While the definition of the word “genocide” is generally understood vernacular to mean something along the lines of “killing people of a different group because of deep-seated

Introduction

While the definition of the word “genocide” is generally understood vernacular to mean something along the lines of “killing people of a different group because of deep-seated

prejudice,” genocide is also (as is commonly known) a crime, and therefore, as with all crimes, has a legal definition. The codification of the term “genocide” into international law (which has been subsequently adopted by the legal statutes of hundreds of nations throughout the world) occurred in the United Nation’s Genocide Convention, in 1948. Unknown to most though, the word “genocide” is not organic to any language. It was invented as a neologism by one

individual, Raphael Lemkin, in the previous century, and half-way through that century codified.

The legal definition of genocide though has been extremely controversial, and has been marked by criticisms of the 1948 Convention’s definition, and alternate definitions and neologisms proposed to solve these perceived issues.

It must be state though, that while the definition of the word has been and is hotly

contested, there do remain some constants. The most important of these is that a convention has

been passed. The Convention has the force of international law, and also the force of law in the

hundreds of countries which have adopted it. In addition, it has also been enforced on several

occasions, though admittedly not as often as some would like. Finally, the Convention has

entered our communal understanding to how the world works. The threat of being taken to The

Hague, and questions as to whether individuals will face genocide charges, is often heard in

newspapers and news reports, and in the scholarly and legal fields there is an understanding that

these are possibilities. As long as the Convention exists, there is no question that an individual

can be put on trial for genocide, the only question is when and under what circumstances.

But there are potential “gaps,”

as William Schabas puts it, to the Convention’s

definition, and they have been the subject of much criticism. One of the main criticisms is that the Convention limits the number of protected groups, the reasons for this will be explained in further detail in the second chapter. Many scholars have proposed alternative definitions to solve these issues, and these definitions have been quite varied. They range from very broad, for instance Pieter N. Drost’s 1959 definition

, or definitions which focus on the motivation of the perpetrator, such as Frank Chalk and Kurt Johassohn who make it clear in their 1990 definition

that genocide is committed by states, to list two examples. In addition, many more scholars have proposed addition neologisms to work alongside genocide to address these other gaps, the most notable of which would be Barbra Hoff and Ted Gurr who posited the creation of “politicide” to address the particular circumstances of the Cambodian genocide.

This thesis will trace the history of the word genocide, from its inception in the mind of a young Lemkin where the first manifestation of “genocide” will be examined in his works, to the process of its codification in 1946-1948 where the legal definition of “genocide” went through many drafts, debates, revisions until it was finally codified into the definition that exists today.

Finally, the enforcement of this Convention will be examined in three case studies, the trials following the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian, and Yugoslavian.

1 William A. Schabas, “ What is Genocide? What are the gaps in the Convention? How to Prevent Genocide?,”

Politorbis, 47 (2009): 33-46.

2 Pieter N. Drost, The Crime of State, vol. 2, Genocide (Leyden: A.W. Sythoff, 1959).

3 Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

Chapter One: Lemkin and the Word

The word “genocide,” as stated before, is not organic to any language. It is the literal brainchild of one individual, a certain Raphael Lemkin, who went on to make the codification of this word his life’s project. As this thesis follows the history of the word genocide and how it has been understood, it is necessary to examine the word in its very first incarnation. But, since genocide was the invention of one individual, it is necessary to understand some of his

background. Inventions do not come out of ether, so a certain understanding of his personality as well as biography is needed.

The story of Raphael Lemkin and his word has been told and retold in almost every single survey text, introduction, paper and lecture on genocide from a broad perspective. This is not surprising. The story itself contains the elements of narrative that appeal to our Romantic notions of a lone genius, “ahead of his time,” which permeate our culture. It is extremely easy to put his story into this prefabricated narrative which inundates our culture and turn it into a trope.

As is always the case, the real story is not as simple but is much more intersting.

Lemkin’s Childhood, as told by Lemkin:

The origins of Lemkin’s birth are also quite fitting. He was born at the very beginning of his century, in 1900, a century that would be called by many, “the century of genocide.”

