Ethnic cleansing is a term used to describe the forced expulsion or removal of an undesirable ethnic group from a territory. It is a form of discrimination that violates international law and often consists of mass killing, torture, displacement, deportation, forced emigration, and destruction of property. It is usually accompanied by the intentional infliction of fear, hatred or contempt for an ethnic or religious group and the destruction of their institutions, places of worship, burial grounds, or cultural and historical buildings.
The term was used to describe the policies of Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia in the 1990s, which led to the breakup of that country and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Since then, the term has been ingrained in the language of war reporting. Mainstream journalists use it in place of “genocide” whenever they need to describe the mass slaughter of people in a conflict. But the word is not only misleading; it obscures the crime and distorts its victims. The term euphemizes the actions of a government against its own citizens, and it taints the witnessing, interpretation, ethical judgment and decision-making of those who try to understand and prevent them.
Genocide is a crime under international law that was first recognised in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly and codified in 1948 as an independent act of international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Countries that sign the Convention are bound by law to acknowledge that they commit genocide when it occurs. By using weaker words, such as “ethnic cleansing,” to describe the massacre of the Rohingya by the Myanmar military in Rakhine State, world leaders signal their unwillingness to stop the crimes and may allow them to continue.