zealand policeman. In January 1930 the administrator declared the Mau seditious, and about 1,500 supporters withdrew into the bush pursued by marines and military police; arrests of men were followed by demonstrations organised by Samoan women. The movement was recognised and the bans lifted after the New Zealand Labour government took office in 1935-36, and Samoa became independent in 1962. In 2002 the New Zealand Prime Minister formally apologised in Apia for the actions of the colonial administration, including Black Saturday and the deportation of Samoan leaders.","deathsLow":9,"deathsHigh":11,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500,"_deaths":10,"countries":["Samoa","New Zealand"],"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The Samoan population of the mandated territory of Western Samoa","baselineYear":1926,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0375},{"id":"italian-camps-in-cyrenaica-1929-1934","title":"Italy's Deportation of the Cyrenaican Population into Camps","startYear":1929,"endYear":1934,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Italian forces under Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani cleared the population of the Jebel Akhdar and interned them in camps on the Sirtica coast","peopleDisplaced":110000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":30.75,"lon":20.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.77,"fromLon":21.85,"toLat":30.75,"toLon":20.23,"label":"Jebel Akhdar -> camps at El Agheila, Soluch, Sidi Ahmed el-Magrun and Agedabia","people":100000}],"summary":"To end the Senussi resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, Italian commanders removed the population that sustained it. Between 1929 and 1931 the semi-nomadic communities of the Jebel Akhdar were driven south to the coastal plain of the Sirtica and held behind wire in about twenty camps, their livestock confiscated or destroyed, while a barbed-wire barrier some 270 kilometres long was built along the Egyptian frontier to cut off supply. Historians estimate that 100,000 to 120,000 people were interned and that 40,000 to 48,000 died of hunger, disease and executions in the camps. Omar al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged before an assembly of internees at Soluch in September 1931, and the campaign was declared over in January 1932. The camps were dissolved in 1934, and survivors returned to a devastated region. Libyan and Italian scholars, notably Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, characterise the episode as genocide; the Italian state has not accepted that characterisation, though the treaty of friendship signed at Benghazi in 2008 included an Italian expression of regret for the colonial period and a substantial compensation package.","deathsLow":40000,"deathsHigh":48000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":110000,"_deaths":44000,"countries":["Libya"],"baselinePop":225000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cyrenaica at the start of the Italian clearances","baselineYear":1929,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4888888888888889},{"id":"mexican-repatriation-1929-1936","title":"The Mexican Repatriation in the United States","startYear":1929,"endYear":1936,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"United States federal, state and county authorities pressed or deported Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them US citizens, to Mexico during the Depression","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.05,"lon":-118.24,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.05,"fromLon":-118.24,"toLat":20.67,"toLon":-103.35,"label":"Los Angeles and the southwestern United States -> central Mexico","people":400000},{"fromLat":41.88,"fromLon":-87.63,"toLat":25.67,"toLon":-100.31,"label":"Midwestern industrial cities -> northern Mexico","people":null}],"summary":"As unemployment rose after 1929, federal immigration raids, county welfare policies and public campaigns pressed people of Mexican descent to leave the United States. Los Angeles County organised trains to the border and other counties followed; relief was withheld from Mexican families, and highly publicised raids such as that in La Placita in Los Angeles in February 1931 spread fear well beyond those actually detained. A majority of those who went were United States citizens, chiefly the American-born children of Mexican immigrants, and many had no legal process at all. Estimates of the total run from 400,000 to two million. Labour demand in the Second World War reversed the flow, and the Bracero programme began recruiting Mexican workers in 1942. In 2005 the California legislature passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, formally apologising for the state's role in the unconstitutional removal of United States citizens and legal residents; no comparable federal apology has been issued.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America","Mexico"],"baselinePop":1692000,"baselineWhat":"The Mexican-origin population of the United States at the 1930 census","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5910165484633569},{"id":"dekulakization-and-the-special-settlements","title":"Soviet Dekulakization and the Special Settlements","startYear":1930,"endYear":1933,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Politburo and the OGPU expropriated and deported peasant families labelled kulaks from the grain-growing regions to closed 'special settlements' in the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and the far north","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":56.84,"lon":60.61,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.44,"fromLon":32.06,"toLat":58.6,"toLon":81.55,"label":"Ukrainian grain districts -> Narym special settlements, western Siberia","people":300000},{"fromLat":45.04,"fromLon":41.97,"toLat":56.84,"toLon":60.61,"label":"North Caucasus -> Urals special settlements","people":250000},{"fromLat":51.53,"fromLon":46.03,"toLat":65,"toLon":57,"label":"Volga region -> Northern Krai and Komi settlements","people":200000}],"summary":"Following the Politburo decision of 30 January 1930 'on measures for the liquidation of kulak households', the OGPU expropriated, arrested or deported peasant families classified as kulaks in order to break resistance to collectivization. Households in the 'first category' were shot or sent to camps, those in the 'second' were deported with their families to remote 'special settlements' under commandant supervision, and those in the 'third' were resettled on poor land within their own districts. Roughly two million people were moved between 1930 and 1933, most of them to the Urals, western Siberia, the Northern Krai and Kazakhstan, where they were set to logging, mining and land clearance with little shelter or food. Mortality in the settlements was severe, reaching about 14 per cent of the registered population in 1933 alone. The special settlement regime, with its commandant offices and travel bans, became the administrative model later applied to whole deported nationalities.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":600000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":450000,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":120000000,"baselineWhat":"The rural population of the Soviet Union at the start of collectivisation","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.016666666666666666,"related":[{"id":"gulag-camp-system-1930-1953","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Deaths among deported kulak families in the special settlements, which the camp administration ran from 1931, may be counted in both the dekulakization entry and the Gulag entry's upper death estimate."}]},{"id":"gulag-camp-system-1930-1953","title":"The Gulag: The Soviet Forced-Labour Camp System","startYear":1930,"endYear":1953,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The OGPU and later the NKVD and MVD held prisoners under sentence in a nationwide network of forced-labour camps and colonies and in exile settlements","peopleDisplaced":18000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":59.56,"lon":150.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":55.75,"fromLon":37.62,"toLat":59.56,"toLon":150.8,"label":"Sentenced prisoners from European Russia -> Kolyma camps, Far East","people":null},{"fromLat":55.75,"fromLon":37.62,"toLat":67.5,"toLon":64.04,"label":"Sentenced prisoners -> Vorkuta and the Arctic coal camps","people":null}],"summary":"The Chief Administration of Camps, created in 1930, turned political and criminal imprisonment into an instrument of economic development, concentrating prisoners in remote regions to cut timber, mine gold, coal and nickel, and build canals, railways and cities. The system expanded with each wave of repression, absorbing dekulakized peasants, victims of the Great Terror, deported nationalities, Poles and Balts, returning Soviet prisoners of war and postwar nationalist insurgents. Camp records opened after 1991 show a population that peaked at about 2.5 million in 1953 and roughly 18 million passing through over two decades, alongside a parallel exile system. Recorded deaths in the camps and colonies exceed 1.6 million, concentrated in the famine year of 1933 and the war years of 1942-43. The system was wound down after Stalin's death in 1953, and the Russian Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression of 1991 provided for the rehabilitation of those convicted on political grounds.","deathsLow":1600000,"deathsHigh":2500000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","summary execution","torture","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":18000000,"_deaths":2050000,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":170557093,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Soviet Union at the 1939 census","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.10553650794224079,"related":[{"id":"dekulakization-and-the-special-settlements","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Deaths among deported kulak families in the special settlements, which the camp administration ran from 1931, may be counted in both the dekulakization entry and the Gulag entry's upper death estimate."},{"id":"soviet-annexation-baltic-states","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some Baltic deportees, notably men separated from their families in June 1941, were sent to Gulag camps and are counted in both entries."},{"id":"soviet-deportations-from-eastern-poland-1940-1941","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some of the Polish citizens deported in 1940-41 were held in labour camps of the Gulag rather than special settlements, so a small part of them is counted in both entries."},{"id":"soviet-forced-repatriation-filtration","rel":"continues-from","note":"Several hundred thousand repatriated Soviet citizens were passed after filtration to the NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag or to exile settlements."}]},{"id":"kazakh-famine-1930-1933","title":"The Kazakh Famine and Forced Sedentarization (Asharshylyk)","startYear":1930,"endYear":1933,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Soviet authorities under Filipp Goloshchyokin confiscated livestock and forced nomadic Kazakh pastoralists into sedentary collective farms","peopleDisplaced":1100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.02,"lon":66.92,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.02,"fromLon":66.92,"toLat":43.83,"toLon":87.62,"label":"Kazakh steppe -> Xinjiang, China","people":100000},{"fromLat":48.02,"fromLon":66.92,"toLat":55.03,"toLon":73.36,"label":"Kazakh steppe -> western Siberia and the Russian republic","people":400000}],"summary":"Collectivization in Kazakhstan combined grain and meat procurement with a campaign to settle the nomadic and semi-nomadic population on collective farms. Livestock, the basis of the pastoral economy, collapsed from roughly 40 million head to about 4.5 million between 1928 and 1933 through requisition, forced slaughter and disease. The resulting famine killed between 1.1 and 1.5 million people, most of them ethnic Kazakhs, a loss of roughly a third to two-fifths of the Kazakh population, and drove hundreds of thousands across the borders into China, Mongolia and beyond. Kazakhstan is the only Soviet republic whose titular nationality became a minority in its own territory as a result. The famine is officially commemorated in Kazakhstan, but the state has not sought a genocide determination, and scholars differ over whether the catastrophe was an intended outcome of sedentarization policy or a consequence of it.","deathsLow":1100000,"deathsHigh":1500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1100000,"_deaths":1300000,"countries":["Kazakhstan","China","Russia"],"baselinePop":3637612,"baselineWhat":"The Kazakh population of Kazakhstan at the 1926 Soviet census, the last before collectivisation","baselineYear":1926,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3023961873888694},{"id":"southern-rhodesia-land-apportionment-removals","title":"Land Apportionment, the Native Land Husbandry Act and African Removals in Southern Rhodesia","startYear":1930,"endYear":1962,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The settler government of Southern Rhodesia divided land by race and moved African families off land reserved for Europeans","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The 1930 Act allotted about 49 million acres to roughly 50,000 Europeans and about 29 million acres of reserves to more than a million Africans, with the rest unassigned","lat":-17.83,"lon":31.05,"flows":[{"fromLat":-18.2,"fromLon":31.6,"toLat":-16.9,"toLon":30.1,"label":"African families moved from European farming areas into reserves","people":null}],"summary":"The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 gave statutory form to racial land division in Southern Rhodesia, reserving the best-watered high-veld for European ownership and confining African freehold to designated Native Purchase Areas. Africans living as tenants or squatters in newly designated European areas were served with eviction notices and moved to reserves, a process that accelerated after the Second World War as settler immigration rose. The Native Land Husbandry Act of 1951 went further, allocating individual arable and grazing rights in the reserves, compelling destocking of cattle and cutting off land rights for those working in towns; it produced widespread rural resistance and was effectively abandoned in the early 1960s. The reserves became overcrowded and eroded, and the removals are a direct antecedent of the land question that dominated Zimbabwean politics after 1980. The 1969 Land Tenure Act extended the division further and falls outside this entry's period.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Zimbabwe"],"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The African population of Southern Rhodesia at the time of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930","baselineYear":1931,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.45454545454545453},{"id":"japanese-seizure-of-manchuria-and-settlement","title":"Japan's Seizure of Manchuria and Agricultural Settlement","startYear":1931,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese Kwantung Army seized Manchuria, installed the puppet state of Manchukuo and settled Japanese farmers on land taken from Chinese cultivators","peopleDisplaced":320000,"territoryKm2":1300000,"territoryDesc":"The three northeastern provinces of China, about 1.3 million square kilometres, were detached from Chinese authority after the Mukden incident of 18 September 1931 and constituted as Manchukuo in March 1932 under the last Qing emperor Puyi, with Jehol added in 1933. Japan controlled the state through the Kwantung Army and Japanese officials until the Soviet invasion of August 1945.","lat":43.82,"lon":125.32,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.65,"fromLon":138.18,"toLat":45.75,"toLon":126.63,"label":"Nagano and other Japanese prefectures -> settlement villages in northern Manchuria","people":270000}],"summary":"Officers of the Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway near Mukden on 18 September 1931 and used it as the pretext for occupying Manchuria, which was constituted the following year as the nominally independent state of Manchukuo. The League of Nations commission under Lord Lytton found in 1932 that the Japanese action could not be justified as self-defence and that Manchukuo did not rest on a genuine independence movement; when the League adopted the report in February 1933 Japan withdrew from the organisation. From 1936 Japan pursued a mass colonisation programme intended to place a million farming households in Manchuria, backed by a company that acquired land cheaply or by compulsion from Chinese cultivators, and by youth brigades of teenage boys. Around 270,000 settlers had gone by 1945. When the Soviet Union invaded in August 1945 the Kwantung Army withdrew southward and left the settler communities behind: of the more than 200,000 still in Manchuria, some 78,500 died in attacks, suicides, disease, starvation and exposure, and thousands of children were left with Chinese families. The repatriation of the survivors is treated separately.","deathsLow":78500,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","forced labour","arbitrary detention","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":7800000,"_deaths":164250,"countries":["China","Japan"],"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Manchuria, the three northeastern provinces, when Japan seized it","baselineYear":1931,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.010666666666666666,"related":[{"id":"japanese-postwar-repatriation","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":120000,"sharedDeaths":[0,78500],"note":"Japanese agricultural settlers who survived the 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchuria were among those repatriated to Japan after the war."}]},{"id":"comfort-women-system","title":"The Japanese Military 'Comfort Women' System","startYear":1932,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese armed forces established and regulated brothels in which women, most of them Korean and Chinese, were held for sexual servitude","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35.68,"lon":139.69,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.16,"fromLon":129.06,"toLat":32.06,"toLon":118.8,"label":"Korea -> comfort stations in occupied China","people":null},{"fromLat":35.16,"fromLon":129.06,"toLat":1.35,"toLon":103.82,"label":"Korea -> comfort stations in Southeast Asia","people":null}],"summary":"From the early 1930s, and on a large scale after 1937, the Japanese armed forces set up 'comfort stations' at bases across China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, staffed by women recruited through deception, debt, official pressure or outright abduction and held under military regulation. On 4 August 1993 Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement acknowledging that the military had been directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the stations, that recruitment was largely by private agents but often against the women's will, and that they had lived in misery under a coercive atmosphere; the statement extended apologies and remorse. In 1996 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, reported on the system as military sexual slavery and recommended state compensation. Japan created the Asian Women's Fund in 1995 to make payments from private donations with government support, an arrangement many survivors rejected as a way of avoiding state legal responsibility. A Japan-Republic of Korea agreement of December 2015 declared the issue resolved finally and irreversibly and provided a one-billion-yen Japanese contribution to a Korean foundation; the foundation was dissolved by Korea in 2018 and the dispute continues, with Seoul courts reaching opposing conclusions on Japan's sovereign immunity in 2021.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["sexual violence","arbitrary detention","forced labour","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Japan","South Korea","China","Singapore"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"holodomor-1932-1933","title":"The Holodomor: Famine in Soviet Ukraine","startYear":1932,"endYear":1933,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet party and state organs seized grain, blacklisted villages and closed the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban to starving peasants","peopleDisplaced":190000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":49.44,"lon":32.06,"flows":[],"summary":"Grain procurement quotas set far above what the 1932 harvest could yield were enforced in Soviet Ukraine and the Kuban by requisition brigades that confiscated seed grain and other foodstuffs, while villages that failed to meet quotas were 'blacklisted' and cut off from supply. The decree of 22 January 1933 sealed the republic's borders against peasants seeking food, and the internal passport system introduced weeks earlier tied collective farmers to their villages. Demographic reconstructions put excess deaths in Ukraine at roughly 3.5 to 5 million in 1932-33, within a Soviet-wide famine toll of at least 5 to 7 million that also devastated Kazakhstan, the Volga and the Kuban. The famine was denied by the Soviet state, excluded from the 1937 census results and not publicly acknowledged until 1986-87. Whether it constituted genocide against Ukrainians is a live political and scholarly dispute: Ukraine, the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and more than thirty other states and parliaments have declared it genocide, while the Russian government rejects that characterization and describes the famine as a shared tragedy of the peoples of the USSR.","deathsLow":3500000,"deathsHigh":5000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":190000,"_deaths":4250000,"countries":["Ukraine"],"baselinePop":31900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Ukrainian SSR at the start of the famine","baselineYear":1932,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0059561128526645765},{"id":"la-matanza-el-salvador-1932","title":"La Matanza: the 1932 Massacre in Western El Salvador","startYear":1932,"endYear":1932,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Salvadoran military government suppressed a peasant and communist uprising by killing Pipil villagers across the western coffee districts","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.745,"lon":-89.6733,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.745,"fromLon":-89.6733,"toLat":14.6349,"toLon":-90.5069,"label":"Survivors fleeing the western departments toward Guatemala","people":null}],"summary":"On 22 January 1932, amid the collapse of coffee prices and after the annulment of municipal and legislative election results, members of the Communist Party of El Salvador and Pipil peasants led by Farabundo Marti and Feliciano Ama rose in the western departments, seizing several towns and killing an estimated 2,000 people in the process. The government of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez declared martial law and put down the revolt within days, then carried out weeks of reprisal killings in which soldiers and civilian patrols executed men in and around the villages of Izalco, Nahuizalco, Juayua and Sonzacate, frequently identifying victims by indigenous dress, features or surnames. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 40,000; because the victims were overwhelmingly Pipil non-combatants and because Pipil language and dress were largely abandoned afterwards, many scholars describe the killing as an ethnocide, though others emphasise its class and political character. Marti and Ama were executed. The episode became foundational to Salvadoran politics on both left and right; the guerrilla front of the 1980s took Marti's name, and the state offered no official reckoning for decades.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":25000,"countries":["El Salvador","Guatemala"],"baselinePop":1443000,"baselineWhat":"The population of El Salvador at the 1930 census","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"nazi-concentration-camps-1933-1939","title":"The Nazi Concentration Camp System before the War","startYear":1933,"endYear":1939,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The SS and German police held political opponents, and then people classified as social, racial and religious undesirables, in camps outside judicial control","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":48.27,"lon":11.47,"flows":[],"summary":"Detention camps appeared in Germany within weeks of Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933, initially run by the SA, the police and local authorities to hold communists, social democrats and trade unionists under 'protective detention' outside any court process. Dachau, opened in March 1933, became the model for a system that Heinrich Himmler consolidated under the SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps. From 1936 the categories of prisoner widened to include Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexual men, repeat offenders and people labelled 'asocial', held for indefinite terms and marked with coloured triangles. Camps were sited to exploit prisoner labour in SS-owned quarries and brickworks. After the annexation of Austria and Kristallnacht in 1938 tens of thousands of Jewish men were seized and held for weeks or months, most being released on condition that they emigrate. The prewar system established the legal void, the labour regime and the personnel on which the wartime camps and killing centres were built.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":15000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","forced labour","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":10000,"countries":["Germany"],"baselinePop":69300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Germany within its 1937 borders on the eve of the war","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.002886002886002886},{"id":"nazi-persecution-and-jewish-refugee-exodus-1933-1939","title":"Nazi Persecution of German Jews and the Refugee Exodus","startYear":1933,"endYear":1939,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The German state stripped Jews of citizenship, employment and property, driving emigration that other states then restricted by quota","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.52,"lon":13.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.52,"fromLon":13.4,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"Germany and Austria -> Britain","people":40000},{"fromLat":52.52,"fromLon":13.4,"toLat":40.71,"toLon":-74.01,"label":"Germany and Austria -> United States","people":95000},{"fromLat":52.52,"fromLon":13.4,"toLat":32.07,"toLon":34.78,"label":"Germany and Austria -> Mandatory Palestine","people":60000}],"summary":"From April 1933 German law progressively excluded Jews from the civil service, the professions, education and the economy; the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 removed their citizenship and criminalised marriage and sexual relations with 'Germans or kindred blood'. Expropriation accelerated after 1937, and in October 1938 about 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship were expelled from Germany in the Polenaktion, many being stranded in the no man's land at Zbaszyn. The pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of businesses, killed at least 91 people and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps, after which emigration became flight. Receiving states largely kept their doors narrow: the Evian conference of July 1938 produced no significant new quotas, the United States left its German quota partly unfilled, and in June 1939 the liner St. Louis was turned away from Cuba and the United States. Britain admitted about 10,000 unaccompanied children while restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine under the 1939 White Paper. Roughly two in five of the Jews who fled Germany and Austria found refuge in countries that Germany later occupied.","deathsLow":91,"deathsHigh":2000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","cultural or religious destruction","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":1045.5,"countries":["Germany","Austria","United Kingdom","United States of America","Israel"],"baselinePop":525000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Germany when Hitler took power","baselineYear":1933,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.7619047619047619,"related":[{"id":"annexation-of-austria-and-the-sudetenland-1938","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":117000,"note":"The 117,000 Austrian Jewish emigrants of 1938-39 are counted in both entries."}]},{"id":"simele-massacre-assyrians-iraq","title":"The Simele Massacre and the Dispersal of Iraq's Assyrians","startYear":1933,"endYear":1937,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Iraqi army and allied irregulars killed Assyrian villagers in and around Simele, driving survivors into Syria","peopleDisplaced":25000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.8686,"lon":42.8494,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.8686,"fromLon":42.8494,"toLat":36.4,"toLon":40.75,"label":"Assyrian survivors resettled on the Khabur in Syria under League of Nations arrangements","people":9000}],"summary":"Assyrians displaced from Hakkari during the First World War had been settled in northern Iraq under British mandate and many served in the Iraq Levies; after Iraqi independence in 1932 their demands for autonomy and their association with British power made them politically exposed. In August 1933, after an armed clash near the Syrian border, Iraqi army units under Bakr Sidqi and allied Kurdish and Arab irregulars killed Assyrian villagers in Simele and dozens of surrounding villages, with League of Nations and British reports giving figures from 600 to 3,000 dead and describing summary executions of unarmed men. Survivors fled to Syria, and the League of Nations, which had guaranteed minority protection in Iraq, arranged their settlement on the Khabur river; the massacre and the League's failure to protect a minority it had underwritten contributed directly to Raphael Lemkin's formulation of the concept that became genocide, which he first presented to a legal conference in Madrid in 1933. Bakr Sidqi was feted in Baghdad and went on to lead a coup in 1936. Iraq has never conducted an official inquiry; the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament recognised the massacre in 2013 and Assyrian organisations mark 7 August as a memorial day. The scale of the killing is far smaller than most events in this atlas, and it is included for its role as a template of state violence against a minority and for the dispersal it began.","deathsLow":600,"deathsHigh":3000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":25000,"_deaths":1800,"countries":["Iraq","Syria"],"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The Assyrian population of Iraq at the time of the Simele massacre","baselineYear":1933,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.625},{"id":"dersim-operations-and-turkeys-settlement-law","title":"Turkey's Settlement Law and the Dersim Operations","startYear":1934,"endYear":1938,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Turkish state used the 1934 Settlement Law and emergency rule to disperse Kurdish and Alevi populations and suppressed Dersim by military operation","peopleDisplaced":25000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.11,"lon":39.55,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.11,"fromLon":39.55,"toLat":38.42,"toLon":27.14,"label":"Dersim (Tunceli) -> forced resettlement in western Anatolia","people":12000}],"summary":"The Settlement Law of June 1934 authorised the Turkish government to move populations for cultural, political or military reasons and classified regions by the degree of assimilation required of their inhabitants, providing the legal basis for dispersing Kurdish communities westward. In December 1935 the Tunceli Law placed the province of Dersim, largely Kurdish-speaking and Alevi, under military emergency administration and renamed it. Military operations in the spring of 1937, following an armed clash, and a far larger campaign in August and September 1938 subdued the region: villages were bombed and burned, and inhabitants were killed or deported. An unpublished official Inspectorate report cited by scholars gives 13,160 civilians killed and 11,818 deported; Alevi and Kurdish accounts give higher figures, some in the tens of thousands. The subject was taboo in Turkey for decades. In November 2009 Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan publicly described the events as a massacre, and in November 2011 he apologised in parliament, citing archival records of 13,806 people killed, while opposition parties disputed his use of the episode against them. The Turkish state has held no judicial inquiry.","deathsLow":13160,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":25000,"_deaths":26580,"countries":["Turkey"],"baselinePop":108000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Dersim, renamed Tunceli province, at the 1935 Turkish census","baselineYear":1935,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.23148148148148148},{"id":"italian-invasion-of-ethiopia-and-yekatit-12","title":"Italy's Invasion of Ethiopia and the Addis Ababa Massacre","startYear":1935,"endYear":1941,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Fascist Italy invaded and annexed Ethiopia, used chemical weapons against its forces and population, and massacred civilians in Addis Ababa in reprisal","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":1100000,"territoryDesc":"Ethiopia, about 1.1 million square kilometres, was annexed on 9 May 1936 and merged with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into Italian East Africa, with Victor Emmanuel III proclaimed emperor. Italian rule collapsed in 1941 when British and Ethiopian forces retook the country and Haile Selassie returned.","lat":9.03,"lon":38.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":9.03,"fromLon":38.74,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"Ethiopian imperial government -> exile in Britain, 1936","people":null}],"summary":"Italy invaded Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somaliland on 3 October 1935 without declaration of war. Italian forces used mustard gas sprayed from aircraft against Ethiopian troops, civilians, livestock and water sources, in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol to which Italy was a party, and bombed field hospitals marked with the Red Cross. Addis Ababa fell in May 1936 and the country was annexed to Italian East Africa. The League of Nations condemned the invasion and imposed limited economic sanctions that excluded oil and were abandoned in 1936, an episode widely seen as demonstrating the League's ineffectiveness. Resistance continued, and after an attempt on the life of the viceroy Rodolfo Graziani on 19 February 1937, Italian soldiers, Blackshirts and civilians killed Ethiopians in Addis Ababa over three days in the massacre known as Yekatit 12; Ian Campbell's reconstruction from Italian, Ethiopian and diplomatic sources puts the dead at roughly 19,000 to 20,000, against Ethiopian claims of 30,000 and much lower Italian figures. Reprisals extended to the massacre of the monastic community of Debre Libanos in May 1937. No Italian was ever tried: Ethiopia's request for extradition of Italian officers after the war was not granted by the Allies.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":760000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":6600000,"_deaths":455000,"countries":["Ethiopia","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":11000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ethiopia at the time of the Italian invasion","baselineYear":1935,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"arab-revolt-palestine-1936-1939","title":"The 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine and its Suppression","startYear":1936,"endYear":1939,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"British Mandate forces suppressed a Palestinian Arab revolt with collective punishment, house demolitions and mass detention, amid communal violence between Arabs and Jews","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.0522,"lon":34.7522,"flows":[],"summary":"A general strike and then armed revolt against British rule, Jewish immigration and land sales began in Palestine in April 1936, lapsed after the strike ended in October, and resumed as a full rural insurgency from 1937 to 1939. Britain deployed some 20,000-25,000 troops, imposed collective fines, curfews and administrative detention, demolished houses on a large scale - most conspicuously the dynamiting of a swathe of the old city of Jaffa in June 1936, presented as urban improvement and challenged unsuccessfully in the Mandate courts - and used punitive village searches and 'human shield' practices documented by Matthew Hughes from British military records. The Palestinian leadership was arrested or driven into exile, the Arab Higher Committee outlawed, and the revolt also produced substantial internal Palestinian violence against suspected collaborators. Estimates of the dead vary: around 5,000 Palestinian Arabs, several hundred Jews and around 260 British on standard reckonings, with Walid Khalidi and Hughes arguing for higher Arab figures. The Peel Commission of 1937 recommended partition with a compulsory transfer of population, the first official proposal of its kind, and the 1939 White Paper restricted Jewish immigration and land purchase. The suppression left Palestinian Arab political and military capacity severely weakened on the eve of the 1947-49 war.","deathsLow":4000,"deathsHigh":8000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","torture","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4800,"_deaths":6000,"countries":["Israel"],"baselinePop":950000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian Arab population of Mandate Palestine at the outbreak of the revolt","baselineYear":1936,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"porajmos-nazi-genocide-of-the-roma","title":"The Porajmos: Nazi Genocide of Roma and Sinti","startYear":1936,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Nazi Germany and its allies registered, interned, deported and killed Roma and Sinti across occupied Europe","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.03,"lon":19.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.21,"fromLon":16.37,"toLat":51.76,"toLon":19.46,"label":"Austria -> Lodz ghetto, autumn 1941","people":5007},{"fromLat":52.52,"fromLon":13.4,"toLat":50.03,"toLon":19.2,"label":"Germany and occupied Europe -> Auschwitz-Birkenau family camp","people":23000},{"fromLat":44.43,"fromLon":26.1,"toLat":47.03,"toLon":28.83,"label":"Romania -> deportation to Transnistria","people":25000}],"summary":"Roma and Sinti were persecuted in Germany from 1933 under vagrancy and 'asocial' laws, then racially defined by the Reich Central Office for the Combating of the Gypsy Nuisance and the research unit of Robert Ritter, and confined from 1936 in municipal camps such as Marzahn in Berlin. Deportations began in 1940. In the occupied Soviet territories the Einsatzgruppen shot at least 30,000 Roma alongside Jews. Himmler's decree of 16 December 1942 sent about 23,000 Roma to a separate family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where roughly 21,000 died of disease, starvation and gassing, including between 4,200 and 4,300 killed in a single night on 2 August 1944. Romania deported some 25,000 Roma to Transnistria, where about half died, and the Independent State of Croatia killed most of its Roma population at Jasenovac. Estimates of the total killed run from at least 250,000 to around 500,000. Survivors were long excluded from West German compensation on the ground that they had been detained for policing rather than racial reasons; Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally acknowledged the genocide in March 1982.","deathsLow":250000,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","forced labour","summary execution","torture","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":375000,"countries":["Poland","Austria","Germany","Romania","Moldova"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The Roma and Sinti population of Europe in the areas that came under Nazi German and Axis control","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.1},{"id":"spanish-civil-war-internal-displacement","title":"Internal Displacement inside Spain during the Civil War","startYear":1936,"endYear":1939,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Republican and Nationalist advances, aerial and naval bombardment and organised evacuations moved civilians within Spain and sent children abroad","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.7213,"lon":-4.4214,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.7213,"fromLon":-4.4214,"toLat":36.8381,"toLon":-2.4597,"label":"Malaga to Almeria along the coast road, February 1937","people":40000},{"fromLat":43.263,"fromLon":-2.935,"toLat":50.9097,"toLon":-1.4044,"label":"Basque children evacuated from Bilbao to Britain, 1937","people":3886},{"fromLat":39.4699,"fromLon":-0.3763,"toLat":41.3874,"toLon":2.1686,"label":"Refugees moving into Catalonia ahead of the Nationalist advance","people":null}],"summary":"The atlas already records the Retirada, the flight of Republicans into France in 1939; the larger movement, however, happened inside Spain. Each Nationalist advance pushed civilians ahead of it into the shrinking Republican zone, and the Republic created refugee committees and a national evacuation apparatus that resettled people in Catalonia, the Levante and Madrid. The best-known single episode is the flight from Malaga on 8 February 1937, when between 15,000 and 50,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, walked the coast road toward Almeria while Nationalist warships and Italian and German aircraft attacked the column; deaths on the road are usually put around 3,000, though the Spanish state has said the true number is unknown and several modern historians argue for lower figures. From 1937 the Basque and Republican authorities also evacuated about 34,000 children abroad, to Britain, France, Belgium, the Soviet Union and Mexico; those sent to the USSR were largely unable to return until after 1956. Most internal refugees returned or were returned home after 1939, often into the classification and punishment system of the new regime.","deathsLow":1500,"deathsHigh":5000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":3250,"countries":["Spain","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":24500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War","baselineYear":1936,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.061224489795918366},{"id":"spanish-civil-war-retirada-and-french-camps","title":"The Spanish Civil War: the Retirada and the French Internment Camps","startYear":1936,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Franco's forces drove the Republican population into exile and France interned the refugees in beach camps in Roussillon","peopleDisplaced":465000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":42.55,"lon":3.02,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.39,"fromLon":2.17,"toLat":42.55,"toLon":3.02,"label":"Catalonia -> Argeles-sur-Mer and the Roussillon beach camps","people":465000},{"fromLat":42.55,"fromLon":3.02,"toLat":48.26,"toLon":14.5,"label":"Spanish republicans in French custody -> Mauthausen concentration camp","people":7288}],"summary":"The collapse of the Republican front in Catalonia in early 1939 pushed close to half a million people over the Pyrenees in a few weeks. France interned them on the beaches of Argeles-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and Le Barcares behind wire, at first without shelter or sanitation, and later in camps such as Gurs, Bram and Rivesaltes; thousands died of dysentery, pneumonia and exposure in the first months. Many were pressed into labour companies, and after 1940 Vichy and the German authorities sent almost 9,000 Spanish republicans to Nazi concentration camps; of the 7,288 registered at Mauthausen-Gusen, 4,676 died there. Others returned to Spain, where the Francoist state prosecuted the defeated through military tribunals, held some 270,000 political prisoners at the peak in 1940, used prisoner labour on public works and carried out tens of thousands of executions after the war; that repression, which fell mostly on people who never went into exile, is treated in the atlas's entry on Francoist postwar camps, prisons and forced labour. Spanish and international researchers have documented mass graves still being exhumed under the memory laws of 2007 and 2022.","deathsLow":4676,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","summary execution","denationalization","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":465000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["France","Spain","Austria"],"baselinePop":24500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Spain at the outbreak of the Civil War","baselineYear":1936,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.018979591836734692,"related":[{"id":"franco-postwar-camps-prisons-forced-labour","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The Retirada of 1939 and Franco's postwar camps, prisons and forced labour followed the same defeat; the Retirada entry now counts only the exiles' deaths, leaving postwar executions to the Francoist entry."}]},{"id":"chinese-wartime-refugees-and-the-yellow-river-breach","title":"China's Wartime Refugee Flight and the Yellow River Dyke Breach","startYear":1937,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese invasion drove tens of millions of Chinese civilians from their homes, and Chinese Nationalist forces breached the Yellow River dykes to slow the advance","peopleDisplaced":80000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.92,"lon":113.47,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.06,"fromLon":118.8,"toLat":29.56,"toLon":106.55,"label":"Lower Yangtze cities -> the wartime capital Chongqing and the southwest","people":null},{"fromLat":34.75,"fromLon":113.63,"toLat":31.86,"toLon":117.28,"label":"Flooded districts of Henan -> Anhui and Jiangsu","people":4000000}],"summary":"The Japanese advance from 1937 emptied cities and whole provinces: universities, factories and government offices moved west to Sichuan and Yunnan, and civilians fled ahead of the front in numbers that contemporary and later estimates place in the tens of millions, among the largest displacements of the century. On 9 June 1938 Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Yellow River dykes cut at Huayuankou in Henan to halt the Japanese advance on Wuhan. The flood inundated some 1.3 million hectares across 44 counties, displaced close to four million people and, over the nine years before the river was returned to its course in 1947, is estimated to have killed more than 800,000. The flooded zone contributed to the Henan famine of 1942-43, in which one to three million people died. Chinese war deaths overall are variously estimated at 14 to 20 million. The dyke breach was carried out by the Chinese government against its own population and was concealed at the time as a Japanese bombing.","deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":900000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":80000000,"_deaths":700000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":500000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of China at the outbreak of the war with Japan","baselineYear":1937,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16,"related":[{"id":"sanko-sakusen-three-alls-campaigns","rel":"includes","note":"The flight of villagers from the Three Alls campaigns in north China is part of the wartime displacement of Chinese civilians."}]},{"id":"deportation-of-soviet-koreans-1937","title":"Deportation of Koreans from the Soviet Far East","startYear":1937,"endYear":1937,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Council of People's Commissars and the NKVD deported the entire Korean population of the Far Eastern Krai to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan","peopleDisplaced":172000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":43.12,"lon":131.89,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.12,"fromLon":131.89,"toLat":44.85,"toLon":65.51,"label":"Vladivostok and the Far Eastern Krai -> Kzyl-Orda and southern Kazakhstan","people":95000},{"fromLat":43.12,"fromLon":131.89,"toLat":41.3,"toLon":69.24,"label":"Far Eastern Krai -> Uzbekistan (Tashkent region)","people":76000}],"summary":"Decree 1428-326ss of 21 August 1937, signed by Stalin and Molotov, ordered the removal of the Korean population from the border districts of the Far Eastern Krai on the stated ground of preventing Japanese espionage; within weeks the order was extended to the whole krai. About 172,000 people were loaded into freight trains and carried some 6,000 kilometres to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they were settled on the steppe and in the Aral and Syr Darya districts, often without prepared housing before winter. Korean schools, newspapers and the Korean-language pedagogical institute were closed, and the deportees were placed under residence restrictions that were not lifted until the 1950s. The operation coincided with the arrest and execution of much of the Korean Soviet intelligentsia. It became the template for the wartime deportations of other nationalities.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":172000,"_deaths":25000,"countries":["Russia","Kazakhstan","Uzbekistan"],"baselinePop":175000,"baselineWhat":"The Korean population of the Soviet Far Eastern Krai","baselineYear":1937,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9828571428571429},{"id":"great-terror-national-operations-1937-1938","title":"The Great Terror: Mass and National Operations of the NKVD","startYear":1937,"endYear":1938,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The NKVD under Nikolai Yezhov arrested, shot or sent to camps quotas of 'anti-Soviet elements' and members of diaspora nationalities on Politburo authority","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":55.75,"lon":37.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":64.56,"toLon":40.53,"label":"Sentenced survivors of the mass operations -> northern camps","people":null}],"summary":"Between July 1937 and November 1938 the NKVD carried out centrally planned mass arrests under numbered operational orders that set regional quotas for execution and for camp sentences. Order 00447 targeted former kulaks, returning deportees, clergy and people with criminal records; a parallel series of 'national operations' targeted Soviet citizens of Polish, German, Latvian, Finnish, Greek, Korean, Chinese and other diaspora origins on the presumption that they were foreign agents. Sentences were passed in absentia by two- and three-man boards on the basis of lists. The Polish operation was proportionally the deadliest, with about four in five of those arrested shot. Wives of executed men were arrested under a separate order and their children placed in institutions. The operations were halted in November 1938 and Yezhov himself was shot in 1940; the Soviet state did not publish the statistics, which emerged from the archives after 1991 and are now maintained in the databases of the Memorial society.","deathsLow":680000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","torture","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":740000,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":162000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Soviet Union at the suppressed census of January 1937","baselineYear":1937,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.009259259259259259},{"id":"nanjing-massacre-1937","title":"The Nanjing Massacre","startYear":1937,"endYear":1938,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese Central China Area Army killed prisoners and civilians and committed mass rape after capturing the Chinese capital","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.06,"lon":118.8,"flows":[],"summary":"Japanese forces entered Nanjing on 13 December 1937 after a pursuit up the Yangtze from Shanghai and, over roughly six weeks, executed surrendered Chinese soldiers and men of military age, killed civilians, burned large parts of the city and committed mass rape. Foreign residents who remained set up a Safety Zone that sheltered some 200,000 to 250,000 people and recorded what they saw in diaries, letters and films. The figures are sharply disputed. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found in 1948 that over 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were killed in and around the city in the first six weeks and recorded some 20,000 cases of rape in the first month; the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal of 1947 put the toll at more than 300,000, the figure inscribed at the memorial hall in Nanjing and used by the Chinese government. Japanese scholars differ widely: Hata Ikuhiko's estimate is around 40,000, other Japanese historians give figures between 100,000 and 200,000, and a revisionist current in Japan claims the massacre was greatly exaggerated or fabricated. Successive Japanese governments have acknowledged that killings of non-combatants occurred while declining to endorse a figure, and the Japanese foreign ministry states that it is difficult to determine the number of victims.","deathsLow":40000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":250000,"_deaths":170000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The population remaining in Nanjing and its immediately surrounding counties when the city fell in December 1937","baselineYear":1937,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.5},{"id":"parsley-massacre-1937","title":"The Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic","startYear":1937,"endYear":1937,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Dominican army and police units under Rafael Trujillo killed Haitians and Haitian-descended residents of the border region and drove survivors into Haiti","peopleDisplaced":25000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.55,"lon":-71.7,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.55,"fromLon":-71.7,"toLat":19.44,"toLon":-71.84,"label":"Dominican border provinces -> Haiti across the Massacre and Dajabon rivers","people":25000}],"summary":"In late September and October 1937 Rafael Trujillo ordered the killing of Haitians in the Dominican border region. Soldiers and police, sometimes with civilian participation, used machetes and rifles over roughly a week, reportedly testing suspected Haitians by asking them to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, a shibboleth that gave the episode its name; the bodies of many victims were thrown into the river that marks the frontier. Estimates of the dead range from about 4,000 to 20,000 or more, with figures of 12,000 to 15,000 common in the literature. The killings formed part of a wider policy of 'Dominicanisation' of the frontier that also expelled survivors and restricted Haitian labour and settlement. Under diplomatic pressure mediated by the United States, Cuba and Mexico, the Dominican Republic agreed in January 1938 to pay Haiti an indemnity of 750,000 US dollars, of which about 525,000 was actually paid, without any admission of responsibility or prosecution of those involved. In 2013 a Dominican constitutional court ruling retroactively stripped citizenship from many Dominicans of Haitian descent, an act critics linked to the same policy tradition.","deathsLow":4000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":25000,"_deaths":12000,"countries":["Dominican Rep.","Haiti"],"baselinePop":60517,"baselineWhat":"The Haitian and Haitian-descended population recorded as resident in the Dominican Republic","baselineYear":1935,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.4131070608258836},{"id":"annexation-of-austria-and-the-sudetenland-1938","title":"The Annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland","startYear":1938,"endYear":1939,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Nazi Germany annexed Austria by invasion and plebiscite and the Czechoslovak borderlands by the Munich agreement of the four powers","peopleDisplaced":287000,"territoryKm2":112000,"territoryDesc":"Austria, about 84,000 square kilometres, was incorporated into the Reich on 13 March 1938 and dissolved into Reichsgaue. The Sudeten borderlands, about 28,000 square kilometres, were ceded by Czechoslovakia under the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938; the remaining Czech lands were occupied on 15 March 1939 as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Slovakia became a nominally independent state and Hungary and Poland took further Czechoslovak districts.","lat":50.66,"lon":14.04,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.66,"fromLon":14.04,"toLat":50.08,"toLon":14.44,"label":"Sudeten borderlands -> rump Czechoslovakia (Prague and the interior)","people":170000},{"fromLat":48.21,"fromLon":16.37,"toLat":51.51,"toLon":-0.13,"label":"Vienna -> emigration abroad after the Anschluss","people":117000}],"summary":"German troops entered Austria on 12 March 1938 and the country was annexed the next day, ratified by a plebiscite held under Nazi control. Persecution of Austrian Jews was immediate and more violent than anything yet seen in Germany, with public humiliations in Vienna, mass arrests and the creation of Adolf Eichmann's Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which forced emigration in exchange for expropriation. Six months later, at Munich on 30 September 1938, Britain, France, Germany and Italy agreed the cession of the Czechoslovak borderlands to Germany without Czechoslovak participation; German forces occupied them in the first ten days of October. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Czechs, Jews and German-speaking opponents of Nazism moved into what remained of Czechoslovakia, which Germany then dismembered in March 1939. The two annexations added roughly ten million people and 112,000 square kilometres to the Reich without war, and extended the concentration camp system with the opening of Mauthausen in August 1938.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":672000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Czechia","Austria","United Kingdom"],"baselinePop":10300000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the territories Germany annexed in 1938: Austria and the Czechoslovak borderlands","baselineYear":1938,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.027864077669902912,"related":[{"id":"nazi-persecution-and-jewish-refugee-exodus-1933-1939","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":117000,"note":"The 117,000 Austrian Jewish emigrants of 1938-39 are counted in both entries."}]},{"id":"phoenix-islands-settlement-scheme","title":"The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme and Gilbertese Resettlement to the Solomon Islands","startYear":1938,"endYear":1971,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The British colonial administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands moved Gilbertese settlers to the Phoenix atolls and later to the Solomon Islands","peopleDisplaced":3000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-4.68,"lon":-174.52,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.35,"fromLon":174.75,"toLat":-4.68,"toLon":-174.52,"label":"Gilbertese settlers to the Phoenix Islands","people":1000},{"fromLat":-4.68,"fromLon":-174.52,"toLat":-8.1,"toLon":156.84,"label":"Evacuation to Gizo and Wagina in the Solomon Islands","people":null}],"summary":"Faced with land shortage in the southern Gilbert Islands, the British colonial administration launched a settlement scheme in 1938 that moved about a thousand Gilbertese to the uninhabited Phoenix atolls of Nikumaroro, Manra and Orona, where they were to establish coconut plantations. Drought and thin soils made the settlements unviable, and in 1963 the administration evacuated the remaining settlers to Wagina and Gizo in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. A parallel resettlement of Gilbertese directly to the Solomons continued from 1954 until the Governing Council effectively stopped it in 1971 over concerns about ethnic tension of the kind seen in Fiji; the 1976 Solomons census counted 2,753 Gilbertese. Participation was organised and encouraged by the administration rather than compelled at law, but the choices available to settlers were shaped by colonial land policy and by the phosphate economy that had already taken Banaba, whose people the atlas records separately. The Gilbertese communities in the Solomons were displaced again during the tensions of 1998-2003 and questions of land and citizenship have persisted.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":3000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Solomon Is."],"baselinePop":28000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Gilbert Islands at the time the resettlement scheme began, from whose overcrowded southern atolls the settlers were drawn","baselineYear":1938,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.10714285714285714},{"id":"aktion-t4-and-the-murder-of-disabled-people","title":"Aktion T4 and the Murder of Disabled People","startYear":1939,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German physicians and the Chancellery of the Fuehrer killed institutionalised disabled children and adults under a centrally organised programme","peopleDisplaced":70273,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.41,"lon":12.55,"flows":[{"fromLat":48.3,"fromLon":14.29,"toLat":48.27,"toLon":13.95,"label":"Austrian asylums -> Hartheim killing centre","people":18000},{"fromLat":50.35,"fromLon":8.32,"toLat":50.45,"toLon":8.04,"label":"Institutions in western Germany -> Hadamar killing centre","people":10000}],"summary":"Beginning in 1939 with the killing of disabled infants and young children in special paediatric wards, the Nazi state extended medical killing to institutionalised adults under an operation run from Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin and authorised by a backdated note from Hitler. Physicians selected patients from questionnaires returned by asylums; those chosen were transported to six centres - Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, Hartheim and Hadamar - and killed with carbon monoxide in gas chambers disguised as showers, their families receiving falsified causes of death. Public protest, notably the sermon of Bishop Clemens August von Galen in August 1941, led Hitler to halt the centralised gassing after 70,273 deaths, but killing continued in institutions by starvation and lethal medication until 1945. The programme supplied the personnel and the technique for the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard, where T4 staff including Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl were deployed. Postwar West German trials convicted a number of the doctors and administrators involved.","deathsLow":250000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","torture","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":70273,"_deaths":275000,"countries":["Germany","Austria"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of German psychiatric hospitals, asylums and care institutions on the eve of the killing programme","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.23424333333333333},{"id":"expulsions-from-annexed-poland-and-heim-ins-reich","title":"Expulsions from Annexed Poland and the 'Heim ins Reich' Resettlement","startYear":1939,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Himmler's Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom expelled Poles and Jews from the annexed Polish provinces and settled ethnic Germans brought in from eastern Europe in their place","peopleDisplaced":1400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.41,"lon":16.93,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.41,"fromLon":16.93,"toLat":50.06,"toLon":19.94,"label":"Wartheland -> General Government (expelled Poles and Jews)","people":700000},{"fromLat":56.95,"fromLon":24.11,"toLat":52.41,"toLon":16.93,"label":"Baltic Germans from Latvia and Estonia -> Wartheland","people":120000},{"fromLat":46.83,"fromLon":29.48,"toLat":52.41,"toLon":16.93,"label":"Germans of Bessarabia and Bukovina -> annexed Polish provinces","people":190000}],"summary":"Hitler appointed Himmler Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom on 7 October 1939 with the task of making the annexed Polish provinces German. Poles and Jews were removed from their farms, shops and houses at short notice, usually with a suitcase each, and moved by train to the General Government; their property was handed to ethnic German settlers brought in under agreements with the Soviet Union, Italy, Romania and the Baltic states that repatriated about a million Volksdeutsche from eastern and southeastern Europe. Racial screening offices sorted both the expelled and the incoming, and at least 20,000 Polish children assessed as Germanizable were taken from their parents and placed with German families. The most systematic clearance in the General Government took place around Zamosc in 1942-43 as a first instalment of Generalplan Ost, the SS scheme for the settlement of eastern Europe by Germans and the removal, over decades, of tens of millions of Slavs. Generalplan Ost was never implemented as drafted, but the expulsions, the Germanization of children and the plunder of property were carried out and were charged at Nuremberg.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","arbitrary detention","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1400000,"_deaths":65000,"countries":["Poland","Latvia","Moldova"],"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Polish territories annexed to the German Reich in 1939","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.14,"related":[{"id":"german-soviet-partition-of-poland-1939","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":500000,"note":"The expulsion of Poles and Jews from the annexed western provinces into the General Government in 1939-41 is counted both in the partition entry and in the Heim ins Reich expulsions entry."}]},{"id":"franco-postwar-camps-prisons-forced-labour","title":"Franco's Postwar Concentration Camps, Prisons and Forced-Labour System in Spain","startYear":1939,"endYear":1947,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Franco dictatorship interned, imprisoned and conscripted into labour battalions Spaniards classified as disloyal after the Republic's defeat","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.4168,"lon":-3.7038,"flows":[],"summary":"After the Republic's surrender in April 1939 the Franco regime kept in place the network of concentration camps built during the civil war and combined it with a greatly expanded prison system and with labour battalions. Classification commissions sorted prisoners into those released, those sent to workers' battalions and those handed to military courts under the Law of Political Responsibilities; the parallel scheme of 'redemption of sentences through work' let prisoners cut their terms by labouring for the state and for private construction, public-works and mining firms, and prisoner labour was used, among many projects, on the Valle de los Caidos monument begun in 1940. Alongside this, children of imprisoned, executed or exiled Republicans were placed in state and church institutions: by 1943 official records show 12,043 such children in state custody, and figures compiled by Judge Baltasar Garzon in 2008 from historical sources put more than 30,000 children under regime 'tutelage' between 1944 and 1954, a practice that victims' associations say later merged into decades of irregular adoptions known in Spain as the ninos robados. The last camp, Miranda de Ebro, closed in 1947. The subject was left largely untouched during the transition under what is commonly called the pacto del olvido; the 2007 Historical Memory Law and the 2022 Democratic Memory Law reopened it, while the 1977 Amnesty Law has continued to block criminal prosecutions.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":50000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","summary execution","torture","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":35000,"countries":["Spain"],"baselinePop":26014278,"baselineWhat":"The population of Spain at the 1940 census","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.015376171500896546,"related":[{"id":"spanish-civil-war-retirada-and-french-camps","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The Retirada of 1939 and Franco's postwar camps, prisons and forced labour followed the same defeat; the Retirada entry now counts only the exiles' deaths, leaving postwar executions to the Francoist entry."}]},{"id":"german-soviet-partition-of-poland-1939","title":"The German-Soviet Partition of Poland","startYear":1939,"endYear":1941,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and divided the Polish state between them under the secret protocol of the pact of 23 August 1939","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":389000,"territoryDesc":"Germany annexed about 92,000 square kilometres of western and northern Poland outright as Danzig-West Prussia, the Wartheland, Upper Silesia and the Ciechanow district, and administered a further 95,000 square kilometres as the General Government from 26 October 1939. The Soviet Union took about 200,000 square kilometres east of the Bug and San, incorporating them into the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics after staged elections in October 1939; Vilnius was handed to Lithuania. The Polish state ceased to exist as a territorial entity until 1945.","lat":52.23,"lon":21.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.41,"fromLon":16.93,"toLat":50.06,"toLon":19.94,"label":"Annexed Wartheland and Pomerania -> General Government","people":500000},{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":49.84,"toLon":24.03,"label":"German-occupied Poland -> Soviet zone (refugees, autumn 1939)","people":300000}],"summary":"The German invasion of 1 September 1939 and the Soviet invasion of 17 September divided Poland along a line fixed by the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and revised by the boundary and friendship treaty of 28 September. Germany annexed the western provinces directly to the Reich and placed the rest under a colonial administration, the General Government, seated in Krakow. The Soviet Union annexed the eastern half to the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics after elections conducted under military occupation, imposed Soviet citizenship, and deported categories of the population it judged hostile. Both occupiers moved at once against Polish elites: German forces shot thousands of teachers, priests, officials and landowners in the Intelligenzaktion of late 1939, while the NKVD shot about 21,857 Polish officers and officials in the spring of 1940. The partition lasted until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, after which the whole territory came under German rule.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","denationalization","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2334000,"_deaths":200000,"countries":["Poland","Ukraine"],"baselinePop":35100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Second Polish Republic","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.042735042735042736,"related":[{"id":"expulsions-from-annexed-poland-and-heim-ins-reich","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":500000,"note":"The expulsion of Poles and Jews from the annexed western provinces into the General Government in 1939-41 is counted both in the partition entry and in the Heim ins Reich expulsions entry."},{"id":"soviet-deportations-from-eastern-poland-1940-1941","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":320000,"note":"The Soviet deportations from eastern Poland in 1940-41 took place within the German-Soviet partition of Poland."}]},{"id":"japanese-wartime-forced-labour","title":"Japanese Wartime Mobilisation of Korean and Chinese Forced Labour","startYear":1939,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese state and Japanese companies conscripted Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese workers for mines, shipyards and factories in Japan and its empire","peopleDisplaced":800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.59,"lon":130.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.16,"fromLon":129.06,"toLat":33.59,"toLon":130.4,"label":"Korea -> coal mines and shipyards of Kyushu and western Japan","people":670000},{"fromLat":38.91,"fromLon":121.61,"toLat":34.69,"toLon":135.5,"label":"North China -> mines and construction sites in Japan","people":38935}],"summary":"From 1939 Japan met wartime labour shortages by recruiting, and from 1944 formally conscripting, workers from colonial Korea and Taiwan and by transporting Chinese prisoners and civilians to Japan. Labourers worked in coal and metal mines, shipyards, steel plants and construction under conditions of confinement, low or withheld pay and high accident and death rates; among the best documented cases are the Hanaoka mine, where Chinese labourers revolted in June 1945 and were killed in the suppression, and the Hashima and Takashima coal mines. Compensation claims have been litigated for decades. Japan holds that all claims arising from the colonial period were settled by the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations and its claims agreement with the Republic of Korea, under which Japan provided grants and loans. On 30 October 2018 the Supreme Court of Korea held that the 1965 agreement did not extinguish individual claims for damages arising from illegal colonial rule and ordered Nippon Steel, and in a subsequent ruling Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, to compensate former labourers; Japan called the rulings a violation of international law, and the dispute led to trade restrictions in 2019. In March 2023 the South Korean government announced that a domestic foundation would pay the judgments, a solution rejected by some plaintiffs.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":60000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","torture","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":800000,"_deaths":40000,"countries":["Japan","South Korea","China"],"baselinePop":23500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of colonial Korea at the 1940 census, the main source of wartime conscripted labour","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.03404255319148936},{"id":"nazi-forced-labour-in-the-reich","title":"Forced Labour in the German War Economy","startYear":1939,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German authorities under Fritz Sauckel's plenipotentiary office conscripted and deported civilians from occupied Europe to work in the Reich","peopleDisplaced":8000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":51.23,"lon":6.78,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":51.23,"toLon":6.78,"label":"Occupied Soviet Union -> industrial western Germany (Ostarbeiter)","people":2800000},{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":48.14,"toLon":11.58,"label":"Occupied Poland -> agriculture and industry in southern Germany","people":1500000},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":50.11,"toLon":8.68,"label":"France (Service du travail obligatoire) -> the Reich","people":650000}],"summary":"Labour shortages caused by conscription led Germany to draw workers from every occupied country, first by recruitment and then by force. Fritz Sauckel, appointed plenipotentiary for labour deployment in March 1942, organised round-ups in Poland, the occupied Soviet territories, France, the Netherlands and the Balkans; whole villages were emptied and people seized in street and cinema raids. A racial hierarchy governed treatment: workers from western Europe were relatively better placed, Poles and Soviet Ostarbeiter wore identifying badges, lived in guarded barracks, faced separate penal law and were fed at levels that produced widespread illness. Concentration camp prisoners were hired out to firms under a policy of extermination through labour, and camp satellites were built beside factories. Sauckel was convicted at Nuremberg and executed. After decades of litigation, the German state and German industry created the Foundation 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' in 2000, which paid compensation to about 1.66 million surviving forced labourers.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":2500000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","torture","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":8000000,"_deaths":1750000,"countries":["Germany","Ukraine","Poland","France"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"german-anti-partisan-war-in-belarus","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":400000,"note":"The Belarus entry's displacement figure is the National Archives of Belarus count of about 400,000 people taken from Belarus to forced labour in Germany. These deportees are among the Soviet Ostarbeiter counted in the forced labour entry's 8 million, so the two displacement figures must not be summed. The archive gives no figure for people driven from the 9,200 burned villages or the cleared 'dead zones', so no separate figure can be substituted."},{"id":"german-treatment-of-soviet-prisoners-of-war","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Soviet prisoners of war put to work in the German war economy appear in both the prisoner-of-war entry and the forced labour entry, whose upper death estimate includes prisoners of war who died as labourers."}]},{"id":"nazi-ghettos-1939-1944","title":"The Ghettos as a System of Confinement","startYear":1939,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German occupation authorities, with Romanian and other allied administrations, confined Jewish populations in closed districts before deporting them","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.24,"lon":20.99,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":52.63,"toLon":22.05,"label":"Warsaw ghetto -> Treblinka killing centre","people":265000},{"fromLat":51.76,"fromLon":19.46,"toLat":52.15,"toLon":18.72,"label":"Lodz ghetto -> Chelmno killing centre","people":70000}],"summary":"From late 1939 German authorities concentrated Jews in designated districts of towns and cities, first in occupied Poland and from 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories, sealing many of them with walls or fences and appointing Jewish councils to administer them. Ghettos served as holding pens and labour pools: inhabitants were set to work for German firms and the army while receiving rations far below subsistence. Overcrowding, hunger and epidemic typhus killed hundreds of thousands, with the Warsaw ghetto alone recording more than 80,000 deaths from starvation and disease before the deportations began. From 1942 the ghettos of the General Government were emptied to the killing centres of Operation Reinhard, and the last large ghettos in Poland and Lithuania were destroyed in 1943 and 1944. Armed resistance broke out in Warsaw in April 1943 and in Bialystok, Vilna and other ghettos. Theresienstadt, established in November 1941, was used both as a transit ghetto and as a propaganda showpiece.","deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","forced labour","mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":3000000,"_deaths":650000,"countries":["Poland"],"baselinePop":3300000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of German-occupied Poland, where most ghettos were established","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9090909090909091,"related":[{"id":"the-holocaust","rel":"part-of","sharedDeaths":[500000,800000],"note":"Ghetto deaths (500,000-800,000) fall inside the Holocaust entry's 5.1-6.2 million; USHMM counts 800,000-1,000,000 Jewish deaths in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps as one component of the six million. Do not sum the two death ranges."}]},{"id":"south-tyrol-option-agreement-1939","title":"The South Tyrol Option Agreement","startYear":1939,"endYear":1943,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy agreed that the German-speaking population of South Tyrol must choose between emigration to the Reich and assimilation in Italy","peopleDisplaced":75000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":46.5,"lon":11.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.5,"fromLon":11.35,"toLat":47.27,"toLon":11.39,"label":"South Tyrol -> Austria and the Reich (Tyrol, Vorarlberg and further afield)","people":75000}],"summary":"South Tyrol had been annexed by Italy in 1919 and subjected to a policy of Italianization that banned German-language schooling and public use of German. On 23 June 1939 German and Italian officials agreed that the province's German- and Ladin-speaking inhabitants would be given a choice: opt for German citizenship and resettlement in the Reich, or remain as Italian citizens and accept assimilation. The campaign that followed split families and villages between 'optants' and 'stayers'. About 185,000 registered to leave, though only some 75,000 had gone by 1943, when the German occupation of northern Italy made further transfers pointless. Most emigrants were settled in Austria rather than in the eastern territories originally envisaged. After the war Italy and Austria agreed in 1946 that optants could return and recover citizenship, and most of those who had left came back; the episode left a lasting division in South Tyrolean society.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":75000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Italy","Austria"],"baselinePop":246036,"baselineWhat":"The German- and Ladin-speaking population of South Tyrol eligible to exercise the option in 1939","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3048334390089255},{"id":"the-holocaust","title":"The Holocaust","startYear":1939,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Nazi Germany, its agencies and its allies and collaborators across occupied Europe systematically murdered Europe's Jews","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.03,"lon":19.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":19.04,"toLat":50.03,"toLon":19.2,"label":"Hungary -> Auschwitz-Birkenau, May-July 1944","people":430000},{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":52.63,"toLon":22.05,"label":"Warsaw ghetto -> Treblinka, summer 1942","people":265000},{"fromLat":52.37,"fromLon":4.9,"toLat":50.03,"toLon":19.2,"label":"Netherlands (Westerbork) -> Auschwitz and Sobibor","people":100000},{"fromLat":40.64,"fromLon":22.94,"toLat":50.03,"toLon":19.2,"label":"Thessaloniki -> Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1943","people":45000}],"summary":"The Holocaust was the state-organised murder of about six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1939 and 1945, carried out in three overlapping ways. From June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and Order Police battalions, assisted by Wehrmacht units and local auxiliaries, shot Jewish communities at the edge of their own towns in the occupied Soviet territories, killing about 33,771 people at Babi Yar outside Kyiv alone on 29-30 September 1941 and at least 1.5 million in all. From 1939 Jews were concentrated in more than 1,300 ghettos, where hunger and disease killed hundreds of thousands. From December 1941 six killing centres using gas - Chelmno, then Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka under Operation Reinhard, and Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek - received deportation trains from across the continent: approximately one million people were murdered at Auschwitz, about 925,000 at Treblinka, 435,000 at Belzec, at least 167,000 at Sobibor and at least 152,000 at Chelmno. The Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942 coordinated the deportation of Jews from the whole of Europe among the agencies of the German state. The concentration camp system, more than 44,000 camps and incarceration sites in all, worked prisoners to death in armaments production, and the last months of the war added the death marches westward from the evacuated camps. Alongside Jews, the Nazi state killed at least 250,000 Roma, some 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, about 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians and 250,000 to 300,000 disabled people. The figure of six million rests on prewar and postwar census comparison, German transport and camp documentation and community-by-community reconstruction; Raul Hilberg's lower reconstruction of about 5.1 million and Yad Vashem's and the Museum's figure of close to six million mark the working range, and about 4.9 million victims have been identified by name.","deathsLow":5100000,"deathsHigh":6200000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","starvation & siege","forced labour","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","torture","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":3000000,"_deaths":5650000,"countries":["Poland","Hungary","Netherlands","Greece"],"baselinePop":9500000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Europe on the eve of the Second World War","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3157894736842105,"related":[{"id":"nazi-ghettos-1939-1944","rel":"includes","sharedDeaths":[500000,800000],"note":"Ghetto deaths (500,000-800,000) fall inside the Holocaust entry's 5.1-6.2 million; USHMM counts 800,000-1,000,000 Jewish deaths in ghettos, labour camps and concentration camps as one component of the six million. Do not sum the two death ranges."}]},{"id":"katyn-massacre-1940","title":"The Katyn Massacre of Polish Prisoners","startYear":1940,"endYear":1940,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet NKVD shot Polish officers, police and officials held prisoner after the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland","peopleDisplaced":21857,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":54.77,"lon":31.79,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.03,"fromLon":35.81,"toLat":54.77,"toLon":31.79,"label":"Kozelsk camp -> Katyn forest execution site","people":4400}],"summary":"After the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939 the NKVD held tens of thousands of captured Polish officers, police, border guards, officials and landowners. On 5 March 1940 the Politburo approved a proposal by Lavrentiy Beria to shoot them without trial as 'hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet power'. About 21,857 people were killed in April and May 1940 at Katyn near Smolensk, in the NKVD prisons of Kalinin and Kharkov and at other sites. When German forces uncovered the Katyn graves in 1943 the Soviet Union blamed Germany, a claim it maintained until 13 April 1990, when the Soviet government acknowledged NKVD responsibility. In 2010 the Russian State Duma adopted a declaration attributing the massacre to Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The Russian criminal investigation was discontinued in 2004 and much of its file remains classified; the European Court of Human Rights found in 2013 that it could not examine the adequacy of that investigation but held that Russia had breached its duty to cooperate with the Court.","deathsLow":21768,"deathsHigh":22000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":21857,"_deaths":21884,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":250000,"baselineWhat":"The Polish military personnel, police and officials taken into Soviet captivity after the invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.087428},{"id":"sanko-sakusen-three-alls-campaigns","title":"The Sanko Sakusen: Japanese Scorched-Earth Campaigns in North China","startYear":1940,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Japanese North China Area Army destroyed villages, food stores and populations in the Communist base areas of north China","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":38.04,"lon":114.51,"flows":[],"summary":"After the Communist Hundred Regiments Offensive of August-December 1940 exposed the weakness of Japanese control in north China, the North China Area Army under Tada Hayao and from 1941 Okamura Yasuji adopted a counter-insurgency strategy of destroying the rural base of the guerrillas: burning villages, seizing or destroying grain, killing or removing inhabitants, and constructing blockade ditches, walls and strongpoints to seal off districts. Chinese sources named the strategy sanguang, 'burn all, kill all, loot all', which entered Japanese usage as sanko sakusen. Whole districts were declared depopulation zones. Estimates of the death toll are highly uncertain: the Japanese historian Himeta Mitsuyoshi has put deaths caused by the policy at about 2.7 million Chinese civilians, a figure repeated in Chinese accounts and questioned by other Japanese scholars as an extrapolation. There is no dispute among historians that the campaigns involved the systematic destruction of villages and the killing of non-combatants, which the Tokyo tribunal treated as part of the pattern of Japanese conduct in China.","deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":2700000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege","summary execution","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1280000,"_deaths":1600000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":44000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Chinese Communist base areas of north China before the Japanese scorched-earth campaigns","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"chinese-wartime-refugees-and-the-yellow-river-breach","rel":"part-of","note":"The flight of villagers from the Three Alls campaigns in north China is part of the wartime displacement of Chinese civilians."}]},{"id":"soviet-annexation-baltic-states","title":"Soviet Annexation of the Baltic States and Mass Deportations","startYear":1940,"endYear":1953,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, reoccupied them in 1944 after German withdrawal, and deported tens of thousands accused of nationalism, wealth, or wartime collaboration to Siberia and Central Asia in 1941 and again in 1949.","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":174900,"territoryDesc":"Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania","lat":56.95,"lon":24.11,"flows":[{"fromLat":56.95,"fromLon":24.11,"toLat":56,"toLon":92.87,"label":"Riga → Siberia","people":90000},{"fromLat":54.68,"fromLon":25.28,"toLat":49.8,"toLon":73.1,"label":"Vilnius → Kazakhstan","people":60000}],"summary":"The Soviet Union occupied and annexed the three Baltic republics in 1940, an act most Western governments never formally recognized. German occupation followed in 1941–44, after which the Red Army reoccupied the territories and Soviet rule was reimposed. Soviet security services deported tens of thousands of people—often entire families of suspected nationalists, wealthier farmers ('kulaks'), or wartime partisans and their supporters—to Siberia and Central Asia, most notably in the June 1941 deportations and the March 1949 Operation Priboi tied to agricultural collectivization. Tens of thousands more fled west as refugees in 1944 ahead of the returning Red Army. The Baltic states regained independence in 1991.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1049400,"countries":["Latvia","Russia","Lithuania","Kazakhstan"],"deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","summary execution","torture"],"_deaths":65000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5970000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at annexation","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.03350083752093802,"related":[{"id":"gulag-camp-system-1930-1953","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some Baltic deportees, notably men separated from their families in June 1941, were sent to Gulag camps and are counted in both entries."},{"id":"soviet-special-settlement-regime","rel":"continues-as","note":"Baltic families deported in 1945-1949, notably in Operation Priboi in March 1949, were held under the special settlement regime until the mid-1950s."