Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. The mass extermination or expulsion of people belonging to one ethnic or religious group by those of another.
WordNet
n. the mass expulsion and killing of one ethic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area
Wikipedia
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory by a more powerful ethnic group, with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration ( deportation, population transfer), intimidation, as well as mass murder and genocidal rape.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory through the destruction of homes, social centers, farms, and infrastructure, and by the desecration of monuments, cemeteries, and places of worship.
Initially used by the perpetrators during the Yugoslav Wars and cited in this context as a euphemism akin to that of the " Final Solution", by the 1990s the term gained widespread acceptance due to journalism and media's heightened use of the term in its generic meaning.
Ethnic Cleansing may refer to one of the following.
- Ethnic cleansing, various policies of forcibly removing people of some ethnic group.
- Ethnic Cleansing, a computer game.
- Ethnic Cleansing A punk band
Ethnic Cleansing is a first-person shooter video game for Microsoft Windows computers, created by the American White nationalist organization National Alliance (and published by its record label Resistance Records on January 21, 2002. As part of a "Race War", the player controls a neo-Nazi or a Klansman and is tasked with killing stereotypical African-American, Latino, and Jewish enemies, ending with former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Using the Genesis3D engine, the National Alliance created the game to be provocative and promote their white supremacist messages. The game has been controversial, with the Anti-Defamation League taking particular issue; it has been ranked several times as one of the most controversial games ever created. It was planned to be followed by a long line of sequels, but only one, titled White Law, has been released.
Usage examples of "ethnic cleansing".
On the left were the spirits of generations past who had showed up too early to enjoy the benefits of nanotechnology and (not explicitly shown, but somewhat ghoulishly implied) croaked from obsolete causes such as cancer, scurvy, boiler explosions, derailments, drive-by shootings, pogroms, blitzkriegs, mine shaft collapses, ethnic cleansing, meltdowns, running with scissors, eating Drano, heating a cold house with charcoal briquets, and being gored by oxen.
As in Afghanistan, we would be likely to find ourselves deploying some kind of ground presence to help root out Iraq's WMD programs, restore order, and prevent Iraq's predatory neighbors from setting up buffer zones or conducting their own ethnic cleansing operations inside Iraq.
The problem with their position, of course, was that if the Serbs could take the economic hit of the tough sanctions, they could continue their aggressive ethnic cleansing without fear of further punishment.
If the Nazi party could convince their people of a right to exterminate certain kinds of people because of their religious beliefs or ethnic culture or physical condition, we should assume that this type of ethnic cleansing and murder can be repeated.
What liberals mean by goose-stepping or ethnic cleansing is generally something along the lines of eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
If they were all stuck here, maybe the ethnic cleansing that had been going on since the breakup of Yugoslavia had accounted for some of the locals .
Cultural meanings that flagrantly violate the fabric of the Kos-mos (from Nazism to Serbian ethnic cleansing) are nothing that one would particularly want to adapt to in the first place.
This was a joke, in Mr Gray's view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic cleansing.
We were buffaloed into espousing the same rhetoric they were feeding the rest of the world-that opposing Slobodan Milosevic and so-called Serb ethnic cleansing would be more in line with the sentiment of the world community.
They used him to, in part, justify their aims of ethnic cleansing.
And Troi came to understand what a truly unique thing that was in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when wars of national separation and 'ethnic cleansing' occured with brutal regularity.
It was a term she was unfamiliar with, 'ethnic cleansing', but then Kevin showed her what it meant, and she was sickened by the images, realizing that this was the precursor to the Eugenics Wars of five decades later, in which over a billion people would die!