Chapter 7 Key Issue 4

1. Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal or killing of ethnic, racial and/or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. It differs from normal warfare in that it specifically targets civilians rather than combatants. 2. After the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Tito in the 1980s and the fall of communism in the 1990s, the country faced major ethno-political problems that eventually led to war as its constituent republics declared independence. 3. In Bosnia, Serbs and Croats ethnically cleansed each other as well as Bosnian Muslims during the war, until the Dayton Accords in 1996 divided the state into two