Raphael Lemkin - Looking Back At The Word Genocide

[HyeFedayis]

Author of the word `genocide' - which referred not only to the Jewish Holocaust but also the the Armenian Genocide, when he came up with the concept following the Second World War. `In fact, when Mr. Lemkin coined the term genocide the Armenian events were one of the two archetypes he used in his work'. Mr. Lemkin was Jewish himself.

 

The fate of the Anatolian Armenians during World War I, and especially the inability of the victorious Allies to prosecute effectively the leading Young Turks, deeply shocked the young Lemkin. In the wake of this experience he concluded that an international law against the wholesale extermination of ethnic and religious groups had to be created. In order to achieve this goal, Lemkin was willing to limit state sovereignty, which most legal philosophers and practitioners of international law rejected: “But sovereignty of states implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads, in brief, all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.”

 

As Lemkin stated in his unpublished autobiography, the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians had a lasting impact on him and reinforced his interest in mass violence. Until his death he was working on a broad study of genocides in the history of humankind. Although his manuscripts on the Armenian genocide and on the Holocaust have been touched upon in the last years, the real signifi- cance of his unpublished works has been neglected.

 

"For example, as we speak about the Armenian Genocide of 1915, not everyone realizes that “genocide” is a word that was not coined until 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist. Turkish propagandists know this well. They point out that what happened to the Armenians could be a massacre or a tragedy, but not genocide, simply because the term genocide did not exist back in 1915. This argument is as ridiculous as saying that Cain could not have murdered Abel because the word murder was not yet invented at that time!

 

Mr. Lemkin had repeatedly mentioned in his writings that as a young man he was so troubled by the Armenian mass murders and the then on-going Holocaust that he coined the word genocide and worked tirelessly until the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, on Dec. 9, 1948. " (From: Lemkin Discusses Armenian Genocide In Newly-Found 1949 CBS Interview, Harut Sassounian)

 

http://www.huliq.com/38675/raphael-lemkin-...e-word-genocide

[VartanM]

Nice article, you need to write more

[Yervant1]

"RAPHAEL LEMKIN'S DOSSIER ON THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE" PUBLISHED

 

PanARMENIAN.Net

28.05.2008 16:32 GMT+04:00

 

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ "Raphael Lemkin's Dossier on the Armenian Genocide,"

a stunningly graphic book published by CAR., the Center for Armenian

Remembrance, constitutes an important contribution for scholars,

human rights activists and others seeking to know what the originator

of the term genocide and the "father" of the Genocide Convention had

to say about the Armenian Genocide, the CAR told PanARMENIAN.Net.

 

This timely book, which was published through the efforts of Attorney

Vartkes Yeghiayan, is the perfect antidote to the denialist campaign

that has lately intensified by the banning of a book in Toronto and

its replacement by books by denialist historians Bernard Lewis and

Guenther Levy.

 

It is impossible not to be touched by the eyewitness reports that

Lemkin has meticulously compiled in this dossier. The reader will

quickly be convinced that the brutal campaign against the Armenians

is the very definition of Genocide. This book has the power to inflame

the reader with indignation, sorrow and righteous anger.

 

"Raphael Lemkin's Dossier on the Armenian Genocide" also contains

a lucid foreword by eminent professor Michael J. Bazyler, and a

meticulous, complete bibliography on Lemkin by Eddie Yeghiayan.

 

"Raphael Lemkin's Dossier on the Armenian Genocide" is the fifth book

in the "The Armenian Genocide and the Armenian Case" series put out

by CAR Publishing.

 

Raphael Lemkin was one of the greatest and most influential lawyers

and human rights activists in the last century. Not only did he coin

the word "genocide," but was also the prime mover for the enactment

of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of

Genocide (the "Genocide Convention"), the international law document

that in 1948 made genocide an international "crime of crimes."

 

Distressed by the cyclical slaughter of Armenians by Turks in 1894,

1909, and 1915, Lemkin compiled a dossier and searched for legal

remedies to punish perpetrators of mass murder and to deter and

prevent future genocides.

 

[Yervant1]

THIS DAY IN JEWISH HISTORY / POLISH LAWYER WHO COINED THE WORD 'GENOCIDE' IS BORN

Ha'aretz, Israel
June 24 2014

Raphael Lemkin almost single-handedly persuaded the newly created
United Nations to approve the Genocide Convention.

