Genocide

From its inception, “genocide” has been a scholarly term. Invented by Raphael Lemkin—a Polish-born Jew, scholar, and lawyer who spoke nearly a dozen languages—in 1944, the term genocide was subsequently codified by the United Nations (UN). It has been a highly debated term in scholarly and political circles ever since.

It was the case of Soghomon Tehlirian that inspired Lemkin to first define, and then create global recognition for, what Winston Churchill called “a crime without a name.” On March 15, 1921, in Berlin, Germany, Tehlirian gunned down Mehmed Talaat in cold blood. Talaat, then Turkish minister of the interior, was one of the masterminds of the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1923. The legal and moral conundrum that Tehlirian could and would be charged with the murder of one person while Talaat and his compatriots would not be charged with the murder of as many as a million people, guided Lemkin's intellectual interests as well as his sense of justice. The incident initiated what was to truly be his life's work.

After trying to warn the world about Hitler in 1933 and living through the 1939 German invasion of Poland, Lemkin provided the world with a term to describe the unspeakable. First defined in his 1944 tome, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin combined the Greek genos (race, kind, tribe) and the Latin cidere (to strike down, chop, beat, slay) to create the word genocide to kill a tribe.

Once defined, Lemkin worked relentlessly for political and legal recognition of his term. Lemkin's years of lobbying, proposing, arguing, and drafting paid off when the United Nations formed the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II redefines genocide and its parameters on the global stage as follows:

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and
• forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A display of skulls of Rwandan genocide victims in the courtyard of the Genocide Memorial Church, Karongi-Kibuye, Rwanda, in 2003. Members of the Hutu ethnic majority tribe reportedly killed as many as 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority between April and July 1994 in the African nation of Rwanda.

In Axis, Lemkin considered genocide to be not only an act fixed in time but also a process with two phases: first destruction, then imposition. Implicit in the notion of process is the idea of logic, planning, and implementation; conscious and methodical efforts aimed to eliminate, in whole or part, another race or ethnic group. Though the 1948 Convention drew heavily from Lemkin's initial definition in Axis, the United [Page 947]Nations document fails to acknowledge his recognition of cultural and political genocide. This omission, conscious and tactical on the part of a global body seeking to create clear and diplomatic guidelines for this newly recognized crime, stands as a location for many volumes of subsequent scholarship and debate concerning the definition.

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