In addition, the placement of this birth is also prophetic. He was born in Bezwodene, then in the Polish province of the doomed Tsardom of Russia, and now in Belarus. The town is now called

4 Most notably in the scholar Eric D. Weitz’s 2003 A Century of Genocide.

Vawkavysk

and is located in Belarus, but is only sixty-four miles from the Polish border. This region would see invasion and occupation, and the horrific effects and consequences of, not only repeated wars, but also suffer all the catastrophes and life-denying practices of the two great dehumanizing and Totalitarian ideologies of this century; fascism and Communism. His parents were Jewish farmers (technically an illegal profession under the Tsar) and they were a small family with only three children, of whom Lemkin was the middle child.

Lemkin wrote a long, extensive, and unfinished autobiography, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, which describes his childhood to an incredibly specific degree (in fact, for someone who would go on to have such a difficult and troubled life, it is curious that he spent so much detail painting an Edenic childhood. In fact, Lemkin appears to be a rather unreliable narrator, many aspects of his life can be proven false or only semi-truths, so it could be that this wonderful pastoral childhood described is more result of projection). In this autobiography (and in his other writings as well) he pointed to reading the work Quo Vadis by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz as the beginning of his interest and lifelong relationship with prosecution

. Quo Vadis was published in 1895, and is a historical love story between a Roman patrician and a Christian, set during Nero’s persecution of the Christians. The novel takes its name from the conversation in the Acts of Peter, wherein the Saint is fleeing Rome where he meets the Risen Christ. He asks Christ where he is going (“quo vadis” in Latin) and Christ tells him that he is going to Rome to be crucified for a second time. This answer gives Peter the courage to go to the city and be crucified himself. The novel is set during Nero’s persecutions, and contains many lurid and graphic descriptions of Nero’s persecutions. Lemkin attributes this singular moment with

awakening in him to the horrible violence man is capable of inflicting on one another, simply for

5 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (London, 2008), 6.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 12.

belonging to the “wrong” group.

He claims that after questioning why the persecuted Christians simply did not seek help from the authorities, he began reading about the persecutions of

Christians, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, etc. and realized that throughout human history people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs. The driving force behind this early investigation (and what would, along with idealism, be the main driving force in his life), was empathy.

I identified myself more and more with the sufferings of the victims, whose numbers grew, and I continued my study of history…It became clear to me that the diversity of nations, religious groups and races is essential to civilization because every one of these groups has a mission to fulfill and a contribution to make in terms of culture. To destroy these groups is to oppose the will of the Creator and to disturb the spiritual harmony of mankind. I have decided to become a lawyer and work for the outlawing of Genocide and for its prevention through the cooperation of nations. These nations must be made to understand tha[t] an attack on one of them is an attack on all of them.

Unfortunately, as he was wont to do, Lemkin provided different variations on this story so its veracity is questionable, as is the case with other aspects of his biography. In another telling of the story he claims he asked his mother why the Christians did not call the police and realized that the Christians could not have called the police and the hopelessness of their situation outside the protection of the authorities. Or he also claimed he made a mental connection to the

Christians suffering under Nero and his fellow Jews suffering under a nearby pogrom.

But, as John Cooper says in his 2008 Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention;

What is clear is that the young Lemkin had many conversations with his mother about the novel, Quo Vadis, which he read and re-read, and we can appreciate how the theme of the novel resonated with the young Lemkin at a time when his family were [sic] following with apprehension the fate of Beilis in a trail for ritual murder and when the young boy was suffering from constant anti-Semitic spite at school.

8 Ibid.

9 Raphael Lemkin, ed. Donna-Lee Frieze, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2013), 18.

10 Cooper, 11.

11 Cooper, 11-12.

The trial Cooper is referring to is that of Mendel Beilis who, in 1913, was put on trial in Kiev for blood libel, which became an international cause célèbre and criticism of Russia’s antiquated and anti-Semitic legal system.

The Beilis Affair, as it came to be known, also exposed the latent anti-Semitism of Eastern Poland for the first time in Lemkin’s life, and programs did occur in cities in the area, and the timing of both of these events, according to Cooper, created a connection in young Lemkin’s mind between the suffering of all people persecuted on religious grounds throughout history and geography.

Lemkin as a Student and Pasha:

Lemkin would grow up to first study philology, which is not surprising for a man who would go on to invent one of the most successful neologisms in recent memory. He appears to have always had an exceptional skill with languages, and would eventually be able to read in twelve.

