Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. The United Nations describes ethnic cleansing as "a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas". Ethnic cleansing is not recognized as an independent crime under international law, but its attributes appear in the crime against humanity of persecution and as a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. The term "ethnic cleansing" has been used to describe the brutal treatment of various civilian groups in conflicts that erupted upon the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing can involve the removal of all physical vestiges of the targeted group through the destruction of monuments, cemeteries, and houses of worship. The goal of ethnic cleansing is to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory, and to seize control of the territory it had formerly inhabited. Ethnic cleansing is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving sense of revenge. Examples of ethnic cleansing include the Armenian massacres by the Turks in 1915-16, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews in the 1930s and 40s, the expulsion of Germans from Polish and Czechoslovak territory after World War II, the Soviet Unions deportation of certain ethnic minorities from the Caucasus and Crimea during the 1940s, and the forced migrations and mass killings in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.