When the war crimes tribunal for the Khmer Rouge genocide finally got underway, there were intimations that some perpetrators would defend themselves by claiming that what happened in Cambodia wasn't really genocide under international law.
They do have a point of sorts... although I don't think there is ultimately a case to be made that genocide as it's legally defined didn't happen in Cambodia. This excellent overview of "meanings and definitions of genocide" quotes the International Criminal Court's definition of genocide:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Many of the outright murders, and the deaths by starvation and overwork that took place in the killing fields weren't directed at any particular "national, ethnical, racial or religious group" -- unless one argues that it was a case of a small group of Cambodians seeking to wipe all Cambodians off the face of the earth. Which actually, there's probably a decent argument there.
But people were murdered for belonging to groups of other kinds -- for being educated/"intellectuals," for being "middle class," for being "elite," for being insufficiently dedicated to revolutionary ideals, for breaking a rule, for complaining, etc. For varying in the tiniest way from the only group that it was acceptable to be a member of, basically.
Of course, the Khmer Rouge also murdered ethnic Cham, and ethnic Vietnamese, and Buddhist monks, and anyone who was religious in any way, so there ya go -- the legal definition of genocide. No one can say the KR wasn't thorough.
But shouldn't all the other stuff be defined as genocide too? The overview goes on to provide a "common definition" of genocide:
The intentional killing (murder) by government of people because of their group identity. Regardless of the legal definition and doubtlessly influenced by the Holocaust, ordinary usage and that by some researchers have tended to wholly equate it with the murder and only the murder by government of people due to their specified or perceived group membership, which for some researchers may include political and other groups. This way of viewing genocide has become so ingrained in the public mind that it seems utterly false to claim genocide for nonlethal mental or physical conditions imposed on a group.
Note that by this definition, the destruction of the group need not be intended. To kill Jews en masse because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, Chinese because they are Chinese would by this common definition be genocide. On this there is confusion, however, for while researchers may mention in their explicit definition that the destruction of the group is intended, in actual application they often include as genocide cases for which this intention is not made explicit (such as for the Stalin made Ukrainian famine and deportation of minority groups, Indonesia's mass murder in East Timor, and the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia), while the murder of people by virtue of group membership is clear.
The wider definition of groups people might identify with makes more sense to me than the groups in the legal definition, although I'm not sure why the "by government" part would be necessary. One implicit distinction is that the "group" not be a military group, but rather a civilian group. In distinguishing genocide from war, Ron Rosenbaum contrasts slavery (possibly genocide) with the Civil War (not genocide):
Yes, war may have civilian casualties in great numbers. But defeating an army is not committing genocide. Deliberately destroying civilian populations is. The North didn't intend to murder all slaveholding Southern whites, only to end the secession and (belatedly) to free the slaves. Intention matters, and it's hard to have useful discussion if terms are so far apart.
The whole Slate piece is pretty good, if you haven't come across it yet. It asks a lot of questions I don't have answers for, but maybe you do? (If genocide "demands both immediate action and blame for inaction," what kinds of action are demanded? In what circumstances, and by whom?)
And it also points to something I sort of obsess about, maybe because I spend a lot of time immersed in the stories of Cambodian refugees for my job, stories that often seem to be invisible in the US. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, some leading intellectuals on the left minimalized and/or denied what was happening. Could that happen again with Iraq?
If things get worse in Iraq after the US withdraws, will liberals do the same thing that conservatives have done regarding their pet war: stick their fingers in their ears and pretend everything is better? Will liberals dismiss genocide, as long as US troops aren't present, as not really being a big deal?
Or will liberals feel that the US has a moral obligation to do anything it can that might reasonably be helpful -- if indeed there *is* anything the US can do -- perhaps not direct military intervention, but maybe financial aid, or petitioning the UN to intervene in some way, or opening up more immigration slots for people trying to leave, or...
Kind of a speculative question, I guess. Who knows, maybe things in Iraq will only get better after the US leaves -- but if the situation deteriorates, I hope we won't end up "getting comfy with genocide," as Rosenbaum puts it.
