The Man Who Conceptualized "Genocide"
In 1948, the United Nations codified the crime of genocide into international law, as the latest addition to a series of councils and tribunals that followed the Second World War. The efforts of the Genocide Convention are seldom overlooked, yet the war, and in particular the mantra of “never again” adopted after it, is often seen as the driving force behind the convention. However, the essence of the term “genocide” and the way it is conceptualized today are predominantly due to the efforts of Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin.
“Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?”
Lemkin posed this question to the League of Nations in 1933, as part of an effort to criminalize the “crime without a name”, as Winston Churchill eventually called it. Lemkin noticed a trend among perpetrators of mass violence—they tended to be figures of authority who could avoid punishment by their governments. At this point, international law had few provisions to judge leaders, and no clear mechanism of enforcement. Mass killings against civilians of one’s own country could be legitimized under the guises of security and protection.
Lemkin’s efforts to conceptualize the crime of mass killing began in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The perpetrators received few consequences for their systematic physical and cultural destruction of the Armenian people in Anatolia, most notably the principal architect of the genocide, Mehmed Talaat. The lack of substantial international judgment of perpetrators like Talaat prompted individuals to act from within. In 1921, Armenian revolutionary Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat in Berlin and was subsequently tried for murder and acquitted. Tehlirian, recognizing that Talaat would not be convicted in an international court, used his own trial to bring details about the Armenian Genocide to light.
As a lawyer, Lemkin recognized the lack of international statutes to prosecute criminals like Talaat, and began his work conceptualizing such a crime, later coined genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The term genocide combines the Greek stem “genos”, meaning race or people, with the English word “cide”, meaning killing. Note the particular use of race. Though emphasized, Lemkin did not necessarily implicate race as the sole determinant of acts of genocide. Later iterations of his work indicated membership to a group that labels the crime as genocide.
At the 1933 League of Nations conference where he asked his momentous question, Lemkin lobbied delegates to use the term genocide and designate it as a crime. Notably, he recognized the importance in highlighting both the physical violence associated with genocide and its cultural aspect. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, he expands that genocide goes beyond mass murder. Rather, it is the intention to physically and culturally destroy the lives and dignity of individuals solely because of their membership to a group. At the aforementioned conference, Lemkin pushed the use of the terms “acts of barbarity” and “acts of vandalism” in international rhetoric to highlight the physical and cultural violence associated with genocide, though he was ultimately unsuccessful.
After narrowly escaping Poland during the Second World War, Lemkin intensified his work after recognizing Hitler’s rhetoric emphasizing the lack of consequences for the Armenian Genocide. After the war, Lemkin worked on the legal term of Robert Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He had hoped that the trials would use “genocide” to describe the Nazis’ extermination efforts of the Holocaust, however, the term was not used. Still, Lemkin campaigned for an official genocide convention, and in December of 1948, the United Nations held and ratified the Genocide Convention, defining the term of genocide and establishing states’ obligations to prevent and punish the crime.
Decades after the ratification of the convention, however, Lemkin’s question still remains. The definition of genocide ratified by the U.N. is not all-encompassing in how it recognizes groups. Article II of the Genocide Convention describes genocide as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.” It does not include political groups, deemed “politicide” by some, or acts of “cultural genocide” that include measures taken to destroy a group’s religion, culture, or identity. These limitations are a result of the processes by which member states agreed to ratify the convention, and are tenets by which acts of genocide have not been uniformly recognized and prosecuted. For example, some have pushed for the killings of large groups of political dissidents to be considered genocide, as well as acts of cultural erasure like forced assimilation, though these cannot be officially recognized as genocide under the convention’s definition. Moreover, prosecution is not uniform even for groups that are recognized under the convention. Foreign intervention does not have a uniform standard of action, and smaller-scale acts of genocide are not always acted upon.
These scholars argue that Lemkin’s work cannot truly be completed until a broader definition of genocide is set that includes clearer standards of preventative and punitive action. Still, Lemkin’s efforts in creating the Genocide Convention should be recognized as a monumental achievement in conceptualizing and combating genocide. Many characterized his lobbying as obsessive and relentless, as he painstakingly moved from office to office, from representative to delegate, with little sleep or food. Though he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ten times, he never received it. Lemkin’s endeavors took a massive toll on his life, and he passed away at the age of 59, largely penniless and alone, still unsatisfied with his work. Yet though his work may still be incomplete, its echoes are nonetheless heard today, even if just by a single word.
