1933 ASSYRIAN GENOCIDE IN IRAQ INSPIRED THE WORD ‘GENOCIDE’
Assyrian International News Agency, CA
Jan 16 2007
Internationally acclaimed as the man who coined the term ‘genocide’,
Raphael Lemkin was born to Jewish parents in Eastern Poland in 1901.
It is ironic that it was not the persecution of his own people which
led Lemkin to not only invent the phrase but to dedicate his life
to fighting its reality. This struggle did not start, as might be
expected, after the atrocities of the Second World War but some years
before they had even begun.
Raphael Lemkin was educated at home together with his two brothers.
He studied philology at the University of Lwow before deciding
on a career in law. He gained a doctorate from the University of
Heidelburg in Germany and in 1929 began teaching at Tachkimoni College
in Warsaw. He became a public prosecutor and for the next five years
represented Poland at conferences all over the world. A prominent
international figure Dr Lemkin also served on the on the Polish Law
Codification Committee and helped draft the criminal code of a newly
independent Poland.
In 1933 Dr Lemkin was deeply disturbed by the massacre of Christian
Assyrians by Iraqis. His distress was compounded by earlier memories
of the slaughter of Armenians by Turks during the First World War and
the international jurist began to examine these acts as crimes in an
effort to deter and prevent them. He presented his first proposal to
outlaw such ‘acts of barbarism’ to the Legal Council of the League
of Nations in Madrid the same year. However, the proposal failed and
his work incurred the disapproval of the Polish government, which was
at the time pursuing a policy of conciliation with Nazi Germany. He
was forced to retire from his public position in 1934. Undeterred Dr
Lemkin continued his work in private law practice until the German
invasion of Poland in 1939 led him to experience at first hand the
very acts that he was working to prevent.
Dr Lemkin was wounded whist fighting the Nazis outside Warsaw. He hid
in the Polish forests for six months before finally escaping to Sweden
by way of Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. The exile was to save him. He
and his brother Elias were the only members of the forty-strong Lemkin
family that were to survive the Nazi occupation.
Now a refugee in Sweden Dr Lemkin worked as a lecturer at the
University of Stockholm, using his time in exile to study Nazism from
the standpoint of jurisprudence. He analysed the legal decrees that
had allowed the Nazi occupation and identified the instruments that
had worked to systematically eliminate a people. He labelled this
premeditated crime ‘genocide’ from the Greek prefix genos meaning
race and the Latin suffix cide meaning killing. His work was later
published in 1944 in the landmark book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
His analysis was used as one of the bases for determining the Nuremberg
trials programme in 1945, where he served as. legal adviser to the
US Chief Prosecutor.
The recognition of genocide in the Nuremberg trials was a considerable
achievement. However since the trials handled cases of war guilt only
and genocide in times of peace was not punishable under those terms,
Dr Lemkin resolved to carry on his campaign for the establishment
of genocide as a crime under international law. He presented a draft
convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide to the Paris
peace conference in 1945. As in 1933, his proposal failed. He had no
funding, no office, nor did he represent any government or accredited
organisation. Yet with the dogged determination that had become
characteristic of Dr Lemkin’s life, he continued his struggle.
His persistent and persuasive lobbying paid off the following year
when a further resolution in favour of an international convention
was put before the United Nations. The resolution was approved and Dr
Lemkin became an adviser in the writing of an international treaty to
that effect. On December 9th 1948, the Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted unanimously by
the United Nations General Assembly. It represented a triumph in the
struggle that Dr Lemkin had begun some 15 years earlier.
Once the convention was in place Dr Lemkin continued to lobby
relentlessly for its ratification. He did so until his death in 1959.
Dr Raphael Lemkin was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work and was honoured with a number of other awards. These included the
Grand Cross of Cespedes from Cuba in 1950 and the Stephen Wise Award
of the American Jewish Congress in 1951. On the 50th anniversary of
the Convention entering into force Dr Rapael Lemkin was also recently
honoured by UN Secretary-General as an inspiring example of moral
engagement.