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Population transfer

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Population transfer is a term referring to a policy by which a state undertakes the forced removal of a large group of people from a region, invariably on the basis of ethnicity or religion. No other basis has been attested in any historical population transfer. By contrast, individuals and smaller groups of their politically effective adherents may be banished or exiled for political reasons.

"Transfer" generally refers to the removal of the people to another region, which may not be adjacent or even suited to their way of life, and being forced, causes substantial harm to the people.

When two populations are transferred in opposite directions at about the same time, the process has been called a population exchange. Such a rare exchange took place as late as the early 20th century, as part of agreements between post-Ottoman Turkey and Greece.

According to political scientist Norman Finkelstein "transfer" was considered as an almost humanist solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around WWII and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but 'often necessary' means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war.

Population transfer differs more than simply technically from individually-motivated migration, though at times of war, the act of fleeing from danger or famine often blurs the differences. If a state can preserve the fiction that migrations are the result of innumerable "personal" decisions, then the state may be able to justify its stand that it has not been culpably involved. Jews who had actually signed over properties in Germany and Austria during Nazism found it nearly impossible to be reimbursed after World War II.

Given the logistics of a forced "transfer," it is widely thought of as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, which in turn, carries the connotations of violence and genocide. In its most idealistic connotation, "transfer" is the mildest form of ethnic cleansing —a peaceful relocation of a compliant people from one area to another. Nationalist agitation and its supportive propaganda are typical political tools by which public support is cultivated in favor of population transfer as a solution to conflict.

The feasibility of population transfer was hugely increased by the creation of railroad networks from the mid-19th century.

United States: Native American relocations

The United States government removed several Native American nations to federally owned and designated reservations. Prominent among these are the 1838-39 Trail of Tears relocation of the Cherokee to Oklahoma, and the establishment of reservations for the Plains Indians that led to the Indian Wars of the late 1800s. Other transfers are discussed in the histories of the five civilized tribes.

Expulsion of Jews and Gypsies

Expulsion of Jews (and of Romany), has been a tool of state control for centuries, even before the most famous such expulsion, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Jews were expelled from numerous French territories from the 11th century onwards[1]. In cases of expulsion, a population is simply declared illegal, and forced to effect their own transfer. Compare the Pale of Settlement effected in Tsarist Russia. The Muslim who were expelled from France in 13xx (date required), and the Huguenots, declared illegal by the Edict of Fontainebleau, 1685, were expected to remove themselves.

Other kinds of transfer

A penal colony such as Georgia, Botany Bay or Devil's Island is a case-by-case transfer that may finally add up to a sizable population, but does not come under this heading. The movement of military POWs can be a case of transfer in cases where the numbers are large. (See forced march, Bataan Death March.)

Ancient World

In the ancient world, population transfer was the more humane alternative to putting all the males of a conquered territory to death and enslaving the women and children. The Babylonian captivity of the elite of Jerusalem on three occasions in the 6th century BCE was a population transfer.

United States: Cherokee Nation and the "reservations"

The illegal removal, contrary to treaties, by the United States government of the Cherokee nation of Georgia to what was called Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1838-39 is full described at Trail of Tears. The Cherokee were not the only population transferred by the U.S. government: other transfers are discussed in the histories of the five civilized tribes.

Ottomans and Turkey

Armenian "deportations" 1915 - 1919

The connotations of "population transfer" in Turkish are illuminated in an on-line statement from Turkey's Ministry of Culture:

"Relocation, tehcir in Turkish, has not a meaning of banishment. "Tehcir" is Arabic originated word meaning "immigration" or "emigration". However, it was translated in English as "deportation" although "tehcir" has a very different meaning. Unfortunately, "Tehcir Code" has been misused against Turkey by provocateurs that make use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power. In fact "Tehcir Code" applied to transfer the Armenians to the more secure regions of the country in order to restore peace and harmony. In spite of this fact, many writers use the word "deportation" to dramatize the situation. 4 This is a historical mistake and a philological mistake." (see link below)

Though the statement is self-explanatory, it should be noted that even the origin of the Turkish euphemism tehcir is Arabic, not Turkish.


