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U.N. honors author of world pact against genocide
UNITED NATIONS, June 13 (Reuters) - The United Nations paid its first official tribute on Wednesday to a Polish resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor who coined the word "genocide" and wrote a landmark U.N. treaty to outlaw mass extermination.
Raphael Lemkin, born 100 years ago this month in Poland, died in 1959, a pauper at the age of 58. The American Jewish Committee paid for his burial and gravestone in New York.
Its Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights sponsored Wednesday's gathering of 250 international lawyers, Jewish leaders and human rights advocates to commemorate the 50th anniversary the Genocide Convention, which went into force in 1951.
"He infused the battle against genocide with new insights and passions," said Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the first top U.N. official in memory to mention Lemkin. "His was a lifelong campaign for every human being's right to live in dignity."
Annan, who is traveling in the Middle East, asked his wife, Nane, to deliver his speech. A lawyer and artist, she is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi gas chambers in 1944.
Annan and others called on nations to honor Lemkin's legacy by ratifying a treaty to create the world's first International Criminal Court, which the United States strongly opposes for fear that American soldiers abroad could be prosecuted.
The court would try individuals for genocide, war crimes and other atrocities.
U.S. DELAYED RATIFYING PACT
The Genocide Convention has been ratified by 132 nations. The United States took 40 years to do, with then President Ronald Reagan convincing right-wingers in 1988 to overcome their opposition.
Countries also were urged to back ad hoc tribunals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and for genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia and Sierra Leone.
"In recent decades, we have seen in Europe, Africa and elsewhere a ghastly procession of massacres and killings of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups," Annan said. Lemkin, he said, gave old crimes "a new name."
Lemkin as a teen-ager in 1915 was horrified by the killings of Armenians by Turks. By 1933, a linguistic and legal expert, he petitioned the League of Nations to outlaw slavery and mass killings, which he called "acts of barbarism."
As a Jew in occupied Poland, he became a guerrilla fighter and then went to Sweden, where in 1943 he coined the word "genocide" to describe the mass extermination of Jews, Gypsies and Poles. His parents and 47 relatives died in the Holocaust.
After the war, he persuaded U.S. prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials to use "genocide" in their indictments against Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust.
CREDITED WITH TREATY
He began dogged work in 1946 to get the fledgling United Nations to establish a binding world treaty, which Annan said he accomplished "almost single-handedly."
David Scheffer, the Clinton administration's ambassador for war crimes, who signed the International Criminal Court treaty for the United States, appealed to nations to consider seriously his proposals to exclude U.S. soldiers from the future tribunal's jurisdiction.
"The world needs the ICC, and the ICC needs the United States," Scheffer said.
"Raphael Lemkin could then truly rest in peace," he said.
The Bush administration has said it will not submit the ICC treaty for Senate ratification. Some officials want to rescind the U.S. signature, and the House of Representatives wants to prevent all American cooperation with the court.
Scheffer said it was time to coin a new term -- "atrocity crimes" -- to describe "orchestrated campaigns of murder or widespread violence against civilians" such as genocide, war crimes, torture, slavery or ethnic cleansing.
He proposed a network to alert the world of mass crimes, with "atrocity beepers" given to civilians in remote areas. They could then contact the United Nations or others when large-scale attacks were imminent or under way.
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