}]},{"id":"soviet-annexation-bessarabia-moldova","title":"Soviet Annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina","startYear":1940,"endYear":1944,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania in 1940 under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, lost the territory to Romanian and German forces in 1941, and reoccupied and permanently annexed it in 1944, forming the Moldavian SSR.","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":50762,"territoryDesc":"Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, formerly part of Romania","lat":47.02,"lon":28.83,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.02,"fromLon":28.83,"toLat":55.03,"toLon":82.92,"label":"Bessarabia/Bukovina → Siberia (Soviet deportations)","people":120000},{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":28,"toLat":52,"toLon":10,"label":"Bessarabian/Bukovinian Germans → Germany","people":125000}],"summary":"In June 1940, acting on the secret protocol of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum forcing Romania to cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which were incorporated into a new Moldavian SSR and parts of the Ukrainian SSR. Most of the region's ethnic German minority was resettled to Germany under a parallel agreement, while Soviet security services deported tens of thousands of others considered politically unreliable to Siberia and Central Asia. Romanian and German forces retook the territory in 1941, during which Romanian authorities deported tens of thousands of Jews to Transnistria, and the Red Army reoccupied and permanently annexed it in 1944, with further mass deportations following in 1949 and 1951 tied to collectivization. The territory forms the core of modern Moldova.","ongoing":false,"_mag":400000,"countries":["Moldova","Russia","Germany"],"deathsLow":18000,"deathsHigh":57000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"_deaths":37500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":3700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina at the Soviet annexation of June 1940","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.10810810810810811},{"id":"soviet-deportations-from-eastern-poland-1940-1941","title":"Soviet Deportations from Occupied Eastern Poland","startYear":1940,"endYear":1941,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet NKVD deported Polish citizens from the territories annexed in 1939 to special settlements, camps and exile in Siberia, Kazakhstan and the far north","peopleDisplaced":320000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":49.84,"lon":24.03,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.84,"fromLon":24.03,"toLat":61.25,"toLon":73.42,"label":"Lviv and eastern Poland -> special settlements in western Siberia","people":140000},{"fromLat":53.9,"fromLon":27.57,"toLat":49.8,"toLon":73.1,"label":"Western Belorussia -> Kazakhstan (Karaganda region)","people":100000}],"summary":"After the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland under the secret protocol of the German-Soviet pact, the NKVD removed categories of the population considered hostile: settlers granted land after the Polish-Soviet war, forest workers, families of officers and officials already arrested, refugees who had fled the German zone and refused Soviet passports, and border-district residents. Deportees travelled in unheated freight cars to special settlements, labour camps and forced residence in Siberia, Kazakhstan, Komi and Arkhangelsk, where they worked in logging, mining and agriculture. Conditions in the first winter were severe and mortality among children and the elderly was high. Most survivors were amnestied after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 under the Sikorski-Mayski agreement, and tens of thousands left the Soviet Union with the Anders Army through Iran, though many others remained until after the war.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":320000,"_deaths":60000,"countries":["Ukraine","Russia","Belarus","Kazakhstan"],"baselinePop":13200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the eastern Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union in September 1939","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.024242424242424242,"related":[{"id":"gulag-camp-system-1930-1953","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some of the Polish citizens deported in 1940-41 were held in labour camps of the Gulag rather than special settlements, so a small part of them is counted in both entries."},{"id":"german-soviet-partition-of-poland-1939","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":320000,"note":"The Soviet deportations from eastern Poland in 1940-41 took place within the German-Soviet partition of Poland."}]},{"id":"strategic-bombing-displacement-1940-1945","title":"Displacement by Strategic Bombing in Germany and Japan","startYear":1940,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Allied air forces destroyed German and Japanese cities, and both governments evacuated urban populations under compulsion","peopleDisplaced":15000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":51.05,"lon":13.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.23,"fromLon":6.78,"toLat":49.45,"toLon":11.08,"label":"Bombed Rhine-Ruhr cities -> reception districts in southern Germany","people":2000000},{"fromLat":35.69,"fromLon":139.69,"toLat":36.65,"toLon":138.18,"label":"Tokyo -> rural evacuation districts","people":1500000}],"summary":"Area bombing of cities by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces, and the firebombing of Japanese cities from late 1944, destroyed housing on a scale that emptied urban populations into the countryside. In Germany raids such as those on Hamburg in July 1943 and Dresden in February 1945 rendered whole cities uninhabitable within days; the United States Strategic Bombing Survey counted 3.6 million dwellings destroyed or heavily damaged and 7.5 million people made homeless, alongside state-organised evacuation schemes that moved children and non-essential civilians out of the cities. In Japan the incendiary raid on Tokyo of 9-10 March 1945 burned out fifteen square miles of the city in a night, and by the surrender about 30 per cent of the urban population had lost their homes; the government had already ordered the evacuation of schoolchildren and of large numbers of urban residents. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 destroyed those cities outright. Much of this displacement was temporary, but it overlapped with the flight of civilians before advancing armies and, in Germany, with the expulsions of 1945 onward.","deathsLow":400000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":15000000,"_deaths":600000,"countries":["Germany","Japan"],"baselinePop":142000000,"baselineWhat":"The combined populations of Germany and Japan at the start of the bombing campaigns","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.1056338028169014,"related":[{"id":"expulsion-germans-poland","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some German civilians evacuated from bombed western cities to the eastern provinces later fled or were expelled from there and may be counted in both entries."}]},{"id":"farhud-and-denaturalisation-of-iraqi-jews","title":"The Farhud and the Denaturalisation of Iraq's Jews","startYear":1941,"endYear":1952,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Rioters and elements of the Iraqi security forces attacked Baghdad's Jews in 1941; the Iraqi state later stripped Jews who emigrated of citizenship and froze their property","peopleDisplaced":125000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.31,"lon":44.36,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.31,"fromLon":44.36,"toLat":32.01,"toLon":34.89,"label":"Iraqi Jews airlifted to Israel, Operations Ezra and Nehemiah","people":120000}],"summary":"On 1-2 June 1941, in the days between the collapse of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's government and the entry of British-backed forces into Baghdad, crowds joined by police and soldiers attacked Jewish quarters of the city in the pogrom known as the Farhud; an Iraqi commission of inquiry counted 179 dead, and other estimates run higher. After 1948 Zionism was made a criminal offence, Jews were dismissed from public employment and some were tried and executed, and in March 1950 Law 1 allowed Jews to emigrate on condition of renouncing Iraqi nationality; Law 5 of March 1951 froze the property of those who had left. Between 1950 and 1952 some 120,000-130,000 Iraqi Jews were flown to Israel in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, ending a community of more than two millennia. A series of bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950-51 accelerated departures; responsibility remains disputed, with Iraqi courts convicting Zionist activists and other accounts attributing them to Iraqi nationalists, and the question has never been settled. This entry sits alongside the atlas's regional entry on the exodus of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries and treats the specifically Iraqi legal machinery.","deathsLow":179,"deathsHigh":600,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":125000,"_deaths":389.5,"countries":["Iraq","Israel"],"baselinePop":135000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of Iraq before the 1950-51 denaturalisation and airlift","baselineYear":1947,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9259259259259259},{"id":"german-anti-partisan-war-in-belarus","title":"German Anti-Partisan Warfare and Village Destruction in Belarus","startYear":1941,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German security forces, SS units and auxiliary police burned villages and killed or deported their inhabitants during operations against partisans in occupied Belarus","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":54.33,"lon":27.94,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.9,"fromLon":27.57,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"Belarus -> forced labour in Germany","people":400000},{"fromLat":54.33,"fromLon":27.94,"toLat":53.86,"toLon":27.63,"label":"Cleared villages -> Trostenets and other camps near Minsk","people":null}],"summary":"Belarus was the centre of Soviet partisan warfare and of the German response to it. Under directives that treated whole districts as bandit areas, SS and police units, Wehrmacht security divisions and locally recruited auxiliaries carried out large sweeps in which villages were burned, inhabitants shot or driven into camps, and livestock and grain removed; 'dead zones' were created from which the population was cleared entirely. Khatyn, whose 149 inhabitants were burned alive in a barn on 22 March 1943, became the emblem of these operations and the site of the national memorial. Belarusian archives count 630 villages destroyed with their people, 9,200 villages burned in whole or part, and about 400,000 people deported to labour in Germany. Trostenets outside Minsk, where about 206,500 people were killed according to the same archives, was among the largest killing sites in the occupied Soviet territories. Estimates of total wartime deaths in Belarus range from the Extraordinary State Commission's 2.2 million to about three million, roughly a quarter to a third of the prewar population, including some 800,000 Jews murdered in the Holocaust.","deathsLow":345000,"deathsHigh":700000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":522500,"countries":["Belarus","Germany"],"baselinePop":9200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Belarusian SSR at the time of the German invasion","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.043478260869565216,"related":[{"id":"nazi-forced-labour-in-the-reich","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":400000,"note":"The Belarus entry's displacement figure is the National Archives of Belarus count of about 400,000 people taken from Belarus to forced labour in Germany. These deportees are among the Soviet Ostarbeiter counted in the forced labour entry's 8 million, so the two displacement figures must not be summed. The archive gives no figure for people driven from the 9,200 burned villages or the cleared 'dead zones', so no separate figure can be substituted."}]},{"id":"german-treatment-of-soviet-prisoners-of-war","title":"German Captivity and Mass Death of Soviet Prisoners of War","startYear":1941,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The German army and the SS held Soviet prisoners of war in open enclosures without adequate food or shelter and shot those in designated categories","peopleDisplaced":5700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":53.9,"lon":27.57,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":52.13,"toLon":21.85,"label":"Captured on the eastern front -> transit camps in occupied Poland","people":null},{"fromLat":53.9,"fromLon":27.57,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"Soviet prisoners -> forced labour in the Reich from 1942","people":1000000}],"summary":"German planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union assumed that captured Soviet soldiers would not be fed at the expense of the Reich. Prisoners were herded into open enclosures without shelter, sanitation or adequate rations, and hundreds of thousands died of starvation, exposure and typhus in the winter of 1941-42 alone. The Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 and the associated commando guidelines directed that political officers, Communist Party functionaries and Jews among the prisoners be identified and shot; SS selection teams operated inside the camps, and several thousand Soviet prisoners were among the first people killed with Zyklon B at Auschwitz in September 1941. From spring 1942, as German labour shortages grew, surviving prisoners were put to work in mines, agriculture and armaments. Of roughly 5.7 million captured, about 3.3 million died. Survivors who returned to the Soviet Union were frequently filtered through NKVD screening camps and some were sentenced to the Gulag.","deathsLow":3000000,"deathsHigh":3500000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","summary execution","forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5700000,"_deaths":3250000,"countries":["Belarus","Ukraine","Poland","Germany"],"baselinePop":34500000,"baselineWhat":"The total number of Soviet personnel mobilised into the armed forces during the Second World War","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16521739130434782,"related":[{"id":"nazi-forced-labour-in-the-reich","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Soviet prisoners of war put to work in the German war economy appear in both the prisoner-of-war entry and the forced labour entry, whose upper death estimate includes prisoners of war who died as labourers."},{"id":"soviet-forced-repatriation-filtration","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":1539475,"note":"Surviving Soviet prisoners of war held by Germany were among those returned to the USSR and screened in the filtration system."}]},{"id":"greek-famine-axis-occupation","title":"The Great Famine in Axis-Occupied Greece","startYear":1941,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation authorities requisitioned food and split Greece into zones while an Allied blockade sealed imports","peopleDisplaced":450000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Greece divided into German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation zones; Bulgaria annexed eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace in 1941","lat":37.9838,"lon":23.7275,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.13,"fromLon":24.88,"toLat":40.6401,"toLon":22.9444,"label":"Greeks expelled from the Bulgarian zone to Thessaloniki and the German zone","people":100000}],"summary":"After the Axis invasion of April 1941 Greece was divided into German, Italian and Bulgarian zones, its merchant fleet and transport were destroyed or seized, occupation forces requisitioned food and imposed occupation costs, and the Allied naval blockade cut off the grain imports on which Greece had depended. Mass starvation set in during the winter of 1941-42, worst in Athens, Piraeus and the islands, and estimates of excess deaths across the occupation range from about 100,000 to 450,000, with roughly 300,000 the figure most often cited; Violetta Hionidou's demographic study puts famine deaths at around 100,000-200,000 for the acute period. The Bulgarian administration in annexed eastern Macedonia and Thrace expelled or drove out roughly 100,000 Greeks, and the Drama uprising of September 1941 was suppressed with mass reprisal killings. From 1942 the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swedish-Swiss Joint Relief Commission ran a negotiated relief operation through the blockade that substantially reduced mortality. The famine is generally attributed to a combination of occupation requisitioning, the collapse of internal transport and administration, hyperinflation and black markets, and the blockade, with historians disagreeing on the weight of each.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":450000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":450000,"_deaths":275000,"countries":["Greece"],"baselinePop":7340000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Greece at the last pre-war census, immediately before the Axis occupation","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.06130790190735695},{"id":"italian-fascist-internment-slovenes-croats","title":"Italian Fascist Internment of Slovenes and Croats: Rab, Gonars and the Annexed Territories","startYear":1941,"endYear":1943,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Italian army interned civilians from the annexed Province of Ljubljana and the Croatian coast in camps on Rab and in Italy","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.7761,"lon":14.7169,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.0569,"fromLon":14.5058,"toLat":44.7761,"toLon":14.7169,"label":"Civilians from the Province of Ljubljana to the Rab camp","people":null},{"fromLat":44.7761,"fromLon":14.7169,"toLat":45.8975,"toLon":13.2422,"label":"Transfers from Rab to Gonars and other camps in Italy","people":null}],"summary":"After Italy annexed the Province of Ljubljana and parts of the Croatian coast in 1941, the Italian Second Army responded to partisan activity with reprisals, house burnings and the mass internment of civilians. Camps were opened at Gonars and Monigo in Italy in early 1942 and on the island of Rab in July 1942, the latter holding whole families, including women, infants and the elderly, in tents behind wire; conditions there were severe enough that the historians Carlo Spartaco Capogreco and James Walston calculated an annual mortality rate of about 18 per cent, which they compared with 15 per cent at Buchenwald. Circulars issued by General Mario Roatta directed commanders to act without 'false compassion' and envisaged clearing and replacing populations, and are the principal documentary basis for characterising the policy as more than security internment. The camps were closed after Italy's armistice in September 1943; Yugoslav partisans evacuated some 2,500 Jewish internees from Rab, while some who remained were deported by German forces to Auschwitz. Yugoslavia, Greece and Ethiopia sought the extradition of about 1,200 Italians accused of war crimes, but no Italian was tried, and the episode was largely absent from Italian public memory for decades.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":4641,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":3320.5,"countries":["Croatia","Slovenia","Italy"],"baselinePop":340000,"baselineWhat":"The civilian population of the Italian-annexed Province of Ljubljana in 1941","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.08823529411764706},{"id":"japanese-occupation-of-guam-and-manenggon","title":"The Japanese Occupation of Guam and the Manenggon Marches","startYear":1941,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Japanese forces occupied Guam, conscripted CHamoru labour and in July 1944 marched nearly the whole civilian population into inland camps","peopleDisplaced":18000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.4,"lon":144.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.47,"fromLon":144.75,"toLat":13.4,"toLon":144.74,"label":"CHamoru marched from Hagatna and the villages to Manenggon","people":18000}],"summary":"Japan captured Guam within days of Pearl Harbor and administered it for two and a half years, requiring CHamoru civilians to work on airfields and fortifications and punishing those suspected of loyalty to the United States, including those who sheltered the American radioman George Tweed. As US forces approached in July 1944 the occupation authorities ordered the population out of the coastal villages and into the interior; nearly the whole civilian population walked, in many cases for days, to camps at Manenggon and other sites, where about 18,000 people lived without shelter, latrines, food or medicine until American troops reached them at the end of July. In the same weeks Japanese troops killed groups of CHamoru at Fena, Chagui'an, Tinta and Faha. Estimates of CHamoru deaths under the occupation are usually put between 1,000 and 2,000, though no systematic count was made. The United States compensated Guam's war survivors only partially and belatedly: a congressionally mandated Guam War Claims Review Commission reported in 2004, and legislation providing payments to survivors and their heirs followed in 2016.","deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":2000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","arbitrary detention","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":18000,"_deaths":1500,"countries":["Guam"],"baselinePop":22290,"baselineWhat":"The population of Guam at the last pre-war census","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8075370121130552},{"id":"siege-of-leningrad-1941-1944","title":"The Siege of Leningrad","startYear":1941,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German Army Group North, with Finnish forces to the north, encircled and starved the population of Leningrad","peopleDisplaced":1400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":59.94,"lon":30.31,"flows":[{"fromLat":59.94,"fromLon":30.31,"toLat":60.02,"toLon":31.62,"label":"Leningrad -> evacuation across Lake Ladoga (the Road of Life)","people":1400000}],"summary":"German forces cut the last land route into Leningrad on 8 September 1941 and held the city under blockade for 872 days, until 27 January 1944. German planning documents envisaged that the city would be starved rather than stormed, and its population fed at no cost to the Reich. Rations fell in November 1941 to 125 grams of adulterated bread a day for dependants, and in the winter of 1941-42 the city lost people at a rate of thousands a day to starvation, cold and disease, compounded by artillery and air bombardment. A supply and evacuation route was improvised across the ice and water of Lake Ladoga, carrying about 1.4 million people out of the city over the course of the siege. Soviet-era figures put civilian deaths at about 632,000; postwar and post-Soviet scholarship generally places the toll between 800,000 and 1.1 million, including deaths among evacuees.","deathsLow":632000,"deathsHigh":1100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1400000,"_deaths":866000,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":2800000,"baselineWhat":"The civilian population trapped inside the Leningrad blockade ring in September 1941","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5},{"id":"ustasha-genocide-independent-state-of-croatia","title":"The Ustasha Regime and the Jasenovac Camps","startYear":1941,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Ustasha regime of the Axis-created Independent State of Croatia killed, expelled and forcibly converted Serbs and killed Jews and Roma","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":45.28,"lon":16.92,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.28,"fromLon":16.92,"toLat":44.79,"toLon":20.45,"label":"Serbs expelled from the Independent State of Croatia -> German-occupied Serbia","people":200000},{"fromLat":45.81,"fromLon":15.98,"toLat":45.28,"toLon":16.92,"label":"Arrested Serbs, Jews and Roma -> Jasenovac camp complex","people":null}],"summary":"The Independent State of Croatia, established under German and Italian sponsorship in April 1941 and run by Ante Pavelic's Ustasha movement, adopted racial laws within weeks and set out to remove the roughly two million Serbs in its territory by killing, expulsion and forced conversion to Catholicism, while destroying its Jewish and Roma populations. Massacres in the Kordun, Lika, Herzegovina and Bosnian Krajina in the summer of 1941 drove hundreds of thousands into flight and fed the Chetnik and Partisan insurgencies. The Jasenovac complex, operating from August 1941 to April 1945, was the regime's principal camp; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that estimates of those killed there range widely, and the Jasenovac Memorial Site maintains a list of 83,145 named victims, of whom about 47,600 were Serbs, 16,200 Roma, 13,100 Jews and 4,300 Croats, including more than 20,000 children. Yugoslav-era figures of 500,000 to 700,000 killed at Jasenovac, and later Croatian revisionist figures of only a few thousand, are both rejected by most current scholarship. The dispute over the numbers remains politically charged in Croatia and Serbia.","deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":500000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":400000,"countries":["Croatia","Serbia"],"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The Serb, Jewish and Roma population of the Independent State of Croatia","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.15},{"id":"vieques-navy-expropriation","title":"The United States Navy on Vieques, Puerto Rico","startYear":1941,"endYear":2003,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States Navy expropriated most of the island of Vieques, evicted its residents into a central strip, and used the eastern end as a bombing and gunnery range for six decades","peopleDisplaced":3000,"territoryKm2":105,"territoryDesc":"About 26,000 acres, roughly 105 km2 of the island's 135 km2, held by the Navy for a munitions depot in the west and a live-fire range in the east; most was transferred to the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the municipality after 2003 and remains under environmental clean-up.","lat":18.13,"lon":-65.44,"flows":[{"fromLat":18.13,"fromLon":-65.44,"toLat":17.73,"toLon":-64.78,"label":"Displaced Viequenses resettled to St Croix","people":null}],"summary":"From 1941 the United States Navy expropriated about two thirds of Vieques, a municipality of Puerto Rico, evicting families from sugar-growing land into a central civilian strip between a munitions depot in the west and a live-fire training range in the east. The range was used for naval gunnery, aerial bombing and amphibious exercises by the US and allied navies for six decades. Long-running local opposition became a mass movement after a civilian security guard, David Sanes, was killed by an errant bomb in April 1999; sustained civil disobedience and encampments on the range, and a referendum in 2001 in which islanders voted for the Navy to leave, led to the end of training in May 2003. The Navy lands passed largely to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the eastern range was placed on the Superfund national priorities list in 2005; contamination and elevated rates of illness on Vieques remain the subject of dispute and litigation. The atlas contained Guantanamo but no entry for military land-taking in Puerto Rico.","deathsLow":1,"deathsHigh":1,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":3000,"_deaths":1,"countries":["Puerto Rico","U.S. Virgin Is."],"baselinePop":10362,"baselineWhat":"The population of the island municipality of Vieques, Puerto Rico, at the 1940 United States census, immediately before the Navy expropriations","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.2895193977996526},{"id":"volga-german-deportation","title":"Deportation of the Volga Germans and Soviet Germans","startYear":1941,"endYear":1942,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet authorities deported the ethnic German population of the Volga German ASSR and other regions of the western USSR to Kazakhstan and Siberia shortly after the German invasion, citing suspected disloyalty; the Volga German ASSR was abolished.","peopleDisplaced":900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":51.48,"lon":46.11,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.48,"fromLon":46.11,"toLat":49.8,"toLon":73.1,"label":"Volga German ASSR → Kazakh SSR","people":400000},{"fromLat":51.48,"fromLon":46.11,"toLat":55.03,"toLon":82.92,"label":"Volga German ASSR → Siberia","people":400000}],"summary":"Days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet authorities ordered the mass deportation of ethnic Germans, most prominently the roughly 480,000 residents of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was abolished. Deportations extended to Germans in Crimea, the North Caucasus, Ukraine, Moscow and elsewhere, bringing the total in the initial wave to at least 846,000, with further waves later exceeding 900,000. Deportees were sent to Kazakhstan and Siberia and typically conscripted into forced-labor battalions ('labor army'); historian estimates of deaths from the deportation and forced-labor system range up to roughly a quarter million. Most Volga Germans were not permitted to return, and many later emigrated to Germany after the Soviet collapse.","ongoing":false,"_mag":900000,"countries":["Russia","Kazakhstan"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":150000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1427222,"baselineWhat":"The ethnic German population of the Soviet Union at the census of 1939","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.6305956606610604},{"id":"japanese-north-american-internment","title":"Internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians","startYear":1942,"endYear":1949,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States and Canadian governments removed and confined their residents of Japanese ancestry, most of them citizens, from the Pacific coast","peopleDisplaced":143000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.7285,"lon":-118.1544,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.7749,"fromLon":-122.4194,"toLat":36.7285,"toLon":-118.1544,"label":"San Francisco Bay Area → Manzanar, California","people":10000},{"fromLat":47.6062,"fromLon":-122.3321,"toLat":42.6786,"toLon":-114.2472,"label":"Seattle and Puget Sound → Minidoka, Idaho","people":9000},{"fromLat":49.2827,"fromLon":-123.1207,"toLat":49.7667,"toLon":-117.4667,"label":"Vancouver and coastal British Columbia → Slocan Valley camps","people":12000}],"summary":"After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States under Executive Order 9066 excluded people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and held approximately 120,000 of them, about two-thirds US citizens, in ten guarded camps at Manzanar, Tule Lake, Poston, Gila River, Minidoka, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Granada, Rohwer and Jerome between 1942 and 1945. Canada acted in parallel, clearing a 100-mile coastal 'protected zone' that contained about 90 per cent of its Japanese Canadian population and uprooting some 23,000 people to interior camps, road gangs and prairie sugar-beet farms. Canadian internees' homes, farms, boats and businesses were confiscated and sold by the Custodian of Enemy Property to finance their own detention, and about 4,000 people were deported to Japan after the war; Japanese Canadians were not permitted to move freely again until 1949. Both states later acknowledged the policy as unjust: the United States passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 and Canada reached a redress agreement the same year, including a formal apology, individual payments and restoration of citizenship. The camps were not death camps and no mass killing occurred, but detention lasted years and dispossession was permanent for most families.","deathsLow":7,"deathsHigh":7,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":143000,"_deaths":7,"countries":["United States of America","Canada"],"baselinePop":150000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Japanese ancestry living in the mainland United States and in Canada in 1941","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9533333333333334},{"id":"japanese-occupation-of-southeast-asia","title":"The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia: Internment, Romusha and Famine","startYear":1942,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Japan interned Allied civilians and prisoners of war and conscripted millions of Asian labourers across its occupied territories","peopleDisplaced":4000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.21,"lon":106.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.21,"fromLon":106.85,"toLat":14.09,"toLon":98.99,"label":"Java -> romusha labour on the Burma-Siam railway and other projects","people":300000},{"fromLat":1.35,"fromLon":103.82,"toLat":14.09,"toLon":98.99,"label":"Allied prisoners of war from Singapore -> Burma-Siam railway","people":60000}],"summary":"Japanese occupation of the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Dutch East Indies and Indochina brought mass internment and mass labour conscription. European civilians in the Indies, about 100,000 people, were held in camps where roughly one in six died. Allied prisoners of war were used as labour in violation of the conventions Japan had undertaken to apply: on the Burma-Siam railway some 12,000 of about 60,000 Allied prisoners died, alongside far higher mortality among the estimated 200,000 Asian labourers, of whom up to 90,000 are thought to have died. In Java the occupation authorities mobilised millions of romusha for construction and agriculture, sending about 300,000 abroad, from whom deaths are estimated at anywhere between 77,000 and 225,000 with total Indonesian romusha deaths put at considerably more than 300,000. Rice requisitioning, the collapse of shipping and forced crop substitution produced famine: about 2.4 million people are estimated to have died in Java in 1944-45, and in northern Vietnam the famine of 1944-45 killed between 400,000 and two million people, the higher figure being the Vietnamese official estimate. The Tokyo tribunal found that the ill-treatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees was a matter of policy, condoned and concealed at the highest levels.","deathsLow":2500000,"deathsHigh":5000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","starvation & siege","mass killing","sexual violence","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4000000,"_deaths":3750000,"countries":["Indonesia","Thailand","Singapore"],"baselinePop":130000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Southeast Asian territories under Japanese occupation","baselineYear":1942,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.03076923076923077},{"id":"papua-new-guinea-wartime-labour-and-displacement","title":"The Pacific War in New Guinea: Conscripted Labour and Civilian Displacement","startYear":1942,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Australian military administration and Japanese forces conscripted Papuans and New Guineans as carriers and labourers and drove villagers from their land","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-9.44,"lon":147.18,"flows":[{"fromLat":-4.2,"fromLon":152.17,"toLat":-6.73,"toLon":146.99,"label":"Villagers displaced from Rabaul and the New Guinea islands","people":null}],"summary":"When Japanese forces landed in New Guinea in 1942, the Australian territories were placed under the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit, which used wartime regulations to conscript indigenous men as carriers, labourers and medical orderlies at fixed low rates of pay, with penalties for desertion; the carriers of the Kokoda campaign, later celebrated in Australia as the 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels', were largely conscripted, a point the Australian War Memorial itself now makes in setting the myth against the record. Japanese forces likewise requisitioned labour, food and land in the areas they controlled, and researchers working on the New Guinea campaign have documented sexual violence against local women by both armies. Villages were bombed, gardens destroyed and populations moved by the fighting along the north coast, in the Markham and Ramu valleys and around Rabaul, where the Tolai were displaced for the duration. Civilian deaths from fighting, disease and famine in the territories ran into the tens of thousands and were never systematically counted. Australian postwar compensation for war damage in the territories was limited.","deathsLow":15000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":22000,"_deaths":27500,"countries":["Papua New Guinea"],"baselinePop":1300000,"baselineWhat":"The Indigenous population of the Territories of Papua and New Guinea at the outbreak of the Pacific War","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"turkey-wealth-tax-askale-labour-camp","title":"Turkey's Wealth Tax and the Askale Labour Camp","startYear":1942,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Turkish state levied a discriminatory capital tax on non-Muslim citizens and sent defaulters to labour camps in eastern Anatolia","peopleDisplaced":1400,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9214,"lon":40.6939,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.0082,"fromLon":28.9784,"toLat":39.9214,"toLon":40.6939,"label":"Defaulting non-Muslim taxpayers deported from Istanbul to the Askale camp","people":1400},{"fromLat":41.0082,"fromLon":28.9784,"toLat":32.0853,"toLon":34.7818,"label":"Emigration of Jews from Turkey after the tax, mainly to Israel from 1948","people":null}],"summary":"The Varlik Vergisi, a one-off capital tax approved by the Turkish parliament on 11 November 1942, was presented as a wartime defence measure but was assessed through separate lists that taxed non-Muslim citizens, chiefly Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantines, at rates several times higher than Muslims, in some cases exceeding a taxpayer's entire wealth. There was no appeal, payment was demanded within fifteen days, and property including that of close relatives was seized and auctioned, in many cases to Muslim buyers at low prices. Those who could not pay were sent to labour camps in eastern Anatolia, principally Askale near Erzurum, where they worked on roads and in quarries with half their wages deducted against the debt; the law's exemption for men over fifty-five was frequently ignored, and twenty-one detainees died. The tax was repealed in March 1944 and outstanding debts cancelled after criticism from Turkey's wartime partners, but the confiscations were not reversed. The episode, together with the 1934 Thrace events and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom already in this atlas, is treated by historians as a major driver of the departure of Turkey's non-Muslim communities; Turkish governments have generally treated it as a fiscal measure of its time rather than as a discriminatory act requiring redress.","deathsLow":21,"deathsHigh":21,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","denationalization","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1400,"_deaths":21,"countries":["Turkey","Bulgaria","Israel"],"baselinePop":320000,"baselineWhat":"The non-Muslim minority population of Turkey — Greeks, Armenians and Jews — at the time of the Wealth Tax","baselineYear":1935,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.004375},{"id":"unangax-aleut-internment-wwii","title":"The Wartime Internment of the Unangax (Aleut) of Alaska","startYear":1942,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"United States authorities evacuated Unangax villages in the Aleutians and held the people in camps in Southeast Alaska; Japanese forces deported the villagers of Attu to Japan","peopleDisplaced":923,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":57.1236,"lon":-170.2761,"flows":[{"fromLat":57.1236,"fromLon":-170.2761,"toLat":58.2544,"toLon":-134.8956,"label":"Pribilof Islanders removed to Funter Bay, Southeast Alaska","people":null},{"fromLat":52.1972,"fromLon":-174.2011,"toLat":55.3422,"toLon":-131.6461,"label":"Atka villagers removed to Ward Lake near Ketchikan","people":null},{"fromLat":52.88,"fromLon":173.19,"toLat":43.1907,"toLon":141.0022,"label":"Attu villagers deported by Japanese forces to Hokkaido","people":42}],"summary":"After Japanese forces bombed Dutch Harbor and occupied Attu and Kiska in June 1942, United States authorities evacuated Unangax residents of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands, in most cases at a few hours' notice, and held them for roughly two years in disused industrial buildings in Southeast Alaska. Conditions were severe: at Funter Bay several hundred people shared a single toilet and drank contaminated water, and 74 people died across the camps, a death rate far above normal for the population. Villages left behind were looted and burned by American and Japanese forces, and four were never resettled; the Pribilof men were meanwhile taken back seasonally to harvest fur seals for the federal government. The 42 Attu villagers captured by Japanese forces were deported to Otaru on Hokkaido, where about half died. In 1982 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported to Congress on the treatment of both Japanese Americans and the Aleuts, and Congress provided restitution under the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands Restitution Act of 1988, paying surviving evacuees 12,000 dollars each and funding community and church compensation.","deathsLow":74,"deathsHigh":100,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":923,"_deaths":87,"countries":["United States of America","Japan"],"baselinePop":1100,"baselineWhat":"The Unangax (Aleut) population of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands on the eve of the 1942 evacuation","baselineYear":1942,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8390909090909091},{"id":"bengal-famine-1943","title":"The Bengal Famine of 1943","startYear":1943,"endYear":1944,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Wartime requisitioning, boat and rice denial policies and market failure under British rule in India produced famine in Bengal","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":22.57,"lon":88.36,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.36,"fromLon":91.78,"toLat":22.57,"toLon":88.36,"label":"Rural eastern Bengal -> Calcutta","people":null}],"summary":"Famine struck Bengal in 1943 after a cyclone and crop disease damaged the winter rice crop, the fall of Burma cut off imports, and prices rose sharply amid hoarding and speculation. Government measures compounded the crisis: a denial policy in coastal districts removed some 45,000 boats and stocks of rice to deny them to a possible Japanese invasion, provincial governments blocked inter-provincial grain movement, and priority was given to feeding Calcutta's war industries and the armed forces. Requests from the government of India for grain imports were repeatedly refused or reduced in London on shipping grounds. Death estimates range from about 1.5 million in the Famine Inquiry Commission's 1945 report to 3 million in later work, with Amartya Sen's study putting the toll at about 3 million and demographic reconstructions by Arup Maharatna and others at roughly 2.1 million. Causation remains argued: Sen emphasised entitlement failure amid adequate aggregate supply, Madhusree Mukerjee and others hold Churchill's war cabinet responsible for refusing relief shipments, and other historians stress crop shortfall, the loss of Burmese rice and provincial mismanagement. No British government has formally apologised.","deathsLow":1500000,"deathsHigh":3000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":2250000,"countries":["India","Bangladesh"],"baselinePop":60306525,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Bengal Presidency at the 1941 census of India","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.016581953611155675},{"id":"istrian-dalmatian-exodus","title":"Istrian–Dalmatian Exodus of Italians","startYear":1943,"endYear":1960,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Following Yugoslav Partisan and then communist control of Istria, Rijeka/Fiume, and Dalmatia—territory transferred from Italy chiefly under the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty—most of the local ethnic Italian population, along with some Slovenes and Croats, emigrated to Italy.","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Istria, the city of Rijeka/Fiume, and parts of Dalmatia, transferred from Italy to Yugoslavia","lat":44.87,"lon":13.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.87,"fromLon":13.85,"toLat":45.65,"toLon":13.77,"label":"Istria → Trieste/Italy","people":150000},{"fromLat":44.12,"fromLon":15.23,"toLat":43.62,"toLon":13.52,"label":"Dalmatia → Ancona/Italy","people":30000}],"summary":"As Yugoslav Partisan and subsequently Yugoslav communist authorities took control of Istria, the city of Rijeka (Fiume), and parts of Dalmatia—territory ceded by Italy chiefly under the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty—the great majority of the region's ethnic Italian population, along with some Slovenes and Croats opposed to the new communist government, departed for Italy over the following years. Estimates of the total number who left range from about 200,000 to 350,000. The exodus is closely linked in public memory to the 'foibe' killings, in which Yugoslav Partisans executed thousands of Italians (and some Slovenes/Croats accused of collaboration) and disposed of bodies in karst pits, though the exodus itself unfolded over a longer period through both violence and political pressure. A joint Italian-Slovenian historical commission later found the evidence did not establish a deliberate, centrally organized expulsion policy.","ongoing":false,"_mag":250000,"countries":["Croatia","Italy","San Marino"],"deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":11000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":7000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the territories transferred from Italy to Yugoslavia - Istria, Fiume/Rijeka, Zara and parts of the Julian March","baselineYear":1936,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.5,"related":[{"id":"trieste-dispute","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":40000,"note":"The departure of about 40,000 Italians from Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste formed the last major wave of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus."}]},{"id":"stalin-punished-peoples-deportations","title":"Deportation of the North Caucasus Peoples, Kalmyks, and Meskhetian Turks","startYear":1943,"endYear":1944,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet NKVD forces deported entire nationalities collectively accused of wartime disloyalty or unreliability — Kalmyks (December 1943), Chechens and Ingush (February 1944, Operation Lentil), Karachays and Balkars, and Meskhetian Turks, Kurds and Hemshils from southern Georgia (November 1944) — to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Siberia.","peopleDisplaced":800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":43.32,"lon":45.7,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.32,"fromLon":45.7,"toLat":43.24,"toLon":76.9,"label":"Chechens & Ingush → Kazakh/Kyrgyz SSR","people":496000},{"fromLat":46.31,"fromLon":44.28,"toLat":55.03,"toLon":82.92,"label":"Kalmyks → Siberia","people":93000},{"fromLat":41.64,"fromLon":43,"toLat":41.3,"toLon":69.24,"label":"Meskhetian Turks → Uzbek SSR","people":115000}],"summary":"In late 1943 and 1944, Stalin's government carried out a series of forced deportations of entire ethnic groups from the North Caucasus and southern Georgia, on the grounds of alleged mass collaboration with German occupying forces (for the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkars) or, in the case of Meskhetian Turks and neighboring groups, proximity to the Turkish border. In total roughly 800,000 people were transported, mostly in sealed freight cars, to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Siberia, and the affected peoples' autonomous republics were abolished. Mortality during transit and the following years from hunger, cold and disease was severe, with death-rate estimates for individual groups ranging from about 13% to over 20% in the first years alone. Survivors were confined to 'special settlements' under close surveillance until restrictions began easing after Stalin's death in 1953, with the Chechens and Ingush permitted to return to the Caucasus from 1957.","ongoing":false,"_mag":800000,"countries":["Russia","Kazakhstan","Georgia","Uzbekistan"],"deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":400000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","forced labour","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":275000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":850000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the nationalities deported in 1943-44 - Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, Kalmyks and Meskhetian Turks","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9411764705882353},{"id":"volhynia-galicia-massacres","title":"The Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia","startYear":1943,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Ukrainian Insurgent Army and allied local units killed and expelled the Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia; Polish underground units carried out reprisals against Ukrainian villages","peopleDisplaced":350000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.75,"lon":25.34,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.75,"fromLon":25.34,"toLat":51.11,"toLon":17.03,"label":"Polish survivors fleeing Volhynia, later resettled in western Poland","people":300000}],"summary":"From the spring of 1943 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and allied village self-defence units conducted a campaign against the Polish rural population of Volhynia, spreading to Eastern Galicia in 1944, with the aim of removing Poles from territory claimed for a future Ukrainian state. Whole villages were destroyed in coordinated attacks, the largest on 11 July 1943 when scores of settlements were struck simultaneously. Polish underground formations and, later, Soviet-backed units carried out reprisal killings in Ukrainian villages. The killings drove the flight of several hundred thousand Poles westwards, feeding the population transfers and Operation Vistula already covered in the atlas. The events remain politically live: Poland's Sejm declared them a genocide in July 2016, a characterisation Ukraine's parliament rejected in a formal statement, and successive Ukrainian governments have declined to adopt it while acknowledging the killings.","deathsLow":60000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","summary execution","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":350000,"_deaths":80000,"countries":["Ukraine","Poland"],"baselinePop":1300000,"baselineWhat":"The Polish population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia before the massacres","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.2692307692307692},{"id":"bulgaria-communist-labour-camps","title":"Bulgaria's Communist Labour Camps: Belene, Lovech and the Camp Network","startYear":1944,"endYear":1962,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Bulgarian communist state interned political opponents and people classed as socially undesirable in labour camps by administrative order","peopleDisplaced":17000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":43.65,"lon":25.1333,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.6977,"fromLon":23.3219,"toLat":43.65,"toLon":25.1333,"label":"Internees sent from Sofia and across Bulgaria to Belene island","people":null},{"fromLat":42.6977,"fromLon":23.3219,"toLat":43.1333,"toLon":24.7167,"label":"Transfers to the Lovech quarry camp","people":null}],"summary":"From 1944 the Bulgarian communist authorities operated camps to which people could be sent without trial by administrative decision. The largest was on Belene island in the Danube, opened in 1949, where inmates drained marshland and farmed; those sent there included opposition politicians, Protestant pastors convicted in the 1949 'Pastors' Trial', peasants who resisted collectivisation and, in the 1980s, ethnic Turks who refused the compulsory name changes of the 'Revival Process' recorded separately in this atlas. After a partial closure, the system's last and harshest camp opened at Lovech in 1959, where inmates broke stone in a quarry; 149 people are recorded as having died from abuse at Lovech and the adjacent women's camp at Skravena before both were closed in 1962. Detainees also included people held for 'social parasitism' or 'loose morals' rather than any political offence. A Bulgarian parliamentary and party inquiry examined the camps in 1990, and Belene continues to operate as a prison, which has complicated commemoration; former inmates have campaigned for recognition and access to files.","deathsLow":149,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":17000,"_deaths":574.5,"countries":["Bulgaria"],"baselinePop":7029349,"baselineWhat":"The population of Bulgaria at the 1946 census, taken as the camp system was being built","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.002418431635703392},{"id":"crimean-tatar-deportation","title":"Deportation of the Crimean Tatars","startYear":1944,"endYear":1944,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet NKVD forces, on Stalin's order, deported the entire Crimean Tatar population from Crimea to Central Asia and the Urals as collective punishment for alleged wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany.","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.95,"lon":34.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.95,"fromLon":34.1,"toLat":41.3,"toLon":69.24,"label":"Crimea → Uzbek SSR","people":151000},{"fromLat":44.95,"fromLon":34.1,"toLat":55.03,"toLon":82.92,"label":"Crimea → Russian SFSR/Siberia","people":30000}],"summary":"On 18–20 May 1944, NKVD troops rounded up and deported virtually the entire Crimean Tatar population—at least 191,000 and by some counts over 228,000 people—from Crimea to Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia and the Urals, packed into sealed freight cars. The Soviet government cited collective accusations of wartime collaboration with German occupation forces as justification, though this applied to only a portion of the population. Roughly 8,000 died during the journey itself, and thousands more died of hunger, disease, and harsh conditions in the following months and years in exile; scholarly death toll estimates through the following years range widely, from roughly 20,000 to over 40,000. Crimean Tatars were only permitted to return to Crimea beginning in the late 1980s.","ongoing":false,"_mag":200000,"countries":["Russia","Uzbekistan"],"deathsLow":27000,"deathsHigh":88000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":57500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":218879,"baselineWhat":"The Crimean Tatar population of Crimea at the 1939 Soviet census","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9137468647060705},{"id":"expulsion-germans-hungary-yugoslavia","title":"Expulsion of Ethnic Germans from Hungary and Yugoslavia","startYear":1944,"endYear":1948,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Hungarian and Yugoslav communist-led authorities expelled or forced the flight of ethnic German (Danube Swabian) communities after the collapse of Axis control; in Yugoslavia many were first interned in camps.","peopleDisplaced":550000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"German-settled communities in Hungary (Swabian Turkey and other regions) and Yugoslavia (Vojvodina, Slavonia)","lat":45.6,"lon":19.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":19,"toLat":48.2,"toLon":16.4,"label":"Hungarian Swabian communities → Austria/Germany","people":220000},{"fromLat":45.25,"fromLon":19.85,"toLat":48,"toLon":15,"label":"Vojvodina Germans → Austria/Germany","people":330000}],"summary":"As Axis forces retreated in 1944–45, ethnic German communities that had lived in Hungary and Yugoslavia for generations came under collective suspicion of collaboration. Hungary expelled roughly a quarter-million ethnic Germans in 1946–48 under Allied-sanctioned population transfer, while Yugoslavia's new communist government interned tens of thousands of Vojvodina Germans in camps where many died of hunger, disease and mistreatment before survivors were expelled or fled westward. Total displacement for the two countries combined is estimated at 500,000–720,000. The events largely ended a centuries-old German presence in the Danube basin outside Austria and Germany.","ongoing":false,"_mag":550000,"countries":["Serbia","Hungary","Austria"],"deathsLow":55000,"deathsHigh":86000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":70500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The ethnic German population of Hungary and Yugoslavia before the expulsions","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.5,"related":[{"id":"malenkij-robot-soviet-reparations-labour-deportations","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Ethnic Germans from Hungary and Yugoslavia deported to the USSR for labour in 1944-45 appear both in the malenkij robot entry and in the account of the German expulsion from those countries."}]},{"id":"expulsion-germans-poland","title":"Expulsion of Germans from Poland (Former Eastern Germany)","startYear":1944,"endYear":1950,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Polish authorities and Soviet occupation forces expelled the ethnic German population of the former eastern German provinces transferred to Poland; many others had already fled ahead of the advancing Red Army in 1944–45.","peopleDisplaced":7000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Former eastern German provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, and southern East Prussia, transferred to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement","lat":51.1,"lon":17,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.11,"fromLon":17.03,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"Breslau/Silesia → occupied Germany","people":3500000},{"fromLat":53.43,"fromLon":14.55,"toLat":53.55,"toLon":10,"label":"Stettin/Pomerania → occupied Germany","people":2000000}],"summary":"Following the Potsdam Agreement's transfer of former German territory to Poland, the resident ethnic German population was expelled westward into occupied Germany, in a process that combined organized 'transfers' with earlier chaotic wartime flight and postwar expulsions and internments. Estimates of the total affected range from about 6.9 to over 8 million people, making it the largest single component of the broader flight and expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. Deaths during flight, expulsion, and in Polish-run camps are separately estimated at anywhere from roughly 500,000 to over 2 million, a range that remains one of the most disputed statistics of the postwar period. By 1950 only a small remnant German population remained in the territories, which were resettled with Poles from central Poland and from the annexed eastern territories.","ongoing":false,"_mag":7000000,"countries":["Poland","Germany"],"deathsLow":400000,"deathsHigh":2000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour"],"_deaths":1200000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":9600000,"baselineWhat":"The German population of the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line transferred to Poland, plus the German minority of pre-war Poland","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.7291666666666666,"related":[{"id":"strategic-bombing-displacement-1940-1945","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some German civilians evacuated from bombed western cities to the eastern provinces later fled or were expelled from there and may be counted in both entries."},{"id":"poland-border-shift","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The expulsion of Germans from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line was the westward half of Poland's postwar border shift."}]},{"id":"finnish-karelia-cession","title":"Finnish Karelia Cession and Evacuation","startYear":1944,"endYear":1945,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Under the 1944 Moscow Armistice (confirmed by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty), Finland ceded Karelia and other border areas to the Soviet Union; virtually the entire Finnish population evacuated westward rather than remain under Soviet rule.","peopleDisplaced":410000,"territoryKm2":44000,"territoryDesc":"Finnish Karelia (the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia, including Vyborg), plus Petsamo and other smaller border areas","lat":60.71,"lon":28.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":60.71,"fromLon":28.75,"toLat":61.5,"toLon":25.5,"label":"Finnish Karelia → interior Finland","people":410000}],"summary":"Finland's defeat in the 1941–44 Continuation War against the Soviet Union led to the 1944 Moscow Armistice, under which Finland ceded Karelia, Petsamo, and other territories, later confirmed by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty. Rather than live under Soviet rule, essentially the entire Finnish-speaking population of the ceded areas—about 410,000–430,000 people, over a tenth of Finland's population—evacuated to what remained of Finland, in an outcome Finland had also experienced on a smaller scale after the 1939–40 Winter War. Finland absorbed and resettled the evacuees under a dedicated land-redistribution program, avoiding the refugee camps seen elsewhere in postwar Europe. Vyborg, Finland's second-largest prewar city, and its surrounding region became part of the Soviet Union (later Russia).","ongoing":false,"_mag":410000,"countries":["Russia","Finland"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":420000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the areas Finland ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1944 - the Karelian Isthmus, Ladoga Karelia, Salla, Petsamo and the Gulf islands","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9761904761904762},{"id":"finnmark-north-troms-scorched-earth-evacuation","title":"The German Scorched-Earth Evacuation of Finnmark and North Troms","startYear":1944,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German forces retreating from the Murmansk front forcibly evacuated northern Norway's civilian population and burned its settlements","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":69.7273,"lon":30.045,"flows":[{"fromLat":69.7273,"fromLon":30.045,"toLat":63.4305,"toLon":10.3951,"label":"Evacuees shipped from Finnmark to Trondelag and southern Norway","people":40000},{"fromLat":70.6634,"fromLon":23.6821,"toLat":69.6492,"toLon":18.9553,"label":"Coastal communities moved to Troms and the Lyngen line","people":null}],"summary":"After Finland left the war in September 1944 and Soviet forces advanced into Sor-Varanger, the German 20th Mountain Army withdrew across northern Norway to a defensive line at Lyngen. On Hitler's order, carried out by Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic and pressed by Reichskommissar Josef Terboven after a voluntary evacuation organised by the Quisling administration failed, the population of Finnmark and North Troms was moved south by force and the region was systematically destroyed: about 12,000 dwellings, 180 lighthouses, 118 power stations and 10,000 km of telegraph line were burned or demolished, amounting on Norwegian estimates to some 30 per cent of all material war damage in Norway. Roughly 25,000 people evaded the order by hiding through the arctic winter, some in caves and mine tunnels; the sick and elderly shipped south were placed in institutions and many never returned. Sea Sami and Kven communities were among the hardest hit, and the postwar reconstruction that followed rebuilt the region in a standardised form that Sami organisations later argued accelerated assimilation, an issue examined by Norway's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported to the Storting in June 2023. At Nuremberg in 1948 the United States Military Tribunal in the Hostages Case acquitted Rendulic of the charge of wanton destruction in Norway, accepting that he could reasonably have believed the devastation militarily necessary, a holding since known as the Rendulic rule.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":50000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Norway"],"baselinePop":75000,"baselineWhat":"The civilian population of Finnmark and North Troms in autumn 1944","baselineYear":1944,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.6666666666666666},{"id":"kwajalein-missile-range-and-ebeye","title":"The US Missile Range at Kwajalein and the Concentration of Marshallese on Ebeye","startYear":1944,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"The United States took Kwajalein Atoll as a military base and missile range and moved its Marshallese population onto the small island of Ebeye","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kwajalein, the world's largest coral atoll lagoon, is used as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site; access to most of its islands is restricted","lat":8.78,"lon":167.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":8.72,"fromLon":167.73,"toLat":8.78,"toLon":167.74,"label":"Kwajalein islanders relocated to Ebeye","people":null},{"fromLat":9.1,"fromLon":167.3,"toLat":8.78,"toLon":167.74,"label":"Mid-corridor islanders evacuated for missile testing","people":null}],"summary":"US forces took Kwajalein from Japan in early 1944 and retained the atoll as a base, later converting it into the principal target and tracking range for American ballistic missile testing. Marshallese residents of Kwajalein island were moved to Ebeye, a small island in the same atoll, where housing was built for a fraction of their number; from the early 1960s residents of the mid-corridor islands were also evacuated as impact zones were established. Ebeye became overcrowded, with chronic problems of water, sanitation and disease, while its residents supplied much of the workforce for the base a short ferry ride away. Landowners protested by sailing back to and occupying their islands in the 'Operation Homecoming' actions of the early 1980s, securing improved land-use payments. Land use is now governed by the Compact of Free Association, first agreed in 1986 and extended in 2003 and again in 2023, under which the United States leases the atoll to 2066; displaced mid-corridor communities have not returned. The nuclear test relocations at Bikini and Enewetak are covered separately in the atlas.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Marshall Is."],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The Marshallese population of Kwajalein Atoll at the time of the American takeover","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"malenkij-robot-soviet-reparations-labour-deportations","title":"Soviet Deportation of Central European Civilians for Reparations Labour (malenkij robot)","startYear":1944,"endYear":1949,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet forces and the NKVD rounded up civilians in Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and the occupied German lands and deported them to labour camps in the USSR","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":47.4979,"lon":19.0402,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.4979,"fromLon":19.0402,"toLat":48.0159,"toLon":37.8028,"label":"Civilians seized in Budapest deported to Donbas mines","people":100000},{"fromLat":45.7983,"fromLon":24.1256,"toLat":48.0159,"toLon":37.8028,"label":"Ethnic Germans from Transylvania and the Banat to the Donbas and Urals","people":70000},{"fromLat":48.6208,"fromLon":22.2879,"toLat":57.1522,"toLon":65.5272,"label":"Deportees from Transcarpathia to camps in the Urals and Siberia","people":null}],"summary":"As the Red Army moved into Central Europe in 1944-45, Soviet commands seized civilians for labour in the USSR, a practice remembered in Hungary and Transcarpathia by the phrase malenkij robot, a garbling of the Russian for 'a little work' used when men were rounded up ostensibly to clear rubble. Deportees were held by the NKVD's directorate for prisoners of war and internees, GUPVI, in a camp network parallel to the Gulag, and worked in mines, quarries and reconstruction across the Donbas, the Urals, Siberia and the Caucasus. A second, more organised wave in January 1945 followed State Defence Committee Order 7161, which directed the deportation of working-age ethnic Germans from the occupied territories; where regional quotas for Germans could not be met, ethnic Hungarians were taken instead. Hungarian sources estimate that 330,000-380,000 forced labourers returned, most between 1946 and 1948, with a final group of about 3,000 released only in 1953-1955, leaving an estimated 200,000 dead in transit or captivity. The episode was not researched or publicly commemorated until the fall of communism, and remains distinct from the westward expulsions of ethnic Germans recorded separately in this atlas.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":700000,"_deaths":200000,"countries":["Hungary","Ukraine","Romania","Russia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The civilian populations of Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and the occupied German lands from which reparations labourers were seized","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"expulsion-germans-hungary-yugoslavia","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Ethnic Germans from Hungary and Yugoslavia deported to the USSR for labour in 1944-45 appear both in the malenkij robot entry and in the account of the German expulsion from those countries."},{"id":"soviet-annexation-carpathian-ruthenia","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The November 1944 round-up of Hungarian and German men in Transcarpathia for Soviet labour was part of the malenkij robot deportations."}]},{"id":"poland-border-shift","title":"Poland's Postwar Border Shift (Curzon Line and Oder–Neisse)","startYear":1944,"endYear":1947,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union annexed eastern prewar Poland (the Kresy), while Poland received compensatory former German territory east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, with both changes ratified at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences.","peopleDisplaced":1800000,"territoryKm2":179740,"territoryDesc":"USSR permanently annexed about 179,740 km² of prewar eastern Poland; Poland received about 103,000 km² of former German territory (Silesia, Pomerania, southern East Prussia) in compensation","lat":51.8,"lon":20,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.84,"fromLon":24.03,"toLat":51.11,"toLon":17.03,"label":"Lwów/Kresy → Wrocław, new western Poland","people":1600000},{"fromLat":49.78,"fromLon":22.77,"toLat":49.84,"toLon":24.03,"label":"Ukrainians/Belarusians → Soviet Ukraine/Belarus","people":500000}],"summary":"At the 1943–45 Allied conferences, the Soviet Union secured the annexation of the eastern third of prewar Poland (the 'Kresy'), roughly along the Curzon Line, incorporating it into the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian Soviet republics. As compensation, Poland's borders shifted west onto former German territory up to the Oder and Neisse rivers. Millions of ethnic Poles were resettled from the annexed east into the new Polish state, while Ukrainians and Belarusians in prewar Polish territory largely moved east. The border became Poland's internationally recognized eastern frontier and was confirmed in a 1990 treaty with reunified Germany on the west.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1800000,"countries":["Poland","Ukraine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5000000,"baselineWhat":"The Polish population of the prewar eastern territories (the Kresy) annexed by the Soviet Union","baselineYear":1931,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.36,"related":[{"id":"expulsion-germans-poland","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The expulsion of Germans from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line was the westward half of Poland's postwar border shift."},{"id":"polish-ukrainian-transfers-vistula","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":787000,"note":"The ~787,000 Poles moved from the Ukrainian SSR in 1944-46 in the transfers entry are part of the border-shift entry's 1.8 million Kresy Poles, which also include those moved from the Belarusian SSR (~150,000-250,000) and the Lithuanian SSR (~150,000). The official 1945-46 total from the western Soviet republics was about 1,167,000. The ~482,000-500,000 Ukrainians moved east, which appear in both entries' flows, are also shared, but they are not part of the border-shift headline figure. Operation Vistula (140,000-150,000) is not shared."}]},{"id":"polish-ukrainian-transfers-vistula","title":"Polish–Ukrainian Population Transfers and Operation Vistula","startYear":1944,"endYear":1947,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Poland and the Soviet Union carried out a bilateral population exchange of Poles and Ukrainians in 1944–46; in 1947 Poland's own communist authorities then forcibly dispersed the remaining Ukrainian, Lemko and Boyko minority under Operation Vistula.","peopleDisplaced":1400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Southeastern Poland (Bieszczady and Low Beskid regions) and western Soviet Ukraine","lat":49.6,"lon":22.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.84,"fromLon":24.03,"toLat":51.11,"toLon":17.03,"label":"Poles from Soviet Ukraine → new western Poland","people":787000},{"fromLat":49.78,"fromLon":22.77,"toLat":49.84,"toLon":24.03,"label":"Ukrainians from Poland → Soviet Ukraine","people":482000},{"fromLat":49.56,"fromLon":22.2,"toLat":53.43,"toLon":14.55,"label":"Operation Vistula dispersal → northern/western Poland","people":145000}],"summary":"As Poland's borders shifted west, Polish and Soviet authorities agreed in September 1944 to a bilateral exchange in which ethnic Poles in the newly Soviet-annexed territories relocated to Poland and ethnic Ukrainians in Poland relocated to the Ukrainian SSR; roughly 787,000 Poles and 482,000 Ukrainians moved under this program by 1946. A substantial Ukrainian, Lemko and Boyko minority nonetheless remained in southeastern Poland, and in April–July 1947 the Polish communist government carried out Operation Vistula, forcibly dispersing roughly 140,000–150,000 of them across the newly acquired northern and western territories, partly as a security measure against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and partly to enforce ethnic homogenization. The dispersal deliberately broke up communities to accelerate assimilation.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1400000,"countries":["Poland","Ukraine"],"deathsLow":200,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":600,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2200000,"baselineWhat":"The Poles living in the territories ceded to the Soviet Union and the Ukrainians and Lemkos living within postwar Poland's new borders","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.6363636363636364,"related":[{"id":"poland-border-shift","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":787000,"note":"The ~787,000 Poles moved from the Ukrainian SSR in 1944-46 in the transfers entry are part of the border-shift entry's 1.8 million Kresy Poles, which also include those moved from the Belarusian SSR (~150,000-250,000) and the Lithuanian SSR (~150,000). The official 1945-46 total from the western Soviet republics was about 1,167,000. The ~482,000-500,000 Ukrainians moved east, which appear in both entries' flows, are also shared, but they are not part of the border-shift headline figure. Operation Vistula (140,000-150,000) is not shared."}]},{"id":"soviet-annexation-carpathian-ruthenia","title":"Soviet Annexation of Carpathian Ruthenia","startYear":1944,"endYear":1946,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union pressured restored Czechoslovakia to cede Carpathian Ruthenia (Subcarpathian Rus'), which was annexed and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as Zakarpattia Oblast.","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":12800,"territoryDesc":"Subcarpathian Rus', the easternmost region of interwar Czechoslovakia","lat":48.62,"lon":22.29,"flows":[],"summary":"Carpathian Ruthenia (Subcarpathian Rus'), the easternmost province of prewar Czechoslovakia, was occupied by the Red Army in late 1944. A Soviet-organized local assembly requested union with the Ukrainian SSR, and Czechoslovakia formally ceded the territory in a June 1945 treaty, ratified by the Czechoslovak parliament in 1946. The region, home to Rusyn, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and other populations, became Zakarpattia (Transcarpathian) Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR and remains part of independent Ukraine today.","ongoing":false,"_mag":76800,"countries":["Ukraine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":725357,"baselineWhat":"The population of Subcarpathian Rus' (Carpathian Ruthenia) at the Czechoslovak census of 1930","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"malenkij-robot-soviet-reparations-labour-deportations","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The November 1944 round-up of Hungarian and German men in Transcarpathia for Soviet labour was part of the malenkij robot deportations."}]},{"id":"soviet-annexation-tuva","title":"Soviet Annexation of Tuva","startYear":1944,"endYear":1944,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union formally annexed the nominally independent Tuvan People's Republic, a Soviet client state since the 1920s, following a request from a Soviet-aligned Tuvan assembly, incorporating it as the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast.","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":170500,"territoryDesc":"Tuvan People's Republic, in southern Siberia on the border with Mongolia","lat":51.72,"lon":94.45,"flows":[],"summary":"Tuva, a sparsely populated region in southern Siberia, had functioned since 1921 as the nominally independent Tuvan People's Republic while remaining under close Soviet political and military control. In October 1944, its small assembly formally petitioned for incorporation into the USSR, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet accepted, making Tuva the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast (later Tuvan ASSR) within the Russian SFSR. Unlike most other annexations covered here, the transfer involved no mass displacement, but it eliminated the last vestige of Tuvan statehood and subjected the region's largely nomadic, Turkic-speaking population to Soviet administrative and collectivization policies.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1023000,"countries":["Russia"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":95000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Tuvan People's Republic at its annexation","baselineYear":1944,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"soviet-forced-repatriation-filtration","title":"Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens and the Filtration System","startYear":1944,"endYear":1947,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet state, with the agreement of Britain and the United States at Yalta, repatriated Soviet prisoners of war, forced labourers and refugees from Western zones and screened them through NKVD filtration camps","peopleDisplaced":5200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":55.75,"lon":37.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":51,"fromLon":11,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Soviet prisoners of war and Ostarbeiter repatriated from the Western occupation zones","people":2300000},{"fromLat":46.83,"fromLon":12.77,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Cossacks and their families handed over by British forces at Lienz","people":45000}],"summary":"At Yalta in February 1945 the Allies agreed to repatriate each other's liberated nationals, and the Western powers applied this to Soviet citizens irrespective of whether they wished to return, using force at Lienz, Dachau, Plattling and elsewhere. Some 5.2 million people were moved east — former prisoners of war, Ostarbeiter conscripted into German industry, and refugees — and passed through NKVD filtration and verification points where their conduct under occupation was investigated. Most were released or conscripted, but several hundred thousand were sentenced to the Gulag or to exile settlement, and returning prisoners of war carried a durable stigma. Handovers of Cossacks and of Russians who had never held Soviet citizenship, including White emigres, produced suicides and killings during the transfers and became the subject of long controversy in Britain. The system connects the atlas's German forced-labour and Soviet prisoner-of-war entries to the postwar Gulag.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5200000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Germany","Austria"],"baselinePop":5500000,"baselineWhat":"The Soviet citizens outside Soviet control at the end of the war - prisoners of war, forced labourers and refugees in Germany and the occupied countries","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9454545454545454,"related":[{"id":"gulag-camp-system-1930-1953","rel":"continues-as","note":"Several hundred thousand repatriated Soviet citizens were passed after filtration to the NKVD and sentenced to the Gulag or to exile settlements."},{"id":"german-treatment-of-soviet-prisoners-of-war","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":1539475,"note":"Surviving Soviet prisoners of war held by Germany were among those returned to the USSR and screened in the filtration system."}]},{"id":"warsaw-uprising-and-expulsion-of-the-city-1944","title":"The Warsaw Uprising and the Expulsion of the City's Population","startYear":1944,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"German forces suppressed the Polish Home Army rising, killed civilians en masse, expelled the surviving population of Warsaw and demolished the city","peopleDisplaced":550000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":52.23,"lon":21.01,"flows":[{"fromLat":52.23,"fromLon":21.01,"toLat":52.17,"toLon":20.8,"label":"Warsaw -> Dulag 121 transit camp, Pruszkow","people":550000},{"fromLat":52.17,"fromLon":20.8,"toLat":51.23,"toLon":6.78,"label":"Pruszkow -> forced labour in Germany","people":150000},{"fromLat":52.17,"fromLon":20.8,"toLat":50.03,"toLon":19.2,"label":"Pruszkow -> concentration camps including Auschwitz and Ravensbrueck","people":60000}],"summary":"The Polish Home Army rose against the German occupation of Warsaw on 1 August 1944 as Soviet forces approached the Vistula. Over sixty-three days German units, including the Dirlewanger and Kaminski formations, retook the city district by district; in the Wola massacre of 5-7 August alone tens of thousands of civilians were shot in a matter of days. Soviet forces halted on the east bank and Allied airdrops were limited. After the capitulation on 2 October the entire remaining civilian population, about 550,000 people, was expelled through the transit camp at Pruszkow; some were sent to labour in Germany, some to concentration camps, and the rest dispersed across the General Government. German demolition squads then systematically destroyed what remained of the city until January 1945, so that roughly 85 per cent of the left-bank city lay in ruins at liberation. Warsaw's prewar population of about 1.3 million had already been reduced by the destruction of the ghetto and its inhabitants in 1942-43.","deathsLow":150000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","arbitrary detention","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":550000,"_deaths":175000,"countries":["Poland","Germany"],"baselinePop":920000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Warsaw at the outbreak of the uprising in August 1944","baselineYear":1944,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5978260869565217},{"id":"albania-hoxha-internment-and-political-prisons","title":"Albania under Hoxha: Internal Exile, Internment Villages and the Political Prison System","startYear":1945,"endYear":1991,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Albanian communist state interned, deported and imprisoned people classed as class enemies, together with their families","peopleDisplaced":59009,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.2969,"lon":20.0192,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.3275,"fromLon":19.8187,"toLat":40.95,"toLon":19.7,"label":"Deportation of families to internment villages in the Myzeqe plain (Lushnje, Fier)","people":null},{"fromLat":42.05,"fromLon":19.95,"toLat":40.2969,"toLon":20.0192,"label":"Northern families deported to the Tepelena camp","people":null}],"summary":"From 1945 the Albanian Party of Labour under Enver Hoxha combined a political prison and labour-camp system with a distinct regime of internim-debim, internment and deportation, under which whole families were moved by administrative decision to designated villages, mostly in the marshy Myzeqe plain around Lushnje and Fier, and required to live and work there under police supervision, often for decades and across generations. Barbed-wire camps operated between 1945 and 1954, the largest at Tepelena holding several thousand people including women and children; forced-labour prisons such as Spac and Burrel worked prisoners in copper and pyrite mines. ISKK figures record 7,022 deaths attributed to internment conditions, 984 political prisoners dead in prison and 5,577 men and 450 women executed under sentence. Restrictions were lifted with the collapse of the regime in 1990-1991. Albania has legislated on compensation and file access and has opened memorial sites at Spac and elsewhere, but the accounting has been slower and less complete than in most other former communist states, and campaigners describe the subject as under-addressed.","deathsLow":8000,"deathsHigh":14000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","summary execution","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":59009,"_deaths":11000,"countries":["Albania"],"baselinePop":1122044,"baselineWhat":"The population of Albania in 1945, when the communist state took power","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05259062924448596},{"id":"australia-stolen-generations","title":"Australia's Stolen Generations","startYear":1945,"endYear":1970,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Australian governments, churches and welfare bodies removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families under protection and assimilation laws","peopleDisplaced":27200,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-25.2744,"lon":133.7751,"flows":[],"summary":"From the early twentieth century until about 1970, Australian state, territory and Commonwealth authorities, working with churches and welfare agencies, removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families under protection and assimilation legislation and placed them in institutions, foster homes or adoptive families, commonly with contact and language use forbidden. The 1997 national inquiry Bringing Them Home, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, took evidence from more than 500 affected people and found that between one in ten and one in three Indigenous children had been forcibly removed between 1910 and 1970, that the removals constituted a gross violation of human rights, and that forcible removal was an act of genocide. It made recommendations for apology, reparations, records access and national standards, and the Commonwealth apology was delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 13 February 2008. The Healing Foundation assessed in 2025 that only about 6 per cent of the inquiry's recommendations had been fully implemented. This entry covers the post-1945 portion of a policy running from roughly 1910; removals continued in some jurisdictions past 1970.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":27200,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia in the mid-1950s","baselineYear":1954,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.272,"related":[{"id":"australia-protection-acts-reserves","rel":"same-population","note":"The protection acts that confined Aboriginal people to reserves also supplied the legal machinery for the child removals of the Stolen Generations, and both applied to the same communities from 1945 to 1969."}]},{"id":"banaba-rabi-relocation","title":"Removal of the Banabans to Rabi Island","startYear":1945,"endYear":1947,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"The British colonial administration and the British Phosphate Commissioners moved the Banaban people to Rabi Island in Fiji and continued mining their island","peopleDisplaced":1000,"territoryKm2":6,"territoryDesc":"Banaba (Ocean Island), about 6 km², annexed by Britain in 1900 and leased to phosphate interests; roughly 90 per cent of its surface, some 22 million tonnes of rock, was stripped and exported between 1900 and 1979, leaving most of the island uninhabitable.","lat":-0.8611,"lon":169.5375,"flows":[{"fromLat":-0.8611,"fromLon":169.5375,"toLat":-16.5,"toLon":179.9833,"label":"Banaba (Ocean Island) → Rabi Island, Fiji","people":1000}],"summary":"Banaba, a small raised-coral island in the western Pacific, was annexed by Britain in 1900 after high-grade phosphate was found there, and the British Phosphate Commissioners obtained exclusive rights to occupy and mine it. Japanese forces occupied the island from 1942 to 1945, deporting most inhabitants and massacring the remaining Gilbertese labourers in August 1945. Rather than returning the Banabans after the war, the colonial authorities declared Banaba uninhabitable and moved them to Rabi Island in Fiji, some 2,000 km away, which had been bought with royalties from the Banabans' own phosphate; about 1,000 people landed there from December 1945 to find an undeveloped island without housing or services. Mining continued on Banaba until the deposits were exhausted in 1979, by which time roughly 90 per cent of the island's surface had been removed. The Banabans sued Britain and the phosphate commissioners in the English courts from 1965; the litigation ended in 1979 without the damages sought, and in 1981 they accepted an ex gratia settlement of A$10 million. The Rabi community, now Fijian citizens with a distinct legal status, continues to press claims over the destruction of their homeland.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Kiribati","Fiji"],"baselinePop":1000,"baselineWhat":"The Banaban population of Ocean Island at the time of the removal","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1},{"id":"canada-indian-residential-schools","title":"Canada's Indian Residential School System","startYear":1945,"endYear":1996,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Canadian government and church bodies removed First Nations, Inuit and Métis children from their families and held them in residential institutions","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.6745,"lon":-120.3273,"flows":[],"summary":"Canada operated a national system of church-run residential schools for Indigenous children under federal funding and authority; 139 institutions are formally recognised and at least 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended between 1883 and the closure of the last school in 1996. Attendance was compelled by law and administrative pressure, children were separated from parents for most of the year, punished for speaking their languages, and set to work under a half-day labour system, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recorded extensive physical and sexual abuse. The TRC concluded in 2015 that the schools were 'an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide'. Mortality was severe: the commission identified thousands of student deaths, largely from tuberculosis and influenza, and found the burial places of many children unmarked or unknown, a finding that gained wider attention after ground-penetrating radar surveys at former school sites from 2021. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 produced $2.8 billion in compensation for 31,970 resolved abuse claims, a 2008 prime ministerial apology and the TRC's 94 Calls to Action. This entry covers the post-1945 portion of a system that began in the 1880s.","deathsLow":4100,"deathsHigh":6000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction","sexual violence","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":5050,"countries":["Canada"],"baselinePop":165000,"baselineWhat":"The First Nations, Inuit and Métis population of Canada around the middle of the twentieth century","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9090909090909091,"related":[{"id":"canada-sixties-scoop","rel":"same-population","note":"Residential schools and the Sixties Scoop were overlapping Canadian policies of removing Indigenous children from their families."