Turkey and Greece: population exchange, 1922

Population transfer was used in 1922 to resolve the Greco-Turkish_War_(1919-1922). The Greeks suffered a decisive defeat in Asia Minor: the Greek army fled from Asia Minor back into Europe and abandoned the area of Thrace. Greek families that had for lived for generations in Asia Minor and Thrace accompanied the Greek army as refugees. A significant portion of the Turkish population of Greece at the time felt significant level of fear for their peace and security. Fridtjen Nansen, a Norwegian diplomat working with the League of Nations proposed the idea of population transfer — moving the Turkish inhabitants of Greece to Turkey and absorbing the Greek inhabitants of Turkey into Greece.

The plan met with fierce opposition in both countries and was condemned vigously by a large number of countries. Undeterred, Nansen worked with both Greece and Turkey to gain their acceptance of the proposed population exchange. Over one million Greeks and half a million Turks were moved from one side of the international border to the other.

Prior to population transfer in 1922, during the interval from 1914 to 1922, Greeks suffered the Pontian Genocide [2] following the model of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk government several years earlier. Population transfer prevented further genocide of the Pontian Greeks.

As a result of the transfers, the Turkish minority in Greece and the Greek minority in Turkey were much reduced. Cyprus was not included in the Greco-Turkish population transfer of 1922 because it was under direct British control.

Central Europe

After the World War II division of Poland according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germans deported Poles and Jews from Polish territories annexed by Nazi Germany, while the Soviet Union deported Poles from areas of Eastern Poland, Kresy. Later on Jews were transferred by Nazis to ghettoes and eventually to death camps.

After World War II, when the Curzon line was implemented, members of all ethnic groups were transferred to their respective new territories (Poles to Poland, Ukrainians to Ukraine). The same applied to the Oder-Neisse line, where German citizens were transferred to Germany. Germans were expelled from areas annexed by the Soviet Union as well as territories such as the so-called Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Soviet Union

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union.

Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations, although an ambition to ethnically cleanse the regions may have also been a factor. After the WWII, the population of East Prussia was replaced by the Soviet one, mainly by Russians.

South Asia

During the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947, more than 5 million Hindus moved from present-day Pakistan into present-day India, and more than 6 million Muslims moved in the other direction. A large number of people (than a million by some estimates) died in the accompanying violence.

On the island of Diego Garcia between 1967 and 1973 the British Government forcibly removed 2000 Ilois islanders to make way for a military base.

South East Europe

During the Yugoslav wars of the 1990's, the breakup of Yugoslavia caused large population transfers, mostly unvoluntary. Because it was a conflict fueled by ethnic nationalism, people of minority ethnicities generally fled towards regions where their ethnicity was in majority.

Since the Bosnian Muslims had no such immediate refuge, they were probably hardest hit by the ethnic violence. United Nations tried to create safe areas for Muslim populations of eastern Bosnia but in cases such as the Srebrenica massacre, the peacekeeping troops failed to protect the safe areas resulting in the massacre of number of Muslims.[3]

The Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, fixating the borders between the two warring parties roughly to the ones established by the autumn of 1995. One immediate result of the population transfer following the peace deal was a sharp decline in ethnic violence in the region.

See Washington Post Balkan Report for a summary of the conflict, and FAS analysis of former Yugoslavia for population ethnic distribution maps.

Middle East

As the locus of all three of the major Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — which have frequently been mutually antagonistic, the Middle East has suffered periodic population transfers motivated by religious beliefs.

Muslim

In the year 20 of the Muslim era, corresponding to 641 CE, the Caliph Umar decreed that the Jewish and Christian Arabs should be removed from all but the southern and eastern fringes of Arabia, in accordance with a deathbed command of Mohammad: Let there not be two religions in Arabia. The Jewish Arabs were located mainly at Khaybar in northern Arabia. The Christian Arabs were located mainly at Najran in southern Arabia. The transfer was gradual rather than sudden. There were reports of Jewish Arabs at Khaybar and Christian Arabs at Najran for some time after the decree. The Jewish Arabs were relocated to Syria and Palestine. The Christian Arabs were relocated to Iraq.

