CALL IT GENOCIDE
by Gavriel Horan
Aish
June 29, 2009
The man who coined the term ‘genocide’ also fought to make it an
international crime.
Applause shook the gallery of the grand Palais de Chaillot. The year
was 1948. In the wake of the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations
met in Paris for the first convention on human rights in history. All
eyes fell on a single, unassuming man in the front row -a Polish
Jew named Raphael Lemkin, the man responsible for it all. Few people
imagined that this moment could ever be possible, but he never gave
up hope, never stopped fighting, and literally gave his life to make
it a reality.
The U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously 55-0 in support of the
Genocide Convention, declaring genocide an international crime liable
to punishment. The president of the General Assembly described it as
an "epoch-making event" regarding the "sacred right of existence of
human groups."
When the clamor died down and the delegates left the hall, the
reporters searched for the man who made it all happen, but Lemkin was
nowhere to be found. Instead of celebrating his monumental victory,
they finally found him sitting in the darkened gallery that he had
occupied all day. "Let me stay here alone," he muttered, while tears
of sadness mixed with joy rolled down his cheeks. Having lost over
40 members of his family in the ashes of the Holocaust, including
his parents, he dreamed for this day when the world would stand up
in opposition to the most heinous of crimes against humanity. The
convention, he later told a reporter, would be an "epitaph on my
mother’s grave."
A Crime without a Name In a chilling radio broadcast, Winston Churchill
referred to the horrors of the Nazi perpetration against European Jewry
as "a crime without a name." Raphael Lemkin believed that in order to
prevent such crimes in the future, it had to have a title fitting of
its malicious intent. As part of his life’s mission he gave it one,
taken from the Greek, genos, meaning people, together with the Latin,
cide, meaning death, coining the term genocide.
How could someone stand by and watch a fellow human being brutally
murdered without doing anything?
Lemkin’s obsession with putting an end to genocide went all the way
back to his childhood. He was born to Yosef and Bella Lemkin in 1900
on a large farm near Bezvodene, on the flatlands of eastern Poland,
then part of czarist Russia. His father was a farmer and his mother
was an intellectual, artist, and linguist. Winters were so fierce that
the three Lemkin boys were usually stuck at home all season long with
little else to do but read. Bella served as her children’s teacher
and she instructed them in the classics, philosophy, and language. By
the time Raphael entered university, he had already mastered half a
dozen languages. He would soon add another four to the list, including
Arabic and Sanskrit.
When he was 11, Raphael read a Polish novel about ancient Rome. One
scene depicted a Roman mob watching as early Christians were fed to
the lions. He couldn’t understand how someone could stand by and watch
a fellow human being brutally murdered without doing anything. He
asked his mother how such injustice could exist. "Isn’t there a law
preventing one from killing people just because they are different?"
His mother responded that there were indeed laws against murder. But
growing up as a Jew in Eastern Europe, witnessing pogroms on a regular
basis, it did not appear that way. "The laws do not seem to be any
good against massacres," he replied. She told him that he would have
to find the answer himself. "That was the day," he later recalled,
"I began to crusade [against genocide] because I started looking for
the answer."
Lemkin entered the University of Lvov in 1920 and majored in
philosophy, hoping to find answers to his questions. While he was
there, an incident occurred that greatly altered his direction. In 1915
he was shocked to read about the massive slaughter of Armenians by the
Ottoman Turkish Empire resulting in the massacre of over a million
innocent people. Six years later, a young Armenian assassinated the
Turkish Interior Minister in retaliation. "That is for my mother,"
he said, before giving himself over to the police. Lemkin asked one
of his professors why the Chief of Police had not been brought to
justice for the grotesque perpetrations that he sanctioned against the
Armenian people. The professor responded that he had not transgressed
any international law and that it was an impingement of a nation’s
sovereignty to interfere with their internal affairs. He compared it
to a farmer who has a right to slaughter his own chickens whenever
he wishes.
"Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of
a single individual?"
Lemkin was shocked at the comparison. "Why is the killing of a million
a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?" he asked,
echoing his childhood query.
This time he decided that the only way to find an answer was to
become an expert in international law. He steeped himself in legal
studies for the next six years, and was then appointed the position
of Warsaw public prosecutor. He felt that the law was the only way
to uphold moral truth. While "it is moral power that counts — the
law can make it count more," he said.
The Murder of Truth With the Nazi rise to power, Lemkin began to
draft his first treatise against genocide — what he then termed
the "crime of barbarity" — which was presented at the League of
Nations assembly in Madrid in 1933. His proposal provoked jeers
of laughter. The German delegates walked out, knowing that it was
primarily directed at them. Although the world was still oblivious,
Lemkin saw what horrors lay ahead.
Lemkin was derided by Polish government officials for "insulting our
German friends" and ridiculed in the press for his idealism. In order
to invest his energy fully into fighting genocide without government
pressures and restrictions, he was forced to resign from his government
position. But his efforts ended abruptly when Germany invaded Poland
in 1939.
