Though “cleansing” campaigns for ethnic or religious reasons have existed throughout history, the rise of extreme nationalist movements during the 20th century led to an unprecedented level of ethnically motivated brutality, including the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I the Nazis’ annihilation of some 6 million European Jews in the Holocaust and the forced displacement and mass killings carried out in the former Yugoslavia and the African country of Rwanda during the 1990s.
“Ethnic cleansing” has been defined as the attempt to get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogenous geographic area.
