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  • Forgotten Rutgers prof who coined 'genocide' now getting his due

    The Star-Ledger, New Jersey
    April 12 2014

    Forgotten Rutgers prof who coined 'genocide' now getting his due

    By Seth Augenstein


    It was the "crime without a name." But Raphael Lemkin gave it utterance.

    "Genocide" was the word Lemkin coined in 1944, as Allied troops were
    just beginning to discover the death camps and mass graves left behind
    by retreating Nazi forces.

    Lemkin, a Jew who fled the Holocaust on foot through Polish forests
    but who lost more than 40 members of his family to it, was
    short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize twice in the 1950s, after he
    pushed the United Nations to outlaw the "crime of all crimes."

    He taught at Rutgers and Yale universities. But he neglected himself,
    becoming an ill and destitute and obsessed man who dropped dead on a
    New York street at 59. Only a handful of people attended his funeral,
    and he sank into obscurity, a historical footnote. Much of his later
    life remains shrouded in mystery, including his short stint at
    Rutgers' Newark campus teaching international law.

    But as Genocide Awareness Month again marks the mass exterminations of
    Armenians, Jews, Rwandans and other groups throughout history, a new
    appreciation of Lemkin has reached a critical mass. Rutgers graduate
    research, publication of an autobiography, a new United Nations award
    in his name and even a Sundance award-winning documentary are
    resurrecting the Polish lawyer's legacy.

    But whether Lemkin would feel he won his crusade -- if he could have
    stomached horror after horror in Cambodia, Bosnia, Darfur, the list
    goes on -- is up for debate.

    "Lemkin is a tragic figure -- he did all this work during his lifetime,
    and he died penniless," said Adassa Richardson, a Rutgers student
    poring over the Lemkin papers at the New York Public Library last
    month. "The world didn't want to deal with it. That's heartbreaking."

    "He was pretty much one of the greatest people of the 20th century
    that people don't know about," said Tanya Elder, senior archivist with
    the American Jewish Historical Society.

    AN ADVENTURE STORY

    Lemkin was born in 1900, the son of poor Jewish farmers in
    southeastern Poland, near a town named Bialystok, as he recounts in
    his memoir. News of Armenians being killed en masse by Turks during
    World War I, and other nightmares throughout history, horrified and
    fascinated the teenager. A pogrom in his small town only reinforced
    the lesson that history is a "huge torture place of the innocent," as
    he later recounted.

    American Jewish Historical Society

    "A line, red from blood, led from the Roman arena, through the gallows
    of France, to the pogrom of Bialystok," Lemkin wrote in his
    autobiography, "Totally Unofficial," published for the first time last
    year by the Yale University Press.

    Lemkin thought humanity might yet erase that red line. As a prominent
    Warsaw prosecutor, he used his sway to propose a measure to the 5th
    International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law outlawing
    crimes of "barbarity" and "vandalism." It was 1933, the same year
    Adolf Hitler took power. The measure was tabled.

    Six years later, as the blitzkrieg raged through Poland, Lemkin made
    his escape: on foot, rail and boat from Sweden through Russia and
    Japan to the United States. In the safety of exile in 1944, Lemkin
    published the book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," which detailed the
    Nazi extermination programs. In that book, he coined "genocide" -- a
    compound of the ancient Greek word "genos," meaning race or tribe, and
    the Latin word "cide," to kill.

    At Nuremberg, Lemkin served as an assistant to the U.S. prosecutor.
    But the convictions weren't enough, Lemkin wrote. So he pushed the new
    United Nations to outlaw what he'd identified as the "crime of all
    crimes." He dogged diplomats and prominent politicians around the
    world, playing a game of international politics detailed in his
    memoir.

    After years, he succeeded in getting the Genocide Convention passed
    and ratified in 1951. For his work, he was short-listed for the Nobel
    Peace Prize twice -- but he didn't get it. His health declined, he was
    evicted and lost jobs, as he says in his autobiography, left
    unfinished at the time of his death.

    "As I am devoting all my time to the Genocide Convention, I have no
    time to take a paying job, and consequently suffer fierce privations ...
    poverty and starvation," he wrote.

    "There's a moral force to his story," said Donna-Lee Frieze, the
    Australian scholar now at the Center for Jewish History in New York,
    who edited the volume.

    IMPACT AT RUTGERS

    Lemkin's last job was as an adjunct international law professor at
    Rutgers' Newark campus, historians say. He discussed starting a center
    devoted to the study of genocide, Frieze said. But he didn't live to
    see that happen, dropping dead of a heart attack on 42nd Street in
    Manhattan in 1959.

    Now, however, Rutgers' Center for the Study of Genocide and Human
    Rights, under director Alex Hinton, is helping to revive Lemkin as
    part of the "The Raphael Lemkin Project." During an entire course this
    semester, the Genocide Center has hosted conferences, thumbed through
    Lemkin's personal papers on field at the New York Public Library and
    elsewhere, and started to publish work about him. For Genocide
    Awareness Month, the students and staff hosted conferences on the
    overlooked Rutgers professor.

