Father of Genocide Convention

EUGENE KAELLIS

Last April, Knowledge TV presented a documentary, Worse than War, by Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The subject was genocide. It was by no means reassuring.

Historically, the homicides of almost entire populations were frequent, but the concept and the word necessary to describe them, genocide, did not exist until Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, whose close relatives were Holocaust victims, supplied both.

In ancient times, once people had developed socially and culturally cohesive groups, they started killing one another, not only as individuals, but by group identity. The present inhabitants of much of the world are thus not descendants of the original inhabitants of the areas they now occupy. They are derived from wanderers who, by numbers or force, overwhelmed the aboriginal inhabitants. People who later became Romans, for example, displaced the Etruscans, and the English had to triumph over the Scots, Welsh and Irish, fashioning them into Great Britain, to say nothing of European colonialist appropriation of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. But what was usual and unquestioned practice in the past has now become criminal – if the international community deems it so.

For example, more than 20 countries so far, not including Canada and the United States, have now officially acknowledged the genocide of Armenians by Turkey, beginning in 1915. Yet, Turkey continues to deny it. They insist that what happened was a “resettlement.” Additionally, the claim is that the numbers have been highly exaggerated and there was much wartime confusion following Turkey’s entry into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers. For Jews, the genocide against the Armenians becomes more historically significant when we learn that Adolf Hitler, fully aware of it, realized that he could get away with the Final Solution and nearly did.

Since the Armenian genocide, there has been the Holocaust, that in logistics, thoroughness and extent far outdid any earlier genocides or those that, so far, have followed: the politically motivated killing of untold numbers of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, the deliberate ethnic murders of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, the religiously motivated shootings and rapes of Muslim Bosnians and Herzegovinians by the Serbs, and the ongoing killings and rapes by the Sudanese in the Darfur region. This is in addition to other, rarely publicized depredations of aboriginal peoples, as in the reaches of the Amazon and what can be called “nibbling” genocide by “the Lord’s Resistance Army” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Serbs, in a bid to enter the European Union, have finally acknowledged the “massacre” in Srebrenica, not, they insist, “genocide.”

But violence is not the only expression of genocide. China is settling Han people in Tibet, demographically overwhelming Tibetans, who will soon become a minority in their traditional territory. And, of course, this is what earlier happened in the Americas, in a process in which violence was the major instrument.

In all the post-Holocaust genocides, the international community – especially the United Nations – was and remains completely ineffective, in large measure because of the perceived interests of some of the permanent members of the Security Council and the economic and political interests of members of the General Assembly, proving the hopeless ineffectiveness and even malfeasance of that international body.

Here is the familiar argument for inaction in the face of major depredations: What (fill in the blank) did or is doing is deplorable but nothing can be done for the victims; it’s already too late. We can better help if we bend our efforts toward assistance rather than condemnation. If we react with force, that would not only be ineffective, it might exacerbate the killings and would reduce the chances for ultimate reconciliation and redress.

Here’s how such an approach may be applied to Turkey and the massacres of Armenians: We cannot restore the victims and we have also to consider that the killings took place in the long-gone Ottoman Empire, so present-day Turks are not responsible. We also have to consider our current interests. Turkey is, significantly, the eastern anchor of NATO, strategically located in a turbulent and threatening part of the world. For Israel, Turkey is a large, nearby, militarily impressive, increasingly unsympathetic Middle Eastern Muslim country.

All this devolves to the age-old circumstance of justice, in any of its guises, being trumped by “practicality,” in any of its guises. It is no wonder that Michel Foucault, in a lucid moment, once said, “Le réalisme, c’est le bon mot des salauds” (“Realism is the slogan of bastards”).

Lemkin’s tireless efforts

Lemkin was born in 1900 into a middle-class Jewish family, much invested in his education; he was tutored by his mother and later acquired a law degree and then a doctorate from a German university. He worked for the Polish government before being discharged when the Poles bowed to pressure by the new German Nazi regime. Lemkin then started a successful and profitable law practice in Warsaw. For someone who subsequently developed a lifelong interest in how conquerors, like the Nazis, fascists, imperial Japanese and Soviet Russians treated subjects of their newly acquired territories, Poland was the ideal “laboratory.” Over time, it had been divided three times between the Germans and Russians, the division after the 1939 Hitler- Stalin pact making the fourth.

Lemkin grew up in an eastern European socio-political environment in flux. At the time of his birth, Jews could still be indicted on the hoary charge of the ritual murder of a Christian child (like Mendel Bailis, who, in 1902, was indicted but eventually acquitted on the charge and whose story was described in Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer). Also at that time, the Russian czarist empire, which included Poland and the Baltic states, forced many restrictions on Jews, geographically, occupationally, scholastically and, as periodic reminders of the full extent of their hatred for Jews, violently.

After being wounded fighting the Wehrmacht, Lemkin escaped the Nazi occupation of Poland by fleeing to Sweden. Remarkably adept at learning languages quickly, he was soon lecturing at a Swedish university. Since Sweden was neutral in the Second World War, Lemkin could correspond with people in Nazi-occupied Europe. He was thus able to acquire edicts of the occupiers, which formed the basis of a book he later wrote, that became useful in the later war crimes trials.

After the war, Lemkin came to the United States – where he remained for the rest of his life – and assisted the prosecution in the Nuremberg process. For the remainder of his life, Lemkin referred to himself as the “unofficial man,” since he was not part of any government or organizational apparatus, but indefatigably lobbied and cajoled diplomats at the UN – and wherever he could find them – to formally define genocide and make it an international crime.

It was largely due to his principled and persistent efforts, undeterred by all the setbacks he experienced, that the UN finally adopted an instrument, the Genocide Convention. According to reports, as the final vote was tallied, Lemkin sat in the UN lounge, crying with the realization of his ultimate success after decades of unstinting and often frustrating effort.

Lemkin died, penniless, in 1959. He had told a friend that the Genocide Convention was an “epitaph for his mother’s grave and a recognition that the many millions did not die in vain.”

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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