THE MAN WHO CRIMINALIZED GENOCIDE
Duke Magazine, Duke University
Issue: Winter 2013
The long journey and lasting legacy of human-rights proselytizer
Raphael Lemkin-from occupied Poland to Duke to the United Nations.
Robert J. Bliwise
November 14, 2013
This is how you mend a broken world. A war-crimes tribunal presses a
genocide charge, some decades later, against the leader of the Bosnian
Serbs. The president of Sudan, wanted on charges of genocide in Darfur,
where violence broke out in 2003, stirs embarrassment and angst with
his plan to attend the United Nations General Assembly.
Bangladesh sentences a former lawmaker to death for the mass murder
of Hindus during the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.
Romanian prosecutors charge the commander of a Communist-era prison
with genocide-an echo of charges against the former dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989.
That’s a roster of recent events. Along with word from Iran’s foreign
minister that his country does not deny the historical reality of the
Holocaust, which he labels, aptly, genocide. A low-bar prerequisite,
surely, for a long-stymied diplomatic conversation.
You’re an agitator against genocide. In fact, you invented the word
“genocide.” So what would you think if you were to survey today’s
global nastiness, deeds that reveal the worst of human nature and
exact the worst of human costs? Would you still think giving a name
to something makes it possible to squeeze it out of the system?
Genocide, it seems, never goes out of fashion, or at least never
lies beyond the realm of the humanly possible. This summer, it found
a different kind of relevance-the past creeping up on the present
through a singular figure-with the publication of Totally Unofficial:
The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin(Yale University Press). Lemkin’s
autobiography, unfinished and unpublished at the time of his death,
was edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, a senior fellow at the Center for
Jewish History in New York and a visiting fellow at Deakin University
in Australia.
As the Nazi stain spread over Europe, Lemkin, a refugee in America,
invented the term “genocide” and worked to propel the idea to
international legal status. In his time, he was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize. But his name is not widely recognized today. Nor
is it widely recognized that an American institution gave him safe
harbor at a critical point. That institution was Duke.
Lemkin’s Duke mentor, Malcolm McDermott. Duke University Archives
History hasn’t completely ignored Lemkin. This past spring, his work
was a major theme in the annual Distinguished Lecture in Ethics-on “The
Ethics of Globalization and the Globalization of Ethics”-sponsored by
Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. The speaker was Michael Ignatieff,
former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and a professor at both
the University of Toronto and Harvard University’s Kennedy School
of Government. In the lecture at Duke, and in his writing over the
years, Ignatieff portrays Lemkin as a figure with an extraordinary
moral imagination-and as an original thinker who could see, early on,
the contours of a perverse form of jurisprudence.
“When the rope is already around the neck of the victim and
strangulation is imminent, isn’t the word ‘patience’ an insult to
reason and nature?”
“His central insight was that the occupation, not just in Poland
but all across Europe, had inverted the equality provisions of all
the European legal traditions,” Ignatieff says. “Food in Poland was
distributed on racial grounds, with Jews getting the least. Marriage
in occupied Holland was organized entirely on racial lines: Germans
responsible for getting Dutch women pregnant were not punished,
as would be the case under normal military law; they were rewarded,
because the resulting child would be a net addition to the Nordic
race.” Lemkin was the first scholar to work out the logic of the
system. “From its unremitting racial bias, he was able to understand,
earlier than most, that the wholesale extermination of groups was
not an accidental or incidental cruelty, nor an act of revenge. It
was the very essence of the occupation.”
The essence of Lemkin’s legacy is the starting point for the Pulitzer
Prize-winning A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,
published just over a decade ago. The author is Samantha Power, once
a correspondent in Sarajevo, a capital city under siege during the
Bosnian War, and now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Lemkin
failed to win support for any measure to protect the Jews against
Hitler’s designs. But, Power points out, he later secured the passage
of the first-ever United Nations human-rights treaty, the treaty that
outlawed genocide.
Human-rights abuses were an early and obsessive interest for Lemkin,
who grew up in a Jewish household. He writes in his autobiography that
as a twelve-year-old, he was struck by an account of ancient Rome and
particularly of Emperor Nero’s massacres of Christian converts. He
built a reading list around similar grim accounts through history.
History, though, hit close to home. When he was just five, Jews were
murdered in pogroms in his home region of Bialystok in Poland.
As a twenty-one-year old linguistics student at the University of
Lvov, Lemkin learned of the case of a young Armenian. The Armenian had
been charged with assassinating a former Turkish interior minister,
an official who had set out to rid Turkey of its Armenian “problem,”
igniting a campaign that reportedly brought the deaths of a million
people. Lemkin asked his professor why the larger crime had gone
unpunished. The professor said there was no law under which the chief
perpetrator could be arrested.
