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The Ethnic cleansing of Circassians refers to the massive displacement (''muhajirism'')〔(Coverage of The tragedy of the Circassian People in Contemporary Georgian Public Thought (later half of the 19th century) ), Niko Javakhishvili, Tbilisi State University, 20 December 2012, retrieved 1 June 2015〕 and expulsion of the indigenous Circassians of historical Circassia, which roughly encompassed major part of the North Caucasus and all along the northeast shore of the Black Sea, into the Ottoman Empire and to a lesser extent Qajar Persia following the aftermath of the Caucasian War in the last quarter of the 19th century.〔Yemelianova, Galina, Islam nationalism and state in the Muslim Caucasus. april 2014. pp. 3〕 Circassians, the indigenous peoples of this region were cleansed〔Memoirs of Miliutin, "the plan of action decided upon for 1860 was to cleanse () the mountain zone of its indigenous population", per Richmond, W. The Northwest Caucasus: Past, Present, and Future. Routledge. 2008.〕 from their homeland at the end of the Russo-Circassian War by victorious Russia. The expulsion was launched before the end of the war in 1864 and it was mostly completed by 1867. The peoples involved were mainly the Circassians (or Adyghe), Ubykhs, Chechens, Abkhaz, and Abaza. This expulsion involved an unknown number of people, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands. The Russian army rounded up people, driving them from their villages to ports on the Black Sea, where they awaited ships provided by the neighboring Ottoman Empire. The explicit Russian goal was to expel the groups in question from their lands.〔Kazemzadeh 1974〕 Only a small percentage (the numbers are unknown) accepted resettlement within the Russian Empire. Circassian populations were thus variously dispersed, resettled, or in some cases killed ''en masse''.〔. ''One after another, entire Circassian tribal groups were dispersed, resettled, or killed en masse.''〕 An unknown number of deportees perished during the process. Some died from epidemics among crowds of deportees both while awaiting departure and while languishing in their Ottoman Black Sea ports of arrival. Others perished when ships underway sank during storms.〔King 2007〕 According to the Russian government's own figures at the time, about 90 percent of the affected peoples were deported. During the same period also masses of other Muslim ethnic groups of the Caucasus were bound to move to Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Iran.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Caucasus Survey )〕 ==Background== In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, although already making attempts in the early 18th century (such as by the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723)), the Russian Empire began actively seeking to expand its territory to the South at the expense of the neighboring Ottoman and Qajar empires, and thus aimed to incorporate the Caucasus into its domain. Some areas proved easier to incorporate than others, largely depending on the nature of local political structures. Eastern Georgia for example, comprising the most powerful and dominant Georgian regions of Kartli and Kakheti had been under intermittent Iranian suzerainty since 1555, but had declared themselves independent upon Nader Shah's death in 1747, while the Georgian king of the territories and former Iranian wali ("viceroy") Erekle II had ratified an alliance with Russia in 1783 (Treaty of Georgievsk) in which he formally and nominally abjured dependence on Iran, and put almost all his kingdom's suzerainty in the Russian hands, in the wake of any affairs, and most importantly, ambitions of Iran to reconquer Georgia into its territories. By this, and the consequences of the invasion and re-subjugation of Georgia into Iran in 1795, Russia found itself eventually able, through a chain of events, to easily annex Georgia in the early 19th century. This would be eventually ratified with Qajar Iran by the Treaty of Gulistan of 1813.〔Timothy C. Dowling (''Russia at War: From the Mongol Conquest to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Beyond'' ) pp 728-729 ABC-CLIO, 2 dec. 2014 ISBN 1598849484〕 Some territories, such as modern-day Armenia and Caucasian Azerbaijan, and southern Dagestan had powerful standing nobility, usually directly affiliated to the shah, and were directly conquered in wars with Qajar Iran, namely by the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) and the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828).