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How did the mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians relate to ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica?

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Two women in headscarves embrace and mourn over a green coffin among rows of identical coffins at the Potocari cemetery during the Srebrenica massacre mass funeral. — Srebrenica genocide Women mourning over a coffin before the mass funeral for 136 newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, 2015.

The mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians was a central component of the ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb leadership aimed to annex territory in eastern Bosnia to Serbia, a goal they believed required the removal of the local Bosniak population.12

To achieve this, they sought to create an environment of total insecurity, eventually forcing more than 20,000 civilians to flee the area. While ethnic cleansing is defined as the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the forced displacement of specific groups, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the combination of these mass expulsions and the systematic massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys constituted genocide.213

Ultimately, the expulsion served as a method to achieve the territorial objectives of the Bosnian Serb forces, while the accompanying mass murder demonstrated the intent to destroy the targeted group, distinguishing the event as a genocide within the broader context of ethnic cleansing.31