The case became an international sensation. According to The New York
Times, the documents introduced in the trial “established once and for
all that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation
but annihilation.” Lemkin was uncomfortable, though, with the fact
that the assassin had acted as the “self-appointed legal officer for
the conscience of mankind,” as Power puts it in her study. “Passion,
he knew, would often make a travesty of justice.” Retribution had to
be legalized.
A decade later, in 1933, Lemkin, by then a public prosecutor in
Warsaw, wrote a paper for an international criminal-law conference
to be held in Madrid, drawing attention both to Hitler’s ascent and
to the slaughter of the Armenians. If it happened once, he argued,
it would happen again. If it happened there, it could happen here.
“Lemkin offered up a radical proposal,” Power writes: Preventing
genocide must be a global imperative, one enshrined in international
law. His draft law would outlaw “barbarity,” meaning “the premeditated
destruction of national, racial, religious, and social collectivities,”
along with “vandalism,” referring to the “destruction of works of
art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of
these collectivities.” But the Polish Foreign Ministry, interested
in an accommodation with Germany, would not allow Lemkin to travel
to Madrid. His proposal was tabled at the conference.
In September of 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Lemkin began a
14,000-milejourney to freedom-and eventually to Duke. He boarded a
train from Warsaw; just as it got under way, the train was bombed by
the German Luftwaffe. He hid for days in the nearby forest and lived
for a time in Poland’s Soviet-occupied territory, where he sought
refuge in the house of a baker. As he relates in his autobiography,
Lemkin resisted his host’s sentiment that in the end all would work
out for the Jews, whose lot it had forever been to suffer and wait.
Lemkin responded that this was a different war. “It is not a war to
grab territory as much as to destroy whole peoples and replace them
with Germans.” Lemkin reunited briefly with his family in eastern
Poland; they refused to join him in flight. He next journeyed to
Lithuania, and then to Stockholm in neutral Sweden. While lecturing
on international law at the University of Stockholm, he visited a
Swedish corporation for which he had done legal work in Warsaw. He
requested a favor: to ask their branch offices to send government
pronouncements from the occupied countries. “I started to read them,
and I also found official gazettes of the German Reich in library
collections in Stockholm,” he writes in his autobiography. It became
clear to him that Germany was pursuing “denationalization followed
by dehumanization.”
That would mean “the death of the nation,” in a spiritual and cultural
sense alike. “As for the Jews, ominous signs pointed to their complete
destruction in gradual steps…. In the peaceful library of Stockholm
I saw an entire race being imprisoned and condemned to death.”
Lemkin became desperate to get to the U.S. And here’s where a Duke
scholar enters-or more precisely, re-enters-the picture: Malcolm
McDermott, a member of the Duke law faculty, who, in 1941, arranged
for Lemkin’s status as a “special lecturer.”
In 1932, Lemkin had worked with McDermott to translate the Polish
criminal code into English. The work accented such unusual features
in the code as imprisonment up to five years for publicly inciting
warfare; it was published byDuke University Press. A few years
later, from 1936 to 1937, McDermott was a visiting lecturer at
the universities of Krakow and Warsaw. On his return to campus,
he expressed admiration for the “law-abiding” tendencies of the Poles.
“Mr. McDermott,” reported Duke’s Law School Bulletin in March 1937,
“finds the Poles like Americans in many ways. One quite unAmerican
trait, however, is that they almost never talk about the weather,
which is mostly bad. They dress as if they expected the worst, and
usually get it.”
With Duke as his destination, Lemkin left Stockholm and caught a flight
to another chronic bad-weather spot, Moscow, followed by a ride on
the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok. From there he picked up
a small boat, the “floating coffin,” and endured three days of stormy
seas en route to the Japanese port of Tsuruga. He was in the country
long enough to learn and muse about the mass murder of Catholics in
Japan, an episode that began in the seventeenth century and lasted
some two centuries. Another, more passenger-friendly boat brought him
from Yokohama to Vancouver and on to Seattle, the U.S. port of entry,
where he landed in April of 1941. A few days later, he arrived by
train in Durham.
