The Ghost of Stalin and Genocide in Cambodia

Add it to the list of Stalin's legacies: The shortcomings of the 1948 Genocide Convention are currently being felt in Cambodia, where efforts to prosecute those responsible for genocide under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime are getting hung up on the nuances of the legal definition of genocide.

Though included in earlier drafts, a category protecting groups from destruction based on "political opinion of its members" was excluded from the final version at the insistence of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin -- ostensibly, with his mind on his own acts of mass murder back home. For Cambodia, this has resulted in a debate over whether Vietnamese and Cham Muslims were targeted by the Khmer Rouge because of their ethnicity and religion, or because of their political opposition to the Khmer Rouge.

Why does it matter? After all, even if prosecutors at Cambodia's special tribunal are unsuccessful in proving the charge of genocide, former leaders of the Khmer Rouge are still likely to go to jail for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the "genocide" label is often most important to the groups who were the target of the onslaught -- as a matter of accuracy of historical record, among other things -- and that a genocide might go unrecognized because of past political wrangling seems more than a little unjust.

The key to genocide is the intent of the perpetrator, and if the perpetrator identifies a group for annihilation, then that's genocide. Or it should be, at any rate -- legally, it's only genocide if the group was targeted for national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity. But prosecutors are hamstrung from delivering full recognition and justice to targeted populations by the ghost of Stalin.

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, then a genocide by any other name would taste as bitter. Sadly, I don't think that the battle over the definition of genocide is anything that anyone is interested in revisiting.

Photo credit: Sean Hoyland