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Cambodia Genocide Essay

475 Words2 Pages

The Cambodian Genocide was wrongly named a genocide as it doesn’t fit the definition rather it should be called crimes against humanity. Khmer Rouge was a communist group led by Pol Pot. The foundation of its policies was influenced by the belief of Pol Pot that Cambodia had been destroyed by outside influences specifically the west. By 1975 the Khmer Rouge had taken over Cambodia and began the killing of what was ultimately 1.7 million people, 21% of the country’s population, during the year 1975-1979. Targets of these killings were the educated; doctors, teachers, lawyers but also Christians and Buddhist Monks. The majority of Khmer Rouge's victims shared their ethnic identity with their attackers which brings to question if the definition …show more content…

Due to the circumstance of the killings what took place in Cambodia is best defined as Crimes Against Humanity. Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity while describing a type of violence along a similar line have a very specific distinction which separates them. As defined by Amnesty International a Crime Against Humanity is "crimes committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians during peace or wartime" whereas a genocide is "acts committed with the intent to destroy, completely or partially, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". Civilians all throughout Cambodia were attacked, placed into mass graves, held captive until they confessed their crimes-which often times they had not committed- and tortured. Children could be killed because they couldn't keep up in the agricultural society that the Khmer Rouge region aimed to turn Cambodia into. The Khmer Rouge committed horrible acts of injustice and killed millions of people but what was not a leading drive for killing specific people was their ethnicity. These acts were not committed with an intent to destroy an ethnic group but they were a systematic attack. Due to this fact, the crimes committed were wrongly named a genocide and the proper terminology would be Crimes Against

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