[10] Beginning in 1991, political upheavals in Bosnia and Herzegovina displaced about 2.7 million people by mid-1992, of which over 700,000 sought asylum in other European countries,[11][12] making it the largest exodus in Europe since World War II.

The UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) later convicted several officials for persecution on political, racial and religious grounds; forced transfer and deportation constituting a crime against humanity.

During this period, large parts of its population, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), converted to Islam, giving its society its multiethnic character.

[16] According to some historians, certain Serb and Croat nationalists, who practiced Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, respectively, never accepted Bosniaks as a nationality[14] and tried to assimilate them into their own cultures.

[17] World War II lead to interethnic clashes, though the three groups were evenly split between various factions and did not rally universally along the ethnic lines.

[23] The RAM Plan began to be implemented, laying the foundations for new borders of a "Third Yugoslavia" in an effort to establish a country where "all Serbs with their territories would live together in the same state".

[26] When the Party of Democratic Action's (SDA) representatives in the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced their plan for a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia on 14 October 1991, leading Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadžić, of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), made a speech at the parliamentary session and publicly threatened war and the extinction of the Bosniaks as a people.

[30] During the 16th session of the Bosnian Serb Assembly on 12 May 1992, Karadžić, who was by then the leader of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska proto-state, presented his "six strategic goals", which included the "separation from the other two national communities and the separation of states", and the "creation of a corridor in the Drina Valley thus eliminating the Drina [River] as a border between Serbian states".

[31] Republika Srpska General Ratko Mladić identified "Muslims and Croat hordes" as the enemy and suggested to the Assembly it must decide whether to throw them out by political means or through force.

[45] The terms "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" are not synonymous but academic discourse considers both to exist within a spectrum of assaults on nations or ethnoreligious groups.

This is not to say that acts described as 'ethnic cleansing' may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region.

[47]The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations published a staff report on the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in August 1992.

[50] On 18 December 1992, the United Nations General Assembly issued resolution 47/147, in which it rejected the "acquisition of territory by force" and condemned "in the strongest possible terms the abhorrent practice of 'ethnic cleansing' ", and recognised "the Serbian leadership in territories under their control in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Yugoslav Army and the political leadership of the Republic of Serbia bear primary responsibility for this reprehensible practice".

It found ethnic cleansing was "the most egregious violations in both Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina" because it envisaged "summary execution, disappearance, arbitrary detention, deportation and forcible displacement of hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of their religion or nationality".

[52] United Nations Security Council Resolution 780 authorised the establishment of a Commission of Experts to record the crimes in the former Yugoslavia, including Bosnia and Herzegovina.

[57] The Serb campaign included selective murder of civic, religious and intellectual representatives of Bosniaks and Croats; the sending of adult males into concentration camps and the rape of women.

[61] Methods used to achieve this included coercion and terror in order to pressure Bosniaks, Croats and others into leaving Serb-claimed areas.

[62] The initial Constitution of Republika Srpska in Article I.1 declared that it was "the state of the Serb people", without any mention of other ethnic groups living there.

[64] In the town of Prijedor, starting from 30 April 1992, non-Serbs were dismissed from their jobs and banned from entering the court building, and were replaced by Serbs.

[7] In Zvornik, Bosniaks were given official stamps on identity cards for a change of domicile; to leave the area, they were forced to transfer their properties to an agency for the exchange of houses.

[70] In the villages around Vlasenica, the Serb Special Police Platoon was ordered by Miroslav Kraljević that the territory has to be "100 % clean" and that no Bosniak should remain.

[83] In 1993, the Bosnian Croat authorities used ethnic cleansing in conjunction with the attack on Mostar, where Bosniaks were placed in Croat-run detention camps.

[84] To assume power in communities in Central Bosnia and Western Herzegovina that were coveted by the HR BH, its president Mate Boban ordered the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) to start persecuting Bosniaks living in these territories.

Croat forces used "artillery, eviction, violence, rape, robbery and extortion" to expel or kill the Bosniak population, some of whom were detained in the Heliodrom and Dretelj camps.

[105] By the end of the war in late 1995, the Bosnian Serb forces had expelled or killed 95% of all non-Serbs living in the territory they annexed.

[123] The demographic changes caused by the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina were the most dramatic that country had experienced in a century; the 2013 population census registered 3,531,159 inhabitants—a more-than-19% decline within a single generation.

[131] Several people were tried and convicted by the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in connection with persecution on racial, religious or ethnic grounds,[b] forced displacement and deportation as a crime against humanity during the Bosnian War.

[134] Those convicted for taking part in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina include Bosnian Serb politicians, soldiers and officials Momčilo Krajišnik,[135] Radoslav Brđanin,[136] Stojan Župljanin, Mićo Stanišić,[137] Biljana Plavšić,[138] Goran Jelisić,[139] Miroslav Deronjić,[140] Zoran Žigić,[141] Blagoje Simić,[142] Jovica Stanišić, Franko Simatović,[143] Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

[144] They also include Bosnian Croat officials Mladen Naletilić,[145] Dario Kordić,[146] Slobodan Praljak, Bruno Stojić and Jadranko Prlić.

[148]In the judgement against Bosnian Croat leader Dario Kordić, the ICTY found there was a plan to remove Bosniaks from Croat-claimed territory: ... the Trial Chamber draws the inference from this evidence (and the evidence of other HVO attacks in April 1993) that there was by this time a common design or plan conceived and executed by the Bosnian Croat leadership to ethnically cleanse the Lašva Valley of Muslims.