Pre-Israel Zionism

The idea of transferring Arabs out of the area of a future Jewish state was a recurring theme throughout the history of the Zionist movement. Many of the important historical Zionists, including Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, supported some version of transfer at some stages of their careers while espousing more moderate policy at other stages.

Israeli

A large amount of population movement occurred at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and during the following years. The majority of the Arab population of the area of the State of Israel fled in 1948-9. After that war, most of the Jews in several Arab countries fled, mostly to Israel. The role of govenments and official institutions as instigators or in support of these population movements is hotly contested.

Meir Kahane advocated transferring Arabs populations from Israel to Arab states as the completion of a population transfer begun in 1948 [4]

Current views

In the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict, some form population transfer has been advocated by all sides of the conflict. The proposals cover the gamut: the deporation of all Jews from Israel to Europe; the expulsion of all Israelis from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the deportation of all Arabs from Israel and the expulsion of all Arabs west of the Jordan River.

In the 2003 Knesset, transfer as an official policy was represented by the seven members of the National Union block (see National Union), which includes the three small parties Moledet, Tkuma and Yisrael Beitenu. The National Union's official position is that transfer should be accomplished by agreement between Israel and the Arab nations which will be willing to give home to the relocated people. The result of an inability to achieve a voluntary agreement are not spelt out, but observers note the Moledet policy to use force in at least some circumstances.

Support for transfer of Arabs amongst the Israeli public has increased since the Oslo Accords, the establisment of the Palestinian Authority and the conflicts that have come in their wake, but support for the transfer of Arabs remains a minority opinion. According to a survey conducted by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University in 2003, 46 percent of Israel's Jewish citizens favor transferring Palestinians out of the territories, while 31 percent favor transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country. These numbers had increased from 38 percent and 24 percent, respectively, in 1991.

The view of international law on population transfer underwent considerable evolution during the 20th century. Prior to World War II, a number of major population transfers were the result of bilateral treaties and had the support of international bodies such as the League of Nations. The tide started to turn when the Charter of the Nuremberg Trials of German Nazi leaders declared forced deportation of civilian populations to be both a war crime and a crime against humanity, and this opinion was progessively adopted and extended through the remainder of the century. Underlying the change was the trend to assign rights to individuals, thereby limiting the rights of states to make agreements which adversely affect them.

There is now little debate about the general legal status of involuntary population transfers: Where population transfers used to be accepted as a means to settle ethnic conflict, today, forced population transfers are considered violations of international law. (Denver Journal of International Law and Policy, Spring 2001, p116). No legal distinction is made between one-way and two-transfers, since the rights of each individual are regarded as independent of the experience of others.

An interim report of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1993) says:

Historical cases reflect a now-foregone belief that population transfer may serve as an option for resolving various types of conflict, within a country or between countries. The agreement of recognized States may provide one criterion for the authorization of the final terms of conflict resolution. However, the cardinal principle of "voluntariness" is seldom satisfied, regardless of the objective of the transfer. For the transfer to comply with human rights standards as developed, prospective transferees must have an option to remain in their homes if they prefer.

The same report warned of the difficulty of ensuring true voluntariness : some historical transfers did not call for forced or compulsory transfers, but included options for the affected populations. Nonetheless, the conditions attending the relevant treaties created strong moral, psychological and economic pressures to move.

The final report of the Sub-Commission (1997) invoked a large number of legal conventions and treaties to support the position that population transfers contravene international law unless they have the consent of both the moved population and the host population; moreover, that consent must be given free of direct or indirect negative pressure.

"Deportation or forcible transfer of population" is defined as a Crime Against Humanity by the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court (Article 7).

Nonetheless, the United Nations took steps, that while not intended to consitute population transfer, given the weakness of UN forces in the area, the steps forseeably lead to the transfer of populations with the boundaries of Yugoslavia during the 1990's. See South East Europe above.

See also: ethnic cleansing deportation.

Other sources

A. De Zayas, International Law and Mass Population Transfers, Harvard International Law Journal 207 (1975).

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