THE FATHER OF GENOCIDE
Wall Street Journal, NY
July 23 2013
Outraged by the Ottomans’ massacres of Armenians, a young Polish
lawyer pushed to have the crime of genocide enshrined in law.
By YASCHA MOUNK
Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Rapgael Lemkin By Raphael
Lemkin, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze (Yale, 293 pages, $35)
During World War I, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian civilian, looked
on helplessly as Ottoman troops shot his mother, raped his sisters
and hacked his brother to death. Six years later, on a Berlin street,
Tehlirian approached Talaat Pasha, a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire
who had coordinated the killing of Armenians. “This is for my mother,”
he told Pasha as he shot him dead.
The press hailed Tehlirian as a hero. But legally his situation was
a disaster. Whereas Pasha never had to face a court, Tehlirian was
put on trial as a common murderer. In the event, he was set free,
but only because a Berlin court was willing to pretend that he had
acted under “psychological compulsion.”
Raphael Lemkin, then a young law student at the University of Lwow,
wasn’t satisfied with that subterfuge. He was revolted that somebody
who had “upheld the moral order of mankind” should be “classified as
insane.” And so Lemkin set out to persuade the world to adopt a law
against the kind of “racial or religious murder” that had claimed
the lives of Tehlirian’s relatives.
Against the odds, he succeeded.
“Totally Unofficial,” Lemkin’s posthumous autobiography, tells the
story of his remarkable achievements. Born in 1900 to Polish-Jewish
parents of modest means in a remote corner of Western Ukraine, his
rise was meteoric. In short succession, he established himself as
a prominent lawyer in Warsaw, escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland,
coined the term “genocide,” served as an adviser to the U.S. War
Department and became a law professor at Yale.
Thanks to Lemkin’s efforts, on Nov. 9, 1948, the 10th anniversary
of Kristallnacht , the United Nations General Assembly unanimously
adopted a “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide.” Cleaving closely to his proposal, it described genocide
as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The horrors of the Holocaust had helped sway world opinion in favor
of Lemkin’s cause. And yet he emphasized that-from Nero’s persecution
of the Christians to the Mongols’ massacres of Eastern Europeans
in the 13th century-genocide had occurred many times throughout
history. It was at his insistence that the U.N.’s definition covered
all cases-past, present or future-in which an ethnic or religious
group was marked out for destruction.
Thanks to this adaptability, the term has gained lasting political as
well as legal relevance. In the decades since Lemkin died of a heart
attack in 1959, the term he invented has become the focus of a strange
tug of war: Activists hope that the powerful label of genocide might
move reluctant publics to stop atrocities; politicians fear that it
could force them into costly foreign adventures or preclude negotiated
settlements. In cases like Darfur, the question of whether given
atrocities amount to “genocide” now plays a key role in determining
how the international community will act.
Unfinished at his death, and published now for the first time,
Lemkin’s autobiography gives a detailed account of his tireless
advocacy. It will prove useful to generations of historians. But,
like most autobiographies by historical figures, it also aims to cast
its protagonist in a flattering light. By that metric, it is at best
a mixed success.
“Totally Unofficial” suffers from big chronological jumps and uneven
prose. While Lemkin is candid in parts, he just as frequently veers
into the smug or self-righteous. Most of his contemporaries at the
U.N. respected him; few found him winning. His autobiography makes
it easy to see why.
In recent years, Lemkin has been lionized as a lone fighter who managed
to make the world a better place. (The best example is “A Problem From
Hell,” the 2002 best seller that launched the career of Samantha Power,
President Barack Obama’s nominee for the U.S.
ambassadorship to the U.N.) This is very much the reading Lemkin
himself encourages, promising to show his readers “how a private
individual almost single-handedly can succeed in imposing a moral
law on the world.”
The truth is more complicated. Lemkin was clearly a man of rare
talents and single-minded devotion. To further the “lifesaving idea”
for which, he believed, providence had chosen him as a “messenger boy,”
he remained single, gave up a lucrative legal career and literally
worked himself to death. Down to the details-like his poverty and
his lifelong impatience with small talk-he makes for an excellent
secular saint.
And yet his influence may not have been as transformative as he
thought. The genocide convention would never have passed if it hadn’t
been conformable to the interests of contemporary superpowers. Locked
in a battle for ideological supremacy, the U.S. and the Soviet Union
had strong reasons of their own to play to world opinion by condemning
genocide. That also explains why Lemkin’s star quickly faded when
he began to advocate for an international court to prosecute state
officials for war crimes. While the great powers were happy to pay
lip service to his lofty ideals, they were unwilling to compromise
their sovereignty.
In the end, then, Lemkin doesn’t quite fit the role of the
extraordinary individual bending history to his will. His life is
interesting in an altogether different way: It is emblematic of both
the ample promise and the real disappointment of international law.
In Lemkin’s own words, the point of the genocide convention had been
nothing less than to be “a starting point for a new conscience.” Over
time, he hoped, “a combination of punishment and prevention” would
help to avert atrocities. Today, well-funded NGOs raise the alarm as
soon as genocide looms in any part of the globe. Under Mr. Obama, the
White House has even instituted an Atrocities Prevention Board. (Its
first head: Samantha Power.)
But atrocities persist. Plenty of mass murderers remain at large. In
recent years, a number of countries have agreed for the International
Criminal Court to prosecute their citizens for war crimes, including
genocide. But in reality only the genocidal leaders of small powers
need to fear justice. Were Tehlirian alive today, he would have as
much reason to become a murderer as he did in 1921.
Mr. Mounk’s “Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern
Germany” will be published in January.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936404578580092983234064.html