McDermott was waiting at the station; this was their first meeting
in five years. Lemkin’s first impression of Durham was of “a lively,
bustling city smelling of tobacco and human perspiration. There were
gasoline stations on the corners, cars crowding bumper to bumper,
people moving along. … People greeted each other in a casual,
friendly manner: ‘Hiya, John!’ ‘Hey, Jack!’ ”
Once McDermott drove him to Duke’s campus, Lemkin found nothing of
“the European university atmosphere of worry.” He was led to “a
huge quadrangle of high buildings, clean-cut and dressed in stony
dignity,” and noted the well-manicured lawns and the imposing trees
that surrounded them. “Young men and women moved about the campus with
a remarkable ease. The boys wore white shirts open at the collar; the
girls wore no stockings-they had on light summer dresses and carried
many books and even more smiles, which they distributed generously.”
On Lemkin’s very first day, McDermott delivered an early surprise:
“There is an alumni dinner this evening with the university president
[Robert Lee Flowers], and I promised that you would speak.” And he
would speak, of course, in English, a language that he had never used
for “everyday living.” McDermott promised to sit right behind him
and whisper prompts as needed. But Lemkin found his message without
coaching from the sidelines:
“If women, children, and old people would be murdered a hundred miles
from here, wouldn’t you run to help? Then why do you stop this decision
of your heart when the distance is 5,000 miles instead of a hundred?”
Since he had arrived near semester’s end, Lemkin didn’t have immediate
teaching duties. Still he would talk with students, often from a seat
on the porch of the law school (then located along the academic quad).
“The American student’s most interesting quality is his curiosity,”
he writes in the autobiography. “This is probably due to the fact that
the high schools in America are of lower quality than those in Europe:
I believe this makes the American student feel that there is always
something new to discover that he should have learned in high school,
when he could have been organizing his mind and knowledge.”
At Duke, Lemkin found himself organizing his mind and knowledge with
plunges into the speaking circuit. (His mentor, McDermott, took to
the road with equal exuberance, on such subjects as “the history of
liberty.”) As he recalls in his autobiography, “I visited many towns
in the state and told the same story to Chamber of Commerce meetings,
to women’s groups, to gatherings of young people.” He bought a white
suit along with white shoes and white socks, all of which he would wear
with a dark silk tie, “in order to attend the dinners I was invited
to.” In the midst of all those public forays, Lemkin received a letter
from his parents on a scrap of paper. “We are well,” the letter read.
Just days later, in June of 1941, he heard a radio broadcast announcing
that Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union; separate German
and Soviet zones in Poland had dissipated with the abrogating of the
German-Soviet non-aggression pact. Forty-nine members of his family
would perish in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was never far from Lemkin’s teaching, lecturing, and
writing at Duke. He began putting together the pieces that would form
his major work,Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944. In the
book’s credits, McDermott is among those acknowledged, along with “the
Library of Duke University for establishing a special documentation
center on laws of occupation at the suggestion of the author.”
In generally detached language and through a narrow legal prism, the
book analyzes Axis authority and policies in occupied Europe. Lemkin
writes in the preface that the book grew out of a desire to reveal,
“based upon objective information and evidence,” the contours of
totalitarian rule. “Every phase of life, even the most intimate,
is covered by a network of laws and regulations which create the
instrumentalities of a most complete administrative control and
coercion. Therefore these laws of occupation are an extremely valuable
source of information regarding such government and its practices. For
the outside world they provide undeniable and objective evidence
regarding the treatment of the subjugated peoples of Europe by the
Axis Powers.”
“He was able to understand, earlier than most, that the wholesale
extermination of groups was not an accidental or incidental cruelty.”
Its first section considers aspects of the German occupation through
multiple lenses, from “Police” to “Property.” Another section looks at
the occupation in individual countries-France, Norway, the Netherlands,
Poland, and on and on through a continent adrift. In a chapter on
“The Legal Status of the Jews,” Lemkin declares, “The treatment
of the Jews in the occupied countries is one of the most flagrant
violations of international law, not only of specific articles of
the Hague Regulations, but also of the principles of the law of
nations as they have emerged from established usage among civilized
nations, from the laws ofhumanity, and from the dictates of the public
conscience-principles which the occupant is equally bound to respect.”
“Genocide,” coined by Lemkin, appears for the first time in print in
his book. “New conceptions require new terms,” the one-time student
of linguistics writes. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a
nation or of an ethnic group.” This particular new term, he goes on,
is made from the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide
(killing), thus corresponding to tyrannicide and homicide. Genocide,
he elaborates, signifies “a coordinated plan of different actions
aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of selves. The
objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political
and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings,
religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the
destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity,
and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
Axis Rule had immediate resonance. The New York Times Book Review
devoted a cover story to the book, comparing its picture of Axis
rule to a “monster” that “gorges itself on blood.” A Washington Post
editorial titled “Genocide” later singled out the word in question as
adequately capturing a brutal revelation: the gassing, over a period
of two years, of some 1,765,000 Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau. According
to the editorial, the profound point about those killings “is that
they were systematic and purposeful.”
