The word genocide is a loaded term. Lawyers, human rights advocates, governments and militaries often spend too much time arguing the finer points of law over whether this crime had actually occurred in areas where there is no doubt that great atrocities took place.
In Cambodia, at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, where Pol Pot’s former henchmen are facing charges of genocide, such arguments are being hotly contested. The expulsion of ethnic Chinese at the point of a gun by the Vietnamese in the late 1970s is another example.
The debate of what constitutes genocide continues to this day in regards to the massacre of communists by Indonesian authorities in the mid-1960s or their treatment of Christians in East Timor during its occupation three decades later.
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