The term "ethnic cleansing" means the mass expulsion or killing of minority ethnic or religious groups in a given area by another group. As regards the former Yugoslavia, it refers to the attempt made by Serb and Croat political leaders, between 1990-1999, to form ethnically homogeneous States. The collapse of the old federation led to a civil war in which the various populations suffered repression, expulsion, internment in lagers, murder, massacres and ethnic rape.
That decade can be divided into three periods:

• June - December 1991, with clashes following the declarations of independence on the part of Slovenia and Croatia;
  
• February 1992 - December 1995, with the declaration of independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Serb siege of Sarajevo, through to the Dayton Accords on the territories for the three ethnic groups: Muslims, Serbs and Croats;
  
• 1998 - 1999, with fighting between Serbs and Albanians for the independence of Kosovo, which culminated in the Nato intervention to stop the massacres.
  

From the end of World War II to the death of general Tito in 1980, Yugoslavia was a socialist federation composed of six republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia) and two autonomous regions united with Serbia (Kosovo and Vojvodina).
With Tito gone, tensions in the former ruling classes of the various republics came to a head and civil war – with ethnic and religious divides – broke out.
As yet, there are no definitive data on the extent of the exterminations.
In Bosnia, according to United Nations figures, as per 1994, no fewer than 187 mass graves had been recorded, each containing between 3000 and 5000 corpses; 962 prison camps, holding a total of approximately half a million detainees; 50,000 cases of torture and 3000 cases of rape.
By the end of the inter-ethnic strife, in 1995, estimates put the number of civilian dead at 250,000, including 16,000 children, and the number of refugees at 3,000,000.
In Kosovo, in 1998, the Serbs killed 1645 civilians, 270 Albanians (152 children and 78 women); there were over 250,000 refugees.
These data are supplied by the UN High Commission for Refugees.
To date, the Hague Tribunal – set up in 1993 to deal with war crimes in the former Yugoslavia – has indicted 91 people, including Radovan Karadzic, president of the Bosnian Serb republic in 1992, general Ratko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Serb republic.