ethnic cleansing
24
9.9
- noun
- /ˈɛθnɪk ˈklɛnzɪŋ/
- Offensive
:
limpieza étnica
- An example of this is the massive ethnic cleansing of Kasai Luba in Katanga in 1993.
- ethnic cleansing and genocide
- ethnic cleansing campaign
- war crimes and ethnic cleansing
It is trying to enact an ethnic cleansing also.
- It is trying to enact an ethnic cleansing also.
- Israel, you see, is engaging in ethnic cleansing, not Hamas.
- And the the Soviet Union continues the ethnic cleansing of local non Ukrainians.
- So the first is that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
- But this is the shell game played to justify continued US support of ethnic cleansing.
- Their only hope was that the world would not turn away in the face of ethnic cleansing and killing, that the world would take a stand.
- One, which is what they attempted at the beginning to expel the population from Gaza to clean it out, a giant ethnic cleansing.
- And there was ethnic cleansing going on basically with it was the Serbs, with the local Muslim populations and they were horrendous what they were doing.
- There are objective thresholds here for apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing.
- So they it was one of the biggest graveyards ever found of ethnic cleansing.
- So Africans but also Americans and he was fixated upon, I suppose, ethnic cleansing achieved through genocide.
- You know, until you know the the full occupation and the full ethnic cleansing.
Examples
-
The camp was built haphazardly after the ethnic cleansing last year in Myanmar in a hilly forest area.
-
But at least for the time being, the ethnic cleansing has been stopped.
Fiction book (1997) -
The sad reality is that much of the ethnic cleansing has already taken place under our watch.
Academic text (2008) -
Who stands accused of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.
-
Their only hope was that the world would not turn away in the face of ethnic cleansing and killing, that the world would take a stand.
-
However new the terms genocide and ethnic cleansing may be, the strategies they describe have a long history.
Academic text (2006) -
The London conference also created a War Crimes Commission to investigate ethnic cleansing and other atrocities.
Academic text (1998) -
The story explained that ethnic cleansing would rid Yugoslavia of the Muslim Bosniaks.
Fiction book (1994) -
When it came to moving against Yugoslavia's murderous strife and "ethnic cleansing," the EC again proved ineffective.
Academic text (1992) -
The international community condemned the government's actions as acts of ethnic cleansing against the minority population.
Synonyms
147
7.7
Killing many people on purpose because they are the same race, country, or religion
Planned killing of a whole racial or cultural group
Planned killing of a racial or cultural group to destroy them
How Violent
- Offensive
147
7.7
- Offensive
24
9.9
- Offensive
10
9.9
329
4.1
45
3.7
Surface Forms
Morphology
The components 'ethnic' (relating to a group) and 'cleanse' (to remove undesirable elements) give a clear clue that something is being removed from a population, but the specific, highly violent sense (systematic expulsion or killing) is a metaphorical and socio-political extension that a B1 learner may not fully predict. The collocation is partly compositional but carries an idiomatic, severe meaning cross-linguistically (many languages use calques), so comprehension is partial rather than fully transparent.
Etymology
Ethnic cleansing uses a hard image: ethnic means a group of people who share a culture, and cleansing is like 'cleaning' a place by taking things away. So the phrase came to mean removing a whole group from an area on purpose, often by force or killing.