    "We've always thought of ourselves as 'The Raphael Lemkin Institute,'
    " Hinton said. "More and more people are recognizing his story -- and
    accepting him as a hero."

    "His heart was in the right place," said Marc Lane, a graduate student
    of global affairs, whose study involves looking at prosecuting
    different degrees of genocide. "He threw himself into his obsession --
    and it consumed him."

    The project conferences united academics with a surviving ancestor of
    Lemkin -- and even those who knew him best.

    Nancy Steinson, a young woman who was Lemkin's assistant and friend
    during the final two years of his life, spoke at a conference this
    month. She remembers a man who had been worn down by his years of
    crusading, but who was gentle and thoughtful all the same.

    "He was destitute -- he was hungry," Steinson said. "But he was so elegant."

    In addition to the Rutgers scholarship and the publication of the
    autobiography, a documentary about Lemkin called "Watchers of the Sky"
    garnered two awards at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The
    United Nations also unveiled a humanitarian award in December named
    after the Polish lawyer.

    A LIVING LEGACY

    But at the unveiling of that UN award, members of the delegations from
    Armenia and Turkey got into a heated argument over the century-old
    killings of more than a million people -- and whether it was genocide,
    according to Joseph Lemkin, a second cousin from Plainsboro who
    attended the ceremony.

    Clearly, Lemkin's "genocide" is still a dirty word, more than half a
    century after he coined it. Political realities mean that "genocide"
    becomes a subjective term -- such as when the United States refused to
    call widespread killings in Rwanda in the 1990s "genocide" because it
    would have required intervention on the global stage.

    The academics -- Hinton, Frieze, the Rutgers students -- all point to
    mass killings that return, like a chronic disease of humanity,
    wherever and whenever different races and religions want to eradicate
    one another.

    "He would appreciate that international law has been improved," said
    Jason Hayman, a global affairs doctoral student. "But he would have
    taken issue how it's implemented and enforced. He's probably rolling
    over in his grave."

    But there are reasons to hope, they add. Hinton, an expert on the
    Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, said Lemkin would have been appalled
    by decades of inaction. But he also would have recognized some serious
    improvements in prosecution and deterrence -- especially in the last
    decade, with prosecutions of Bosnian mass killers and intervention in
    Darfur.

    "If you look back to the 1990s, there's a completely different
    landscape now," said Hinton.

    Since Lemkin's genocide law was adopted by the international community
    more than 60 years ago, the killings have continued in different
    corners of the globe. But over the past decade or so, international
    tribunals have prosecuted a handful of mass murderers from Rwanda and
    Bosnia-Herzegovina. Meting out justice -- and eventually deterring the
    killers -- was Lemkin's goal all along, and he knew it would take a
    long time to change human nature, experts said.

    "I don't think he really believed the Genocide Convention was a
    panacea for humankind," said Frieze. "But he thought it was better
    than nothing."

    A HISTORY OF HORROR

    The cases of genocide listed below -- all from the past 100 years -- are
    generally accepted by historians to fit Raphael Lemkin's definition of
    a systematic killing-off of a population or a culture through murder
    and other means. But there are other cases still up for debate,
    including the Stolen Generations in Australia, as well as massacres in
    Burundi, East Timor, Kosovo and the "dirty wars" in Argentina.

    The Armenians, 1915-17

    Some 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey were killed by the
    government. Still a hotly debated part of history, but Lemkin himself
    pointed to it as the first example of modern genocide.

    The Holocaust, 1933-45

    The Nazi state in Germany systematically killed 6 million Jews, as
    many as 3 million Soviet POWs, and hundreds of thousands more gays,
    the disabled, Gypsies and others who didn't fit their vision of racial
    purity.

    Cambodia, 1975-79

    The Khmer Rouge regime killed 2 million, as much as one-third of the
    country's population, in an attempt to bring about a farming utopia.
    People identified with education and modernity -- even those merely
    wearing eyeglasses -- were marked for death.

    Bosnia/Herzegovina, 1992-95

    About 100,000 people, mostly ethnic Bosniaks, were butchered after the
    breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The world was shocked when 8,000
    people were killed at Srebrenica -- the largest massacre in Europe
    since the Holocaust.

    Rwanda, April-July 1994
    (100 days)

    >From 500,000 to 1 million people, predominantly Tutsis, were massacred
    by Hutu-led government forces.

    Darfur, 1950s to present

    Some 2.5 million civilians have been killed, as the Arab-dominated
    Sudanese government tried to dominate African minorities. Although
    southern Sudan retained independence in 2011, violence continues to
    this day.

    Sources: Donna-Lee Frieze, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Rutgers
    University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights,
    University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies


    http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/04/the_man_who_named_horror_forgotten_rutgers_prof_co ined_genocide_now_getting_his_due.html

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