The following was posted on IPN’s Facebook page on April 1, 2020:
“1948 UN Convention defines the crime of genocide as one “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
➡️On 1 April 1975, Cambodian President Lon Nol fled the country, as his name opened the execution lists of people constituting or linked to the previous administration – lists compiled by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces.
➡️Lon Nol had not been a saint himself, but the regime which took over the capital and other major cities, surpassed everything Cambodia had experienced. Khmer Rouge’s “social engineering” targeted mostly the elites and intelligentsia, claiming up to 2 million lives.
Rid of to make the Cambodian society perfect.
➡️35 years earlier, on 1 April 1940, the Head of NKVD’s POW Department Soprunienko started telephoning special camps that held Polish officers and intelligentsia, dictating their commandants execution lists. The resulting bloodbath claimed 22,000 lives.
Rid of to make the Polish society obedient.
➡️Now, some people claim that neither Stalin’s Katyń nor Pol Pot’s purges can be classified as genocide because they targeted a social class, not “a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. That’s a complety wrong notion. Wrong for two reasons.
➡️First, the list of criteria in the UN definition is not exhaustive. If it was, the Soviet extermination of so-called kulaks, i.e. wealthy peasants, or German killing of communists in concentration camps, and comissars in 1941 could not be seen as genocidal. Yet they are.
➡️More importantly, however, both Cambodian intellectuals and Polish officers were eliminated because of their national affiliation: they were targeted as members of their nations.
➡️And genocide, as the UN definitione reads, is killing nations in whole or in PART.◾️”