}]},{"id":"expulsion-germans-czechoslovakia","title":"Expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia","startYear":1945,"endYear":1947,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The restored Czechoslovak state expelled its ethnic German minority under the Beneš decrees, following an initial wave of chaotic 'wild expulsions' and violence in the summer of 1945.","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Sudetenland and other predominantly German-populated border districts of Czechoslovakia","lat":50.23,"lon":12.87,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.23,"fromLon":12.87,"toLat":49.45,"toLon":11.08,"label":"Sudetenland → occupied Bavaria/Germany","people":3000000}],"summary":"After Czechoslovakia's restoration in 1945, its government moved to expel the roughly 3-million-strong ethnic German minority concentrated in the Sudetenland, first through unregulated 'wild' expulsions accompanied by violence and internment, and then through an organized transfer authorized by the Potsdam Agreement and carried out under presidential decrees issued by Edvard Beneš. The decrees also stripped expelled Germans (and, initially, ethnic Hungarians) of citizenship and property. Death toll estimates from a joint Czech-German historical commission range from roughly 15,000 to 30,000, far below earlier German estimates that ran into the hundreds of thousands. The expulsion permanently ended the centuries-old German presence in Bohemia and Moravia.","ongoing":false,"_mag":3000000,"countries":["Czechia","Germany"],"deathsLow":15000,"deathsHigh":273000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","arbitrary detention","forced labour","denationalization"],"_deaths":144000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":3230000,"baselineWhat":"The German population of the Czech lands","baselineYear":1930,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9287925696594427},{"id":"japanese-postwar-repatriation","title":"Repatriation of Japanese Settlers from Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan and Sakhalin","startYear":1945,"endYear":1958,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Allied Occupation authorities and Japan repatriated Japanese civilians and soldiers from former colonies/occupied territories; Soviet, Chinese and Korean authorities controlled departures","peopleDisplaced":6600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.72,"lon":121,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.88,"fromLon":125.32,"toLat":35.47,"toLon":135.33,"label":"Manchuria (Changchun) → Maizuru, Japan","people":1600000},{"fromLat":37.57,"fromLon":126.98,"toLat":33.6,"toLon":130.4,"label":"Korea (Seoul) → Hakata/Sasebo, Japan","people":800000},{"fromLat":25.03,"fromLon":121.56,"toLat":31.6,"toLon":130.55,"label":"Taiwan (Taipei) → Kagoshima, Japan","people":480000},{"fromLat":46.96,"fromLon":142.74,"toLat":43.06,"toLon":141.35,"label":"South Sakhalin → Hokkaido, Japan","people":400000}],"summary":"After Japan's August 1945 surrender, roughly 6.6 million Japanese civilians and demobilized soldiers stranded across its former empire were repatriated to the home islands over the following decade, mostly by 1949 but continuing into the late 1950s. The largest flows came from Manchuria, colonial Korea, Taiwan, and southern Sakhalin, with additional large groups of soldiers held in Soviet internment in Siberia. Tens of thousands died from disease, violence, or in Soviet labor camps before they could return, and an unknown number of Japanese children were left behind or separated from parents amid the chaos, particularly in Manchuria. The process was organized primarily by the US-led Allied occupation of Japan in cooperation with local Chinese, Korean, and Soviet authorities.","ongoing":false,"_mag":6600000,"countries":["North Korea","China","Japan","South Korea","Taiwan","Russia"],"deathsLow":55000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","sexual violence"],"_deaths":177500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6900000,"baselineWhat":"Japanese nationals — soldiers, colonists and civilians — outside the home islands at the surrender in August 1945","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9565217391304348,"related":[{"id":"japanese-seizure-of-manchuria-and-settlement","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":120000,"sharedDeaths":[0,78500],"note":"Japanese agricultural settlers who survived the 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchuria were among those repatriated to Japan after the war."},{"id":"soviet-seizure-sakhalin-kurils","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":400000,"note":"The removal of Japanese residents from South Sakhalin and the Kurils was one component of the postwar repatriation of Japanese from the former empire."}]},{"id":"okinawa-battle-camps-and-us-land-seizures","title":"The Battle of Okinawa, the Civilian Camps and the US Seizure of Okinawan Land","startYear":1945,"endYear":1972,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"US forces fought the 1945 battle among the civilian population, interned survivors in camps, and then expropriated Okinawan land for permanent bases under military administration","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"US bases came to cover about 20 per cent of Okinawa Island; Okinawa remained under US military administration until reversion to Japan in 1972","lat":26.34,"lon":127.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":26.2,"fromLon":127.68,"toLat":26.62,"toLon":128,"label":"Civilians moved into US camps in northern Okinawa, 1945","people":null},{"fromLat":26.34,"fromLon":127.8,"toLat":-17.8,"toLon":-63.18,"label":"Okinawan emigration to Bolivia after land loss","people":null}],"summary":"The battle fought on Okinawa between April and June 1945 killed an estimated 94,000-150,000 Okinawan civilians, a quarter to a third of the prefecture's population, including deaths in mass suicides in which Japanese troops distributed grenades and, in documented cases, ordered or pressed civilians to kill themselves and each other. Survivors were collected into US internment camps in the north while their villages, land and cemeteries were absorbed into military installations. Under US administration in the 1950s the military expropriated further land: when about 98 per cent of landowners refused to sign leases, forced seizures followed, remembered in Okinawa as 'bayonets and bulldozers', with the communities of Isahama, Iejima and others resisting, and a reported 250,000 people joining island-wide protests in 1956. Some displaced families accepted assisted emigration to Bolivia and elsewhere. Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972 with the bases in place. Japan's textbook treatment of the compulsory mass suicides has been repeatedly contested: the Education Ministry ordered references to army orders removed in 2007, prompting mass protest in Okinawa, and an Osaka court in 2008 rejected a libel suit brought against the writer Kenzaburo Oe over the same question.","deathsLow":94000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":122000,"countries":["Japan","Bolivia"],"baselinePop":574579,"baselineWhat":"The population of Okinawa Prefecture at the last pre-war census","baselineYear":1940,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.522121414113638},{"id":"roma-persecution-postwar-europe","title":"Roma Persecution, Coerced Assimilation and Expulsion in Postwar Europe","startYear":1945,"endYear":2012,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Communist and later democratic European states banned nomadism, dispersed and sterilised Roma, evicted them from settlements and expelled Roma migrants across EU borders","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":50.08,"lon":14.44,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.67,"fromLon":21.17,"toLat":44.43,"toLon":26.1,"label":"Roma and Ashkali displaced from Kosovo after 1999","people":90000},{"fromLat":48.86,"fromLon":2.35,"toLat":44.43,"toLon":26.1,"label":"Roma returned from France to Romania and Bulgaria, 2010","people":null}],"summary":"Roma across postwar Europe were subject to a sequence of coercive measures that the atlas's Porajmos entry, ending in 1945, does not reach. Communist states banned nomadism and dispersed Romani settlements — Czechoslovakia's law of 1958 and dispersal programme of 1965 are the best documented — and pursued assimilation through segregated schooling and, in Czechoslovakia and its successor states, the sterilisation of Romani women without valid consent, first exposed by Charter 77 in 1978, found unlawful by the Czech public defender of rights in 2005 and compensated by Czech legislation in 2021. After 1989, Roma were displaced by pogrom-style attacks in several countries, and some 80,000-100,000 Roma and Ashkali fled Kosovo in and after 1999. In western Europe, Italy's 2008 'nomad emergency' decrees, later annulled by the Italian courts, and France's 2010 clearance of Roma camps and organised returns to Romania and Bulgaria drew censure from the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner and the European Commission. The measures are unified less by a single perpetrator than by a continent-wide pattern documented by the Council of Europe and the European Roma Rights Centre.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","denationalization","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Czechia","Kosovo","Romania","France"],"baselinePop":11000000,"baselineWhat":"The Roma population of Europe, on the Council of Europe's working estimate","baselineYear":2012,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"soviet-annexation-konigsberg","title":"Soviet Annexation of Königsberg (Kaliningrad)","startYear":1945,"endYear":1948,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet Union annexed the northern third of East Prussia around Königsberg under the Potsdam Agreement, later formally expelling the remaining German population and resettling the area with Soviet citizens.","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":15100,"territoryDesc":"Northern East Prussia surrounding Königsberg, reorganized as Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian SFSR","lat":54.71,"lon":20.51,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.71,"fromLon":20.51,"toLat":52.52,"toLon":13.4,"label":"Königsberg region → occupied Germany","people":100000}],"summary":"The Potsdam Agreement awarded the northern portion of East Prussia, including the city of Königsberg, to the Soviet Union pending a final peace settlement that never occurred; the remainder went to Poland. Most of the prewar German population had already died or fled during the brutal Soviet advance of early 1945; the remnant, reduced by famine and disease under Soviet occupation, was formally expelled to Germany by 1947–48. The territory was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 and resettled with Soviet citizens, becoming a militarized Russian exclave separated from the rest of the USSR/Russia by Lithuania and Poland.","ongoing":false,"_mag":100000,"countries":["Russia","Germany"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":75000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The pre-war population of the northern third of East Prussia that became the Kaliningrad Oblast","baselineYear":1939,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.09090909090909091},{"id":"soviet-seizure-sakhalin-kurils","title":"Soviet Seizure of South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands","startYear":1945,"endYear":1949,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Soviet Union invaded and annexed Japanese-administered South Sakhalin (Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands, expelling most Japanese and Ainu residents","peopleDisplaced":420000,"territoryKm2":46600,"territoryDesc":"South Sakhalin (Karafuto, ~36,000 km2) and the Kuril Island chain (~10,500 km2), seized from Japan and incorporated into the USSR","lat":46.96,"lon":142.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.96,"fromLon":142.74,"toLat":43.06,"toLon":141.35,"label":"South Sakhalin → Hokkaido, Japan","people":400000},{"fromLat":44.08,"fromLon":146,"toLat":43.33,"toLon":145.58,"label":"Kuril Islands (Kunashir) → Nemuro, Japan","people":18000}],"summary":"In the final days of WWII and immediately after, Soviet forces invaded and occupied the Japanese-held southern half of Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Island chain, formally annexing them in 1945–46. Almost the entire Japanese civilian population, along with the small indigenous Ainu community, was expelled or repatriated to Japan by 1949, while ethnic Koreans who had been brought to the islands as forced laborers were largely denied Soviet or Japanese citizenship for years afterward. The USSR (and later Russia) has administered the territory since, while Japan has never recognized the loss of the four southernmost Kuril islands. No peace treaty formally ending the state of war between Japan and Russia has been signed, and the sovereignty dispute remains unresolved.","ongoing":false,"_mag":420000,"countries":["Russia","Japan"],"deathsLow":3500,"deathsHigh":3700,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"_deaths":3600,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":420000,"baselineWhat":"The Japanese-administered population of Karafuto (South Sakhalin) and the Kuril Islands in August 1945","baselineYear":1945,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":1,"related":[{"id":"japanese-postwar-repatriation","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":400000,"note":"The removal of Japanese residents from South Sakhalin and the Kurils was one component of the postwar repatriation of Japanese from the former empire."}]},{"id":"soviet-special-settlement-regime","title":"Soviet \"Special Settlement\" Regime for Deported Nationalities","startYear":1945,"endYear":1957,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Soviet NKVD/MVD holding deported national and social groups as spetsposelentsy in designated settlements under administrative supervision and a ban on leaving the assigned perimeter","peopleDisplaced":2753356,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Designated settlements across Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Siberia and the Urals, in which registered settlers had to report periodically to a commandant and were prohibited from leaving the perimeter of their assigned area","lat":49.8,"lon":73.1,"flows":[],"summary":"Whole nationalities deported during and immediately after the Second World War - among them Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Karachays, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Koreans, Greeks and large numbers from the annexed Baltic states, western Ukraine and Poland - were not imprisoned in camps but registered as \"special settlers\" in fixed places of residence. The regime was one of confinement rather than incarceration: settlers lived and worked in ordinary settlements but were legally second-class residents, obliged to register with an MVD commandant, forbidden to move without permission, and liable to criminal penalties, including long terms of hard labour, for leaving their assigned area. Archival counts opened after 1991 show 2.57 million registered in January 1950 and 2.75 million in January 1953, the peak of the system. After Stalin's death the regime was dismantled piecemeal by decrees through 1954-1956 removing groups from the register and from administrative supervision: Poles deported in 1936 in January 1956, Kalmyks in March, Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians in March, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds and Hemshins in April, and Chechens and Ingush in July 1956 - the last expressly without the right to return to their homeland. In 1957-1958 the national autonomies of the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkars were restored and those peoples were permitted to return, while the Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Meskhetian Turks were not, their return bans lasting into the late Soviet period; the Supreme Soviet declared the deportations criminal in November 1989.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2753356,"countries":["Kazakhstan"],"deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":600000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour"],"_deaths":400000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":170548000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Soviet Union in 1946, against which the special-settlement population is measured","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.01614417055608978,"related":[{"id":"soviet-annexation-baltic-states","rel":"continues-from","note":"Baltic families deported in 1945-1949, notably in Operation Priboi in March 1949, were held under the special settlement regime until the mid-1950s."},{"id":"north-caucasus-deportees-return-1957","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":415000,"note":"Chechens and Ingush held under the special-settlement regime returned to the North Caucasus once it was lifted in 1956-57."}]},{"id":"setif-guelma-kherrata-massacres-1945","title":"The Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata Massacres","startYear":1945,"endYear":1945,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"French troops, aircraft and warships, together with settler militias armed by local officials, killed thousands of Algerian Muslims in the Constantine department after a nationalist demonstration and rural uprising in which 102 Europeans were killed","peopleDisplaced":4560,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.19,"lon":5.41,"flows":[],"summary":"On 8 May 1945, as Europe celebrated the German surrender, police fired on a banned nationalist march in Sétif carrying the Algerian flag, killing among others the young scout Bouzid Saâl; rioting spread through the countryside towards Kherrata and Bougie, where Algerian peasants killed about 90 Europeans, and 12 more were killed around Guelma, for 102 in all. The repression that followed was conducted around Sétif by the army with artillery, aircraft that bombed rural hamlets between 9 and 19 May, and the cruiser Duguay-Trouin, which shelled the coast; around Guelma it was carried out mainly by settler militias armed by the sub-prefect, which until 26 June killed men drawn from nationalist, scout and trade-union membership lists, then dug up and burned many of the bodies in a lime kiln at Héliopolis before the Interior Minister's visit (Jean-Pierre Peyroulou). The number of Algerians killed is unknown: French authorities gave 1,165 in 1946, historians' estimates run from several thousand to 20,000–30,000, and the Algerian state uses 45,000. France's ambassador called the massacres an 'inexcusable tragedy' in 2005, his successor said in 2008 that 'the time of denial is over', and in 2015 a French minister attended the commemoration for the first time; a resolution tabled in the National Assembly in September 2025 to recognise them as state crimes had not been adopted when consulted.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_mag":4560,"_deaths":17500,"countries":["Algeria"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"dutch-military-violence-indonesia-1945-1949","title":"Dutch Military Violence in the Indonesian War of Independence","startYear":1945,"endYear":1949,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Dutch armed forces (KL, KNIL and special forces) fought to reimpose Dutch authority over territory held by the Republic of Indonesia, using extreme violence against Indonesian civilians and prisoners","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Republican-held territory on Java and Sumatra seized in Operation Product (21 July-5 August 1947) and Operation Kraai (December 1948), together with Dutch reoccupation of the outer islands including South Sulawesi; sovereignty was transferred to Indonesia on 27 December 1949","lat":-7.8,"lon":110.36,"flows":[],"summary":"After Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, the Netherlands sought to restore its authority by force, deploying up to about 150,000 troops, including some 95,000-100,000 conscripts, in a war it officially termed 'police actions' and Indonesians call Agresi Militer Belanda. Two large offensives, Operation Product in July-August 1947 and Operation Kraai in December 1948, seized Republican territory, but guerrilla resistance, international pressure and the collapse of Dutch control led to the transfer of sovereignty in December 1949. A government-funded research programme by KITLV, NIMH and NIOD concluded in February 2022 that the Dutch government and military leadership deliberately condoned the systematic and widespread use of extreme violence, including torture, executions without trial, rape, the burning of kampongs, mass detention and heavy use of artillery, which caused the majority of Indonesian casualties. The best-known cases are the South Sulawesi campaign of Captain Raymond Westerling's Depot Speciale Troepen and other KNIL units, in which at least 3,500 unarmed Indonesians were executed without trial between mid-December 1946 and 22 February 1947, and the massacre at Rawagede on 9 December 1947. Prime Minister Mark Rutte endorsed the conclusions and apologised to the people of Indonesia on 17 February 2022. The violence of the bersiap period of 1945-46, much of it by Indonesian groups against Europeans, Indo-Europeans, Chinese and others, is a separate episode not counted here.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Indonesia"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"bikini-marshall-islands-nuclear-relocations","title":"Bikini Atoll and Marshall Islands Nuclear Test Relocations","startYear":1946,"endYear":1958,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"The United States relocated Marshallese communities from Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik atolls to conduct 67 nuclear weapons tests","peopleDisplaced":1000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.6,"lon":165.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.6,"fromLon":165.4,"toLat":11.35,"toLon":167.42,"label":"Bikini Atoll → Rongerik, then Kili Island","people":167},{"fromLat":11.5,"fromLon":162.33,"toLat":9.75,"toLon":160.98,"label":"Enewetak Atoll → Ujelang Atoll","people":145},{"fromLat":11.15,"fromLon":166.87,"toLat":8.72,"toLon":167.73,"label":"Rongelap Atoll → Mejatto, Kwajalein Atoll","people":300}],"summary":"Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, then a US-administered UN trust territory, requiring the relocation of the indigenous populations of Bikini and Enewetak atolls before testing began. The March 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, far more powerful than expected, spread heavy fallout over inhabited Rongelap and Utirik atolls, prompting emergency evacuations and causing severe radiation sickness; many Rongelap residents left permanently in 1985 due to lingering contamination. Bikinians who were resettled to Rongerik and later Kili Island found the new locations unable to sustain them, and despite a 1968-69 attempt to resettle Bikini itself, elevated radiation levels forced a second evacuation in 1978, leaving the atoll uninhabited to this day. Compensation and cleanup disputes between affected communities and the US government continue.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1000,"countries":["Marshall Is."],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":550,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the four atoll communities removed or evacuated for the United States nuclear test programme — Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utirik","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1.8181818181818181},{"id":"greek-civil-war-displacement","title":"Greek Civil War Displacement and Child Evacuations","startYear":1946,"endYear":1949,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Fighting between the Greek government and the Communist-led Democratic Army of Greece produced large-scale internal displacement and cross-border refugee flows, including the removal of tens of thousands of children from conflict areas and government-directed mass evacuation of villages.","peopleDisplaced":850000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40,"lon":21.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.28,"fromLon":20.75,"toLat":41.03,"toLon":21.34,"label":"Grammos/Vitsi region → Yugoslavia","people":100000},{"fromLat":40.78,"fromLon":21.41,"toLat":41.3,"toLon":69.24,"label":"Northern Greece → USSR (Tashkent)","people":12000}],"summary":"The 1946–49 Greek Civil War between the government and the Communist-led Democratic Army of Greece caused extensive displacement in the country's northern regions. As the Democratic Army was defeated in 1949, an estimated 100,000 or more fighters and civilians fled across the border into Yugoslavia and onward to other Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union. Separately, Communist forces evacuated roughly 28,000–32,000 children from combat zones to Eastern Bloc countries in 1948–49 for their safety, a program the Greek government and many Western accounts described at the time as forced abduction ('paidomazoma'). The Greek government simultaneously evacuated and relocated large numbers of villagers from contested areas as a counterinsurgency measure. Many refugees, particularly those identifying as ethnic Macedonians, were barred from returning to Greece for decades.","ongoing":false,"_mag":850000,"countries":["Greece","Macedonia","Uzbekistan"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":80000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children"],"_deaths":65000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":7400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Greece at the start of the civil war","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.11486486486486487},{"id":"first-kashmir-war","title":"First Kashmir War and the Line of Control","startYear":1947,"endYear":1949,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"India and Pakistan fought over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir following its disputed accession to India; a UN-mediated ceasefire divided the territory","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":222236,"territoryDesc":"The former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, divided by the 1949 ceasefire line (from 1972, the Line of Control) into Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir/Ladakh and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir/Gilgit-Baltistan","lat":34.08,"lon":74.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.73,"fromLon":74.87,"toLat":32.49,"toLon":74.53,"label":"Jammu region → Sialkot, Pakistan (Muslim refugees)","people":200000},{"fromLat":34.37,"fromLon":73.47,"toLat":34.08,"toLon":74.8,"label":"Western Kashmir → Srinagar, India-administered Kashmir (Hindu/Sikh refugees)","people":100000}],"summary":"After the ruler of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in October 1947 amid a tribal invasion from Pakistan, India and Pakistan fought their first war over the territory. A UN-brokered ceasefire in January 1949 established a ceasefire line dividing the state into Indian- and Pakistani-administered portions, later formalized as the Line of Control. The war and its aftermath displaced several hundred thousand people, including Muslims fleeing Jammu toward Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fleeing toward India. The dispute over Kashmir's final status remains unresolved and has triggered further wars in 1965 and 1999.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1333416,"countries":["India","Pakistan"],"deathsLow":25000,"deathsHigh":110000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"_deaths":67500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":4021616,"baselineWhat":"The population of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir at the last census before partition","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.12432813078125808,"related":[{"id":"jammu-massacres-1947","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":400000,"sharedDeaths":[20000,100000],"note":"The 1947 Jammu massacres and the Mirpur and Rajouri killings took place within the First Kashmir War."},{"id":"partition-of-india","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Communal violence and flight in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 are often treated as part of the wider partition violence."}]},{"id":"greek-detention-and-exile-islands","title":"Greece's Detention and Exile Islands: Makronisos, Gyaros and Ai Stratis","startYear":1947,"endYear":1974,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Greek governments and, later, the military junta deported and detained communists, suspected sympathisers and conscripts on barren islands","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.7167,"lon":24.1333,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.9838,"fromLon":23.7275,"toLat":37.7167,"toLon":24.1333,"label":"Detainees shipped from Athens and Lavrio to Makronisos","people":null},{"fromLat":37.9838,"fromLon":23.7275,"toLat":37.6167,"toLon":24.7167,"label":"Prisoners deported to Gyaros","people":20000},{"fromLat":40.6401,"fromLon":22.9444,"toLat":39.5333,"toLon":25,"label":"Exiles from northern Greece to Ai Stratis","people":null}],"summary":"Greece's system of internal exile long predated the civil war, but from 1947 it expanded into a network of island camps that continued, with interruptions, until the fall of the colonels in 1974. Makronisos, off the Attic coast, held soldiers and conscripts of suspect loyalty as well as civilians, and combined labour and military drill with a programme of 'national re-education' whose object was a signed declaration of repentance renouncing communism; those who signed were released or returned to their units, while those who refused faced beatings and prolonged detention. Gyaros, described in the press as the Dachau of the Mediterranean, held about 20,000 people after the civil war and was closed in 1952 following international criticism, then reopened by the junta in 1967 and closed again in 1968 after Red Cross and international protest. Ai Stratis operated as an exile settlement from 1929 to 1974. Detainees included writers and composers later central to Greek public life, among them Yannis Ritsos and Mikis Theodorakis. Internal exile was abolished during the metapolitefsi in 1974; Makronisos was designated a protected historical site in 1989. This entry is distinct from the atlas's existing coverage of civil war displacement and the evacuation of children.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greece"],"baselinePop":7632801,"baselineWhat":"The population of Greece at the 1951 census, from which those deported to the exile islands were drawn","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.007860810205847106},{"id":"india-dam-development-displacement","title":"Dam and Development-Induced Displacement in Independent India","startYear":1947,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Indian federal and state governments acquired land for dams, mines and industry, displacing rural and largely Adivasi populations","peopleDisplaced":40000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":21.83,"lon":73.747,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.9,"fromLon":74.4,"toLat":21.7,"toLon":73.2,"label":"Narmada valley submergence resettlement in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra","people":200000}],"summary":"Since independence India has acquired land on a vast scale for dams, canals, mines, industrial estates and urban expansion under the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and its successors, displacing tens of millions of people. Estimates of the cumulative total range from about 21 million in an Indian government working-group calculation to 40-60 million in the state-by-state reconstruction by the sociologist Walter Fernandes and colleagues; Adivasi (tribal) and Dalit communities are heavily over-represented, holding perhaps a quarter of the displaced despite being under a tenth of the population, and a large share of those displaced were never resettled. The Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada became the emblematic case: sustained protest by the Narmada Bachao Andolan led the World Bank to commission the Morse Committee independent review, which in 1992 found resettlement and environmental requirements unmet, and the Bank withdrew from the project in 1993; construction continued with Indian funding and the Supreme Court of India permitted the dam to be raised in judgments from 2000. India replaced the colonial land-acquisition law in 2013 with legislation requiring consent, social impact assessment and resettlement entitlements, whose implementation and subsequent amendment remain contested. Displacement is administrative and compensated in law rather than violent, but the compulsion, the scale and the failure of resettlement are documented by government committees themselves.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":361088090,"baselineWhat":"The population of India at the 1951 census, the first after independence","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":true,"_share":0.11077629284311205},{"id":"jammu-massacres-1947","title":"The 1947 Jammu Massacres and the Reciprocal Killings in Mirpur and Rajouri","startYear":1947,"endYear":1948,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Communal killings and expulsions in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, involving the Maharaja's forces, Hindu and Sikh militias, and Pakistani tribal raiders","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.7266,"lon":74.857,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.7266,"fromLon":74.857,"toLat":32.5,"toLon":74.1,"label":"Muslims driven from Jammu province into West Punjab","people":300000},{"fromLat":33.14,"fromLon":73.75,"toLat":32.7266,"toLon":74.857,"label":"Hindus and Sikhs from Mirpur and Rajouri to Jammu","people":80000}],"summary":"In the autumn of 1947, as the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was drawn into the partition conflict, large-scale communal killing took place in Jammu province, where Muslims were killed and driven towards West Punjab in October and November; accounts by British journalists and later scholars implicate state forces of Maharaja Hari Singh alongside Hindu and Sikh militias and refugees from West Punjab, while Indian accounts stress that the violence followed the Poonch rebellion and the Pakistani tribal invasion. The demographic effect was decisive: Jammu province's Muslim majority became a minority. In the same months tribal raiders from the North-West Frontier and Pakistani irregulars killed and abducted Hindus and Sikhs at Baramulla, Mirpur and Rajouri and drove survivors east, with the Mirpur killings of November 1947 the largest single episode. Estimates for both directions of violence vary enormously and no impartial inquiry was ever conducted; Indian and Pakistani national accounts differ on sequence, scale and responsibility. The killings shaped the population geography that the ceasefire line of 1949 froze in place.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":60000,"countries":["India","Pakistan"],"baselinePop":1200000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim population of Jammu province at the last pre-partition census","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3333333333333333,"related":[{"id":"first-kashmir-war","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":400000,"sharedDeaths":[20000,100000],"note":"The 1947 Jammu massacres and the Mirpur and Rajouri killings took place within the First Kashmir War."},{"id":"partition-of-india","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Muslims driven from Jammu into West Punjab in 1947 may also be counted among partition refugees."}]},{"id":"nakba-1948","title":"1948 Arab-Israeli War and the Palestinian Nakba","startYear":1947,"endYear":1949,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Zionist militias/Israeli forces and neighboring Arab states' armies fought over Mandate Palestine; the State of Israel was established and roughly 80% of the Palestinian Arab population fled or was expelled from the territory that became Israel.","peopleDisplaced":720000,"territoryKm2":20770,"territoryDesc":"Israel established control over roughly 78% of Mandate Palestine (within the 1949 Armistice/Green Line), exceeding the 56% allotted to a Jewish state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan; Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt administered the Gaza Strip.","lat":31.9,"lon":35,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.8,"fromLon":35.3,"toLat":33.27,"toLon":35.2,"label":"Galilee → South Lebanon","people":100000},{"fromLat":32.05,"fromLon":34.75,"toLat":31.5,"toLon":34.47,"label":"Coastal Palestine → Gaza Strip","people":200000},{"fromLat":31.95,"fromLon":34.89,"toLat":31.9,"toLon":35.2,"label":"Lydda & Ramle → West Bank","people":210000},{"fromLat":31.25,"fromLon":34.79,"toLat":31.95,"toLon":35.93,"label":"Southern Palestine → Transjordan","people":100000}],"summary":"In the war surrounding Israel's establishment, some 700,000–760,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from the territory that became the State of Israel, in what Palestinians call the Nakba ('catastrophe'). Displacement began amid intercommunal fighting after the November 1947 UN Partition Plan and intensified during the 1948–49 war with neighboring Arab states. Palestinian refugees settled in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where many and their descendants remain registered with UNRWA today, numbering over 5.9 million. Israel emerged with control over about 78% of Mandate Palestine, more than the UN partition plan had allotted to a Jewish state.","ongoing":false,"_mag":720000,"countries":["Palestine","Israel","Lebanon","Jordan"],"deathsLow":16000,"deathsHigh":35000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":25500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1300000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian Arab population of Mandate Palestine before the war","baselineYear":1947,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5538461538461539,"related":[{"id":"palestinian-refugees-lebanon","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":100000,"note":"Palestinians who fled to Lebanon in 1948 became the refugee population held under Lebanon's legal restrictions."}]},{"id":"partition-of-india","title":"Partition of India","startYear":1947,"endYear":1948,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"British India was partitioned into the new dominions of India and Pakistan along the Radcliffe Line; Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims crossed the new borders amid widespread communal violence","peopleDisplaced":15000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"British India divided into the Dominions of India and Pakistan; the provinces of Punjab and Bengal were split along the Radcliffe Line","lat":31.5,"lon":74.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.55,"fromLon":74.35,"toLat":31.63,"toLon":74.87,"label":"West Punjab → East Punjab, India (Hindus & Sikhs)","people":6500000},{"fromLat":30.9,"fromLon":75.85,"toLat":31.42,"toLon":74.2,"label":"East Punjab, India → West Punjab, Pakistan (Muslims)","people":5500000},{"fromLat":23.7,"fromLon":90.4,"toLat":22.57,"toLon":88.36,"label":"East Bengal → West Bengal, India (Hindus)","people":3500000},{"fromLat":25.6,"fromLon":85.1,"toLat":23.7,"toLon":90.4,"label":"Bihar/West Bengal, India → East Bengal, Pakistan (Muslims)","people":1000000}],"summary":"The 1947 partition of British India created the independent states of India and Pakistan, splitting the provinces of Punjab and Bengal along a boundary drawn by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe. In the following months, an estimated 10–20 million people crossed the new borders in one of the largest and most rapid mass migrations in history, as Hindus and Sikhs moved toward India and Muslims toward Pakistan. The migration was accompanied by widespread communal massacres, abductions, and sexual violence; death toll estimates range from roughly 200,000 to 2 million. The event permanently reshaped the demography of South Asia and set the stage for enduring India-Pakistan tensions, including over Kashmir.","ongoing":false,"_mag":15000000,"countries":["Pakistan","India","Bangladesh"],"deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":2000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":1100000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":89000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the two partitioned provinces, Punjab and Bengal, at the census of 1941","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16853932584269662,"related":[{"id":"first-kashmir-war","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Communal violence and flight in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 are often treated as part of the wider partition violence."},{"id":"jammu-massacres-1947","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Muslims driven from Jammu into West Punjab in 1947 may also be counted among partition refugees."}]},{"id":"taiwan-228-incident-and-white-terror","title":"Taiwan's 228 Incident and the White Terror","startYear":1947,"endYear":1992,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese Nationalist government suppressed the 1947 uprising in Taiwan and then imprisoned and executed political suspects under four decades of martial law","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":25.03,"lon":121.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":25.03,"fromLon":121.56,"toLat":22.66,"toLon":121.49,"label":"Political prisoners sent to Green Island","people":null}],"summary":"On 28 February 1947, after officials beat a woman selling untaxed cigarettes in Taipei, protests spread across Taiwan against the administration installed by the Chinese Nationalist government two years earlier; Governor Chen Yi negotiated while requesting troops, and reinforcements arriving on 8 March carried out mass shootings and arrests that fell heavily on the island's educated elite. Martial law, imposed in 1949 and lifted only in 1987, underpinned the White Terror: military tribunals tried civilians for sedition and communist association, sending prisoners to the New Life Correction Centre on Green Island and executing several thousand at sites including Machangding in Taipei. President Lee Teng-hui issued a state apology in 1995, a compensation foundation and memorial were established, and the Transitional Justice Commission of 2018-22 opened archives, exonerated thousands and mapped the security apparatus. Estimates of the 228 death toll remain disputed, in part because household registration records were incomplete and in part because the subject was unmentionable for forty years; the figures also carry present-day political weight in arguments between parties over the Nationalist period.","deathsLow":8000,"deathsHigh":32000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":16000,"_deaths":20000,"countries":["Taiwan"],"baselinePop":6500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Taiwan at the time of the 228 Incident","baselineYear":1947,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"trieste-dispute","title":"Free Territory of Trieste and Its 1954 Partition","startYear":1947,"endYear":1954,"type":"territory","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The 1947 Paris Peace Treaty created the Free Territory of Trieste, split into an Anglo-American-administered Zone A and a Yugoslav-administered Zone B pending a final settlement; the 1954 London Memorandum divided the territory de facto between Italy and Yugoslavia.","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":738,"territoryDesc":"The city of Trieste and a coastal strip (Zone A) and northwestern Istria (Zone B)","lat":45.65,"lon":13.77,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.3,"fromLon":13.9,"toLat":45.65,"toLon":13.77,"label":"Zone B (Yugoslav Istria) → Zone A/Italy","people":40000}],"summary":"The 1947 Paris Peace Treaty created the Free Territory of Trieste as a nominally independent buffer state to resolve the competing Italian and Yugoslav claims to the city and its hinterland, but the planned UN governor was never appointed and the territory instead remained split between an Anglo-American military administration in Zone A (Trieste city and a coastal strip) and Yugoslav administration in Zone B (northwestern Istria). The dispute became one of the earliest Cold War flashpoints in Europe. The 1954 London Memorandum ended the arrangement by assigning Zone A to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia on a de facto basis, prompting several tens of thousands of ethnic Italians in Zone B to relocate to Italian-administered territory. The border was made permanent only by the 1975 Treaty of Osimo.","ongoing":false,"_mag":40000,"countries":["Italy","Croatia"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":370000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Free Territory of Trieste — about 300,000 in Anglo-American Zone A and about 71,000 in Yugoslav Zone B","baselineYear":1949,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.10810810810810811,"related":[{"id":"istrian-dalmatian-exodus","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":40000,"note":"The departure of about 40,000 Italians from Zone B of the Free Territory of Trieste formed the last major wave of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus."}]},{"id":"malagasy-uprising-suppression-1947-1949","title":"The Suppression of the Malagasy Uprising","startYear":1947,"endYear":1949,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"French colonial forces and police suppressed a nationalist insurrection in eastern Madagascar, during which much of the rural population of the insurgent districts fled to forest refuges and more than 18,000 people were arrested","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-18.95,"lon":48.23,"flows":[],"summary":"On the night of 29 March 1947 nationalist insurgents armed mainly with spears attacked French posts and plantations in eastern Madagascar, and the revolt spread through the eastern forest belt. The colonial authorities blamed the MDRM party and arrested its leaders, including its deputies to the French National Assembly, several of whom were sentenced to death in 1948 in a trial that, according to Wikipedia's account, relied largely on evidence obtained through torture; the sentences were commuted in 1949. Jean Fremigacci, working from the colonial archives and field inquiries, documents war crimes in the first three months — the machine-gunning of detainees in railway wagons at Moramanga on 6 May 1947 (at least 124 and probably over 160 dead), killings at Mananjary, prison massacres, systematic burning of villages and executions without trial — totalling one to two thousand dead, after which the command ordered restraint and pursued a slow 'pacification' that lasted until late 1948, with the last armed resistance ended in early 1949. Most of the dead were people who had fled into the forest and died of hunger and disease. In 2005 President Chirac spoke in Antananarivo of the 'unacceptable character' of the repressions produced by the colonial system, and in April 2025 President Macron acknowledged 'painful pages', including 1947, and announced a joint Franco-Malagasy historians' commission.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"_mag":28000,"_deaths":35000,"countries":["Madagascar"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"hyderabad-annexation","title":"Indian Annexation of Hyderabad (\"Operation Polo\")","startYear":1948,"endYear":1948,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Indian Army invaded and annexed the princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam, in a five-day military operation followed by large-scale communal violence","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":214190,"territoryDesc":"The princely state of Hyderabad in the Deccan, the largest princely state in British India, annexed into the Indian Union","lat":17.38,"lon":78.48,"flows":[{"fromLat":17.38,"fromLon":78.48,"toLat":24.86,"toLon":67.01,"label":"Hyderabad → Karachi, Pakistan (Muslim migration)","people":50000}],"summary":"In September 1948, India's military invaded the princely state of Hyderabad, whose Muslim ruler (the Nizam) had resisted joining the Indian Union, in an operation India termed a 'police action' and annexed the state within days. The operation was followed by widespread violence, principally targeting the state's Muslim population; a government-commissioned inquiry (the Sunderlal Committee) estimated 27,000–40,000 people killed, though the report was suppressed for decades and other estimates range higher. Some Hyderabadi Muslims subsequently migrated to Pakistan. The episode remains one of the more disputed integrations of a princely state into independent India.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1285140,"countries":["India","Pakistan"],"deathsLow":27000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":33500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":16338534,"baselineWhat":"The population of Hyderabad State at the 1941 census, the last before annexation","baselineYear":1941,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"jeju-4-3-uprising-and-suppression","title":"Jeju 4·3 Uprising and Suppression","startYear":1948,"endYear":1949,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"South Korean police, army units and rightist youth groups, under the US military government and then the new Republic of Korea, suppressed an armed uprising on Jeju Island and destroyed and emptied its mid-mountain villages","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.36,"lon":126.53,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.37,"fromLon":126.54,"toLat":33.51,"toLon":126.52,"label":"Mid-mountain villages → coastal evacuation zone","people":20000}],"summary":"On 3 April 1948 the Jeju branch of the South Korean Labor Party launched an armed uprising against planned separate elections in the south. The suppression that followed, carried out by police, army units and rightist paramilitary groups first under the US military government and then under the Republic of Korea, escalated in mid-November 1948 into a scorched-earth campaign in which mountain villages were burned and their inhabitants ordered to the coast. The government's National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4·3 Incident put civilian deaths at 25,000 to 30,000, roughly a tenth of the island's population, with about 14,373 individual deaths registered; South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that 86 per cent of reported deaths were caused by security forces, police and rightist groups. The state renamed the events from a 'rebellion' to an 'incident' and recognised the dead as civilians; the archives were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2025. Parallel mass executions of detainees and Bodo League registrants elsewhere in South Korea in 1950 were investigated by the same commission.","deathsLow":14373,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":22186.5,"countries":["South Korea"],"baselinePop":280000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Jeju Island in 1948","baselineYear":1948,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.07142857142857142},{"id":"jewish-exodus-arab-lands","title":"Exodus of Jews from Arab and Muslim Countries","startYear":1948,"endYear":1974,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Jewish communities across Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria left, fled, or were expelled amid state-sponsored discrimination, violence, and legal restrictions following Israel's creation and subsequent Arab-Israeli wars.","peopleDisplaced":850000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.3,"lon":44.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.3,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":32.08,"toLon":34.78,"label":"Iraq → Israel (Operations Ezra & Nehemiah, 1950–51)","people":120000},{"fromLat":33.57,"fromLon":-7.59,"toLat":48.85,"toLon":2.35,"label":"Morocco → France","people":150000},{"fromLat":32.89,"fromLon":13.19,"toLat":32.08,"toLon":34.78,"label":"Libya → Israel","people":30000},{"fromLat":15.37,"fromLon":44.19,"toLat":32.08,"toLon":34.78,"label":"Yemen → Israel (Operation Magic Carpet, 1949–50)","people":44000}],"summary":"Between 1948 and the early 1970s, roughly 850,000 Jews left Arab and Muslim-majority countries, driven by a mix of Zionist immigration appeals, economic pressure, legal disabilities, mob violence (such as the 1941 Baghdad Farhud and later riots), and formal expulsions following the Arab-Israeli wars. Iraq's Jewish community of about 120,000 left almost entirely in 1950–51 under Operations Ezra and Nehemiah; Yemen's community departed via Operation Magic Carpet; large-scale emigration from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt followed over subsequent decades. About 650,000 resettled in Israel and the remainder mainly in France and North America. Communities that numbered in the hundreds of thousands in 1948 had shrunk to a few thousand or fewer by the 2000s.","ongoing":false,"_mag":850000,"countries":["Iraq","Israel","Morocco","France","Libya","Yemen"],"deathsLow":200,"deathsHigh":800,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":856000,"baselineWhat":"The Jewish population of the Arab states, Iran and Turkey in 1948","baselineYear":1948,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9929906542056075,"related":[{"id":"algeria-pied-noir-harki-exodus","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":130000,"note":"About 130,000 Algerian Jews who left for France in 1962 are counted both in the Jewish exodus from Arab lands and among the pieds-noirs."}]},{"id":"la-violencia-colombia","title":"La Violencia in Colombia","startYear":1948,"endYear":1958,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Liberal and Conservative partisans, police and army units killed and drove out rural populations of the opposing affiliation and seized their land","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Large-scale transfer of coffee and cattle land in Tolima, Valle del Cauca, Caldas, Antioquia and the eastern plains from displaced smallholders to buyers and armed patrons; estimates of properties changing hands range from 200,000 to 400,000.","lat":4.71,"lon":-74.07,"flows":[{"fromLat":4.44,"fromLon":-75.24,"toLat":4.71,"toLon":-74.07,"label":"Rural families displaced from Tolima and the coffee belt to Bogota and other cities","people":null}],"summary":"The assassination of the Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá on 9 April 1948 set off riots and then a decade of partisan killing in the Colombian countryside, in which Liberal and Conservative armed groups, police and army units destroyed villages, massacred families and drove opponents off their land. Deaths are conventionally estimated at around 200,000, within a published range of roughly 100,000 to 300,000, and about two million people were displaced, many permanently into the cities. Land seizure was a central mechanism rather than a by-product, concentrating coffee and cattle holdings. The violence was formally ended by the National Front power-sharing pact of 1958, but the self-defence groups and agrarian grievances it left behind fed directly into the guerrilla insurgencies from 1964 that the atlas already covers. Colombia's Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica treats La Violencia as the opening phase of a continuous armed conflict.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":200000,"countries":["Colombia"],"baselinePop":11548172,"baselineWhat":"The population of Colombia at the 1951 national census","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.12989068746118435},{"id":"malayan-emergency-new-villages","title":"Malayan Emergency \"New Villages\" Resettlement","startYear":1948,"endYear":1960,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"British colonial authorities in Malaya, under the Briggs Plan, moved rural Chinese squatter communities into fenced and guarded settlements to cut off support to the Malayan Communist Party","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":4,"lon":101.4,"flows":[],"summary":"The Emergency was declared in 1948 after the Malayan Communist Party launched an armed campaign against British colonial rule. Removals began piecemeal: squatters around Sungei Siput in Perak were cleared to an unprepared site at Pantai Remis in October 1948, a government Squatter Committee recommended in early 1949 that squatters who could not be policed be resettled, and states had moved some 18,500 people by March 1950. From mid-1950 the Briggs Plan made this systematic, ordering the resettlement of roughly half a million rural squatters, overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese who farmed the jungle fringe, into purpose-built settlements that were fenced, guarded, subject to curfew and food control, and administered under Emergency Regulations. The stated aim was to deny the insurgency food, intelligence and recruits; the British administration also invested in housing, schooling and land titles in the villages, and after 1952 conditions were upgraded under General Templer. Roughly 410 New Villages existed by 1952 and most remain populated settlements in Malaysia today. The programme is credited by counter-insurgency literature with helping defeat the insurgency and is criticised by Malaysian Chinese community historians as a coerced mass relocation carried out without consent.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Malaysia"],"baselinePop":1900000,"baselineWhat":"The Chinese population of the Federation of Malaya","baselineYear":1947,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.2631578947368421},{"id":"nationalist-retreat-taiwan","title":"Nationalist (KMT) Retreat to Taiwan","startYear":1948,"endYear":1950,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The defeated Republic of China (Kuomintang) government, military, and supporters relocated from mainland China to Taiwan as the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":25.03,"lon":121.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.06,"fromLon":118.79,"toLat":25.03,"toLon":121.56,"label":"Nanjing → Taipei","people":700000},{"fromLat":31.23,"fromLon":121.47,"toLat":25.13,"toLon":121.74,"label":"Shanghai → Keelung","people":500000}],"summary":"As Communist forces won the Chinese Civil War in 1948–49, Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China government, most of its army, and roughly one to two million civilian supporters and refugees relocated to Taiwan, which the ROC had administered since Japan's 1945 surrender. Chiang declared Taipei the ROC's provisional capital in December 1949 and imposed martial law that lasted until 1987, ruling over both the existing Taiwanese population and the new mainlander arrivals. The Communist-led People's Republic of China, proclaimed in October 1949, has never controlled Taiwan, producing a political division that persists today. The event reshaped Taiwan's demographics, politics, and its unresolved international status.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1500000,"countries":["Taiwan","China"],"deathsLow":1500,"deathsHigh":2000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":1750,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6090860,"baselineWhat":"The population of Taiwan before the Nationalist influx, at the 1946 census taken after the Japanese surrender","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.24627064158427545},{"id":"palestinian-refugees-lebanon","title":"Legal Confinement of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon","startYear":1948,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Lebanese state restricting Palestine refugees' employment, property ownership and, at several camps, physical entry and exit, with camps administered by Palestinian factions rather than the state","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"12 recognised camps including Ein el-Hilweh near Sidon, Nahr al-Bared near Tripoli and Burj el-Barajneh in Beirut, together a few square kilometres of land on which construction and the import of building materials have at times been restricted","lat":33.53,"lon":35.38,"flows":[],"summary":"Palestine refugees who arrived in Lebanon from 1948 and their descendants have never been naturalised and are treated as foreigners without the reciprocity rights that Lebanese law grants nationals of other states, so that they cannot claim the protections available to ordinary foreign residents. UNRWA records that they are barred from as many as 39 professions, including the syndicated professions such as law, medicine and engineering, and a 2001 amendment to the property law effectively prevents them from acquiring or inheriting registered real property. Most live in or around 12 camps that the Lebanese army does not enter under a long-standing arrangement dating from 1969, leaving internal administration to Palestinian factions; several camps, notably Ein el-Hilweh and Nahr al-Bared, are surrounded by army checkpoints where residents and construction materials are inspected on entry and exit. The camps cannot be expanded, so growth has been vertical and densities are extreme; Nahr al-Bared was largely destroyed in 2007 fighting and its reconstruction has been prolonged. Lebanese governments justify the restrictions by reference to the country's sectarian balance and to a constitutional rejection of tawtin, the permanent settlement of Palestinians, which they present as protecting the right of return; UN human rights bodies and refugee organisations describe the cumulative effect as institutionalised marginalisation that confines a population to camps without lawful means of livelihood.","ongoing":true,"_mag":250000,"countries":["Lebanon"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":476000,"baselineWhat":"Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA in Lebanon","baselineYear":2019,"asOf":"2019","weakSources":false,"_share":0.5252100840336135,"related":[{"id":"nakba-1948","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":100000,"note":"Palestinians who fled to Lebanon in 1948 became the refugee population held under Lebanon's legal restrictions."},{"id":"lebanese-civil-war-displacement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were among those displaced again during the Lebanese civil war, notably at Tel al-Zaatar."},{"id":"lebanon-war-1982","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were among those displaced by the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut."}]},{"id":"sri-lanka-indian-tamils-statelessness","title":"The Denationalization and Repatriation of Sri Lanka's Indian Tamils","startYear":1948,"endYear":1988,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Ceylon stripped citizenship from plantation workers of Indian descent and agreed with India to repatriate them","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":6.9497,"lon":80.7891,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.9497,"fromLon":80.7891,"toLat":9.9252,"toLon":78.1198,"label":"Repatriation of plantation Tamils to Tamil Nadu under the Sirima-Shastri Pact","people":460000}],"summary":"Tamils brought from southern India by British planters in the nineteenth century formed the workforce of Ceylon's tea and rubber estates and about a tenth of the island's population at independence. Two of the first laws passed by independent Ceylon, the Citizenship Act of 1948 and the Indian and Pakistani Residents Act of 1949, defined citizenship in terms that most of them could not meet, and a 1949 amendment removed their voting rights, leaving close to a million people stateless and politically excluded. Under the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1964, India agreed to accept 525,000 of them and Ceylon to naturalise 300,000, with the remainder settled in a 1974 agreement; repatriation proceeded over three decades and moved roughly half a million people, many to Tamil Nadu estates and resettlement schemes, in many cases separating families. The community was also repeatedly targeted in anti-Tamil violence, notably in 1977 and 1983, and displaced from the hill country. Sri Lanka finally granted citizenship to remaining stateless persons of Indian origin by Acts of 1988 and 2003, closing one of the largest cases of statelessness created by decolonisation.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Sri Lanka","India"],"baselinePop":780589,"baselineWhat":"The Indian Tamil population of Ceylon at the 1946 census, immediately before the citizenship laws that made them stateless","baselineYear":1946,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.64054194973283},{"id":"china-laogai-laojiao-system","title":"China's Laogai and Re-education Through Labour Camp System","startYear":1949,"endYear":2013,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese state operated a nationwide penal and administrative labour-camp system holding criminal convicts and, without trial, those deemed politically or socially deviant","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9042,"lon":116.4074,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.2304,"fromLon":121.4737,"toLat":38.92,"toLon":100.45,"label":"Prisoners transported to labour camps and farms in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang","people":null}],"summary":"From 1949 the People's Republic of China built a nationwide system of penal labour, known as laogai or reform through labour, in which convicted prisoners worked in camps, farms and factories, many of them in the far west and north-east; it expanded massively during the campaigns against counter-revolutionaries, the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution. Alongside it ran laojiao, re-education through labour, an administrative measure allowing the police to detain people for up to four years without trial for offences including petty crime, prostitution, drug use, petitioning and, in practice, religious and political dissent. Conditions in the camps have been documented by former prisoners and by human rights organisations, which recorded forced labour, malnutrition, and the export of camp-produced goods; the Chinese government has maintained that the system was lawful punishment and productive rehabilitation. China renamed laogai facilities simply 'prisons' in 1994 and abolished laojiao by decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee in December 2013, though critics including Amnesty International argued that other forms of extrajudicial detention, including drug rehabilitation centres and 'legal education' centres, absorbed much of its function. Later mass-detention systems in Xinjiang are treated separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":582603417,"baselineWhat":"The population of China at the 1953 census, the first enumeration after the camp system was established","baselineYear":1953,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"china-land-reform-and-suppression-of-counterrevolutionaries","rel":"continues-from","note":"Many of those imprisoned in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries served their terms in the laogai camp system."}]},{"id":"china-reservoir-resettlement-and-three-gorges","title":"Reservoir Resettlement in China and the Three Gorges Dam","startYear":1949,"endYear":2012,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese state relocated rural and urban populations from reservoir areas for hydropower, flood control and water transfer projects","peopleDisplaced":10000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Three Gorges reservoir extends about 600 km up the Yangtze and inundated some 630 square kilometres of valley floor","lat":30.82,"lon":111,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.05,"fromLon":109.47,"toLat":31.23,"toLon":121.47,"label":"Three Gorges resettlers moved to coastal and inland provinces","people":null}],"summary":"Reservoir construction has been one of the largest single causes of forced relocation in modern China. Early projects such as Sanmenxia on the Yellow River in the late 1950s moved several hundred thousand people from the Wei valley to Ningxia and elsewhere, many of whom returned to flooded or marginal land; official figures put cumulative reservoir resettlement from 1949 to the late 1990s at around 10 million. The Three Gorges Dam, approved in 1992 and completed in 2012, relocated an officially stated 1.13 million people, later reported as 1.4 million, from 13 cities, 140 towns and more than 1,350 villages, some to new towns on higher ground and some to distant provinces. Human Rights Watch documented in 1995 that residents who protested or petitioned over compensation were detained, and China's own National Audit Office later found large-scale diversion of resettlement funds. The government presents the programme as necessary flood control, power generation and poverty reduction with compensation and new housing; critics, including Chinese scientists and journalists, have pointed to inadequate land at resettlement sites, income loss and landslides around the reservoir. In 2007 officials announced that a further four million people might be moved from the reservoir region for ecological reasons.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":10000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":541670000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the People's Republic of China at its founding in 1949, from which reservoir resettlement drew over six decades","baselineYear":1949,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.018461424852770136},{"id":"goli-otok-cominform-camp","title":"Goli Otok: Yugoslavia's Camp for Cominform Prisoners","startYear":1949,"endYear":1956,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Yugoslav state security held party members and citizens suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies on a barren Adriatic island after the Tito-Stalin split","peopleDisplaced":16000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.8464,"lon":14.7178,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.8125,"fromLon":20.4612,"toLat":44.8464,"toLon":14.7178,"label":"Prisoners sent from across Yugoslavia to Goli Otok","people":null}],"summary":"After Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948, the Communist Party turned on members and citizens suspected of siding with Moscow. From 1949 they were sent, mostly without trial, to a camp on the uninhabited island of Goli Otok in the northern Adriatic, and to a smaller camp for women on nearby Sveti Grgur, where they quarried and broke stone in summer heat above 40C and in the winter bora. The camp was run largely through the prisoners themselves: newcomers ran a gauntlet on arrival, and inmates were required to beat, denounce and ostracise one another, a system prisoners later described as designed to break political identity rather than merely to punish. Alongside suspected Stalinists the camp held party members accused on thin evidence, non-party citizens, and nationalists of several nationalities; after 1956 it continued as an ordinary prison until 1988 and was abandoned in 1989. The subject was taboo in Yugoslavia until the early 1980s and remains politically awkward across the successor states, where it is variously invoked to indict the Titoist system as a whole or minimised as a defensive measure in a moment of Soviet threat; Croatia, on whose territory the island lies, has not developed it as a state memorial.","deathsLow":400,"deathsHigh":4000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":16000,"_deaths":2200,"countries":["Croatia","Serbia"],"baselinePop":15772000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Yugoslavia at the 1948 census, the year of the Tito–Stalin split","baselineYear":1948,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.001014455997971088},{"id":"romania-communist-deportations-systematization","title":"Romania under Communism: The Baragan Deportations, the Canal Camps and Systematization","startYear":1949,"endYear":1989,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Romanian communist state deported border-zone populations to the Baragan plain, ran forced-labour camps on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, and demolished villages and urban quarters under the systematization programme","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A deportation zone along the Yugoslav frontier; large sections of central Bucharest and of villages in Ilfov and Giurgiu counties were demolished and rebuilt as agro-industrial centres.","lat":44.43,"lon":26.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.75,"fromLon":21.23,"toLat":44.6,"toLon":27.4,"label":"Deportation from the Yugoslav border zone to the Baragan plain, June 1951","people":44000}],"summary":"Romania is absent from the atlas between the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and the present. In June 1951, during the rupture with Tito's Yugoslavia, the Romanian authorities deported nearly 44,000 people — Germans, Serbs, Bessarabian refugees, Aromanians and others judged unreliable — from the border strip to the open Baragan steppe, where they built shelters from scratch and were held under residence restrictions until 1956. In parallel, the Danube-Black Sea Canal project of 1949-1953 operated as a network of forced-labour colonies for political prisoners and peasants who resisted collectivisation. From 1974 the systematization programme demolished historic quarters of Bucharest for the Civic Centre and House of the People, and from 1988 extended to a plan for halving the number of villages, provoking international protest before it was halted by the 1989 revolution. A presidential commission chaired by Vladimir Tismaneanu reported in 2006 and led the Romanian president to condemn the communist regime as illegitimate and criminal.","deathsLow":1700,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":20850,"countries":["Romania"],"baselinePop":15900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Romania at the start of the communist period","baselineYear":1948,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.009433962264150943},{"id":"xinjiang-incorporation-han-settlement","title":"Incorporation of Xinjiang into the PRC and Han Settlement Policy","startYear":1949,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The People's Liberation Army took control of Xinjiang in 1949 and the PRC subsequently promoted large-scale Han Chinese migration and settlement, including through the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan)","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":1660000,"territoryDesc":"Xinjiang (East Turkestan), roughly 1.66 million km2 in China's northwest, brought under PRC control in 1949","lat":43.83,"lon":87.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.06,"fromLon":103.83,"toLat":43.83,"toLon":87.62,"label":"Gansu/Lanzhou corridor → Urumqi","people":3000000},{"fromLat":34.75,"fromLon":113.62,"toLat":43.83,"toLon":87.62,"label":"Henan/eastern China → Urumqi (Bingtuan and state-planned settlement)","people":3000000}],"summary":"In late 1949, PLA forces entered Xinjiang following the collapse of the short-lived, Soviet-backed Second East Turkestan Republic, and the region was formally incorporated into the newly founded People's Republic of China. Over subsequent decades, Beijing promoted large-scale Han Chinese settlement, notably through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan), a paramilitary agricultural and industrial organization that built farms, towns, and later cities across the region. The Han share of Xinjiang's population rose from roughly 6–7% in the early 1950s to around 40% by the 2000s, dramatically altering the demographic balance with the Turkic Muslim Uyghur majority population. This settlement policy, alongside more recent large-scale internment and assimilation campaigns targeting Uyghurs since the late 2010s, remains a source of ongoing international controversy.","ongoing":true,"settlers":5000000,"_mag":9960000,"countries":["China"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5110000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Xinjiang at the first census after the People's Liberation Army took control","baselineYear":1953,"asOf":"2021","weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"apartheid-forced-removals","title":"Apartheid Forced Removals and Bantustan Resettlement","startYear":1950,"endYear":1991,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"South Africa's apartheid government forcibly relocated Black, Coloured, and Indian residents under the Group Areas Act and homelands policy","peopleDisplaced":3500000,"territoryKm2":160000,"territoryDesc":"about 13% of South African land was designated as racially exclusive Black 'homelands' (Bantustans), while the remaining 87% was reserved largely for white ownership","lat":-26.1667,"lon":27.9333,"flows":[{"fromLat":-26.1667,"fromLon":27.9333,"toLat":-26.257,"toLon":27.865,"label":"Sophiatown → Meadowlands/Soweto","people":60000},{"fromLat":-33.933,"fromLon":18.42,"toLat":-34.03,"toLon":18.6,"label":"District Six, Cape Town → Cape Flats","people":60000},{"fromLat":-26.2,"fromLon":28.05,"toLat":-29,"toLon":30.4,"label":"Urban areas → Bantustans (e.g. KwaZulu)","people":2000000}],"summary":"Under the Group Areas Act (1950) and related apartheid laws, South Africa's government forcibly relocated non-white residents from land designated for whites, destroying mixed-race inner-city neighborhoods such as Sophiatown (Johannesburg, cleared 1955) and District Six (Cape Town, cleared from 1968) and resettling residents in segregated townships. In parallel, the government pursued a 'homelands' or Bantustan policy that stripped Black South Africans of citizenship and pushed millions into ten nominally self-governing ethnic territories covering about 13% of the country's land. Estimates of the total number forcibly removed under these combined policies range around 3.5 million people between the 1950s and the Group Areas Act's repeal in 1991. The policy was central to apartheid's system of racial segregation and was declared a crime against humanity by the 1973 UN Apartheid Convention.","ongoing":false,"_mag":3500000,"countries":["South Africa"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":10000000,"baselineWhat":"The Black African, Coloured and Indian population of South Africa at the 1951 census, when the Group Areas Act came into force","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.35,"related":[{"id":"south-africa-bantustans-pass-laws","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"People forcibly removed into the homelands are among the 3.5 million counted in the forced removals entry and also among the homeland population counted here; no available source separates how many, so no shared figure is given."}]},{"id":"bodo-league-massacres-south-korea","title":"The Bodo League Massacres in South Korea","startYear":1950,"endYear":1951,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"South Korean police and military executed detained members of a state re-education organisation and political prisoners after the North Korean invasion","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.35,"lon":127.38,"flows":[],"summary":"In 1949 the South Korean government created the National Guidance League, enrolling former leftists and, in practice, many people signed up to meet local quotas, in exchange for amnesty and re-education. When North Korea invaded in June 1950, police and military units were ordered to detain and kill League members and prisoners held in southern jails to prevent them assisting the advancing army; among the largest killings were those at Daejeon, where an estimated 3,000-7,000 people were shot over several days in July 1950, photographed by a US Army officer whose images were declassified decades later. Estimates of the total run from 60,000 to 200,000. The killings were officially denied for half a century, and public discussion was punishable; an Associated Press investigation and the opening of US archives in the late 1990s reopened the subject. South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2005, confirmed a large number of incidents, recommended a state apology and compensation, and President Roh Moo-hyun apologised for several specific massacres. North Korean forces also killed detainees and suspected collaborators during their occupation and retreat, and both sets of killings are documented in the commission's reports.","deathsLow":60000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":104000,"_deaths":130000,"countries":["South Korea"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The registered membership of the Bodo League (National Guidance League) at the outbreak of the Korean War","baselineYear":1950,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"korean-war-displacement-division","rel":"part-of","sharedDeaths":[60000,200000],"note":"The Bodo League massacres took place in the first months of the Korean War."}]},{"id":"chinese-annexation-tibet","title":"Chinese Annexation of Tibet","startYear":1950,"endYear":1951,"type":"territory","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The People's Liberation Army entered Tibet in 1950; the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement, which Tibetan exile authorities say was signed under duress, formalized Chinese central government control","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":1200000,"territoryDesc":"The Tibetan plateau, later organized by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region and adjoining Tibetan-populated prefectures in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan","lat":29.65,"lon":91.11,"flows":[],"summary":"In October 1950, forces of the newly established People's Republic of China entered eastern Tibet and defeated Tibetan forces at Chamdo. In May 1951, Tibetan representatives in Beijing signed the Seventeen Point Agreement, which affirmed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet while nominally preserving the Dalai Lama's status and Tibetan autonomy. Tibetan exile authorities say the agreement was signed under duress and is invalid, while China regards it as a legitimate reassertion of longstanding sovereignty. The agreement's terms broke down over the following years, leading to the 1959 uprising and the Dalai Lama's flight into exile.","ongoing":false,"_mag":7200000,"countries":["China"],"deathsLow":180,"deathsHigh":4000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":2090,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1270000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the territory administered from Lhasa, later the Tibet Autonomous Region, at the time of the annexation","baselineYear":1953,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"east-bengal-exodus-after-partition","title":"The Continuing Exodus from East Bengal after Partition","startYear":1950,"endYear":1964,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Communal violence, property law and official pressure in East Pakistan pushed Hindus into India, with reciprocal movement of Muslims from West Bengal and Assam","peopleDisplaced":3500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":23.81,"lon":90.41,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.81,"fromLon":90.41,"toLat":22.57,"toLon":88.36,"label":"Hindu migration from East Pakistan to West Bengal","people":null},{"fromLat":22.57,"fromLon":88.36,"toLat":23.81,"toLon":90.41,"label":"Muslim migration from West Bengal to East Pakistan","people":null}],"summary":"Unlike Punjab, Bengal's partition did not produce a single exchange of populations but a slow outflow that continued for two decades. Riots in East Bengal and in Calcutta in early 1950 killed thousands and pushed hundreds of thousands across the border in a few months, prompting the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of April 1950, under which both governments undertook to protect minorities and allow returns; the pact slowed but did not stop the movement. Departures continued through the 1950s under pressure from land and property measures culminating in East Pakistan's Enemy Property rules, from local violence and from the insecurity of minority status. Riots following the theft of a relic from the Hazratbal shrine in Kashmir in December 1963 set off further killings in Khulna and Dhaka and a fresh exodus in 1964, with several hundred thousand crossing into India and reciprocal movement of Muslims out of West Bengal and Assam. The refugees reshaped Calcutta, Tripura and the Assam valley and left a politics of citizenship and documentation that remains unresolved.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":3500000,"_deaths":12500,"countries":["Bangladesh","India"],"baselinePop":9240000,"baselineWhat":"The Hindu population of East Bengal (East Pakistan) at the 1951 census of Pakistan","baselineYear":1951,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3787878787878788},{"id":"hungary-rakosi-internment-and-class-deportations","title":"Hungary under Rakosi: Internment Camps and the Deportation of 'Class Enemies'","startYear":1950,"endYear":1953,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The Hungarian communist state interned people without trial and deported families from Budapest and the border zones to closed labour settlements","peopleDisplaced":25000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":47.5833,"lon":21.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.4979,"fromLon":19.0402,"toLat":47.5833,"toLon":21.15,"label":"Deportation from Budapest to the Hortobagy closed camps and countryside villages","people":13000},{"fromLat":46.253,"fromLon":20.1414,"toLat":47.5833,"toLon":21.15,"label":"Families cleared from the southern and western border zones","people":null}],"summary":"Between 1950 and 1953 the Hungarian Workers' Party government under Matyas Rakosi used administrative internment alongside the courts. From June 1950 families living near the Yugoslav and Austrian frontiers, treated as a security risk after the Tito-Stalin split, were given about an hour to pack and moved to twelve closed camps on state farms in the Hortobagy region, where they worked under armed guard; in 1951 thousands of Budapest residents classed as former landowners, officers, officials or bourgeois were deported to designated countryside villages, and their flats and property were taken over. The State Protection Authority also ran a secret forced-labour camp at Recsk, in a quarry in the Matra hills, from 1950. The camps were dissolved after the amnesty declared by Imre Nagy's first government in July 1953, but deportees were generally barred from returning to their homes, their confiscated property was not returned and none were compensated at the time. Hungary began commemorating and partially compensating the deportations only after 1989; survivor associations were founded in 2000 and the subject is now presented at the House of Terror museum in Budapest.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":25000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Hungary"],"baselinePop":9204799,"baselineWhat":"The population of Hungary at the census of 1949","baselineYear":1949,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0027159745693523564},{"id":"korean-war-displacement-division","title":"Korean War Displacement and the Division of Korea","startYear":1950,"endYear":1953,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"North Korea (with Chinese and Soviet backing) and South Korea (with UN/US-led forces) fought a war that entrenched the division of the Korean Peninsula and displaced millions of civilians","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":1000,"territoryDesc":"The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the permanent division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South Korea along a reinforced line near the 38th parallel","lat":38,"lon":127,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.02,"fromLon":125.75,"toLat":37.57,"toLon":126.98,"label":"Pyongyang region → Seoul (southward flight)","people":1000000},{"fromLat":37.57,"fromLon":126.98,"toLat":35.18,"toLon":129.08,"label":"Seoul → Busan (wartime refugee flow south)","people":2000000}],"summary":"Following Japan's 1945 defeat, Korea was divided into Soviet and US occupation zones along the 38th parallel, hardening into two rival states in 1948. North Korea's June 1950 invasion of the South triggered a three-year war involving US-led UN forces and later Chinese troops, during which front lines swept up and down the peninsula and millions of civilians fled combat, bombing, and reprisals in both directions. The 1953 armistice restored a border close to the original parallel, institutionalized as the DMZ, without a peace treaty, leaving the peninsula formally still at war and millions of families permanently divided. The displacement and division remain a defining, unresolved legacy of the conflict.","ongoing":false,"_mag":5000000,"countries":["South Korea","North Korea"],"deathsLow":2500000,"deathsHigh":4000000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":3250000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Korean peninsula on the eve of the war","baselineYear":1950,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16666666666666666,"related":[{"id":"bodo-league-massacres-south-korea","rel":"includes","sharedDeaths":[60000,200000],"note":"The Bodo League massacres took place in the first months of the Korean War."}]},{"id":"unrwa-palestine-refugee-camps","title":"UNRWA Refugee Camps and Protracted Palestinian Statelessness","startYear":1950,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Host states and occupying authority in five fields of operation, with UNRWA providing services to registered Palestine refugees who have no state of nationality and no realised right of return or, in most host states, naturalisation","peopleDisplaced":5900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"58 recognised refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, most of them dense urban quarters of a few tenths of a square kilometre built on land leased from host governments","lat":31.99,"lon":35.93,"flows":[],"summary":"UNRWA was established by the General Assembly in December 1949 and began operations in May 1950 to assist Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war; registration passes to descendants through the male line, so the registered population has grown from about 750,000 to roughly 5.9 million. Around a third live in 58 recognised camps, which are not detention facilities and are policed by host authorities rather than by UNRWA, but which have become permanent quarters where residents typically cannot own land, build freely or acquire the nationality of the host state. The character of the confinement varies sharply by field: refugees in Jordan mostly hold Jordanian citizenship, those in Syria historically held near-equal civil rights, those in Lebanon are excluded from most professions and from property registration, and those in Gaza and the West Bank live under Israeli occupation and its movement regime. What is common across fields is protracted statelessness: registered refugees have no state of nationality, and the return contemplated in General Assembly resolution 194 (III) of 1948 has not occurred. UNRWA's own position has deteriorated since 2024, when Israeli legislation barred the agency from operating on Israeli territory and from contact with Israeli officials, adding to funding suspensions by several donors after allegations concerning agency staff. As of 2026 the registered population continues to grow and no framework for its permanent status has been agreed.","ongoing":true,"_mag":5900000,"countries":["Jordan"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":750000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA when it began operations in 1950","baselineYear":1950,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":7.866666666666666,"related":[{"id":"six-day-war-1967","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":145000,"note":"About 145,000 of the Palestinians displaced in 1967 were 1948 refugees uprooted a second time and are also counted among UNRWA-registered refugees."}]},{"id":"china-land-reform-and-suppression-of-counterrevolutionaries","title":"China's Land Reform and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries","startYear":1950,"endYear":1953,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese Communist Party and the new People's Republic, through work teams, people's tribunals, the security police and village militias, killed, imprisoned and placed under surveillance landlords, former Nationalist officials and alleged counterrevolutionaries","peopleDisplaced":2620000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9,"lon":116.4,"flows":[],"summary":"In the first years of the People's Republic the Communist Party carried out two overlapping campaigns. Land reform, carried out across the countryside between 1950 and 1953, classified rural households by class, redistributed landlords' land and property, and mobilised villagers in 'speaking bitterness' and struggle sessions, which Jeffrey Javed's Harvard study describes as the world's largest and most violent land reform. The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, which Yang Kuisong calls the first campaign of the People's Republic aimed at cleansing opposition elements, targeted former officials, 'bandits' and 'evil tyrants' among others; Zhou Xun reports that a February 1951 Central Committee meeting agreed a guideline of executing one person per thousand, and that Mao urged killings 'fast and thorough like blast rain'. According to the official 1954 report, the security campaign arrested 2.62 million people and executed 712,000; Yang Kuisong and Frank Dikötter argue the true number of executions was higher, and Zhou's archival work in Sichuan and Guizhou shows killing far exceeding quotas, with villagers beaten and tortured to death in land-reform struggles. Yang Kuisong and Julia Strauss analyse the security campaign as part of the new regime's consolidation of power through state-sponsored terror.","deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":5000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention"],"_mag":2620000,"_deaths":3000000,"countries":["China"],"weakSources":false,"related":[{"id":"china-laogai-laojiao-system","rel":"continues-as","note":"Many of those imprisoned in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries served their terms in the laogai camp system."}]},{"id":"canada-sixties-scoop","title":"Canada's Sixties Scoop: Removal and Adoption of Indigenous Children","startYear":1951,"endYear":1991,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Provincial child-welfare authorities in Canada removed First Nations, Metis and Inuit children from their families and placed them with non-Indigenous adoptive and foster families","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":49.8951,"lon":-97.1384,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.8951,"fromLon":-97.1384,"toLat":44.9778,"toLon":-93.265,"label":"Manitoba children placed for adoption in the United States","people":null},{"fromLat":53.7267,"fromLon":-127.6476,"toLat":49.2827,"toLon":-123.1207,"label":"British Columbia children removed to urban non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes","people":null}],"summary":"A 1951 amendment to the Indian Act extended provincial child-welfare jurisdiction onto reserves, and over the following four decades provincial agencies apprehended Indigenous children in large numbers, placing them with non-Indigenous families in Canada, the United States and overseas; the practice overlapped with, and outlasted, the residential school system recorded separately in this atlas. Saskatchewan ran an explicit adoption-promotion programme advertising Indigenous children to prospective parents. Adoptees have described losing language, family and status, and researchers have documented poor outcomes and high rates of placement breakdown. In February 2017 the Ontario Superior Court held in Brown v. Canada that the federal government had breached a duty of care by failing to protect the Indigenous identity of children placed in provincial care, and in October 2017 Canada announced an 800 million dollar settlement covering Status Indian and Inuit survivors; Metis and non-status survivors were excluded and have continued to litigate. Manitoba apologised in June 2015; several other provinces have since done so.