Lemkin, like the other iconoclastic and forward thinking philologist, Nietzsche, is more famous for his later works as a thinker than for his exception philology skill. Lemkin credits his transition to studying international law to an interaction with a Professor he had when he was twenty-years-old. The conversation was prompted by Lemkin’s moral indignation at the conviction of Soghomon Tehlirian, who had assassinated Talaat Pasha, the former head of the Turkish police forces, in Berlin.

Talaat Pasha was an extremely powerful Ottoman politician, eventually becoming the Grand Vizier in 1917, and one of the “Three Pashas” and one of the Young Turks, who

effectively controlled the Ottoman Empire. He also acted as the Minister of the Interior during the First World War and was an architect of the Armenian Genocide. After the war, he was in Berlin where he became a target of Operation Nemesis. Operation Nemesis was an operation by

12 “The Beilis Affair,” The American Jewish Year Book, 16 (1914-1915) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23600920.

13 Steven Leonard Jacobs, Lemkin on Genocide: Written by Raphael Lemkin (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 5.

the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, an Armenian Independence force which predated the genocide, which embarked on assassinating individuals responsible for the genocide. Tehlirian was one of their successful assassins, renting a house next to the one Pasha had rented in Berlin, and eventually shooting him in broad daylight with a Luger pistol. He was promptly arrested, and put on trial in Berlin, where he was eventually acquitted on an insanity plea, but not before creating huge controversy over the questions of sovereignty and vigilantism,

which lead to Lemkin’s argument with his professor.

Apparently he asked the professor why they had not, instead, simply arrested Pasha, as he was obviously a great criminal responsible for the deaths of about one and a half million people.

The Professor told him that there was no law prohibiting what Pasha, or the Turkish State, had done during the Great War. Lemkin pressed further and was told that sovereignty protected Turkey and her government’s officials, and it was up to Turkey to decide what the Turkish State would or would not do, who to kill and not kill, within Turkey. The Professor then, in an attempt to make the concept of national sovereignty more clear to Lemkin, made an analogy to a farmer who owns some chickens. If this farmer were to kill some of his own chickens, what matter is that to us? To which Lemkin apparently replied, “the Armenians are not chickens”

which solicited a strong (and accurate) rebuttal from the professor explaining that he was naïve and did not understand anything of international law. Regardless of the accuracy of the details of this story (though, there is no reason to doubt this particular anecdote), this was the incident that Lemkin accredited with pushing him to study law.

14 Joseph Kanon, “Operation Nemesis,’ by Eric Bogosian,” The New York Times, April 16, 2015, Sunday Book Review.

15 William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin (New York: Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, of the American Jewish Committee, 2001), 8.

This background is necessary to understand why in 1933 there were proposals being made by a young Polish lawyer to ban a “genocide”-like concept; a combination of “the crimes of barbarity” and “acts of destruction.” Lemkin, he stated repeatedly, had been looking for an international crime relating to the murder of groups of peoples for belonging to a group (to put the concept at its vaguest definition), and having found none, he devoted his life to creating and enforcing one. In 1933 the world was first exposed, in a serious way, to this concept and

proposal where, between the 14

and 20

of October, 1933, at the 5

Conference for the

Unification of Penal Law in Madrid a proposal from Lemkin was read out to amend international law towards this goal. Strangely, Lemkin later wrote about presenting this and seeing the

representatives from the Third Reich walked out on his presentation, even though it is known that Lemkin did not give this presentation in person and instead had it read aloud to the Conference on his behalf. This is perhaps the most curious instance of Lemkin being an

unreliable narrator of his own past, as it is quite a departure from reality. Whether or not one had gone to Madrid to give an address in person or instead delivered it to be read aloud would be quite simple to recall, one would think, and such a serious deviation, misremembering or misrepresenting what country he was in at the time, is enough evidence to suggest that one not take Totally Unofficial as a completely reliable source. Regardless, this Convention would not only launch the concept of what would become “genocide” onto the international stage, but also would set Lemkin’s own life on being its advocate. Lemkin could not deliver the address in person because he was a public prosecutor for the city of Warsaw

at the time that he submitted his proposal, which was not received well by National Socialist Germany (who dismissed him as an “idealist”) or with the skittish Polish government who were concerned about offending the

16 Ibid.

Germans.

Because of this, criticisms were immediately leveled at him for taking too bold of a stand for a civic employee, and he promptly resigned his post.

