Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, and the Origins of “Genocide”
Preface: On Wednesday January 10, at the Center for Jewish History, human rights lawyer Philippe Sands will explore how personal lives and history are interwoven in his book East West Street. In this work, Sand connects his own work on crimes against humanity, to an untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg Trials. A conversation with Douglas Irvin-Erikson, author of Raphäel Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide, will follow. He will discuss the ongoing consequences of the concept of genocide, from the Armenian killings of 1915, to the atrocities perpetrated on the Yazidi and Rohingya communities a century later.
CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE. ADOPTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS ON 9 DECEMBER 1948
HAVING CONSIDERED the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world ;
RECOGNIZING that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity; and
BEING CONVINCED that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required,
HEREBY AGREE AS HEREINAFTER PROVIDED
So begins the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified by the United Nations in 1951.
The first inklings of the Convention took form not during World War II, but in the head of a Polish Jewish teenager named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who opened a newspaper one day in 1915. Staring back at him from the page was news of the Armenian Genocide: the 1915 mass murder of approximately 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey.
Lemkin would not have another intellectual encounter with this form of mass murder until 1933, when he learned of the Simele Massacre: the Iraqi mass murder of Assyrian Christians.
In the years between these two encounters, Lemkin studied linguistics at the University of John Casimir in Lvov, philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and law back at John Casimir. He graduated with his legal degree in 1926. Lemkin worked as Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw and, while doing so, wrote about law and worked on the team codifying the penal codes of Poland.
It was the plight of the Assyrian Christians which drove Lemkin to bring together his intellectual encounters with mass murder with his work as a lawyer. In October, 1933, the Legal Council of the League of Nations held a conference on international criminal law in Madrid. Lemkin attended, and there presented to the delegation his first attempt to enter recognition of mass killings aimed against a specific group of people into the international legal lexicon.
He urged the Council to accept his proposal that the “destruction of national, religious, and racial groups” should be declared “an international crime,” and proposed a ban on mass murder. The Nazi delegation to the conference greeted the proposal—introduced by a Polish Jew, of all things—with laughter. The proposal failed. When Lemkin returned to Poland, the Polish Foreign Minister reprimanded him for his remarks. Under pressure, Lemkin resigned from his public position in 1934 and went into private practice.
Five years later, mass murder came to Raphael Lemkin. When the Nazis marched into Poland, Lemkin joined up with a group of partisans in the forest. He escaped into Lithuania when the opportunity presented itself. The majority of his family—with the exception of his brother Elias, Elias’ wife, and their two sons—would die in the war between the machinations of Hitler and Stalin.
From Lithuania, Lemkin made his way to Sweden. There, in addition to lecturing on international finance at the University of Stockholm, Lemkin persuaded Swedish officials to give him copies of the Nazi directives issued to occupied nations. Soon thereafter, Lemkin’s friend and colleague, Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott, invited Lemkin to join him as a professor at Duke. Directives in hand, Lemkin made his way east—via Russia and Japan—to the United States. He arrived in 1941.
Lemkin’s 1946 War Department ID
Lemkin presented the confiscated Nazi directives to the Department of State and the Department of War. When the United States entered Second World War, the military took him on as a teacher and consultant.
It was during this period that Lemkin completed what was quite possibly the most important work of his career, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. In chapter 9, Lemkin, introduced the term and concept of “genocide,” combining the Greek “genos,” or, “race,” with the Latin “cide,” or, “killing.” In this, Lemkin created an entirely new legal conception of killing, one based on the deliberate destruction of a national, racial, ethnic, religious, or political minority by the majority or dominant group. With this piece of writing, Lemkin completed the work he began in Madrid nearly ten years previously.
In 1945, Lemkin advised US Supreme Court Judge Robert Jackson during the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials. Over the course of the trials Lemkin fought to have the word “genocide” introduced into the record, but the British prosecutors objected on the grounds that the word was not listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In 1946 the UN General Assembly convened in Lake Success, NY. Lemkin, determined to have the act of genocide condemned by the highest international legal body, presented a draft of the Genocide Convention to three UN member states: Cuba, India, and Panama. He persuaded them to sponsor the Convention. With the support of the United States, the resolution to ratify the Convention went before the General Assembly. The General Assembly approved the draft of Resolution 96 (I) on December 11, 1946.
Over the next two years, the UN hammered out the wording and details of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide, with Lemkin regularly consulting on the articles of the treaty. In December 1948, the draft of the Convention went before the General Assembly at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. Lemkin, despite his money problems and ill health, was in attendance when the UN adopted the Convention on December 9, 1948. The United States was the first Member State to provide the signature needed for UN treaty adoption.
However, it was also necessary for each signatory state to ratify and adopt the treaty. When the Convention was introduced to the US Congress in 1949, the combination of domestic ideological factors and international policy interests came together to block US ratification of the Convention. In April 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew all human rights treaties from consideration.
Though devastated by the decision of his adopted country, Lemkin would spend the rest of his life working towards the goal of US ratification of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide.
Raphael Lemkin died of a heart attack at the age of 59, in 1959. He is buried in the Hebron Cemetery in Queens. The headstone reads: “The Father of the Genocide Convention.”
The United States would not ratify the Convention until 1988.
His papers are held in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society. be hyperlinked) http://findingaids.cjh.org/?pID=109202
Though the United States would not ratify the Convention during Lemkin’s lifetime, it did have immediate impact. One of the first accusations of genocide to be submitted to the United Nations was a 1951 petition submitted by the Civil Rights Congress titled “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” It charged that the United States was party to hundreds of genocidal legal and extra-legal murders and abuses of Black Americans. However, the petition failed in the maelstrom of racism and Cold War politics which characterized US politics in the late 1940s and 1950s.
The Convention was enforced for the first time in September, 1998 when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of nine counts of genocide, and convicted Jean Kambanda on genocide charges. The first state to be found in breach of the Genocide convention was Serbia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, the International Court of Justice ruled that Belgrade had breached international law in failing to prevent the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, and in failing to transfer persons accused of genocide to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
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