By David B. Green

June 24, 1900, is the birthdate of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born
Jewish lawyer who coined the word "genocide" and who, in 1951,
almost single-handedly persuaded the newly created United Nations to
approve the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide.

Raphael Lemkin was born in Bezwodne, Volkovysk, in the Russian Empire
(today in Poland), to Joseph Lemkin and the former Bella Pomerantz.

Joseph was a farmer and Bella a painter, philosopher and linguist. As
a young child, Raphael was home-schooled by his mother, and although
he also received a Jewish education, Lemkin was steeped in Polish
and Russian culture as well.

Lemkin, a polyglot, studied linguistics, philosophy and law at John
Casimir, Heidelberg and Lwow (now Lviv) universities, and received his
law degree from the latter at the end of the 1920s. From an early age,
he had been fascinated by tales of human cruelty throughout history,
and it was the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 that provided
much of the impetus for him to enter law school.

>From 1929 to 1934, Lemkin served as a public prosecutor, first
in Berezhany (in Galicia) and then in Warsaw, and also had his own
private legal practice. He also helped to codify the Polish penal
codes, as all the while he studied the ability of international law
to act against crimes against ethnic and cultural collectives. In this
regard, Lemkin came up with two new concepts: "barbarity," which is the
term he used for the destruction of groups, and "vandalism," which is
the word he proposed to refer to the destruction of cultural heritage.

Lemkin participated, and was wounded, in the Polish army's defense of
Warsaw against the German invasion in 1939. Then, having an ominous
sense of the Nazis' murderous intentions, he fled the country,
first to Sweden and eventually to the United States, following a
lengthy journey via Vladivostok and Japan. Lemkin's parents, however,
together with 47 other relations, perished in the Holocaust.

With the help of Malcolm McDermott, a law professor at Duke University
in North Carolina, Lemkin took up a position there in 1941, while
traveling around the United States lecturing about the crimes being
committed by Germany. He had acquired copies of the laws introduced
in the lands occupied by the Germans, material that served as the
basis for his groundbreaking 1944 book, "Axis Rule in Occupied
Europe." It was there that Lemkin first used the term "genocide,"
a neologism based on the Greek for "race" or "tribe," and the Latin
suffix for "killing." He defined it as "the destruction of a nation
or an ethnic group."

For the rest of his life, Lemkin was obsessed with introducing
into international law the prohibition of genocide, which Winston
Churchill referred to in 1941 as "the crime without a name." He
assisted the American prosecution in the 1946 Nazi war crimes trials
in Nuremberg, succeeding in having the crime of genocide entered into
the indictments, and devoted his final years to the goal of having
the UN draft an anti-genocide convention.

Lemkin, who never married, basically had no life outside his lobbying
work at the United Nations, where he effectively took up residence.

The convention that was adopted in 1948, and ratified three years
later, did address the problem of genocide, but only in its physical
sense, whereas Lemkin also pointed to the psychological and cultural
aspects of the crime. Lemkin spoke out, for example, about what he
saw as the Soviet pursuit of genocide against Ukrainians in the 1930s,
as manifested in the destruction of what he described as that nation's
culture, beliefs and "common ideas."

Raphael Lemkin suffered a fatal heart attack on August 28, 1959. At
his death, he left behind fragments of an autobiography, which
were located, edited and published as a book last year by scholar
Donna-Lee Frieze.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/this-day-in-jewish-history/1.600728

[Yervant1]

Raphael Lemkin on the Genesis of the Concept behind the Word Genocide

Armenian News Network / Groong
December 1, 2014


A documentary video entitled "Raphael Lemkin on the Genesis of the
Concept behind the Word Genocide" which includes original film footage
from 1949 and transcript along with commentary, copy of the Genocide
Convention and suggestions for further reading has been posted on the
"Conscience Films" YouTube site.

The full title is "Raphael Lemkin on the Genesis of the Concept behind
the Word Genocide - Connecting the Dots between the Ottoman Turkish
Genocide of the Armenians and the Nazi Genocide, and Working for a
Viable Legal Framework for the Punishment of Genocide: a seminal 1949
television presentation with Quincy Howe as host and discussants
Raphael Lemkin, Ivan Kerno and Emanuel Celler."

Full Program Footage and Transcript are provided by Eugene L. Taylor
and Abraham D. Krikorian.

The URL is: http://youtu.be/CXliPhsI530