The publicity that surrounded Lemkin’s proposal did not fail to attract hostile attention. Warsaw policy makers, already jittery about Hitler’s intentions, were irritated that Lemkin had not checked with the Foreign Office about his proposal.

Polish foreign minister Josef Beck denounced him for “insulting our German friends.” Government-inspired newspapers attacked him as a foolish idealist. If he wished to continue his “crusade,” he knew he would be obliged to retire from his government post. Lemkin quit his public prosecutor job and launched a full-time campaign against “the crime of barbarity.

Lemkin’s Law, The Original Concept

The logic of Lemkin’s proposal is clear, straightforward, and simple. It begins by

pointing out that international laws do exist and it is possible to commit a crime against “the law of nations (delicta iuris genitium).”

When one commits those crimes, regardless of the State they committed the crime in or the State in which they are found or apprehended, they will be punished as the jurisdiction for these crimes is the entire globe. These crimes are unique, and recognized by humanity as being particularly reprehensible, so much so as to warrant no sanctuary. “The principle of universal repression does not apply to all crimes, but only those considered so particularly dangerous as to present a threat to the interests, either of a material nature or of a moral nature, of the entire international community.”

He quotes the 1

Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, held in Warsaw in 1927 and lists the crimes which were agreed to warrant the abdication of sovereignty;

a) Piracy,

b) Counterfeiting of coins, bank notes and securities c) Trade in slaves

17 Ibid., 12.

18 Ibid.

19 Raphael Lemkin, “Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations,” presented to the 5^th Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, Madrid, 14-20 October, 1933.

20 Ibid.

d) Trade in women or children,

e) Intentional use of any instrument capable of producing a public danger [terrorism], f) Trade in narcotics,

g) Traffic in obscene publications

Lemkin then points out that this list of crimes is not fixed and has been amended in the past,

specifically in the The Hague Congress of 1932. For example, he points to a certain named international offense “international use of any instrument capable of producing a public danger,” which the brackets point out is the definition of the vernacular, terrorism. Lemkin, correctly, points out that terrorism is a specific phenomenon, namely, dependent on the position of the actor (terrorist) with their political and sociological goals. This is an identifiable

phenomenon of human behavior, a specific crime that is distinct from others, and not listed in the The Hague Conference of 1932, but has been banned in international law nonetheless. Similarly, then, Lemkin proposes to expand international laws jurisdiction to the fundamental crime

Lemkin believed to have been missing since he (supposedly) spoke with his professor when he was twenty. Lemkin then proposed “to place among the offences of law of nations the following offences:

a) acts of barbarity, b) acts of vandalism,

c) provocation of catastrophes in international communications, d) intentional interruption of international communications, e) propagation of human, animal or vegetable contagions.

Of these proposed crimes, it is the acts of barbarity and vandalism which are of interest.

Lemkin’s proposal to Madrid is well fleshed out and he explains each of these acts in detail. In his section explaining “acts of barbarity” he states that there are people who commit crimes against individual persons, but have the broader intention of attacking the group that that

21 Ibid.

22 Something which would not be seen in the later 1948 Genocide Convention.

23 Ibid.

individual belongs to: not only to hurt them, “but also to cause damage to the collectivity to which the latter belongs.” Lemkin defines acts of barbarity as “acts of extermination” against

“ethnic, religious, or social collectives whatever the motives.” He identifies “massacres, pogroms, actions undertaken to ruin the economic existence of the members of a collectivity, etc.” specifically as ways of committing the crime of barbarity, though obviously also includes the “etc.” Already, this definition contains one aspect of Lemkin’s notion of genocide which would later be dropped from the 1948 Convention, the idea that attacking the economic security of a group was a form of barbarity or genocide. “Acts of vandalism” is explained more or less as what is now called “cultural genocide” and would become, along with political genocide, a contested issue at the Genocide Convention. It would eventually be removed from the

Convention’s definition of genocide, and the repercussions of this decision are still felt to this day. Lemkin defined vandalism as

the form of systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage in which the unique genius and achievement of a collectivity are revealed in fields of science, arts and literature. The contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole, forms of the wealth of all humanity, even while exhibiting unique characteristics.

