Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA
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and implementation of election policies and actual elections; and the involvement of
nongovernmental organizations in various human rights projects germane to various
facets of society.
Democratic Kampuchea. Immediately upon its take-over of Cambodia in 1975, the
revolutionary communist Khmer Rouge renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.
The use of the word “democratic” was both ironic and cynical, as there was nothing democratic
about the ironclad, totalitarian state that eventually became infamous for its genocidal
policies and “killing fields.”
Denazification. The term applied by the Allied victors (Great Britain, the United
States, and the Soviet Union) to the eradication of Nazism in Germany as well as the
punishment of those responsible for the implementation of National Socialism and its
various agendas (e.g., waging aggressive war, and crimes against humanity).
The initial agreement regarding denazification took place between Franklin Roosevelt
(USA), Winston Churchill (Great Britain), and Joseph Stalin (the Soviet
Union) at a meeting in Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945, and later reaffirmed at
Potsdam, Germany, in August of that same year. The Potsdam Agreement called for the
removal from public office and other positions of responsibility those associated with
National Socialism, though specific guidelines were not addressed at that time. Thus, each
of the victorious Allies in their own zones of responsibility addressed the process differently.
France, whose representatives played no significant role at either Yalta or Potsdam,
was later brought into the discussion, and thus a fourth zone of occupation was created. In
an attempt to standardize the process somewhat, several organizations were created,
including the Allied Control Commission for Italy, the Allied Control Council, the Central
Registry for War Criminals and Security Suspects, the Counter-Intelligence Corps,
the Office of the Military Government of the United States, the United Nations War
Crimes Commission, and the War Crimes Groups. According to the West German Government,
by 1949 more than 3.5 million persons had undergone the process of denazification,
including those who had been punished for their crimes. With a change in the
international political climate, and the onset of the Cold War between East and West,
enthusiasm for this agenda waned, as Germany herself, now a split nation (East Germany
and West Germany) began its own rebuilding.
Deportations, in USSR. The communist regime in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin
(1879–1953) recognized early on that a distinctive sense of nationhood was a factor militating
against the creation of a proletarian state. In the multiethnic Soviet Union, the
existence of so many separate national groups posed a threat which Stalin could not
ignore. As a way to constrain their aspirations, his dictatorial government introduced
measures to exile entire national groups to the interior of the USSR. Deported to places
vast distances from their historic homelands, disoriented and removed from familiar networks,
the intention was that they would more readily be able to embrace the communist
way of life, rather than one in which their (often) nascent nationalism could take hold.
Accordingly, in 1937, Soviet Koreans were removed from the Far East to Kazakhstan and
Uzbekistan; in 1941 and 1942 the Volga Germans and other Volksdeutsche (German communities
living outside of Germany proper) were rounded up and sent to Kazakhstan and
Siberia; in May 1942, Greeks living in the Crimea were deported to Uzbekistan; in late
1943 the Karachays and Kalmyks were sent to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Kirghizia; and, at
various times in 1944, the Chechens and Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tartars, Meskhetian