Changes

'''Ethnic Cleansing''' is a term popularized in the 1990s, referring to forcible displacement of ethnic groups during conflict, initially in Croatia, [[Serbia ]] and Bosnia. It refers to a practice seen much more widely, and despite sustained vociferous denials by the perpetrators and their descendants, in modern Middle East of [[Palestinians]] by [[Israel]]is in 1948-9; of [[Kurds]] by the Ba'thist regime in [[Iraq]] in the 1980s; of non-Arab minorities in the wars of the [[Sudan]]; of Greeks and Armenians from [[Turkey]] in the first decades of the twentieth century; and of Turks and other [[Muslim]] peoples from the Balkans and around the Black Sea over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The word 'cleansing' has a sinister polysemic character, appearing to stop short of killing or [[genocide]], with mere displacement, but also echoing the twentieth-century word 'purge' - a [[euphemisms|euphemism]], as in Soviet Russia, for mass murder. In all of these cases a significant proportion of those 'cleansed' were actually killed, not least to encourage the others to leave.

==Related SourceWatch Resourcesarticles==

*Michael Hirsh, [http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12920385/site/newsweek "Washington’s Washingtonâ??s New Watchword: Containment. As Iraq’s Iraqâ??s weak new government takes shape, the Bush administration’s administrationâ??s best hope is for a non-bloodbath,"] ''Newsweek'' (MSNBC), May 22, 2006. [[Category:Doublespeak]]