〔Timothy C. Dowling (''Russia at War: From the Mongol Conquest to Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Beyond'' ) pp 728 ABC-CLIO, 2 dec. 2014 ISBN 1598849484〕 Others, such as Lower Kabarda and areas of Dagestan, which also had powerful nobility but had remained largely independent of empires, were incorporated by co-opting the local elite and incorporating them into the Russian nobility. Both of these types of areas proved relatively easy to incorporate. In Kartli-Kakheti, as briefly described above, the Russian government used a request by the late king Giorgi XII Bagrationi for similar autonomous incorporation as a pretext for outright annexation and deposing the royal family. The ruler of Imereti militarily resisted Russia, while revolts often led by dynasty members broke out in Kartli-Kakheti, and the Georgian territories as a whole were restive for much of the 19th century. The remaining areas of the Caucasus, those that were never yet conquered by outside empires and where power was not heavily concentrated, proved the hardest for the Russians to incorporate. It was to this category that most of Circassia belonged.〔 In Circassia, the Russians faced disorganized but continuous resistance. While Russia believed it held authority over Circassia based on the Ottomans ceding it in the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople, the Circassians considered this invalid, arguing that because their territory had been independent of the Ottomans, leaving Istanbul no right to cede it. While earlier relations between the Circassians and the Cossacks had often been cordial with extensive trade, the Circassians and other Caucasian peoples began systematically raiding Russian encampments and then disappearing. At the same time, as more Russian troops came to be stationed in the region, their own perceived needs (due to the difficulty of shipping materials back from Russia proper) tempted them to in turn raid native villages, further enraging the natives and producing cycles of retaliation.〔King, ''Ghost of Freedom'', 43〕 The Russian military tried to impose authority by building a series of forts, but these forts in turn became the new targets of raids and indeed a number of times the highlanders actually captured and held the forts.〔King, ''Ghost of Freedom'', 47〕 Under Ermolov, the Russian military began using a strategy of disproportionate retribution for raids. With the goal of imposing stability and authority over the whole Caucasus, Russian troops retaliated by destroying villages where resistance fighters were thought to hide, as well as employing assassinations, kidnappings and the execution of whole families.〔King, ''Ghost of Freedom'', p47-49. Quote on p48:''This, in turn, demanded...above all the stomach to carry the war to the highlanders themselves, including putting aside any scruples about destroying, forests, and any other place where raiding parties might seek refuge... Targeted assassinations, kidnappings, the killing of entire families and the disproportionate use of force became central to Russian operations...''〕 Understanding that the resistance was relied on sympathetic villages for food, the Russian military also systematically destroyed crops and livestock.〔King, ''The Ghost of Freedom'', 74〕 These tactics further enraged natives and intensified resistance to Russian rule. The Russian army was thus frustrated by a combination of highly mobile (often mounted) raiders and evasive guerrillas with superior terrain knowledge. The Circassian resistance continued, with villages that had previously accepted Russian rule often found resisting again. Furthermore, the Circassian cause began to arouse sympathies in the West, especially Britain, which they assisted and in the Crimean War.〔King, ''Ghost of Freedom'', p93-94〕 Imam Shamil in the Northeast Caucasus, meanwhile, had tried to win over their support for his own struggle against Russia on numerous occasions, but the Circassians were largely cold toward his overtures.〔King, ''Ghost of Freedom'', 80.〕 After he surrendered to Russia, their resistance continued unabated. The Russians countered the heavy Circassian resistance by modifying the terrain. They laid down a network of roads and cleared the forests around these roads, destroyed native villages, and often settled new farming communities of Russians or pro-Russian Caucasian peoples. In this increasingly bloody situation, the wholesale destruction of villages became a standard tactic.〔King, ''The Ghost of Freedom'', p73-76. p74:"''The hills, forests and uptown villages where highland horsemen were most at home were cleared, rearranged or destroyed... to shift the advantage to the regular army of the empire.''"... p75:"''Into these spaces Russian settlers could be moved or "pacified" highlanders resettled.''"〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ethnic cleansing of Circassians」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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