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Canada","United States of America"],"baselinePop":312000,"baselineWhat":"The Indigenous (First Nations, Metis and Inuit) population of Canada around the height of the removals","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0641025641025641,"related":[{"id":"canada-indian-residential-schools","rel":"same-population","note":"Residential schools and the Sixties Scoop were overlapping Canadian policies of removing Indigenous children from their families."}]},{"id":"south-africa-bantustans-pass-laws","title":"Bantustans and Influx Control in Apartheid South Africa","startYear":1951,"endYear":1994,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The South African apartheid state assigning the Black population to ethnically defined homelands and controlling their presence in \"white\" areas through pass laws and influx control","peopleDisplaced":15500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Ten bantustans in South Africa proper - four of them declared nominally independent as Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei - covering about 13 per cent of the country's land area, with ten further homelands designated in South West Africa (Namibia)","lat":-31.59,"lon":28.79,"flows":[],"summary":"From the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 the South African government designated ten territories as ethnic homelands for the African majority, covering about 13 per cent of the land, and progressively transferred political rights there while removing them in the rest of the country. Movement into and residence in urban \"white\" areas was regulated by influx control and the pass system: the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act of 1952 required every Black person over 16 to carry a passbook recording employer, address and permission to remain, with only white employers able to authorise residence; officials could cancel that permission with a stroke of the pen, and by the government's own count more than 17 million people were arrested under influx control laws between 1921 and 1986. Forced removals into the homelands and relocation settlements, part of some 3.5 million removals between 1960 and 1983, are recorded in a separate entry; by the early 1990s about 15.5 million people lived in the homelands. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 all Black South Africans were assigned homeland citizenship, and when Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei were declared independent between 1976 and 1981 their assigned populations lost South African nationality; no state other than South Africa recognised these entities, and the UN General Assembly and Security Council rejected their independence. The requirement to carry passbooks was lifted in July 1986 with the Abolition of Influx Control Act, and the bantustans were reincorporated into South Africa on 27 April 1994.","ongoing":false,"_mag":15500000,"countries":["South Africa"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"related":[{"id":"apartheid-forced-removals","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"People forcibly removed into the homelands are among the 3.5 million counted in the forced removals entry and also among the homeland population counted here; no available source separates how many, so no shared figure is given."}]},{"id":"inner-german-border-berlin-wall","title":"The Inner-German Border, the Berlin Wall and the Border-Zone Clearances","startYear":1952,"endYear":1989,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The German Democratic Republic sealed its western frontier, cleared the population of the border strip, and criminalised unauthorised departure by its own citizens","peopleDisplaced":16000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A fortified strip roughly 1,400 km long along the inner-German frontier, with a five-kilometre restricted zone behind it, plus 155 km of wall and fence around West Berlin.","lat":52.52,"lon":13.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.3,"fromLon":10.5,"toLat":51.8,"toLon":12.3,"label":"Residents removed from the five-kilometre border restricted zone into the GDR interior, 1952 and 1961","people":13000}],"summary":"The GDR closed its western frontier in May 1952 and, in the operation officially codenamed Aktion Ungeziefer, expelled from the new restricted strip residents judged politically unreliable, relocating them into the interior; a second sweep, Aktion Kornblume, followed the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The fortifications — minefields, automatic firing devices, watchtowers and a wall around West Berlin — were directed inwards, at the state's own population, and unauthorised departure was a criminal offence under the Republikflucht provisions. At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall and several hundred more along the wider frontier, according to counts by the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Memorial; the exact figure remains disputed because of differences over which deaths to include. The system held roughly 17 million people in place for 28 years and is the largest state confinement of a population by movement control in postwar Europe. It fills the gap in the atlas between the postwar expulsions and 1989.","deathsLow":140,"deathsHigh":400,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":16000000,"_deaths":270,"countries":["Germany"],"baselinePop":18400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the German Democratic Republic when it sealed its western frontier in 1952","baselineYear":1952,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8695652173913043},{"id":"kenya-emergency-villagization-detention","title":"The Kenya Emergency: Villagization and the Detention Camp 'Pipeline'","startYear":1952,"endYear":1960,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The British colonial administration in Kenya interned Kikuyu detainees in a camp system and forced the rural Kikuyu population into fortified villages","peopleDisplaced":1050000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kikuyu reserves reorganised into fortified villages; land consolidation under the 1954 Swynnerton Plan redistributed holdings during the emergency","lat":-0.4197,"lon":36.9476,"flows":[{"fromLat":-0.42,"fromLon":36.95,"toLat":-0.55,"toLon":37.45,"label":"Kikuyu households moved into fortified emergency villages","people":1000000},{"fromLat":-1.2864,"fromLon":36.8172,"toLat":-3.5,"toLon":40.0333,"label":"Detainees through the Pipeline to Manyani, Mackinnon Road and Hola","people":80000}],"summary":"Britain declared a state of emergency in Kenya in October 1952 in response to the Mau Mau revolt, and over the following years combined a mass detention system with the compulsory concentration of the rural Kikuyu population. Over a million people were moved into some 800 fortified villages surrounded by ditches and spiked barricades, subject to curfew, communal labour and collective punishment, in an operation the administration described as protective and Kikuyu communities experienced as internment. Detainees were held without trial in a graded system of camps known as the Pipeline, where the 'dilution technique' involved beatings to compel confession and renunciation of the Mau Mau oath; abuses were reported to London at the time by officials including the Kenyan attorney-general and eventually by the 1959 Hola camp killings, in which eleven detainees were beaten to death, an episode that helped end the emergency. Official figures record 11,503 Mau Mau killed and 1,090 hanged; Caroline Elkins argues from demographic gaps and testimony for a far higher toll and for detention numbers several times the official count, while David Anderson and others accept lower figures. In June 2013 the British government announced a settlement with 5,228 Kenyan claimants, paying £19.9 million and expressing sincere regret for torture and ill-treatment during the emergency, while not accepting legal liability.","deathsLow":12000,"deathsHigh":90000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","summary execution","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1050000,"_deaths":51000,"countries":["Kenya"],"baselinePop":1026341,"baselineWhat":"The Kikuyu population of Kenya recorded in the 1948 East African census","baselineYear":1948,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1.023051792727758},{"id":"maralinga-emu-nuclear-tests","title":"British Nuclear Tests at Maralinga and Emu Field and the Removal of the Anangu","startYear":1952,"endYear":1967,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"Britain, with Australian government consent, took Anangu country in South Australia for nuclear testing and the Anangu were moved off it","peopleDisplaced":500,"territoryKm2":3200,"territoryDesc":"About 3,200 km² of Anangu country in South Australia was taken as the permanent Maralinga test range, adjoining the Woomera Prohibited Area, with the earlier Emu Field site to the north; the land was returned to the Maralinga Tjarutja traditional owners in December 2009 after clean-up, though the safety of parts of it remains disputed.","lat":-30.1667,"lon":131.6167,"flows":[{"fromLat":-30.45,"fromLon":131.8333,"toLat":-31.4667,"toLon":131.85,"label":"Ooldea → Yalata mission","people":500}],"summary":"Prime Minister Robert Menzies authorised British nuclear testing in Australia in 1951; after tests at Emu Field, Maralinga was chosen in 1954 as the permanent site, and seven major tests plus hundreds of smaller 'minor trials' were carried out there between 1956 and 1963, with contamination continuing to be assessed into 1967. About 3,200 km² of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara country was closed off, and in 1952 Anangu families were moved from Ooldea, where water sources had already been depleted by railway use and grazing, to the Yalata mission about 150 km to the south, separating families from their country for more than three decades. Aboriginal people continued to travel through the range, including the Milpuddie family found camping near a test crater in May 1957, and Yankunytjatjara accounts describe illness, vomiting and blindness after a fallout 'black mist'. The McClelland Royal Commission of 1984-85 found significant residual radiation hazards and condemned the disregard for Aboriginal safety, recording that patrols were inadequate, sightings disbelieved and reports discouraged. Britain contributed £20 million to clean-up in 1993, Australia paid A$13.5 million in compensation to the Maralinga Tjarutja in 1994, and the land was formally returned in December 2009.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":19200,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: the Anangu living in and moving through the prohibited area were never counted","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"us-indian-termination-urban-relocation","title":"US Termination Policy and the Indian Urban Relocation Program","startYear":1952,"endYear":1973,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The US Bureau of Indian Affairs moved Native Americans from reservations to designated cities while Congress terminated federal recognition of scores of tribes","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.0522,"lon":-118.2437,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.6797,"fromLon":-109.0537,"toLat":34.0522,"toLon":-118.2437,"label":"Navajo Nation → Los Angeles (approximate)","people":25000},{"fromLat":43.0255,"fromLon":-102.556,"toLat":39.7392,"toLon":-104.9903,"label":"Northern Plains reservations → Denver (approximate)","people":12000},{"fromLat":47.8763,"fromLon":-95.0169,"toLat":41.8781,"toLon":-87.6298,"label":"Upper Midwest reservations → Chicago (approximate)","people":12000}],"summary":"From 1952 the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran a relocation program that paid one-way travel and short-term support for Native Americans who left reservations for designated cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City; the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains estimates about 100,000 people moved by 1973. The program was formalised by the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 and ran alongside congressional 'termination', which ended federal recognition and trust protection for more than a hundred tribes and dissolved reservation land bases. Participation was nominally voluntary, but it was promoted amid deliberate withdrawal of reservation services and employment, and the National Archives records that because the BIA funded only outbound travel, people who could not find work were often unable to return. Relocatees encountered discrimination, low-wage work and loss of kin and ceremonial ties; the resulting urban Indian communities also produced new political organisation, including the founding of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968. The policy was repudiated in the 1970s by the shift to self-determination, and several terminated tribes were later restored. Destination breakdowns above are approximate: the BIA reported annual placements rather than a full city-by-city census.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["United States of America"],"baselinePop":551669,"baselineWhat":"The American Indian and Alaska Native population of the United States at the 1960 census","baselineYear":1960,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.18126811548229102},{"id":"canada-high-arctic-relocation","title":"Canada's High Arctic Relocation and Inuit Settlement Centralisation","startYear":1953,"endYear":1975,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Government of Canada moved Inuit families from northern Quebec and Baffin Island to uninhabited High Arctic sites and, more broadly, concentrated Inuit into administered settlements","peopleDisplaced":92,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The relocations established permanently inhabited communities at Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, in the far north of the Canadian Arctic archipelago.","lat":58.45,"lon":-78.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":58.45,"fromLon":-78.1,"toLat":74.7,"toLon":-94.83,"label":"Inuit families moved from Inukjuak to Resolute Bay","people":null},{"fromLat":72.7,"fromLon":-77.97,"toLat":76.42,"toLon":-82.9,"label":"Inuit families moved from Pond Inlet to Grise Fiord","people":null}],"summary":"In 1953 and 1955 the Canadian government moved 92 Inuit from Inukjuak in northern Quebec and Pond Inlet on Baffin Island some 1,200-2,000 km north to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, sites with no prior permanent population, darker winters and unfamiliar game. Families were separated on arrival, promised returns after two years did not materialise, and the first years brought hunger and hardship. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples examined the episode in a 1994 report and concluded the relocation was not the humanitarian measure the government had described; a $10 million settlement followed in 1996 and a formal apology by the Minister of Indian Affairs in August 2010. Contemporary scholarship and the relocatees themselves have argued that a principal purpose was to assert Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic, a motive the government long denied. The wider movement of Inuit off the land into administered settlements in the same decades was examined by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, which reported in 2010. Canada's residential schools and reserve system were in the atlas; the Arctic relocations were not.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":92,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Canada"],"baselinePop":11000,"baselineWhat":"The Inuit population of Canada in the early 1950s","baselineYear":1953,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.008363636363636363},{"id":"thule-pituffik-relocation-greenland","title":"The Thule Relocation in Greenland","startYear":1953,"endYear":1953,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Danish government moved the Inughuit community of Uummannaq to make way for the expansion of the United States air base at Thule","peopleDisplaced":130,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The hunting grounds and settlement site at Uummannaq passed into the defence area of the Thule (now Pituffik) air base, built from 1951 under the 1951 Danish-American defence agreement.","lat":76.53,"lon":-68.7,"flows":[{"fromLat":76.53,"fromLon":-68.7,"toLat":77.47,"toLon":-69.23,"label":"Inughuit families moved from Uummannaq to Qaanaaq","people":130}],"summary":"The United States began building a large air base at Thule in north-west Greenland in 1951 under a defence agreement with Denmark. In May 1953 the Danish authorities required the neighbouring Inughuit settlement of Uummannaq — twenty-seven families — to move about 100 km north to a new site at Qaanaaq, with a few days' notice and inadequate housing on arrival; the community lost access to its hunting grounds. The Hingitaq 53 association sued the Danish state, and in 1999 the Eastern High Court found the relocation an unlawful interference and awarded compensation, a ruling largely upheld by the Danish Supreme Court in 2003, which nonetheless denied a right of return to the base area. The European Court of Human Rights declared a subsequent application inadmissible in 2006. Greenland was otherwise absent from the atlas; the case is a well-documented instance of a European state moving an Arctic Indigenous community for a foreign military installation, and its findings are unusually explicit.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":130,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Greenland"],"baselinePop":300,"baselineWhat":"The Inughuit (Polar Inuit) population of the Thule district in northern Greenland in 1953","baselineYear":1953,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.43333333333333335},{"id":"algeria-pied-noir-harki-exodus","title":"Algerian Independence: Pied-Noir and Harki Exodus","startYear":1954,"endYear":1962,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"French settlers (pieds-noirs) fled Algeria for France after independence; harkis, Algerian Muslims who had served France, were largely abandoned and many were killed or fled","peopleDisplaced":900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.75,"lon":3.06,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.75,"fromLon":3.06,"toLat":43.3,"toLon":5.37,"label":"Algiers → Marseille, France (pieds-noirs)","people":800000},{"fromLat":35.7,"fromLon":-0.63,"toLat":43.6,"toLon":1.44,"label":"Oran → southern France (harkis)","people":90000}],"summary":"The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) ended French colonial rule and triggered the sudden exodus of nearly the entire European settler population, the pieds-noirs, who fled largely to France in the summer of 1962 as violence escalated between the French army, the FLN independence movement, and pro-French Algerian irregulars known as harkis. An estimated 800,000–900,000 pieds-noirs left Algeria, while the roughly 90,000 harkis evacuated to France represented only a fraction of a much larger group; those who remained faced reprisal killings by the new Algerian state and FLN-aligned militias, with death toll estimates disputed and ranging from the low tens of thousands to well over 100,000.  The events remain a politically sensitive subject in both France and Algeria.","ongoing":false,"_mag":900000,"countries":["Algeria","France"],"deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":80000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1150000,"baselineWhat":"The European settler population of Algeria together with the Algerians who served France as auxiliaries","baselineYear":1960,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.782608695652174,"related":[{"id":"jewish-exodus-arab-lands","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":130000,"note":"About 130,000 Algerian Jews who left for France in 1962 are counted both in the Jewish exodus from Arab lands and among the pieds-noirs."}]},{"id":"newfoundland-resettlement-programme","title":"Newfoundland's Resettlement Programme","startYear":1954,"endYear":1975,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Newfoundland provincial government, later with Ottawa, paid and pressed outport communities to abandon their settlements and move to designated growth centres","peopleDisplaced":28000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":47.4,"lon":-54.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.4,"fromLon":-54.2,"toLat":47.7628,"toLon":-53.9906,"label":"Placentia Bay island outports to mainland growth centres such as Arnold's Cove","people":null},{"fromLat":49.65,"fromLon":-55.6,"toLat":49.18,"toLon":-55.04,"label":"Notre Dame Bay outports to designated growth centres","people":null}],"summary":"After Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, successive provincial governments concluded that services could not be delivered to hundreds of small, often island, fishing settlements, and offered payments to households that agreed to move to designated centres. Under the centralization programme from 1954 the whole community had to agree, and payments began at 150 dollars a family, rising to 600; under the federal-provincial programme from 1965 the threshold was lowered to 90 and then 80 per cent of households, and assistance rose to 1,000 dollars a family plus 200 per dependant and moving costs. Houses were often floated across bays to the new sites. Supporters described the scheme as a rational response to the decline of the inshore fishery; critics, including many of those moved, argued that the consent thresholds coerced dissenting households, that promised employment in the growth centres frequently did not materialise, and that communities and fishing rights were destroyed. It is generally described as one of the most controversial programmes in post-Confederation Newfoundland, and it remains a live subject in the province, where a smaller relocation scheme with a high consent threshold continues to operate.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":28000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["St. Pierre and Miquelon","Canada"],"baselinePop":415000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Newfoundland and Labrador at the 1956 census","baselineYear":1956,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.06746987951807229},{"id":"operation-passage-to-freedom-1954","title":"1954 North-to-South Vietnam Exodus (Operation Passage to Freedom)","startYear":1954,"endYear":1955,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"French and US naval/air forces evacuated Vietnamese civilians, disproportionately Catholic, from communist-controlled North Vietnam to the newly formed State/Republic of Vietnam in the south","peopleDisplaced":900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":21.03,"lon":105.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.03,"fromLon":105.85,"toLat":10.82,"toLon":106.63,"label":"Hanoi → Saigon","people":500000},{"fromLat":20.86,"fromLon":106.68,"toLat":10.82,"toLon":106.63,"label":"Haiphong (main embarkation port) → Saigon","people":400000}],"summary":"After the 1954 Geneva Accords ended the First Indochina War and temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel, roughly 800,000 to one million people, a majority of them Catholic, moved from the newly communist-controlled North to the anti-communist South during a 300-day free-movement window. The US Navy and French vessels carried out the bulk of the movement in what the US termed Operation Passage to Freedom, aided by anti-communist propaganda campaigns, including covert US and South Vietnamese efforts encouraging Catholics to flee. A much smaller reverse flow of an estimated 90,000–140,000 people, mostly Viet Minh cadres and supporters, moved north. The migration reshaped South Vietnam's politics, giving disproportionate influence to Catholic refugee networks under President Ngô Đình Diệm.","ongoing":false,"_mag":900000,"countries":["Vietnam"],"deathsLow":54,"deathsHigh":54,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":54,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":13500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam zone north of the 17th parallel) in 1954","baselineYear":1954,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.06666666666666667},{"id":"operation-wetback","title":"Operation Wetback","startYear":1954,"endYear":1955,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, with Border Patrol and local police, swept Mexican workers and communities in the south-west and expelled them to Mexico","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.66,"lon":-115.47,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.72,"fromLon":-114.62,"toLat":21.16,"toLon":-100.93,"label":"Deportees flown, bussed and shipped deep into the Mexican interior","people":null}],"summary":"Launched in June 1954 under Attorney General Herbert Brownell and INS commissioner Joseph Swing, Operation Wetback used Border Patrol sweeps, roadblocks and factory and neighbourhood raids across California, Arizona and Texas to apprehend Mexican workers, most of whom were expelled without hearings. To prevent re-entry, deportees were moved deep into Mexico by bus, aircraft and ship; conditions on some transports were severe, and 88 people died of heat in July 1955 on one operation, while a Mexican inquiry into the vessel Mercurio described conditions likened to an eighteenth-century slave ship. The programme operated alongside the Bracero guest-worker system, which continued to recruit Mexican labour legally, and drew criticism for the removal of United States citizens without due process. Historians have established that the widely quoted figure of over a million deportations is inflated. The atlas already contained the Mexican Repatriation of 1929-1936; this is the second and better-known mass expulsion campaign, and its omission was conspicuous.","deathsLow":88,"deathsHigh":88,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":250000,"_deaths":88,"countries":["United States of America","Mexico"],"baselinePop":2300000,"baselineWhat":"The Mexican-origin population of the five south-western US states at the 1950 census","baselineYear":1950,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.10869565217391304},{"id":"paraguay-stroessner-repression","title":"Paraguay under Stroessner: Detention, Torture and Exile","startYear":1954,"endYear":1989,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Stroessner government and its police detained, tortured, disappeared and exiled opponents and dispossessed indigenous communities","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-25.2637,"lon":-57.5759,"flows":[{"fromLat":-25.2637,"fromLon":-57.5759,"toLat":-34.6037,"toLon":-58.3816,"label":"Political exiles to Argentina, where some were seized under Operation Condor","people":null},{"fromLat":-24,"fromLon":-55.5,"toLat":-25.5,"toLon":-56.5,"label":"Ache and other indigenous communities removed from eastern Paraguay to mission settlements","people":null}],"summary":"General Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay from 1954 until his overthrow in February 1989, governing under a near-permanent state of siege with the Colorado Party, the army and a political police force whose surveillance files were found in 1992 in a suburban police station and became known as the Archives of Terror. Opposition parties were banned or tightly controlled, elections were fraudulent, and detention without charge, torture and forced exile were routine instruments; Paraguay was also a participant in Operation Condor, the coordination of the Southern Cone security services against exiles. The Truth and Justice Commission, created by law in 2003 and reporting in August 2008, documented nearly 20,000 arbitrary detentions and over 18,000 cases of torture, and examined violations against women, children and indigenous peoples, including the removal, killing and sale of Ache people during the 'pacification' of eastern Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which some scholars and the Ache themselves have characterised as genocide; a genocide complaint was filed in an Argentine court in 2014. Stroessner died in exile in Brazil in 2006 without being tried; some subordinates have been convicted.","deathsLow":395,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":697.5,"countries":["Paraguay","Argentina"],"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Paraguay when Stroessner took power","baselineYear":1954,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.013333333333333334},{"id":"algeria-regroupement-camps","title":"French Army 'Regroupement' Camps in Algeria","startYear":1955,"endYear":1962,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The French army cleared rural Algerians out of zones declared forbidden and held them in army-supervised 'centres de regroupement' to separate the population from the FLN","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Large areas of the Aurès, Kabylia and the Algerian interior were declared 'zones interdites' from which the civilian population was removed and into which movement was prohibited.","lat":35.55,"lon":6.2,"flows":[],"summary":"From 1955 the French army in Algeria adopted forced resettlement as a counterinsurgency method: it declared rural areas forbidden zones, removed the people living there, and concentrated them in 'centres de regroupement' under military supervision, so as to deny the FLN food, shelter and recruits. As many as two million people, about a quarter of Algeria's Muslim population, were moved into such centres before independence in 1962. Conditions were poor: an ICRC delegate reporting on a 1962 mission found that only a small minority of centres had permanent structures, most consisting of huts of clay and straw brick roofed with thatch or branches and without floors, and recorded high infant mortality attributable to poor hygiene and nutritional deficiency, together with widespread tuberculosis, rickets and conjunctivitis, concluding that residents lacked the basic necessities. The ICRC provided mobile medical teams from 1959, after French press coverage — including Michel Rocard's official report — brought the camps to public attention. The policy destroyed the settlement pattern and agricultural economy of large parts of rural Algeria; many of those uprooted never returned to their land and moved instead to the shantytowns of the coastal cities. This is distinct from, and much larger than, the 1962 departure of the pieds-noirs and harkis.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Algeria"],"baselinePop":8450000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim Algerian population at the French census of 1954","baselineYear":1954,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.23668639053254437},{"id":"istanbul-pogrom-and-greek-exodus","title":"Istanbul Pogrom and the Departure of Turkey's Greeks","startYear":1955,"endYear":1966,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Organised crowds attacked Greek homes, businesses and churches in Istanbul in September 1955, and in 1964 the Turkish government expelled Greek citizens resident in the city and froze their assets","peopleDisplaced":52000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":41.01,"lon":28.98,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.01,"fromLon":28.98,"toLat":37.98,"toLon":23.73,"label":"Istanbul → Greece","people":52000}],"summary":"On the night of 6-7 September 1955, after a false report that Atatürk's birthplace in Salonica had been bombed, organised crowds attacked the Greek minority of Istanbul; the Greek foreign ministry records the destruction of 1,004 houses, some 5,000 businesses, 73 churches, 23 schools, two cemeteries and five community centres. Scholarship in Genocide Studies and Prevention describes the riots as government-instigated and argues they amounted to a crime against humanity; Turkish courts later tried members of the Menderes government at Yassıada, and the events remain politically sensitive in Turkey. Emigration followed, and in March 1964 Turkey abrogated the 1930 establishment convention and expelled Greek citizens living in Istanbul, seizing or freezing property; the Greek foreign ministry puts the expulsions at more than 12,000 people over two years, with about 40,000 Turkish citizens of Greek descent, largely their relatives, leaving too. The community that had numbered over 130,000 in the 1920s is now a few thousand.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":52000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bulgaria","Greece"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul on the eve of the September 1955 pogrom","baselineYear":1955,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.52},{"id":"sudanese-civil-wars","title":"Sudanese Civil Wars (First and Second)","startYear":1955,"endYear":2005,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Sudan's government in Khartoum fought southern Sudanese rebel movements (Anyanya, then the SPLA) in two prolonged civil wars over political power, religion, resources and autonomy","peopleDisplaced":4000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":4.85,"lon":31.58,"flows":[{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":15.5,"toLon":32.56,"label":"Southern Sudan → Khartoum IDP camps","people":1800000},{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":3.12,"toLon":34.87,"label":"Southern Sudan → Kakuma, Kenya","people":400000},{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":1.37,"toLon":32.29,"label":"Southern Sudan → Uganda","people":300000}],"summary":"Sudan fought two of Africa's longest civil wars between the Arab, Muslim-dominated north and the largely Christian and traditional-religion south: the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972) and, after an eleven-year peace, the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), fought principally between Khartoum's government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The second war, driven by disputes over political power, oil resources, and the imposition of sharia law, is estimated to have killed around 2 million people, mostly through famine and disease, and displaced roughly 4 million, including large numbers who fled to Khartoum's periphery and to neighboring Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and elsewhere. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the war and set the stage for South Sudan's 2011 independence referendum.","ongoing":false,"_mag":4000000,"countries":["S. Sudan","Sudan","Kenya","Uganda"],"deathsLow":1500000,"deathsHigh":2500000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":2000000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of southern Sudan at the start of the second civil war","baselineYear":1983,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.7547169811320755},{"id":"hungarian-1956-refugee-exodus","title":"1956 Hungarian Refugee Exodus","startYear":1956,"endYear":1957,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Following the Soviet military suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, roughly 200,000 Hungarians fled across the borders into Austria and Yugoslavia.","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":47.5,"lon":19.04,"flows":[{"fromLat":47.5,"fromLon":19.04,"toLat":48.21,"toLon":16.37,"label":"Budapest/Hungary → Austria","people":180000},{"fromLat":46.25,"fromLon":20.15,"toLat":45.5,"toLon":19.5,"label":"Southern Hungary → Yugoslavia","people":20000}],"summary":"After Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising in November 1956, an estimated 200,000 Hungarians—about 2% of the country's population—fled westward, most crossing the still-porous border into neutral Austria and a smaller number into Yugoslavia, before Hungarian authorities sealed the frontier. The refugees included many students, intellectuals, and skilled workers. The exodus prompted one of the first large coordinated international refugee resettlement efforts of the Cold War, with the newly formed UNHCR playing a central coordinating role and dozens of countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, admitting Hungarian refugees under expedited programs.","ongoing":false,"_mag":200000,"countries":["Hungary","Austria","Serbia"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":9800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Hungary at the time of the 1956 revolution","baselineYear":1956,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.02040816326530612},{"id":"north-caucasus-deportees-return-1957","title":"The Return of the Deported North Caucasus Peoples and the Conflicts of Restoration","startYear":1956,"endYear":1959,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Soviet state lifted the special-settlement regime and restored the North Caucasus autonomies, setting returning deportees against those settled in their homes","peopleDisplaced":419000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":43.3169,"lon":45.6981,"flows":[{"fromLat":49.8047,"fromLon":73.1094,"toLat":43.3169,"toLon":45.6981,"label":"Chechens and Ingush returning from Kazakhstan and Kirghizia","people":419000},{"fromLat":43.1167,"fromLon":46.3333,"toLat":42.9849,"toLon":47.5047,"label":"Laks, Avars and Dargins moved back into Dagestan from Chechen-Akkin villages","people":null}],"summary":"The 1944 deportation of the North Caucasus peoples is recorded separately in this atlas; their return was a second mass movement with consequences of its own. A Presidium decree of July 1956 lifted the special-settlement restrictions on Chechens, Ingush and Karachais, and a decree of January 1957 allowed free movement and restored the Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic. Returnees, who had often sold everything to make the journey, found their houses occupied by Russians, Ossetians, Laks, Avars and Dargins settled there after 1944, some highland districts still closed to settlement, and the republic's borders redrawn: North Ossetia retained the Prigorodny district and Psedakh, amounting on Ingush reckoning to about a sixth of their pre-deportation territory, while the republic was compensated with lowland districts to the north. Moscow suspended the influx in the summer of 1957 as the returns outpaced planning, and settlers who had been moved into Chechen-Akkin villages, principally Laks, were themselves relocated. Competition over housing, land and jobs produced anti-Chechen rioting in Grozny in 1958, put down by the authorities and denounced as chauvinist even as republican policy was adjusted in favour of the Russian population. The unresolved status of the Prigorodny district led directly to the Ossetian-Ingush conflict of 1992, recorded separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":419000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Kazakhstan"],"baselinePop":500000,"baselineWhat":"The deported North Caucasus peoples — Chechens, Ingush, Karachays and Balkars — registered in Soviet special settlements in the mid-1950s","baselineYear":1956,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.838,"related":[{"id":"soviet-special-settlement-regime","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":415000,"note":"Chechens and Ingush held under the special-settlement regime returned to the North Caucasus once it was lifted in 1956-57."}]},{"id":"north-korea-songbun-relocation","title":"North Korea's Songbun Classification and Forced Relocation","startYear":1957,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The North Korean state classified its whole population by inherited political loyalty and used the classification to control where people may live and work","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.0392,"lon":125.7625,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.0392,"fromLon":125.7625,"toLat":41.1,"toLon":128.2,"label":"Families of 'hostile' songbun expelled from Pyongyang to remote north-eastern counties","people":null}],"summary":"From the late 1950s the North Korean state sorted its population by inherited political background into a 'core', 'wavering' and 'hostile' class, subdivided into dozens of categories, on the basis of ancestors' status before and during the Korean War. Songbun governs where a person may live, what education and work they may have, and access to rations, and people classed as hostile were expelled from Pyongyang and from strategically sensitive border areas to remote mountainous counties, in some cases as whole families and villages. The system operates alongside a permit regime that makes internal travel dependent on state authorisation, so classification effectively fixes people in place. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea concluded in 2014 that the state maintains a system of discrimination based on songbun that determines almost every aspect of life, that this has been used to conduct forced relocations, and that crimes against humanity have been committed pursuant to state policies. North Korea rejects the Commission's report in its entirety and denies that songbun exists as described; almost all evidence comes from defector testimony and smuggled documents, which the Commission cross-checked but which cannot be independently verified inside the country.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention","forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["North Korea"],"baselinePop":26000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of North Korea, the whole of which is classified by songbun","baselineYear":2024,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":null,"related":[{"id":"north-korea-kwanliso","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The UN Commission of Inquiry found that imprisonment in the kwanliso fell along songbun lines."}]},{"id":"great-leap-forward-famine","title":"The Great Leap Forward, the People's Communes and the Great Chinese Famine","startYear":1958,"endYear":1962,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese Communist Party collectivised the rural population into communes, requisitioned grain against inflated output claims, and restricted movement as famine set in","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.147,"lon":114.0913,"flows":[],"summary":"In 1958 the Chinese Communist Party launched the Great Leap Forward, merging collectives into people's communes, abolishing private plots and household cooking, and diverting labour to backyard steel furnaces and water-conservancy works. Local cadres reported grossly inflated harvests, and the state set procurement quotas against those reports, so that in the worst provinces - Anhui, Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, Guizhou - grain was requisitioned from villages that had none, while the newly tightened household registration system and militia roadblocks prevented peasants from leaving. The resulting famine of 1959-61 is the deadliest in recorded history; estimates of excess deaths range from about 15 million to 55 million. The Chinese demographers Ansley Coale and Judith Banister produced early estimates of 16.5 and 30 million; Cao Shuji's provincial reconstruction gives about 32.5 million; the journalist Yang Jisheng, working from provincial archives, gives about 36 million; Frank Dikotter argues for at least 45 million and emphasises deaths from violence as well as starvation; a minority of Chinese scholars, notably Sun Jingxian, argue that census-based methods overstate the toll by an order of magnitude. Archival work also documents beatings, torture and killings of peasants by cadres enforcing procurement. The policy was reversed from 1961-62 and the party itself later described the period as one of grave error.","deathsLow":15000000,"deathsHigh":45000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","forced labour","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":24000000,"_deaths":30000000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":550000000,"baselineWhat":"The rural population of China enrolled in the people's communes at the launch of the Great Leap Forward","baselineYear":1958,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"north-korea-kwanliso","title":"North Korea's Kwanliso Political Prison Camp System","startYear":1958,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Ministry of State Security of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea holding political prisoners, historically together with their families, in closed penal colonies outside the ordinary criminal justice system","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"At least four camps identified from satellite imagery and testimony, including Kaech'on (No. 14) and Pukch'ang (No. 18) in South Pyongan province and Hwasong (No. 16) and Ch'ongjin (No. 25) in North Hamgyong province, some covering hundreds of square kilometres of fenced mountain valley","lat":41.2,"lon":129.4,"flows":[],"summary":"North Korea operates a network of kwanliso, closed political penal colonies administered by the state security apparatus, in which people are held without trial for perceived political offences, attempted flight abroad, religious practice or association with someone accused. Prisoners in the \"total control zones\" are held for life and, under the guilt-by-association principle applied for much of the system's history, entire families including children were imprisoned for the acts of one member. The UN Commission of Inquiry, reporting in February 2014 on the basis of some 80 public hearings and more than 240 confidential interviews conducted outside the country, estimated 80,000-120,000 prisoners, documented deliberate starvation used as a means of control and punishment, and concluded that crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape and forced abortion were being committed pursuant to policies set at the highest level of the state; it wrote that the atrocities resembled those of twentieth-century totalitarian camp systems and recommended referral to the International Criminal Court. North Korea did not cooperate with the Commission, denies that political prison camps exist and describes the inquiry as a fabrication by hostile states. The camps cannot be independently visited, so estimates rest on defector testimony and satellite imagery; several camps appear from imagery to have been closed or reconfigured since 2014, and the total held is thought to have fallen, though the system as a whole remains in operation.","ongoing":true,"_mag":100000,"countries":["North Korea"],"deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","starvation & siege","torture","summary execution","sexual violence","enforced disappearance"],"_deaths":600000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":26000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea","baselineYear":2024,"asOf":"2014","weakSources":false,"_share":0.0038461538461538464,"related":[{"id":"north-korea-songbun-relocation","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"The UN Commission of Inquiry found that imprisonment in the kwanliso fell along songbun lines."}]},{"id":"cuban-exodus-waves","title":"The Cuban Exodus in Waves","startYear":1959,"endYear":1995,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Cubans left the island in successive waves after the 1959 revolution, at times expelled or released by the Cuban state and at times restricted from leaving","peopleDisplaced":664000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":23.1136,"lon":-82.3666,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.1136,"fromLon":-82.3666,"toLat":25.7617,"toLon":-80.1918,"label":"Havana → Miami, 1959-62 'historical exiles'","people":248100},{"fromLat":23.156,"fromLon":-81.253,"toLat":25.7617,"toLon":-80.1918,"label":"Varadero → Miami, Freedom Flights 1965-73","people":260600},{"fromLat":23,"fromLon":-82.75,"toLat":24.5551,"toLon":-81.8067,"label":"Mariel → Key West, 1980 boatlift","people":124800},{"fromLat":23.1136,"fromLon":-82.3666,"toLat":25.7617,"toLon":-80.1918,"label":"Balsero crossings of the Florida Straits, 1994","people":30900}],"summary":"Following the 1959 revolution, Cuba's population moved outward in distinct politically driven waves rather than as steady migration. The first, 1959-62, carried roughly 248,100 people, largely propertied and professional families whose assets had been confiscated, and included Operation Pedro Pan, under which more than 14,000 unaccompanied children were flown out between December 1960 and October 1962 by parents who expected to follow. The 1965-73 Freedom Flights moved about 260,600 people under a bilateral arrangement; in April-September 1980 Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel and about 124,800 people crossed to Key West, among them prisoners and psychiatric patients whom the Cuban state placed on departing boats; in August-September 1994 roughly 30,900 balseros were interdicted at sea during the post-Soviet economic collapse. Each opening was controlled by the Cuban government, and those who left were commonly stripped of property and, in the earlier waves, denied return. The waves reshaped southern Florida, where the great majority settled.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":664000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Cuba","Bahamas","United States of America"],"baselinePop":6900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cuba in 1959, at the start of the revolutionary emigration","baselineYear":1959,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.09623188405797102},{"id":"rwanda-1959-revolution-tutsi-exodus","title":"The 1959 Rwandan Revolution and the Tutsi Refugee Exodus","startYear":1959,"endYear":1964,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Hutu political movements, backed by the Belgian trusteeship administration, drove Tutsi chiefs and families out of Rwanda and killed thousands after 1963 raids","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-1.94,"lon":29.87,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.94,"fromLon":29.87,"toLat":-1.37,"toLon":30.28,"label":"Tutsi refugees to Uganda","people":null},{"fromLat":-1.94,"fromLon":29.87,"toLat":-3.38,"toLon":29.36,"label":"Tutsi refugees to Burundi","people":null}],"summary":"In November 1959 an attack on a Hutu sub-chief triggered a wave of arson and killing directed at Tutsi households across Rwanda; the Belgian administration, under Colonel Guy Logiest, replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu appointees rather than restoring the previous order. Communal elections in 1960 and the 1961 referendum ended the monarchy, and successive waves of violence pushed Tutsi families into Uganda, Burundi, Tanganyika and the Congo. In December 1963 raids by exile fighters (the inyenzi) from Burundi were met by reprisals inside Rwanda, most severely in Gikongoro prefecture, where an estimated 10,000 or more Tutsi were killed; Bertrand Russell and some contemporary observers called it genocide, and the events were reported to the UN. Those who remained were subject to ethnic quotas, and the refugee population that accumulated abroad, denied return for three decades, produced the Rwandan Patriotic Front that invaded in 1990. The 1959-64 displacement is thus the beginning of the sequence that the atlas already records at 1990 and 1994.","deathsLow":12000,"deathsHigh":25000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":18500,"countries":["Rwanda","Burundi"],"baselinePop":430000,"baselineWhat":"The Tutsi population of Rwanda at the end of the 1950s","baselineYear":1959,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6976744186046512},{"id":"tibet-democratic-reform-communes-and-nomad-resettlement","title":"Tibet after 1959: Democratic Reform, Communes and the Resettlement of Nomads","startYear":1959,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Chinese state abolished the monastic estate system, collectivised Tibetan agriculture and pastoralism, and later rehoused and settled Tibetan farmers and herders","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":29.65,"lon":91.14,"flows":[{"fromLat":32.5,"fromLon":90,"toLat":30.1,"toLon":91,"label":"Nomadic herders settled from the northern rangelands into fixed settlements","people":null}],"summary":"After the 1959 uprising Beijing carried out 'democratic reform' in Tibet, abolishing the monastic and aristocratic estates, redistributing land and holding struggle sessions against former elites; communes followed in the mid-1960s, and the Cultural Revolution brought the destruction of most monasteries and of religious practice. Grain procurement and the switch to unsuitable crops contributed to severe shortages in Tibetan areas during the Great Leap period. From the 2000s a second transformation took place: the 'comfortable housing' campaign and grassland policies rebuilt or moved the homes of, by Chinese official count, more than 2 million people in the Tibet Autonomous Region between 2006 and 2012, and settled nomadic herders in fixed villages, often requiring them to sell livestock and take on construction debt. The Chinese government presents these programmes as poverty alleviation, ecological protection and voluntary improvement in living standards, and publishes white papers documenting rising incomes; Human Rights Watch and Tibetan exile organisations describe them as coerced, with quotas, and as ending pastoral livelihoods. Later labour-transfer and boarding-school programmes have extended the argument into the 2020s.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["cultural or religious destruction","forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":2500000,"baselineWhat":"The Tibetan population of the Tibetan plateau","baselineYear":1964,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"tibetan-exodus-1959","title":"1959 Tibetan Uprising and Exodus","startYear":1959,"endYear":1960,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Following the failed 1959 Lhasa uprising against Chinese rule, the 14th Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans fled into exile in India, Nepal, and Bhutan","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":27.59,"lon":91.86,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.65,"fromLon":91.11,"toLat":32.22,"toLon":76.32,"label":"Lhasa, Tibet → Dharamshala, India (Dalai Lama and followers)","people":80000},{"fromLat":29.3,"fromLon":88,"toLat":27.7,"toLon":85.3,"label":"Tibet → Nepal","people":20000}],"summary":"In March 1959, a popular uprising against Chinese rule broke out in Lhasa amid fears for the Dalai Lama's safety; Chinese forces suppressed it, and the 14th Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas into India, where he was granted asylum and established a government-in-exile at Dharamshala. Tens of thousands of Tibetans followed in the following months and years, settling in India, Nepal, and Bhutan. China dissolved the Tibetan local government shortly after the uprising and tightened direct control over the region. The exodus produced a lasting Tibetan diaspora and an unresolved political dispute over Tibet's status that continues into the present.","ongoing":false,"_mag":80000,"countries":["India","China","Nepal"],"deathsLow":12000,"deathsHigh":87000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":49500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1270000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the territory administered from Lhasa, later the Tibet Autonomous Region, around the time of the 1959 uprising","baselineYear":1959,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.06299212598425197},{"id":"chittagong-hill-tracts-displacement","title":"The Chittagong Hill Tracts: the Kaptai Dam, Settlement and Counter-Insurgency","startYear":1960,"endYear":1997,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Pakistani and then Bangladeshi governments flooded, settled and militarised the indigenous Chittagong Hill Tracts","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":13295,"territoryDesc":"The Chittagong Hill Tracts, whose indigenous share of population fell from roughly 90 per cent in 1951 to about half by 1991 through state-sponsored settlement","lat":22.6533,"lon":92.1752,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.6533,"fromLon":92.1752,"toLat":23.8315,"toLon":91.2868,"label":"Jumma refugees to camps in Tripura, India","people":70000},{"fromLat":23,"fromLon":90.4,"toLat":22.6533,"toLon":92.1752,"label":"State-sponsored Bengali settlement into the Hill Tracts","people":350000}],"summary":"The Kaptai hydroelectric dam, built in East Pakistan and completed in 1962, submerged the Chakma royal capital and about two-fifths of the region's arable land, displacing around 100,000 indigenous people with minimal compensation and sending some 40,000 into India. After Bangladeshi independence the indigenous Jumma peoples' demand for autonomy was rejected, the region was militarised, and the armed Shanti Bahini began an insurgency in 1977. From 1979 successive governments sponsored the settlement of several hundred thousand Bengalis from the plains onto land claimed by indigenous communities, and the army concentrated indigenous villagers into guarded cluster villages; Amnesty International, the independent Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission and IWGIA documented massacres of indigenous civilians at Logang, Longadu, Naniarchar and elsewhere between 1980 and 1993, arson, sexual violence and the flight of some 70,000 people to Tripura. The 1997 Peace Accord ended the insurgency and provided for a regional council, land commission and the withdrawal of temporary camps, but indigenous organisations say its key provisions remain unimplemented and the Bangladeshi government maintains that most have been carried out. The demographic balance of the region was permanently altered.","deathsLow":2500,"deathsHigh":10000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":6250,"countries":["Bangladesh","India"],"baselinePop":385000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Chittagong Hill Tracts around the building of the Kaptai dam, almost all of it indigenous","baselineYear":1961,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":1.2987012987012987},{"id":"guatemala-civil-war","title":"Guatemalan Civil War and Maya Genocide","startYear":1960,"endYear":1996,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Guatemalan military and state, particularly under General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83), waged a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerrillas and Maya indigenous communities in the highlands","peopleDisplaced":1200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":15.4,"lon":-91.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.4,"fromLon":-91.15,"toLat":16.25,"toLon":-92.13,"label":"Ixil region/highlands → Chiapas, Mexico","people":150000}],"summary":"Guatemala's 36-year civil war pitted the military government against leftist guerrilla organizations, with the conflict's most intense violence occurring in the largely Maya highlands during the early 1980s under General Efraín Ríos Montt. The UN-backed Commission for Historical Clarification (1999) documented over 200,000 people killed or disappeared and found that state forces committed 'acts of genocide' against Maya communities in specific regions, alongside massacres, forced displacement and scorched-earth destruction of villages. An estimated 1 million people were internally displaced and 150,000-250,000 fled as refugees, mainly to Mexico; Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013 in a landmark domestic trial, though the conviction was later annulled on procedural grounds by Guatemala's Constitutional Court.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1200000,"countries":["Guatemala","Mexico"],"deathsLow":132000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":166000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6054227,"baselineWhat":"The population of Guatemala at the 1981 census, taken at the start of the scorched-earth campaign","baselineYear":1981,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.1982086234956172},{"id":"soviet-punitive-psychiatry","title":"Soviet Punitive Psychiatry and the Special Psychiatric Hospitals","startYear":1960,"endYear":1989,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet security organs and state psychiatrists confined dissenters, believers and would-be emigrants in psychiatric hospitals without criminal trial","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":55.7414,"lon":37.5936,"flows":[],"summary":"From the early 1960s Soviet authorities increasingly dealt with political dissent through compulsory psychiatric committal rather than criminal trial, using a broad diagnostic category, 'sluggish schizophrenia', associated with Andrei Snezhnevsky's school at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, under which symptoms could include pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authority. Those found not responsible were sent either to ordinary psychiatric hospitals or to special psychiatric hospitals run by the interior ministry, which operated as prisons; detainees and their advocates documented forced administration of drugs including sulfazine and haloperidol, beatings and indefinite confinement dependent on renouncing their views. The practice was exposed from inside the USSR by the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and by samizdat, and abroad by Amnesty International and Western psychiatrists; facing expulsion, the Soviet psychiatric society withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association at its 1983 Vienna congress and was readmitted in 1989 after acknowledging past abuse. The Russian Federation has acknowledged that psychiatry was used for political purposes and accepted responsibility toward the victims. Soviet-era psychiatrists and some Russian commentators have continued to argue that most committals were clinically motivated.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":208826650,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Soviet Union at the 1959 census","baselineYear":1959,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":9.577321668474786e-05},{"id":"eritrean-independence-war","title":"Eritrean War of Independence","startYear":1961,"endYear":1993,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Eritrean People's Liberation Front and predecessor movements fought a three-decade war against Ethiopian rule; Eritrea achieved independence via a 1993 UN-observed referendum","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":117600,"territoryDesc":"Eritrea (about 117,600 km2), a former Italian and British-administered territory federated with and later annexed by Ethiopia in 1962, became an independent state after a 1993 referendum in which 99.8% voted for independence","lat":15.33,"lon":38.93,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.33,"fromLon":38.93,"toLat":15.45,"toLon":36.4,"label":"Eritrea → Kassala, Sudan","people":400000}],"summary":"Eritrean nationalist forces, initially the Eritrean Liberation Front and later the dominant Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), fought a war against Ethiopian rule from 1961, after Ethiopia's 1962 annexation of what had been a UN-federated territory, until Ethiopian forces were defeated in 1991. Decades of fighting and Ethiopian counterinsurgency campaigns drove several hundred thousand Eritreans into refuge in neighboring Sudan. Following the EPLF's military victory and the fall of Ethiopia's Derg regime in 1991, Eritrea held a UN-supervised independence referendum in April 1993 in which 99.8% of voters approved independence, and Eritrea became a sovereign state that May. The war and its aftermath left long-term refugee populations in Sudan and elsewhere, some of whom remain displaced generations later.","ongoing":false,"_mag":705600,"countries":["Eritrea","Sudan"],"deathsLow":65000,"deathsHigh":250000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"_deaths":157500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Eritrea at the start of the armed struggle in 1961","baselineYear":1961,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3333333333333333},{"id":"goa-annexation","title":"Indian Annexation of Goa, Daman and Diu","startYear":1961,"endYear":1961,"type":"territory","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"India's military conducted 'Operation Vijay,' seizing the Portuguese colonial enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu on the western Indian coast","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":3814,"territoryDesc":"The Portuguese colonial territories of Goa, Daman and Diu on India's west coast","lat":15.4,"lon":74.05,"flows":[],"summary":"In December 1961, India's armed forces invaded and annexed the Portuguese enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu after Portugal refused to relinquish them as it had other European colonial holdings in the subcontinent. The brief operation ended over four centuries of Portuguese colonial rule with minimal casualties. India characterized the action as the completion of decolonization; Portugal, then under the Estado Novo dictatorship, and some Western governments condemned it at the time as an act of military aggression against a NATO member's territory. Portugal did not formally recognize Indian sovereignty over the territories until 1974, after its own Carnation Revolution.","ongoing":false,"_mag":22884,"countries":["India"],"deathsLow":50,"deathsHigh":60,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":55,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":626978,"baselineWhat":"The population of Goa, Daman and Diu at the 1961 census, taken shortly after the Indian annexation","baselineYear":1961,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"expulsion-of-indians-from-burma-1962","title":"The Departure of Burma's Indian and Chinese Communities after 1962","startYear":1962,"endYear":1967,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Ne Win's military government nationalised private enterprise, expelled non-citizens and drove out most of Burma's Indian and much of its Chinese population","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.87,"lon":96.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.87,"fromLon":96.2,"toLat":13.08,"toLon":80.27,"label":"Indians evacuated from Rangoon to Madras","people":300000}],"summary":"After the 1962 coup, General Ne Win's Revolutionary Council pursued the Burmese Way to Socialism, nationalising banks, trade and industry under the Enterprise Nationalisation Law of 1963-64. The measures fell hardest on Burma's Indian community, long dominant in commerce, moneylending and the professions, and on Chinese business families; property was seized without effective compensation, licences withdrawn and residence permits refused. The Indian government organised ships and aircraft to evacuate people from Rangoon, and more than 300,000 left in two years, most with only what they could carry. Those who remained were largely excluded from citizenship, a position formalised by the 1982 citizenship law which recognised only 'national races' resident before 1823. Anti-Chinese riots in Rangoon in June 1967, encouraged by official propaganda during a dispute with Beijing, killed dozens and prompted further departures. The episode is little remembered outside the communities affected, and is a direct antecedent of Myanmar's later statelessness regimes.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Myanmar","India"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The Indian and Chinese communities of Burma at the start of the 1960s","baselineYear":1962,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3},{"id":"sino-indian-war-aksai-chin","title":"Sino-Indian War and Chinese Control of Aksai Chin","startYear":1962,"endYear":1962,"type":"territory","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"China and India fought a brief border war in the Himalayas; China retained control of the Aksai Chin plateau in the western sector, which India claims as part of Ladakh","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":37244,"territoryDesc":"Aksai Chin, a high-altitude, largely uninhabited plateau in the western Himalayas, claimed by India as part of the union territory of Ladakh and administered by China as part of Xinjiang/Tibet","lat":35,"lon":79.5,"flows":[],"summary":"In October–November 1962, China and India fought a short but intense war along their disputed Himalayan frontier, triggered by competing territorial claims and India's 'Forward Policy' of establishing outposts in contested areas. China declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew from most gains in the eastern sector (near Arunachal Pradesh) but retained control of Aksai Chin in the west, a strategically important plateau linking Tibet and Xinjiang. India considers Aksai Chin part of Ladakh and the loss of the territory a lasting national grievance; the two countries have never agreed on a final boundary in this sector, and it remains patrolled along the Line of Actual Control.","ongoing":false,"_mag":223464,"countries":["China"],"deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":3000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":2500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The resident population of the Aksai Chin plateau","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"west-papua-takeover-transmigration","title":"Indonesian Takeover of West Papua and Transmigration","startYear":1962,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Indonesia assumed administration of Dutch New Guinea under the 1962 New York Agreement, formalized control after the 1969 Act of Free Choice, and sponsored large-scale settler migration into the region","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":421981,"territoryDesc":"Western New Guinea (former Dutch New Guinea), roughly 421,981 km2, transferred to Indonesian administration and later formally annexed","lat":-2.53,"lon":140.72,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.2,"fromLon":106.82,"toLat":-2.53,"toLon":140.72,"label":"Jakarta/Java → Jayapura (transmigration)","people":400000},{"fromLat":-8.65,"fromLon":115.22,"toLat":-8.47,"toLon":140.4,"label":"Bali → Merauke (transmigration)","people":150000},{"fromLat":-4.09,"fromLon":138.94,"toLat":-2.67,"toLon":141.3,"label":"Papua highlands (Wamena) → Vanimo, Papua New Guinea (refugee flight)","people":40000}],"summary":"Following Dutch decolonization negotiations, the 1962 New York Agreement placed Dutch New Guinea under UN and then Indonesian administration, contingent on a future act of self-determination. In the contested 1969 \"Act of Free Choice,\" only 1,025 Papuan representatives, hand-selected and reportedly pressured by the Indonesian military, voted unanimously for integration with Indonesia, a result the UN General Assembly noted rather than formally endorsed. Indonesia subsequently sponsored decades of state transmigration bringing hundreds of thousands of settlers, chiefly from Java and Bali, into the region, while low-level separatist insurgency and military operations have displaced tens of thousands of indigenous Papuans, some permanently across the border into Papua New Guinea. Demographic change, resource extraction, and continuing conflict remain central and unresolved issues in the region, now split into several Indonesian provinces.","ongoing":true,"settlers":550000,"_mag":2531886,"countries":["Indonesia"],"deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","torture","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":200000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":800000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous Papuan population of western New Guinea when Indonesia took over","baselineYear":1962,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":true,"_share":0.05},{"id":"dhofar-rebellion-oman-resettlement","title":"The Dhofar Rebellion: Collective Punishment, Resettlement and Refugee Flight in Oman","startYear":1963,"endYear":1976,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Omani sultanate, with British and Iranian support, fought a Marxist insurgency in Dhofar and used food denial, aerial attack and controlled resettlement against the mountain population","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":17.02,"lon":54.09,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.95,"fromLon":53.6,"toLat":16.69,"toLon":53.05,"label":"Dhofari refugees into the PDRY (Hauf)","people":null}],"summary":"An insurgency that began in 1963 as a movement of Dhofari tribesmen became, after 1968, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, supported from the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen. Sultan Said bin Taimur responded with collective punishment: wells were filled, livestock shot and villages burned, and movement between the mountains and the coast was controlled. After Qaboos deposed his father in 1970 the campaign was redesigned with British advice around amnesty, civil-action teams, drilled wells and government centres, alongside food-denial operations and aerial attack in areas held by the front; populations were concentrated where they could be supplied and watched. Thousands fled west into the PDRY, where the front administered camps and schools; others were resettled around the coastal towns. The war ended in 1975-76 with the front's defeat, and the resettlement pattern permanently changed jebali life. Omani official history treats the period as a renaissance; scholarly accounts of the counter-insurgency emphasise the coercive elements alongside the development programme.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":10000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":6000,"countries":["Oman","Yemen"],"baselinePop":35000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Dhofar at the outbreak of the rebellion","baselineYear":1965,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8571428571428571},{"id":"french-nuclear-testing-moruroa","title":"French Nuclear Testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa","startYear":1963,"endYear":1996,"dateApprox":false,"type":"territory","region":"Oceania","actors":"France appropriated two atolls in the Tuamotu group as a nuclear test site and conducted 193 atmospheric and underground tests, exposing the Maohi population of French Polynesia to fallout","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the Tuamotu archipelago were taken over by the Centre d'experimentation du Pacifique from 1963-64 and closed to Polynesians; they remain under French military control, and the Moruroa atoll rim is monitored for subsidence and radionuclide leakage.","lat":-21.84,"lon":-138.89,"flows":[{"fromLat":-21.84,"fromLon":-138.89,"toLat":-23.12,"toLon":-134.97,"label":"Fallout from atmospheric tests over the Gambier Islands","people":null}],"summary":"After Algerian independence ended testing in the Sahara, France established the Centre d'experimentation du Pacifique in 1963 and converted the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa in French Polynesia into a nuclear test site, conducting 193 tests between 1966 and 1996 — 46 in the atmosphere until 1974 and the remainder underground. Populated islands downwind, including the Gambiers and Tureia, were exposed to fallout without evacuation; the French authorities maintained for decades that the tests were clean and denied harm, a position they began to retreat from with the Morin Law of 2010, which created a compensation scheme administered by CIVEN. Declassified documents underpinning the 2021 Moruroa Files investigation by Disclose and Princeton researchers indicated that fallout doses were substantially higher than the state had acknowledged and that roughly 110,000 people, nearly the whole population of the territory, may have been exposed above compensation thresholds. President Macron acknowledged in 2021 that France owed a debt to French Polynesia, while rejecting the language of deliberate concealment. The atlas covered Maralinga and Bikini but not Moruroa.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["French Polynesia"],"baselinePop":84551,"baselineWhat":"The population of French Polynesia at the census immediately before testing began","baselineYear":1962,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"nubian-displacement-aswan-high-dam","title":"Nubian Displacement for the Aswan High Dam","startYear":1963,"endYear":1964,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Egyptian state relocated the Nubian population of the Nile valley above Aswan to government-built villages near Kom Ombo before Lake Nasser flooded their land; Sudan separately moved the population of Wadi Halfa district to New Halfa","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Nile valley from just above the old Aswan dam to the Sudanese border, and the Wadi Halfa district in Sudan, were flooded by Lake Nasser/Lake Nubia, permanently ending riverine settlement in Lower Nubia.","lat":22.35,"lon":31.62,"flows":[{"fromLat":22.35,"fromLon":31.62,"toLat":24.4764,"toLon":32.9433,"label":"Egyptian Nubia → New Nubia, Kom Ombo","people":50000},{"fromLat":21.8,"fromLon":31.35,"toLat":15.32,"toLon":35.6,"label":"Wadi Halfa → New Halfa, Sudan","people":null}],"summary":"Construction of the Aswan High Dam from 1960 created Lake Nasser, which submerged the whole of Egyptian Nubia and the Sudanese town and district of Wadi Halfa. About 50,000 Egyptian Nubians were moved in 1963–64 to a crescent of state-built villages near Kom Ombo, north of Aswan, on land and in housing very different from the riverside settlements they had occupied for centuries; Sudan moved the Wadi Halfa population south-east to the New Halfa irrigation scheme on the Atbara. The relocations were carried out with compensation and with the resettlement villages built in advance, but the sites were remote from the river, the housing and agricultural allotments were smaller and differently organized than what people had left, and anthropological studies of the new settlements documented sustained health, livelihood and social difficulties. UNESCO's parallel international campaign moved the temples of Abu Simbel and Philae. Egyptian Nubians have campaigned since for the right to return to the shores of Lake Nasser.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":50000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Egypt","Sudan"],"baselinePop":50000,"baselineWhat":"The resident Nubian population of the 44 Egyptian villages of the Nile valley above Aswan flooded by Lake Nasser","baselineYear":1963,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1},{"id":"shaksgam-cession","title":"1963 Sino-Pakistan Shaksgam Boundary Agreement","startYear":1963,"endYear":1963,"type":"territory","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Pakistan and China signed a bilateral boundary agreement under which Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Valley (Trans-Karakoram Tract), part of the disputed former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, to China","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":5300,"territoryDesc":"The Trans-Karakoram Tract (Shaksgam Valley), a sparsely populated high-mountain area in the northern part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir","lat":36,"lon":76.5,"flows":[],"summary":"In March 1963, Pakistan and China signed a boundary agreement delimiting their frontier in the Karakoram region, under which Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Valley (Trans-Karakoram Tract) to China while China relinquished other territorial claims further south. The agreement, reached while Kashmir's final status remained (and remains) unresolved between India and Pakistan, was never recognized by India. Cited figures for the area involved vary by source, from roughly 1,900 km² (net Pakistani concession after Chinese counter-concessions) to about 5,300 km² (the gross area some Indian sources attribute to the cession). The area remains sparsely inhabited high mountain terrain near K2.","ongoing":false,"_mag":31800,"countries":["China"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The resident population of the Shaksgam Valley (Trans-Karakoram Tract)","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"africville-destruction-halifax","title":"The Destruction of Africville, Halifax","startYear":1964,"endYear":1970,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The City of Halifax expropriated and demolished a long-established Black community on the shore of Bedford Basin and relocated its residents","peopleDisplaced":400,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.6672,"lon":-63.6019,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.6672,"fromLon":-63.6019,"toLat":44.6535,"toLon":-63.594,"label":"Africville residents rehoused in central Halifax public housing, including Uniacke Square","people":null}],"summary":"Africville was a Black community on the north shore of Halifax harbour founded in the nineteenth century by descendants of Black Loyalists and Black Refugees. Its residents paid municipal taxes but were never provided with water, sewers or paved roads, while the city placed a prison, an infectious-diseases hospital, a slaughterhouse and finally the municipal dump nearby; the area was then designated a slum. Between 1964 and 1967 the city expropriated the land for industrial and port development and for approaches to a new harbour bridge, moving residents and their possessions in municipal garbage trucks, an image that survivors have said summed up the manner of the removal. Households without registered title were offered 500 dollars, a furniture allowance and public housing; the last house was demolished on 2 January 1970 and the church was bulldozed at night. Halifax Regional Council formally apologised on 24 February 2010 and agreed a package including 4.5 million dollars and land for a replica church and heritage trust. Former residents and their descendants have continued to seek individual compensation and the return of land.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Canada"],"baselinePop":400,"baselineWhat":"The residents of Africville, the Black community on the shore of Bedford Basin, at the start of expropriation","baselineYear":1964,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":1},{"id":"brazil-indigenous-dispossession","title":"Dispossession and Displacement of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil","startYear":1964,"endYear":2016,"dateApprox":true,"type":"both","region":"Americas","actors":"The Brazilian state, ranchers and state-backed infrastructure projects seized indigenous lands and removed their inhabitants, first under the military dictatorship and later for Amazon dams","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":516,"territoryDesc":"516 km² flooded by the Belo Monte reservoir on the Xingu, of which about 400 km² was standing forest, with roughly 80 per cent of the river's flow diverted; the National Truth Commission separately found the Brazilian state responsible for the illegal seizure of indigenous lands across the country between 1946 and 1988 without quantifying the area.","lat":-3.2033,"lon":-52.2064,"flows":[{"fromLat":-3.4,"fromLon":-51.8,"toLat":-3.2033,"toLon":-52.2064,"label":"Volta Grande do Xingu and riverside settlements → Altamira resettlement districts","people":40000}],"summary":"Brazil's National Truth Commission reported in 2014 that the state bore responsibility, by action or omission, for the illegal seizure of indigenous lands and grave human rights violations against indigenous peoples between 1946 and 1988, estimating that at least 8,350 indigenous people were killed in that period. The commission documented deaths and forced removals caused by road and hydroelectric construction, deliberate exposure to infectious disease, detention and torture at institutions such as the Krenak Reformatory, and the engineered break-up of communities, naming the Waimiri-Atroari, Panará, Parakanã, Xetá, Tapayuna, Avá-Canoeiro, Nambikwara, Yanomami, Aikewara and Guarani Kaiowá among the peoples affected. The same pattern of state-driven displacement continued after the dictatorship in the Amazon dam programme: construction of Belo Monte on the Xingu from 2011 forcibly displaced more than 40,000 people, flooded 516 km² and diverted about 80 per cent of the river's flow, with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granting precautionary measures in April 2011 and admitting a case against Brazil in December 2015 over the absence of prior consultation. Resettlement conditions for displaced riverside and indigenous families were widely found inadequate, and recently contacted peoples including the Parakanã and Arara were among those affected.","deathsLow":8350,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","torture","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Brazil"],"baselinePop":100000,"baselineWhat":"The indigenous population of Brazil at the nadir of its decline, around the time the military government's frontier programmes began","baselineYear":1964,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4},{"id":"colombia-internal-displacement","title":"Colombian Internal Armed Conflict and Displacement","startYear":1964,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Leftist guerrillas (FARC, ELN), right-wing paramilitaries (AUC and successors), the Colombian state, and drug-trafficking armed groups have all displaced civilians over six decades of conflict","peopleDisplaced":9000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":5.7,"lon":-76.6,"flows":[{"fromLat":7.89,"fromLon":-76.65,"toLat":4.6,"toLon":-74.08,"label":"Urabá/Chocó → Bogotá","people":800000},{"fromLat":8.3,"fromLon":-73.1,"toLat":7.89,"toLon":-72.5,"label":"Catatumbo → Cúcuta","people":400000}],"summary":"Colombia has experienced one of the world's longest-running internal armed conflicts, involving Marxist guerrilla groups (principally FARC and ELN), right-wing paramilitary organizations (the AUC and its successors), state security forces, and drug-trafficking armed groups, with civilians repeatedly displaced through massacres, land seizures and forced recruitment. Colombia's Victims' Unit has registered more than 9 million people as displacement victims since 1985, and despite the 2016 peace accord with the FARC, violence by ELN, FARC dissident factions and other armed groups has continued to generate large-scale new displacement in regions such as Chocó, Catatumbo and Nariño. Colombia consistently ranks among the countries with the largest internally displaced populations globally.","ongoing":true,"_mag":9000000,"countries":["Colombia"],"deathsLow":450664,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":625332,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":17484508,"baselineWhat":"The population of Colombia at the 1964 census, the year the conflict is conventionally dated from","baselineYear":1964,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.5147413927803973},{"id":"laos-air-war-and-plain-of-jars-evacuation","title":"The Air War over Laos and the Evacuation of the Plain of Jars","startYear":1964,"endYear":1975,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"US air power, the CIA-directed Lao irregular forces and North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops emptied the Plain of Jars and much of northern Laos","peopleDisplaced":750000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.43,"lon":103.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.43,"fromLon":103.15,"toLat":18.58,"toLon":102.6,"label":"Plain of Jars population evacuated towards Vientiane","people":null}],"summary":"From 1964 the United States bombed Laos on a scale that made it, per head, one of the most heavily bombed countries in history: more than 500,000 sorties and about 2 million tons of ordnance over nine years, targeting the Ho Chi Minh trail in the south and Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese positions in the north. On the Plain of Jars the population moved into caves and trenches and farmed at night; in 1969, as the ground war shifted, the plain's remaining inhabitants were evacuated, some by CIA-organised airlift, and the area was left empty. USAID refugee statistics recorded 700,000-750,000 people displaced within Laos by the early 1970s, many repeatedly. Fred Branfman's collection of refugee testimony and drawings, Voices from the Plain of Jars, published in 1972, was the first substantial public account; the US government had described the campaign as limited or denied it altogether. Unexploded ordnance has continued to kill and injure Laotians and to sterilise farmland for fifty years, and the atlas covers the postwar Hmong flight separately.","deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":60000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":750000,"_deaths":40000,"countries":["Laos"],"baselinePop":2500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Laos at the start of the American air campaign in the mid-1960s","baselineYear":1965,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3},{"id":"zanzibar-revolution-1964","title":"The 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and the Flight of Zanzibar's Arabs","startYear":1964,"endYear":1964,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Insurgents of the Afro-Shirazi movement overthrew the Sultanate of Zanzibar and killed and expelled members of the island's Arab and South Asian minorities","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.1659,"lon":39.2026,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.1659,"fromLon":39.2026,"toLat":23.588,"toLon":58.3829,"label":"Zanzibar → Oman","people":null},{"fromLat":-6.1659,"fromLon":39.2026,"toLat":-6.7924,"toLon":39.2083,"label":"Zanzibar → mainland Tanganyika","people":null}],"summary":"On 12 January 1964, a month after independence, an armed uprising overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah and the Arab-led government of Zanzibar. Britannica records that the revolt was carried out by only about 600 armed men under John Okello but drew wide support from the African population, and that thousands of Arabs were massacred in the ensuing violence while thousands more fled. Estimates of the dead vary enormously and none rests on a body count: academic estimates cited in the press range from 5,000 to 15,000 Arabs killed, the BBC has cited up to 17,000 including South Asians, and other historians consider figures in the low thousands more plausible. Thousands were also imprisoned. The revolution installed Abeid Amani Karume as president; Zanzibar united with Tanganyika in April 1964 to form Tanzania. Property confiscations and discriminatory decrees under Karume drove continued emigration of Arabs and South Asians through the 1960s and 1970s, chiefly to Oman. No inquiry into the killings was ever conducted.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":17000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":8800,"_deaths":11000,"countries":["Tanzania","Oman"],"baselinePop":70000,"baselineWhat":"The Arab and South Asian population of Zanzibar recorded at the last colonial census before the revolution","baselineYear":1958,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"cuba-umap-labour-camps","title":"Cuba's UMAP Forced-Labour Camps","startYear":1965,"endYear":1968,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Cuban government conscripted men classed as unfit for military service or socially deviant into agricultural labour camps in Camaguey","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":21.3808,"lon":-77.9169,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.1136,"fromLon":-82.3666,"toLat":21.3808,"toLon":-77.9169,"label":"Conscripts sent from Havana and across Cuba to the Camaguey camps","people":null}],"summary":"The Military Units to Aid Production, known by the Spanish acronym UMAP, were agricultural labour camps run by the Cuban armed forces in Camaguey province from November 1965 to July 1968. They took men liable to the draft who were classed as unsuitable for regular service: conscientious objectors, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, gay men, farmers who resisted collectivisation and others labelled antisocial or counter-revolutionary. A 1967 report by the Organization of American States described over 30,000 internees working ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without pay, in congested barracks with poor food and water and no electricity or showers, and concluded that the camps served both to supply free labour and to punish young people who refused to join communist organisations. The Cuban government maintained that the units were a form of military service rather than labour camps; Fidel Castro said in a 2010 interview that there had been moments of great injustice, and the state has since presented the camps as an error. Historians including Abel Sierra Madero argue they should be understood as an instrument of social engineering combining military, judicial, educational and psychiatric means.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Cuba"],"baselinePop":7800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cuba when the UMAP camps opened","baselineYear":1965,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.0038461538461538464},{"id":"indonesian-mass-killings-1965-66","title":"Indonesian Mass Killings and Mass Detention","startYear":1965,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Indonesian army under Major General Suharto, working with civilian militias and religious youth groups, killed and imprisoned alleged members and sympathisers of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI)","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-7.5,"lon":110.9,"flows":[],"summary":"After the killing of six army generals on 1 October 1965, blamed by the army on the PKI, Indonesian military units and allied civilian militias carried out a campaign of killings and mass arrests that ran through 1966 and was concentrated in Central and East Java, Bali and North Sumatra. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both place the death toll at between 500,000 and one million, while several hundred thousand more were imprisoned without trial, some for over a decade, including at the Buru Island penal colony; the government declared its phased release of untried 'B-category' detainees complete with a final release of 105 prisoners on 20 December 1979, though Amnesty International disputed that the problem was resolved and released prisoners remained under restrictions. Indonesia's national human rights commission, Komnas HAM, concluded in 2012 that there was sufficient preliminary evidence of gross violations amounting to crimes against humanity, listing killing, extermination, enslavement, forced eviction, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence, persecution and enforced disappearance; the government rejected the findings and no prosecutions have followed. A non-binding International People's Tribunal in The Hague reached a similar conclusion in 2016. Indonesian state accounts have long characterised the events as a spontaneous popular response to an attempted communist coup rather than an organised military campaign.","deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","forced labour","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":750000,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":104000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Indonesia in 1965","baselineYear":1965,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.009615384615384616},{"id":"vietnam-war-wartime-displacement","title":"Vietnam War Wartime Displacement","startYear":1965,"endYear":1975,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"US, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces conducted operations, bombing, and resettlement programs (e.g. strategic hamlets) that displaced millions of South Vietnamese civilians","peopleDisplaced":10000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.05,"lon":108.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.12,"fromLon":108.8,"toLat":16.05,"toLon":108.2,"label":"Rural Quang Ngai province → Da Nang","people":1500000},{"fromLat":10.03,"fromLon":105.78,"toLat":10.82,"toLon":106.63,"label":"Mekong Delta countryside → Saigon","people":2000000}],"summary":"Between the escalation of US involvement in 1965 and the war's end in 1975, sustained combat, aerial bombing, defoliation campaigns, and forced-resettlement programs such as the Strategic Hamlet Program drove one of the largest internal displacements of the era, pushing millions of rural South Vietnamese into cities, refugee camps, and government-controlled hamlets. Estimates of the cumulative number of people displaced at least once vary widely, from about 5 million to more than 10 million, reflecting the difficulty of tracking repeated, overlapping displacement over a decade of conflict. The war also produced large displacement inside Laos and Cambodia as fighting spread across Indochina. Urban populations, especially Saigon's, swelled dramatically as a result.","ongoing":false,"_mag":10000000,"countries":["Vietnam"],"deathsLow":1000000,"deathsHigh":3800000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":2400000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":16100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of South Vietnam at the start of large-scale American ground operations in 1965","baselineYear":1965,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6211180124223602,"related":[{"id":"vietnam-new-economic-zones","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Many people sent to Vietnam's New Economic Zones after 1975 were wartime refugees from the swollen southern cities."}]},{"id":"cultural-revolution-expulsions-and-rural-massacres","title":"The Cultural Revolution: Urban Expulsions, Cadre Schools and Rural Massacres","startYear":1966,"endYear":1976,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Party organisations, Red Guards and local militias in China expelled 'bad class' households from the cities, sent officials to rural labour and carried out mass killings in several provinces","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9,"lon":116.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":116.4,"toLat":37.87,"toLon":114.51,"label":"'Bad class' households expelled from Beijing to rural counties","people":77000}],"summary":"Alongside the sending-down of urban youth, the Cultural Revolution produced several distinct forced movements and killings. In the 'Red August' of 1966, Beijing's authorities and Red Guards expelled 77,000 people of stigmatised class background from the capital and recorded 1,772 deaths in the city that month; similar expulsions took place in other cities. Cadres, academics and technical staff were dispersed to May Seventh Cadre Schools for manual labour. In the provinces, factional conflict and campaigns against alleged class enemies turned into organised killing: official Guangxi investigations after 1980 recorded 84,000-100,000 or more deaths in that province in 1967-68, an official inquiry in Dao County, Hunan, recorded 4,519 dead, and the campaign against the alleged Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party produced official figures of 16,222 deaths and 87,180 people permanently injured, most of them Mongols, with unofficial estimates far higher. Estimates of total Cultural Revolution deaths range from about 750,000 in the rural-focused work of Andrew Walder and Su Yang to figures of several million in other reconstructions; the Sciences Po survey gives an average across six investigators of about 2.95 million. The Chinese Communist Party's 1981 resolution described the decade as a catastrophe caused by Mao's errors, but the underlying archives are largely closed.","deathsLow":750000,"deathsHigh":3000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":1875000,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":745000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the People's Republic of China at the start of the Cultural Revolution","baselineYear":1966,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"guyana-venezuela-essequibo","title":"Guyana-Venezuela Essequibo Territorial Dispute","startYear":1966,"endYear":2026,"type":"territory","region":"Americas","actors":"Venezuela claims sovereignty over the Essequibo region, about two-thirds of Guyana's territory, disputing the validity of an 1899 arbitral award; the dispute intensified after offshore oil discoveries and Venezuela's 2023 unilateral referendum","peopleDisplaced":0,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Essequibo region, about 159,500 km² — claimed by Venezuela, administered by Guyana; no territory has changed hands on the ground","lat":6.8,"lon":-58.6,"flows":[{"fromLat":10.48,"fromLon":-66.9,"toLat":6.8,"toLon":-58.6,"label":"Venezuela's territorial claim over Essequibo","people":0}],"summary":"Venezuela claims the Essequibo region administered by Guyana, arguing the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award that set the modern boundary was fraudulent, a position it bases on the 1966 Geneva Agreement that reopened the question shortly before Guyana's independence. The dispute intensified after major offshore oil discoveries in Guyana's Essequibo-adjacent waters in the 2010s, and in December 2023 Venezuela held a domestic referendum asserting claims to the territory and later created a nominal Venezuelan state of 'Guayana Esequiba.' The International Court of Justice, hearing Guyana's case seeking to affirm the 1899 award as final and binding, ordered provisional measures in December 2023 directing Venezuela not to take unilateral action altering Guyana's control of the territory, and held oral hearings on the merits in 2026.","ongoing":true,"_mag":0,"countries":["Guyana","Venezuela"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":125000,"baselineWhat":"The resident population of the Essequibo region of Guyana, the territory claimed by Venezuela, which covers about two-thirds of Guyana's land area","baselineYear":2012,"asOf":"2026-05","weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"village-grouping-in-mizoram-and-nagaland","title":"Village Grouping in Mizoram and Nagaland","startYear":1966,"endYear":1975,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Indian Army regrouped the rural population of the Mizo Hills into guarded settlements to cut off the Mizo National Front","peopleDisplaced":236000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":23.73,"lon":92.72,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.3,"fromLon":92.9,"toLat":23.73,"toLon":92.72,"label":"Villagers moved into grouping centres along the roads","people":null}],"summary":"After the Mizo National Front declared independence in March 1966 and seized Aizawl, the Indian Air Force strafed and bombed the town in the only instance of India using air power on its own territory, an action the government did not publicly acknowledge for decades. The Union Cabinet approved a regrouping scheme in December 1966, and from 1967 the army moved villagers out of their settlements, often burning the abandoned houses and granaries, into guarded roadside camps under curfew and rationing. Records show 516 of 764 villages emptied and about 236,000 people relocated, close to four-fifths of the rural population; jhum cultivation cycles were broken, and villages were never restored to their former sites. Similar grouping had been used in Nagaland from the late 1950s. The Mizo insurgency ended with the 1986 accord and Mizoram's statehood; the grouping years remain central to Mizo public memory and to arguments about the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which remains in force in parts of the north-east.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":236000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":332390,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Mizo Hills district (later Mizoram)","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.7100093263936942},{"id":"biafran-war","title":"Nigerian Civil War (Biafran War)","startYear":1967,"endYear":1970,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Nigerian federal government fought the secessionist, Igbo-led Republic of Biafra; a federal blockade caused mass famine among Biafran civilians","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":76000,"territoryDesc":"the self-declared Republic of Biafra (approximately 76,000 km2 of southeastern Nigeria) attempted to secede; it was militarily defeated and reincorporated into Nigeria in 1970","lat":6.44,"lon":7.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.44,"fromLon":7.5,"toLat":5.53,"toLon":7.49,"label":"Enugu → Umuahia (wartime capital moves)","people":300000},{"fromLat":4.82,"fromLon":7.05,"toLat":5.53,"toLon":7.49,"label":"Port Harcourt → interior Biafra","people":500000}],"summary":"In 1967 the Eastern Region of Nigeria, dominated by the Igbo ethnic group, declared independence as the Republic of Biafra following a series of coups and anti-Igbo pogroms in northern Nigeria. The Nigerian federal government responded with a military campaign that included a blockade of Biafran territory, producing mass starvation that became a defining international humanitarian crisis of the era, with widely publicized images of famine driving global relief efforts. Biafra surrendered in January 1970; estimates of total deaths range from roughly one million to three million, the large majority from starvation and disease rather than direct combat, and millions of civilians were displaced within Biafran territory during the war. The war remains a foundational and contested episode in Nigerian history, with debates over whether the federal blockade constituted a deliberate policy of starvation.","ongoing":false,"_mag":3000000,"countries":["Nigeria"],"deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":3000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege","mass killing"],"_deaths":1750000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":13500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which seceded as Biafra","baselineYear":1967,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2222222222222222},{"id":"east-jerusalem-annexation","title":"Israeli Annexation of East Jerusalem","startYear":1967,"endYear":1980,"type":"territory","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israel extended its law, jurisdiction, and municipal administration over East Jerusalem within days of capturing it in June 1967, and formally declared unified Jerusalem its capital under the 1980 Jerusalem Law.","peopleDisplaced":14000,"territoryKm2":70,"territoryDesc":"About 70 km2 of the West Bank, including the Old City and surrounding villages, was annexed to an expanded Jerusalem municipality.","lat":31.78,"lon":35.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.78,"fromLon":35.23,"toLat":31.9,"toLon":35.2,"label":"East Jerusalem (revoked residency) → West Bank","people":14000}],"summary":"Within days of capturing East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Israel extended its law and municipal boundaries over roughly 70 km2, including the Old City, and later passed the 1980 Jerusalem Law declaring a united Jerusalem its 'eternal and undivided' capital. Palestinian residents were granted Israeli permanent-resident status rather than citizenship, a status that can be and has been revoked; human rights groups document over 14,000 such revocations since 1967, alongside home demolitions and settlement construction in and around the city. Roughly 370,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem today alongside a growing Israeli settler population. No other state recognizes Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, and most embassies remain in Tel Aviv or, more recently, some in western Jerusalem only.","ongoing":false,"_mag":14000,"countries":["Palestine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":68600,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian population of the East Jerusalem area annexed by Israel in June 1967","baselineYear":1967,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.20408163265306123},{"id":"six-day-war-1967","title":"1967 Six-Day War and Territorial Occupation","startYear":1967,"endYear":1967,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israel fought Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, capturing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria in six days of fighting.","peopleDisplaced":420000,"territoryKm2":67000,"territoryDesc":"Sinai Peninsula (~60,000 km2), West Bank (~5,655 km2), Gaza Strip (~365 km2), and Golan Heights (~1,200 km2) came under Israeli military occupation.","lat":31.9,"lon":35.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.9,"fromLon":35.2,"toLat":31.95,"toLon":35.93,"label":"West Bank → Jordan","people":250000},{"fromLat":33.13,"fromLon":35.82,"toLat":33.51,"toLon":36.28,"label":"Golan Heights → Syria","people":100000},{"fromLat":31.13,"fromLon":33.8,"toLat":30.04,"toLon":31.24,"label":"Sinai (Egyptian residents/military) → Egypt","people":15000}],"summary":"In the June 1967 war, Israel decisively defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Some 300,000–430,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and elsewhere, many of them refugees for a second time since 1948, while up to 130,000 Syrians left the Golan Heights, whose population fell from around 130,000 to a few thousand. UN Security Council Resolution 242 subsequently called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for peace, a formula not fully implemented. Sinai was later returned to Egypt (1982), while the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights remain, in whole or part, under Israeli control or occupation.","ongoing":false,"_mag":420000,"countries":["Palestine","Jordan","Israel","Syria","Egypt"],"deathsLow":12300,"deathsHigh":19300,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":15800,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the territories Israel occupied in June 1967 — the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and Sinai","baselineYear":1967,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3,"related":[{"id":"unrwa-palestine-refugee-camps","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":145000,"note":"About 145,000 of the Palestinians displaced in 1967 were 1948 refugees uprooted a second time and are also counted among UNRWA-registered refugees."}]},{"id":"west-bank-settlements","title":"Israeli Settlement Expansion in the West Bank","startYear":1967,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Successive Israeli governments and settler organizations established and expanded civilian settlements and outposts across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on land occupied since 1967, alongside a road, checkpoint, and barrier network.","peopleDisplaced":50000,"territoryKm2":3000,"territoryDesc":"Area C, about 60% of the West Bank (~3,400 km² of a ~5,655 km² territory), under full Israeli civil and security control under the Oslo II framework","lat":31.95,"lon":35.25,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.4,"fromLon":35.13,"toLat":31.44,"toLon":35.11,"label":"Masafer Yatta → nearby Palestinian towns","people":1200},{"fromLat":31.83,"fromLon":35.3,"toLat":31.85,"toLon":35.28,"label":"Khan al-Ahmar area → East Jerusalem periphery","people":3000}],"summary":"Since 1967, and accelerating after the 1993 Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, Israel has built and expanded settlements now housing over 700,000 Israeli citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlement growth has been accompanied by land expropriation, demolition of Palestinian structures built without hard-to-obtain Israeli permits, and restrictions on Palestinian movement and construction, particularly in Area C, which covers roughly 60% of the West Bank. Communities such as Masafer Yatta and Bedouin herding communities near Jerusalem have faced repeated eviction pressure and demolitions. The pace of settlement expansion and settler violence against Palestinians has increased markedly since 2023.","ongoing":true,"_mag":50000,"countries":["Palestine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":660000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian population of the West Bank including East Jerusalem when the occupation began","baselineYear":1967,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.07575757575757576,"related":[{"id":"west-bank-movement-regime","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinians displaced by settlement expansion are also among the West Bank population whose movement is restricted by the closure and permit regime."}]},{"id":"aldeamentos-and-protected-villages","title":"Aldeamentos and Protected Villages: Counter-Insurgency Resettlement in Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia","startYear":1968,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Portuguese colonial forces and the Rhodesian government concentrated rural African populations into guarded settlements to separate them from guerrilla movements","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-16.1564,"lon":33.5867,"flows":[{"fromLat":-15.5,"fromLon":33,"toLat":-16.1564,"toLon":33.5867,"label":"Mozambican villagers moved into aldeamentos in Tete province","people":500000},{"fromLat":-17,"fromLon":32,"toLat":-16.5,"toLon":31.5,"label":"Rhodesian protected villages in the north-east","people":400000}],"summary":"Facing rural guerrilla movements, both the Portuguese colonial state and the Rhodesian government adopted the counter-insurgency doctrine of separating populations from insurgents by physical concentration. In Mozambique from 1968 the Portuguese army moved roughly a million people into aldeamentos - fenced villages under military or militia guard, with curfews and controlled movement - concentrated in Tete, Cabo Delgado and Niassa, and pursued a similar policy in Angola and Guinea-Bissau; the programme was accompanied by free-fire zones outside the perimeters and by the destruction of abandoned settlements. Rhodesia began its Protected Villages programme in 1973-74 in the Chiweshe and Madziwa tribal trust lands, and by 1978 official figures record about 580,000 people in some 230 protected villages, with residents subject to curfew, searches, restrictions on food carried outside the fence, and communal fines. Conditions in both systems were widely reported as poor, with crowding, distance from fields, loss of livestock and rising malnutrition and mortality; both governments presented the settlements as protective and as development schemes. The systems ended with Mozambican independence in 1975 and with the Lancaster House settlement in Rhodesia in 1979, and displaced populations largely dispersed back to their land, in Mozambique into the further upheaval of the post-independence civil war.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","forced labour","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mozambique","Zimbabwe"],"baselinePop":18000000,"baselineWhat":"The African population of Mozambique, Angola and Rhodesia around 1970","baselineYear":1970,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.1111111111111111},{"id":"anfal-kirkuk-arabization","title":"Anfal Campaign and Arabization of Kirkuk","startYear":1968,"endYear":2003,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein's Baath Party carried out the Anfal campaign (1986–1989, most intensely in 1988) against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq, including chemical attacks such as the 1988 Halabja massacre, alongside a decades-long 'Arabization' policy expelling Kurdish, Turkmen, and Assyrian residents from the Kirkuk area and replacing them with Arab settlers.","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":9679,"territoryDesc":"Kirkuk Governorate (~9,679 km2), a major oil-producing area, was subjected to systematic demographic engineering intended to reduce its Kurdish and Turkmen population share and consolidate Arab and central government control.","lat":35.47,"lon":44.39,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.47,"fromLon":44.39,"toLat":35.56,"toLon":45.44,"label":"Kirkuk Kurds/Turkmen → Sulaymaniyah region","people":150000},{"fromLat":35.18,"fromLon":45.99,"toLat":35.52,"toLon":46.18,"label":"Halabja → Iran border (post chemical attack)","people":60000},{"fromLat":31.06,"fromLon":46.26,"toLat":35.47,"toLon":44.39,"label":"Arab settlers relocated from southern Iraq → Kirkuk","people":100000}],"summary":"From the late 1960s, and especially under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government pursued a systematic 'Arabization' policy in the oil-rich Kirkuk region, expelling Kurdish, Turkmen, and Assyrian families and resettling Arab families from central and southern Iraq in their place. This policy culminated in the 1986–1989 Anfal campaign, a military operation against Kurdish rural areas that destroyed an estimated 1,200 or more villages, forcibly relocated survivors to guarded camps, and killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people according to Human Rights Watch, including roughly 5,000 killed in the March 1988 chemical attack on Halabja. Iraqi, Kurdish, and international bodies have variously recognized these events as genocide against the Kurds. The demographic status of Kirkuk, contested between Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab communities, remains legally unresolved under Article 140 of Iraq's post-2003 constitution.","ongoing":false,"_mag":600000,"countries":["Iraq","Iran"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":182000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":116000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":3700000,"baselineWhat":"The Kurdish population of Iraq around the time of the Anfal campaign","baselineYear":1987,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16216216216216217},{"id":"burma-four-cuts-forced-relocations","title":"Burma's Four Cuts Strategy and Forced Relocation in the Ethnic States","startYear":1968,"endYear":2005,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Burmese army emptied villages in the Shan, Karen, Karenni and Mon states to separate insurgents from the population, and used the displaced as forced labour","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":20.79,"lon":97.03,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.5,"fromLon":98,"toLat":20.79,"toLon":97.03,"label":"Villagers moved into army relocation sites in central Shan State","people":300000},{"fromLat":18,"fromLon":97.6,"toLat":18.3,"toLon":97.8,"label":"Karen and Karenni villagers displaced towards the Thai border","people":null}],"summary":"From the late 1960s the Burmese armed forces applied the pya ley pya or Four Cuts doctrine, aiming to sever insurgents from food, funds, intelligence and recruits by clearing the civilian population out of contested areas. Villages were given days or hours to move to sites beside army posts and roads; those who stayed or returned to their fields were treated as insurgents. The largest single operation, in central Shan State in 1996-98, emptied more than 1,400 villages and displaced over 300,000 people, documented in detail by the Karen Human Rights Group and Amnesty International, with extrajudicial killings of villagers found outside the relocation sites. Relocated populations were used for portering, road building and camp construction. In 1998 an International Labour Organization Commission of Inquiry found that forced labour was imposed in Myanmar widely and systematically in violation of Convention No. 29, a formal finding that led to unprecedented ILO measures against a member state. Myanmar's government rejected the reports as fabrications; the displacement fed the border camp population that the atlas covers separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Myanmar","Thailand"],"baselinePop":6600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Burma's Shan, Karen (Kayin), Karenni (Kayah) and Mon states","baselineYear":1983,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.09090909090909091},{"id":"chagos-depopulation","title":"Depopulation of the Chagos Archipelago","startYear":1968,"endYear":1973,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The United Kingdom, having detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to form the British Indian Ocean Territory, forcibly removed the entire Chagossian population to enable a US military base on Diego Garcia","peopleDisplaced":1800,"territoryKm2":60,"territoryDesc":"The Chagos Archipelago (British Indian Ocean Territory), including Diego Garcia, detached by the UK from Mauritius in 1965 ahead of Mauritian independence","lat":-7.31,"lon":72.41,"flows":[{"fromLat":-7.31,"fromLon":72.41,"toLat":-20.35,"toLon":57.55,"label":"Chagos Archipelago → Mauritius","people":1200},{"fromLat":-7.31,"fromLon":72.41,"toLat":-4.68,"toLon":55.49,"label":"Chagos Archipelago → Seychelles","people":300}],"summary":"In 1965, the United Kingdom detached the Chagos Archipelago from the colony of Mauritius, three years before Mauritian independence, to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Between 1968 and 1973, the UK forcibly removed the archipelago's entire population of roughly 1,500–2,000 Chagossians, relocating them mainly to Mauritius and Seychelles under harsh conditions, to allow the United States to build a military base on Diego Garcia, which remains operational. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2019 finding that the UK's detachment of Chagos was unlawful and that decolonization of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed. In 2025, the UK and Mauritius concluded a treaty under which the UK will cede sovereignty of the archipelago to Mauritius while retaining a long-term lease on Diego Garcia for the joint UK-US base; Chagossians themselves were not direct parties to those negotiations and continue to press for a right of return and fuller compensation.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1800,"countries":["Br. Indian Ocean Ter.","Mauritius","Seychelles"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1800,"baselineWhat":"The resident population of the Chagos Archipelago before its depopulation, including those prevented from returning while abroad","baselineYear":1966,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1},{"id":"china-rustication-down-to-the-countryside","title":"China's \"Down to the Countryside\" Rustication of Urban Youth","startYear":1968,"endYear":1980,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong relocated urban secondary-school graduates to rural villages, state farms and border regions for \"re-education by poor peasants\"","peopleDisplaced":17000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9,"lon":116.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.23,"fromLon":121.47,"toLat":47.35,"toLon":127,"label":"Shanghai → Heilongjiang state farms (indicative)","people":1000000},{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":116.4,"toLat":43,"toLon":111.9,"label":"Beijing → Inner Mongolia (indicative)","people":300000}],"summary":"Following Mao Zedong's December 1968 directive that it was 'very necessary for educated youth to go to the countryside', some 17 million urban secondary-school graduates, most aged between 15 and 23, were assigned to villages, state farms and frontier regions across China. The campaign closed urban schools and factories to a whole cohort, dispersed families, and tied those sent down to rural household registration that made return difficult; assignments continued after Mao's death and the movement was wound up around 1980, when large-scale returns to the cities began. Historians describe it as one of the largest state-organised population transfers of the twentieth century; participation was directed by the state rather than chosen, though pressure varied by city, family background and year, and a substantial minority of the eligible cohort was never sent. The returnees are widely referred to in China as the 'lost generation' for the schooling and careers forgone.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":17000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"baselinePop":135000000,"baselineWhat":"China's urban population at the start of the rustication campaign","baselineYear":1968,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.1259259259259259},{"id":"buru-island-penal-colony-indonesia","title":"The Buru Island Penal Colony for Indonesia's Political Prisoners","startYear":1969,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Indonesia's New Order government deported untried political detainees from Java to a prison colony on Buru and used them to clear and farm the island","peopleDisplaced":12000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-3.38,"lon":126.68,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.2,"fromLon":106.85,"toLat":-3.38,"toLon":126.68,"label":"Detainees shipped from Java to Buru","people":12000}],"summary":"Following the mass killings and mass detentions of 1965-66, the Indonesian government classified surviving detainees by supposed degree of involvement with the Communist Party; those in Category B, against whom no charges were brought, faced indefinite detention. From 1969 about 10,000-12,000 of them were shipped to Buru in the Moluccas, where they cleared forest, dug irrigation channels and grew rice under military supervision, in units that became permanent settlements. Prisoners were unpaid, subject to beatings and to deaths from illness and hunger; the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed the Buru Quartet there orally before writing it down. International pressure, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Carter administration, contributed to releases between 1977 and 1979. Released prisoners carried an ex-detainee marking on identity cards until 2004 and were barred from public employment. Indonesia's national human rights commission, Komnas HAM, concluded in 2012 that the events of 1965-66, including arbitrary detention and enslavement, amounted to gross violations of human rights; the Attorney General's office has not prosecuted, and in 2023 President Joko Widodo acknowledged past gross violations including this period without accepting state legal responsibility.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":12000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":600000,"baselineWhat":"The untried political detainees held by Indonesia's New Order after the killings of 1965-66, from whom the Buru exiles were selected","baselineYear":1969,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.02},{"id":"equatorial-guinea-macias-exodus","title":"Equatorial Guinea under Macías Nguema: Exodus and Forced Labour","startYear":1969,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"President Francisco Macías Nguema's government killed and imprisoned perceived opponents and conscripted citizens into compulsory plantation labour, driving roughly a third of the population into exile","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":3.7523,"lon":8.7742,"flows":[{"fromLat":1.85,"fromLon":9.76,"toLat":0.4162,"toLon":9.4673,"label":"Río Muni → Gabon","people":50000},{"fromLat":1.85,"fromLon":9.76,"toLat":4.0511,"toLon":9.7679,"label":"Río Muni → Cameroon","people":30000},{"fromLat":3.7523,"fromLon":8.7742,"toLat":40.4168,"toLon":-3.7038,"label":"Equatorial Guinea → Spain","people":8000}],"summary":"Francisco Macías Nguema, elected at independence in 1968, established a one-party state and progressively destroyed the country's administration, church and education system. The International Commission of Jurists, which observed his 1979 trial, reported that a March 1976 presidential decree conscripted all citizens over fifteen into compulsory labour on state plantations and mines, with about 25,000 workers 'recruited' in 1977 alone, working roughly twelve-hour days for food rations and subject to beatings. The tribunal worked from an indicative list of 441 named victims of assassination, expanded to 474 during the trial, while its chairman said the real number was far higher; later accounts have cited tens of thousands killed. Roughly 100,000 people, about a third of the population, left for Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria and Spain. Macías was overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang in August 1979, tried by a special military tribunal and executed the following month.","deathsLow":474,"deathsHigh":50000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","forced labour","torture","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":100000,"_deaths":25237,"countries":["Eq. Guinea","Gabon","Cameroon","Spain"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Equatorial Guinea at independence","baselineYear":1968,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3333333333333333},{"id":"northern-ireland-displacement-1969-72","title":"Northern Ireland: The Displacement of 1969-1972 and Internment","startYear":1969,"endYear":1975,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Sectarian intimidation, arson and paramilitary and mob attack drove Catholic and Protestant families out of mixed districts in Belfast and Derry, while the United Kingdom interned suspects without trial from 1971","peopleDisplaced":55000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Mixed streets in Belfast and Derry were resegregated into contiguous Catholic and Protestant districts, later formalised by peace walls.","lat":54.6,"lon":-5.93,"flows":[{"fromLat":54.6,"fromLon":-5.93,"toLat":53.35,"toLon":-6.26,"label":"Refugees crossing to camps in the Republic of Ireland, August 1969","people":null}],"summary":"The disturbances of August 1969 in Belfast and Derry, in which streets were burned in the Falls and Ardoyne areas and British troops were deployed, began a sustained movement of families out of mixed and minority districts; historians estimate 45,000-60,000 people were displaced between 1969 and 1973, with thousands crossing temporarily to camps in the Republic. The Scarman Tribunal, reporting in 1972, examined the 1969 violence and its social costs, including intimidation and the displacement of persons. From August 1971 the government introduced internment without trial under Operation Demetrius, detaining some 1,900 people over four years, overwhelmingly from the Catholic and nationalist community; fourteen detainees were subjected to the 'five techniques' of interrogation. In Ireland v. the United Kingdom (1978) the European Court of Human Rights held that these techniques amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment in breach of Article 3, reversing the Commission's finding of torture; Ireland's 2014 request to revise the judgment to a finding of torture was refused in 2018. Characterisations of the period remain politically contested in Northern Ireland.","deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":1400,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","torture","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":55000,"_deaths":1200,"countries":["United Kingdom","Ireland"],"baselinePop":1536065,"baselineWhat":"The population of Northern Ireland","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.03580577644826228},{"id":"cambodia-vietnamese-minority-expulsion","title":"The Expulsion and Killing of Cambodia's Vietnamese Minority","startYear":1970,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Lon Nol republic and then the Khmer Rouge expelled and killed Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese population","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.5564,"lon":104.9282,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.5564,"fromLon":104.9282,"toLat":10.7626,"toLon":106.6602,"label":"Ethnic Vietnamese expelled from Cambodia to South Vietnam","people":250000}],"summary":"After the March 1970 coup that installed Lon Nol, Cambodian forces and civilians carried out killings of ethnic Vietnamese residents, most notoriously at Prasaut and along the Mekong where bodies were floated downriver, and the government interned and then expelled much of the community; South Vietnamese and international accounts put the number repatriated at 200,000-300,000 and the dead in the thousands. Under Democratic Kampuchea the remaining Vietnamese were expelled in 1975-76 and those who stayed, along with Khmer people with Vietnamese spouses, were systematically killed. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found in Case 002/02 that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese of Cambodia, convicting Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan in November 2018; the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2022. The community was effectively eliminated from Cambodia by 1979, and those who returned afterwards have faced continuing statelessness and periodic violence.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","denationalization","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":20000,"countries":["Cambodia","Vietnam"],"baselinePop":400000,"baselineWhat":"The ethnic Vietnamese population of Cambodia before the 1970 pogroms","baselineYear":1970,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.75,"related":[{"id":"khmer-rouge-democratic-kampuchea-1975-1979","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedDeaths":[7000,20000],"note":"The Khmer Rouge expulsion and killing of ethnic Vietnamese in 1975-79 falls within the Democratic Kampuchea period; the 1970 pogroms do not."}]},{"id":"faili-kurds-expulsion-iraq","title":"Expulsion and Denationalization of Iraq's Faili Kurds","startYear":1970,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Iraq's Ba'athist government stripped Faili (Shi'a) Kurds of citizenship as alleged Iranians, confiscated their property and expelled them across the border into Iran, detaining and disappearing thousands of young men","peopleDisplaced":250000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.3152,"lon":44.3661,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.3152,"fromLon":44.3661,"toLat":34.3142,"toLon":47.065,"label":"Baghdad and the Iraqi border districts → Iran (Kermanshah and Ilam)","people":250000},{"fromLat":33.74,"fromLon":45.55,"toLat":33.63,"toLon":46.42,"label":"Mandali and Badra → Ilam province, Iran","people":null}],"summary":"The Faili Kurds are Shi'a Kurds long settled in Baghdad and in the border districts of eastern Iraq, many of whom were classed under the 1924 Iraqi nationality law as descendants of Persian rather than Ottoman subjects. From the late 1960s the Ba'athist government treated them as foreigners: tens of thousands were expelled to Iran between 1969 and the mid-1970s, and in April 1980 Decree 666 provided for revoking the citizenship of Iraqis deemed of foreign origin or disloyal. Between 220,000 and 300,000 Faili Kurds were denationalized, their businesses and property confiscated and most driven across the Iranian border, in many cases on foot. Minority Rights Group records that thousands of military-age men were detained instead of expelled and that between 10,000 and more than 20,000 people disappeared and were never recovered. In 2010 the Iraqi High Criminal Court ruled that the deportation, disappearance and confiscation of the Faili Kurds' rights constituted genocide, and the Iraqi parliament passed a corresponding resolution in 2011. Restitution of nationality after 2003 has been partial: only 16,580 people obtained reinstatement between 2003 and 2013, and roughly 100,000 remain without nationality.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":250000,"_deaths":15000,"countries":["Iraq","Iran"],"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defensible denominator: Iraq never separately enumerated the Faili Kurds, and the community was defined by the state as foreign in order to expel it","baselineYear":null,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"gulf-kafala-migrant-labour","title":"The Kafala System and Migrant Labour in the Gulf States","startYear":1970,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":true,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Gulf states bound migrant workers' legal residence to individual employers, restricting their ability to change jobs or leave the country","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":25.2854,"lon":51.531,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.8103,"fromLon":90.4125,"toLat":25.2854,"toLon":51.531,"label":"Labour migration from South Asia to the Gulf under sponsorship contracts","people":null}],"summary":"Under the kafala or sponsorship system, developed across the Gulf states after the oil boom of the 1970s, a migrant worker's legal residence is tied to a named employer, who has historically controlled the worker's ability to change jobs and, in several states, to leave the country. The International Labour Organization, human rights organisations and the UN special rapporteurs on trafficking and on migrants' rights have documented the resulting practices - passport confiscation, contract substitution, withheld wages, debt bondage from recruitment fees, restrictions on movement and confinement of domestic workers in private homes - as producing conditions that in many cases meet the international definition of forced labour, while Gulf governments have described the system as a lawful residence framework and have pointed to reforms. Migrant deaths, particularly among South Asian construction workers in Qatar in the decade before the 2022 World Cup, became a focus of international scrutiny; a Guardian investigation counted more than 6,500 deaths of migrants from five South Asian countries in Qatar between 2010 and 2020 from all causes, while Qatar's government said the figure conflated all deaths in a large population with work-related deaths. Qatar entered a technical cooperation programme with the ILO in 2017 and abolished exit permits and the no-objection certificate requirement and introduced a non-discriminatory minimum wage; Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE have made partial reforms; the ILO and rights organisations report that enforcement remains uneven and that domestic workers are often excluded.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Qatar","Bangladesh"],"baselinePop":30000000,"baselineWhat":"The migrant population of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states, whose residence is tied to a sponsoring employer","baselineYear":2020,"asOf":"2020","weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"mindanao-conflict-displacement","title":"Mindanao Conflict Displacement, Philippines","startYear":1970,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Decades of conflict between the Philippine state and Moro separatist/insurgent groups (and later extremist factions) in Mindanao repeatedly displaced civilians","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":7.22,"lon":124.25,"flows":[{"fromLat":8,"fromLon":124.29,"toLat":8.23,"toLon":124.24,"label":"Marawi City → Iligan evacuation centers","people":360000},{"fromLat":7.02,"fromLon":124.42,"toLat":7.22,"toLon":124.25,"label":"Rural Maguindanao → Cotabato City","people":300000}],"summary":"Since the Moro National Liberation Front launched its armed independence struggle in the early 1970s, followed by decades of further conflict involving successor groups (MILF, ASG, and others) and, more recently, ISIS-aligned factions, Mindanao in the southern Philippines has experienced recurrent cycles of displacement. Humanitarian trackers record roughly 5 to 6 million displacement incidents since the early 2000s, as many families are forced to flee repeatedly with each new outbreak of fighting; the 2017 siege of Marawi City by ISIS-aligned militants alone displaced 360,000-400,000 people for months. A series of peace agreements, culminating in the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and the 2019 creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, have reduced large-scale conflict but not eliminated displacement from clan feuds (\"rido\"), residual insurgent activity, and military operations.","ongoing":true,"_mag":5000000,"countries":["Philippines"],"deathsLow":120000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":135000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":7963932,"baselineWhat":"The population of Mindanao at the 1970 Philippine census, at the start of the Moro conflict","baselineYear":1970,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":false,"_share":0.627830574143526,"related":[{"id":"marcos-martial-law-detention-and-hamletting","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Martial-law hamletting in Mindanao was part of the counter-insurgency against the Moro National Liberation Front recorded in the Mindanao conflict entry."}]},{"id":"bangladesh-liberation-war","title":"Bangladesh Liberation War and Refugee Crisis","startYear":1971,"endYear":1971,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Pakistan's military crackdown on the Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan triggered a war of independence, a massive refugee outflow into India, and Indian military intervention leading to the creation of Bangladesh","peopleDisplaced":10000000,"territoryKm2":147570,"territoryDesc":"East Pakistan seceded and became the independent state of Bangladesh","lat":23.7,"lon":90.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.7,"fromLon":90.4,"toLat":22.57,"toLon":88.36,"label":"East Pakistan → West Bengal, India","people":6000000},{"fromLat":23.8,"fromLon":91.3,"toLat":23.83,"toLon":91.28,"label":"East Pakistan → Tripura, India","people":2000000},{"fromLat":24.9,"fromLon":91.9,"toLat":25.57,"toLon":91.88,"label":"East Pakistan → Assam/Meghalaya, India","people":1500000}],"summary":"In March 1971, the Pakistani military launched a crackdown ('Operation Searchlight') against the Bengali nationalist Awami League and its supporters in East Pakistan after the party won national elections, sparking a war of independence and mass atrocities. Some 8–10 million refugees, mostly Hindus but also Muslims, fled into neighboring Indian states over the following months, straining Indian resources and contributing to India's decision to intervene militarily in December 1971. Pakistani forces surrendered on 16 December 1971, and East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh. Death toll estimates for the war and preceding violence are among the most disputed in modern South Asian history, ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to the 3 million figure commonly cited in Bangladesh.","ongoing":false,"_mag":10000000,"countries":["Bangladesh","India"],"deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":3000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":1650000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":68000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of East Pakistan in 1971","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.14705882352941177},{"id":"burundi-1972-ikiza","title":"The Ikiza: Burundi's 1972 Mass Killings","startYear":1972,"endYear":1973,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Burundi's Tutsi-dominated army and the Micombero government killed Hutu civilians across the country after a Hutu-led insurrection, and survivors fled to Tanzania, Rwanda and Zaire","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-3.3822,"lon":29.3644,"flows":[{"fromLat":-3.9,"fromLon":29.6,"toLat":-4.88,"toLon":29.63,"label":"Southern Burundi → western Tanzania (Kigoma/Tabora settlements)","people":150000},{"fromLat":-2.95,"fromLon":29.75,"toLat":-2.6,"toLon":29.75,"label":"Northern Burundi → Rwanda","people":null}],"summary":"In late April 1972 a Hutu-led insurrection in Rumonge and Nyanza-Lac killed several thousand Tutsi and other civilians. The army and government of President Michel Micombero responded with a nationwide campaign of killings and arrests directed at Hutu, concentrated on the educated: civil servants, clergy, university and secondary students, teachers and businessmen. Sciences Po's Mass Violence project records that by June 1972 roughly 45 per cent of primary school teachers and nearly all secondary teachers were reported missing. Estimates of the dead range from about 100,000 to 300,000; the US embassy's deputy chief of mission reported as many as 200,000 killed by the end of August 1972. About 150,000 people fled abroad, mostly to Tanzania, where their descendants remained stateless for four decades. Burundi's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in December 2021 that genocide had been committed against the Hutu in 1972–73, a characterization that is not universally accepted inside or outside Burundi.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":200000,"countries":["Burundi","Tanzania","Rwanda"],"baselinePop":3000000,"baselineWhat":"The Hutu population of Burundi in 1972","baselineYear":1972,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05},{"id":"marcos-martial-law-detention-and-hamletting","title":"Martial Law in the Philippines: Mass Detention, Disappearance and Hamletting","startYear":1972,"endYear":1986,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Ferdinand Marcos's government detained tens of thousands without charge and the armed forces moved rural communities into guarded settlements in counter-insurgency areas","peopleDisplaced":70000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":14.6,"lon":120.98,"flows":[],"summary":"Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on 21 September 1972 under Proclamation 1081, suspending Congress, closing newspapers and authorising arrest by military order. Amnesty International documented about 70,000 detentions, 34,000 cases of torture and 3,240 killings over the following fourteen years, held in military stockades and safehouses; disappearances of activists, students, journalists and clergy were widespread. In counter-insurgency zones against the New People's Army and the Moro National Liberation Front, the armed forces used hamletting, concentrating rural families in guarded settlements and declaring the surrounding land free-fire, most extensively in Mindanao and in the Cordillera, where opposition to the Chico River dam project brought military operations against Kalinga and Bontoc communities. After the 1986 uprising, a US federal court found the Marcos estate liable for torture, summary execution and disappearance, and in 2013 the Philippine Congress passed Republic Act 10368, which recognised martial-law victims and provided reparations from recovered Marcos assets. The figures are now publicly disputed by supporters of the Marcos family, and the recognition law's findings are the principal official record.","deathsLow":3240,"deathsHigh":3500,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":70000,"_deaths":3370,"countries":["Philippines"],"baselinePop":39000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Philippines at the declaration of martial law","baselineYear":1972,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0017948717948717949,"related":[{"id":"mindanao-conflict-displacement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Martial-law hamletting in Mindanao was part of the counter-insurgency against the Moro National Liberation Front recorded in the Mindanao conflict entry."}]},{"id":"stranded-biharis-bangladesh-camps","title":"The Stranded Biharis of Bangladesh and the Urdu-Speaking Camps","startYear":1972,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Bangladesh and Pakistan left Urdu-speaking Biharis stateless in camps after the 1971 war","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":23.7565,"lon":90.3652,"flows":[{"fromLat":23.7565,"fromLon":90.3652,"toLat":31.5204,"toLon":74.3587,"label":"Partial repatriation of Biharis to Pakistan, 1973-1993","people":178000}],"summary":"Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated from Bihar and elsewhere in India to East Pakistan after 1947 were widely identified with the Pakistani state during the 1971 liberation war, and after Bangladesh's independence large numbers were dispossessed, killed in reprisals or driven into camps set up as temporary shelters by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Around 540,000 registered a wish to move to Pakistan; Pakistan accepted about 178,000 under agreements concluded in 1973, 1974 and 1992 and then effectively stopped, leaving the remainder in Bangladesh without citizenship of either country. For more than three decades they lived in overcrowded camps with insecure tenure, limited access to public services and to formal employment, and no passports. In 2008 the Bangladesh High Court ruled in the Sadaqat Khan case that Urdu-speakers born in Bangladesh or minors at independence are citizens entitled to voter registration, which ended their formal statelessness; most, however, remain in the same camps, and the settlements face periodic eviction and demolition, most seriously the 2014 Kalshi camp arson attack. Pakistan has continued to reject further repatriation.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bangladesh","Pakistan"],"baselinePop":800000,"baselineWhat":"The Urdu-speaking (Bihari) population of East Pakistan at the end of the 1971 war","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":"2020","weakSources":false,"_share":0.375},{"id":"uganda-asian-expulsion","title":"Idi Amin's Expulsion of Ugandan Asians","startYear":1972,"endYear":1972,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the country's South Asian minority and seized their businesses and property","peopleDisplaced":80000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":0.3476,"lon":32.5825,"flows":[{"fromLat":0.3476,"fromLon":32.5825,"toLat":51.5072,"toLon":-0.1276,"label":"Kampala → United Kingdom","people":30000},{"fromLat":0.3476,"fromLon":32.5825,"toLat":19.076,"toLon":72.877,"label":"Kampala → India","people":20000},{"fromLat":0.3476,"fromLon":32.5825,"toLat":43.65,"toLon":-79.38,"label":"Kampala → Canada","people":7000}],"summary":"In August 1972, Ugandan President Idi Amin announced that all South Asians in Uganda, many of them descendants of laborers and traders brought under British colonial rule, had 90 days to leave the country, citing an alleged 'economic war' to transfer control of businesses to Black Ugandans. An estimated 50,000–80,000 people, most of them Ugandan citizens or British passport holders, were stripped of their property and forced to leave, with the largest number resettling in the United Kingdom and smaller numbers going to India, Canada, and other countries. The expulsion devastated Uganda's economy, as expropriated businesses were handed to Amin loyalists and largely collapsed. The event remains one of the most widely cited examples of state-directed ethnic expulsion in postcolonial Africa.","ongoing":false,"_mag":80000,"countries":["Uganda","United Kingdom","India","Canada"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":80000,"baselineWhat":"The South Asian population of Uganda at the time of the expulsion order","baselineYear":1972,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1},{"id":"balochistan-insurgency-displacement","title":"Insurgency, Military Operations and Displacement in Balochistan","startYear":1973,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Pakistani military operations against Baloch nationalist insurgents displaced tribal populations, alongside disappearances documented by human rights bodies","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":29.0355,"lon":69.1554,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.0355,"fromLon":69.1554,"toLat":30.1798,"toLon":66.975,"label":"Displacement from Dera Bugti and Kohlu to Quetta and Sindh","people":150000},{"fromLat":29.5,"fromLon":66.5,"toLat":31.6,"toLon":65.7,"label":"Baloch exile into Afghanistan after the 1973-77 operation","people":null}],"summary":"Balochistan has seen repeated armed conflict between Baloch nationalist insurgents and the Pakistani state, most significantly in 1973-77, when a large army operation against the Marri, Mengal and Bugti tribes displaced tens of thousands of civilians and drove a substantial exile community into Afghanistan, and from 2004 onwards in a fifth insurgency triggered in part by disputes over gas revenues and the killing of the tribal leader Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006. Military operations in Dera Bugti and Kohlu in 2005-06 displaced an estimated 84,000 to 200,000 people, many of whom lived for years in unrecognised camps around Quetta, Sibi and in Sindh. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan have documented enforced disappearances of Baloch students, activists and suspected militants attributed to Pakistani intelligence and paramilitary forces, and the recovery of bodies in what Baloch organisations call a 'kill and dump' pattern; Pakistan's own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances has received thousands of cases from the province. Baloch armed groups have separately carried out attacks on Punjabi and Hazara civilians, on Chinese nationals and on labourers. Access to the province by journalists and independent monitors is tightly controlled, so all figures are partial.","deathsLow":6000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","torture","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":13000,"countries":["Pakistan","Afghanistan"],"baselinePop":2430000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Balochistan province at the census nearest the start of the insurgency","baselineYear":1972,"asOf":"2024","weakSources":false,"_share":0.0823045267489712},{"id":"southern-cone-dictatorships-exile-disappearance","title":"Southern Cone Dictatorships: Disappearance and Exile in Chile and Argentina","startYear":1973,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Chilean and Argentine military governments detained, tortured, killed, disappeared and expelled political opponents, coordinating across borders through Operation Condor","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-33.4489,"lon":-70.6693,"flows":[{"fromLat":-33.4489,"fromLon":-70.6693,"toLat":19.4326,"toLon":-99.1332,"label":"Chilean exiles → Mexico (approximate)","people":15000},{"fromLat":-33.4489,"fromLon":-70.6693,"toLat":59.3293,"toLon":18.0686,"label":"Chilean exiles → Sweden and Western Europe (approximate)","people":40000},{"fromLat":-34.6037,"fromLon":-58.3816,"toLat":40.4168,"toLon":-3.7038,"label":"Argentine exiles → Spain (approximate)","people":50000}],"summary":"The military governments that took power in Chile in September 1973 and Argentina in March 1976 combined mass detention and enforced disappearance with the expulsion and flight of political opponents on a scale that emptied universities, unions and parties. Chile's Rettig Commission investigated killings and disappearances and its successor, the Valech Commission, took testimony from 35,868 people between 2003 and 2005, recognising 27,255 cases of political imprisonment and torture and adding 1,204 more in a complementary report, with about two-thirds of recognised abuses occurring in 1973 alone. Argentina's CONADEP documented 8,960 disappearances for 1976-83 and concluded that disappearance, torture, secret detention and clandestine disposal of bodies were systematic practices ordered from the top; its report Nunca Más noted that estimates of the true total ranged from 10,000 to 30,000. The two governments cooperated with Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil through Operation Condor to pursue exiles across borders. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans and Argentines went into exile in Mexico, Spain, Sweden, France, Canada and elsewhere; most exile figures come from scholarly reconstruction rather than official counts, and the flow numbers above are approximate.","deathsLow":12000,"deathsHigh":33000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance","torture","summary execution","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":22500,"countries":["Chile","Mexico","Åland","Argentina","Spain"],"baselinePop":34800000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Chile and Argentina when the Chilean coup took place in 1973","baselineYear":1973,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.011494252873563218,"related":[{"id":"uruguay-civic-military-dictatorship","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Many Uruguayans disappeared in Argentina under Operation Condor and may also appear in Argentine disappearance totals."}]},{"id":"tanzania-ujamaa-villagization","title":"Tanzania's Ujamaa Villagization (Operation Vijiji)","startYear":1973,"endYear":1976,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Tanzania's government under Julius Nyerere moved scattered rural households into planned villages, with party cadres, police and army enforcing relocation in the compulsory phase","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.163,"lon":35.7516,"flows":[],"summary":"The 1967 Arusha Declaration set out ujamaa, Nyerere's programme of rural socialism, under which Tanzanians were to move into cooperative villages. Voluntary uptake was low: Britannica notes that Nyerere's exhortations did not produce the enthusiasm he hoped for and that individuals resisted collectivization. From 1973 the government made relocation compulsory, and during Operation Vijiji in 1973–76 more than five million people were moved into some 8,000 registered villages. The campaign is described in the scholarly literature as one of the largest social engineering exercises in postcolonial Africa; it involved the abandonment of dispersed homesteads and established farming systems, and studies of specific districts document ecological and agricultural damage. Agricultural output fell and Britannica records that the cooperative village scheme failed, adding pressure to an already weak economy. There was no mass mortality associated with the programme.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":5000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Tanzania"],"baselinePop":13000000,"baselineWhat":"The rural population of Tanzania at the start of Operation Vijiji","baselineYear":1973,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.38461538461538464},{"id":"uruguay-civic-military-dictatorship","title":"Uruguay's Civic-Military Dictatorship: Mass Political Imprisonment and Exile","startYear":1973,"endYear":1985,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"Uruguay's armed forces and police imprisoned, tortured and drove into exile political opponents under a civilian-fronted military regime","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-34.9011,"lon":-56.1645,"flows":[{"fromLat":-34.9011,"fromLon":-56.1645,"toLat":-34.6037,"toLon":-58.3816,"label":"Uruguayan exiles to Argentina, where many were later pursued under Operation Condor","people":null},{"fromLat":-34.9011,"fromLon":-56.1645,"toLat":59.3293,"toLon":18.0686,"label":"Political exiles to Sweden and western Europe","people":null},{"fromLat":-34.9011,"fromLon":-56.1645,"toLat":19.4326,"toLon":-99.1332,"label":"Exiles to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America","people":null}],"summary":"The atlas records the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships; Uruguay's, which ran from the coup of 27 June 1973 to March 1985, worked differently and is usually distinguished from them. Civilian presidents remained in office while the armed forces exercised power, political parties and unions were suspended, and repression took the form less of mass killing than of mass imprisonment: tens of thousands were detained, held for years under military justice in prisons such as Libertad and Punta de Rieles, and subjected to torture and prolonged isolation, while a large share of the population emigrated. Uruguayans made up the largest national group among the victims of Operation Condor abroad, most of them seized in Argentina, and children of disappeared Uruguayans were among those appropriated. In December 1986 parliament passed the Ley de Caducidad, which barred prosecution of military and police personnel; it survived referendums in 1989 and 2009 before being effectively undone from 2011, and in 2011 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held in Gelman v. Uruguay that the law was incompatible with the American Convention and could not bar investigation. Searches for the remains of the disappeared continue.","deathsLow":200,"deathsHigh":400,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":300,"countries":["Uruguay","Argentina","Åland","Mexico"],"baselinePop":2829000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Uruguay at the 1973 coup","baselineYear":1973,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.10604453870625663,"related":[{"id":"southern-cone-dictatorships-exile-disappearance","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Many Uruguayans disappeared in Argentina under Operation Condor and may also appear in Argentine disappearance totals."}]},{"id":"china-paracel-spratly-occupation","title":"Chinese Occupation and Construction in the Paracel and Spratly Islands","startYear":1974,"endYear":2026,"type":"territory","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam by force in 1974 and has since built up military and artificial-island facilities in the Spratly Islands, amid overlapping claims from Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei","peopleDisplaced":100,"territoryKm2":13,"territoryDesc":"A few square kilometers of natural islets and reefs, expanded to roughly 13 km2 of Chinese-built artificial islands since 2014, anchoring competing claims to some 3.5 million km2 of the South China Sea","lat":16.83,"lon":112.33,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.05,"fromLon":108.2,"toLat":20.02,"toLon":110.35,"label":"Captured South Vietnamese garrison (Paracels) → Hainan, China","people":48}],"summary":"In January 1974, China's navy defeated South Vietnamese forces in the Battle of the Paracel Islands, seizing full control of the Paracel archipelago, which Vietnam (and Taiwan) continue to claim. China has since also built up a network of military outposts and, since roughly 2014, large artificial islands with airstrips and ports on reefs it controls in the Spratly Islands further south, an archipelago also claimed in whole or in part by Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan. Although the islands are largely uninhabited, the buildup has repeatedly displaced Vietnamese and Philippine fishing crews from traditional grounds and fueled recurring naval standoffs. A 2016 international arbitral tribunal, brought by the Philippines under UNCLOS, ruled that China's expansive \"nine-dash line\" claim had no legal basis, a ruling China has rejected and does not recognize.","ongoing":true,"_mag":100,"countries":["Vietnam","China"],"deathsLow":150,"deathsHigh":170,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":160,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"The resident population of the Paracel and Spratly Islands","baselineYear":null,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"cyprus-invasion-1974","title":"Turkish Invasion and Division of Cyprus","startYear":1974,"endYear":1975,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Turkey invaded Cyprus following a Greek-junta-backed coup against President Makarios, leading to the island's de facto partition; Greek Cypriots fled or were expelled from the north, and Turkish Cypriots relocated to the north, largely under a 1975 population exchange agreement.","peopleDisplaced":210000,"territoryKm2":3355,"territoryDesc":"Turkish forces occupied roughly 36% of Cyprus (~3,355 km2 of the island's 9,251 km2), where the self-declared 'Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus' was proclaimed in 1983 and is recognized only by Turkey.","lat":35.2,"lon":33.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.12,"fromLon":33.94,"toLat":34.92,"toLon":33.63,"label":"Famagusta → South Cyprus","people":40000},{"fromLat":35.34,"fromLon":33.32,"toLat":35.16,"toLon":33.35,"label":"Kyrenia → South Cyprus (Nicosia area)","people":30000},{"fromLat":34.71,"fromLon":33.02,"toLat":35.34,"toLon":33.32,"label":"South Cyprus (Limassol/Paphos) → Turkish Cypriot north","people":55000}],"summary":"In July 1974, a Greek military junta-backed coup sought to unite Cyprus with Greece; Turkey responded by invading the island, citing its role as a treaty guarantor power, and by August had captured roughly 36% of Cyprus in the north. Around 150,000–200,000 Greek Cypriots fled or were displaced to the south, while about 45,000–65,000 Turkish Cypriots relocated to the north, a movement formalized in a 1975 UN-mediated population exchange agreement. Cyprus has remained divided since, with a UN-patrolled buffer zone separating the Republic of Cyprus (an EU member since 2004) from the north, where Turkey unilaterally recognized the 'Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus' in 1983. Reunification talks have repeatedly failed, most recently in 2017, and the property and displacement disputes remain largely unresolved five decades later.","ongoing":false,"_mag":210000,"countries":["N. Cyprus","Cyprus"],"deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":6000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":4500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":631778,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cyprus at the last pre-war census","baselineYear":1973,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.33239524010016175},{"id":"portuguese-retornados-1975","title":"Portugal's Retornados from Angola and Mozambique","startYear":1974,"endYear":1976,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"The collapse of Portuguese colonial rule and the wars that followed independence drove settler and mixed-race populations out of Angola and Mozambique to Portugal","peopleDisplaced":505078,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":38.72,"lon":-9.14,"flows":[{"fromLat":-8.84,"fromLon":13.23,"toLat":38.72,"toLon":-9.14,"label":"Angola → Portugal","people":309058},{"fromLat":-25.97,"fromLon":32.57,"toLat":38.72,"toLon":-9.14,"label":"Mozambique → Portugal","people":164065}],"summary":"After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 and the negotiated independence of Portugal's African territories in 1975, the settler population of Angola and Mozambique left en masse, most of it between the spring and autumn of 1975 as civil war took hold in Angola. The 1981 census recorded 505,078 arrivals, equivalent to about five per cent of Portugal's population at the time, though estimates run as high as one million because arrivals were incompletely registered and some subsequently emigrated onward to Brazil and South Africa. Many travelled by whatever means they could find, including small boats, and arrived having lost their property; the Portuguese state provided integration assistance with support from the United States, the Council of Europe and Sweden, housing thousands in requisitioned hotels, but paid no compensation for lost assets. The retornados included people of mixed and African descent as well as European settlers, and were received with considerable social suspicion in a country in political upheaval.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":505078,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Portugal","Angola","Mozambique"],"baselinePop":525000,"baselineWhat":"The settler population of Portuguese Angola and Mozambique on the eve of independence","baselineYear":1974,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.9620533333333333},{"id":"angolan-civil-war","title":"Angolan Civil War","startYear":1975,"endYear":2002,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The MPLA government, backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, fought UNITA insurgents, backed by the United States, South Africa and Zaire, in a Cold War-era proxy war following independence from Portugal","peopleDisplaced":4000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-12.78,"lon":15.74,"flows":[{"fromLat":-12.78,"fromLon":15.74,"toLat":-15.42,"toLon":28.28,"label":"Central Highlands → Zambia","people":200000},{"fromLat":-12.78,"fromLon":15.74,"toLat":-4.44,"toLon":15.27,"label":"Central Highlands → DR Congo","people":150000},{"fromLat":-12.78,"fromLon":15.74,"toLat":-8.84,"toLon":13.23,"label":"Interior → Luanda (internal displacement)","people":1500000}],"summary":"Angola's civil war began almost immediately after independence from Portugal in 1975, as the MPLA government, supported by Cuban troops and Soviet aid, fought the UNITA insurgency backed at various points by the United States, apartheid South Africa, and Zaire, making it one of the Cold War's major African proxy conflicts. Fighting continued with only brief interruptions until UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in 2002, ending large-scale hostilities. The war killed an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 people and displaced roughly 4 million internally at various points, along with several hundred thousand refugees in neighboring Zambia, DR Congo, and Namibia; landmines laid during the conflict continued to kill and injure civilians for decades afterward.","ongoing":false,"_mag":4000000,"countries":["Angola","Zambia","Dem. Rep. Congo"],"deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":800000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege"],"_deaths":650000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Angola at independence, when the civil war began","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6060606060606061},{"id":"cambodian-refugee-exodus-thailand","title":"Cambodian Refugee Exodus to Thailand","startYear":1975,"endYear":1993,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Cambodians fled Khmer Rouge rule and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation into refugee camps along the Thai border, later repatriated under UN supervision","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.66,"lon":102.85,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.55,"fromLon":104.9,"toLat":13.66,"toLon":102.85,"label":"Phnom Penh/interior Cambodia → Khao-I-Dang camp, Thailand","people":300000},{"fromLat":13.1,"fromLon":103.2,"toLat":13.82,"toLon":102.07,"label":"Battambang → Sa Kaeo camp, Thailand","people":200000}],"summary":"Throughout the Khmer Rouge period (1975–79) and especially after Vietnam's invasion toppled the regime in early 1979, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled westward toward the Thai border to escape violence, famine, and continued fighting between Vietnamese forces and remaining Khmer Rouge and other resistance factions. Large camps such as Khao-I-Dang and Sa Kaeo housed as many as 600,000 refugees at the peak of the crisis in the early 1980s, supported by a major international relief effort after initial chaos and forced Thai pushbacks in 1979 drew global attention. Many refugees spent a decade or more in camp limbo before the 1991 Paris Peace Accords ended the conflict, after which the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) repatriated roughly 370,000 people in 1992–93.","ongoing":false,"_mag":600000,"countries":["Cambodia","Thailand"],"deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":5000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","sexual violence","forced labour"],"_deaths":3000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":7400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took power","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.08108108108108109,"related":[{"id":"khmer-rouge-evacuation-cities","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some of those driven from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were among the Cambodians who later fled to the Thai border camps."},{"id":"khmer-rouge-democratic-kampuchea-1975-1979","rel":"continues-from","note":"Many Cambodians held in Khmer Rouge cooperatives fled to the Thai border during and after the regime's fall."}]},{"id":"east-timor-occupation-1999-violence","title":"Indonesian Invasion and Occupation of East Timor, and 1999 Violence","startYear":1975,"endYear":1999,"type":"both","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Indonesia invaded and annexed the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975; pro-Indonesia militias, backed by the Indonesian military, drove mass displacement after the 1999 independence referendum","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":14874,"territoryDesc":"The former Portuguese colony of East Timor, approximately 14,874 km2, invaded and annexed by Indonesia in 1975–76","lat":-8.55,"lon":125.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":-8.55,"fromLon":125.56,"toLat":-9.11,"toLon":124.89,"label":"Dili → Atambua, West Timor (forced deportation, 1999)","people":260000},{"fromLat":-8.99,"fromLon":125.51,"toLat":-8.55,"toLon":125.56,"label":"Interior/Ainaro region → Dili and hills (internal displacement)","people":150000}],"summary":"Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in December 1975, shortly after it declared independence, and formally annexed it in 1976 in a move the UN never recognized. The occupation that followed, marked by counterinsurgency campaigns and forced resettlement into strategic hamlets, is estimated by Timor-Leste's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) to have caused 102,800 to as many as 183,000 conflict-related deaths and displaced far more. After East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum in August 1999, pro-Indonesia militias backed by elements of the Indonesian military carried out a scorched-earth campaign, killing an estimated 1,000-1,400 people and displacing up to 500,000, including some 250,000-300,000 forcibly deported to West Timor. International intervention (INTERFET) restored order, and East Timor achieved formal independence in 2002.","ongoing":false,"_mag":500000,"countries":["Timor-Leste","Indonesia"],"deathsLow":102800,"deathsHigh":183000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","starvation & siege","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":142900,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":650000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Portuguese Timor at the Indonesian invasion of December 1975","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.7692307692307693},{"id":"hmong-exodus-from-laos","title":"Hmong Flight from Laos after the Pathet Lao Victory","startYear":1975,"endYear":2007,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Lao People's Democratic Republic pursued Hmong communities associated with the US-backed wartime resistance, driving them into Thailand or into hiding in the highlands","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.15,"lon":103.15,"flows":[{"fromLat":19.15,"fromLon":103.15,"toLat":17.65,"toLon":101.75,"label":"Xiangkhouang and Long Cheng → Thai border camps","people":200000}],"summary":"When the Pathet Lao took power in 1975, Hmong communities that had fought with the CIA-backed irregular forces during the war in Laos were exposed to reprisals, and their leadership was evacuated or fled. More than 200,000 Hmong left Laos over the following decades, initially crossing the Mekong into Thai camps such as Ban Vinai; the Migration Policy Institute attributes the exodus to post-war repression of past and continuing resistance activity alongside collectivisation failures and drought. Around 90 per cent of those recognised as refugees were resettled in the United States. Official Thai camps closed in the mid-1990s and the residual community at the Wat Tham Krabok monastery was resettled from 2004. Groups remaining in the Lao highlands were still subject to military operations decades later: Amnesty International recorded an attack near Vang Vieng that killed at least 26 people, mostly women and children, which the Lao government denied, and documented the forcible return of Hmong from Thailand into incommunicado detention.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Laos","Thailand"],"baselinePop":300000,"baselineWhat":"The Hmong population of Laos at the communist victory in 1975","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6666666666666666},{"id":"khmer-rouge-evacuation-cities","title":"Khmer Rouge Forced Evacuation of Cambodian Cities","startYear":1975,"endYear":1975,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated Phnom Penh and other Cambodian cities within days of taking power, driving urban residents into rural labor communes","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.55,"lon":104.9,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.55,"fromLon":104.9,"toLat":13.1,"toLon":103.2,"label":"Phnom Penh → Battambang province","people":700000},{"fromLat":11.55,"fromLon":104.9,"toLat":12,"toLon":105.46,"label":"Phnom Penh → Kampong Cham province","people":600000},{"fromLat":11.55,"fromLon":104.9,"toLat":12.53,"toLon":103.92,"label":"Phnom Penh → Pursat province","people":500000}],"summary":"When Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, they immediately ordered the entire city, whose population had swollen to an estimated 2 to 2.5 million with wartime refugees, evacuated within days, at gunpoint and often on foot, with little food or water. Similar evacuations swept every other Cambodian city and town in the following weeks as the new Communist Party of Kampuchea leadership sought to remake the country into an agrarian, self-sufficient society under what it called \"Year Zero.\" The forced marches and subsequent collectivized labor in rural communes killed an unknown but large number of people from exhaustion, starvation, and disease, and became a defining feature of the broader Khmer Rouge period, during which an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of execution, forced labor, and famine by 1979.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2000000,"countries":["Cambodia"],"deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution"],"_deaths":11000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2500000,"baselineWhat":"The urban population of Cambodia in April 1975, above all Phnom Penh, swollen by five years of war refugees","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8,"related":[{"id":"cambodian-refugee-exodus-thailand","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Some of those driven from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were among the Cambodians who later fled to the Thai border camps."},{"id":"khmer-rouge-democratic-kampuchea-1975-1979","rel":"continues-as","sharedDeaths":[2000,20000],"note":"The people evacuated from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were then held in the Khmer Rouge cooperatives."}]},{"id":"lebanese-civil-war-displacement","title":"The Lebanese Civil War: Massacres, Sieges and Sectarian Displacement","startYear":1975,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Lebanese militias, Palestinian factions, and Syrian and Israeli forces displaced populations along sectarian lines across fifteen years of war","peopleDisplaced":900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.8938,"lon":35.5018,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.7,"fromLon":35.44,"toLat":33.95,"toLon":35.62,"label":"Christians from Damour and the south to East Beirut and Mount Lebanon","people":100000},{"fromLat":33.75,"fromLon":35.55,"toLat":33.86,"toLon":35.5,"label":"Muslims and Palestinians from Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar to West Beirut and the south","people":100000},{"fromLat":33.7,"fromLon":35.6,"toLat":33.9,"toLon":35.55,"label":"Christians displaced from the Chouf in the 1983-84 Mountain War","people":150000}],"summary":"Lebanon's civil war ran from April 1975 to 1990 and produced an estimated 120,000 deaths, close to 900,000 displaced and large permanent emigration, alongside interventions by Syria from 1976 and Israel in 1978 and 1982. Its displacement was overwhelmingly sectarian and reciprocal: in January 1976 Christian militias overran the Karantina slum in East Beirut and Palestinian and allied forces destroyed the Christian town of Damour days later; the Tel al-Zaatar camp fell after a long siege in August 1976 with heavy Palestinian civilian casualties; the Sabra and Shatila massacre followed the 1982 Israeli invasion, recorded separately in this atlas; and the Mountain War of 1983-84 in the Chouf expelled most of the Christian population of the district. Beirut was divided by a Green Line for fifteen years. Some 17,000 people disappeared and remain unaccounted for, and Lebanon's 1991 general amnesty foreclosed prosecutions for wartime crimes; a National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared was finally established by law in 2018 after decades of campaigning by families. A post-war Ministry of the Displaced managed a partial and contested return programme, and many displaced never went back.","deathsLow":90000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","enforced disappearance","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","summary execution","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":900000,"_deaths":120000,"countries":["Lebanon"],"baselinePop":2700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Lebanon at the outbreak of the civil war","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3333333333333333,"related":[{"id":"palestinian-refugees-lebanon","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were among those displaced again during the Lebanese civil war, notably at Tel al-Zaatar."},{"id":"lebanon-war-1982","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedDeaths":[9000,20000],"note":"The 1982 Israeli invasion took place during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, whose death and displacement totals cover the invasion period."}]},{"id":"sahrawi-tindouf-camps","title":"Sahrawi Refugees in the Tindouf Camps, Algeria","startYear":1975,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Polisario Front administering the camps on Algerian territory with Algerian consent, with return to Western Sahara blocked by the Moroccan-built sand wall and the unresolved status of the territory","peopleDisplaced":173600,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Five camps - Laayoune, Awserd, Smara, Boujdour and Dakhla - in the Hamada desert of Tindouf province, south-western Algeria","lat":27.6,"lon":-8.15,"flows":[],"summary":"Sahrawis who fled Western Sahara during the Moroccan and Mauritanian takeover of the territory in 1975-1976 have lived for five decades in camps near Tindouf in the Algerian desert, administered by the Polisario Front, which also has its seat of government there. Residents move freely within the camps and to Tindouf town, but travel further into Algeria requires a movement permit issued by the Polisario authorities, valid for about 15 days, and return to the parts of Western Sahara under Moroccan control is prevented by the 2,700 km sand berm, its minefields and Moroccan forces. The camps have no productive land and depend almost entirely on international food aid; a WFP ration cut of about 30 per cent from November 2023 worsened rates of anaemia among women and stunting among children. The population figure is itself part of the political dispute, because the number of Sahrawis bears on the electorate of the self-determination referendum that MINURSO was created to hold in 1991 and that has never taken place. As of 2026 the political process remains blocked, no repatriation has occurred, and a third generation has been born in the camps.","ongoing":true,"_mag":173600,"countries":["Algeria"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","forced labour"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":73497,"baselineWhat":"The Sahrawi population of Spanish Sahara recorded in the 1974 Spanish census, the last count before the territory was partitioned","baselineYear":1974,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":2.362001170115787,"related":[{"id":"western-sahara-1975","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":45000,"note":"The Sahrawis who fled the 1975-76 takeover of Western Sahara are the founding population of the Tindouf camps."}]},{"id":"sikkim-annexation","title":"Indian Annexation of Sikkim","startYear":1975,"endYear":1975,"type":"territory","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Following political unrest and a referendum, India abolished the monarchy of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, previously an Indian protectorate, and incorporated it as India's 22nd state","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":7096,"territoryDesc":"The Kingdom of Sikkim, a Himalayan monarchy under Indian suzerainty since 1950, absorbed as an Indian state","lat":27.33,"lon":88.61,"flows":[],"summary":"Sikkim became an Indian protectorate in 1950, with India controlling its defense, foreign affairs, and communications while the Chogyal (monarch) retained internal rule. Amid growing political unrest and demands from the state's Nepali-origin majority for democratic reform, Indian troops took control of the capital Gangtok in April 1975, and a referendum on abolishing the monarchy and joining India as a state was held, reportedly passing with over 97% support. Sikkim formally became India's 22nd state later that year, and the Chogyal's title was abolished. China did not recognize Indian sovereignty over Sikkim until 2003.","ongoing":false,"_mag":42576,"countries":["India"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":209843,"baselineWhat":"The population of Sikkim at the 1971 census, the last before annexation","baselineYear":1971,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"vietnam-new-economic-zones","title":"Vietnam's New Economic Zones","startYear":1975,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Socialist Republic of Vietnam moved southern city populations to cleared land in the highlands and border provinces under a state resettlement programme","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":10.82,"lon":106.63,"flows":[{"fromLat":10.82,"fromLon":106.63,"toLat":12.68,"toLon":108.05,"label":"Saigon residents sent to New Economic Zones in the Central Highlands","people":null}],"summary":"After 1975 the Vietnamese government sought to reduce the population of southern cities swollen by the war and to bring uncultivated land into production by establishing New Economic Zones in the Central Highlands, the south-west and border provinces. Families were assigned to zones by neighbourhood committees; those associated with the former South Vietnamese state, ethnic Chinese and households without residence or ration entitlement were disproportionately selected, and refusal carried the loss of registration, work and food rations, so participation is best described as coerced rather than voluntary. Conditions in the zones were often extremely poor: cleared forest without infrastructure, malaria, crop failure and, in some areas, unexploded ordnance. Large numbers returned unofficially to Ho Chi Minh City, where they lived without residence papers. The programme, alongside re-education detention, property confiscation and the treatment of the ethnic Chinese, contributed to the exodus of boat people that the atlas records separately; Hanoi presented the zones as economic development and land settlement.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Vietnam"],"baselinePop":19600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of southern Vietnam, the former Republic of Vietnam, at the end of the war","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.05102040816326531,"related":[{"id":"vietnam-war-wartime-displacement","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Many people sent to Vietnam's New Economic Zones after 1975 were wartime refugees from the swollen southern cities."},{"id":"ethnic-chinese-expulsion-vietnam","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Ethnic Chinese were disproportionately assigned to the New Economic Zones, and some later left Vietnam in the 1978-79 exodus."