Abstract
Mass violence and extreme problems have characterised the 20th Century. The ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and in Sudan only marks the most extreme recent cases. Unlike some types of warfare, genocide is always a state-organized crime. More precisely, ethnic cleansing has been defined as "the elimination of an unwanted group from society, as by genocide or forced migration." This definition is inherently broader than that of genocide alone, and thereby includes mass killings and forced civilians' removals in far greater number. The U.S. State Department, in a recent report on Kosovo, concluded that ethnic cleansing "generally entails the systematic and forced removal of members of an ethnic group from their communities to change the ethnic composition of a region." The latter definition is seemingly too narrow to be a useful descriptor of a majority of situations which are encompassed in the broader definition.
