chapotraphouse

The term ethnic cleansing has some problematic aspects and in my opinion it should not be used.

First of all, calling a campaign of genocidal mass expulsions a "cleansing" concedes to the racist ideology behind by implying that the victims are "dirt" whose violent removal leaves the place "clean" and better than it was before.

Unlike the term genocide which elicits a moral reaction in must people and has a clear meaning in international law, the term "ethnic cleansing" sounds less severe and calling something an "ethnic cleansing" does not impose any legal obligations on either the perpetrators or other international actors. By being so vaguely defined it allows disingenuous outside actors to talk the talk of condemning what is going on without having to walk the walk of taking material actions to stop it from happening.

"Ethnic cleansing" has a history of being used to whitewash genocide, making clearly genocidal acts sound more palatable to casual observers.

Instead, I think the term genocide is better in most cases. If you want to discuss the specific genocidal act of removing a tergeted population from an area, value-neutral descriptive terms like "forced population transfer" are to be preferred over euphemisms like "ethnic cleansing" in my view.