}]},{"id":"vietnamese-boat-people","title":"Post-1975 Vietnamese Boat People and Re-education Camps","startYear":1975,"endYear":1996,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The new communist government of unified Vietnam sent former South Vietnamese officials and soldiers to re-education camps and forced many urban residents to New Economic Zones, while hundreds of thousands fled by boat to neighboring countries","peopleDisplaced":1600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":10.35,"lon":107.08,"flows":[{"fromLat":10.35,"fromLon":107.08,"toLat":22.32,"toLon":114.17,"label":"Vietnam coast → Hong Kong","people":200000},{"fromLat":10.35,"fromLon":107.08,"toLat":5.62,"toLon":103.06,"label":"Vietnam coast → Pulau Bidong, Malaysia","people":250000},{"fromLat":10.35,"fromLon":107.08,"toLat":7.2,"toLon":100.6,"label":"Vietnam coast → southern Thailand","people":150000}],"summary":"After South Vietnam's fall in April 1975, the new government sent up to 300,000 former officials, military officers, and others associated with the old regime to re-education camps, while forcibly relocating roughly one million urban residents to rural \"New Economic Zones.\" Facing political repression, economic hardship, and (from 1978) an exodus of ethnic Chinese, an estimated 1.6 million or more Vietnamese fled the country between 1975 and the mid-1990s, most notably around 800,000 \"boat people\" who crossed the South China Sea in often unseaworthy vessels toward Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Tens to hundreds of thousands are believed to have died at sea from storms, starvation, or piracy, though precise figures are disputed. The crisis prompted large-scale international resettlement and, eventually, the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action, under which many later arrivals were screened and repatriated.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1600000,"countries":["Cambodia","Hong Kong","Singapore"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":400000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","forced labour","sexual violence"],"_deaths":225000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":19500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of former South Vietnam at reunification in 1975","baselineYear":1975,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.08205128205128205},{"id":"western-sahara-1975","title":"Morocco's Takeover of Western Sahara and the Sahrawi Exodus","startYear":1975,"endYear":1976,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Following Spain's withdrawal, Morocco organized the 'Green March' and, with Mauritania (until 1979), moved to control Western Sahara; the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria, fought Moroccan forces, and tens of thousands of Sahrawis fled to refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria.","peopleDisplaced":45000,"territoryKm2":266000,"territoryDesc":"Western Sahara (~266,000 km2); Morocco administers roughly 80% of the territory west of a defensive berm, while the Polisario-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic controls the remainder.","lat":24.5,"lon":-13,"flows":[{"fromLat":27.15,"fromLon":-13.2,"toLat":27.67,"toLon":-8.14,"label":"Laayoune area → Tindouf, Algeria","people":25000},{"fromLat":26.74,"fromLon":-11.67,"toLat":27.67,"toLon":-8.14,"label":"Smara → Tindouf refugee camps","people":20000}],"summary":"After Spain announced its withdrawal from its colony of Spanish Sahara in 1975, Morocco organized the mass 'Green March' of civilians into the territory and, together with Mauritania, moved to partition and control it, despite an International Court of Justice advisory opinion that found no basis for Moroccan or Mauritanian sovereignty and affirmed the Sahrawi right to self-determination. The Polisario Front declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and fought a guerrilla war against Moroccan (and until 1979, Mauritanian) forces, while tens of thousands of Sahrawis fled to refugee camps near Tindouf in Algeria, where a large population remains today. Morocco built a lengthy defensive berm and now controls roughly 80% of the territory; a UN-monitored ceasefire held from 1991 until fighting resumed in 2020. The territory's final status remains unresolved, with the UN still classifying it as a Non-Self-Governing Territory pending an unimplemented referendum.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1596000,"countries":["Morocco","Algeria"],"deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":15000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":74000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Spanish Sahara recorded before the Moroccan takeover","baselineYear":1974,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6081081081081081,"related":[{"id":"sahrawi-tindouf-camps","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":45000,"note":"The Sahrawis who fled the 1975-76 takeover of Western Sahara are the founding population of the Tindouf camps."}]},{"id":"khmer-rouge-democratic-kampuchea-1975-1979","title":"Democratic Kampuchea: Cooperatives, Forced Labour and Mass Killing under the Khmer Rouge","startYear":1975,"endYear":1979,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) held Cambodia's population in agricultural cooperatives and worksites under forced labour, and killed perceived enemies, former officials, Buddhists and minorities through a network of security centres","peopleDisplaced":5800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":12.71,"lon":104.89,"flows":[],"summary":"After taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea held the whole population in agricultural cooperatives and labour worksites in pursuit of what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls a ruthless agrarian ideology. The emptying of the cities in April 1975 is covered by the atlas's separate entry on the evacuation; this entry covers the regime that followed until its fall in January 1979. Overwork, starvation and disease killed vast numbers, while a network of security offices imprisoned, tortured and executed people accused of being enemies; the Documentation Center of Cambodia has mapped 196 Democratic Kampuchea prisons and 19,733 mass grave pits at 388 sites, and Yale's Cambodian Genocide Program holds a 100,000-page archive of the regime's security police. The ECCC demographic expert report estimated 1.75-2.2 million deaths, of which 0.8-1.3 million were violent, and found that about 36 per cent of Cham and nearly all Vietnamese remaining in Cambodia perished against 18.7 per cent of ethnic Khmer. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of crimes against humanity including extermination, enslavement at cooperatives and worksites, persecution of Buddhists, the Cham and former Khmer Republic officials, torture and forced marriage, and of genocide of the Vietnamese; the expulsion and killing of the Vietnamese minority is covered in its own atlas entry.","deathsLow":1700000,"deathsHigh":2200000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","forced labour","torture","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","cultural or religious destruction"],"_mag":5800000,"_deaths":1950000,"countries":["Cambodia"],"weakSources":false,"related":[{"id":"cambodia-vietnamese-minority-expulsion","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedDeaths":[7000,20000],"note":"The Khmer Rouge expulsion and killing of ethnic Vietnamese in 1975-79 falls within the Democratic Kampuchea period; the 1970 pogroms do not."},{"id":"cambodian-refugee-exodus-thailand","rel":"continues-as","note":"Many Cambodians held in Khmer Rouge cooperatives fled to the Thai border during and after the regime's fall."},{"id":"khmer-rouge-evacuation-cities","rel":"continues-from","sharedDeaths":[2000,20000],"note":"The people evacuated from Cambodia's cities in April 1975 were then held in the Khmer Rouge cooperatives."}]},{"id":"ethiopia-red-terror-1976-1978","title":"Ethiopia's Red Terror","startYear":1976,"endYear":1978,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Ethiopia's military government (the Derg) under Mengistu Haile Mariam, through kebele neighbourhood committees, armed Defense Squads and the army, killed, tortured and detained suspected members of the EPRP, MEISON and other opponents, mostly young urban people","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":9.03,"lon":38.74,"flows":[],"summary":"The Red Terror was a campaign of urban counter-insurgency that the Derg waged mainly in Addis Ababa between 1976 and 1978 against the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), which had begun assassinating regime officials, and later against the rival leftist group MEISON. After Mengistu Haile Mariam took sole power in February 1977, the regime armed kebele Defense Squads and declared the 'Red Terror' officially; Africa Watch records at least 2,500 killed in the first wave in spring 1977, an estimated 3,000-4,000 in a second wave in October, and perhaps 5,000 in Addis Ababa in a third wave from December 1977 to February 1978, with killings extending to provincial towns such as Asmara, Gonder, Bahir Dar, Jimma and towns in Tigray in 1978. Bodies were left in the streets, relatives were forbidden to mourn and in some cases charged for the 'wasted bullet', and detainees were tortured and many disappeared. Africa Watch called it one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa and judged that a generation of educated young people was lost. This entry covers only the Red Terror; the Derg's later resettlement and villagization programmes are in 'ethiopia-villagization-resettlement' and its war in Eritrea in 'eritrean-independence-war'. Ethiopian courts later convicted Mengistu and other officials of genocide, and a Dutch court convicted a former Derg official of war crimes in 2017.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance"],"_mag":30000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ethiopia"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"mozambican-civil-war","title":"Mozambican Civil War","startYear":1977,"endYear":1992,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"RENAMO insurgents, initially backed by Rhodesia and later apartheid South Africa, fought the FRELIMO government","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-19,"lon":34,"flows":[{"fromLat":-19,"fromLon":34,"toLat":-15.79,"toLon":35.02,"label":"Central Mozambique → Blantyre, Malawi","people":1000000},{"fromLat":-19,"fromLon":34,"toLat":-17.83,"toLon":31.05,"label":"Mozambique → Zimbabwe","people":350000},{"fromLat":-25.97,"fromLon":32.58,"toLat":-25.75,"toLon":32.05,"label":"Southern Mozambique → South Africa/Eswatini","people":350000}],"summary":"Shortly after Mozambique's 1975 independence from Portugal, the RENAMO insurgency, initially organized by Rhodesian intelligence and later sponsored by apartheid South Africa as a proxy against the Marxist FRELIMO government, launched a brutal guerrilla war marked by attacks on civilians, infrastructure, and rural health and education systems. The war, compounded by drought and famine, killed an estimated 1 million people and displaced roughly 5 million, including about 1.7 million who became refugees in neighboring Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, Eswatini (then Swaziland) and Zambia. A 1992 peace accord ended the war and led to Mozambique's first multiparty elections in 1994, though most refugees and IDPs had returned by the mid-1990s.","ongoing":false,"_mag":5000000,"countries":["Mozambique","Malawi","Zimbabwe"],"deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":750000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":11673725,"baselineWhat":"The population of Mozambique at the 1980 census, the first after independence","baselineYear":1980,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4283122996301523},{"id":"somalia-civil-war-collapse","title":"Somali State Collapse and Civil War","startYear":1977,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Ogaden War (1977-78) between Ethiopia and Somalia was followed by the 1991 collapse of Somalia's central government and decades of clan-based civil war and, later, conflict with al-Shabaab","peopleDisplaced":3500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":2.05,"lon":45.32,"flows":[{"fromLat":7.85,"fromLon":44,"toLat":2.05,"toLon":45.32,"label":"Ethiopia's Ogaden region → Somalia (1977-78 refugees)","people":1000000},{"fromLat":2.05,"fromLon":45.32,"toLat":0.05,"toLon":40.3,"label":"Somalia → Dadaab, Kenya (post-1991 exodus)","people":900000},{"fromLat":2.05,"fromLon":45.32,"toLat":9.03,"toLon":38.74,"label":"Somalia → Ethiopia (refugee flows)","people":300000}],"summary":"Somalia's modern displacement crisis has roots in the 1977-78 Ogaden War, in which Somalia unsuccessfully attempted to seize Ethiopia's ethnic-Somali Ogaden region, a defeat that sent up to 1-2 million ethnic Somali refugees into Somalia itself. The collapse of Siad Barre's government in 1991 triggered a prolonged civil war among rival clan militias, followed from the mid-2000s by conflict involving the Islamist insurgent group al-Shabaab, producing repeated waves of famine, displacement, and flight. Kenya's Dadaab camp complex, established in 1991-92, grew into one of the world's largest refugee settlements, at times sheltering several hundred thousand Somalis. As of the mid-2020s, UNHCR and IDMC estimates put internal displacement in Somalia at roughly 2.9-3.8 million people, with several hundred thousand more registered as refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and elsewhere, making it one of the world's longest-running displacement crises.","ongoing":true,"_mag":3500000,"countries":["Somalia","Ethiopia","Kenya"],"deathsLow":400000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":700000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":17600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Somalia","baselineYear":2024,"asOf":"2024","weakSources":false,"_share":0.19886363636363635},{"id":"ethnic-chinese-expulsion-vietnam","title":"Expulsion of Ethnic Chinese (Hoa) from Vietnam","startYear":1978,"endYear":1979,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Vietnam's government, amid deteriorating Sino-Vietnamese relations and nationalization of private trade, drove out much of the ethnic Chinese (Hoa) population by land and sea","peopleDisplaced":450000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":21.53,"lon":107.97,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.03,"fromLon":105.85,"toLat":22.82,"toLon":108.32,"label":"Hanoi/Haiphong → Guangxi, China (overland)","people":250000},{"fromLat":10.75,"fromLon":106.66,"toLat":22.32,"toLon":114.17,"label":"Cholon (Saigon's Chinese quarter) → Hong Kong (by boat)","people":150000}],"summary":"As relations between Vietnam and China collapsed in 1978–79, culminating in the brief Sino-Vietnamese War, Vietnam's government nationalized private trade (in which ethnic Chinese, or Hoa, played an outsized role) and pressured the community to leave, amid rising discrimination and fears of a Chinese \"fifth column.\" An estimated 250,000 Hoa crossed overland into southern China, while tens of thousands more, especially from southern Vietnam, left by boat as part of the broader \"boat people\" exodus, together totaling roughly 450,000–500,000 departures. The episode devastated Vietnam's ethnic Chinese business class and became a significant point of tension between Hanoi and Beijing. China accepted many of the overland refugees into state-run farms in Guangxi and Yunnan.","ongoing":false,"_mag":450000,"countries":["China","Vietnam","Hong Kong"],"deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":70000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["sexual violence"],"_deaths":45000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1500000,"baselineWhat":"The ethnic Chinese (Hoa) population of unified Vietnam before the exodus","baselineYear":1977,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3,"related":[{"id":"vietnam-new-economic-zones","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Ethnic Chinese were disproportionately assigned to the New Economic Zones, and some later left Vietnam in the 1978-79 exodus."}]},{"id":"rohingya-expulsions-myanmar","title":"Rohingya Expulsions from Myanmar","startYear":1978,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Myanmar's military and security forces carried out repeated campaigns against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State, driving mass flight into Bangladesh","peopleDisplaced":1350000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":20.15,"lon":92.9,"flows":[{"fromLat":20.82,"fromLon":92.37,"toLat":21.45,"toLon":92.01,"label":"Northern Rakhine (Maungdaw) → Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, 2017","people":750000},{"fromLat":20.82,"fromLon":92.37,"toLat":21.45,"toLon":92.01,"label":"Northern Rakhine → Bangladesh, 1978 and 1991-92 waves (largely repatriated)","people":450000},{"fromLat":20.15,"fromLon":92.9,"toLat":21.45,"toLon":92.01,"label":"Rakhine State → Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, 2024-25","people":150000}],"summary":"The Rohingya, a Muslim minority concentrated in Myanmar's Rakhine State and denied citizenship under the country's 1982 Citizenship Law, have been driven from Myanmar in several major waves since 1978, each involving military operations that Rohingya and human rights groups describe as ethnic cleansing. The largest exodus followed an August 2017 military crackdown, in which over 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh amid reports of mass killings, sexual violence, and village burnings, and renewed fighting in Rakhine drove up to 150,000 more into Bangladesh in 2024-25; the refugee population in the Cox's Bazar camps stood at close to one million on UNHCR-Government registration in 2026. Earlier waves in 1978 and 1991-92 each displaced a comparable 200,000-250,000 people, some of whom were later repatriated to Myanmar under contested, often coercive conditions. The crisis has left one of the world's largest and most protracted refugee populations, with no safe or agreed path to return.","ongoing":true,"_mag":1350000,"countries":["Myanmar","Bangladesh"],"deathsLow":6700,"deathsHigh":13759,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"_deaths":10229.5,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The Rohingya population of northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, before the expulsion of August 2017","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":1.2272727272727273,"related":[{"id":"rohingya-cox-bazar-camps","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":900000,"note":"The camp population (close to one million) is made up mostly of people who arrived in 2017 and 2024-25, counted in the expulsion entry's flows, plus earlier residents and children born in the camps. Do not sum the two displacement figures."}]},{"id":"el-salvador-civil-war","title":"Salvadoran Civil War","startYear":1979,"endYear":1992,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The US-backed Salvadoran military government, allied death squads, and the FMLN guerrilla coalition fought a 12-year civil war marked by massacres such as El Mozote","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.79,"lon":-88.9,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.79,"fromLon":-88.9,"toLat":34.05,"toLon":-118.24,"label":"El Salvador → United States (Los Angeles area)","people":500000},{"fromLat":13.79,"fromLon":-88.9,"toLat":14.1,"toLon":-87.2,"label":"El Salvador → Honduras","people":100000}],"summary":"El Salvador's civil war pitted a US-backed military government and allied paramilitary death squads against the FMLN guerrilla coalition from 1979 until the 1992 Chapultepec peace accords. The conflict included mass atrocities such as the 1981 El Mozote massacre, in which the army killed close to 1,000 civilians, and displaced roughly a million people, about a fifth of the population, many fleeing to the United States and forming the basis of large diaspora communities. The UN Truth Commission (1993) found that state security forces and allied paramilitaries were responsible for roughly 85% of documented human rights violations and the FMLN for about 5%.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1000000,"countries":["El Salvador","United States of America","Honduras"],"deathsLow":60326,"deathsHigh":83775,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":72050.5,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":4600000,"baselineWhat":"The population of El Salvador at the outbreak of the civil war","baselineYear":1979,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.21739130434782608},{"id":"iran-post-1979-exodus-and-bahai-persecution","title":"Post-Revolutionary Iran: Mass Emigration and the Persecution of the Baha'is","startYear":1979,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Islamic Republic's prosecutions, executions and exclusions drove large-scale emigration and stripped the Baha'i community of rights and property","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35.69,"lon":51.39,"flows":[{"fromLat":35.69,"fromLon":51.39,"toLat":34.05,"toLon":-118.24,"label":"Iranian emigration to North America","people":null},{"fromLat":35.69,"fromLon":51.39,"toLat":48.86,"toLon":2.35,"label":"Iranian emigration to Europe","people":null}],"summary":"After the 1979 revolution and through the war with Iraq, large numbers of Iranians left the country: former officials and officers, professionals, religious minorities including Jews, Armenians, Zoroastrians and Baha'is, and later students and political opponents. Political prisoners were executed in large numbers in the 1980s, culminating in the mass executions of 1988, which Amnesty International documented in its 2018 report Blood-Soaked Secrets and which UN special rapporteurs have repeatedly raised. The Baha'i community, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority and unrecognised by the constitution, has been subject to a documented state policy: more than 200 Baha'is were executed in the 1980s, cemeteries and holy places were destroyed, and a 1991 memorandum approved at the highest level set out that Baha'is should be blocked from higher education and from influential employment. Iran rejects the characterisation, stating that those prosecuted were convicted of espionage or security offences and that Baha'ism is a political organisation rather than a religion. The exclusions have continued into the 2020s, with property confiscations in Baha'i villages reported by UN human-rights bodies.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2000000,"_deaths":17500,"countries":["Iran","United States of America","France"],"baselinePop":37000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Iran at the time of the 1979 revolution","baselineYear":1979,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.05405405405405406},{"id":"sinai-return-1982","title":"Sinai Peninsula: Israeli Withdrawal under the 1979 Peace Treaty","startYear":1979,"endYear":1982,"type":"territory","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Under the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty (1979), Israel agreed to withdraw fully from the Sinai Peninsula, occupied since 1967, completing the withdrawal by April 1982 and evacuating Israeli settlements, including Yamit.","peopleDisplaced":7000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Sinai Peninsula, about 60,000 km², returned by Israel to Egypt in stages under the 1979 peace treaty — a reversal of a seizure rather than one","lat":29.5,"lon":33.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.08,"fromLon":34.28,"toLat":31.5,"toLon":34.6,"label":"Yamit settlers → Israel proper","people":7000}],"summary":"As part of the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state, Israel agreed to withdraw entirely from the Sinai Peninsula in phases, completing the process in April 1982. The withdrawal required the evacuation of some 7,000 Israeli settlers, most controversially from the town of Yamit, which was demolished after residents were forcibly removed by the Israeli army. The Sinai's return, in exchange for peace and demilitarization arrangements later monitored by the Multinational Force and Observers, is frequently cited as a precedent for 'land for peace' arrangements. Egypt maintains sovereignty over the peninsula today, though a heavily restricted security zone remains in place under the treaty's annexes.","ongoing":false,"_mag":7000,"countries":["Egypt","Israel"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Sinai Peninsula at the time of the Israeli withdrawal","baselineYear":1982,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.035},{"id":"soviet-invasion-afghanistan","title":"Soviet Invasion and Occupation of Afghanistan","startYear":1979,"endYear":1989,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its communist government against a mujahideen insurgency backed by the US, Pakistan, and others, producing one of the largest refugee crises of the Cold War","peopleDisplaced":6000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.53,"lon":69.17,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.53,"fromLon":69.17,"toLat":34.01,"toLon":71.58,"label":"Afghanistan → Pakistan","people":3200000},{"fromLat":34.53,"fromLon":69.17,"toLat":36.3,"toLon":59.6,"label":"Afghanistan → Iran","people":2900000}],"summary":"The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 to prop up its embattled communist government, beginning a decade-long occupation contested by US-, Pakistani-, and Saudi-backed mujahideen insurgents. The resulting war caused massive civilian displacement: by the late 1980s an estimated 5–6 million Afghans, roughly a third of the pre-war population, had fled to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, while millions more were internally displaced. Estimates of Afghan deaths during the conflict range widely, commonly cited between 1 and 2 million. Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, but displacement continued through subsequent civil war and Taliban rule.","ongoing":false,"_mag":6000000,"countries":["Afghanistan","Pakistan","Iran"],"deathsLow":876000,"deathsHigh":2000000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","enforced disappearance"],"_deaths":1438000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":15500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Afghanistan on the eve of the Soviet invasion","baselineYear":1979,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3870967741935484},{"id":"iran-iraq-war","title":"Iran–Iraq War Border Displacement","startYear":1980,"endYear":1988,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980, beginning an eight-year war fought largely along the shared border; both governments displaced border populations, and Iraq expelled tens of thousands of Iraqis of alleged Iranian descent, including Faili Kurds.","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":31,"lon":48,"flows":[{"fromLat":30.43,"fromLon":48.17,"toLat":35.7,"toLon":51.4,"label":"Khuzestan border cities → interior Iran","people":800000},{"fromLat":33.3,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":31.32,"toLon":48.67,"label":"Iraq (Faili Kurds expelled) → Iran border","people":200000}],"summary":"Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980 in a dispute over the Shatt al-Arab waterway and regional influence, beginning an eight-year war of trench warfare, missile strikes on cities, and chemical weapons use that killed an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 people combined. Iranian border cities such as Khorramshahr and Abadan were besieged, shelled, or occupied, forcing roughly 1–1.2 million Iranians from Khuzestan province into the interior. Iraq, for its part, expelled well over 200,000 Iraqis it deemed of Iranian origin, including many Shia Faili Kurds who were stripped of citizenship and forced across the border into Iran, often with little warning. The war ended in a 1988 ceasefire that largely restored the pre-war border under UN Security Council Resolution 598.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1500000,"countries":["Iran","Iraq"],"deathsLow":400000,"deathsHigh":1250000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":825000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":52000000,"baselineWhat":"The combined populations of Iran and Iraq at the outbreak of the war in 1980","baselineYear":1980,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.028846153846153848},{"id":"peru-internal-armed-conflict","title":"Peru's Internal Armed Conflict and Highland Displacement","startYear":1980,"endYear":2000,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Shining Path and the MRTA fought the Peruvian armed forces and peasant self-defence patrols, with Quechua-speaking highland communities bearing most of the violence","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-13.1588,"lon":-74.2239,"flows":[{"fromLat":-13.1588,"fromLon":-74.2239,"toLat":-12.0464,"toLon":-77.0428,"label":"Ayacucho → Lima shanty districts","people":200000},{"fromLat":-12.7861,"fromLon":-74.9722,"toLat":-12.0653,"toLon":-75.2049,"label":"Huancavelica and Apurímac highlands → Huancayo (approximate)","people":60000}],"summary":"Between 1980 and 2000 Peru's internal armed conflict, fought between the Maoist Shining Path, the smaller MRTA, the armed forces and army-organised peasant self-defence patrols, killed or disappeared more than 69,000 people and drove over 600,000 from their homes. Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that three of every four victims were Quechua-speaking peasants from the poorest highland and jungle provinces, and that state agents were responsible for 37 per cent of reported deaths and disappearances while Shining Path perpetrated the majority. Entire highland communities in Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Apurímac were emptied, with survivors moving to provincial towns and to the shanty districts of Lima, where many remained displaced decades later. The commission attributed the scale of the killing to entrenched racial and regional discrimination, the ceding of the emergency zones to military control without oversight, and judicial failure, and it documented massacres, torture, rape and disappearance by both sides. Its report, delivered in August 2003, remains the authoritative account, though its statistical method has since been challenged.","deathsLow":48000,"deathsHigh":70000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":59000,"countries":["Peru"],"baselinePop":17005210,"baselineWhat":"The population of Peru at the 1981 national census","baselineYear":1981,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.03528330435201917},{"id":"golan-heights-annexation","title":"Israeli Annexation of the Golan Heights","startYear":1981,"endYear":1981,"type":"territory","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israel's Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli civil law, jurisdiction, and administration to the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 war and never returned.","peopleDisplaced":0,"territoryKm2":1200,"territoryDesc":"The Golan Heights (~1,800 km²), of which Israel has occupied about 1,200 km² — roughly two-thirds of the plateau — since 1967, and applied Israeli law to in 1981","lat":33,"lon":35.8,"flows":[],"summary":"Fourteen years after capturing the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967, Israel's parliament passed the Golan Heights Law in December 1981, applying Israeli law and administration to the territory in a move widely understood as annexation, though Israel avoided the word explicitly. Some 20,000–25,000 Syrian Druze and Alawite residents remained in northern Golan villages such as Majdal Shams; most have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Roughly 20,000-25,000 Israeli settlers now live in dozens of settlements across the Golan. Syria continues to demand full withdrawal, and the territory's status remains a central unresolved issue between the two countries.","ongoing":false,"_mag":7200,"countries":["Israel"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":15000,"baselineWhat":"The Syrian population remaining in the Israeli-held Golan Heights at the time of the 1981 annexation law","baselineYear":1981,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"nicaragua-miskito-relocation","title":"Forced Relocation of the Miskito from the Río Coco, Nicaragua","startYear":1981,"endYear":1987,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Sandinista government emptied Miskito villages along the Honduran border and moved their inhabitants to inland resettlement camps during the contra war","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":14.7419,"lon":-83.9722,"flows":[{"fromLat":14.7419,"fromLon":-83.9722,"toLat":14.05,"toLon":-83.9,"label":"Río Coco villages → Tasba Pri resettlement camps","people":8500},{"fromLat":14.7419,"fromLon":-83.9722,"toLat":15.2,"toLon":-84.1167,"label":"Río Coco → Mocorón and the Honduran Mosquitia","people":20000}],"summary":"In late 1981 the Sandinista government, facing contra incursions from Honduras and an armed Miskito insurgency, ordered the evacuation of Miskito settlements along the Río Coco, which forms the border. Between 1 January and 20 February 1982 about 8,500 people from 42 villages were moved inland to camps grouped under the name Tasba Pri; upriver communities walked out because no road existed, houses were burned and livestock left behind, and roughly half the river's population crossed into Honduras rather than comply. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigated and reported in 1983, found that the government had killed a considerable number of Miskito at Leimus in reprisal for the killing of soldiers at San Carlos, that hundreds had been detained arbitrarily on vague counter-revolutionary accusations, and that around 70 people had disappeared, while also finding that the relocation itself was carried out in a context of armed attack from across the border. Refugee flows into the Honduran Mosquitia continued through the mid-1980s, with a further wave of about 10,500 in 1986. The 1987 autonomy statute for the Atlantic coast regions and subsequent negotiations allowed many Miskito to return to the Río Coco.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":40000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Nicaragua","Honduras"],"baselinePop":70000,"baselineWhat":"The Miskito population of Nicaragua's Atlantic coast at the start of the relocations","baselineYear":1981,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5714285714285714},{"id":"luwero-triangle-obote-1981-1985","title":"The Luwero Triangle Campaign","startYear":1981,"endYear":1985,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) of Milton Obote's second government, fighting Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army, cleared the Luwero Triangle north of Kampala, killing civilians and herding the population into military-controlled camps","peopleDisplaced":750000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":0.84,"lon":32.47,"flows":[],"summary":"After the disputed December 1980 election returned Milton Obote to power, Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army began a guerrilla war in the Buganda countryside north and northwest of Kampala, the area that became known as the Luwero Triangle. To cut the guerrillas off from rural support, the government army (UNLA) launched 'Operation Bonanza' in January 1983 and moved almost 750,000 people into internment camps under military control; people found outside the camps were treated as rebels. Human Rights Watch, quoting Ofcansky, records that UNLA troops destroyed towns, villages and farms, that Amnesty International reported at least 36 mass grave sites, and that the Banyarwanda community lost 45,000-60,000 people. Death toll estimates range from about 12,000 to 500,000, and the Library of Congress study notes piles of skulls found in bush clearings years later. Obote was overthrown by his own army in July 1985 and the NRA took Kampala in January 1986; Uganda's Commission of Inquiry into Violations of Human Rights (1986-94) heard testimony on the period but its 720-page report was never published, and Human Rights Watch notes that Obote was never called to account. The later camps of northern Uganda are a separate entry, 'northern-uganda-protected-camps'.","deathsLow":12000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"_mag":750000,"_deaths":156000,"countries":["Uganda"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"lebanon-war-1982","title":"1982 Lebanon War and Displacement","startYear":1982,"endYear":2000,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israel invaded Lebanon to expel the PLO and besieged Beirut; Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian forces were combatants, and allied Christian Phalangist militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians under Israeli military oversight.","peopleDisplaced":550000,"territoryKm2":850,"territoryDesc":"The 'security belt' in southern Lebanon, about 850 km² (roughly a tenth of the country), held by Israel and the South Lebanon Army from 1985 until the withdrawal in May 2000","lat":33.5,"lon":35.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.27,"fromLon":35.2,"toLat":33.89,"toLon":35.5,"label":"South Lebanon → Beirut","people":300000},{"fromLat":33.88,"fromLon":35.49,"toLat":33.55,"toLon":35.38,"label":"Beirut (besieged) → Bekaa Valley","people":150000}],"summary":"Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, driving PLO forces out of southern Lebanon and besieging PLO fighters and civilians in West Beirut for over two months before a negotiated evacuation. Civilian displacement across southern Lebanon and Beirut has been estimated at 500,000 to over 700,000 people, with heavy damage to Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre. In September 1982, Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia allied with Israel killed an estimated 1,300–3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps; an Israeli commission of inquiry (the Kahan Commission) found Israel indirectly responsible for failing to prevent the massacre. Israel subsequently maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon, contributing to further waves of displacement, until withdrawing in 2000.","ongoing":false,"_mag":550000,"countries":["Lebanon"],"deathsLow":9000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":14500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Lebanon in 1982, including some 350,000 registered Palestine refugees","baselineYear":1982,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.19642857142857142,"related":[{"id":"palestinian-refugees-lebanon","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were among those displaced by the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut."},{"id":"lebanese-civil-war-displacement","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedDeaths":[9000,20000],"note":"The 1982 Israeli invasion took place during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, whose death and displacement totals cover the invasion period."}]},{"id":"hama-massacre-1982","title":"The Hama Massacre","startYear":1982,"endYear":1982,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Syrian government forces under Hafez al-Assad, led by Rifaat al-Assad's Defence Companies, besieged and stormed the city of Hama to crush a Muslim Brotherhood uprising, killing and detaining large numbers of its residents","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35.13,"lon":36.75,"flows":[],"summary":"After the Muslim Brotherhood ambushed soldiers in Hama on the night of 2 February 1982, the government of Hafez al-Assad sent several thousand troops, led by the Defence Companies (Saraya al-Difaa) of his brother Rifaat, to retake the city. Over a siege and assault of about 27 days, old quarters were bombed from the air and shelled and the Hadra neighbourhood was reportedly razed by tanks; Amnesty International records that security forces killed large numbers of residents who stayed in their homes and carried out mass arrests, with torture reported to be rife. Estimates of the dead run from about 5,000 to 40,000, and the Syrian state never published a figure. In March 2024 the Swiss Office of the Attorney General indicted Rifaat al-Assad for war crimes and crimes against humanity over Hama; the case was closed on 31 March 2026 after his death, without a trial. The separate entry 'syria-civil-war' covers displacement after 2011, when Hama was again a site of protest and repression.","deathsLow":5000,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_mag":18000,"_deaths":22500,"countries":["Syria"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"habre-repression-chad-1982-1990","title":"Repression under Hissène Habré","startYear":1982,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Hissène Habré's government in Chad, through its political police, the Directorate of Documentation and Security (DDS), detained, tortured and killed suspected opponents and carried out campaigns against the Hadjerai, Zaghawa and Chadian Arab communities and the south","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":12.11,"lon":15.04,"flows":[],"summary":"Hissène Habré ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990. His one-party government relied on the DDS, a political police force that ran prisons where detainees were systematically tortured and many died; Human Rights Watch documents waves of repression against people in the south in 1984, the Hadjerai in 1987 and the Zaghawa in 1989-90, as well as Chadian Arabs. A Commission of Inquiry created by his successor, Idriss Déby, in December 1990 reported in 1992 that Habré's government was responsible for more than 40,000 deaths and singled out the DDS. After a campaign by victims and Human Rights Watch, the Extraordinary African Chambers, set up by Senegal and the African Union, convicted Habré on 30 May 2016 of crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture, including sexual violence, and sentenced him to life imprisonment; on appeal in April 2017 the life sentence was upheld though his personal conviction for rape was overturned. A Chadian court had convicted 20 former security agents in March 2015. Habré died in August 2021, and Human Rights Watch reported in 2022 that victims had received no reparations.","deathsLow":1208,"deathsHigh":40000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","sexual violence"],"_mag":16483.2,"_deaths":20604,"countries":["Chad"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"sri-lankan-civil-war","title":"Sri Lankan Civil War and Tamil Displacement","startYear":1983,"endYear":2009,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"A 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), fighting for an independent Tamil state in the north and east, caused mass displacement and heavy civilian casualties, especially in the war's final 2009 offensive","peopleDisplaced":800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":9.66,"lon":80.02,"flows":[{"fromLat":9.66,"fromLon":80.02,"toLat":6.93,"toLon":79.85,"label":"Northern Sri Lanka (Tamil areas) → Colombo","people":300000},{"fromLat":8.7,"fromLon":80.3,"toLat":9.28,"toLon":79.31,"label":"Northern Sri Lanka → Tamil Nadu, India (refugees across the Palk Strait)","people":150000}],"summary":"Sri Lanka's civil war, fought from 1983 to 2009 between government forces and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) seeking an independent Tamil state in the north and east, caused repeated waves of displacement among the mostly Tamil population of those regions, as well as significant Sinhalese and Muslim displacement. Over the course of the war, an estimated 800,000 to over a million people were displaced at various points, and roughly 100,000–150,000 Tamils fled as refugees to Tamil Nadu, India. The war's final months in early 2009 saw intense fighting in a shrinking government-declared 'no-fire zone' in the north, displacing an estimated 280,000–300,000 civilians and causing a disputed number of civilian deaths. The conflict ended in May 2009 with the LTTE's military defeat.","ongoing":false,"_mag":800000,"countries":["Sri Lanka"],"deathsLow":80000,"deathsHigh":140000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","enforced disappearance","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children"],"_deaths":110000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Sri Lanka's Northern and Eastern Provinces at the census of 1981, the war zone from which most displacement came","baselineYear":1981,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.38095238095238093,"related":[{"id":"ltte-expulsion-northern-muslims-1990","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":75000,"note":"The LTTE's 1990 expulsion of northern Muslims took place within the Sri Lankan civil war."}]},{"id":"gukurahundi-matabeleland-1983-1987","title":"Gukurahundi","startYear":1983,"endYear":1987,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government, chiefly through the army's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, killed, tortured and detained civilians, mostly Ndebele-speaking supporters of Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU, in Matabeleland and the Midlands in a campaign against armed 'dissidents'","peopleDisplaced":10000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-18.93,"lon":27.8,"flows":[],"summary":"Gukurahundi is the name given to the campaign that Zimbabwe's government waged in Matabeleland and the Midlands from early 1983 against armed 'dissidents', in practice falling mainly on Ndebele-speaking civilians associated with Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU. The army's Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korea and reporting directly to the Prime Minister's office, carried out most of the killings and disappearances, according to the CCJP and Legal Resources Foundation report 'Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace' (1997), which Amnesty International summarised as documenting more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions, hundreds of disappearances, more than 7,000 beatings or cases of torture and more than 10,000 arbitrary detentions; Amnesty judged the atrocities 'tantamount to crimes against humanity'. The violence ended with the Unity Accord between ZANU-PF and PF-ZAPU in December 1987, followed by an amnesty that covered those responsible. The government never published either the 1984 Chihambakwe Commission report or acknowledged the CCJP report; Mugabe later called the period 'a moment of madness' without accepting responsibility. President Emmerson Mnangagwa, minister of state security at the time, who denies responsibility, set up a programme of hearings led by traditional chiefs that began behind closed doors in June 2025 with compensation to be considered case by case; some activists have called it a sham. This entry is the event that 'zimbabwe-murambatsvina-land-seizures' refers to as the separate, far deadlier Gukurahundi massacres of 1983-87; that entry covers the land seizures and urban demolitions of 2000-05.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","torture","arbitrary detention"],"_mag":10000,"_deaths":11500,"countries":["Zimbabwe"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"bulgarian-turks-expulsion-1989","title":"Bulgaria's \"Revival Process\" and the 1989 Expulsion of Turks","startYear":1984,"endYear":1989,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"The Bulgarian communist government under Todor Zhivkov forcibly renamed its Turkish and Muslim minority and then drove roughly a third of it across the border into Turkey","peopleDisplaced":320000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":41.65,"lon":25.37,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.65,"fromLon":25.37,"toLat":41.68,"toLon":26.56,"label":"Kardzhali and the Turkish-populated districts → Turkey","people":320000}],"summary":"From December 1984 the Bulgarian government carried out what it called the Revival Process, compelling more than 800,000 ethnic Turks and other Muslims to replace their names with Slavic ones within about three months and restricting Turkish-language and Muslim religious practice. Protests were suppressed by force, including with live rounds at Momchilgrad in December 1984. In the summer of 1989 the authorities opened the border and pressed the minority to leave for Turkey in what was officially styled the 'Great Excursion'; around 320,000 people, about a third of Bulgaria's Turkish population, crossed within months, in the largest single displacement in Cold War Europe. After the fall of Zhivkov in November 1989 and the restoration of names and rights, up to 200,000 returned by the end of 1991. The Bulgarian parliament formally declared the events a form of ethnic cleansing in 2012; charges brought against communist-era leaders in the early 1990s were reduced or dropped and no one was ever convicted.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":2500,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":320000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bulgaria","Turkey"],"baselinePop":850000,"baselineWhat":"The Turkish and Bulgarian-Muslim (Pomak) minority of Bulgaria in the late 1980s","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.3764705882352941},{"id":"ethiopia-villagization-resettlement","title":"Ethiopian Villagization and Resettlement Campaign","startYear":1984,"endYear":1989,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Ethiopia's Marxist Derg government under Mengistu Haile Mariam forcibly relocated famine-affected highlanders to state farms and grouped rural populations nationwide into planned villages","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.13,"lon":39.63,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.13,"fromLon":39.63,"toLat":8.15,"toLon":34.57,"label":"Wollo highlands → Gambela resettlement zone","people":200000},{"fromLat":11.13,"fromLon":39.63,"toLat":11.32,"toLon":36.45,"label":"Wollo highlands → Pawe/Metekel resettlement zone","people":150000}],"summary":"Amid the 1983–85 famine, Ethiopia's Derg government under Mengistu Haile Mariam launched a program forcibly relocating roughly 594,000 people, most from the drought-stricken northern highlands (especially Wollo), to state-run farms in the south and west, officially framed as famine relief but widely criticized as a tool of counterinsurgency against rebel-held northern regions. An estimated 5.5% of resettled people, about 33,000, died from starvation and disease, and tens of thousands fled the settlements. A separate, much larger villagization campaign begun in 1985 forcibly regrouped as many as 13 million rural Ethiopians into planned village clusters nationwide, disrupting agriculture and traditional land use. International criticism, including from aid organizations, led to a temporary suspension of resettlement in 1986, though the broader programs continued until the Derg's fall in 1991.","ongoing":false,"_mag":600000,"countries":["Ethiopia"],"deathsLow":50000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","summary execution","starvation & siege"],"_deaths":75000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":42616876,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ethiopia at the census of 1984, the country's first","baselineYear":1984,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.014078929670959457},{"id":"thailand-myanmar-border-camps","title":"Closed \"Temporary Shelters\" on the Thai-Myanmar Border","startYear":1984,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Thai authorities confining Karen, Karenni and other refugees from Myanmar to designated border shelters under a policy that until 2025 barred them from working or leaving the camps","peopleDisplaced":81000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Nine camps designated \"temporary shelters\" in Mae Hong Son, Tak, Kanchanaburi and Ratchaburi provinces along the Thai-Myanmar border, including Mae La, Ban Mai Nai Soi and Ban Mae Surin","lat":16.95,"lon":98.52,"flows":[],"summary":"Thailand is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has since 1984 accommodated people fleeing conflict in eastern Myanmar in fenced camps that it designates \"temporary shelters\", administered by the Ministry of Interior with services delivered by NGOs. Residents historically could not work legally, could not leave the camp area without permission, and risked arrest and deportation if found outside; many have lived this way for three decades and roughly half of the present population was born inside the camps. Large-scale resettlement to third countries between 2005 and 2014 moved more than 100,000 people abroad and reduced the camp population, but resettlement has since slowed sharply. In August 2025 the Thai cabinet approved a resolution allowing long-staying refugees from Myanmar to work legally, which UNHCR welcomed as a turning point while noting that it reaches only a limited number of people; work cards became available from October 2025 and take-up has been slow. A suspension of United States funding in early 2025 cut health and food services in the camps, and Thai authorities adopted a staged plan in August 2025 aiming at camp consolidation and eventual closure, including the merger of the two Karenni camps in Mae Hong Son. From mid-May 2026 the authorities tightened restrictions on residents who do not hold work authorisation, preventing them from leaving the camps.","ongoing":true,"_mag":81000,"countries":["Thailand"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":140000,"baselineWhat":"The refugee population from Myanmar registered in Thailand's nine border shelters at their peak","baselineYear":2008,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.5785714285714286},{"id":"chernobyl-exclusion-zone-evacuation","title":"Chernobyl Evacuation and Exclusion Zone","startYear":1986,"endYear":1991,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Soviet authorities evacuated and then permanently resettled the population of the contaminated area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine and Belarus","peopleDisplaced":346000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A 30-kilometre exclusion zone around the reactor in Ukraine and Belarus, closed to habitation since 1986; further strictly controlled zones cover areas with caesium deposition above 555 kBq per square metre","lat":51.4,"lon":30.05,"flows":[{"fromLat":51.4,"fromLon":30.05,"toLat":50.45,"toLon":30.52,"label":"Pripyat and the 30-km zone → Kyiv and resettlement areas","people":116000}],"summary":"The explosion and fire at reactor 4 of the Chernobyl plant on 26 April 1986 released large quantities of radionuclides across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Pripyat, a town of 45,000, was evacuated on 27 April, and 116,000 people in total were removed from the 30-kilometre zone by mid-May; the World Health Organization records a further 230,000 relocated from contaminated districts in later years, giving a state-ordered permanent removal of roughly 350,000 people. The zone remains closed to habitation, though about a thousand mostly elderly returnees, the samosely, moved back informally. Thirty people died immediately or within weeks from the explosion and acute radiation syndrome. The WHO expert group projected up to 4,000 additional cancer deaths over the lifetimes of the most exposed groups, which are the liquidators, evacuees and residents of strictly controlled zones, and up to a further 5,000 among the roughly five million people living in less contaminated areas; other researchers have published far higher projections, and the true long-term toll is unlikely ever to be known precisely.","deathsLow":30,"deathsHigh":9000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":346000,"_deaths":4515,"countries":["Ukraine"],"baselinePop":5000000,"baselineWhat":"The population living in the areas of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia designated as contaminated after the accident","baselineYear":1986,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0692},{"id":"fiji-coups-indofijian-exodus","title":"Fiji's Coups and the Indo-Fijian Exodus","startYear":1987,"endYear":2006,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Military and nationalist coups in Fiji installed an ethnically weighted political order, prompting the departure of a large share of the Indo-Fijian population","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-18.1416,"lon":178.4419,"flows":[{"fromLat":-18.1416,"fromLon":178.4419,"toLat":-36.8485,"toLon":174.7633,"label":"Fiji → New Zealand","people":25000},{"fromLat":-18.1416,"fromLon":178.4419,"toLat":-33.8688,"toLon":151.2093,"label":"Fiji → Australia","people":22000},{"fromLat":-18.1416,"fromLon":178.4419,"toLat":49.2827,"toLon":-123.1207,"label":"Fiji → Canada and the United States","people":10000}],"summary":"Sitiveni Rabuka's two military coups in May and September 1987 removed a government supported by Fiji's Indo-Fijian majority-of-voters and were followed by a constitution weighting political representation toward indigenous Fijians; George Speight's armed seizure of parliament in May 2000 removed another Indo-Fijian-led government and was accompanied by looting and violence against Indo-Fijian homes and businesses. Emigration, which had run at about 2,300 people a year before 1987, more than doubled afterwards: 50,703 people left between 1987 and 1996 and a further 16,825 between 1997 and 2000, with roughly nine in ten of them Indo-Fijian. Departure was driven by political exclusion, the ethnic patterning of public-sector appointment and promotion, and the non-renewal of thirty-year agricultural leases from the 1960s and 1970s, which pushed Indo-Fijian farming families off cane land. The Indo-Fijian share of the population, close to half at the time of the first coup, fell to roughly a third by the 2007 census. Most emigrants went to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"settlers":null,"_mag":60000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Fiji","New Zealand","Australia","Canada"],"baselinePop":348704,"baselineWhat":"The Indo-Fijian population of Fiji at the last census before the 1987 coups","baselineYear":1986,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.17206570615765807},{"id":"jvp-insurrection-counter-insurgency-sri-lanka","title":"The JVP Insurrection and Counter-Terror in Southern Sri Lanka","startYear":1987,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) waged an insurrection of assassinations and intimidation in Sinhala-majority Sri Lanka; government security forces and allied death squads responded with mass extrajudicial executions, disappearances and detention of suspected supporters, mostly rural Sinhalese youth","peopleDisplaced":9000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":6.68,"lon":80.4,"flows":[],"summary":"The JVP, a Marxist revolutionary group drawn largely from disaffected Sinhalese students and school pupils, launched its second insurrection in 1987, the year the Indian Peace Keeping Force took charge of security in the Tamil northeast. Amnesty International recorded that the JVP 'terrorized political opponents, killing several thousand people, and had murdered the families of members of the security forces'. From 1987 to 1990 the security forces, alongside plainclothes death squads linked to them, ran what Amnesty called an 'unprecedented campaign of counter-terror'. Amnesty documented thousands of extrajudicial executions, disappearances and killings in custody, and mutilated or burned bodies left in public places. JVP leader Rohana Wijeweera died in army custody in November 1989, along with most of the politburo, and the insurgency collapsed. Totals rest on estimates: Mick Moore judged about 40,000 dead a likely order of magnitude, Human Rights Watch reported estimates of 35,000 to at least 60,000 killed and disappeared, and Amnesty later wrote of an estimated 30,000 or more disappeared in 1989-90 alone. Presidential commissions appointed in 1994 examined 27,526 complaints of disappearances since January 1988 and established 16,800; Amnesty counted fewer than 30 convictions for abduction or wrongful confinement between 1987 and 2007. The concurrent war with the LTTE in the north and east is covered in the entry on the Sri Lankan civil war, whose death toll does not include this campaign.","deathsLow":30000,"deathsHigh":60000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","torture","arbitrary detention"],"_mag":9000,"_deaths":45000,"countries":["Sri Lanka"],"ongoing":false,"weakSources":false},{"id":"bougainville-conflict-blockade","title":"The Bougainville Conflict and Blockade","startYear":1988,"endYear":1998,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Papua New Guinea forces fought the Bougainville Revolutionary Army over the Panguna mine and secession, imposing a sea and air blockade on the island","peopleDisplaced":85000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-6.2276,"lon":155.5697,"flows":[{"fromLat":-6.3167,"fromLon":155.4833,"toLat":-5.4222,"toLon":154.6733,"label":"Panguna and central Bougainville → care centres in the north and on Buka","people":50000},{"fromLat":-6.2276,"fromLon":155.5697,"toLat":-9.4456,"toLon":159.9729,"label":"Bougainville → Solomon Islands","people":17000}],"summary":"Landowner grievances over compensation and environmental damage from the Australian-operated Panguna copper mine escalated into sabotage in 1988 and then into a secessionist war between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force; the mine closed in 1989 and never reopened. From May 1990 Papua New Guinea imposed a sea and air blockade on the island, which lasted formally until September 1994 and in practice for up to eight years in BRA-held areas, barring medicines and other goods; health centre records document 2,023 deaths from preventable disease between January 1990 and July 1991 alone. Government forces concentrated civilians in 'care centres', into which about 67,300 people were displaced, while 15,000 to 20,000 left the island, mainly for the Solomon Islands. Amnesty International documented at least 62 extrajudicial executions and 13 disappearances by the PNGDF and government-backed Resistance forces, along with deliberate killings and hostage-taking by the BRA, and noted that only one alleged PNGDF killing had been investigated. A truce in 1997 and the Bougainville Peace Agreement of 2001 ended the war and created an autonomous region; a non-binding independence referendum in 2019 returned an overwhelming vote for independence.","deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":20000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":85000,"_deaths":10500,"countries":["Papua New Guinea","Solomon Is."],"baselinePop":160000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Bougainville (North Solomons Province) at the outbreak of the conflict","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.53125},{"id":"karabakh-war-1988-94","title":"First Nagorno-Karabakh War","startYear":1988,"endYear":1994,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Armenian and ethnic Armenian Karabakh forces, backed by Armenia, fought Azerbaijani forces over the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and seven adjacent Azerbaijani districts as the Soviet Union collapsed","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":11900,"territoryDesc":"Nagorno-Karabakh (about 4,400 km²) plus seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts (about 7,500-9,200 km²), placed under Armenian/Karabakh Armenian control after the war","lat":39.82,"lon":46.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":40,"fromLon":46.92,"toLat":40.4,"toLon":49.85,"label":"Nagorno-Karabakh/adjacent districts → Baku (Azerbaijanis)","people":700000},{"fromLat":40.4,"fromLon":49.85,"toLat":40.18,"toLon":44.5,"label":"Azerbaijan proper → Armenia (Armenians)","people":350000}],"summary":"As the Soviet Union weakened, the predominantly ethnic Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast sought to join Armenia, triggering pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijani cities and full-scale war after both republics gained independence in 1991. Armenian and Karabakh Armenian forces, with Armenian state backing, took control of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani districts by the 1994 Bishkek ceasefire, displacing roughly 600,000-800,000 Azerbaijanis, while some 300,000-400,000 Armenians fled or were expelled from Azerbaijan proper. The unrecognized 'Republic of Artsakh' was established in the captured territory, and the conflict remained frozen for over two decades.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1000000,"countries":["Azerbaijan","Armenia"],"deathsLow":18500,"deathsHigh":30000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":24250,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":10326000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Soviet Azerbaijan and Soviet Armenia at the 1989 census, the two republics between which the population was exchanged","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0968429207824908},{"id":"aceh-insurgency-martial-law","title":"The Aceh Insurgency, Military Operations Zone and Martial Law Displacement","startYear":1989,"endYear":2005,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Indonesian security forces fought the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), emptying villages and confining the province under military rule","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":5.5483,"lon":95.3238,"flows":[{"fromLat":5.2,"fromLon":97.15,"toLat":5.1801,"toLon":96.95,"label":"Villagers moved into camps in North Aceh and Bireuen","people":100000}],"summary":"The Free Aceh Movement launched an armed separatist campaign in 1976, and from 1989 to 1998 Aceh was designated a Military Operations Area (Daerah Operasi Militer), a period in which Indonesian human rights bodies later documented extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture and sexual violence. After the fall of Suharto the conflict escalated again, and in May 2003 the Indonesian government declared martial law and launched its largest domestic military operation since East Timor; Human Rights Watch documented more than 100,000 people displaced within seven months, forced relocations into camps, restrictions on movement and journalist access, and summary executions. Estimates of total conflict deaths across 1976-2005 range from about 10,000 to 33,000, most of them civilians. The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed some 130,000 people in Aceh, transformed the political situation and was followed by the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding of August 2005, which ended the war and granted Aceh special autonomy. An Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in 2016 and has taken statements from thousands of victims, and in January 2023 President Joko Widodo acknowledged twelve past gross human rights violations by the Indonesian state, including cases in Aceh.","deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":33000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","sexual violence","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":21500,"countries":["Indonesia"],"baselinePop":3416156,"baselineWhat":"The population of Aceh province at the 1990 Indonesian census","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.087818003627469},{"id":"crimean-tatar-repatriation","title":"Crimean Tatar Return to Crimea and Its Obstruction","startYear":1989,"endYear":2014,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Crimean Tatars deported in 1944 returned from Central Asia to Crimea as Soviet restrictions lapsed, and faced Soviet and then Ukrainian obstacles to citizenship, land and housing","peopleDisplaced":266000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.95,"lon":34.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":41.3,"fromLon":69.24,"toLat":44.95,"toLon":34.1,"label":"Uzbekistan and Central Asia → Crimea","people":266000}],"summary":"Deported wholesale to Central Asia in 1944 and barred from return for decades, Crimean Tatars began returning to Crimea in numbers from 1989 as Soviet restrictions collapsed. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly recorded in April 2000 some 260,000 returnees out of a diaspora of 400,000-550,000, with about 30,000 still in Uzbekistan. Return was not accompanied by restitution: returnees found their former homes occupied, were allocated land on poor peripheral sites where many built unauthorised settlements, and faced infrastructure gaps in which 70 per cent of settlements had electricity, 27 per cent running water and none any sewerage. Many arrived stateless or without Ukrainian citizenship, a problem addressed by a 1997 law under which some 25,000 stateless Crimean Tatars had received Ukrainian passports by mid-1999 and by a UNHCR statelessness programme that reported over 90 per cent holding Ukrainian citizenship by 2001; unemployment among returnees was put at around 60 per cent. Ukraine spent some 300 million dollars on the resettlement between 1991 and 2000, which the Assembly judged insufficient against needs. Return slowed after the early 1990s; the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities put the total at about 266,000 Crimean Tatars by 2013 and found that many structural problems of integration remained unresolved when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, which is treated in a separate entry.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":266000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Russia","Uzbekistan"],"baselinePop":271715,"baselineWhat":"The Crimean Tatar population of the Soviet Union recorded at the 1989 census, overwhelmingly in Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian republics","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.978966932263585},{"id":"kashmir-insurgency-displacement-security-regime","title":"The Kashmir Insurgency, Counter-Insurgency Displacement and the 2019 Reorganisation","startYear":1989,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Indian security forces, Pakistan-backed and indigenous militant groups, and civilians displaced across and within the Line of Control","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"In August 2019 India revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and split the state into two federally administered union territories","lat":34.0837,"lon":74.7973,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.38,"fromLon":74.31,"toLat":32.7266,"toLon":74.857,"label":"Villagers from the Line of Control belt to camps in Jammu","people":150000}],"summary":"An armed insurgency against Indian rule began in the Kashmir valley in 1989-90 and continues at lower intensity; Indian official figures put conflict deaths at roughly 41,000-45,000 since 1990, while Kashmiri civil-society organisations and the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society put the toll at 70,000 or more and document mass graves and thousands of enforced disappearances, which the Indian government disputes. Alongside the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1990, recorded separately, tens of thousands of families were displaced from villages along the Line of Control by cross-border shelling and militant infiltration and housed in long-term camps in Jammu. Indian security legislation, principally the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Public Safety Act, has been criticised by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which published reports on the human rights situation in 2018 and 2019 covering both Indian- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir; India rejected both reports as fallacious and motivated. In August 2019 India revoked Article 370, splitting the state into two union territories, and imposed a months-long communications blackout and mass preventive detention in which thousands were held, including three former chief ministers; Pakistan and China objected to the reorganisation, and the Indian Supreme Court upheld the revocation in December 2023.","deathsLow":41000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":150000,"_deaths":70500,"countries":["India"],"baselinePop":7700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the state of Jammu and Kashmir at the outbreak of the insurgency","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.01948051948051948,"related":[{"id":"kashmiri-pandit-exodus","rel":"includes","sharedDeaths":[219,650],"note":"The 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits took place within the Kashmir insurgency."}]},{"id":"liberia-sierra-leone-civil-wars","title":"Liberian and Sierra Leonean Civil Wars","startYear":1989,"endYear":2003,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Charles Taylor's NPFL and rival Liberian factions fought two civil wars; the conflict spilled into Sierra Leone, where the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), backed by Taylor, fought the government in a war marked by mass amputations and child soldier recruitment","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":6.3,"lon":-10.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.3,"fromLon":-10.8,"toLat":9.64,"toLon":-13.58,"label":"Liberia → Guinea (Conakry region)","people":500000},{"fromLat":8.48,"fromLon":-13.23,"toLat":9.64,"toLon":-13.58,"label":"Sierra Leone → Guinea","people":450000},{"fromLat":6.3,"fromLon":-10.8,"toLat":5.36,"toLon":-4.01,"label":"Liberia → Côte d'Ivoire","people":300000}],"summary":"Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) launched an insurgency against President Samuel Doe in December 1989, beginning a first civil war (1989-1997) followed by a second (1999-2003) after Taylor himself became president; the fighting was marked by warlordism, ethnic massacres, and widespread recruitment of child soldiers. Taylor also backed the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighboring Sierra Leone from 1991, whose decade-long war against the Sierra Leonean government became notorious for the mass amputation of civilians' limbs and 'blood diamond' financing. Combined, the two interlinked conflicts killed an estimated 320,000 people and displaced 2-3 million, sending large refugee populations into Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire; UN peacekeeping interventions and, in Sierra Leone, British military intervention helped end the fighting by 2002-2003, and both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh were later prosecuted for war crimes.","ongoing":false,"_mag":3000000,"countries":["Liberia","Guinea","Sierra Leone","Côte d'Ivoire"],"deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":325000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":262500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6300000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Liberia and Sierra Leone when the Liberian war began","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.47619047619047616},{"id":"panama-1989-invasion-el-chorrillo","title":"The 1989 United States Invasion of Panama and the Destruction of El Chorrillo","startYear":1989,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"United States forces invaded Panama to remove General Manuel Noriega; fighting and fire destroyed the El Chorrillo neighbourhood of Panama City","peopleDisplaced":20000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":8.95,"lon":-79.545,"flows":[{"fromLat":8.95,"fromLon":-79.545,"toLat":8.9564,"toLon":-79.558,"label":"El Chorrillo residents to emergency shelters in the former Canal Zone","people":null},{"fromLat":8.95,"fromLon":-79.545,"toLat":8.9333,"toLon":-79.6667,"label":"Resettlement in new housing west of Panama City","people":null}],"summary":"United States forces invaded Panama on 20 December 1989 to depose General Manuel Noriega, who had annulled the 1989 election results and been indicted in the United States on drug charges. The assault on the Panamanian Defence Forces headquarters, La Comandancia, set fires that destroyed much of the adjoining El Chorrillo, a densely populated neighbourhood of wooden tenements; United States accounts attribute part of the burning to Noriega's paramilitary Dignity Battalions, Panamanian residents and human rights groups to the American bombardment. The Pentagon put Panamanian deaths at 516, including 202 civilians; Americas Watch estimated about 300 civilian deaths, Panama's Institute of Legal Medicine reported 342-346 total dead by 1991, and Panamanian human rights organisations have claimed figures in the thousands. Around 20,000 people lost their homes, many living in shelters for more than a year before replacement housing was built, with recurrent complaints about its quality. The United Nations General Assembly, the Organization of American States and the European Parliament condemned the invasion as a violation of international law; the United States cited protection of its nationals, the canal treaties and the restoration of the elected government. Panama later created a commission to investigate the deaths, and 20 December is a national day of mourning.","deathsLow":300,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":20000,"_deaths":650,"countries":["Panama"],"baselinePop":25000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the El Chorrillo neighbourhood of Panama City immediately before the December 1989 invasion","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8},{"id":"mauritania-expulsions-1989-1991","title":"Mauritania's Expulsions of Black Mauritanians","startYear":1989,"endYear":1991,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Mauritania's military government expelled tens of thousands of black Mauritanians, mainly Halpulaar (Peul), Soninke and Wolof from the Senegal River valley, across the border into Senegal and Mali, stripping them of identity papers and property","peopleDisplaced":60000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":16.15,"lon":-13.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.15,"fromLon":-13.5,"toLat":15.62,"toLon":-13.26,"label":"Senegal River valley, Mauritania → northern Senegal","people":53000},{"fromLat":15.16,"fromLon":-12.18,"toLat":14.45,"toLon":-11.44,"label":"Guidimakha, Mauritania → Kayes region, Mali","people":null}],"summary":"A border dispute over grazing rights between Mauritania and Senegal in April 1989 set off communal violence in Nouakchott and Dakar that left hundreds dead. Mauritania's government used the crisis to expel tens of thousands of its own black citizens, chiefly Halpulaar (Peul), Soninke, Wolof and Bambara people from the Senegal River valley: Human Rights Watch reported that they were summoned, forced to give up their identity cards, trucked to the river and pushed across, while villages were burned and possessions and livestock seized. Expulsions continued into 1990, and between November 1990 and March 1991 Africa Watch reported that 500-600 black political prisoners, mostly Halpulaar soldiers and civil servants, were executed or tortured to death in custody. Human Rights Watch described the campaign as serving the government's 'Arabization' of the country. Some 35,000 refugees returned on their own in 1996-98, and from January 2008 UNHCR ran an organised repatriation from Senegal that was declared complete in March 2012, though returnees protested that farmland confiscated in 1989 had not been restored and many struggled to re-establish their identity documents.","deathsLow":500,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"_mag":60000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mauritania","Senegal","Mali"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"bhutanese-lhotshampa-nepal-camps","title":"Bhutanese Lhotshampa in the Eastern Nepal Camps","startYear":1990,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Nepal hosting Lhotshampa expelled from Bhutan in UNHCR-administered camps without local integration, while Bhutan declined to accept their return","peopleDisplaced":107000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Seven camps in Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal, including Beldangi I and II and Sanischare, consolidated into two camps as resettlement proceeded","lat":26.65,"lon":87.9,"flows":[],"summary":"Following Bhutan's \"one nation, one people\" policies and the 1985 Citizenship Act, which required documentary proof of residence in 1958, more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa from southern Bhutan lost their citizenship or left the country between 1988 and 1993, most travelling through India to eastern Nepal. Nepal admitted them into seven camps administered by UNHCR but did not permit local integration: residents faced restricted or controlled movement, restricted ability to work and limited access to the local justice system, and remained without any nationality for close to two decades while more than fifteen rounds of bilateral talks between Nepal and Bhutan produced no agreed repatriation. Bhutan classified many of those who left as voluntary emigrants and treated the associated political parties as anti-national, and declined to guarantee full citizenship and rights to returnees; property left behind was in many cases reallocated. From 2007 a group of resettlement countries led by the United States, with Canada, Australia, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, began large-scale third-country resettlement, and by 2019 about 112,800 people had left. Those remaining, consolidated into two camps, are disproportionately elderly and separated from resettled relatives, and no repatriation to Bhutan has taken place.","ongoing":true,"_mag":107000,"countries":["Nepal"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The Lhotshampa (ethnic Nepali) population of southern Bhutan around 1990","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":true,"_share":0.535,"related":[{"id":"lhotshampa-expulsion-bhutan","rel":"same-population","sharedPeople":107000,"note":"Both entries use the ~107,000 camp-registration peak in eastern Nepal; the people confined in the camps are the people expelled. Count once. HRW's 2007 report 'Last Hope' estimates a further 10,000-15,000 unregistered Bhutanese refugees outside the camps in Nepal and 15,000-30,000 in India. A future revision of the expulsion entry could cite these as the upper end of a wider range, but the camp figure is a defensible central estimate."}]},{"id":"kashmiri-pandit-exodus","title":"Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits","startYear":1990,"endYear":1990,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Amid the outbreak of an armed insurgency and targeted killings and threats by militants in the Kashmir Valley, the Hindu Kashmiri Pandit minority fled in large numbers, mostly to Jammu and Delhi","peopleDisplaced":150000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.08,"lon":74.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.08,"fromLon":74.8,"toLat":32.73,"toLon":74.87,"label":"Kashmir Valley → Jammu, India","people":150000},{"fromLat":34.08,"fromLon":74.8,"toLat":28.61,"toLon":77.21,"label":"Kashmir Valley → Delhi, India","people":50000}],"summary":"Beginning in late 1989 and escalating through 1990, an armed insurgency against Indian rule broke out in the Kashmir Valley, accompanied by targeted killings, threats, and intimidation directed at the region's Hindu Kashmiri Pandit minority by militant groups. Facing this violence, a large majority of the Valley's Pandit population, along with some Kashmiri Muslims, fled to Jammu, Delhi, and other parts of India, where many lived for years in refugee camps or migrant settlements. The precise number displaced is disputed, with estimates ranging from about 100,000 to over 350,000. The episode remains a highly sensitive and politically charged chapter of the broader Kashmir conflict, with most displaced Pandits still unable or unwilling to return.","ongoing":false,"_mag":150000,"countries":["India"],"deathsLow":219,"deathsHigh":650,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":434.5,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":160000,"baselineWhat":"The Kashmiri Pandit population of the Kashmir Valley immediately before the 1990 exodus","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9375,"related":[{"id":"kashmir-insurgency-displacement-security-regime","rel":"part-of","sharedDeaths":[219,650],"note":"The 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits took place within the Kashmir insurgency."}]},{"id":"kuwait-invasion-1990","title":"Iraqi Invasion and Annexation of Kuwait","startYear":1990,"endYear":1991,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and formally annexed Kuwait as its '19th province' in August 1990, citing historical and economic claims; a US-led multinational coalition expelled Iraqi forces in the Gulf War of January–February 1991.","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":17818,"territoryDesc":"Kuwait (~17,818 km2) was formally annexed by Iraq for roughly seven months before the 1991 coalition military campaign restored its sovereignty and independence.","lat":29.3,"lon":47.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.38,"fromLon":47.99,"toLat":31.95,"toLon":35.93,"label":"Foreign workers, including Jordanian-passport Palestinians → Jordan, during the occupation (many in transit home)","people":350000},{"fromLat":29.38,"fromLon":47.99,"toLat":24.71,"toLon":46.68,"label":"Kuwaitis fled → Saudi Arabia","people":300000}],"summary":"On 2 August 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, formally annexing it days later as Iraq's '19th province,' citing disputed historical claims, oil pricing disputes, and Kuwaiti debt from the Iran-Iraq war. The UN Security Council declared the annexation null and void and, after sanctions and a diplomatic ultimatum failed, authorized a US-led coalition that liberated Kuwait in a six-week campaign (Operation Desert Storm) in early 1991. During the seven-month occupation, several hundred thousand Kuwaitis and over 400,000 foreign workers fled the country, and Iraqi forces looted and set fire to hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells during their retreat. Kuwait's Palestinian community of 350,000-400,000 was largely dispersed. Many left during the occupation, and after liberation the Kuwaiti government, citing the PLO leadership's alignment with Iraq, refused most of them re-entry and pressed others to leave, so that by September 1991 Human Rights Watch put the remaining community at 50,000-80,000. That episode is treated as a separate entry.","ongoing":false,"_mag":700000,"countries":["Kuwait","Jordan","Saudi Arabia"],"deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":2300,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":1650,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2140000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Kuwait on the eve of the Iraqi invasion","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.32710280373831774,"related":[{"id":"kuwait-palestinian-expulsion-1991","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinians who left during the occupation are among the invasion entry's foreign-worker departures, and they are also in the Palestinian entry's net reduction of ~270,000. The exact overlap is unknown."}]},{"id":"kuwait-palestinian-expulsion-1991","title":"Departure and Expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait","startYear":1990,"endYear":1992,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Palestinians left Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation, and after liberation the Kuwaiti authorities dismissed, detained and deported those who remained and refused re-entry to those who had gone","peopleDisplaced":270000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":29.3759,"lon":47.9774,"flows":[{"fromLat":29.3759,"fromLon":47.9774,"toLat":31.9539,"toLon":35.9106,"label":"Kuwait → Jordan","people":null},{"fromLat":29.3759,"fromLon":47.9774,"toLat":30.5085,"toLon":47.7804,"label":"Kuwait → Iraq (deportations across the northern border)","people":2000}],"summary":"Kuwait's Palestinian community, more than 350,000 strong before August 1990 and central to the country's professional and administrative workforce, was largely dispersed by the Gulf crisis. Around 180,000 left during the Iraqi occupation, abandoning homes and property accumulated over decades. After liberation in February 1991 the Kuwaiti government, citing the PLO leadership's alignment with Iraq and alleged collaboration, refused with very few exceptions to allow those who had left to return, dismissed Palestinians from public employment, declined to renew residence permits, and subjected many to security detention and, in the immediate post-liberation weeks, to torture and extrajudicial killing. Human Rights Watch documented that about 2,000 Palestinians were taken by the authorities to the Iraqi border and deported, that stateless Palestinians holding Egyptian travel documents were given two weeks' notice to leave, and that families of detainees were pressured to depart. The Crown Prince publicly denied that Kuwait had expelled or would expel Palestinians. By November 1991 around 80,000 remained, including some 23,000 Gazans whose Egyptian travel documents entitled them to settle nowhere. Most of those who left went to Jordan.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":270000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Kuwait","Jordan","Iraq"],"baselinePop":400000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian community resident in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion of August 1990","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.675,"related":[{"id":"kuwait-invasion-1990","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinians who left during the occupation are among the invasion entry's foreign-worker departures, and they are also in the Palestinian entry's net reduction of ~270,000. The exact overlap is unknown."}]},{"id":"lhotshampa-expulsion-bhutan","title":"Expulsion of the Lhotshampa from Bhutan","startYear":1990,"endYear":1996,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Bhutan's government, implementing 'One Nation, One People' citizenship and cultural policies, forced out or pressured the departure of a large share of its ethnic Nepali-speaking (Lhotshampa) population, many of whom were rendered stateless","peopleDisplaced":107000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":26.85,"lon":90.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":26.85,"fromLon":90.35,"toLat":26.65,"toLon":87.28,"label":"Southern Bhutan → UNHCR refugee camps, eastern Nepal","people":107000},{"fromLat":26.65,"fromLon":87.28,"toLat":38.9,"toLon":-77.04,"label":"Nepal refugee camps → third-country resettlement (mainly USA)","people":108500}],"summary":"During the late 1980s and 1990s, Bhutan's government implemented citizenship and cultural assimilation policies widely seen as targeting the Lhotshampa, an ethnic Nepali-speaking, largely Hindu minority concentrated in southern Bhutan. Following unrest and a 1990 crackdown, tens of thousands of Lhotshampa were expelled or fled, with departures peaking in the early-to-mid 1990s; by 1996 over 100,000 had left, and a network of UNHCR-run refugee camps in eastern Nepal reached a peak population of roughly 107,000. Bilateral talks between Bhutan and Nepal over repatriation failed to produce returns, and beginning in 2007 most camp residents were instead resettled to third countries, chiefly the United States. Many Lhotshampa describe the episode as a state-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing.","ongoing":false,"_mag":107000,"countries":["India","Nepal","United States of America"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":200000,"baselineWhat":"The Lhotshampa (Nepali-speaking southern Bhutanese) population of Bhutan around 1990","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.535,"related":[{"id":"bhutanese-lhotshampa-nepal-camps","rel":"same-population","sharedPeople":107000,"note":"Both entries use the ~107,000 camp-registration peak in eastern Nepal; the people confined in the camps are the people expelled. Count once. HRW's 2007 report 'Last Hope' estimates a further 10,000-15,000 unregistered Bhutanese refugees outside the camps in Nepal and 15,000-30,000 in India. A future revision of the expulsion entry could cite these as the upper end of a wider range, but the camp figure is a defensible central estimate."}]},{"id":"ltte-expulsion-northern-muslims-1990","title":"LTTE Expulsion of Muslims from Sri Lanka's Northern Province","startYear":1990,"endYear":1990,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ordered the entire Muslim population out of the five northern districts at gunpoint and confiscated their property","peopleDisplaced":75000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":9.66,"lon":80.02,"flows":[{"fromLat":9.66,"fromLon":80.02,"toLat":8.03,"toLon":79.83,"label":"Jaffna and the northern districts → Puttalam","people":75000}],"summary":"In October 1990 the LTTE ordered the removal of the entire Muslim population from the northern districts of Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Mannar and parts of Vavuniya. The expulsions began at Chavakachcheri on 15 October and culminated in Jaffna town on 30 October, where residents were given two hours to leave; deadlines elsewhere ranged from two hours to a week. Departing families were permitted to keep only about 150 rupees in cash and a single set of clothes, with money, jewellery and property taken by LTTE cadres, and at least 35 businessmen were abducted for ransom. Around 75,000 people, almost the entire community, were displaced, most of them to Puttalam district outside the province, where many remained in welfare camps for two decades. A Sri Lankan Citizens' Commission documented the expulsion in 2011; the LTTE offered a qualified apology in 2002, and return has been partial and contested over land.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":75000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Sri Lanka"],"baselinePop":75000,"baselineWhat":"The Muslim population of Sri Lanka's five northern districts","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":1,"related":[{"id":"sri-lankan-civil-war","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":75000,"note":"The LTTE's 1990 expulsion of northern Muslims took place within the Sri Lankan civil war."