Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

In late 1946 a weary Lemkin flew from Germany to a pair of peace conferences in England and France. His proposal was again rejected, here on the grounds that he was “trying to push international law into a field where it did not belong.” “Afterward he was admitted to an American military hospital in Paris with high blood pressure. 10No sooner did he land in the hospital ward than he caught two stories on the radio that convinced him he had to return to the United States immediately. First, on what he would later call the “the blackest day” of his life, he heard the pronouncement of the Nuremberg tribunal. Nineteen Nazi defendants were convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. No mention was made of genocide. But Lemkin heard a second item: The new UN General Assembly had begun deliberating the contents of its autumn agenda. Lemkin checked himself out of the hospital and flew to New York. On the plane he drafted a sample General Assembly resolution condemning genocide.

Closing the Loophole: Moving from Word to Declaration

Lemkin’s aim in New York was to establish an international law that did not link the destruction of groups to cross-border aggression, which accompanied genocide in the Nazi case but often would not. Nuremberg, he noted, had made “an advance of 10 or 20 percent” toward outlawing genocide. 12It had left far too many loopholes through which killers could squirm. Statesmen were interested in preventing war, but they had less interest in genocide. “Genocide is not war!” he wrote, “It is more dangerous than war!” 13War, of course, has killed more individuals in history than has genocide, and it too leaves its survivors permanently scarred. But Lemkin argued that when a group was targeted with genocide—and was effectively destroyed physically or culturally—the loss was permanent. Even those individuals who survived genocide would be forever shorn of an invaluable part of their identity.

On October 31, 1946, Lemkin arrived at the newly improvised UN headquarters, located in an abandoned Sperry Gyroscope war plant on Long Island. 14The entrenched and somewhat impenetrable UN of today was then unimaginable. Security guards were willing to look the other way when the unaccredited, somewhat fanatical lawyer would turn any empty UN office into his home for the day—“like a hermit crab,” a Hungarian friend said. 15Lemkin spent endless hours haunting the drafty halls.

Kathleen Teltsch and A. M. Rosenthal were then cub reporters with the New York Times . Both were fond of Lemkin but recall the horror of many a correspondent and diplomat when the wildeyed professor with steelrimmed glasses and a relentless appetite for rejection began sprinting after them in the corridors, saying, “You and I, we must change the world.” Teltsch remembers:

He was always there like a shadow, a presence, floating through the halls and constantly pulling scraps of paper out of his pockets. He was not loved because he was known as a time consumer. If he managed to nab you, you were trapped. Correspondents on deadline used to run from him like mad. But he would run after them, tie flopping in the air, genocide story at the ready.

Rosenthal occupied the desk nearest the door of the New York Times office, where Lemkin popped his head in several times a day offering a new angle on the genocide story. “I don’t remember how I met him,” Rosenthal says, “but I remember I was always meeting him.” Carrying his black briefcase, he would say, “Here is that pest, that Lemkin…I have a genocide story for you.” 16

Most of the correspondents who bothered to notice Lemkin wondered how he made ends meet. He was learned enough to maintain a quiet dignity about him, but his collar and cuffs were frayed at the edges, his black shoes scuffed. The journalists frequently spotted him in the UN cafeteria cornering delegates, but they never saw him eat. In his rush to persuade delegates to support him, he frequently fainted from hunger. Completely alone in the world and perennially sleepless, he often wandered the streets at night. 17A New York Post reporter described him as growing “paler, thinner and shabbier” as the months passed. He seemed determined to stay in perpetual motion.

However irritating the correspondents and delegates found Lemkin, his efforts in New York were well timed. The images of Allied camp liberations remained fresh in people’s minds; the Nuremberg proceedings had fueled interest in international law; the United Nations had high hopes for itself as a collective security body; and powerful member states seemed prepared to invest clout and resources toward ensuring its success. Around the world, even in the United States, people believed in the UN’s promise. The organization carried with it a grand air of possibility. When UN planners had met in San Francisco in 1945 to complete the UN charter, E. B. White summed up the hopes of many. “The delegates to San Francisco have the most astonishing job that has ever been dumped into the laps of a few individuals,” White wrote. “On what sort of rabbit they pull from the hat hang the lives of most of us, and of our sons and daughters.” 18

The United Nations was new; it was newsworthy; and if you wanted something done, it was the place to bring your proposal. 19Many advocates peddled schemes to the new body. But diplomats quietly learned to distinguish Lemkin (thanks to hefty packages that he thrust upon them containing his memos, letters, and his 712-page Axis Rule ). He was the one who had foreseen the need to ban genocide ahead of World War II. Indeed, when the UN delegates in the new General Assembly began debating whether to pass a resolution on genocide, Lemkin beamed as Britain’s UN delegate pointed out that the League of Nation’s failure to accept Lemkin’s Madrid proposal had allowed the Nazis to escape punishment at Nuremberg for the atrocities they committed before the war.

Ten years of lobbying had taught Lemkin to play up both the values at stake and the interests. He stressed the costs of genocide not only to victims, with whom few in New York would identify, but also to bystanders. The destruction of foreign national or ethnic identities would bring huge losses to the world’s cultural heritage. All of humankind, even those who did not feel vulnerable to genocide, would suffer:

We can best understand this when we realize how impoverished our culture would be if the peoples doomed by Germany, such as the Jews, had not been permitted to create the Bible, or to give birth to an Einstein, a Spinoza; if the Poles had not had the opportunity to give to the world a Copernicus, a Chopin, a Curie; the Czechs, a Huss, a DvoYík; the Greeks, a Plato and a Socrates;the Russians, a Tolstoy and a Shostakovich. 20

With time running out in the General Assembly session, Lemkin homed in on the ambassadors from several developing countries and urged them to introduce a resolution on genocide. His logic—“large countries can defend themselves by arms; small countries need the protection of the law”—proved persuasive. After convincing the Panamanian, Cuban, and Indian representatives to sign a draft resolution, he rushed “like an intoxicated man” to the office of the secretary-general, where he deposited the proposed text. 21Lemkin also got essential support from Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. representative on the UN Steering Committee. Hoping to neutralize anticipated Soviet opposition, he called upon Jan Masaryk of Czechoslovakia. Ahead of the meeting, Lemkin had hurriedly reviewed the works of Masaryk’s father, Thomas Gatfigue Masaryk, who had written extensively on the cultural personality of nations. Lemkin told Masaryk that if his father were alive, he would be lobbying for the passage of the genocide convention. Lemkin urged him to win over the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Vishinsky, saying that the Soviet Union had nothing to fear from the law, as “penicillin is not an intrigue against the Soviet Union.” Masaryk pulled out his appointment calendar for the next day and jotted: “Vishinsky. Genocide. Penicillin.” He called Lemkin within twenty-four hours to inform him that he had persuaded Vishinsky to support the measure. 22