Edward J Erickson - A Global History of Relocation in Counterinsurgency Warfare

Notes

This figure does not reflect the 2,0003,000 Acadians previously removed from Acadia.

This figure does not reflect Boers living in cities and towns. The percentage removed of the rural population likely exceeded 95 per cent.

This figure reflects the number of relocated Ottoman-Armenians from the six Eastern Anatolian provinces and key cities on the lines of communications identified by the Ministry of the Interiors relocation directive of 31 May 1915.

This is a reasonable estimate of the death toll of Ottoman-Armenian population of the six Anatolian provinces and key cities who were relocated in 1915. The estimated 1915 death toll does not include the two subsequent periods of increased Ottoman-Armenian deaths (191822) or those who died in Russia.

No reliable figures exist for the total number or Russian Jews who were relocated. At least one million but, perhaps, as many as three million were forcibly evacuated. Within the Pale itself, a figure of 90 per cent relocated is not unlikely.

An additional 1,175,000 Algerians were relocated into existing Muslim villages. The combined total of some 3.5 million Algerians represented about 30 per cent of the total Algerian Muslim population.

Dorothee M. Kellou, A Microhistory of the Forced Resettlement of the Algerian Muslim Population during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962): Mansourah, Kabylia , MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2012, 82.

The official RVN/USG figure of 8,000,00010,000,000 living in Strategic Hamlets includes those who never moved but lived in villages designated as Strategic Hamlets. About 400,000 and 5 per cent of the countrys population represents the scholarly consensus on the actual number moved.

Portuguese Angola.

Portuguese Guinea.

Mozambique.

Major Christine Keating

But Contrary to their expectation the Gate was shut and they confined as Prisoners.

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL JOHN WINSLOW
Grand Pr, 16 September 1755

Introduction

The small church in the village of Grand Pr sat nestled at the heart of the community. For its Catholic, French Acadian congregants, the church represented the heart and soul of their efforts to make their land productive, to live peacefully with their Mikmaq neighbours and to remain free of earthly obligation to foreign rule. But on 5 September 1755, the church would become something else entirely: that symbol of salvation would become the prison in which 418 Acadian men and boys were held captive by British colonial troops. Lured there by the orders of Colonel John Winslow for a proclamation, it was there that the Acadian men would discover that they and their families were to be ripped from their land and deported, dispersed throughout the more southern British colonies in North America. Taking only what they could carry, their homes would be burned, their cattle commandeered, their farms settled by white families from New England.

French Acadia 1755. Acadia was colonized by France in 1604 but was conquered by Britain in 1713. The permanent expulsions in 1755 forcibly emptied Acadia of nearly all of its French inhabitants. The modern Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island comprise what was Acadia. Many of the exiled Acadians moved to Louisiana where they are today known as Cajuns.

In the surrounding weeks and months, similar scenes would play out across Acadia. Ultimately, nearly 7,000 Acadians would be relocated, scattered throughout the British North American colonies.neighbouring Mikmaq indigenous people were passing information and supplies to French troops garrisoned nearby. When British troops discovered Acadians within the captured Fort Beausjour (later rechristened Fort Cumberland) in 1755, this proved their worst fears of collusion. Lieutenant Governor and Colonel Charles Lawrence decided the only way forward was to rid Nova Scotia of the Acadians entirely.

Throughout June and July 1755, Lawrence and New England Governor William Shirley devised a plan to expunge Nova Scotia of its formerly French inhabitants. This was a political decision, carried out by local colonial regiments and militia purpose-built for the operation. To say that the British expelled the Acadians is inaccurate; it was local colonial governments, charged with their own protection by a distant and disinvested mother country thousands of miles away, that devised and carried out a solution to the perceived Acadian threat. The Acadian expulsion was a military solution to a political problem, with financial and social benefits for Nova Scotia and New England. Decades of careful drainage and cultivation by farmers determined to make the coastal marshlands fruitful, made Acadian farmland particularly desirous. Acquiring that land for Protestant New England settlers became a priority, creating rich, religiously homogenous settlements and simultaneously securing a buffer zone against French attack by sea in the North Atlantic.

Although the political rhetoric surrounding the decision to expel the Acadians focused on the supposed security threat posed by the neutrals, the concept of military necessity is demonstrated here in a less developed, less distinct way than in later conflicts described in this book. Where later we will see military commanders executing relocations for strategic ends, sometimes predicated on political imperatives, in the case of Acadia, government and military decision making were one and the same. It was not the royal British standing army that marched on Grand Pr; it was local colonial regiments and militias called exclusively for that purpose by colonial governors William Shirley of Massachusetts and Charles Lawrence of Nova Scotia. Colonies were responsible for their own defence, and it was common practice at that time to muster militias for particular threats or campaigns (often against native populations). Thus the political exigencies of the day were the military exigencies of the day, and often vice versa. This was not a case of a military sent to occupy land and subdue a population, where the commander decided that the only way to achieve that end was through relocation; this was a military mission conceived of by political leaders who appointed commanders explicitly for the purpose of expelling the neutral French.