The Star-Ledger, New Jersey
April 12 2014
Forgotten Rutgers prof who coined ‘genocide’ now getting his due
By Seth Augenstein
It was the “crime without a name.” But Raphael Lemkin gave it utterance.
“Genocide” was the word Lemkin coined in 1944, as Allied troops were
just beginning to discover the death camps and mass graves left behind
by retreating Nazi forces.
Lemkin, a Jew who fled the Holocaust on foot through Polish forests
but who lost more than 40 members of his family to it, was
short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize twice in the 1950s, after he
pushed the United Nations to outlaw the “crime of all crimes.”
He taught at Rutgers and Yale universities. But he neglected himself,
becoming an ill and destitute and obsessed man who dropped dead on a
New York street at 59. Only a handful of people attended his funeral,
and he sank into obscurity, a historical footnote. Much of his later
life remains shrouded in mystery, including his short stint at
Rutgers’ Newark campus teaching international law.
But as Genocide Awareness Month again marks the mass exterminations of
Armenians, Jews, Rwandans and other groups throughout history, a new
appreciation of Lemkin has reached a critical mass. Rutgers graduate
research, publication of an autobiography, a new United Nations award
in his name and even a Sundance award-winning documentary are
resurrecting the Polish lawyer’s legacy.
But whether Lemkin would feel he won his crusade — if he could have
stomached horror after horror in Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur, the list
goes on — is up for debate.
“Lemkin is a tragic figure — he did all this work during his lifetime,
and he died penniless,” said Adassa Richardson, a Rutgers student
poring over the Lemkin papers at the New York Public Library last
month. “The world didn’t want to deal with it. That’s heartbreaking.”
“He was pretty much one of the greatest people of the 20th century
that people don’t know about,” said Tanya Elder, senior archivist with
the American Jewish Historical Society.
AN ADVENTURE STORY
Lemkin was born in 1900, the son of poor Jewish farmers in
southeastern Poland, near a town named Bialystok, as he recounts in
his memoir. News of Armenians being killed en masse by Turks during
World War I, and other nightmares throughout history, horrified and
fascinated the teenager. A pogrom in his small town only reinforced
the lesson that history is a “huge torture place of the innocent,” as
he later recounted.
American Jewish Historical Society
“A line, red from blood, led from the Roman arena, through the gallows
of France, to the pogrom of Bialystok,” Lemkin wrote in his
autobiography, “Totally Unofficial,” published for the first time last
year by the Yale University Press.
Lemkin thought humanity might yet erase that red line. As a prominent
Warsaw prosecutor, he used his sway to propose a measure to the 5th
International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law outlawing
crimes of “barbarity” and “vandalism.” It was 1933, the same year
Adolf Hitler took power. The measure was tabled.
Six years later, as the blitzkrieg raged through Poland, Lemkin made
his escape: on foot, rail and boat from Sweden through Russia and
Japan to the United States. In the safety of exile in 1944, Lemkin
published the book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” which detailed the
Nazi extermination programs. In that book, he coined “genocide” — a
compound of the ancient Greek word “genos,” meaning race or tribe, and
the Latin word “cide,” to kill.
At Nuremberg, Lemkin served as an assistant to the U.S. prosecutor.
But the convictions weren’t enough, Lemkin wrote. So he pushed the new
United Nations to outlaw what he’d identified as the “crime of all
crimes.” He dogged diplomats and prominent politicians around the
world, playing a game of international politics detailed in his
memoir.
After years, he succeeded in getting the Genocide Convention passed
and ratified in 1951. For his work, he was short-listed for the Nobel
Peace Prize twice — but he didn’t get it. His health declined, he was
evicted and lost jobs, as he says in his autobiography, left
unfinished at the time of his death.
“As I am devoting all my time to the Genocide Convention, I have no
time to take a paying job, and consequently suffer fierce privations …
poverty and starvation,” he wrote.
“There’s a moral force to his story,” said Donna-Lee Frieze, the
Australian scholar now at the Center for Jewish History in New York,
who edited the volume.
IMPACT AT RUTGERS
Lemkin’s last job was as an adjunct international law professor at
Rutgers’ Newark campus, historians say. He discussed starting a center
devoted to the study of genocide, Frieze said. But he didn’t live to
see that happen, dropping dead of a heart attack on 42nd Street in
Manhattan in 1959.
Now, however, Rutgers’ Center for the Study of Genocide and Human
Rights, under director Alex Hinton, is helping to revive Lemkin as
part of the “The Raphael Lemkin Project.” During an entire course this
semester, the Genocide Center has hosted conferences, thumbed through
Lemkin’s personal papers on field at the New York Public Library and
elsewhere, and started to publish work about him. For Genocide
Awareness Month, the students and staff hosted conferences on the
overlooked Rutgers professor.
