After more than 300 years of warfare against the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus, the army of the Russian Tsarist Empire succeeded in bringing the northern Caucasus under its control in 1864. In May 1864, the numerically superior Russian army defeated the Circassian forces and, after surrendering, gave them the choice of either fighting in the ranks of the Tsar’s army or exile. For the expansion of the Russian tsarist empire, the conquest of these territories was of strategic importance. With the capture began the expulsion of 800,000-1,500,000 Circassians and other Caucasian peoples, who were forced to leave their homeland forever.
Units of the Russian armed forces systematically destroyed arable land where the harvest had already begun, as well as the livestock of the rural Circassian population, depriving them of their livelihood. A famine ensued, forcing people to flee. During the expulsion and after arriving in the host countries, many refugees died from violence, hunger, exhaustion, disease, and poverty. Figures of Circassian civilians who perished during the expulsion vary from half a million to a million displaced Circassians who lost their lives in cruel marches and ship crossings in the Black Sea.
The largest group of displaced Circassians settled in the Ottoman Empire and others in the then provinces of the multi-ethnic empire in present-day Syria, Palestine, Jordan and other countries. According to calculations, today there are about three million Circassians living in Turkey, another two million in other states, and 700,000 in their homeland, in what is now the Autonomous Republic of Adygeya. To this day, Russian governments refuse to acknowledge the injustice committed against the Circassians, because the expulsion and extermination of the Circassian people does not fit into the Russian historical picture.
For the Circassians, May 21 is a day of remembrance, when the expulsion of the Caucasian people is commemorated with memorial events by the diaspora and flowers are thrown into the sea in memory of the victims. In a 2011 decision, the Georgian parliament recognized the expulsion of the Circassians as genocide. In Turkish and Azerbaijani historiography, the term mezalim has become established as a technical term for mass violent crimes against the Muslim civilian population.