"Ethnic cleansing"... over-used

There has been a lot of back and forth about "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," each party in the conflict trying to outdo the other in the strongest political rhetoric available.

While genocide is a stretch, real ethnic cleansing is happening, and being openly admitted to by the separatist leaders in South Ossetia. From Civil Georgia today:

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Georgian enclaves within South Ossetia have been “liquidated,” the breakaway region’s leader, Eduard Kokoity, said on August 22 as quoted by the Russian online news agency, Regnum.

“Villages of Kekhvi and Tamarasheni, which were uncontrolled [by the South Ossetia authorities] are now totally destroyed as a result of military operations,” Kokoity was quoted as saying.
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This is just the latest round. More than 40,000 refugees escaped from the violence in this same region in 1990. More than 250,000 fled Abkhazia during that conflict in 2003. Do these people have the right to return to their homes? How are their voices factored into the decisions of Russian policy makers who purport to be bowing to the 'will of the people' when they vote for the Independence of these two enclaves?

Not that these kinds of analogies are really appropriate, but just to make the absurdity of this claim more understandable: if French Canadians living in Maine voted to secede from the USA, and join Quebec... if most of the population of Maine was living in refugee camps in Boston, Worchester, Concord, and Manchester as a result of Canadian supported conflicts in Maine... if they couldn't return to their homes because of Canadian "peace-keeping" checkpoints and in fact their homes had been destroyed anyway.... would the European press consider that the repressed French-Canadian minority of Maine has the right to vote for independence from the US, and that the Canadian government has the duty to "respect the will of the French Canadian population, and grant the State of Maine independence," even if it is clear to everyone involved that in fact, Canada is only interested in a monopoly of the St. Lawrence River shipping route and summer dachas on the 'southern' Atlantic coast? (Russian businessmen have already pored millions of dollars of investment into building summer resorts in Abkhazia).