After he was wounded while fighting briefly in the Polish Resistance,
Lemkin escaped through Lithuania and eventually took refuge in
Sweden. He later commented that witnessing the bombing of hundreds of
refugee children by German war planes and being forced to leave his
home and family made his passion to fight genocide even stronger. His
final goodbye to his parents "was like going to their funerals while
they were still alive." He was certain that the crime which he had
devoted his life to prevent was about to come to fruition in his own
backyard. Few people shared his ominous vision. "Hitler had already
promulgated … his blueprint for destruction," he wrote. "Many
people thought he was bragging, but I believed that he would carry
out his program."
In Sweden, Lemkin set to work developing a fully documented piece on
Nazi policies that would provide solid evidence of their demonic plans,
in the hope that the world might take notice. He was successful at
obtaining hundreds of orders signed by Wehrmacht commanders and Reich
cabinet ministers, including Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering,
desperately wishing that he could alert the world before the Final
Solution was implemented. "Would this blind world only then see it,
when it would be too late?" he asked.
Deciding that his efforts would be more effective in America, Lemkin
obtained a visa and immigrated to the United States in 1941 as a
member of the law faculty of Duke University. When he arrived, he
immediately dispatched duplicate sets of his extensive portfolio on
Nazi crimes to the State and War Departments. He wasn’t the first to
bring evidence of the slaughter that had already begun to take place,
but it was of little interest to politicians or press. He sent an
urgent letter to President Roosevelt pleading for immediate action,
but the response he received back was that he should have patience.
"Patience… but I could bitterly see only the faces of the millions
awaiting death."
"Patience," Lemkin wrote. "But I could bitterly see only the faces of
the millions awaiting death… All over Europe the Nazis were writing
the book of death with the blood of my brethren." Jewish groups pressed
Washington to bomb the camps or rail lines to no avail, even though
Allied planes were within striking distance. "The impression of a
tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air," Lemkin wrote. "A
double murder was taking place. . . It was the murder of the truth."
Legacy Seeing the futility of effecting change through the government,
Lemkin decided to attempt to reach the public sector instead. He
began writing his most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe, in which he depicted the reality of Nazi rule and gave name
to the crime of genocide. It was published in 1944 by the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, but did nothing to save the lives
of the six million victims.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor when the United States entered
the war effort, the U.S. Army recruited him to teach classes on
military government at Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Board of
Economic Warfare drafted him as a chief consultant, which eventually
included advising US Chief Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg
Tribunals. The word "genocide" became famous after its use in
Nuremberg by two British prosecutors in their case against the 21
Nazi officers, but Lemkin was not satisfied. The trials did nothing
to codify genocide as an international crime and did little to prevent
it from happening again.
After a lifetime of heartache and hard work, his efforts finally
came to fruition in 1948 when his Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocidewas finally adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations in Paris. It was only a half victory,
considering that the Convention wasn’t ratified until 1986. Prior to
its ratification, the United States Senate was treated to a speech
by Senator William Proxmire in favor of the treaty every single day
that the Senate was in session between 1967 and 1986. The Convention
was first implemented during the creation of the International
Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. To date,
132 nations have ratified the Convention but almost 60 have not,
including Indonesia, Japan and half of the countries of Africa.
Days after the adoption of the Genocide Convention, Lemkin fell
terribly ill. When doctors were unable to render a diagnosis, Lemkin
offered one himself: "Genociditis — exhaustion from work on the
Genocide Convention."
He died alone, despite giving his entire life to help humanity.
Raphael Lemkin passed away of a sudden heart attack in the office
of his publisher in 1959, at the age of 59. He remained unmarried,
too busy with his single minded obsession to burden himself with
a family. Only seven people came to his funeral. He died alone,
despite giving his entire life to help humanity. All that remains
is an obscure, unvisited gravestone in the Mount Hebron cemetery in
Queens, New York. His gravestone reads "Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959)
Father of the Genocide Convention." Some years later, the B’nai Brith
commissioned a bronze bust of Raphael Lemkin which my great uncle —
his distant relative and talented amateur sculptor — gladly made.
Today, the life and work of the father of the first human rights
convention is hardly known, nor is his name given any recognition
anywhere in the UN. It is arguable whether or not his efforts really
succeeded in preventing such crimes from taking place again in the
future. Since his time the world has witnessed the Khmer Rouge reign
of terror in Cambodia, the repression of Kurds in Iraq, the slaughter
of Tutsis in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia,
and rampant killing in The Congo and Darfur.
Most recently, we watched with horror as Iran’s president was hosted
by the United Nations itself, despite his unabashed public display
of hatred against Israel and the Jews, in standing violation of the
Genocide Convention’s prohibition against the "direct and public
incitement to genocide." One cannot help feeling sad that nothing
has really changed in the world. Was Lemkin’s life’s all for naught?
Although the picture looks grim, Lemkin’s contribution to the world
may not have been in vain. The world may not yet be ready to practice
what they preach, but the fact that most nations acknowledge, at
least in theory, the evils of discrimination on the basis of race,
is a step in the right direction towards the ultimate unification
of humanity. It’s like a diet. How many do you have to break before
you actually lose weight? The first step in successful dieting is to
recognize that you have a problem; it takes a life time to work on
it. Everything follows after the desire.
At least the world is doing lip service to the right ideals. We may
have gotten it wrong again and again over the past few millennium,
but the Torah’s message of world peace will eventually prevail. Until
then, we must continue to look forward to the day when "nations will
no longer lift sword against one another and will study war no more."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
