Last week two of the top officials of the Khmer Rouge, former minister Ieng Sary and his wife Ieng Thirith, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Cambodia's UN-backed genocide tribunal. This brings the number of top officials arrested to four, and many more are still at large. Here is a link to the Chronicle story: Khmer Rouge Couple Formally Detained
The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-79 and were responsible for roughly 1.7 million deaths from malnutrition, starvation, and murder. The government imposed very strict and unreasonably high grain taxes as part of their plan to increase Cambodia's productivity, though in reality the high quotas caused mass starvation and death among the rural Cambodian population. The Khmer Rouge is most well-known for its murdering and torturing of political dissidents in highly secret interrogation facilities such as S-21.
If you all will remember, the annihilation of certain political groups is not included under the legal definition of genocide, and it is for this reason that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are not accused of committing genocide, but of crimes against humanity, even though it targeted a specific group. Many people consider their actions a genocide, though legally it is not.
Some questions:
1) Why are political groups not included under the UN's definition of genocide? Should they be? Or is the law already complete as it is?
2) Why are leaders of the Khmer Rouge being convicted 30 years after the fact while leaders of the Young Turks were never convicted?
3) Should the interrogators (aka torturers and murderers) of the secret prisons be convicted of crimes as well? Even if they would have been killed had they disobeyed their orders?
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3 comments:
These are some difficult questions. In response to the first one, I think that political groups should be included under the definition of genocide, because they make up a part of a person's identity, and in cases of genocide that we have studied the groups being killed share some common identity. I think that any annihilation of a specific group, no matter what criteria are used to group them, should be considered genocide.
In response to the second question, although I do not think that this is right, an argument that may be used could be that the term "genocide" did not exist when the Young Turks instigated a genocide, while the Khmer Rouge leaders instigated a genocide when genocide was a term. In my opinion, the crime of genocide is just as reprehensible even if it was undefined at the time it was committed, but the "genocide didn't exist back then" argument in reference to the Armenian Genocide has been referred to in class and it makes sense that it would be used in this context.
Jordan, I think that your question about why political groups are not part of the legal definition of genocide is really interesting. In response, I'd say that naturally (like we've discussed in class) people tend to form groups based on their interests and other such factors, one of them being political biases. So a political group can only be defined by what a certain group of people believe should be happening in the government, nothing else. The people in a certain political group are not necessarily all of the same race, ethnicity, or religion.
"genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"
So I think the answer comes back to what people are born into (nation, race, ethnicity, religion) versus what they have control over (political viewpoints...); massacres are considered genocides against groups to which the members are born (don't have a choice).
In response to the third question, I think that this brings us back to the theme of obedience. Although many Nazis during the Holocaust only committed crimes because they were ordered to, isn't it still a crime that they committed- murder? The same idea can be applied to the torturers of the secret prisons in Cambodia. They were ordered to kill and we're "just obeying orders." While I can see this argument, I think that their own moral code should have stopped them from killing.
And should these people be convicted if they would have been killed had they disobeyed orders? this is hard to say because naturally an individual is going to put their life in front of another individual to whom they have no personal connection. It takes a lot of courage to sacrifice for another individual who somebody doesn't even know. If these torturers were going to be killed for disobeying then I don't think they should be convicted because it is a natural human instinct to take actions to better one's own situation.
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