“We’ve always thought of ourselves as ‘The Raphael Lemkin Institute,’
” Hinton said. “More and more people are recognizing his story — and
accepting him as a hero.”
“His heart was in the right place,” said Marc Lane, a graduate student
of global affairs, whose study involves looking at prosecuting
different degrees of genocide. “He threw himself into his obsession —
and it consumed him.”
The project conferences united academics with a surviving ancestor of
Lemkin — and even those who knew him best.
Nancy Steinson, a young woman who was Lemkin’s assistant and friend
during the final two years of his life, spoke at a conference this
month. She remembers a man who had been worn down by his years of
crusading, but who was gentle and thoughtful all the same.
“He was destitute — he was hungry,” Steinson said. “But he was so elegant.”
In addition to the Rutgers scholarship and the publication of the
autobiography, a documentary about Lemkin called “Watchers of the Sky”
garnered two awards at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The
United Nations also unveiled a humanitarian award in December named
after the Polish lawyer.
A LIVING LEGACY
But at the unveiling of that UN award, members of the delegations from
Armenia and Turkey got into a heated argument over the century-old
killings of more than a million people — and whether it was genocide,
according to Joseph Lemkin, a second cousin from Plainsboro who
attended the ceremony.
Clearly, Lemkin’s “genocide” is still a dirty word, more than half a
century after he coined it. Political realities mean that “genocide”
becomes a subjective term — such as when the United States refused to
call widespread killings in Rwanda in the 1990s “genocide” because it
would have required intervention on the global stage.
The academics — Hinton, Frieze, the Rutgers students — all point to
mass killings that return, like a chronic disease of humanity,
wherever and whenever different races and religions want to eradicate
one another.
“He would appreciate that international law has been improved,” said
Jason Hayman, a global affairs doctoral student. “But he would have
taken issue how it’s implemented and enforced. He’s probably rolling
over in his grave.”
But there are reasons to hope, they add. Hinton, an expert on the
Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, said Lemkin would have been appalled
by decades of inaction. But he also would have recognized some serious
improvements in prosecution and deterrence — especially in the last
decade, with prosecutions of Bosnian mass killers and intervention in
Darfur.
“If you look back to the 1990s, there’s a completely different
landscape now,” said Hinton.
Since Lemkin’s genocide law was adopted by the international community
more than 60 years ago, the killings have continued in different
corners of the globe. But over the past decade or so, international
tribunals have prosecuted a handful of mass murderers from Rwanda and
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Meting out justice — and eventually deterring the
killers — was Lemkin’s goal all along, and he knew it would take a
long time to change human nature, experts said.
“I don’t think he really believed the Genocide Convention was a
panacea for humankind,” said Frieze. “But he thought it was better
than nothing.”
A HISTORY OF HORROR
The cases of genocide listed below — all from the past 100 years — are
generally accepted by historians to fit Raphael Lemkin’s definition of
a systematic killing-off of a population or a culture through murder
and other means. But there are other cases still up for debate,
including the Stolen Generations in Australia, as well as massacres in
Burundi, East Timor, Kosovo and the “dirty wars” in Argentina.
The Armenians, 1915-17
Some 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey were killed by the
government. Still a hotly debated part of history, but Lemkin himself
pointed to it as the first example of modern genocide.
The Holocaust, 1933-45
The Nazi state in Germany systematically killed 6 million Jews, as
many as 3 million Soviet POWs, and hundreds of thousands more gays,
the disabled, Gypsies and others who didn’t fit their vision of racial
purity.
Cambodia, 1975-79
The Khmer Rouge regime killed 2 million, as much as one-third of the
country’s population, in an attempt to bring about a farming utopia.
People identified with education and modernity — even those merely
wearing eyeglasses — were marked for death.
Bosnia/Herzegovina, 1992-95
About 100,000 people, mostly ethnic Bosniaks, were butchered after the
breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The world was shocked when 8,000
people were killed at Srebrenica — the largest massacre in Europe
since the Holocaust.
Rwanda, April-July 1994
(100 days)
>From 500,000 to 1 million people, predominantly Tutsis, were massacred
by Hutu-led government forces.
Darfur, 1950s to present
Some 2.5 million civilians have been killed, as the Arab-dominated
Sudanese government tried to dominate African minorities. Although
southern Sudan retained independence in 2011, violence continues to
this day.
Sources: Donna-Lee Frieze, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Rutgers
University’s Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights,
University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/04/the_man_who_named_horror_forgotten_rutgers_prof_coined_genocide_now_getting_his_due.html