Forced labour in the context of "Ethnic discrimination"

Penal labour or prison labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios are sometimes applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.

Large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships.

The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe.

Many workers died as a result of their living conditions – extreme mistreatment, severe malnutrition and abuse were the main causes of death. Many more became civilian casualties from enemy (Allied) bombing and shelling of their workplaces throughout the war. At the peak of the program, the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war. Besides Jews, the harshest deportation and forced labor policies were applied to the populations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. By the end of the war, half of Belarus's population had been either killed or deported.

Forced labour was used extensively in the Soviet Union and the following categories may be distinguished.

The Haitian Revolution (Haitian Creole: Lagè d Lendependans; French: Révolution haïtienne [ʁevɔlysjɔ̃ a.isjɛn] or Guerre de l'indépendance) was a successful insurrection by rebellious self-liberated enslaved Africans against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolution was one of the only known slave rebellions in human history that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour) and ruled by former captives.

The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most prominent general. The successful revolution was a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World and the revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves had won, and with the collaboration of already free people of color, of their independence from white Europeans.

The encomienda (Spanish pronunciation: [eŋkoˈmjenda] , lit. 'entrusting') was a 16th-century Spanish labour system that rewarded Spain's conquistadors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors provided the labourers with benefits, including military protection and education. In practice, the conquered were subject to conditions that closely resembled instances of forced labour and slavery. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian Reconquista, and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish East Indies. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the early sixteenth century, the grants were considered a monopoly on the labour of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero; starting from the New Laws of 1542, the encomienda ended upon the death of the encomendero, and was replaced by the repartimiento.

Encomiendas devolved from their original Iberian form into a form of communal slavery. In the encomienda, the Spanish Crown granted a person a specified number of natives from a specific community but did not dictate which individuals in the community would have to provide their labour. Indigenous leaders were charged with mobilising the assessed tribute and labour. In turn, encomenderos were to ensure that the encomienda natives were given instruction in Catholicism and the Spanish language, to protect them from warring tribes or pirates; to suppress rebellion against Spaniards, and maintain infrastructure. The natives provided tributes in the form of metals, maize, wheat, pork, and other agricultural products.

Dulag 121 camp in Pruszków (Durchgangslager [pl] 121 Pruszków) was a Nazi transit camp where civilian population from Warsaw and surrounding areas, expelled from their homes during and after the Warsaw Uprising, was gathered.

The camp was established on 6 August 1944, on the premises of the former Railway Rolling Stock Repair Works in Pruszków [pl]. It operated until mid-December 1944, and in a residual form, until 16 January 1945. During this period, between 390,000 and 410,000 people passed through Dulag 121, among whom tens of thousands were deported to forced labor in the depths of the Reich or sent to concentration camps after a short stay in the camp. Due to diseases, exhaustion, or at the hands of guards, hundreds to several thousand prisoners of Dulag 121 perished. However, over 30,000 people managed to leave the camp thanks to the assistance of the Polish personnel employed there.

Democratic Kampuchea was the official name of the Cambodian state from 1976 to 1979, under the general secretaryship of Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), commonly known as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital Phnom Penh in 1975 effectively ended the United States-backed Khmer Republic under Prime Minister-later President Lon Nol.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge's one-party regime killed millions of its own people through mass executions, forced labour, and starvation, in an event which has come to be known as the Cambodian genocide. The killings ended when the Khmer Rouge were ousted from Phnom Penh by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN). The Khmer Rouge subsequently established a government-in-exile in neighbouring Thailand and retained Kampuchea's seat at the United Nations (UN). In response, Vietnamese-backed communists created a rival government, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, but failed to gain international recognition.

From 1885 to 1908, many atrocities were committed in the Congo Free State (today the Democratic Republic of the Congo) under the absolute rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. These atrocities were particularly associated with the labour policies, enforced by colonial administrators, used to collect natural rubber for export. Combined with epidemic disease, famine, mass population displacement and, falling birth rates caused by these disruptions, the atrocities contributed to a sharp decline in the Congolese population. The magnitude of the population decline over the period is disputed, with modern estimates ranging from 1.2 million to 10 million.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the European powers recognized the claims of a supposedly philanthropic organisation run by Leopold II, to most of the Congo Basin region. Leopold had long-held ambitions for colonial expansion. The territory under Leopold's control exceeded 2,600,000 km (1,000,000 sq mi), more than 85 times the territory of Belgium; amid financial problems, it was directed by a tiny cadre of administrators drawn from across Europe. Initially the quasi-colony proved unprofitable and insufficient, with the state always close to bankruptcy. The boom in demand for natural rubber, which was abundant in the territory, created a radical shift in the 1890s—to facilitate the extraction and export of rubber, all vacant land in the Congo was nationalised, with the majority distributed to private companies as concessions. Some was kept by the state. Between 1891 and 1906, the companies were allowed free rein to exploit the concessions, with the result being that forced labour and violent coercion were used to collect the rubber cheaply and maximise profit. The Free State's military force, the Force Publique, enforced the labour policies. Individual workers who refused to participate in rubber collection could be killed and entire villages razed.