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Last update - 16:26 28/04/2008 Pen Ultimate / Genocide. So what? By Michael Handelzalts Tags: Lemkin, genocide Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day - also called Holocaust Remembrance Day - is observed on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan (May 1st this year), according to a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. That date was chosen to commemorate the day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising erupted, but does not coincide with the original Hebrew day on which the uprising began, in 1943, as it was the 14th of Nissan (April 19), Passover eve. The United Nations declared, only in 2005, that Holocaust Remembrance Day should be on January 27, marking the anniversary of the day on which the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. Until 1943 there wasn't even a term for defining the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe, mainly (but by no means only) on European Jews. In August 1941, Winston Churchill spoke in Parliament about "a crime without a name." Earlier that same year, a Jewish-Polish refugee named Raphael Lemkin arrived in the United States, where he spent the remaining years of his life coming up with a name for that crime, and doing his utmost to prevent it from happening again in the future. Lemkin was born in 1900 in a village that is now in Belarus. As a child he read the novel "Quo Vadis" by the Polish writer (and Nobel Prize laureate) Henryk Sienkiewicz, and was deeply moved by the story of the Christians who were persecuted by the Romans in the first century C.E. In his childhood, he had to hide with his family in the woods near their village for fear of pogroms. In 1921, while studying philology in Lvov University, Lemkin read in the newspapers about the trial of Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian, who on March 13 of that year assassinated, on a street in Berlin, Mehmed Talat Pasha. Talat Pasha was one of those bearing responsibility for the mass murder of more than 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks, from 1915 onward. Advertisement Lemkin was amazed to discovered that a person could be tried for homicide, whereas (as one of his professors explained to him) a person implicated in the murder of many people - as part of a policy he was implementing - could not be put on trial, as there was no international law that applied in such an instance. His amazement grew when Jewish anarchist Shalom Schwartzbard was tried in Paris after he assassinated, in May 1926, the Ukrainian politician named Simon Petlyura, thought by many to be responsible for pogroms perpetrated on Jews in 1918-1919 in Ukraine. In Lemkin's view, those assassinations were from the moral point of view "beautiful crimes," as there were no legal means available to deal with the heinous acts that Petlyura and Talat Pasha allegedly committed. Lemkin subsequently changed his field of study to law and wrote his doctoral thesis on the comparative study of national penal codes. He moved to Warsaw and while working as the public prosecutor for the city's district court, embarked on his monumental life work: to devise a legal framework for dealing with a crime perpetrated by an individual or group, with the aim of destroying a nation or an ethnic group. At the assembly of the League of Nations in 1933, he read a paper, prepared at the request of the League, concerning the need to create a legal framework by which international law would deal with crimes perpetrated on specific groups of individuals because of their ethnic, religious or social background. He wrote specifically about crimes of "barbarism" and "vandalism," and mentioned the difficulty of defining, for the purposes of international law, the crime of "international terrorism." At a conference in 1935, he spoke about the need for an international anti-terrorism treaty. One-man task force In 1934 Lemkin was released from his duties as public prosecutor and joined the staff at the Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw, lecturing on family law (my grandfather taught Hebrew and literature there). In February 1940, on the advice of his mother, Lemkin managed to escape from occupied Poland to Sweden, where he lectured, while at the same time compiled the various laws enacted and implemented by the Axis powers in German-occupied Europe. He brought the compilation with him upon immigrating to the U.S., where he wrote his major work, entitled: "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe." Although he based his conclusions on laws passed until 1942, Lemkin proposed, while writing his forward in November 1943 (the book was published in 1944): "New conceptions require new terms. By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc." In the chapter about genocide, Lemkin stressed: "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." Lemkin subsequently served as an adviser to the American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, and the word he coined, genocide, was mentioned in the indictment. However, he saw the verdict, which declared that the defendants were guilty of crimes against humanity and of war crimes, as a failure - since, in his words, "the Allies decided in Nuremberg the case against a past Hitler but refused to envisage future Hitlers or like situations." If one considers the fact that Lemkin was a one-man task force, his accomplishments are astounding. On November 21, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted on a draft of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The next item on the General Assembly's agenda, on November 29th, was the vote on the partition of Palestine, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The General Assembly eventually adopted the convention for prevention of genocide on December 8, 1948; the next resolution it passed was the UN Declaration of Human Rights. On the day the convention regarding genocide was finally adopted, the journalists who were usually pestered and hunted down by Lemkin couldn't find him: Finally they spied him in one of the corridors, sobbing. He had lost 49 members of his family in the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish nation by the Nazis in Europe. During the next sixth months Lemkin managed to convince 20 nations to ratify the UN convention (thus making it legally binding). He was especially proud that Turkey was one of those nations; Israel and Poland were also among the first 20 member states to ratify the convention. Germany acceded to it in 1954. China, which backs the regimes of Sudan and Myanamar, implicated in present-day genocides, ratified the convention in 1951, but with the reservation that it would not accept the authority of an international court (which was established only in the 1990s) to rule on such matters. The U.S., in spite of Lemkin's tireless lobbying, agreed to sign off on the convention only in 1988. Lemkin lost his job and health at some point in the process, and joked bitterly that he had contracted "genociditis." In the 1950s he was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize (author Pearl Buck was one of those who suggested his nomination), but he did not receive it. The manuscript of his autobiography, "Totally Unofficial" - with the words "why" and "so what" scribbled repeatedly in his handwriting on the margins - was rejected by an anonymous editor at Simon & Schuster, the reason being that, "If Lemkin does not win the Nobel Prize, I think the audience for such a book will be very small." The editor added: "I know several relatively well-read college students who not only have never heard of Lemkin, but could not define genocide." I'm afraid that editors in the U.S. and Israel would have reacted much in the same way today. Lemkin died alone and penniless of a heart attack in 1959. Only seven mourners attended his funeral. "Shoah" and "Holocaust" are words charged with many meanings, and they have become worn out because of overuse, abuse and misuse. The term coined by Raphael Lemkin, genocide, is the only word that precisely describes the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and their accomplices on Jews (again, mainly but not only) in Europe between the years 1933-1945. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Security first Foreign Minister Livni tells the PA to ensure terrorists don't exploit Israel's gestures. Terrorist pride Lebanon-based guerillas Hezbollah say they're proud to appear on the U.S. terrorist list.   1.   The Unthinkable 02:27  |  Joseph 04/05/08

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