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Salute to a Rights Campaigner who gave Genocide its Name
by Barbara Crossette, NYTimes.com - June 13, 2001
Posted: Tuesday, June 19, 2001 at 04:20 AM CT
UNITED NATIONS, June 12 -- One hundred years after his birth, a
largely forgotten immigrant from Poland who coined the word
genocide and pushed a convention outlawing it through the General
Assembly is being honored here, thanks to a small human rights
institute in New York campaigning to keep his story alive.
The immigrant, Raphael Lemkin, a legal expert and linguist who died
in 1959 at 58, had fought since 1933 to make genocide, which he
first labeled a "crime of barbarity," a recognized and punishable
international offense. The convention, adopted in December 1948,
came into force in 1951. The United States did not ratify it until
1988, in the waning days of the second Reagan administration.
Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Center for the
Advancement of Human Rights, the organization honoring Mr. Lemkin,
said that although 132 countries had now ratified the convention,
and genocide is regarded universally as the worst of offenses, a
number of countries where mass crimes against ethnic or religious
groups have been committed in recent decades have not adhered to
the agreement. Among them are Indonesia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and
Sudan. Overall, most African countries and more than half a dozen
Latin American and Caribbean nations have not ratified the
convention.
On Wednesday at the United Nations, the Clinton administration's
ambassador for war crimes, David Scheffer, and Secretary General
Kofi Annan's wife, Nane Annan, are to speak at the event focusing
on Mr. Lemkin's legacy. (Mr. Annan left Monday night for the
Middle East.) Mr. Scheffer was the chief American negotiator in
the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which will
give a legal home for prosecution of genocide, war crimes and
crimes against humanity.
The treaty establishing the court was signed by Mr. Scheffer on
behalf of the United States on Dec. 31, but the Clinton White
House did not try to fight for its adoption in a hostile Congress
and against the strong objections of the Pentagon, which wants a
guarantee that no American will ever be tried.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said here after a meeting with
Mr. Annan earlier this year that the Bush administration would
never support the court. United Nations officials say the
administration has quietly asked the United Nations whether it can
rescind Washington's signature.
Mr. Lemkin first took up the cause of endangered minorities as a
child in Poland, where he read "Quo Vadis" and became obsessed with
images of early Christians being torn to death by lions in Rome as
the crowds cheered, according to a new biography by William Korey,
a writer on human rights topics. Dr. Korey is on the board of the
Blaustein institute, part of the American Jewish Committee, which
paid for Mr. Lemkin's burial in Queens, where he died after a
heart attack.
By 1933, before the world's attention - and Mr. Lemkin's - turned
to Nazi Germany, he was known internationally for his battle as a
Polish prosecutor to codify crimes against humanity and against
cultural and artistic works of ethnic groups, among them the
Armenians who were the victims of the Ottoman Turks. He fled
Poland for Sweden in 1939 after the German invasion. His parents
died in the Holocaust nearly a decade later, though he did not know
their fate for several years.
By the end of World War II, and with the establishment of the
United Nations, Mr. Lemkin moved to New York to begin his campaign
for a genocide convention.
Writing and teaching law intermittently at Duke University and
Yale, he lobbied endlessly and often annoyingly, according to Dr.
Korey, until the Genocide Convention won a place on the United
Nations' agenda.
"Genocide" first appeared in 1944, the Oxford English Dictionary
says, in a book by Mr. Lemkin, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,"
which was published in the United States by the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace. He told his contemporaries that he had
stumbled on the idea while reading Plato, who used the Greek word
genos to describe a clan or ethnic group.
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