Collection Facing History and Ourselves. Ethnic cleansing is the forced removal of one ethnic or religious group from a region controlled by another. It is accompanied by violence and terror, including rape and murder as tools of mobilization, and destruction of cultural artifacts, institutions, homes and monuments. Prevalent in the 1992–1995 wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, it is a crime against humanity. The photographs in the piece are of the backs of locomotives and the interior of a steel plant, alluding to the use of industrial means to accomplish such ends.