A new title for those who want to learn more about Raphael Lemkin – his unfinished autobiography, put together ‘from drafts deposited in the New York Public Library’ – brings this discussion of Lemkin’s life’s work by Jay Winter, professor of history at Yale. It’s an interesting review and tells of the difficulties Lemkin experienced. His fate, Winter thinks, is ‘largely [to have] disappeared from history’.
Lemkin was a prophet without honors, descending into illness and poverty and dying alone, in 1959, of a heart attack at a bus stop on 42nd Street in New York City. Seven people showed up at his funeral.
The man who gave the world a definiton of the new crime of genocide wrote at one point:
I find myself pleading a holy cause at the U.N. while wearing holey clothes. My friends at the U.N. “plot” to see that I eat at least one meal a day. I am ashamed and try to limit myself to a bowl of soup when I am their guest.
Despite all this, I think it’s an exaggeration to say that Lemkin has ‘disappeared from history’. He’s not a household word, it’s true; but his name is well known to anyone interested in international human-rights law, genocide and crimes against humanity – and that isn’t only legal scholars but a more general public tuned in to these important topics.
Be this as it may, I find the bigger question Winter pursues in his review handled in a way that is curiously off centre. A detail, though a not unimportant one, is Winter’s saying that ‘Lemkin’s life’s work was to make the destruction of an entire people illegal’. Yes and no. It did make the destruction of an entire people illegal, but it went further than that: for the UN Genocide Covention ‘defines genocide as any of a number of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part (my emphasis), a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. More generally, Winter considers why the law against genocide hasn’t been more effective and why, correspondingly, Lemkin’s achievement has been obscured. He offers several possible reasons, among them: ‘Lemkin worked not in an institution but as a one-man crusade’; the survival and flourishing of the nation state; that globalization hasn’t done much for human rights; the changing nature of war and the illiberal excesses of liberal states; and ‘the Holocaust was so monstrous in its scope that putting other abominations alongside it and saying, yes, this too is genocide, has been difficult’.
That is, to speak frankly, a mish-mash. It doesn’t matter how Lemkin worked, the Genocide Convention was adopted by the UN, as Winter himself emphasizes; and if prevention of genocide really does depend on the death of the nation state, we’ll be waiting a very long time for any improvement in this area. What globalization has or hasn’t done for human rights doesn’t bear specifically on the matter of genocide prevention, and neither does the changing nature of war or illiberal measures adopted by liberal states. Finally, putting other abominations alongside the Holocaust and seeing them as genocide is not at all difficult if in fact they fit the definition.
On the other hand, international law, including the law on genocide, is only as effective as it is – which isn’t always very effective – and powerful geopolitical interests often operate to block global institutions from doing what needs to be done when genocides threaten or occur. That is not Raphael Lemkin’s failure, and this is a more economical explanation than is Winter’s throwing in of everything including the kitchen sink.