The article is deals with ethnic cleansing, that is, the violent methods that constituted the central element of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. The article aims to show the fatal consequences of the military operations that were conducted with the aim of the ethnic homogenisation of the individual territories, and were rooted in the differences in the demographic development of the constituent peoples (the Serbs, Croatians, and Muslim Bosniaks) of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the outbreak of the confl ict and the impact of this development on the transformation of the ethnic composition of the individual regions. After defi ning the terms ''ethnic cleansing'' and ''genocide,'' the author analyses the character and extent of the violent local homogenisation that led to the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War. On the basis of a summary of the individual stages of the ethnic cleansing during the war from 1992 to 1995, the author seeks to demonstrate that the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina at fi rst erupted mainly in places that had, during the last two decades before the breakup of Yugoslavia, manifested the most striking changes in the ethnic representation of the constituent nations (chiefl y the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Muslims). In the second part of the text, the author focuses on analysing the strategic interests of the elites of the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks and the forms these interests took during the violent ethnic homogenisation of the territory under their military control.