Ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.[3][4][5] It constitutes a crime against humanity and may also fall under the Genocide Convention, even as ethnic cleansing has no legal definition under international criminal law.[3][6][7]

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Many instances of ethnic cleansing have occurred throughout history; the term was first used by the perpetrators as a euphemism during the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Since then, the term has gained widespread acceptance due to journalism and the media's heightened use of the term in its generic meaning.[8] The concept was also widely deployed by Imperial Russian Army when it launched the Circassian genocide of 1860s, when Russian general Nikolay Yevdakimov used the term “ochishchenie" (cleansing) to refer to the operations that massacred and expelled native Circassians from the Caucasus region.[9]