Very interesting, and tragic. I'm reading quite a bit about Stalin over my winter break (morbid, I know!) and am continually amazed at how little we learn, in U.S. schools, about Stalin's crimes. Reminders of the price of ignoring murderous regimes, like this one, reinforce the need to accurately teach history.

This question of definition is not a mere technicality.  "Genocide" has a specific definition precisely because it's such a ghastly crime: virtually every nation in the world agreed as to just what constitutes genocide, and they clearly didn't mean the term to be applied broadly. 

This is also part of the problem with proposed declarations about what the Ottoman Turks did to the Armenians in 1915-18.  Massive human rigts violations?  That seems pretty clear.  Genocide, which specifically includes the evident intent to wipe out the entire ethnic group?  I, for one, am not convinced, certainly not to the point of deeply offending an important ally whose current government was not a party to the crime(s).  I'm open to persuasion, but I think it's a high standard of proof that's required, and it should remain so.

In Cambodia's case, as I understand it, there's solid evidence that a Vietnamese accent was enough to get a person persecuted and quite likely killed.  That seems to me to meet the strict definition.  But, again, let's make sure it does before applying that label to it.  Preserving fairness to the accused is essential to credible justice.

I hasten to re-emphasize that my uncertainty about whether the Armenian Great Calamity, as the Armenians generally call it, fits the strict definition of genocide in no way implies any doubt about whether it really did occur or whether it constituted multiple crimes against humanity, as defined by latter 20th-Century standards.  Some European national courts are already convinced that it was genocide.  My point is simply that the legal question seems still to be short of a definitive international judgment, and I'd rather have that before we turn the issue over to national legislatures.