In June of 1942, Lemkin left Duke to work as chief consultant for
the federal Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic
Administration. Two years later, he started with the War Department
as an expert in international law. Power writes that Lemkin pleaded
with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to have the U.S. adopt a treaty
against barbarity and to make protection of Europe’s minorities a
central war aim. Roosevelt urged patience. Lemkin’s response, as
recorded in his autobiography: “[W]hen the rope is already around
the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isn’t the word
‘patience’ an insult to reason and nature?” He saw a “double murder,”
one by the Nazis against the Jews and the other by the Allies, who
refused to publicize or denounce Hitler’s extermination campaign.
Lemkin, in the book’s preface, underscores the importance of bringing
to justice “the considerable numbers of Germans responsible for the
great carnage.” In the spring of 1946, he went to Europe to search
out surviving members of his family-and to observe the international
military tribunal at Nuremberg as a kind of lobbyist, as Power
describes him. His goal was to highlight mass slaughter as a crime in
any context; the prosecutors, though, largely focused on aggression
that grew from violations of another state’s sovereignty. He did
manage to score what Power calls an occasional victory-including an
indictment stating that some defendants “conducted deliberate and
systematic genocide,” the first official mention of genocide in an
international legal setting.
Lemkin arrived at U.N. headquarters in the fall of 1946, just as
the new international organization was considering a resolution on
genocide. That December, the General Assembly unanimously passed a
resolution that condemned genocide as “the denial of the right of
existence of entire human groups.” It was deemed shocking to “the
conscience of mankind,” and contrary to “moral law and to the spirit
and aims of the United Nations.” The resolution charged a U.N.
committee with drafting a full-fledged treaty that would mark genocide
as a violation of international law. It was a triumphant moment for
Lemkin when, in December of 1948, the genocide convention finally
passed. Around the crime of genocide, offending states would no
longer have the legal right to be left alone; in fact, other states
would have the legal responsibility to put to trial those suspected
of committing genocide. Lemkin had felt that a mere declaration of
human rights would be meaningless without an enforcement mechanism.
Early U.S. leadership on the genocide treaty, though, evaporated-a
consequence, argues Power, of traditional hostility toward any
infringement on U.S. sovereignty. That hostility was only amplified
by the Red Scare of the 1950s. Lemkin himself became a target, if
not directly of anti-Communist zeal, then at least of politically
convenient slander: A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
complained that the “biggest propagandist” for the treaty was “a man
who comes from a foreign country who…speaks broken English.”
After a number of countries signed the convention in 1957, The New York
Timeslauded Lemkin as “that exceedingly patient and totally unofficial
man.” But the U.S. wouldn’t ratify the treaty until the 1980s. And
it was only in 1998 that the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu of genocide; it was the first such
prosecution by an international court since the adoption of the 1948
convention. American policymakers had deliberately avoided the term
“genocide” out of a concern that a genocide finding would have obliged
the U.S. to act-a sad irony of the Lemkin legacy. Three years later,
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found
Radislav Krstic guilty of genocide for his role in the massacre of
some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica. That was seen
as the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II.
Totally Unofficial, the incomplete autobiography, ends with fragmentary
notes for a concluding chapter. Lemkin refers to “an uphill fight,
especially since I have to borrow money for postage to write to
influential and interested people.” At that point he was jobless
and penniless; he complains about critics who, “aware of my extreme
poverty, use it to humiliate and undercut me.”
Still campaigning for his cause, still aspiring to see genocide
elevated as an international crime, he was living in a one-room
apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan. On a visit to a Park
Avenue public-relations agency, he died of a heart attack in August
of 1959, at age fifty-nine.
Would Lemkin have been disappointed that genocide persists,
irrespective of international opprobrium? Today the editor of his
autobiography, Donna-Lee Frieze, says he had long acknowledged that
the struggle to eradicate, prevent, or punish genocide would be long,
and that an international convention was just a framework for the
task. “Looking at the surface of Lemkin’s ideas, one could argue that
he would have been disappointed and shocked. But I don’t think that’s
the case,” she says. “He wasn’t so naïve as to expect a convention
would immediately eradicate genocide. He was so deeply a student
of genocide history that he understood that this was a ‘disease’
of humankind that continually occurs.”
From: Baghdasarian
http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/man-who-criminalized-genocide