Raphael Lemkin - Postwar

Postwar

After the war, Lemkin chose to remain in the United States. Starting in 1948, he gave lectures on criminal law at Yale University. In 1955, he became a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law in Newark. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during the Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down.

Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on December 9, 1948. In 1951, Lemkin only partially achieved his goal when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty. This treaty had confined its consideration solely to physical aspects of genocide which The Convention defines as:

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

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide which he personally defined as:

• "Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group."

• "Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals."

He also outlined his various observed "techniques" on achieving genocide which ranged from:

• Political
• Social
• Cultural
• Economic
• Biological
• Physical:

• Endangering Health
• Mass Killing

• Religious
• Moral

Less well known was Lemkin's view on crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet Union. In 1953, in a speech given in New York City, he described the "destruction of the Ukrainian nation" as the "classic example of Soviet genocide," going on to point out that "the Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different... to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism... the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed...a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order... if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation... This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is as case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation."

On Sunday, 20 September 1953, “10,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent. . .gathered at Washington Square, as many of their compatriots had done on Nov. 18, 1933, in a protest parade that moved up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street and hence to the meeting place on Eight Avenue,” reported The New York Times. Among the marchers were members of clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America and people in Ukrainian folk costumes. Later, an audience 3,000 strong filled the Manhattan Center, while “hundreds more stood on the sidewalks at Thirty-fourth Street.” Ukrainians had gathered to remember “that dark hour in the history of the Ukraine when 5,000,000 inhabitants of the Russian ‘granary’ were starved to quell the resistance of an independent people to the Soviet regime.” Congressman Arthur G. Klein, noted the Times, “urged that the fight for Ukrainian liberation be continued,” while Raphael Lemkin “said that high crime had been employed 100 years ago against the Irish.” The Ukrainian Weekly was more explicit on Lemkin’s speech:

Lemkin’s views on the Ukrainian genocide remained obscured for 55 years. His perceptive analysis of the Ukrainian tragedy remained virtually unknown and hardly ever figured in publications on the famine of 1932-1933 or studies of genocide. The text was brought to public attention only in 2008. Lemkin’s holistic approach to the Soviet regime’s systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation was highly innovative in its time and has not lost its significance today.