Genocide in Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge Committed Genocide, Notwithstanding Autogenocide

By Keenan Loder

Keenan Loder is a third-year student at Albany Law School. Keenan grew up in Richmondville, New York, and received his Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Molloy College.

While at Albany Law School, Keenan has served as a Teaching Assistant for Constitutional Law, an intern with the Charities Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, and a summer associate at Whiteman Osterman & Hanna LLP. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Albany Law Review.

Upon graduating, Keenan will be joining Whiteman Osterman & Hanna LLP as an associate and hopes to focus his practice on corporate matters.

Keenan wrote this paper for Professor Bonventre’s International Law of War and Crime seminar.

Cambodia in the late 1970s delivered a dark chapter in human history courtesy of the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge. The reign of the Khmer Rouge resulted in over a million deaths and a mass exodus. Regardless of what can only be described as mass travesties, scholars have cast doubt on whether the leaders of the Khmer Rouge committed genocide.

This Paper argues that the acts of the Khmer Rouge meet the definition of genocide from the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It argues that this is the case even though more than one group was targeted by the Khmer Rouge and the motivation for killing some of those groups was not because of the exhibited characteristics that place them in a protected class.

This Paper will provide historical background on the definition of genocide, the events leading to the Khmer Rouge seizing control of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge’s brief reign, and the aftermath. It will then describe the arguments promoted for regarding the executions as crimes against humanity as opposed to genocide with a specific emphasis on the all-or-nothing approach, and it will then discuss the arguments extended for describing the acts of the Khmer Rouge as genocide.

Finally, the paper will conclude and argue that the Khmer Rouge did commit genocide, even though some of the executions were against political rivals and were not motivated by destroying a protected group.

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To read the paper, open HERE.