Ethnic Cleansing

Full Description

The forced removal of an ethnic or religious group from a territory, using violence, terror, deportation, or the destruction of homes and cultural sites. The term came to international attention during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, when Serbian and Croatian forces systematically expelled Muslim Bosniaks and other groups from territories they sought to control. The concept sits in a legal grey area between genocide (which requires intent to destroy a group entirely) and population transfer, but its effects on victims are devastating.

Critical Perspective

The emergence of the term “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s created a terminological distinction that some argue shielded perpetrators from the charge of genocide. The Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered by Serbian forces, was definitively ruled genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — but the broader Serbian campaign against Bosnia’s Muslims was classified as ethnic cleansing, a term whose legal status remains contested.