Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

As the language for the genocide resolution was batted around the special committee, some proposed using the word “extermination” instead of “genocide.” But Judge Abdul Monim Bey Riad of Saudi Arabia, whom Lemkin considered the most sophisticated of all representatives, pleaded that “extermination” was a term that could also apply to insects and animals. He also warned that the word would limit the prohibited crime to circumstances where every member of the group was killed. Lemkin’s broader concept, “genocide,” was important because it signaled destruction apart from physical destruction and because it would require states to respond before all the damage had been done. The more expansive term “genocide” was preserved.

On December 11, 1946, one year after the final armistice, the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution that condemned genocide as “the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups,” which “shocks the conscience of mankind” and is “contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.” More gratifying to Lemkin, who was no fan of declarations, the resolution tasked a UN committee with drafting a full-fledged UN treaty banning the crime. If that measure passed the General Assembly and was ratified by two-thirds of the UN member states, it would become international law.

A New York Times editorial proclaimed that the resolution and the ensuing law would mark a “revolutionary development” in international law. The editors wrote, “The right to exterminate entire groups which prevailed before the resolution was adopted is gone. From now on no government may kill off a large block of its own subjects or citizens of any country with impunity.” 23Lemkin returned to his rundown one-room apartment in Manhattan, pulled down the shades, and slept for two days. 24

Closing the Loophole: Moving from Resolution to Law

At the behest of UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie, Lemkin helped prepare the first draft of the UN genocide convention. 25When the official UN process kicked in, however, the Polish lawyer bowed out, knowing he could be more valuable on the outside. In 1947 Lemkin began work on a history of genocide and carried a thick file folder bulging with gruesome details on various cases. He took his cause and himself exceptionally seriously. Later, with full sincerity, he wrote that “of particular interest” to UN delegates were his “files on the destruction of the Maronites, the Herreros in Africa, the Huguenots in France, the Protestants in Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain, the Hottentots, the Armenians in 1915 and the Jews, gypsies and Slavs by the Nazis.” 26Many stuffy UN delegates would eventually agree to vote for the proposed convention simply in order to bring the daily litany of carnage to as rapid an end as possible.

This was a crucial phase. If he kept up the pressure, Lemkin believed the law would at last be born. Rosenthal often challenged Lemkin with the realist reproach: “Lemkin, what good will it do to write mass murder down as a crime; will a piece of paper stop a new Hitler or Stalin?” Lemkin, the believer, would stiffen and snap: “Only man has law. Law must be built, do you understand me? You must build the law!” As Rosenthal notes, “He was not naive. He didn’t expect criminals to lay down and stop committing crimes. He simply believed that if the law was in place it would have an effect—sooner or later.” 27

For a legal dreamer, a man with no experience in Polish politics, and a newcomer to the American and UN political processes, Lemkin had surprisingly sharp political instincts. He had learned one lesson during the Holocaust, which was that if a UN genocide convention were ever to come to pass, he would have to appeal to the domestic political interests of UN delegates. He obtained lists of the most important organizations in each of the UN member states and assembled a committee that spoke for groups in twenty-eight countries and claimed a remarkable joint membership of more than 240 million people. The committee, which was more of a front for Lemkin, compiled and sent petitions to each UN delegate urging passage of the convention. UN diplomats who hesitated received telegrams—usually drafted by Lemkin—from organizations at home. He used the letters to make delegates feel as if “by working for the Genocide Convention,” they were “representing the wishes of their own people.” 28Lemkin wrote personally to UN delegates and foreign ministers from most countries. In Catholic countries he preached to bishops and archbishops. In Scandinavia, where organized labor was active, he penned notes to the large labor groups. He cornered intellectuals like Pearl Buck, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Gabriela Mistral, who published an appeal in the New York Times on November 11, 1947. A Times editorial branded Lemkin “the man who speaks through sixty nations.”

Although Lemkin was determined to see genocidal perpetrators prosecuted, he did not believe the genocide convention should itself create a permanent international criminal court. The world was “not ready,” he said, as the court would mark too great an affront to state sovereignty. Instead, under the “universal repression” principle, genocidists should be treated as pirates had been in the past: Any country could try a genocide suspect, regardless of where the atrocities were committed.

In August 1948 Lemkin cobbled together the funds to fly to Geneva to lobby the UN subcommittee that was overseeing the drafting of the actual text of the genocide convention. 29No longer working at the State Department or teaching, he lived off donations from religious groups and borrowed from a cousin who lived on Long Island. He found his stay in Geneva eerie, as it was the first visit he had paid to the former home of the League of Nations since 1938, when he had lobbied “paralyzed minds” to prohibit barbarity. With “the blood…not yet dried” in Europe, he hoped his plea would be heard differently this time. He also knew that he had a distinct advantage operating in Geneva rather than New York because the UN delegates, away from their headquarters, were likely to be lonelier and more prepared to endure him. Lemkin knew he grated on people’s nerves. Often, before entering a room, he would pause outside and make a pledge to himself not to bring up genocide and instead allow the conversation to drift from art to philosophy to literature, subjects in which he was fluent. If he could bring himself to hold his tongue, he told himself, eventually his companion would be better disposed to his campaign. When he delivered formal lectures on genocide in Geneva, he was less shy. “I did not refrain from reading aloud from my historical files in considerable detail,” he wrote. 30Indeed, he rarely censored his graphic tales of torture and butchery.

Wherever the law went, Lemkin followed. He decided to prepare for the September 1948 General Assembly session with a short rest near Montreux, France. Lemkin recovered some of the strength sapped by years of unceasing commotion. While visiting a local casino, he even invited a young lady to dance a tango. He was captivated by her beauty and recalled, “Every word the girl said was intelligent and meaningful.” She told him she was of Indian descent, born in Chile. Lemkin saw his opening: He informed her that his work on mass slaughter would be of particular interest to her because of the destruction of the Incas and the Aztecs. 31This was one pickup line the young woman had probably never heard before. She soon departed.

When he returned to Geneva, Lemkin attended every single session of the Legal Committee. In between sessions he prepared memos for the delegates. 32He felt it essential that they draw upon historic cases of mass atrocity so the law would capture a variety of techniques of destruction. He ritually reminded the representatives of the old maxim that the “legislator’s imagination must be superior to the imagination of the criminal.” 33The convention’s chief opponent in Britain was Hartley Shawcross, who had prosecuted the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and considered the genocide law a waste of time. Shawcross ran into Lemkin in the hall in the fall of 1948 and remarked, “The Committee is becoming emotional, this is a bad sign.” Lemkin, who was so tired that he could hardly stand up, was heartened. 34The Legal Committee approved the draft and submitted it to the General Assembly, which scheduled a vote on the measure for December 9, 1948.