}]},{"id":"saudi-expulsion-yemeni-workers-1990","title":"The Expulsion of Yemeni Workers from Saudi Arabia","startYear":1990,"endYear":1991,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Saudi Arabia revoked the privileged residence status of Yemeni workers after Yemen's position in the Gulf crisis, forcing a mass return","peopleDisplaced":850000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":15.3694,"lon":44.191,"flows":[{"fromLat":24.7136,"fromLon":46.6753,"toLat":14.7978,"toLon":42.9545,"label":"Yemeni workers and families expelled from Saudi Arabia to Hudayda and the north","people":850000}],"summary":"For decades Yemenis had held a privileged position in Saudi Arabia, able to work and trade without the sponsorship required of other foreigners. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, newly unified Yemen took a position on the Security Council and in the Arab League that Riyadh treated as support for Iraq, and in September 1990 Saudi Arabia withdrew the exemption, requiring Yemenis to obtain Saudi sponsors within a month. Between 800,000 and one million Yemenis left or were expelled within months, together with their families, in one of the largest sudden labour expulsions of the period and a close parallel to the simultaneous expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait. The effect on Yemen was severe: remittances and Gulf assistance worth roughly 1.7 billion dollars a year were lost, poverty rose from about 15 to 35 per cent of the population and unemployment from about 4 to 25 per cent on the figures reported by MERIP and by international financial institutions, tent settlements grew around Hudayda and other towns, and returnee grievances fed the riots of December 1992 and the tensions that produced the 1994 civil war. Saudi Arabia has repeated smaller mass deportations of Yemenis since, notably in 2013.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":850000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Yemen","Saudi Arabia"],"baselinePop":1000000,"baselineWhat":"The Yemeni worker population resident in Saudi Arabia before the 1990 Gulf crisis","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.85},{"id":"transnistria-1992","title":"Transnistria War","startYear":1990,"endYear":1992,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Transnistrian separatists, backed by Russia's 14th Guards Army, fought Moldovan government forces over the mainly Russian/Ukrainian-speaking left bank of the Dniester","peopleDisplaced":110000,"territoryKm2":4100,"territoryDesc":"Transnistria, a strip of land on the left bank of the Dniester River, about 4,100 km², de facto independent of Moldova since 1992 and unrecognized by any UN member state","lat":46.85,"lon":29.6,"flows":[{"fromLat":46.85,"fromLon":29.6,"toLat":47,"toLon":28.86,"label":"Transnistria → Chișinău-controlled Moldova","people":100000}],"summary":"As Moldova moved toward independence and closer ties with Romania, the mainly Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking population on the left bank of the Dniester declared the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Fighting escalated in 1992, with Russia's locally stationed 14th Guards Army intervening on the separatist side; a ceasefire that July left Russian troops stationed in the territory. An estimated 100,000-130,000 people were displaced, and Transnistria has remained a Russian-backed, internationally unrecognized breakaway territory ever since, despite a 1999 OSCE commitment by Russia to withdraw its forces.","ongoing":false,"_mag":110000,"countries":["Moldova"],"deathsLow":600,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["torture","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":800,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":679000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the left bank of the Dniester and Bender, the territory claimed by the separatist authorities, at the 1989 Soviet census","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16200294550810015},{"id":"turkey-southeast-village-evacuations","title":"Village Evacuations and Displacement in South-East Turkey","startYear":1990,"endYear":1999,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Turkish security forces emptied and burned Kurdish villages and hamlets in south-eastern Anatolia during the conflict with the PKK","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":37.9144,"lon":40.2306,"flows":[{"fromLat":37.55,"fromLon":42.45,"toLat":37.9144,"toLon":40.2306,"label":"Sirnak and Hakkari villages to Diyarbakir","people":400000},{"fromLat":38.5,"fromLon":41,"toLat":38.4237,"toLon":27.1428,"label":"Eastern provinces to Izmir and western Turkey","people":300000}],"summary":"During the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and most intensively between 1991 and 1995, Turkish security forces cleared rural settlements across the mainly Kurdish south-east under emergency rule. Human Rights Watch documented troops and gendarmes surrounding villages, burning houses, stored grain, orchards and livestock, often after residents refused to join the state-armed 'village guard' militia, which numbered roughly 45,000 men by the mid-1990s; the government said evacuations were required to deny the PKK logistical support and that some villages were burned by the PKK itself. Turkish state figures record 378,335 people displaced from 820 villages and 2,345 hamlets, while a 2006 survey commissioned by the Turkish government from Hacettepe University put the total at 953,680 to 1,201,200 and Kurdish organisations claim up to three million; roughly 3,000 settlements were depopulated. Most of the displaced moved into Diyarbakir, Van, Batman and other regional cities and into Istanbul, Mersin and Izmir, where they formed large impoverished peripheries. The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly found Turkey responsible for the destruction of homes and property in these operations, and a 2004 compensation law and a village return programme produced limited returns; Human Rights Watch reported in 2002 that returns were being obstructed by village guards and unmet claims.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Turkey"],"baselinePop":6000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the emergency-rule (OHAL) provinces of south-eastern and eastern Anatolia at the 1990 census","baselineYear":1990,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16666666666666666},{"id":"croatian-war-1991-95","title":"Croatian War of Independence (Vukovar, Krajina, Operation Storm)","startYear":1991,"endYear":1995,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Croatian government forces fought Croatian Serb rebels (Republic of Serbian Krajina) backed by the Yugoslav National Army; Croatia's August 1995 Operation Storm recaptured the Krajina","peopleDisplaced":450000,"territoryKm2":17000,"territoryDesc":"The self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, roughly a quarter to a third of Croatian territory, retaken by Croatia in 1995","lat":44.04,"lon":16.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":45.35,"fromLon":19,"toLat":45.8,"toLon":16,"label":"Vukovar/E. Slavonia → Croatian-held territory (1991-92)","people":150000},{"fromLat":44.04,"fromLon":16.2,"toLat":44.79,"toLon":20.45,"label":"Krajina → Serbia (Operation Storm, 1995)","people":200000}],"summary":"As Yugoslavia broke apart, Croatian Serbs backed by the Yugoslav army declared the Republic of Serbian Krajina and, alongside the 87-day siege and fall of Vukovar in 1991, expelled Croats and other non-Serbs from areas they controlled. In August 1995 Croatia's Operation Storm recaptured nearly all Krajina territory in days, triggering the flight of some 200,000 Croatian Serbs, accompanied by killings and destruction of property documented by the ICTY and human rights groups. The operation effectively ended large-scale ethnic Serb presence in the region and paved the way for the Dayton settlement later that year.","ongoing":false,"_mag":450000,"countries":["Croatia","Serbia"],"deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":23500,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":21750,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":4784265,"baselineWhat":"The population of Croatia at the 1991 Yugoslav census, of whom 581,663 (12.2 per cent) declared themselves Serbs","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0940583349793542},{"id":"georgia-separatist-wars-1992-93","title":"Georgia's Abkhaz and South Ossetian Wars","startYear":1991,"endYear":1993,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatist forces, with volunteer and covert Russian support, fought Georgian government forces for control of the two regions as Georgia gained independence","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":12500,"territoryDesc":"Abkhazia (about 8,600 km²) and South Ossetia (about 3,900 km²), both remaining outside effective Georgian government control since these wars","lat":43,"lon":41.02,"flows":[{"fromLat":43,"fromLon":41.02,"toLat":41.72,"toLon":44.79,"label":"Abkhazia → Tbilisi-controlled Georgia (Georgians)","people":250000},{"fromLat":42.22,"fromLon":43.97,"toLat":41.99,"toLon":44.11,"label":"South Ossetia → Tbilisi-controlled Georgia","people":40000}],"summary":"As Georgia became independent from the Soviet Union, separatist movements in South Ossetia (1991-92) and Abkhazia (1992-93), aided by volunteers and covert support from Russia, fought and defeated Georgian government forces. An estimated 250,000-260,000 ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia amid documented atrocities, and tens of thousands more were displaced from South Ossetia. Both regions became de facto independent, unrecognized by the UN, with the conflicts remaining formally unresolved for decades and displaced Georgians largely unable to return.","ongoing":false,"_mag":300000,"countries":["Georgia"],"deathsLow":8000,"deathsHigh":15000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":11500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":624000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Abkhazia and South Ossetia at the last Soviet census","baselineYear":1989,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4807692307692308},{"id":"kenya-encampment-dadaab-kakuma","title":"Kenya's Encampment Policy: Dadaab and Kakuma","startYear":1991,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Kenyan government requiring refugees to reside in designated camps and to obtain movement passes to travel elsewhere, under the Refugees Act and its predecessor framework","peopleDisplaced":715775,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Dadaab complex in Garissa county near the Somali border and the Kakuma camp with the adjacent Kalobeyei integrated settlement in Turkana county, both in arid and remote regions far from major economic centres","lat":0.05,"lon":40.32,"flows":[],"summary":"Kenya has required refugees to live in designated camps since the early 1990s, when Dadaab was opened for Somalis and Kakuma for Sudanese; refugees who leave the camps without a movement pass are liable to arrest, and access to formal employment, business licences and freedom of residence has been limited. Some of the camps have now operated for more than thirty years, with second and third generations born inside them, and the government has periodically announced closure - most prominently in 2016 and again in 2021 - on security grounds linked to the conflict in Somalia, plans that were suspended after litigation and international objection. The Refugees Act 2021 introduced a more inclusive framework, including provision for identity documents and easier access to work, and in March 2025 Kenya launched the Shirika Plan, which proposes to transform the camps into integrated settlements open to host communities and to move away from encampment toward inclusion and self-reliance. Implementation has been slow and contested locally, and a review one year on found the plan only partially realised, with most of the camp population still dependent on rations and without effective freedom of movement. The camp population continued to grow modestly through early 2026, with almost no voluntary repatriation recorded.","ongoing":true,"_mag":715775,"countries":["Kenya"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","sexual violence","torture"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":857065,"baselineWhat":"The registered refugee and asylum-seeker population of Kenya subject to the encampment policy","baselineYear":2026,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":0.8351466924912346},{"id":"kurdish-uprising-1991","title":"1991 Kurdish Uprising and Refugee Crisis","startYear":1991,"endYear":1991,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Following Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, Kurds in northern Iraq rose up against Saddam Hussein's government; Iraqi forces crushed the uprising, prompting a mass refugee flight toward the Turkish and Iranian borders that led to a US/UK/France-enforced 'safe haven' and no-fly zone.","peopleDisplaced":1800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.5,"lon":43.5,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.19,"fromLon":44.01,"toLat":37.25,"toLon":42.47,"label":"Iraqi Kurdistan → Turkey border","people":500000},{"fromLat":35.56,"fromLon":45.44,"toLat":35.52,"toLon":46.18,"label":"Iraqi Kurdistan → Iran border","people":1000000}],"summary":"After Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War in February 1991, Kurds in the north and Shia Arabs in the south rose up against Saddam Hussein's government, briefly seizing control of most Kurdish cities. Iraqi forces, using helicopter gunships not covered by the ceasefire terms, crushed the uprising within weeks, prompting an estimated 1.5–2 million Kurds to flee toward the mountainous Turkish and Iranian borders, where thousands died of exposure, hunger, and disease. The humanitarian crisis prompted the US, UK, and France to launch Operation Provide Comfort and impose a northern no-fly zone, enabling refugees to return and creating the conditions for the de facto autonomous Kurdistan Region that has persisted since. A separate, less internationally publicized crackdown followed the failed Shia uprising in southern Iraq.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1800000,"countries":["Iraq","Turkey","Iran"],"deathsLow":10000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":55000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":3700000,"baselineWhat":"The Kurdish population of northern Iraq at the time of the March 1991 uprising","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.4864864864864865},{"id":"marsh-arabs-draining","title":"Draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes and Marsh Arab Displacement","startYear":1991,"endYear":2003,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"In reprisal for the 1991 uprising, Saddam Hussein's government accelerated large-scale drainage of southern Iraq's marshes via canals and dikes, displacing and punishing the indigenous Marsh Arabs (Ma'dan) and destroying their traditional way of life.","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":15000,"territoryDesc":"Roughly 15,000–20,000 km2 of wetlands in southern Iraq were drained via engineered canals and dikes, eliminating up to 90% of the marshland by 2000; some re-flooding has occurred since 2003.","lat":31,"lon":47,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.84,"fromLon":47.15,"toLat":31.32,"toLon":48.67,"label":"Central/Amara marshes → Iran refugee camps","people":100000},{"fromLat":31.06,"fromLon":46.26,"toLat":30.51,"toLon":47.78,"label":"Southern marshes → Basra and other Iraqi cities","people":100000}],"summary":"The Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq, home to the Marsh Arabs (Ma'dan) for millennia, were subjected to accelerated draining after the failed 1991 uprising, when Saddam Hussein's government built canals and dikes explicitly intended to punish the marshes' inhabitants, who had sheltered rebels and army deserters, and to deny insurgents refuge. By 2000, roughly 90% of the wetlands had been eliminated, and the Ma'dan population fell from an estimated 250,000–500,000 in the 1950s to as few as 20,000 living in the marshes by 2003. More than 200,000 people were displaced in total, with tens of thousands fleeing to refugee camps across the border in Iran and others moving to Iraqi towns and cities. Following the 2003 US-led invasion, dikes were breached and roughly half the marshland has since been re-flooded, though restoration remains partial and the Ma'dan community has not fully recovered.","ongoing":false,"_mag":200000,"countries":["Iraq","Iran"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":250000,"baselineWhat":"The Marsh Arab population of the southern Iraqi marshes before the drainage campaign","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8},{"id":"haitian-refugee-detention-guantanamo-1991-1995","title":"The Detention of Haitian Refugees at Guantánamo Bay","startYear":1991,"endYear":1995,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States Coast Guard intercepted Haitians fleeing the 1991 military coup at sea and held them at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, including about 300 asylum seekers held in a separate camp because they had tested HIV-positive","peopleDisplaced":34000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":19.906,"lon":-75.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":18.54,"fromLon":-72.34,"toLat":19.906,"toLon":-75.1,"label":"Intercepted at sea → Guantánamo, 1991-92 (peak occupancy)","people":12500},{"fromLat":18.54,"fromLon":-72.34,"toLat":19.906,"toLon":-75.1,"label":"Intercepted at sea → Guantánamo safe haven, 1994 (August 1994 population)","people":21400},{"fromLat":19.906,"fromLon":-75.1,"toLat":18.54,"toLon":-72.34,"label":"Guantánamo → Haiti, compulsory returns from January 1995","people":3900}],"summary":"After the military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, tens of thousands of Haitians fled by boat. The United States Coast Guard intercepted them at sea and, from November 1991, held them in tent camps at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, where immigration officers screened them for asylum claims. When the camps reached capacity in May 1992 President Bush ordered interdicted Haitians returned without screening, an order the Supreme Court upheld in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council (1993). Some 300 refugees who had passed the credible-fear screening but tested HIV-positive were barred from entry under the immigration ban on HIV and held apart in a separate camp. In June 1993 Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. of the Eastern District of New York found that their indefinite detention, lack of access to counsel and inadequate medical care violated due process, called the facility 'nothing more than an HIV prison camp', and ordered them released; the camp closed and the case was settled in 1994. In 1994 the base was used again as a 'safe haven' holding about 21,000 Haitians, most of whom returned after Aristide's restoration, with the last 3,900 returned compulsorily in January 1995. The post-2002 detention of terrorism suspects at the same base is covered in the entry on extraterritorial detention at Guantánamo Bay; scholars including Paik have traced its legal and historical lineage to the Haitian camps.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"_mag":34000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Cuba","Haiti"],"ongoing":false,"weakSources":false},{"id":"afghan-civil-war-displacement-1992-2001","title":"Afghan Civil War and Taliban-Era Displacement","startYear":1992,"endYear":2001,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Rival mujahidin factions destroyed much of Kabul in factional fighting, and Taliban forces later expelled and burned out civilian populations in the Shomali plain and massacred civilians in Hazara and Tajik areas","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.53,"lon":69.17,"flows":[{"fromLat":35,"fromLon":69.3,"toLat":34.53,"toLon":69.17,"label":"Shomali plain → Kabul, August 1999","people":40000},{"fromLat":35,"fromLon":69.3,"toLat":35.45,"toLon":69.9,"label":"Shomali plain → Panjshir valley","people":100000},{"fromLat":34.53,"fromLon":69.17,"toLat":34.01,"toLon":71.58,"label":"Afghanistan → Peshawar, Pakistan (2000)","people":172000}],"summary":"The mujahidin capture of Kabul in April 1992 prompted the return of some 900,000 refugees, the largest and fastest repatriation UNHCR had then assisted, but factional fighting for control of the capital destroyed a third of the city by 1995 and killed an estimated 50,000 people, about 25,000 of them in 1994 alone. The Taliban's advance, taking Kabul in 1996 and Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, produced fresh exoduses of professionals and of ethnic minorities, particularly Hazaras. During the August 1999 Shomali offensive the Taliban forced civilians from their homes and then burned houses, crops, wells and irrigation canals to prevent return; the UN estimated some 40,000 people reached Kabul in two weeks and over 100,000 were displaced into the Panjshir valley, while about a thousand Tajik men were separated from their families and detained. Human Rights Watch recorded the killing of at least 2,000 people, mostly Hazara civilians, at Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998 and at least 178 civilians at Yakaolang in January 2001, after which Taliban forces burned the town and surrounding villages. By October 2001 at least 700,000 Afghans were internally displaced and 3.6 million remained refugees.","deathsLow":25000,"deathsHigh":50000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":700000,"_deaths":37500,"countries":["Afghanistan","Pakistan"],"baselinePop":15000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Afghanistan at the start of the factional civil war in 1992","baselineYear":1992,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.04666666666666667},{"id":"algerian-civil-war-displacement-1992-2002","title":"The Algerian Civil War: Village Massacres and Mass Displacement","startYear":1992,"endYear":2002,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Armed Islamist groups and Algerian security forces and militias fought a decade-long war marked by village massacres and the emptying of the countryside","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":36.75,"lon":3.06,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.47,"fromLon":2.83,"toLat":36.75,"toLon":3.06,"label":"Flight from the Mitidja plain into Algiers","people":null}],"summary":"After the army cancelled the second round of legislative elections in January 1992, which the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win, an insurgency developed that by 1994-95 had become a war of massacres. Armed groups, principally the Armed Islamic Group, killed civilians in villages of the Mitidja and the western interior, with individual massacres at Rais, Bentalha and Relizane in 1997 killing hundreds each; security forces and state-armed village militias conducted sweeps, and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented thousands of enforced disappearances by state agents. Villagers abandoned the countryside in large numbers for the towns. The Algerian government has put the death toll at 150,000-200,000; independent estimates range from about 60,000 to 200,000. Responsibility for some of the largest massacres is contested: the state attributes them to the armed groups, while former officers and some researchers have alleged army complicity or infiltration, allegations Algiers rejects and which no independent inquiry has been permitted to test. The 2005 Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation granted amnesties and criminalised public questioning of the security forces' conduct.","deathsLow":60000,"deathsHigh":200000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","enforced disappearance","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1500000,"_deaths":130000,"countries":["Algeria"],"baselinePop":26300000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Algeria in 1992, at the start of the civil war","baselineYear":1992,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.057034220532319393},{"id":"bosnian-war-1992-95","title":"Bosnian War and Ethnic Cleansing","startYear":1992,"endYear":1995,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Bosnian Serb forces (VRS), backed by Serbia, waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosniaks and Croats; Bosniak and Croat forces also displaced civilians in areas under their control, including during the 1992-94 Croat-Bosniak war","peopleDisplaced":2200000,"territoryKm2":51197,"territoryDesc":"Bosnia and Herzegovina's entire territory, partitioned by the 1995 Dayton Agreement into the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (about 51%) and Republika Srpska (about 49%), largely following wartime front lines","lat":43.85,"lon":18.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.98,"fromLon":16.71,"toLat":45.53,"toLon":18.68,"label":"Prijedor area (Bosniaks/Croats expelled) → Federation territory / abroad","people":300000},{"fromLat":44.1,"fromLon":19.3,"toLat":44.54,"toLon":18.68,"label":"Podrinje enclaves → Tuzla (Bosniaks)","people":100000},{"fromLat":43.85,"fromLon":18.4,"toLat":43.82,"toLon":18.68,"label":"Sarajevo suburbs → Republika Srpska (Serbs, post-Dayton 1996)","people":60000}],"summary":"The breakup of Yugoslavia triggered a three-sided war in Bosnia and Herzegovina among Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats, marked by sieges (notably Sarajevo, besieged for nearly four years), concentration camps and systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing. The ICTY convicted numerous Bosnian Serb, Croat and, to a lesser extent, Bosniak commanders and political leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the largest share of documented atrocities attributed to Bosnian Serb forces. The 1995 Dayton Agreement ended the fighting and froze the resulting demographic partition into two entities. An estimated 100,000 people were killed and about 2.2 million displaced, one of the largest displacement crises in Europe since 1945.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2200000,"countries":["Bosnia and Herz.","Croatia"],"deathsLow":95940,"deathsHigh":104732,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","starvation & siege","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":100336,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":4377033,"baselineWhat":"The population of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the census of 1991, the last before the war","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.5026235808594544,"related":[{"id":"prijedor-camps-1992","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":47000,"note":"The Prijedor camps and expulsions took place within the Bosnian War."},{"id":"srebrenica-1995","rel":"includes","sharedPeople":30000,"sharedDeaths":[7000,8372],"note":"The Srebrenica genocide took place within the Bosnian War."}]},{"id":"prigorodny-ingush-expulsion-1992","title":"Ossetian-Ingush Conflict and Expulsion from the Prigorodny District","startYear":1992,"endYear":1992,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"North Ossetian interior ministry troops and paramilitaries, with Russian forces implicated, expelled the Ingush population of the disputed Prigorodny district of North Ossetia","peopleDisplaced":45000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Prigorodny district, transferred from Ingushetia to North Ossetia after the 1944 deportation of the Ingush and claimed by Ingushetia since","lat":43.02,"lon":44.72,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.02,"fromLon":44.75,"toLat":43.23,"toLon":44.77,"label":"Prigorodny district → Ingushetia (Nazran)","people":45000}],"summary":"Fighting broke out on 31 October 1992 over the Prigorodny district, an area east of Vladikavkaz that had been transferred to North Ossetia after the wartime deportation of the Ingush and to which Ingushetia laid claim after the 1991 Russian rehabilitation law. Six days of fighting left about 583 people dead according to the Russian Procuracy, 350 of them Ingush and 192 Ossetians, with 939 wounded and 261 reported missing. Human Rights Watch found that most of the estimated 34,500 to 64,000 Ingush displaced had been forcibly expelled by Ossetian forces, often with the support of, or in the presence of, Russian interior ministry and army units, and that thousands of homes were destroyed. Violations were committed by North and South Ossetian formations, Ingush militias and Russian units. Return was slow and obstructed despite federal decrees permitting it; Minority Rights Group estimates that about 30,000 Ingush returned to the Prigorodny region and the outskirts of Vladikavkaz over the following decade, and the district remains a source of dispute.","deathsLow":583,"deathsHigh":583,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","summary execution","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":45000,"_deaths":583,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":48000,"baselineWhat":"The Ingush population of the Prigorodny district and the rest of North Ossetia before the October 1992 conflict","baselineYear":1992,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.9375},{"id":"prijedor-camps-1992","title":"Prijedor Camps and the Expulsion of Non-Serbs","startYear":1992,"endYear":1992,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Bosnian Serb forces seized Prijedor municipality in north-west Bosnia, detained non-Serb civilians in the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps and expelled the rest","peopleDisplaced":47000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":44.98,"lon":16.71,"flows":[],"summary":"Bosnian Serb forces took over the Prijedor municipality on 30 April 1992 in a planned operation involving more than 1,500 armed men, then dismissed non-Serbs from employment, imposed movement restrictions and attacked the Muslim villages of Hambarine and Kozarac in May. About 800 civilians were killed in the assault on Kozarac. Detainees were held at the Omarska mine, the Keraterm ceramics factory and the Trnopolje camp; the ICTY found in Kvocka and others that Omarska held roughly 3,334 people in conditions of extreme overcrowding, starvation rations, beatings on arrival and at interrogation, and rape of the small number of women detained, with prisoners losing 25-35 kilograms. In August 1992, 188 of 200 men separated from a convoy were executed at Korićanske Stijene on Mount Vlašić. Roughly 47,000 non-Serbs were displaced from the municipality. The ICTY charged 27 people over crimes in Prijedor; Milomir Stakić received 40 years, Biljana Plavšić pleaded guilty to the ethnic cleansing campaign, and camp personnel including Miroslav Kvočka, Zoran Žigić and Duško Tadić were convicted.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","summary execution","mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":47000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Bosnia and Herz."],"baselinePop":55800,"baselineWhat":"The non-Serb population of Prijedor municipality - Bosniaks and Croats - at the 1991 Yugoslav census","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.8422939068100358,"related":[{"id":"bosnian-war-1992-95","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":47000,"note":"The Prijedor camps and expulsions took place within the Bosnian War."}]},{"id":"tajik-civil-war","title":"Tajik Civil War","startYear":1992,"endYear":1997,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"A civil war between the secular post-Soviet government of Tajikistan, backed by Russia and Uzbekistan, and a coalition of Islamist, democratic, and regionally based opposition forces caused widespread internal displacement and refugee flight into Afghanistan","peopleDisplaced":800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":38.58,"lon":68.79,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.3,"fromLon":69,"toLat":38.58,"toLon":68.79,"label":"Rural districts of Tajikistan → Dushanbe (internally displaced)","people":500000},{"fromLat":37.91,"fromLon":69.79,"toLat":36.73,"toLon":68.86,"label":"Southern Tajikistan (Kulob region) → northern Afghanistan (refugees)","people":100000}],"summary":"Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan descended into civil war in 1992 between the government, dominated by figures from the Kulob and Leninabad regions and backed by Russia and Uzbekistan, and an opposition coalition of Islamist, democratic, and regionally based (mainly Garmi and Pamiri) groups. The war, fought largely along regional and clan lines, killed an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands within the country, while roughly 60,000–100,000 fled as refugees into northern Afghanistan. A 1997 peace agreement, brokered with UN and Russian involvement, ended the fighting and incorporated opposition elements into a power-sharing government. Most displaced Tajiks eventually returned home in the years following the peace accord.","ongoing":false,"_mag":800000,"countries":["Tajikistan","Afghanistan"],"deathsLow":20000,"deathsHigh":100000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing"],"_deaths":60000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Tajikistan at the outbreak of the civil war","baselineYear":1992,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.14545454545454545},{"id":"burundi-1993-crisis-and-civil-war","title":"Burundi's 1993 Crisis and Civil War","startYear":1993,"endYear":2005,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"After soldiers assassinated President Melchior Ndadaye, Hutu killings of Tutsi civilians and army reprisals against Hutu drove mass flight; the army later confined rural civilians in 'regroupment' camps","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-3.3822,"lon":29.3644,"flows":[{"fromLat":-3.38,"fromLon":29.93,"toLat":-2.6,"toLon":29.74,"label":"Northern Burundi → Rwanda","people":null},{"fromLat":-3.9,"fromLon":29.9,"toLat":-4.88,"toLon":29.63,"label":"Burundi → Tanzania (Kigoma camps)","people":null}],"summary":"Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi's first Hutu president, was assassinated by soldiers on 21 October 1993, three months after taking office. Killings of Tutsi civilians by Hutu supporters of the ruling FRODEBU party followed in much of the countryside, and the Tutsi-dominated army conducted reprisals against Hutu. UNHCR recorded some 700,000 people fleeing to Rwanda, Tanzania and Zaire. The violence became a civil war that lasted until the 2003–05 transition, killing an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people. From February 1996 the army forcibly concentrated rural populations in guarded 'regroupment' camps, holding around 350,000 people by early 1997 according to the International Crisis Group, a policy repeated around Bujumbura in 1999–2000 and criticized by humanitarian agencies. A UN International Commission of Inquiry reported in 1996 that acts of genocide had been committed against the Tutsi minority after 21 October 1993, and also documented indiscriminate killings of Hutu by the army, gendarmerie and Tutsi civilians.","deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":300000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":700000,"_deaths":250000,"countries":["Burundi","Rwanda","Tanzania"],"baselinePop":5900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Burundi at the time of the 1993 assassination and the crisis that followed","baselineYear":1993,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.11864406779661017},{"id":"west-bank-movement-regime","title":"West Bank Closure, Permit and Barrier Regime","startYear":1993,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israeli military and civil administration restricting Palestinian movement in the occupied West Bank through checkpoints, gates, permits, the separation barrier and Area C planning controls","peopleDisplaced":3400000,"territoryKm2":5655,"territoryDesc":"The West Bank including East Jerusalem, about 5,655 km², of which roughly 60 per cent is Area C under full Israeli control; the separation barrier runs about 700 km, mostly inside the West Bank","lat":32,"lon":35.25,"flows":[],"summary":"Since the general closure policy introduced in the early 1990s, Palestinian movement in the West Bank has been governed by a system of physical obstacles and individual permits: OCHA documented 925 movement obstacles as of December 2025, a 43 per cent increase on the twenty-year average, comprising 89 staffed checkpoints, 218 partial checkpoints, 232 road gates, 167 earthmounds, 114 linear closures and 105 roadblocks, with more than 120 new road gates installed during 2025 alone. About half of these obstacles block or hinder access between Palestinian towns and villages and main roads, and around a fifth block access to farmland, producing enclaves in which communities depend on gates opened at the discretion of the military. Construction of the separation barrier from 2002, about 85 per cent of it inside the West Bank, placed communities and land on the Israeli side and created a \"seam zone\" whose residents require permits to live in their own homes. Access to East Jerusalem, including its hospitals, is permit-based: of 87,427 patient permit applications in 2025, 36 per cent were denied or unresolved by the appointment date. The International Court of Justice held in its advisory opinion of 9 July 2004 that the barrier's route in occupied territory and its associated regime were contrary to international law and impeded freedom of movement, and in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 it held Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and found that Israeli legislation and measures breach the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid in Article 3 of the Racial Discrimination Convention. Israel rejects both opinions, maintaining that the barrier and closures are temporary security measures that have reduced attacks and that the territory's status is a matter for negotiation.","ongoing":true,"_mag":3400000,"countries":["Palestine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":3400000,"baselineWhat":"The Palestinian population of the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem","baselineYear":2025,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":1,"related":[{"id":"west-bank-settlements","rel":"partial-overlap","note":"Palestinians displaced by settlement expansion are also among the West Bank population whose movement is restricted by the closure and permit regime."}]},{"id":"chechen-wars-1994-2000","title":"First and Second Chechen Wars","startYear":1994,"endYear":2000,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Russian federal forces fought Chechen separatists in two wars (1994-96 and 1999-2000), the second including the destructive siege and recapture of Grozny","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":17300,"territoryDesc":"Chechnya, which held de facto independence from 1996 to 1999 after the first war before being reconquered by Russian forces and reincorporated into the Russian Federation","lat":43.32,"lon":45.7,"flows":[{"fromLat":43.32,"fromLon":45.7,"toLat":43.22,"toLon":44.77,"label":"Grozny/Chechnya → Ingushetia","people":300000},{"fromLat":43.32,"fromLon":45.7,"toLat":42.98,"toLon":47.5,"label":"Grozny/Chechnya → Dagestan","people":100000}],"summary":"Russia fought two wars in Chechnya after the republic declared independence following the Soviet collapse: the First Chechen War (1994-96), which ended in a humiliating Russian withdrawal and de facto Chechen independence, and the Second Chechen War (1999-2000), launched after apartment bombings blamed on Chechen militants, which culminated in the destruction and recapture of Grozny. Both wars caused massive civilian displacement, mostly into neighboring Russian republics, and were marked by widely documented abuses on both sides, including indiscriminate shelling, disappearances and reprisal killings. Chechnya was reincorporated into the Russian Federation under a Moscow-backed government following the second war.","ongoing":false,"_mag":700000,"countries":["Russia"],"deathsLow":75000,"deathsHigh":160000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","enforced disappearance","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":117500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Chechnya on the eve of the first Russian campaign","baselineYear":1994,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6363636363636364},{"id":"rwanda-genocide-refugee-flight","title":"Rwandan Genocide and Refugee Flight to Zaire","startYear":1994,"endYear":1997,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Hutu-extremist government forces and Interahamwe militias killed Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians; the Tutsi-led RPF's military victory triggered a mass flight of Hutu civilians and former perpetrators into Zaire","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-1.94,"lon":29.87,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.94,"fromLon":29.87,"toLat":-1.68,"toLon":29.23,"label":"Rwanda → Goma, Zaire","people":850000},{"fromLat":-2.6,"fromLon":29.74,"toLat":-2.48,"toLon":28.85,"label":"Southern Rwanda → Bukavu, Zaire","people":350000},{"fromLat":-1.94,"fromLon":29.87,"toLat":-2.5,"toLon":30.65,"label":"Rwanda → Ngara, Tanzania","people":500000}],"summary":"Between April and July 1994, extremist Hutu political and military leaders in Rwanda organized the systematic killing of an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 people, overwhelmingly ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu, in a genocide recognized as such by the United Nations. As the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front advanced and took power, roughly 2 million Hutu civilians, including many genocide perpetrators, fled into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), creating one of the largest and fastest refugee flows of the late 20th century, concentrated around Goma and Bukavu. Conditions in the refugee camps were dire, with a cholera epidemic killing tens of thousands within weeks. In 1996–97, a Rwandan-backed rebellion (the First Congo War) forcibly dispersed and drove home much of the refugee population, while armed remnants of the Rwandan genocidal forces remained in eastern Zaire, fueling subsequent regional conflict.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2000000,"countries":["Rwanda","Dem. Rep. Congo","Tanzania"],"deathsLow":500000,"deathsHigh":1000000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","summary execution"],"_deaths":750000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":7157551,"baselineWhat":"The population of Rwanda at the 1991 census, the last before the genocide","baselineYear":1991,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.27942518327847055},{"id":"eritrea-indefinite-national-service","title":"Eritrea's Indefinite National Service and the Exodus","startYear":1995,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Eritrean government conscripts its population into open-ended national service, and hundreds of thousands have fled the country","peopleDisplaced":600000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":15.3229,"lon":38.9251,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.3229,"fromLon":38.9251,"toLat":14.25,"toLon":36.38,"label":"Eritreans fleeing to eastern Sudan and to Tigray camps","people":300000},{"fromLat":15.3229,"fromLon":38.9251,"toLat":31.0461,"toLon":34.8516,"label":"Onward movement through Sinai to Israel and to Europe","people":100000}],"summary":"Eritrea's National Service Proclamation of 1995 established eighteen months of compulsory service, but after the 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia the government extended service indefinitely under the Warsai-Yikealo Development Campaign of 2002, assigning conscripts to the army, to ministries and to state and party-owned construction and mining enterprises for pay well below subsistence and for periods that in many cases have lasted decades. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea concluded in 2015 and 2016 that Eritrean officials had committed crimes against humanity, including enslavement through indefinite conscription, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, persecution, rape and murder, and estimated that thousands were fleeing every month. Eritrea rejected the Commission's findings as politically motivated and denies that service is indefinite in practice. Large numbers of the resulting refugees moved through Sudan and Libya to Europe, and thousands were kidnapped and tortured for ransom in the Sinai in the early 2010s. Eritrean refugee camps in Tigray were attacked and largely destroyed during the 2020-22 Tigray war.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["forced labour","arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","sexual violence"],"settlers":null,"_mag":600000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Eritrea","Sudan","Israel"],"baselinePop":3200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Eritrea when indefinite national service began","baselineYear":1995,"asOf":"2024","weakSources":false,"_share":0.1875},{"id":"srebrenica-1995","title":"Srebrenica Genocide","startYear":1995,"endYear":1995,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) under General Ratko Mladić overran the UN-declared 'safe area' of Srebrenica, separating and killing Bosniak men and boys while expelling the remaining population","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The UN-designated 'safe area' enclave of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, under-defended by a small Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion","lat":44.1,"lon":19.3,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.1,"fromLon":19.3,"toLat":44.54,"toLon":18.68,"label":"Srebrenica enclave → Tuzla (women, children, elderly)","people":25000}],"summary":"In July 1995, VRS forces under General Ratko Mladić captured the UN 'safe area' of Srebrenica, overwhelming the lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping contingent stationed there. Over the following days, VRS forces separated an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from their families and killed them, while forcibly transporting roughly 25,000-30,000 women, children and elderly to Bosniak-held territory near Tuzla. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice both formally found that genocide occurred at Srebrenica.","ongoing":false,"_mag":30000,"countries":["Bosnia and Herz."],"deathsLow":7000,"deathsHigh":8372,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","enforced disappearance","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":7686,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":40000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Srebrenica UN 'safe area' in July 1995","baselineYear":1995,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.75,"related":[{"id":"bosnian-war-1992-95","rel":"part-of","sharedPeople":30000,"sharedDeaths":[7000,8372],"note":"The Srebrenica genocide took place within the Bosnian War."}]},{"id":"nepal-maoist-conflict-displacement","title":"Nepal's Maoist Conflict and Rural Displacement","startYear":1996,"endYear":2006,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Nepalese state security forces drove rural populations from the mid-western hills","peopleDisplaced":200000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":28.35,"lon":82.6167,"flows":[{"fromLat":28.35,"fromLon":82.62,"toLat":27.7172,"toLon":85.324,"label":"Displacement from the mid-western hills to Kathmandu and the Terai","people":120000}],"summary":"The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched an armed insurgency in February 1996 that spread across most of Nepal's districts before ending with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of November 2006. Roughly 13,000-17,000 people were killed, the majority by state security forces according to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' Nepal Conflict Report of 2012, which documented unlawful killings, torture and enforced disappearances by both sides and identified more than 9,000 individual incidents. Rural populations left the mid-western hill districts under Maoist taxation, forced recruitment including of children, abductions and executions of alleged informers, and under army and armed-police operations, cordon-and-search and detention; teachers, local officials and landowners were particularly targeted. Estimates of internal displacement range from about 100,000 to 200,000 in official and IDMC reporting to several hundred thousand in NGO figures that include movement to India, which is difficult to distinguish from Nepal's established seasonal labour migration. Nepal established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons in 2015; both have received tens of thousands of complaints and have been criticised by the Supreme Court of Nepal, OHCHR and victims' groups for failing to deliver prosecutions, and the enabling law was amended in 2024.","deathsLow":13000,"deathsHigh":17800,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","enforced disappearance","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":200000,"_deaths":15400,"countries":["Nepal"],"baselinePop":21900000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Nepal at the start of the Maoist insurgency in 1996","baselineYear":1996,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0091324200913242},{"id":"northern-uganda-protected-camps","title":"Northern Uganda's 'Protected Villages' and the Lord's Resistance Army War","startYear":1996,"endYear":2008,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Ugandan army moved the rural Acholi population into guarded camps during the war against the Lord's Resistance Army, which abducted tens of thousands of civilians","peopleDisplaced":1800000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":2.7746,"lon":32.299,"flows":[{"fromLat":3.05,"fromLon":32.9,"toLat":2.7746,"toLon":32.299,"label":"Rural Acholi moved into protected villages around Gulu and Kitgum","people":1000000}],"summary":"From 1996 the Ugandan army ordered the rural population of Acholiland into 'protected villages', giving families days to move and firing on those who remained; by 2005 some 1.8 to 2 million people were living in more than 200 camps, which were overcrowded, dependent on food aid, and only partly protected, being attacked repeatedly by the Lord's Resistance Army. A 2005 mortality survey by the Ugandan Ministry of Health with WHO and UN agencies found roughly 1,000 excess deaths a week in the camps, overwhelmingly from malaria, AIDS and other preventable causes rather than violence, a rate the survey described as far above emergency thresholds. The Lord's Resistance Army abducted an estimated 24,000-66,000 children and young people to serve as fighters, porters and wives, and committed massacres including at Barlonyo in 2004. Uganda referred the situation to the International Criminal Court in 2003; the Court issued arrest warrants for Joseph Kony and four commanders in 2005 and in 2021 convicted Dominic Ongwen of 61 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including attacks on the Pajule, Odek, Lukodi and Abok camps. Camps were dismantled from 2006 after the Juba talks and most residents had returned by 2011; the Ugandan government maintained the camps were necessary protection, while human rights organisations and Acholi leaders characterised them as forced encampment.","deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":400000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["abduction or transfer of children","sexual violence","mass killing","forced labour","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1800000,"_deaths":250000,"countries":["Uganda"],"baselinePop":1145437,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda — Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts — at the 2002 census","baselineYear":2002,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":1.5714526420920574},{"id":"us-immigration-detention-family-separation","title":"United States Immigration Detention and Family Separation","startYear":1996,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States government detained non-citizens in a nationwide network of federal, county and privately operated facilities pending removal, and in 2018 separated children from parents prosecuted at the border","peopleDisplaced":73400,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"A network of more than 200 detention facilities across the United States, mostly county jails and privately operated centres under contract to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.","lat":31.76,"lon":-106.49,"flows":[],"summary":"Legislation of 1996 made detention mandatory for broad categories of non-citizens facing removal, and the detained population grew steadily thereafter through a network of federal, county and privately run facilities. In 2018 the 'zero tolerance' prosecution policy at the south-west border produced the systematic separation of children from parents; a federal court in Ms L. v. ICE ordered reunification in June 2018, and the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General reported that the number separated was substantially larger than the government had acknowledged and that no adequate tracking system existed. Detention numbers rose sharply again from 2025: the Vera Institute of Justice, analysing ICE data, recorded a single-day population of 73,400 in January 2026, exceeding all previous peaks, with 152 new facilities opened and roughly 444,900 people booked into detention since January 2025. Conditions, medical care and deaths in custody have been the subject of DHS Office of Inspector General reports and litigation. The atlas already contains Guantanamo and El Salvador's mass incarceration; the largest immigration detention system in the world was absent.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","abduction or transfer of children"],"settlers":null,"_mag":73400,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":24400000,"baselineWhat":"The non-citizen population resident in the United States","baselineYear":2024,"asOf":"2026-01","weakSources":false,"_share":0.0030081967213114753},{"id":"congo-brazzaville-civil-wars-1997-1999","title":"Congo-Brazzaville's Civil Wars and the Emptying of the Capital","startYear":1997,"endYear":1999,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Militias loyal to Denis Sassou-Nguesso, Pascal Lissouba and Bernard Kolélas, with Angolan military backing for Sassou-Nguesso, fought for Brazzaville and the southern provinces, driving civilians into the forests of the Pool","peopleDisplaced":810000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-4.2634,"lon":15.2429,"flows":[{"fromLat":-4.2634,"fromLon":15.2429,"toLat":-4.3628,"toLon":14.7644,"label":"Brazzaville → forests of the Pool","people":250000},{"fromLat":-4.2,"fromLon":12.67,"toLat":-4.3628,"toLon":14.7644,"label":"Dolisie and southern towns → Pool and interior","people":null}],"summary":"Fighting between militias attached to Congo-Brazzaville's rival political leaders destroyed much of Brazzaville in the June–October 1997 war, which ended with Denis Sassou-Nguesso's return to power with Angolan military support. A second round from December 1998 centred on the southern Pool, Bouenza, Niari and Lékoumou regions. According to the Global IDP Project profile, roughly 500,000 people fled Brazzaville in 1997 and an estimated 810,000 — about 30 per cent of the population — were displaced from December 1998, with the towns of Dolisie and Nkayi emptied entirely. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that more than 250,000 people fled the capital into the forests of the Pool in December 1998, where they were beyond the reach of aid for months; when about 200,000 returned from May 1999, MSF recorded 14,700 cases of severe and 31,000 of moderate malnutrition, describing an unprecedented nutritional and medical emergency. Most of the displaced went home during 2000, though the Pool remained unstable.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":810000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Congo"],"baselinePop":2800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Republic of the Congo at the outbreak of the 1997 war","baselineYear":1997,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.2892857142857143},{"id":"ethiopia-eritrea-border-war","title":"Ethiopia–Eritrea Border War","startYear":1998,"endYear":2000,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Ethiopia and Eritrea fought over the disputed border town of Badme and adjacent territory; both governments expelled or deported each other's nationals","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":400,"territoryDesc":"the core dispute centered on Badme and adjacent border areas (roughly 400 km2 immediately contested); a 2002 international Boundary Commission ruling awarded Badme to Eritrea but was not implemented by Ethiopia until a 2018 peace agreement","lat":14.68,"lon":37.79,"flows":[{"fromLat":14.53,"fromLon":36.5,"toLat":14.1,"toLon":38.28,"label":"Badme border area → Shire, Tigray (Ethiopia)","people":300000},{"fromLat":15.33,"fromLon":38.93,"toLat":9.03,"toLon":38.74,"label":"Deportation of Ethiopians from Eritrea","people":75000}],"summary":"Seven years after Eritrean independence, a border dispute over the town of Badme escalated into full-scale war between Ethiopia and Eritrea from May 1998 to June 2000, involving trench warfare reminiscent of World War I and killing an estimated 70,000-100,000 soldiers on both sides. The war displaced roughly 1 million civilians from border areas, and both governments expelled or deported tens of thousands of each other's nationals and dual-heritage residents on grounds of national security. A 2000 peace agreement created a UN-monitored buffer zone, and an independent Boundary Commission ruled in 2002 that Badme belonged to Eritrea, but Ethiopia refused to withdraw for nearly two decades, leaving the two countries in a state of 'no war, no peace' until a 2018 rapprochement formally ended the conflict.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1000000,"countries":["Eritrea","Ethiopia"],"deathsLow":70000,"deathsHigh":140000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization","arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":105000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":67100000,"baselineWhat":"The combined populations of Ethiopia and Eritrea at the outbreak of the border war","baselineYear":1998,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.014903129657228018},{"id":"kosovo-war-1998-2000","title":"Kosovo War, NATO Intervention, and Reverse Exodus","startYear":1998,"endYear":2000,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Yugoslav/Serb security forces fought the Kosovo Liberation Army and expelled Kosovo Albanian civilians; NATO conducted a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 without UN Security Council authorization; after the Serb withdrawal, Kosovo Serbs and Roma faced revenge attacks and fled","peopleDisplaced":1500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Kosovo, then an autonomous province of Serbia within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, placed under UN administration (UNMIK) per Security Council Resolution 1244 after the war","lat":42.66,"lon":21.16,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.66,"fromLon":21.16,"toLat":42.08,"toLon":20.42,"label":"Kosovo → Albania (Albanian refugees, 1998-99)","people":444000},{"fromLat":42.66,"fromLon":21.16,"toLat":41.99,"toLon":21.43,"label":"Kosovo → North Macedonia (Albanian refugees, 1998-99)","people":244000},{"fromLat":42.66,"fromLon":21.16,"toLat":44.79,"toLon":20.45,"label":"Kosovo → Serbia proper (Serb/Roma exodus, 1999-2000)","people":200000}],"summary":"Fighting between Yugoslav/Serb forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army escalated through 1998 into a campaign that expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians and included massacres such as at Račak. In March 1999, NATO launched a 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia without UN Security Council authorization, citing humanitarian necessity; Belgrade withdrew its forces in June 1999 and Kosovo came under UN administration. In the aftermath, an estimated 200,000 Kosovo Serbs and Roma fled or were driven out amid revenge violence, with further unrest, including riots in March 2004, entrenching their displacement.","ongoing":false,"_mag":1500000,"countries":["Kosovo","Albania","Macedonia","Serbia"],"deathsLow":13000,"deathsHigh":13600,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":13300,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Kosovo on the eve of the war","baselineYear":1998,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.75},{"id":"second-congo-war","title":"Second Congo War (\"Africa's World War\")","startYear":1998,"endYear":2003,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Nine African states and numerous rebel and militia groups fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo following the fall of Mobutu, in what became the deadliest conflict since World War II by some estimates","peopleDisplaced":3400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-1.68,"lon":29.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.68,"fromLon":29.23,"toLat":0.52,"toLon":25.2,"label":"Goma region → Kisangani","people":600000},{"fromLat":-2.48,"fromLon":28.85,"toLat":-3.38,"toLon":29.36,"label":"Bukavu → Burundi border areas","people":300000},{"fromLat":-1.68,"fromLon":29.23,"toLat":-4.44,"toLon":15.27,"label":"Eastern DRC → Kinshasa (internal flight)","people":500000}],"summary":"The Second Congo War began in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda backed rebels against the government of Laurent Kabila (whom they had earlier helped install), drawing in Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and other states along with dozens of local militias in a conflict over territory, resources, and regional security. Fighting and its humanitarian consequences, especially disease and malnutrition among displaced populations, produced what the International Rescue Committee called the world's deadliest conflict since World War II, with a widely cited but contested estimate of 3.3–5.4 million excess deaths between 1998 and 2008. At its peak roughly 2.2–3.4 million people were internally displaced within the DRC, concentrated in the eastern provinces. A 2002-03 peace process formally ended the war, though armed conflict and displacement in eastern DRC have continued intermittently ever since.","ongoing":false,"_mag":3400000,"countries":["Rwanda","Dem. Rep. Congo","Burundi"],"deathsLow":900000,"deathsHigh":5400000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":3150000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":46700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the outbreak of the second war","baselineYear":1998,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.0728051391862955},{"id":"solomon-islands-tensions","title":"The Solomon Islands Tensions and the Expulsion of Malaitans from Guadalcanal","startYear":1998,"endYear":2003,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Guadalcanal militants drove Malaitan settlers from rural Guadalcanal; a Malaitan militia seized Honiara and the police armoury and forced the prime minister's resignation","peopleDisplaced":30000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-9.43,"lon":159.96,"flows":[{"fromLat":-9.6,"fromLon":160.2,"toLat":-9.43,"toLon":159.96,"label":"Malaitan settlers driven from rural Guadalcanal into Honiara","people":null},{"fromLat":-9.43,"fromLon":159.96,"toLat":-8.95,"toLon":161,"label":"Displaced Malaitans returning to Malaita","people":null}],"summary":"From late 1998 militants on Guadalcanal, organised as the Guadalcanal Revolutionary Army and later the Isatabu Freedom Movement, attacked and drove out Malaitan settlers who had migrated to the island over previous decades, in a conflict over land, employment and the distribution of state resources. Malaitans formed the Malaita Eagle Force, which in June 2000 seized the Honiara police armoury, took the prime minister hostage and forced his resignation. Between 20,000 and 35,000 people were displaced, most of them Malaitans; the state effectively ceased to function, and a 2000 peace agreement at Townsville did not hold. Australia led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands from July 2003, which disarmed the militias and restored basic administration. The Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Sir Peter Kenilorea, delivered its report in 2012, documenting around 200 killings together with widespread destruction of property, torture and sexual violence, and criticised the government for delaying publication. The Pacific island states outside Fiji, Bougainville and Nauru were thinly covered in the atlas.","deathsLow":200,"deathsHigh":250,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property","sexual violence","torture","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":30000,"_deaths":225,"countries":["Solomon Is."],"baselinePop":109000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Guadalcanal province and Honiara","baselineYear":1999,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.27522935779816515},{"id":"dagestan-1999-invasion-and-displacement","title":"The 1999 Invasion of Dagestan and the Displacement of its Border Villages","startYear":1999,"endYear":1999,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Armed groups from Chechnya seized villages in western Dagestan; Russian federal forces and Dagestani militias drove them out with air and artillery attacks","peopleDisplaced":32000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":42.6667,"lon":46.2167,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.6667,"fromLon":46.2167,"toLat":42.9849,"toLon":47.5047,"label":"Villagers from Botlikh and Tsumada districts to Makhachkala and lowland Dagestan","people":null},{"fromLat":43.1167,"fromLon":46.3333,"toLat":42.9849,"toLon":47.5047,"label":"Displacement from Novolakskoye and the Kadar zone","people":null}],"summary":"In August 1999 armed formations led by Shamil Basayev and the commander known as Ibn al-Khattab crossed from Chechnya into the Botlikh and Tsumada districts of western Dagestan and proclaimed an Islamic state; a second incursion followed in September into the Novolak district, alongside fighting for the Kadar-zone villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi, which had asserted autonomy from the republican authorities. Russian federal forces, Dagestani police and locally raised volunteer militias expelled the fighters by mid-September, using heavy air and artillery bombardment that destroyed much of several highland villages. Federal authorities announced 275 servicemen killed, 15 missing and about 937 wounded; insurgent losses were put by Russian sources in the high hundreds to low thousands, and the number of civilians killed was never compiled. Roughly 32,000 civilians were displaced. The invasion, together with the apartment bombings in Russian cities that month, was the immediate trigger for the second Russian campaign in Chechnya recorded separately in this atlas; the displaced population of Novolakskoye, itself a district resettled by Laks after the 1944 deportation of the Chechen-Akkins, was caught in a longer-running dispute over land and return.","deathsLow":800,"deathsHigh":2500,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":32000,"_deaths":1650,"countries":["Russia"],"baselinePop":2120000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Republic of Dagestan in 1999, of which the fighting affected the Botlikh, Tsumada, Novolak and Kadar-valley districts","baselineYear":1999,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.01509433962264151},{"id":"zimbabwe-murambatsvina-land-seizures","title":"Zimbabwe's Land Seizures and Operation Murambatsvina","startYear":2000,"endYear":2005,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Mugabe government's fast-track land reform seized thousands of white-owned commercial farms from 2000; in 2005 the government's Operation Murambatsvina demolished urban informal settlements and vending sites, disproportionately affecting opposition supporters","peopleDisplaced":700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-17.83,"lon":31.05,"flows":[{"fromLat":-17.83,"fromLon":31.05,"toLat":-17.5,"toLon":30.9,"label":"Harare urban settlements → peri-urban/rural areas","people":400000}],"summary":"Beginning in 2000, Zimbabwe's government under Robert Mugabe launched a 'fast-track' land reform program that saw war veterans and government supporters forcibly occupy and seize most of the country's roughly 4,000 white-owned commercial farms, displacing farm owners and, more numerously, hundreds of thousands of Black farm workers and their families, while agricultural production collapsed. In May-July 2005, the government carried out Operation Murambatsvina ('drive out the rubbish'), a mass demolition campaign against urban informal housing, market stalls and small businesses, officially described as urban cleanup but widely seen as retaliation against urban populations that had voted for the opposition. A UN Special Envoy report by Anna Tibaijuka found that Murambatsvina directly affected an estimated 700,000 people through loss of homes, livelihoods, or both, and criticized the operation as carried out with indifference to human suffering and in violation of international law.","ongoing":false,"_mag":700000,"countries":["Zimbabwe"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":11631657,"baselineWhat":"The population of Zimbabwe at the 2002 census","baselineYear":2002,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.060180591638835296},{"id":"beijing-olympics-evictions-2000-2008","title":"Evictions and Demolitions for the Beijing 2008 Olympics","startYear":2000,"endYear":2008,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Beijing municipal government, district authorities and affiliated developers demolished housing and relocated residents for Olympic venues, infrastructure and city redevelopment, at times by coercion","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":39.9,"lon":116.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.9,"fromLon":116.4,"toLat":39.91,"toLon":116.66,"label":"Central Beijing neighbourhoods → outer districts such as Tongzhou","people":null}],"summary":"Beijing's bid for and preparation of the 2008 Summer Olympics accelerated a wave of demolition and redevelopment across the city, clearing old hutong neighbourhoods and other housing for venues, roads, 'beautification' and commercial projects. COHRE estimated that about 1.5 million people were displaced between 2000 and 2008, more than twice the annual rate of the 1990s, and reported that many were coerced into accepting compensation below market value, given little notice, harassed by demolition companies and resettled far from work and schools; China's Foreign Ministry put those displaced by Olympic preparations at 6,037 families and rejected COHRE's figures. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented the imprisonment of residents who resisted, including Ye Guozhu, sentenced to four years after seeking to protest evictions and reportedly tortured in custody, and the housing-rights lawyer Ni Yulan, who was beaten. In the months before the Games authorities also ordered tens of thousands of migrant recyclers, beggars and petitioners out of the city, according to Human Rights Watch. Unlike most entries in the atlas, the bulk of this displacement took the form of compensated, if often coerced, urban redevelopment rather than expulsion by force, and the share that amounted to forced eviction is unknown.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","torture"],"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["China"],"weakSources":false},{"id":"australia-offshore-detention","title":"Australian Offshore Detention on Nauru and Manus Island","startYear":2001,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Oceania","actors":"Australia transferring asylum seekers who arrived by boat to processing centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea under bilateral agreements, with the host states holding formal legal responsibility","peopleDisplaced":4000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Regional Processing Centre on Nauru, an island state of 21 km², and the centre at Lombrum on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, with later accommodation sites at Lorengau","lat":-0.53,"lon":166.93,"flows":[{"fromLat":-10.49,"fromLon":105.63,"toLat":-0.53,"toLon":166.93,"label":"Christmas Island → Nauru and Manus","people":4000}],"summary":"Under the \"Pacific Solution\" from 2001 and again from August 2012, Australia transferred asylum seekers intercepted at sea to processing centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where they were held while claims were assessed, with successive Australian governments stating that anyone arriving by boat would never be resettled in Australia. Detention was prolonged and indefinite, with people held for years while resettlement options were negotiated with third countries including the United States, New Zealand and Cambodia. The Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled on 26 April 2016 that detention at the Manus centre breached the constitutional right to personal liberty and was therefore illegal, and ordered both governments to end it; the centre formally closed on 31 October 2017, when about 690 men remained and several hundred refused to leave, and they were moved to alternative accommodation on the island. The Nauru centre wound down to zero residents in March 2019 and was reactivated under a new agreement in September 2021 as a standing capability. At least eight people died in connection with the Manus operation between 2013 and 2019, from suicide, violence and delayed medical treatment, and leaked incident reports and repeated UN and medical assessments documented severe mental health deterioration among detainees. Australia maintains that the policy ended deaths at sea by deterring boat voyages and that its operation is lawful; UN human rights bodies, the UNHCR and Australian medical and legal organisations have found the arrangements to constitute arbitrary and indefinite detention with serious health consequences.","ongoing":true,"_mag":4000,"countries":["Nauru","Indian Ocean Ter."],"deathsLow":8,"deathsHigh":14,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","sexual violence","torture"],"_deaths":11,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":51000,"baselineWhat":"The people who reached Australia by boat as asylum seekers between 2008 and 2013, the group from which offshore transfers were selected","baselineYear":2013,"asOf":"2025-09","weakSources":true,"_share":0.0784313725490196},{"id":"cote-divoire-conflict-2002-2011","title":"Côte d'Ivoire's Division and Post-Election Crisis","startYear":2002,"endYear":2011,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Forces Nouvelles rebels held the north from 2002 while government forces and allied militias held the south; in 2010–11 forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo and to Alassane Ouattara fought for control, with mass killings of civilians on both sides","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"From September 2002 until 2011 the Forces Nouvelles administered roughly the northern half of Côte d'Ivoire, separated from the government-held south by a UN- and French-patrolled buffer zone (the 'zone of confidence').","lat":5.36,"lon":-4.0083,"flows":[{"fromLat":6.74,"fromLon":-7.35,"toLat":6.3,"toLon":-10.8,"label":"Western Côte d'Ivoire → Liberia (by February 2011)","people":40000},{"fromLat":5.36,"fromLon":-4.0083,"toLat":6.82,"toLon":-5.28,"label":"Abidjan → interior towns","people":null}],"summary":"A failed coup in September 2002 split Côte d'Ivoire between a rebel-held north and a government-held south, divided by a buffer zone patrolled by French and UN troops, a division that lasted until 2011. Laurent Gbagbo's refusal to concede the November 2010 presidential election to Alassane Ouattara triggered six months of violence. Human Rights Watch documented at least 3,000 civilians killed and more than 150 women raped between November 2010 and May 2011, naming pro-Gbagbo units including the Republican Guard, CECOS and the Young Patriots militia, and pro-Ouattara Republican Forces and Invisible Commandos; the largest single massacre took place at Duékoué in March 2011. The ICC Prosecutor cited widespread and systematic attacks on civilians, roughly one million people displaced, mass graves in Abidjan, and widespread arbitrary arrests, disappearances and rape. Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé were tried at the ICC for crimes against humanity and acquitted in January 2019, an acquittal upheld on appeal in March 2021. No senior pro-Ouattara commander has been convicted for crimes committed by his forces.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Côte d'Ivoire","Liberia"],"baselinePop":17500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cote d'Ivoire when the country divided","baselineYear":2002,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.05714285714285714},{"id":"guantanamo-bay-detention","title":"Extraterritorial Detention at Guantanamo Bay","startYear":2002,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The United States holding foreign nationals captured in counter-terrorism operations at a naval base on leased Cuban territory, outside the ordinary reach of United States immigration and criminal courts","peopleDisplaced":780,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The detention facilities at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a base held by the United States under a 1903 lease over which the United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control while Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty","lat":19.9,"lon":-75.1,"flows":[],"summary":"From January 2002 the United States transferred men captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to a detention facility at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, chosen in part because the government argued that its location outside United States sovereign territory placed detainees beyond the reach of the federal courts. The administration classified them as unlawful enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war and asserted that they could be held under the law of war until the end of hostilities without criminal charge; a small number were prosecuted before military commissions, and the case against those accused of the September 11 attacks has not reached trial after more than a decade of pre-trial litigation. The Supreme Court progressively rejected the jurisdictional argument, holding in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that federal habeas statutes reached the base, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) that the original commissions were unlawful, and in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) that detainees have a constitutional right to habeas corpus and that the Military Commissions Act's suspension of it was invalid. Most detainees were released or transferred without charge to third countries; by January 2025 fifteen remained, several of them held for more than twenty years, including men cleared for transfer years earlier who could not be resettled. UN special procedures and human rights organisations have found the detention arbitrary, criticised the conditions of confinement and the effects of earlier torture in CIA custody, and called for closure, while successive United States administrations have differed on closure but maintained that law-of-war detention is lawful.","ongoing":true,"_mag":780,"countries":["Cuba"],"deathsLow":9,"deathsHigh":9,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture"],"_deaths":9,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":"No defined population was subject to the policy; detainees were seized in some 40 countries and no group of which they form a share can be specified","baselineYear":2002,"asOf":"2025-08","weakSources":true,"_share":null},{"id":"darfur-conflict","title":"Darfur Conflict","startYear":2003,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Sudanese government forces and allied Janjaweed militias (later reorganized as the Rapid Support Forces) fought Darfuri rebel groups; the campaign against Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities was formally declared genocide by the United States","peopleDisplaced":5500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.63,"lon":25.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.63,"fromLon":25.35,"toLat":12,"toLon":22.5,"label":"El Fasher, Darfur → Chad refugee camps","people":380000},{"fromLat":13.45,"fromLon":22.45,"toLat":12,"toLon":22.5,"label":"El Geneina, West Darfur → Chad","people":200000}],"summary":"Beginning in 2003, non-Arab Darfuri rebel groups took up arms against Sudan's central government over marginalization; Khartoum responded with a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign using regular forces and allied Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, targeting the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups. The United States government formally declared the campaign genocide in 2004, while a 2005 UN Commission of Inquiry found evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity but did not conclude genocide had occurred; the International Criminal Court later indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity charges. The initial 2003-2005 phase displaced an estimated 2.7 million people and killed roughly 200,000-400,000, with death toll estimates varying considerably by source. Violence in Darfur, including large-scale killings in El Geneina and the 2024-25 siege of El Fasher, resurged dramatically after the outbreak of Sudan's broader civil war in April 2023.","ongoing":true,"_mag":5500000,"countries":["Sudan","Chad"],"deathsLow":200000,"deathsHigh":400000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":300000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Darfur region of Sudan at the outbreak of the conflict in 2003","baselineYear":2003,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.9166666666666666},{"id":"iraq-war-2003","title":"2003 Iraq War and Sectarian Displacement","startYear":2003,"endYear":2008,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"A US-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein's government in 2003; the ensuing insurgency and, especially, the 2006–2008 Sunni–Shia sectarian civil war displaced millions of Iraqis internally and to neighboring countries, mainly Syria and Jordan.","peopleDisplaced":4700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":33.3,"lon":44.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.3,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":33.51,"toLon":36.28,"label":"Baghdad → Syria","people":1200000},{"fromLat":33.3,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":31.95,"toLon":35.93,"label":"Baghdad → Jordan","people":750000},{"fromLat":33.3,"fromLon":44.4,"toLat":36.19,"toLon":44.01,"label":"Baghdad → Iraqi Kurdistan (internal displacement)","people":400000}],"summary":"The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein's government but was followed by a prolonged insurgency and, from 2006, an intense Sunni–Shia sectarian civil war marked by militia violence, bombings of mosques and markets, and ethnic cleansing of mixed neighborhoods, particularly in Baghdad. By 2007–2008, an estimated 4.7 million Iraqis had been displaced, roughly 2.7 million internally within Iraq and about 2 million as refugees, overwhelmingly in Syria and Jordan, which together hosted the bulk of the externally displaced population. Baghdad's demographic makeup shifted markedly as previously mixed neighborhoods became segregated along sectarian lines. Displacement eased somewhat after 2008 as violence declined, though it was later compounded by the rise of ISIS after 2014.","ongoing":false,"_mag":4700000,"countries":["Iraq","Syria","Jordan"],"deathsLow":100000,"deathsHigh":655000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","enforced disappearance","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":377500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":26000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion","baselineYear":2003,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.18076923076923077},{"id":"pakistan-fata-kp-displacement","title":"Military Operations and Mass Displacement in Pakistan's Tribal Districts","startYear":2004,"endYear":2018,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Pakistani military conducted successive offensives against militant groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Malakand, evacuating whole districts","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Federally Administered Tribal Areas were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province by constitutional amendment in 2018, ending a separate colonial-era legal regime","lat":33.0033,"lon":70.0666,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.0033,"fromLon":70.0666,"toLat":32.9928,"toLon":70.6417,"label":"North Waziristan to Bannu during Operation Zarb-e-Azb","people":1000000},{"fromLat":34.75,"fromLon":72.36,"toLat":34.0151,"toLon":71.5249,"label":"Swat and Malakand to Mardan, Peshawar and Nowshera, 2009","people":2000000}],"summary":"From 2004 the Pakistani army fought a series of campaigns against the Pakistani Taliban and allied groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and adjoining districts, each of which required or produced the evacuation of the civilian population. The largest single episode was the Malakand and Swat operation of spring 2009, when two to three million people left in a matter of weeks, most staying with host families rather than in camps; Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan from June 2014 displaced about a million registered people to Bannu and beyond, with the district closed to civilians for years. Displacement was accompanied by curfews, the destruction of houses and bazaars in militant-held areas by both air strikes and militants, and by collective punishment provisions under the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation. Returns were organised in phases from 2015 and mostly completed by 2018, when the tribal areas were merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Frontier Crimes Regulation abolished; returnees found extensive destruction and, in some agencies, restrictions on movement. Independent access to the areas during operations was almost entirely closed, so casualty and damage assessments rest largely on official statements.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":5000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Pakistan"],"baselinePop":7440000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Malakand Division at the census nearest the start of the operations","baselineYear":1998,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6720430107526881},{"id":"mexico-criminal-violence-displacement","title":"Internal Displacement from Criminal Violence in Mexico","startYear":2006,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":true,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Cartels and armed criminal groups, and in places security forces, drove rural and small-town populations from their homes across northern, western and southern Mexico","peopleDisplaced":392000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":24.8091,"lon":-107.394,"flows":[{"fromLat":25.36,"fromLon":-107.55,"toLat":24.8091,"toLon":-107.394,"label":"Sierra of Sinaloa → Culiacán (approximate)","people":30000},{"fromLat":17.5506,"fromLon":-99.5006,"toLat":16.8531,"toLon":-99.8237,"label":"Guerrero highlands → Acapulco and coastal towns (approximate)","people":20000}],"summary":"Since the militarised counter-narcotics campaign launched in December 2006, contests between criminal organisations and between those organisations and the state have emptied villages and urban districts in Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas and Chiapas, through massacres, extortion, forced recruitment and the burning of homes. IDMC counted more than 392,000 people internally displaced by violence at the end of 2023, while INEGI's national victimisation survey put the number who moved for safety reasons during 2023 alone above one million; Mexico has no official register of the internally displaced and only adopted framework legislation on displacement at state level in a minority of states. The associated disappearances are on a scale of their own: UN experts noted in May 2022 that Mexico's official registry had passed 100,000 disappeared persons, up from about 5,000 reported missing in 2011, and warned of a chronic pattern of impunity, with enforced disappearances continuing daily. Displacement is typically short-distance and unrecorded, with families moving to municipal capitals or across state lines and rarely receiving assistance.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":392000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mexico"],"baselinePop":110000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Mexico at the start of the militarised campaign against the cartels","baselineYear":2007,"asOf":"2024","weakSources":false,"_share":0.0035636363636363634},{"id":"gaza-closure-blockade","title":"Closure and Blockade of the Gaza Strip","startYear":2007,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Israel controlling Gaza's land, sea and air access, with Egypt controlling the Rafah crossing, following the Hamas takeover of the territory in June 2007","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":365,"territoryDesc":"The Gaza Strip, about 365 km²; as of 2026 Israeli forces hold positions covering roughly half the territory behind the ceasefire's \"yellow line\", restricting civilian access to that area","lat":31.42,"lon":34.36,"flows":[],"summary":"After Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007 Israel designated the territory a \"hostile entity\" and intensified pre-existing restrictions, closing most crossings to people and goods, imposing a naval blockade and a land buffer zone, and permitting exit through Erez only for defined categories such as medical patients, traders and staff of international organisations; Egypt has separately opened and closed the Rafah crossing according to its own policy. OCHA has recorded that the population grew by more than half during the closure while permitted exits fell by orders of magnitude, and has said the measures raise concerns of collective punishment under international humanitarian and human rights law, calling for the closure to be lifted in line with Security Council resolution 1860. Israel states that the restrictions are a lawful response to armed attacks and to arms smuggling by an organisation it and several states designate as terrorist, and that it permits humanitarian goods and medical exits. Following the October 2023 attacks and the war that followed, movement was almost entirely halted and both crossings were closed for extended periods. Under the ceasefire that began in October 2025 the Rafah crossing reopened on 2 February 2026 on a limited basis, supervised by an EU border assistance mission with Egyptian and Israeli vetting, initially at about 50 people a day in each direction for medical evacuation and return, against a WHO estimate of more than 20,000 patients needing treatment abroad; goods were not admitted through it and reconstruction materials remained restricted.","ongoing":true,"_mag":2000000,"countries":["Palestine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Gaza Strip","baselineYear":2023,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.9523809523809523,"related":[{"id":"gaza-war-2023","rel":"same-population","sharedPeople":1900000,"note":"The people displaced in the Gaza war since October 2023 are the same population held under the closure of the Gaza Strip since 2007."}]},{"id":"kenya-post-election-violence-2007-2008","title":"Kenya's 2007–08 Post-Election Violence and Displacement","startYear":2007,"endYear":2008,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Organized youth gangs and militias aligned with rival political camps attacked communities identified with the other side, and police shot demonstrators, driving mass ethnic separation in the Rift Valley and beyond","peopleDisplaced":663921,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-0.3031,"lon":36.08,"flows":[{"fromLat":-0.3031,"fromLon":36.08,"toLat":-0.0917,"toLon":34.768,"label":"Rift Valley → Nyanza and western Kenya","people":null},{"fromLat":0.5143,"fromLon":35.2698,"toLat":-0.4167,"toLon":36.95,"label":"Uasin Gishu → Central Kenya","people":null}],"summary":"The disputed announcement of Mwai Kibaki's re-election on 30 December 2007 set off two months of violence concentrated in the Rift Valley, Nyanza, western Kenya and the slums of Nairobi. Attacks were organized along ethnic and political lines, with the burning of homes, evictions of tenants and farm workers, killings at roadblocks and, in the most notorious case, the burning alive of dozens of people sheltering in a church at Kiambaa. Police shot large numbers of demonstrators. The Waki Commission documented 1,133 people killed between 27 December 2007 and the end of February 2008 and at least 663,921 internally displaced; the ICC Prosecutor cited over 1,000 killed, more than 900 documented acts of rape and sexual violence, over 3,500 seriously injured and around 350,000 displaced across six of Kenya's eight provinces. A power-sharing agreement in February 2008 ended the violence. The Waki Commission recommended a special tribunal; it was never created, the ICC cases against six suspects collapsed, and Human Rights Watch found that by 2011 only two murder convictions had resulted.","deathsLow":1133,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":663921,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Kenya"],"baselinePop":37700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Kenya at the time of the December 2007 election","baselineYear":2007,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.017610636604774535},{"id":"northern-territory-emergency-response","title":"Australia's Northern Territory Emergency Response","startYear":2007,"endYear":2022,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Oceania","actors":"The Australian government imposed emergency measures on prescribed Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, taking compulsory leases over their townships and controlling residents' welfare income","peopleDisplaced":null,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Compulsory five-year leases over 64-65 Aboriginal community townships in the Northern Territory, granting the Commonwealth control of land held under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act; sources differ between 64 and 65.","lat":-23.7,"lon":133.88,"flows":[],"summary":"In June 2007, following the Little Children are Sacred report on child sexual abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, the Australian government announced an emergency response that went well beyond the report's recommendations. Legislation passed in August 2007 imposed alcohol and pornography bans, compulsory income management of welfare payments, compulsory five-year leases over 64-65 community townships, changes to the permit system and the deployment of additional police and, initially, army logistics to 73 prescribed communities of about 45,500 people. The measures were made possible by suspending the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, restored in 2010 when the scheme was redesigned in ostensibly non-discriminatory terms. In 2010 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, James Anaya, reported that the intervention was incompatible with Australia's human rights obligations, discriminated on racial grounds and undermined self-determination, while accepting the seriousness of the problems it addressed. The framework continued as Stronger Futures until 2022. The intervention divided Aboriginal opinion in the Territory and remains contested in Australia.