Circassians, ethnic cleansing of

In the middle of the 19th century, large numbers of native inhabitants of the Northwest Caucasus leave or are expelled (the reason for their departure is disputed) to the neighboring Ottoman Empire, following Russian conquest of the region after a long war.Circassians, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Caucasus, were driven from their homeland at the end of the Caucasian War by victorious Russia.

The expulsion is launched even before the end of the war in 1864 and it continues into the 1870s, although it is mostly completed by 1867.

The peoples involved are mainly the Circassians (Adyghe in their own language), Ubykhs, Abkhaz, and Abaza.This expulsion involves an unknown number of people, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands.

The Russians had come to refer to them as mountain-people.

The Russian army rounds 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 is to expel the groups in question from their lands.

They are given a choice as to where to be resettled: in the Ottoman Empire or in Russia far from their old lands.

Only a small percentage (the numbers are unknown) accept resettlement within the Russian Empire.An unknown number of deportees perishes during the process.

Some die from epidemics among crowds of deportees both while awaiting departure and while languishing in their Ottoman Black Sea ports of arrival.

Others perish when ships underway sink during storms.

Two other Muslim peoples in the northwest Caucasus, the Karachay and the Balkars, are not deported in large numbers after 1864.

According to the Russian government's own figures at the time, about 90 percent of the affected peoples are deported.

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