A reminder that international law guarantees neither peace nor justice: And so even Cambodians who were relieved by the guilty verdicts and especially the life sentences, like these two women, were left feeling baffled, even betrayed, by the court’s handling of the genocide charge. This is only natural. “Genocide” has been the term of choice in Cambodia to describe Pol Pot’s regime for nearly four decades. It is the characterization favored in schoolbooks and the local news, by bureaucrats and lawyers. In this respect at least, the ECCC is frustrating the very people to whom it was supposed to bring resolution, recognition, and reconciliation. Not only does the court’s narrow, technical definition of genocide clash with the widespread popular understanding of the crime, it also risks pitting different Cambodian communities against one another. There is, in fact, a simple explanation for why most of the Khmer Rouge’s crimes, though widely thought to be a paradigmatic example of genocide, both inside and outside Cambodia, are not actually that: the 1948 Genocide Convention, which codified the concept into international law, deliberately ruled out its application to political pogroms and class war — the signal crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. That treaty defines genocide as killings, among other acts, committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” This idea built on the word “genocide” itself, a neologism combining genos (Greek for race or tribe) and cide (Latin for killing), which the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin proposed in 1944, well into the Holocaust, to denote the deliberate “destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” But the language adopted in the convention was also a compromise reflecting the power dynamics of the day. The Soviet Union, for example, opposed including “political” in the list of protected groups in the definition, presumably because it was wary of getting into trouble for purging its opponents back home.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 12:03:03 +0000