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":0,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Australia"],"baselinePop":45500,"baselineWhat":"The Aboriginal population of the 73 prescribed communities in the Northern Territory when the intervention began","baselineYear":2007,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"georgia-russia-war-2008","title":"Russo-Georgian War (South Ossetia/Abkhazia)","startYear":2008,"endYear":2008,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Georgian forces shelled Tskhinvali and moved into South Ossetia; Russia responded with a large-scale military intervention in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then recognized both as independent states","peopleDisplaced":192000,"territoryKm2":12500,"territoryDesc":"South Ossetia and Abkhazia, recognized by Russia as independent states after the war (also recognized by a small number of other states including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru and Syria)","lat":42.22,"lon":43.97,"flows":[{"fromLat":42.22,"fromLon":43.97,"toLat":41.72,"toLon":44.79,"label":"South Ossetia buffer zone → Tbilisi-controlled Georgia (Georgians)","people":25000},{"fromLat":42.22,"fromLon":43.97,"toLat":43.02,"toLon":44.68,"label":"South Ossetia → North Ossetia, Russia (Ossetians)","people":30000}],"summary":"In August 2008, after rising tensions and cross-border shelling, Georgian forces attacked Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital; Russia responded with a five-day military intervention that pushed into undisputed Georgian territory before a French-brokered ceasefire. Russia subsequently recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, a move rejected by Georgia and most of the international community. An EU-commissioned inquiry (the Tagliavini Report, 2009) found Georgia had initiated the attack on Tskhinvali but that this followed a period of provocations, and that Russia's subsequent actions exceeded the bounds of proportionate self-defense in parts of undisputed Georgian territory; about 192,000 people were displaced.","ongoing":false,"_mag":192000,"countries":["Georgia","Russia"],"deathsLow":800,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":900,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":4382100,"baselineWhat":"The population of Georgia including Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008","baselineYear":2008,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.04381460943383309},{"id":"kosovo-independence-2008","title":"Kosovo's Declaration of Independence","startYear":2008,"endYear":2008,"type":"territory","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Kosovo's assembly unilaterally declared independence from Serbia; recognized by the United States and most EU/NATO states, rejected by Serbia, Russia, China and several EU members","peopleDisplaced":0,"territoryKm2":10887,"territoryDesc":"The territory of Kosovo, approximately 10,887 km², formerly a province of Serbia administered by the UN since 1999","lat":42.66,"lon":21.16,"flows":[],"summary":"On 17 February 2008, Kosovo's assembly declared independence from Serbia, ending nearly a decade of UN administration under Resolution 1244. Serbia rejected the declaration as illegal, and Kosovo's sovereignty remains contested: as of 2026 it is recognized by roughly 100 of 193 UN member states, including the United States and most EU and NATO countries, but not by Serbia, Russia, China, or five EU members (Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia). The 2010 International Court of Justice advisory opinion found the declaration itself did not violate international law, though it did not rule on Kosovo's statehood as such.","ongoing":false,"_mag":65322,"countries":["Kosovo"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":[],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Kosovo at the 2008 declaration of independence","baselineYear":2008,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"boko-haram-lake-chad-basin","title":"Boko Haram Insurgency and Lake Chad Basin Displacement","startYear":2009,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The jihadist group Boko Haram, and its offshoot ISWAP, waged an insurgency based in northeastern Nigeria that spread into Cameroon, Chad and Niger; regional military operations also displaced civilians","peopleDisplaced":3000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":11.85,"lon":13.16,"flows":[{"fromLat":11.85,"fromLon":13.16,"toLat":10.55,"toLon":13.85,"label":"Borno State, Nigeria → Minawao camp, Cameroon","people":100000},{"fromLat":11.85,"fromLon":13.16,"toLat":13.32,"toLon":12.61,"label":"Borno State → Diffa, Niger","people":250000},{"fromLat":11.85,"fromLon":13.16,"toLat":13.48,"toLon":14.32,"label":"Borno State → Baga Sola, Chad","people":20000},{"fromLat":11.85,"fromLon":13.16,"toLat":11.75,"toLon":13.05,"label":"Rural Borno → Maiduguri IDP camps (internal)","people":1800000}],"summary":"The jihadist insurgency Boko Haram, founded in northeastern Nigeria in the early 2000s, launched an armed uprising in 2009 seeking to establish an Islamic state, and by the mid-2010s had seized territory across Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states and expanded operations into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger around Lake Chad. A 2016 split produced the rival Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Insurgent attacks, mass abductions (including the 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok), and government counterinsurgency operations have together displaced roughly 2.6-3 million people across the four-country Lake Chad Basin region, with around 2 million displaced within Nigeria alone, and have directly killed an estimated 35,000-40,000 people since 2009, with the wider humanitarian toll, including famine-linked deaths, considered substantially higher. The crisis remains active, with periodic upsurges in violence and displacement as of the mid-2020s.","ongoing":true,"_mag":3000000,"countries":["Nigeria","Cameroon","Niger","Chad"],"deathsLow":35000,"deathsHigh":350000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","forced labour","torture","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":192500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":15000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the conflict-affected areas of the Lake Chad basin - Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states in Nigeria, Far North Cameroon, Diffa in Niger and the Lac province of Chad - when the insurgency escalated","baselineYear":2010,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.2},{"id":"sri-lanka-menik-farm-camps","title":"Closed IDP Camps at Menik Farm, Sri Lanka","startYear":2009,"endYear":2012,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Sri Lankan government and military holding Tamil civilians who left the final conflict zone in guarded camps in Vavuniya district pending screening for LTTE membership","peopleDisplaced":280000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"The Menik Farm complex of fenced zones near Cheddikulam in Vavuniya district, together with smaller camps and public buildings used as holding sites across the Vanni","lat":8.75,"lon":80.5,"flows":[],"summary":"When the Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009, civilians who emerged from the last LTTE-held pocket were transported to closed camps in Vavuniya district, the largest of which, Menik Farm, held more than 200,000 people behind fencing and under military administration. Residents were initially not permitted to leave at all, humanitarian and media access was tightly controlled, and families were separated when individuals were removed for screening. The government said the restrictions were necessary to clear landmines in the north before return and to identify LTTE cadres hiding among the displaced, and it undertook to release the population within six months. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and human rights organisations described the sites as internment camps, and Tamil political representatives used stronger language still. From 1 December 2009 restrictions were partially eased so that residents could leave for up to fifteen days after registering with the authorities, and some were released permanently subject to police reporting; the military said it would trace those who failed to return. Resettlement proceeded unevenly over the following two years and Menik Farm was officially closed on 25 September 2012, though thousands of families remained without a permanent place of return years afterwards.","ongoing":false,"_mag":280000,"countries":["Sri Lanka"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":330000,"baselineWhat":"The Tamil civilian population trapped in the LTTE-held Vanni during the final phase of the war","baselineYear":2009,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.8484848484848485},{"id":"osh-violence-2010","title":"June 2010 Ethnic Violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan","startYear":2010,"endYear":2010,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Kyrgyz crowds and armed groups, with elements of the security forces implicated, attacked ethnic Uzbek neighbourhoods in Osh and Jalal-Abad following the collapse of central authority","peopleDisplaced":400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":40.53,"lon":72.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":40.53,"fromLon":72.8,"toLat":40.78,"toLon":72.34,"label":"Osh and Jalal-Abad → Andijan region, Uzbekistan","people":75000}],"summary":"In the political vacuum that followed the April 2010 overthrow of President Bakiyev, violence erupted in Osh on 11 June 2010 and spread to Jalal-Abad, lasting about four days. The independent Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission, chaired by Kimmo Kiljunen, recorded at least 470 deaths, around three-quarters of them ethnic Uzbeks, some 1,900 injured and more than 400,000 people displaced; Human Rights Watch cites official data of 426 deaths, 276 of them Uzbek. Whole Uzbek mahallas were burned. The Commission concluded that if proven in court, certain acts, including murder, rape and other sexual violence and persecution directed against the Uzbek minority, would amount to crimes against humanity, and found that the authorities had failed in their duty to prevent the violence and protect citizens. Human Rights Watch subsequently documented torture, arbitrary arrest and unfair trials in an investigation and prosecution process that fell disproportionately on ethnic Uzbeks. A Kyrgyz national commission reached a different conclusion in January 2011, attributing provocation to the Uzbek minority. Similar interethnic violence in Osh in 1990 forms the background to the events.","deathsLow":426,"deathsHigh":470,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":400000,"_deaths":448,"countries":["Kyrgyzstan","Uzbekistan"],"baselinePop":2400000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Osh and Jalal-Abad provinces including Osh city","baselineYear":2010,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.16666666666666666},{"id":"libya-displacement-since-2011","title":"Libya since 2011: Forced Displacement and Migrant Detention","startYear":2011,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Armed groups expelled whole communities — most completely the town of Tawergha — during and after the 2011 uprising and the 2014–2020 civil wars, while successive authorities and militias have arbitrarily detained migrants and refugees in a network of centres","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":32.8872,"lon":13.1913,"flows":[{"fromLat":32,"fromLon":15.06,"toLat":32.8872,"toLon":13.1913,"label":"Tawergha → camps in Tripoli, Benghazi and elsewhere","people":48000},{"fromLat":32.1167,"fromLon":20.0667,"toLat":32.8872,"toLon":13.1913,"label":"Benghazi and Derna → western Libya and abroad","people":null}],"summary":"Libya's 2011 uprising and the civil wars that followed produced repeated waves of displacement and a system of detention for migrants and refugees. The clearest single case of forced displacement is Tawergha: its entire civilian population of roughly 48,000, accused collectively of siding with Gaddafi's forces against Misrata, fled in August 2011 and was prevented from returning for years; Human Rights Watch found the town systematically destroyed and looted, described the expulsion as collective punishment that may amount to crimes against humanity, and reported that as of December 2018 only about 100 families had attempted to resettle. Communities were also expelled from Benghazi and Derna by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces from 2014. Human Rights Watch recorded over 125,000 internally displaced people as of August 2024. In parallel, migrants and refugees intercepted at sea by the EU-supported Libyan Coast Guard — 16,466 by September 2024 — are held in facilities controlled by state bodies and armed groups. The UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya concluded in March 2023 that there were reasonable grounds to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, including murder, enslavement, torture, rape and sexual slavery, and that migrants had been systematically targeted and tortured.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","forced labour","enforced disappearance","summary execution","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Libya"],"baselinePop":6200000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Libya at the start of the 2011 uprising","baselineYear":2011,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":false,"_share":0.08064516129032258},{"id":"south-sudan-independence-civil-war","title":"South Sudan Independence and Civil War","startYear":2011,"endYear":2020,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"South Sudan seceded from Sudan in 2011 after a referendum; a 2013 power struggle between President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar's forces triggered a civil war fought largely along ethnic lines","peopleDisplaced":4000000,"territoryKm2":644000,"territoryDesc":"South Sudan (about 644,000 km2) became Africa's newest state after seceding from Sudan in July 2011; the oil-rich Abyei area straddling the border remains disputed, administered under interim arrangements pending an unresolved final status referendum","lat":4.85,"lon":31.58,"flows":[{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":3.48,"toLon":31.38,"label":"South Sudan → Bidi Bidi, Uganda","people":800000},{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":3.12,"toLon":34.87,"label":"South Sudan → Kakuma, Kenya","people":400000},{"fromLat":4.85,"fromLon":31.58,"toLat":8.15,"toLon":34.57,"label":"South Sudan → Gambela, Ethiopia","people":450000},{"fromLat":9.46,"fromLon":28.42,"toLat":15.5,"toLon":32.56,"label":"Abyei/border area → Sudan","people":100000}],"summary":"South Sudan became independent from Sudan in July 2011 following a 2005 peace agreement and a near-unanimous 2011 referendum, but the disputed, oil-producing Abyei border area was left unresolved, with a promised referendum there never held. In December 2013, a political and military split between President Salva Kiir (Dinka) and former Vice President Riek Machar (Nuer) escalated into a civil war marked by ethnically targeted violence; a 2018 peace deal and unity government only partially stemmed the fighting. The war displaced roughly 4 million people, including about 2.2 million refugees in Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and elsewhere and 1.8 million internally displaced, with death toll estimates ranging from about 190,000 to 380,000. A UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan documented widespread atrocities, including ethnically targeted killings and sexual violence, by multiple armed actors.","ongoing":false,"_mag":4000000,"countries":["S. Sudan","Uganda","Kenya","Ethiopia","Sudan"],"deathsLow":190000,"deathsHigh":400000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":295000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":10500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of South Sudan at independence","baselineYear":2011,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.38095238095238093},{"id":"syria-civil-war","title":"Syrian Civil War: Refugees and Internal Displacement","startYear":2011,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"A popular uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad escalated into a multi-sided civil war involving Syrian government forces, an array of opposition and jihadist groups, Kurdish-led forces, and foreign militaries (Russia, Iran, Turkey, the US, and Israel), driving the largest displacement crisis in the world until Assad's government fell in December 2024.","peopleDisplaced":13000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":35,"lon":38,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.2,"fromLon":37.16,"toLat":37.06,"toLon":37.38,"label":"Aleppo → Turkey","people":1800000},{"fromLat":34.73,"fromLon":36.72,"toLat":33.89,"toLon":35.5,"label":"Homs/Damascus area → Lebanon","people":1500000},{"fromLat":32.62,"fromLon":36.1,"toLat":32.29,"toLon":36.32,"label":"Deraa/southern Syria → Jordan (Zaatari camp)","people":700000},{"fromLat":35.93,"fromLon":36.63,"toLat":36.2,"toLon":37,"label":"Idlib → IDP camps, northwest Syria","people":2000000}],"summary":"What began as peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad's government in March 2011 escalated into a full-scale civil war involving the Syrian government (backed by Russia and Iran), a fragmented array of opposition and jihadist factions, Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, Turkey, and periodic Israeli and US strikes. Over more than a decade, the war displaced over 13 million people at its peak: roughly 6.8 million refugees, hosted mainly by Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and 6.7–7.2 million internally displaced within Syria, alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths. Chemical weapons attacks, sieges of cities such as Aleppo and Ghouta, and the rise and fall of ISIS's self-declared caliphate compounded the humanitarian crisis. Assad's government collapsed in a rapid opposition offensive in December 2024, after which over a million Syrians began returning from abroad and from internal displacement, though the country's political transition and the fate of millions of remaining refugees and IDPs remained unresolved as of 2026.","ongoing":true,"_mag":13000000,"countries":["Syria","Turkey","Lebanon","Jordan"],"deathsLow":306887,"deathsHigh":618000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","starvation & siege","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":462443.5,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":21000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Syria at the start of the uprising","baselineYear":2011,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.6190476190476191},{"id":"kachin-conflict-displacement-2011","title":"Myanmar's Kachin Offensive and Displacement after the 2011 Ceasefire Collapse","startYear":2011,"endYear":2021,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"The Myanmar armed forces (Tatmadaw) attacked Kachin Independence Army areas and Kachin villages in Kachin and northern Shan States, driving civilians into camps along the China border","peopleDisplaced":100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":25.38,"lon":97.4,"flows":[{"fromLat":25.38,"fromLon":97.4,"toLat":24.77,"toLon":97.55,"label":"Villages of Kachin State → camps around Laiza on the China border","people":null},{"fromLat":24.77,"fromLon":97.55,"toLat":24.71,"toLon":97.94,"label":"Kachin State → Yunnan, China (forcibly returned in part in August 2012)","people":10000}],"summary":"On 9 June 2011 the Myanmar army launched a major offensive against the Kachin Independence Army, ending a 17-year ceasefire. Human Rights Watch documented in March 2012 that soldiers attacked and shelled villages, razed and pillaged homes, tortured and raped civilians, used villagers including children as porters and forced labourers, laid landmines and killed civilians, while the KIA used child soldiers and landmines. About 75,000 people had fled by early 2012, most to camps along the Chinese border in KIA-controlled territory; China forcibly returned at least 1,000 of the 7,000-10,000 Kachin who had sought refuge in Yunnan in August 2012, according to Human Rights Watch, which China denied. Fighting spread to northern Shan State, and in 2018 the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found a pattern of systematic attacks on civilians and concluded that crimes against humanity and war crimes had been committed in Kachin and Shan States, principally by the Tatmadaw. About 100,000 people remained in protracted displacement by 2018-2020. This entry ends with the February 2021 coup; new displacement in Kachin since then is covered by the atlas entry on Myanmar's post-coup civil war, and earlier forced relocations by the entry on the Four Cuts strategy.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","sexual violence","forced labour","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance","cultural or religious destruction"],"_mag":100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Myanmar","China"],"weakSources":false,"related":[{"id":"myanmar-post-coup-displacement","rel":"continues-as","sharedPeople":0,"note":"After the fix, the post-coup figure excludes the 68,400 pre-coup Kachin and 7,600 northern Shan IDPs, so the figures no longer overlap. Kachin displacement continues in the post-coup entry (181,400 displaced in Kachin since the coup)."}]},{"id":"mali-conflict-2012","title":"Northern Mali's Seizure and the Malian Conflict","startYear":2012,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"both","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Tuareg MNLA and then the Islamist groups Ansar Dine, MUJAO and AQIM seized northern Mali in 2012; French and Malian forces retook the towns in 2013, after which jihadist groups, ethnic militias, the Malian army and Russian Wagner personnel have fought across the centre and north","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":820000,"territoryDesc":"The regions of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal — roughly two-thirds of Mali's land area — were held by the MNLA and then by Ansar Dine, MUJAO and AQIM from April 2012 until the French-led intervention of January 2013.","lat":16.7735,"lon":-3.0074,"flows":[{"fromLat":16.7735,"fromLon":-3.0074,"toLat":15.9,"toLon":-5.65,"label":"Timbuktu region → Mbera camp, Mauritania","people":null},{"fromLat":16.27,"fromLon":-0.04,"toLat":14.02,"toLon":0.85,"label":"Gao region → Niger (Tillabéri)","people":null},{"fromLat":14.5,"fromLon":-4.2,"toLat":12.65,"toLon":-8,"label":"Mopti and central Mali → Bamako","people":null}],"summary":"In early 2012 Tuareg fighters of the MNLA, many returning armed from Libya, seized northern Mali, and were rapidly displaced by the Islamist groups Ansar Dine, MUJAO and AQIM, which governed Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal until French forces intervened in January 2013. Human Rights Watch documented summary executions, rape, amputations, recruitment of children as young as eleven and the destruction of religious and cultural sites, together with executions and disappearances by the Malian army, and recorded some 400,000 people displaced. The conflict subsequently spread south into central Mali and across the borders into Burkina Faso and western Niger, drawing in the jihadist coalitions JNIM and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and communal militias. In May 2023 the UN human rights office reported that Malian troops and foreign military personnel had killed over 500 people at Moura in March 2022, the great majority summarily executed, with at least 58 women and girls raped, and stated that these acts amount to war crimes and could amount to crimes against humanity. Around 355,000 people remained internally displaced in Mali in April 2024, with a further 288,000 Malian refugees abroad.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","cultural or religious destruction"],"settlers":null,"_mag":4920000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mali","Mauritania","Niger"],"baselinePop":1293550,"baselineWhat":"The population of Mali's three northern regions — Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal — seized in 2012","baselineYear":2009,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.38653318387383556},{"id":"rohingya-rakhine-closed-camps","title":"Rohingya Confined in Closed Camps and Villages in Rakhine State, Myanmar","startYear":2012,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Myanmar state and Rakhine State authorities, and since 2024 the Arakan Army, confining Rohingya and Kaman Muslims to camps and villages under movement restrictions and statelessness imposed by the 1982 Citizenship Law","peopleDisplaced":130000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Around 24 camps and camp-like settlements in Sittwe, Pauktaw, Myebon, Kyaukpyu and other townships of central Rakhine, together with segregated villages and the Aung Mingalar quarter of Sittwe","lat":20.13,"lon":92.88,"flows":[],"summary":"After communal violence in 2012 displaced more than 140,000 people in Rakhine State, Myanmar authorities moved Rohingya and Kaman Muslims into camps in central Rakhine and did not allow them to return home, maintaining the camps with barbed-wire fencing, checkpoints, curfews and a permission system that in practice prevents residents from leaving. A 2019 survey found that 99.6 per cent of Rohingya respondents reported being prevented from travelling outside their township, and residents have described paying bribes and passing through multiple checkpoints to reach hospitals or markets. The confinement rests on a wider legal architecture: the 1982 Citizenship Law, which ties citizenship to membership of recognised national races and requires proof of pre-1948 residence, has been applied to exclude the Rohingya and render them stateless across generations. From 2017 the government announced a camp-closure programme, but it has largely built permanent structures on or near existing camp sites without restoring freedom of movement or land, an approach that UN assessments have said contributes to permanent segregation. Human Rights Watch characterises the regime as apartheid and persecution amounting to crimes against humanity; Myanmar's governments have rejected this, describing the arrangements as temporary humanitarian shelter and security management. Since the Arakan Army took control of most of Rakhine State in 2024 the camps have changed hands but restrictions on movement, arbitrary arrest and denial of citizenship have continued, and the state is largely cut off from humanitarian access.","ongoing":true,"_mag":130000,"countries":["Myanmar"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","cultural or religious destruction","denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1300000,"baselineWhat":"The Rohingya population of Rakhine State, Myanmar, before the 2012 violence","baselineYear":2012,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":false,"_share":0.1,"related":[{"id":"myanmar-post-coup-displacement","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":130000,"note":"The UN's Myanmar displacement total used for the post-coup entry includes Rohingya held in Rakhine camps since 2012."}]},{"id":"central-african-republic-conflict-2013","title":"Central African Republic Conflict and the Flight of the Muslim Population","startYear":2013,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Séléka coalition seized power in Bangui in March 2013; anti-balaka militias then attacked Muslim civilians across the west, and ex-Séléka groups attacked Christian communities, emptying much of the country's Muslim population into Chad and Cameroon","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":4.3947,"lon":18.5582,"flows":[{"fromLat":5.5,"fromLon":17,"toLat":5.88,"toLon":14.55,"label":"Western CAR → Cameroon (Garoua-Boulaï and the eastern border)","people":null},{"fromLat":6.5,"fromLon":18.5,"toLat":9.65,"toLon":18.75,"label":"Northern CAR → Chad (Sido)","people":null}],"summary":"The mainly Muslim Séléka coalition took Bangui in March 2013 and its fighters committed widespread killings and looting against non-Muslim communities. From late 2013 the anti-balaka, self-defence militias drawn largely from Christian and animist communities, attacked Muslim civilians across the west of the country; Human Rights Watch documented massacres in Bossangoa, Zéré and elsewhere and recorded 450,000 people displaced and over 70,000 refugees by December 2013. The UN International Commission of Inquiry, reporting on 22 December 2014, found that all parties — FACA, Séléka and anti-balaka — had committed war crimes, that the anti-balaka campaign against Muslims amounted to ethnic cleansing constituting a crime against humanity, and that the threshold for genocidal intent had not been established. It estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people killed while calling this a probable radical under-estimate. Most of the Muslim population of the west left for Chad and Cameroon or was evacuated; displacement inside the country peaked above 935,000 in January 2014 and has remained high, with continued fighting in the east and centre through the 2020s.","deathsLow":3000,"deathsHigh":6000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","destruction of homes & property","starvation & siege"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":4500,"countries":["Central African Rep.","Cameroon","Chad"],"baselinePop":4700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Central African Republic when the Seleka took Bangui","baselineYear":2013,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":false,"_share":0.2127659574468085},{"id":"crimea-annexation-2014","title":"Russia's Annexation of Crimea","startYear":2014,"endYear":2014,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Unmarked Russian troops ('little green men') seized control of Crimea following Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution; Russia staged a referendum and formally annexed the peninsula in March 2014","peopleDisplaced":40000,"territoryKm2":27000,"territoryDesc":"The Crimean peninsula, approximately 27,000 km², annexed by Russia and administered as Russian federal territory, not recognized as such by Ukraine or most UN member states","lat":44.95,"lon":34.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":44.95,"fromLon":34.1,"toLat":50.45,"toLon":30.52,"label":"Crimea → Kyiv-controlled Ukraine","people":40000}],"summary":"In late February 2014, unmarked Russian soldiers seized key sites across Crimea following the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia organized a referendum on 16 March 2014, held under military occupation and not observed by credible international monitors, and formally annexed Crimea two days later. The UN General Assembly (Resolution 68/262) declared the referendum invalid and affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity; tens of thousands fled to mainland Ukraine, and Crimean Tatars in particular have faced ongoing repression, including prosecutions and disappearances documented by UN and Council of Europe monitors.","ongoing":false,"_mag":162000,"countries":["Russia","Ukraine"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["enforced disappearance","torture","arbitrary detention","denationalization"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2284000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Crimea, including Sevastopol, at the time of the 2014 annexation","baselineYear":2014,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.017513134851138354},{"id":"donbas-war-2014-2022","title":"War in Donbas","startYear":2014,"endYear":2022,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Russian-backed separatists proclaiming the 'Donetsk' and 'Luhansk People's Republics', supported by Russian personnel and materiel, fought Ukrainian government forces in eastern Ukraine","peopleDisplaced":2000000,"territoryKm2":16000,"territoryDesc":"Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts held by Russian-backed separatists from 2014, prior to Russia's full recognition and further seizure of territory in 2022","lat":48,"lon":37.8,"flows":[{"fromLat":48,"fromLon":37.8,"toLat":50,"toLon":36.23,"label":"Donetsk/Luhansk → government-controlled Ukraine","people":1500000},{"fromLat":48,"fromLon":37.8,"toLat":47.23,"toLon":39.72,"label":"Donetsk/Luhansk → Russia","people":500000}],"summary":"Following Russia's annexation of Crimea, Russian-backed armed groups seized government buildings and territory in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in spring 2014, proclaiming separatist 'people's republics.' Ukrainian forces fought to contain the separatists in a war that, despite the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, settled into a low-intensity but continuous conflict along a roughly 400-kilometer front until Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. The war displaced an estimated 1.5-2 million people, including over a million registered by Russian authorities as arrivals, a figure Ukrainian and Western analysts say reflects coerced relocation in part by Russian authorities, a figure Ukraine and Western analysts view partly as involving coerced relocation.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2000000,"countries":["Ukraine","Russia"],"deathsLow":14200,"deathsHigh":14400,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["torture","arbitrary detention","enforced disappearance"],"_deaths":14300,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":6583400,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts at the start of 2014","baselineYear":2014,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.3037943919555245},{"id":"isis-yazidi-sinjar","title":"ISIS Territorial Seizure and the Yazidi Genocide in Sinjar","startYear":2014,"endYear":2019,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"The Islamic State (ISIS) seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014, declaring a self-styled 'caliphate'; its August 2014 assault on Sinjar targeted the Yazidi religious minority with mass killings, abductions, and sexual enslavement, subsequently recognized as genocide by the UN and several national governments and courts.","peopleDisplaced":350000,"territoryKm2":100000,"territoryDesc":"At its territorial peak in 2014–2015, ISIS controlled an estimated 100,000 km2 across Iraq and Syria, home to some 8 million people, before losing all held territory by March 2019.","lat":36.32,"lon":41.86,"flows":[{"fromLat":36.32,"fromLon":41.86,"toLat":36.38,"toLon":41.85,"label":"Sinjar → Sinjar Mountain (initial flight)","people":50000},{"fromLat":36.32,"fromLon":41.86,"toLat":37.14,"toLon":42.69,"label":"Sinjar → Duhok/Zakho, Iraqi Kurdistan","people":150000},{"fromLat":36.32,"fromLon":41.86,"toLat":36.5,"toLon":40.75,"label":"Sinjar → northeast Syria (Hasakah area)","people":35000}],"summary":"In summer 2014, ISIS swept across northern and western Iraq, capturing Mosul and large parts of Syria to declare a self-proclaimed 'caliphate' that at its peak controlled roughly 100,000 km2 and around 8 million people. On 3 August 2014, ISIS fighters attacked the Yazidi-majority Sinjar region, killing an estimated 5,000 Yazidi men, abducting thousands of women and girls into sexual slavery, and forcing roughly 200,000 people to flee, tens of thousands to the barren Sinjar Mountains where many died of thirst and exposure before a US-backed air campaign and Kurdish ground forces opened a corridor to safety. The UN, the US, and other governments and courts have formally recognized these acts as genocide against the Yazidi people. ISIS was militarily defeated as a territorial entity by 2017 in Iraq and 2019 in Syria, though displaced Yazidi and other communities have only partially returned to Sinjar, and an insurgency has continued at lower intensity.","ongoing":false,"_mag":600000,"countries":["Iraq","Syria"],"deathsLow":2100,"deathsHigh":5000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","starvation & siege","forced labour","abduction or transfer of children","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":3550,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":450000,"baselineWhat":"The Yazidi population of Iraq in 2014, concentrated in the Sinjar district and the Shekhan area","baselineYear":2014,"asOf":null,"weakSources":true,"_share":0.7777777777777778},{"id":"yemen-war","title":"Yemen War and Mass Displacement","startYear":2014,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Houthi (Ansar Allah) forces seized the capital Sanaa in 2014–2015, prompting a Saudi- and UAE-led coalition military intervention on behalf of the internationally recognized Yemeni government; the resulting war has produced one of the world's largest humanitarian crises.","peopleDisplaced":4500000,"territoryKm2":130000,"territoryDesc":"Houthi forces control much of northern and western Yemen (roughly a third of the country's land area but the majority of its population), including the capital Sanaa, while the internationally recognized government and allied forces hold the south and east.","lat":15.5,"lon":44.2,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.37,"fromLon":44.19,"toLat":15.47,"toLon":45.32,"label":"Sanaa area → Marib (IDP influx)","people":1000000},{"fromLat":14.8,"fromLon":42.95,"toLat":13.58,"toLon":44.02,"label":"Hodeidah → Taiz","people":500000},{"fromLat":13.58,"fromLon":44.02,"toLat":12.78,"toLon":45.04,"label":"Taiz → Aden","people":400000}],"summary":"Houthi forces, drawn from Yemen's Zaidi Shia minority, captured Sanaa in 2014 and forced out the government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who fled to Saudi Arabia. In March 2015, a Saudi- and UAE-led coalition began a military intervention, including a prolonged air campaign and naval blockade, to restore the government, precipitating years of grinding conflict, famine conditions, and a cholera epidemic. Over 4.5 million Yemenis remain internally displaced as of the mid-2020s, out of more than 6 million displaced at some point during the war, with front-line cities such as Hodeidah, Taiz, and Marib absorbing large IDP populations. A UN-brokered truce in 2022 substantially reduced large-scale fighting, but the country remains split between Houthi-controlled northern territories and government/coalition-aligned areas in the south, and a comprehensive political settlement had not been reached as of 2026.","ongoing":true,"_mag":4500000,"countries":["Yemen","Djibouti"],"deathsLow":154000,"deathsHigh":377000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance","sexual violence"],"_deaths":265500,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":26500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Yemen when the war began","baselineYear":2014,"asOf":"2025","weakSources":false,"_share":0.16981132075471697},{"id":"burkina-faso-displacement-crisis","title":"Burkina Faso's Displacement Crisis","startYear":2015,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Jihadist groups affiliated to JNIM and Islamic State in the Sahel, the Burkinabè army and the pro-government Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland have attacked and besieged civilian communities, producing one of the world's largest internal displacement crises","peopleDisplaced":2100000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":14.1,"lon":-1.6,"flows":[{"fromLat":14.1,"fromLon":-1.6,"toLat":12.3714,"toLon":-1.5197,"label":"Sahel and Centre-Nord regions → Ouagadougou and southern towns","people":null},{"fromLat":13.5,"fromLon":0.5,"toLat":14.02,"toLon":0.85,"label":"Eastern Burkina Faso → Niger (Tillabéri)","people":null},{"fromLat":11.2,"fromLon":-3,"toLat":9.4,"toLon":-0.85,"label":"Southern Burkina Faso → northern Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire","people":null}],"summary":"Jihadist violence spreading from Mali reached Burkina Faso from 2015 and escalated sharply after 2018, producing what became, in proportion to population, one of the largest internal displacement crises in the world. Human Rights Watch reported that by August 2024 more than 2.3 million people had been forced from their homes, 2.1 million of them inside the country. Both sides have attacked civilians: HRW recorded Islamist armed groups killing 1,004 civilians in 259 attacks between January and August 2024, and the army and the pro-government Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland killing at least 1,000 civilians between January and July 2024, including the summary execution of at least 223 civilians, among them 56 children, at Nondin and Soro in February 2024, and up to 400 civilians during operations in April and May. Islamist groups have besieged dozens of towns, cutting inhabitants off from food and aid; the Norwegian Refugee Council reported 800,000 people under blockade in 2023, half in Djibo. Two military coups in 2022 did not reverse the trend, and the government has restricted humanitarian access and expelled journalists and aid organizations. The same conflict system has displaced hundreds of thousands in western Niger's Tillabéri region.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","starvation & siege","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2100000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Burkina Faso","Niger","Ghana"],"baselinePop":20505155,"baselineWhat":"The population of Burkina Faso at the national census of 2019","baselineYear":2019,"asOf":"2023-03","weakSources":false,"_share":0.10241327119936426},{"id":"europe-external-border-detention","title":"Europe's External Border: Hotspot Detention, Containment and Pushbacks","startYear":2015,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"European Union member states and Frontex confined arriving asylum seekers in island hotspots and closed centres, contained them in transit countries under bilateral deals, and conducted summary returns at land and sea borders","peopleDisplaced":1015000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Reception and identification centres on the Greek Aegean islands and in southern Italy, closed controlled-access centres from 2021, and fenced land borders at Evros, Melilla and Ceuta and along the Poland-Belarus frontier.","lat":39.15,"lon":26.51,"flows":[{"fromLat":38.42,"fromLon":27.14,"toLat":39.15,"toLon":26.51,"label":"Aegean crossings from Turkey to the Greek islands","people":null},{"fromLat":32.9,"fromLon":13.19,"toLat":35.5,"toLon":12.61,"label":"Central Mediterranean crossings from Libya to Lampedusa","people":null}],"summary":"After more than a million people crossed the Mediterranean in 2015, the European Union adopted a containment approach built on island hotspots in Greece and Italy, the March 2016 statement with Turkey, and cooperation with Libyan and other authorities to intercept departures. Asylum seekers were held for extended periods in facilities far beyond their capacity — Moria on Lesbos held roughly 20,000 people in a site designed for 3,000 before it burned in 2020 — and from 2021 in new closed controlled-access centres with restricted entry and exit. Human rights bodies including the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, UNHCR and the EU's own anti-fraud office have documented summary returns without asylum assessment at the Greek-Turkish, Croatian, Spanish and Polish borders, which the states concerned deny or defend as border protection. IOM's Missing Migrants Project has recorded more than 30,000 deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean since 2014. The system is Europe's largest contemporary confinement regime and was absent from the atlas.","deathsLow":25000,"deathsHigh":32000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1015000,"_deaths":28500,"countries":["Greece","Turkey","Libya","Malta"],"baselinePop":2600000,"baselineWhat":"The people who arrived irregularly at the European Union's external borders from 2015 onward","baselineYear":2015,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.3903846153846154},{"id":"venezuela-exodus","title":"Venezuelan Refugee and Migrant Crisis","startYear":2015,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Economic collapse, hyperinflation, and political repression under the Chávez and Maduro governments drove sustained mass emigration from Venezuela, accelerating sharply after 2017","peopleDisplaced":7900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":10.48,"lon":-66.9,"flows":[{"fromLat":10.48,"fromLon":-66.9,"toLat":7.89,"toLon":-72.5,"label":"Venezuela → Colombia","people":2800000},{"fromLat":10.48,"fromLon":-66.9,"toLat":-12.05,"toLon":-77.04,"label":"Venezuela → Peru","people":1500000},{"fromLat":10.48,"fromLon":-66.9,"toLat":25.76,"toLon":-80.19,"label":"Venezuela → United States","people":900000}],"summary":"Since roughly 2015, and accelerating sharply from 2017 onward, an economic collapse marked by hyperinflation, shortages, and political repression under President Nicolás Maduro has driven one of the largest displacement crises in recent history. As of 2025-26, over 7.9 million Venezuelans, close to a quarter of the country's population, have left the country, with Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and the United States hosting the largest numbers. The crisis has strained host-country services across Latin America and produced one of the world's largest cross-border displacement flows outside a formal war zone.","ongoing":true,"_mag":7900000,"countries":["Venezuela","Colombia","Peru","Bahamas"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","enforced disappearance","torture","sexual violence","arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":30100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Venezuela in 2015, at the start of the mass exodus","baselineYear":2015,"asOf":"2026-02","weakSources":false,"_share":0.26245847176079734},{"id":"cabo-delgado-displacement","title":"Cabo Delgado Insurgency and Displacement, Mozambique","startYear":2017,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"An Islamist insurgency known locally as al-Shabaab and claimed by the Islamic State has attacked towns and villages in northern Mozambique, and government forces and Rwandan and SADC troops have fought it, emptying much of Cabo Delgado province","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-11.35,"lon":40.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":-11.35,"fromLon":40.35,"toLat":-12.974,"toLon":40.5178,"label":"Northern Cabo Delgado → Pemba and southern districts","people":null},{"fromLat":-11,"fromLon":39.9,"toLat":-15.1165,"toLon":39.2666,"label":"Cabo Delgado → Nampula province","people":null}],"summary":"Attacks by an Islamist insurgency began in Mocímboa da Praia in October 2017 and escalated into a war across northern Cabo Delgado, a province where major offshore gas projects were under development. Insurgents seized towns, burned villages and beheaded civilians; government forces and, from 2021, Rwandan and SADC contingents pushed them back from the main towns without ending the insurgency. ACAPS recorded more than 2,000 fatalities, mostly civilians, and over one million people displaced as of April 2023, counting both those still displaced and those who had returned. UNHCR reports displacement exceeding one million at the 2021–22 peak, with more than 582,000 still displaced in January 2024 and around 632,400 returns since July 2021. Renewed attacks in 2024 and 2025 displaced further waves. Access restrictions, limited press freedom and government reluctance to acknowledge the conflict's severity have left the data incomplete.","deathsLow":2000,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Mozambique","Comoros"],"baselinePop":2333278,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cabo Delgado province at the 2017 Mozambican census, taken as the insurgency began","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.428581592077755},{"id":"cameroon-anglophone-crisis","title":"Cameroon's Anglophone Crisis","startYear":2017,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Cameroonian security forces and armed Anglophone separatist groups have fought in the North-West and South-West regions, both attacking civilians and driving them into the bush, into other regions and into Nigeria","peopleDisplaced":500000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":5.9631,"lon":10.1591,"flows":[{"fromLat":5.9631,"fromLon":10.1591,"toLat":5.96,"toLon":8.71,"label":"North-West and South-West Cameroon → Cross River State, Nigeria","people":76493},{"fromLat":4.1536,"fromLon":9.2679,"toLat":4.0511,"toLon":9.7679,"label":"South-West → Douala and the Littoral","people":null}],"summary":"Protests by Anglophone lawyers and teachers in Cameroon's North-West and South-West regions in late 2016 against the use of French in courts and schools were met with force; by 2017 armed separatist groups had declared an independent 'Ambazonia' and a full insurgency was under way. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect records more than 6,500 people killed since 2016 and states the real figure is believed to be higher, with at least 334,098 internally displaced and more than 76,493 refugees in Nigeria. Security forces have been documented committing extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture and the burning of villages; separatists have killed, kidnapped and extorted civilians, imposed an education boycott and attacked schools, students, teachers, health facilities and aid workers. UNHCR counted 969,000 internally displaced people in Cameroon as of mid-2025 across all of the country's crises. The conflict has attracted little international attention and no international judicial process.","deathsLow":6500,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"settlers":null,"_mag":500000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Cameroon","Nigeria"],"baselinePop":3500000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Cameroon's North-West and South-West regions at the start of the crisis","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2025-02","weakSources":false,"_share":0.14285714285714285},{"id":"drc-eastern-displacement","title":"Displacement in Eastern DR Congo","startYear":2017,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Fighting between the Congolese army, the M23 movement backed by Rwanda according to UN experts, and scores of other armed groups has repeatedly uprooted civilians across North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri","peopleDisplaced":5000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":-1.68,"lon":29.23,"flows":[{"fromLat":-1.68,"fromLon":29.23,"toLat":-1.95,"toLon":30.06,"label":"North Kivu → Rwanda","people":100000},{"fromLat":-2.51,"fromLon":28.86,"toLat":-3.38,"toLon":29.36,"label":"South Kivu → Burundi","people":90000},{"fromLat":1.56,"fromLon":30.24,"toLat":0.65,"toLon":30.27,"label":"Ituri → Uganda","people":200000}],"summary":"Eastern DR Congo has been in near-continuous conflict since the Second Congo War formally ended, with more than a hundred armed groups active across North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri. The resurgence of the M23 movement from 2021, which UN groups of experts have reported receiving Rwandan military support, drove repeated mass flight around Goma, culminating in the group's capture of Goma and Bukavu in early 2025. Roughly 5 million people are internally displaced and about 8.2 million forcibly displaced in total, making this one of the largest and least-reported displacement crises in the world. Displacement here is highly repetitive: many families have fled multiple times, and camps around Goma have been overrun and emptied more than once.","ongoing":true,"_mag":5000000,"countries":["Rwanda","Dem. Rep. Congo","Burundi","Uganda"],"deathsLow":15000,"deathsHigh":45000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","abduction or transfer of children","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":30000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":25000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — North and South Kivu, Ituri and Tanganyika","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.2},{"id":"ethiopia-2017-2019-mass-displacement","title":"Ethiopia's Mass Internal Displacement of 2017-2019","startYear":2017,"endYear":2019,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"Communal and regional conflict along the Oromia-Somali and Gedeo-West Guji boundaries drove the largest new internal displacement in the world in 2018","peopleDisplaced":2900000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":6.4104,"lon":38.3097,"flows":[{"fromLat":5.9,"fromLon":38,"toLat":6.4104,"toLon":38.3097,"label":"Gedeo displacement from West Guji into Gedeo zone","people":800000},{"fromLat":7.5,"fromLon":42,"toLat":8.5,"toLon":39.3,"label":"Oromo and Somali displaced across the Oromia-Somali regional boundary","people":1000000}],"summary":"Between 2017 and 2019 Ethiopia experienced the largest new internal displacement of any country in the world, driven by conflict along the boundary between the Oromia and Somali regions, in which regional special police forces were implicated and hundreds of thousands of Oromo and Somali residents were expelled in both directions, and by the outbreak of violence between Gedeo and Guji Oromo communities in April 2018, which displaced up to 970,000 people into Gedeo zone in a matter of weeks. Further displacement followed in Benishangul-Gumuz, in the Amhara-Tigray boundary areas and around Addis Ababa. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded around 2.9 million new displacements in 2018 alone, and the Norwegian Refugee Council reported in September 2018 that Ethiopia had more newly displaced people in the first half of that year - 1.4 million - than any other country. From 2019 the federal government pursued a rapid returns programme; the Norwegian Refugee Council, Human Rights Watch and humanitarian agencies reported that returns were in places pressured or premature and that assistance was withdrawn from people who had not returned voluntarily, which the government denied. The displacement crisis preceded and partly shaped the later Tigray war, which is recorded separately.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["destruction of homes & property","mass killing"],"settlers":null,"_mag":2900000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Ethiopia"],"baselinePop":60400000,"baselineWhat":"The combined population of Ethiopia's Oromia, Somali and Southern Nations (SNNP) regions, where the displacement occurred","baselineYear":2018,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.048013245033112585},{"id":"rohingya-cox-bazar-camps","title":"Rohingya Confined in the Cox's Bazar Camps, Bangladesh","startYear":2017,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Bangladeshi authorities holding Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in fenced camps under an encampment policy that grants no formal refugee status and no right to work","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"33 camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf sub-districts, Cox's Bazar, including the contiguous Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion site, one of the largest refugee settlements in the world, plus the silt island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal","lat":21.2,"lon":92.16,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.2,"fromLon":92.16,"toLat":22.29,"toLon":91.11,"label":"Cox's Bazar → Bhasan Char","people":34500}],"summary":"Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and treats the Rohingya as \"forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals\" rather than refugees, confining them to camps in Cox's Bazar under a policy that bars formal employment, restricts access to Bangla-language and accredited education, and requires permission to leave the camp area. From 2019 the authorities erected barbed-wire perimeter fencing around the camps and installed watchtowers and checkpoints, which the government described as a security and anti-trafficking measure and which humanitarian organisations said impeded movement and cost lives during fires and floods. From December 2020 the government relocated refugees to Bhasan Char, a low-lying island roughly 60 km offshore developed to decongest the camps; some 34,500 people were living there as of December 2025, and movement between the island and the mainland requires official permission through a process that Fortify Rights in January 2026 described as opaque and arbitrary. Bangladesh states that all relocations were voluntary and that the island offers better living conditions than the congested mainland camps; Fortify Rights and other groups documented misleading inducements and threats and characterise the arrangement as de facto arbitrary detention. As of 2026 there has been no verified voluntary repatriation to Myanmar, funding shortfalls have cut rations and services, and the population continues to grow through new arrivals and births.","ongoing":true,"_mag":1000000,"countries":["Bangladesh"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":1100000,"baselineWhat":"The Rohingya population of northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, before the expulsion of August 2017, from which the camp population is drawn","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":0.9090909090909091,"related":[{"id":"rohingya-expulsions-myanmar","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":900000,"note":"The camp population (close to one million) is made up mostly of people who arrived in 2017 and 2024-25, counted in the expulsion entry's flows, plus earlier residents and children born in the camps. Do not sum the two displacement figures."}]},{"id":"xinjiang-internment-china","title":"Xinjiang Internment and Re-education System","startYear":2017,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Chinese state and Xinjiang regional authorities holding Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslims in extrajudicial \"vocational education and training centres\" and, later, in the formal prison system","peopleDisplaced":1000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":41,"lon":85,"flows":[],"summary":"From 2017 Chinese authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region built a network of facilities in which large numbers of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities were held without criminal charge, trial or judicial review, initially denied and from October 2018 described by the government as lawful \"vocational education and training centres\" for counter-terrorism and de-extremification. Detention was triggered by conduct such as praying, travelling abroad, contacting relatives overseas or possessing religious material, flagged in part through a regional data-aggregation platform. The OHCHR assessment of 31 August 2022 concluded that \"a pattern of large-scale arbitrary detention occurred in VETC facilities, at least during 2017 to 2019, affecting a significant proportion of the Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority community\", and that the underlying legal framework remained intact and \"could be re-engaged at any point\". From about 2019 the system shifted toward formal imprisonment through the criminal courts and toward state-organised labour-transfer schemes moving workers within Xinjiang and to factories in other provinces; ASPI documented over 80,000 such transfers in 2017-2019 and later reporting has documented further movements. China maintains that the centres have closed, that all trainees graduated into employment, that participation in labour programmes is voluntary poverty alleviation, and that external accounts are fabrications by hostile states; it rejects the OHCHR assessment as unlawful and politically driven. As of 2026 there is no independent access to the region, no accountability mechanism has been created, and OHCHR has said that aspects of the labour-transfer programmes may amount to forcible transfer and/or enslavement as crimes against humanity.","ongoing":true,"_mag":1000000,"countries":["China"],"deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence","forced labour","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":null,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":12500000,"baselineWhat":"The Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and other Turkic Muslim population of Xinjiang around 2017","baselineYear":2017,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.08},{"id":"al-hol-roj-camps-syria","title":"Al-Hol and Roj Camps, North-East Syria","startYear":2019,"endYear":2026,"type":"confinement","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their civil administration holding families associated with the Islamic State group, mostly women and children, without charge or judicial review; the Syrian government took over al-Hol in January 2026","peopleDisplaced":73000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":"Two fenced camps in Hasakah governorate, north-east Syria: al-Hol near the Iraqi border and the smaller Roj camp near Derik/al-Malikiyah, both with guarded perimeters and annexes for foreign nationals","lat":36.44,"lon":41.2,"flows":[],"summary":"After the territorial defeat of the Islamic State group in 2019, tens of thousands of people who had left the group's last enclaves were held in fenced camps in north-east Syria run by the Kurdish-led authorities, principally al-Hol and the smaller Roj, which housed foreign nationals from more than sixty countries. Residents, the overwhelming majority of them women and children and almost none of them charged with any offence, could not leave; conditions were life-threatening, with killings inside al-Hol, inadequate water and medical care, and children making up around two-thirds of the population. The Kurdish-led administration described the camps as a security necessity and repeatedly asked states to repatriate their nationals, which many did slowly or not at all, citing security and evidentiary difficulties; Iraq began organised returns of its citizens to a transit facility from 2021. Following a military offensive in the north-east that forced the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw, Syrian government security forces took control of al-Hol on 20-21 January 2026 and announced its full evacuation by 22 February; departures were largely unplanned, with residents leaving by bus, on foot and with smugglers, and by mid-February the population had fallen to the low thousands. Human Rights Watch, which had described the detention as arbitrary and unlawful, warned that the chaotic manner of the closure exposed people to trafficking, exploitation and armed-group recruitment, and that thousands were unaccounted for. Roj remained under SDF control in early 2026 and was expected to close.","ongoing":true,"_mag":73000,"countries":["Syria"],"deathsLow":390,"deathsHigh":1000,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","sexual violence","denationalization"],"_deaths":695,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":null,"baselineWhat":null,"baselineYear":null,"asOf":"2026-02","weakSources":false,"_share":null},{"id":"belarus-2020-crackdown-and-exodus","title":"Belarus since 2020: Mass Detention and the Post-Election Exodus","startYear":2020,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Europe & Northern Eurasia","actors":"Belarusian security forces detained, prosecuted and imprisoned protesters and critics, prompting large-scale emigration","peopleDisplaced":300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":53.9006,"lon":27.559,"flows":[{"fromLat":53.9006,"fromLon":27.559,"toLat":52.2297,"toLon":21.0122,"label":"Belarusians to Poland","people":180000},{"fromLat":53.9006,"fromLon":27.559,"toLat":54.6872,"toLon":25.2797,"label":"Belarusians to Lithuania","people":57500},{"fromLat":53.9006,"fromLon":27.559,"toLat":41.7151,"toLon":44.8271,"label":"Belarusians to Georgia","people":12000}],"summary":"After the disputed presidential election of 9 August 2020, mass protests in Belarus were met with a sustained police and security response. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at least 37,000 people were detained between May 2020 and May 2021, and found that torture and ill-treatment of detainees were widespread and systematic, recommending that the pattern be assessed under international criminal law; independent monitors including Viasna, whose own leaders were imprisoned, have listed over a thousand people held on politically motivated charges at any given time since. Independent media, trade unions and non-governmental organisations were liquidated, and opposition figures were prosecuted in absentia. A large emigration followed, concentrated in Poland, Lithuania and Georgia, with recent estimates putting the number of Belarusians living abroad at around 400,000 by the end of 2024, more than four per cent of the population, at an estimated cost of over three per cent of GDP. The Belarusian government denies that it holds political prisoners, describing those convicted as having committed criminal offences including extremism, and has periodically pardoned or released groups of prisoners.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture","enforced disappearance"],"settlers":null,"_mag":300000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Belarus","Poland","Lithuania","Georgia"],"baselinePop":9349645,"baselineWhat":"The population of Belarus at the start of 2020, before the disputed presidential election","baselineYear":2020,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.03208677976543495},{"id":"karabakh-war-2020","title":"Second Nagorno-Karabakh War","startYear":2020,"endYear":2020,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Azerbaijan, using Turkish-made drones and reportedly Syrian mercenaries, launched a 44-day offensive against Armenian/Karabakh Armenian forces; Russia brokered a ceasefire and deployed peacekeepers","peopleDisplaced":90000,"territoryKm2":9000,"territoryDesc":"Azerbaijan recaptured most of the seven districts surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, including the town of Shusha/Shushi","lat":39.76,"lon":46.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.76,"fromLon":46.75,"toLat":40.18,"toLon":44.5,"label":"Nagorno-Karabakh → Armenia (wartime displacement)","people":90000}],"summary":"In September-November 2020, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale offensive to reclaim territory lost in the 1990s, using Turkish drones and, according to multiple observers, Syrian mercenaries. The 44-day war ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire on 10 November 2020 under which Azerbaijan regained most of the seven surrounding districts and part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, and Russian peacekeepers were deployed to the remaining Armenian-held core. Roughly 90,000-100,000 ethnic Armenians were displaced, some temporarily and some permanently, and both sides faced documented allegations of abuses, including videos of mistreatment of prisoners of war.","ongoing":false,"_mag":90000,"countries":["Azerbaijan","Armenia"],"deathsLow":7000,"deathsHigh":7600,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","torture","cultural or religious destruction"],"_deaths":7300,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":145000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Nagorno-Karabakh (the self-declared Republic of Artsakh) before the war","baselineYear":2015,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.6206896551724138},{"id":"tigray-war","title":"Tigray War","startYear":2020,"endYear":2022,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Ethiopian federal government, with allied Eritrean and Amhara regional forces, fought the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) for control of Ethiopia's Tigray region","peopleDisplaced":2700000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.5,"lon":39.47,"flows":[{"fromLat":13.5,"fromLon":39.47,"toLat":14.75,"toLon":35.9,"label":"Tigray → Hamdayet, Sudan","people":60000},{"fromLat":13.5,"fromLon":39.47,"toLat":14.1,"toLon":38.28,"label":"Tigray → Shire (internal displacement camps)","people":1000000}],"summary":"War broke out in November 2020 between Ethiopia's federal government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional ruling party, after months of rising tension; Eritrean forces and Amhara regional militia fought alongside the federal army. The conflict was marked by widespread reports of massacres, sexual violence used as a weapon of war, and a de facto blockade of Tigray that contributed to famine-like conditions; a UN-mandated International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia found reasonable grounds to believe multiple parties, including Eritrean forces, committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts amounting to ethnic cleansing. An estimated 2.5-2.7 million people were internally displaced within Tigray at the conflict's height. A November 2022 Pretoria peace agreement ended major hostilities, though Eritrean forces and disputed territorial control in western Tigray have complicated implementation, and death toll estimates remain unusually wide-ranging and contested.","ongoing":false,"_mag":2700000,"countries":["Ethiopia","Sudan"],"deathsLow":162000,"deathsHigh":600000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","sexual violence","torture","starvation & siege","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":381000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":5700000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ethiopia's Tigray region on the eve of the war","baselineYear":2020,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.47368421052631576},{"id":"haiti-gang-displacement","title":"Gang Control and Mass Displacement in Haiti","startYear":2021,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"Americas","actors":"Armed gangs seized control of most of Port-au-Prince and stretches of the Artibonite and Centre departments, driving residents out amid state collapse","peopleDisplaced":1400000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":18.5944,"lon":-72.3074,"flows":[{"fromLat":18.5944,"fromLon":-72.3074,"toLat":19.15,"toLon":-72.0167,"label":"Port-au-Prince → Centre department (Hinche and surrounds)","people":300000},{"fromLat":18.5944,"fromLon":-72.3074,"toLat":18.65,"toLon":-74.1167,"label":"Port-au-Prince → Grand'Anse and the southern peninsula","people":200000}],"summary":"After the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, armed gangs consolidated control over most of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and expanded into the Artibonite and Centre departments, using killings, arson and sexual violence to clear neighbourhoods. Internal displacement rose from about 520,500 people in September 2024 to more than 1 million in January 2025 and roughly 1.4 million by September 2025, close to one in eight Haitians, with about 69 per cent of recorded movements occurring outside the capital. The UN Human Rights Office recorded 5,601 people killed, 2,212 injured and 1,494 kidnapped in gang violence in 2024, including a massacre in Cité Soleil in early December in which at least 207 people, mostly elderly, were killed; it also documented 315 lynchings and 281 summary executions by specialised police units over the same year. Three-quarters of the displaced shelter with host families in the provinces, and the rest largely in formal sites in the capital. OCHA projected 6.4 million people needing emergency assistance in 2026 with only about 10 per cent of inpatient health facilities nationally still fully operational.","deathsLow":5601,"deathsHigh":5601,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution"],"settlers":null,"_mag":1400000,"_deaths":5601,"countries":["Haiti"],"baselinePop":11800000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Haiti","baselineYear":2025,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":0.11864406779661017},{"id":"myanmar-post-coup-displacement","title":"Myanmar Civil War Displacement Since the 2021 Coup","startYear":2021,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"East & Southeast Asia","actors":"Myanmar's military (Tatmadaw), which seized power in a February 2021 coup, has fought an expanding array of resistance forces and ethnic armed organizations, driving mass internal displacement and refugee flight","peopleDisplaced":3727700,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":21.9,"lon":96.1,"flows":[{"fromLat":21.9,"fromLon":96.1,"toLat":21.9,"toLon":95,"label":"Sagaing Region: largest internally displaced caseload (1,346,100 as of July 2026)","people":null},{"fromLat":17.2,"fromLon":97.8,"toLat":16.7,"toLon":98.57,"label":"Kayin (Karen) State → Mae Sot, Thailand","people":null},{"fromLat":22.4,"fromLon":93.5,"toLat":23.7,"toLon":92.7,"label":"Chin State and Sagaing → Mizoram and Manipur, India","people":62400},{"fromLat":20.15,"fromLon":92.9,"toLat":21.45,"toLon":92.01,"label":"Rakhine State → Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh (post-coup arrivals, mostly Rohingya)","people":141900}],"summary":"Myanmar's military seized power from the elected civilian government in February 2021, triggering nationwide protests that the military suppressed with lethal force, followed by an expanding armed conflict as newly formed \"People's Defense Forces\" allied with long-standing ethnic armed organizations across the country. Fighting, airstrikes, and village burnings have driven mass displacement, with the UN recording roughly 3.48 million internally displaced people as of late 2024, about 3.21 million of them displaced since the coup, concentrated in Sagaing, Kayin, Kayah, Chin, and Rakhine regions. By July 2026 the UN estimated about 3.73 million people displaced since the coup and still displaced inside the country, and about 204,000 more in neighbouring countries, chiefly Bangladesh and India. The conflict, combined with a collapsing economy, has produced Myanmar's largest displacement crisis in decades, compounding earlier internal displacement including the Rohingya crisis in Rakhine State.","ongoing":true,"_mag":3727700,"countries":["Myanmar","Thailand","India","Bangladesh"],"deathsLow":100114,"deathsHigh":100114,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","torture","sexual violence","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":100114,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":54000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Myanmar at the time of the coup","baselineYear":2021,"asOf":"2026-07","weakSources":false,"_share":0.06903148148148149,"related":[{"id":"kachin-conflict-displacement-2011","rel":"continues-from","sharedPeople":0,"note":"After the fix, the post-coup figure excludes the 68,400 pre-coup Kachin and 7,600 northern Shan IDPs, so the figures no longer overlap. Kachin displacement continues in the post-coup entry (181,400 displaced in Kachin since the coup)."},{"id":"rohingya-rakhine-closed-camps","rel":"partial-overlap","sharedPeople":130000,"note":"The UN's Myanmar displacement total used for the post-coup entry includes Rohingya held in Rakhine camps since 2012."}]},{"id":"taliban-takeover-2021","title":"2021 Taliban Takeover and Afghan Displacement","startYear":2021,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan as US and NATO forces withdrew in August 2021, triggering internal displacement and refugee flight, later compounded by large-scale expulsions of Afghans from Pakistan and Iran","peopleDisplaced":2300000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.53,"lon":69.17,"flows":[{"fromLat":34.53,"fromLon":69.17,"toLat":33.68,"toLon":73.05,"label":"Afghanistan → Pakistan (post-2021 refugee flight)","people":600000},{"fromLat":34.53,"fromLon":69.17,"toLat":35.69,"toLon":51.39,"label":"Afghanistan → Iran (post-2021 refugee flight)","people":1000000}],"summary":"As US and NATO forces completed their withdrawal in August 2021, the Taliban rapidly seized control of Afghanistan, prompting a new wave of displacement, including an estimated 700,000 people newly displaced within the country that year alone amid the collapse of the Afghan government and subsequent economic crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans, including former government employees, security personnel, and members of at-risk groups, fled or sought evacuation abroad, mainly to Pakistan and Iran. UNHCR counted about 1.6 million Afghans arriving in neighbouring countries after the takeover, roughly one million in Iran and 600,000 in Pakistan. From late 2023 Pakistan and Iran reversed much of this movement through mass deportation campaigns, which are recorded as a separate event.","ongoing":true,"_mag":2300000,"countries":["Afghanistan","Pakistan","Iran"],"deathsLow":1000,"deathsHigh":3000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["summary execution","enforced disappearance","arbitrary detention","torture"],"_deaths":2000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":40100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Afghanistan when the Taliban took power","baselineYear":2021,"asOf":"2026-02","weakSources":false,"_share":0.057356608478802994,"related":[{"id":"afghan-mass-expulsions-pakistan-iran","rel":"continues-as","note":"Some of the ~1.6 million who fled after August 2021 were among those deported back from 2023, but the expulsion figures count border crossings of a far larger long-resident population. The overlap cannot be quantified."}]},{"id":"el-salvador-state-of-exception","title":"El Salvador's State of Exception and Mass Incarceration","startYear":2022,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"confinement","region":"Americas","actors":"The Salvadoran government suspended constitutional guarantees and detained tens of thousands of people without individualised charge in an anti-gang campaign","peopleDisplaced":85000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":13.6929,"lon":-89.2182,"flows":[],"summary":"El Salvador declared a state of exception in March 2022 after a weekend in which gangs killed dozens of people, suspending constitutional guarantees including the right to be informed of the reason for arrest and access to a lawyer. Security forces have since detained roughly 85,000 people, about 1.4 per cent of the population, largely on the basis of appearance, neighbourhood and anonymous tips rather than individualised evidence, and mass hearings have been conducted online with hundreds of defendants at a time. Human Rights Watch documented torture and severe beatings during arrest and detention, extreme overcrowding requiring detainees to sleep standing or on floors, immersion in ice water for up to two hours, denial of medication, and 66 cases of children subjected to torture and abusive conditions. Salvadoran human rights organisations record more than 350 deaths in state custody since March 2022, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has documented torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment in detention centres. The government credits the policy with an over-80 per cent fall in homicides and it retains broad domestic support; the CECOT mega-prison at Tecoluca, designed for 20,000 and later expanded toward 40,000, has become the emblem of the policy and in 2025 received men deported from the United States. The measure has been renewed by the legislature every month since it began.","deathsLow":350,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":"deaths in transit or in camps","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","torture"],"settlers":null,"_mag":85000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["El Salvador"],"baselinePop":6029976,"baselineWhat":"The population of El Salvador at the 2024 national census","baselineYear":2024,"asOf":"2026-01","weakSources":false,"_share":0.014096241842421926},{"id":"ukraine-invasion-2022","title":"Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine","startYear":2022,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, occupying large areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts and purporting to annex them in September 2022","peopleDisplaced":9600000,"territoryKm2":113000,"territoryDesc":"Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea and parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, together roughly 18-19% of Ukraine's internationally recognized territory as of 2026","lat":48.5,"lon":34,"flows":[{"fromLat":50.45,"fromLon":30.52,"toLat":52.23,"toLon":21.01,"label":"Ukraine → Poland and other EU states (refugees)","people":5900000},{"fromLat":50,"fromLon":36.23,"toLat":49.84,"toLon":24.03,"label":"Eastern/frontline Ukraine → western Ukraine (IDPs)","people":3700000},{"fromLat":47.1,"fromLon":37.55,"toLat":55.75,"toLon":37.62,"label":"Occupied territories → Russia (incl. deported children)","people":20000}],"summary":"Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the largest conventional war in Europe since 1945, and has occupied significant portions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts in addition to Crimea. In September 2022, Russia declared the annexation of four partially occupied oblasts, a move the UN General Assembly (Resolution ES-11/4) declared to have no validity under international law. As of early 2026, an estimated 5.9 million Ukrainians remain refugees abroad and about 3.7 million are internally displaced; the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, with Ukraine estimating thousands of children affected.","ongoing":true,"_mag":9600000,"countries":["Ukraine","Poland","Russia"],"deathsLow":300000,"deathsHigh":600000,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["sexual violence","torture","enforced disappearance","abduction or transfer of children","arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":450000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":41167336,"baselineWhat":"The population of Ukraine on 1 January 2022, excluding Crimea and Sevastopol","baselineYear":2022,"asOf":"2025-09","weakSources":false,"_share":0.23319458903048768},{"id":"afghan-mass-expulsions-pakistan-iran","title":"The Mass Expulsion of Afghans from Pakistan and Iran","startYear":2023,"endYear":2026,"dateApprox":false,"type":"displacement","region":"South & Central Asia","actors":"Pakistan and Iran deported or pressured out millions of Afghan refugees and migrants after 2023","peopleDisplaced":6000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":34.5553,"lon":69.2075,"flows":[{"fromLat":33.6844,"fromLon":73.0479,"toLat":34.1333,"toLon":71.0833,"label":"Afghans expelled from Pakistan via Torkham and Spin Boldak","people":2500000},{"fromLat":35.6892,"fromLon":51.389,"toLat":34.3529,"toLon":61.1,"label":"Afghans deported from Iran via Islam Qala and Milak","people":3500000}],"summary":"Pakistan announced its Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan in October 2023, requiring undocumented foreigners - overwhelmingly Afghans, many born in Pakistan - to leave by 1 November or face deportation, and subsequently extended the policy in phases to holders of Afghan Citizen Cards and then to Proof of Registration cardholders. Iran, which hosted a larger Afghan population, ran parallel deportations that increased sharply in 2025. UNHCR reported more than six million returns and deportations from the two countries between late 2023 and mid-2026, the largest movement of Afghans since the 1980s, into a country under Taliban rule with a collapsed economy, restricted aid and severe restrictions on women and girls. UNHCR, IOM and human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described elements of the campaigns as refoulement and documented arbitrary detention, property loss, extortion at checkpoints and family separation; Pakistan and Iran maintain that they are enforcing immigration law after decades of hosting refugees with limited international support. Returnees have concentrated in Kabul, Nangarhar, Kandahar and Herat, where humanitarian agencies report severe shortages of shelter, water and work.","deathsLow":null,"deathsHigh":null,"deathsBasis":null,"atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["arbitrary detention","destruction of homes & property","denationalization"],"settlers":null,"_mag":6000000,"_deaths":null,"countries":["Afghanistan","Pakistan","Iran"],"baselinePop":7500000,"baselineWhat":"The Afghan population living in Pakistan and Iran when the expulsion campaigns began in late 2023","baselineYear":2023,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":0.8,"related":[{"id":"taliban-takeover-2021","rel":"continues-from","note":"Some of the ~1.6 million who fled after August 2021 were among those deported back from 2023, but the expulsion figures count border crossings of a far larger long-resident population. The overlap cannot be quantified."}]},{"id":"gaza-war-2023","title":"Gaza War: Mass Displacement since October 2023","startYear":2023,"endYear":2026,"type":"both","region":"Middle East & North Africa","actors":"Following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and around 251 taken hostage, Israel launched a large-scale military offensive in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly ordering evacuations that displaced the large majority of Gaza's population, often multiple times.","peopleDisplaced":1900000,"territoryKm2":237,"territoryDesc":"By mid-2026 the UN reported roughly 53% of the Gaza Strip lying beyond the 'Yellow Line' and about 65% (~237 km²) under direct Israeli control or subject to access restrictions","lat":31.42,"lon":34.35,"flows":[{"fromLat":31.5,"fromLon":34.47,"toLat":31.34,"toLon":34.31,"label":"North Gaza/Gaza City → Khan Younis","people":700000},{"fromLat":31.34,"fromLon":34.31,"toLat":31.29,"toLon":34.24,"label":"Khan Younis → Rafah","people":600000},{"fromLat":31.29,"fromLon":34.24,"toLat":31.3,"toLon":34.23,"label":"Rafah → Al-Mawasi coastal 'safe zone'","people":400000}],"summary":"After the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people and saw around 251 taken hostage into Gaza, Israel launched an extensive air and ground campaign against Hamas across the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces issued repeated evacuation orders, pushing the population south and then into ever-shrinking designated 'humanitarian' or 'safe' zones such as Al-Mawasi, while establishing military corridors, including the Netzarim and Philadelphi corridors, that fragmented the territory; UN OCHA estimated some 1.9 million people, about 90% of Gaza's population, were displaced at least once, many repeatedly. The offensive caused tens of thousands of deaths according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (figures cited by the UN as broadly reliable) and widespread destruction of housing, hospitals, and infrastructure, alongside a severe hunger crisis. A ceasefire-and-hostage framework was reached in January 2025 followed by renewed fighting, and by 2026 the situation remained volatile, with large-scale displacement, destruction, and humanitarian access constraints continuing amid a partial and contested ceasefire process.","ongoing":true,"_mag":1900000,"countries":["Palestine"],"deathsLow":73770,"deathsHigh":126000,"deathsBasis":"direct killing","atrocityPrimary":true,"violenceForms":["mass killing","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property","arbitrary detention","torture","sexual violence"],"_deaths":99885,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":2100000,"baselineWhat":"The population of the Gaza Strip on the eve of the war","baselineYear":2023,"asOf":"2026-06","weakSources":false,"_share":0.9047619047619048,"related":[{"id":"gaza-closure-blockade","rel":"same-population","sharedPeople":1900000,"note":"The people displaced in the Gaza war since October 2023 are the same population held under the closure of the Gaza Strip since 2007."}]},{"id":"karabakh-exodus-2023","title":"2023 Azerbaijani Offensive and Exodus of Karabakh Armenians","startYear":2023,"endYear":2023,"type":"both","region":"Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus","actors":"Azerbaijan launched a rapid military offensive on 19-20 September 2023 after a nine-month blockade of the Lachin corridor, leading to the surrender and dissolution of the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh and the flight of nearly its entire population","peopleDisplaced":100617,"territoryKm2":2900,"territoryDesc":"The remaining Armenian-held core of Nagorno-Karabakh, brought under full Azerbaijani control; the Republic of Artsakh formally dissolved on 1 January 2024","lat":39.82,"lon":46.75,"flows":[{"fromLat":39.82,"fromLon":46.75,"toLat":40.18,"toLon":44.5,"label":"Nagorno-Karabakh → Armenia (exodus, Sept-Oct 2023)","people":100617}],"summary":"After a roughly nine-month blockade of the Lachin corridor (the sole route between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh) that the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to lift in February 2023, Azerbaijan launched a rapid military offensive on 19-20 September 2023 that led to the surrender of Karabakh Armenian forces. Within about ten days, over 100,600 ethnic Armenians, well over 99% of the enclave's population, fled to Armenia, and the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh dissolved itself on 1 January 2024. A fuel depot explosion during the exodus killed over 200 people, and dozens more died during the journey.","ongoing":false,"_mag":100617,"countries":["Azerbaijan","Armenia"],"deathsLow":200,"deathsHigh":700,"deathsBasis":"conflict deaths incl. combatants","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["starvation & siege"],"_deaths":450,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":120000,"baselineWhat":"The Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh immediately before the September 2023 offensive","baselineYear":2023,"asOf":null,"weakSources":false,"_share":0.838475},{"id":"sudan-war-2023","title":"Sudan War (SAF–RSF Conflict)","startYear":2023,"endYear":2026,"type":"displacement","region":"Sub-Saharan Africa","actors":"The Sudanese Armed Forces under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces under Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo fought for control of the state","peopleDisplaced":12000000,"territoryKm2":null,"territoryDesc":null,"lat":15.5,"lon":32.56,"flows":[{"fromLat":15.5,"fromLon":32.56,"toLat":13.47,"toLon":22.8,"label":"Khartoum/Darfur → Adré, Chad","people":800000},{"fromLat":15.5,"fromLon":32.56,"toLat":24.09,"toLon":32.9,"label":"Khartoum → Egypt (Aswan/Cairo)","people":1500000},{"fromLat":13.63,"fromLon":25.35,"toLat":9.46,"toLon":31.55,"label":"Darfur/El Fasher → Renk, South Sudan","people":700000},{"fromLat":15.5,"fromLon":32.56,"toLat":19.62,"toLon":37.22,"label":"Khartoum → Port Sudan (internal displacement)","people":3000000}],"summary":"Fighting erupted in April 2023 between Sudan's regular armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), former allies who had jointly staged a 2021 coup, after a dispute over the RSF's integration into the military. The war has devastated Khartoum and spread across the country, with especially severe atrocities in Darfur, including mass killings in El Geneina in 2023 and a prolonged RSF siege of El Fasher. By 2025 the conflict had displaced more than 12 million people, more than any other active crisis in the world, including over 8 million people displaced within Sudan and roughly 4 million refugees in Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and other neighboring states, alongside famine conditions confirmed in parts of Darfur. In January 2025, the United States government determined that the RSF had committed genocide against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities in Darfur.","ongoing":true,"_mag":12000000,"countries":["Sudan","Egypt","S. Sudan"],"deathsLow":62000,"deathsHigh":150000,"deathsBasis":"excess mortality incl. disease and starvation","atrocityPrimary":false,"violenceForms":["mass killing","summary execution","sexual violence","torture","arbitrary detention","starvation & siege","destruction of homes & property"],"_deaths":106000,"dateApprox":false,"baselinePop":48000000,"baselineWhat":"The population of Sudan at the outbreak of the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces in April 2023","baselineYear":2023,"asOf":"2026","weakSources":false,"_share":0.25}]