Ethnic Cleansing Campaigns

During the Bosnian War, the term 'ethnic cleansing' (etničko čišćenje) entered the global lexicon to describe the systematic, violent policies executed by nationalist forces, principally, by the ICTY's findings, the VRS and Serbian paramilitary units, and also the Croat Defence Council (HVO) in Herzegovina and central Bosnia, to permanently expel civilian populations of other ethnicities from specific geographic regions. These campaigns involved extrajudicial executions, mass rape as a weapon of war, systemic destruction of cultural heritage (such as mosques and historical archives), and the forced displacement of over two million people, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Crucial to this apparatus was the establishment of brutal detention camps throughout the country.

In the Prijedor municipality, camps like Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje became sites of horrific torture, mass executions, and starvation, exposed to the world by international journalists in August 1992. In southern Bosnia, HVO forces ran equivalent detention centers like Heliodrom and Dretelj to hold Bosniak civilians. , 2013 and 2017); and officers and guards of the Army of RBiH for crimes at the Čelebići camp (1998) and in central Bosnia (Hadžihasanović, 2006; Rasim Delić, 2008).

The tribunal's findings on scale and organisation differ sharply between the sides, and the pages here follow those findings.