Political cleansing of a population is the elimination of categories of people in specific areas for political reasons. The means may vary from forced migrationtogenocide.[citation needed]
Politicide is the deliberate physical destruction or elimination of a group whose members share the main characteristic of belonging to a political movement. It is a type of political repression and one of the means used to politically cleanse populations, another being forced migration. It may be compared to genocideorethnic cleansing, both of which involve the killing of people based on their membership in a particular racialorethnic group rather than their adherence to a particular ideology.[citation needed]
Politicide is used to describe the killing of groups that would not otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention.[1] Social scientists Ted Robert Gurr and Barbara Harff use politicide to describe the killing of groups of people who are targeted not because of their shared ethnic or communal traits, but because of "their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups."[citation needed] Harff studies genocide and politicide, sometimes shortened as geno-politicide, in order to include the killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups.[2] Manus Midlarsky uses politicide to describe an arc of large-scale killing from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.[3] In his book The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.[4]
Under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide generally[citation needed] applies to mass murderofethnic rather than politicalorsocial groups. Protection of political groups was eliminated from the United Nations resolution after a second vote because many states, including Stalin's Soviet Union,[5] anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.[6][7] Scholarly study of genocide usually acknowledges the United Nations omission of economic and political groups, and uses mass political killing datasets of democide, and genocide and politicide, or geno-politicide.[8] Killings by the Khmer RougeinDemocratic Kampuchea have been labeled genocide or autogenocide, and the deaths under Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and MaoisminCommunist China have been controversially investigated as possible cases; the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward have been controversially "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent."[9]
Some groups attempt to eliminate the base of support for political opponents such as insurgents. This happens in many countries with high levels of insurgency such as Colombia.[10] It may be a means for and referred to as pacification.[11]
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