IS LEMKIN’S LEGACY GOING UNHEEDED?
by Eric Herschthal

The Jewish Week
a17697/Editorial__Opinion/The_Last_Word.html
Jan 19 2010

The Center for Jewish History is currently showing an exhibit
dedicated to the life and work of Raphael Lemkin. If his name isn’t
quite familiar to you, rest assured, you’re not alone. In any event,
you certainly know the one word that’s become synonymous with him:
genocide. In 1943, Lemkin invented the term. And in 1951, he saw to
it that the United Nations make it punishable crime.

The exhibit is a timely one, but you might say it’s timeless too.

There is the matter of Darfur, of course, but perhaps just as tragic
is the ongoing resistance to what is often called "Lemkin’s Law." A
walk through the exhibit’s myriad of letters, legal documents and
grainy recorded speeches gives you a pretty good understanding why.

>From the beginning, Lemkin knew that his task wouldn’t be easy. In
1933, for instance, Lemkin, a young Jewish lawyer born in Poland and
then working for its government, traveled to Madrid for a League of
Nations conference. His mission was straightforward enough: prosecute
the Turkish officials who initiated the Armenian genocide. One million
Armenians had been slaughtered at the outbreak of World War I, and
Lemkin, a fresh-faced 33-year-old, wondered why nothing was being
done. "Why," he asked, "is it a crime for one man to murder another,
but not for a government to kill a million?"

Alas, his timing was off. The year of the Madrid conference, the Nazis
seized power, and under Hitler’s watchful eye the Polish government
pressured Lemkin to resign. Six years later, the Nazi invasion of
Poland forced him to flee, and in 1941 he landed in the United States.

He got prestigious teaching posts at the Duke and University of
Virginia law schools with the help of sympathetic American professors.

But his growing awareness of the Holocaust pulled him out of the ivory
tower. He last heard from his parents just after he fled Poland,
and by the war’s end, he learned that 49 of his closest relatives
had been killed. Years later, he described his march to criminalize
genocide as an "epitaph on his mother’s grave."

What Samantha Power, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book that also
recaps Lemkin’s career, called "a problem from hell," had for Lemkin
become personal. By 1943, he had already coined the term "genocide"
— from the Greek work genos, for "tribe," and cide, for "kill" —
but the word went into wide circulation only after the publication
of his book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," published in 1944. Once
the war had ended and the UN had been created, Lemkin began the next
phase of his career: turning a word into a crime.

It’s at this point that Lemkin’s real tragedy begins. Power’s book does
an especially good job bringing to life the shameful recalcitrance
of even the most civilized governments, particularly America’s,
to endorse the genocide resolution. The main sticking point was
clear: the U.S. did not want to endorse a law that might put their
own government at risk. While respectable institutions like the
American Bar Association made a smart case that the UN law allowed
for too expansive a reading, it was obvious that the real stumbling
block was the U.S. government. Segregation was still allowed in the
South, and the government felt that under related war-crime clauses,
it might be found guilty.

Of course the U.S. was fine leading the charge at the Nuremburg
Trials, which prosecuted Nazis just after the war. But the laws used
to indict the Nazis employed the softer "crimes against humanity"
clause, a holdover from the League of Nations days. That clause
prevented the prosecution of governments for crimes committed within
their own borders. "If the Nazis had exterminated the entire German
Jewish population," Power writes, "but never invaded Poland, they
would not have been liable at Nuremberg." Lemkin’s mission at the UN
was to close that loophole.

He succeeded, but the legacy of criminalized genocide is
disheartening. The UN may have criminalized it in 1951, but the
United States did not sign on until 1987. (Lemkin died in 1959.) More
recently, the International Criminal Court, which in 2002 became
the body responsible for prosecuting genocides, has been severely
handicapped. It has still not been ratified by the U.S., to say nothing
of Israel, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and China, among others. And even then,
it is a court of last resort, summoned only when independent countries
do not try criminals themselves.

To date, eight people have been convicted of genocide in a period
that has seen millions die in its name. Given that record, it’s worth
asking what Lemkin’s Law means if his legacy goes unheeded. He worked
tirelessly in the name of the law, but that was only the handmaiden
of his larger aim. Justice was what mattered, and it is something
that eludes him, and us, still.

Eric Herschthal covers arts and culture for the paper.