Hi there. This is pretty much the central question of the week on Cambodia in the genocide studies course in which I teach. I'm not a specialist on the Cambodian genocide - my knowledge is primarily on colonial genocide in Australasia and post-colonial genocide in Africa - but I've taught it for long enough and I'd like to share my thoughts.

First up: this probably does not need saying, but the targeting of Vietnamese, Muslim Cham, Buddhists, Chinese, etc. would constitute genocide under any reading of the UN Genocide Convention. The KR was definitely a genocidal regime, whatever anybody's conclusions are regarding their killing of ethnic Khmers.

Second - never forget that genocide is a crime of intent.

So with regards to ethnic Khmers, I think what is important is to remember the second point above, intent. How did the perpetrators frame their victims? Were they killed because of their membership of a particular group? The Khmer Rouge viewed the Khmers it killed as racially impure, especially the "New People" from the cities or those from "suspect" regions (i.e. those near Vietnam). They were supposedly polluted by foreign influences, urbanisation, and other forces, thus threatening the viability of the Khmer nation. That suggests to me that the KR saw these impure people as no longer truly Khmer, but as a distinct and separate group - members of a polluted ethnicity - that needed to be purged. That in my view would meet the Genocide Convention's definition.

Hi there, I'm not a historian but I am a law student who has done extensive research on the ICTY and the genocide in Bosnia.

To your first question, no it is not legally incorrect to classify the killings as a genocide. Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as;

genocide means 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.

U.N.T.S., No. 1021, vol. 78 (1951), p. 277

This same language has been used by the ICTY and the ICTR as their definition of a genocide.

Because the Khmer Rouge and those they killed were of the same ethnic group (which I cannot say would be universally true) would not disprove a genocide. Their intent was clear to exterminate those within their country that were undersireable. If you want to be picky on the staturoy language, please focus on the "in part", it may have never been Pol Pot's intent to destroy the entire race but certainly a part of the Khmer people.

There is a difference between crimes that are genocide and crimes that look like genocide but are not considered genocide. The ICTY for example charged crimes that weren't genocide but looked like genocide (mass killings, ethnic cleansing, mass rape) as crimes against humanity under Article 5. The way this worked out in practicality is Serbs and Bosnian Serbs tended to be charged under genocide and article 4. Croats, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, were charged under Article 5 because it is felt that the latter groups crimes, no matter how heinous, did not rise to meet the elements of genocide. Please be aware that this decision is incredibly controversial in the region (ex-Yu) and in parts of the legal community.

I hope this helps, sorry for the haste, this is my first post on ask historians and I'm happy to answer questions later on.

Definitions of genocide vary depending on who you ask. Many argue that genocide is not just about ethnic or religious cleansing.

Instead genocide is the purposeful extermination of identity, that can be ethnic, religious, class, cultural, political and so on.

The Cambodian genocide was a mixture of a class and political genocide.