In the opinion of this author, the use of the word “vandalism” has an appropriate poetic connotation. The word “vandalism” comes from the Vandal peoples who sacked the city of Rome and have forever been associated with the destruction of civilization. While it is

historically inaccurate; Vandals, vandalism, and the Sack of Rome still bring to mind Romantic images

of the material and cultural wealth of Rome and civilization, built over thousands of years, being destroyed in a frenzy of looting. This image is fitting as Lemkin was referring to cultural genocide, destroying the ability of a culture to continue to survive, which the extremely

24 Ibid.

25 No doubt influenced by the many paintings of this scene which have been produced over the years.

simplified narrative of “the Sack of Rome followed by the Dark Ages” is a hyperbolic example of.

The War:

Lemkin’s work on these concepts would be halted by the Second World War and the invasion of Poland. He managed to leave occupied Poland, after having served ineffectually in the Polish army where he was shot in the hip during the siege of Warsaw in the fall of 1939.

He was forced to escape, “Lemkin’s initial thoughts were to flee to safety to either Lithuania or Sweden and then move on to the United States, places where he had already established good contacts.”

He went first to visit his parents, where he tried, ineffectually, to persuade them to flee Poland with him, and then made it to Lithuania. He procured a visa to Sweden quickly, and went to Stockholm, where he taught law at the University of Stockholm. It was in Stockholm that he decided to study occupation and colonization, along with the concepts of barbarity and

vandalism, through the legal codes imposed by the Third Reich in her occupied territories. It is this work, the analyses of the laws and statutes he could obtain while in Stockholm, that would become the famous Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of

Government, Proposals for Redress in which the word “genocide” would first be introduced to the world. This work is an analysis of the legal codes the Third Reich put in place over countries it had conquered throughout Europe. The first section examines these legal codes on a country- to-country basis, while the second section of the book makes a broad sociological and historical argument on colonization as a practice, and eventually introduces, for the first time, the concept of genocide. Genocide is defined explicitly in Axis Rule by a long, two-part definition, and then a

26 Paul R. Bartrop and Steven Leonard Jacobs, Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection (Santa Barbra: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 1301.

27 Ibid.

chapter is spent explaining the phenomenon, its history, and its execution by the Third Reich.

While in Sweden, he procured a position at North Carolina’s Duke University through a friend, Malcolm McDermott, and his American visa arrived in the spring of 1941, and he quickly caught a train on the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, where he sailed to Japan to catch a steamer going to British Columbia and Washington, where he caught a train to Durham, North Carolina, via Chicago, and arrived in the middle of that year. He lived and worked at Duke during the buildup to war, and, when America finally declared war, he received an invitation to be the chief consultant of the Board of Economic Warfare, under Vice President Henry Wallace, in 1942.

This board was tasked with regulating international trade in order to provide the United States’

industrial capacity the raw materials to engage in total war.

Lemkin as the Inventor of “Genocide”:

Lemkin himself is not the subject of this thesis, nor are the details of his life of great importance here. This is not a biography, and therefore, details of his family life and his personal hardships leaving Poland and during the war have also been left out. What has been included has been judged to play some role or shed some light on the man that would eventually produce this word, especially in relation to how this word affected his life. This is just to say that the above abridged biography has had a teleological focus; Lemkin producing the neologism. From this point of the story, after Lemkin has published a book containing the word, his definition of it, and an explanation of it, the focus can be on the word itself.

Addressing a Need:

While Lemkin already had a concept of genocide which he had finally, after many years,

been able to turn from a vague recognition that persecution is, at some fundamental level, the

same, to a fully thought-out and defined new word, the rest of the world had not embarked on

this task with him and still existed in a genocide-less state. It was the Nazis and the Holocaust which forced the rest of the world to acknowledge what Lemkin had already realized arguing with his professor; there needed to be a recognition of what had happened and a mechanism in place to prevent “it” from ever happening again. Many works on the word genocide points to the fact that in 1941, three years before Axis Rule would be published, a recognition of this absence was pointed out in the public sphere. Winston Churchill pointed out that there was no word in English to convey the crimes of the German occupation of Eastern Europe. That this example is always used unsurprising, as it is a wonderful coincidence of history where a towering figure clearly states the historical issue at the time, in this case a nameless concept, and our protagonist responds with a solution. On August 24

, 1941, Churchill was describing German actions in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union and state;

Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.

And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

Of course, this was only the beginning of what would become the defining image of this “crime without a name.”

There is some justification in the attention that this passage of Churchill’s speech receives, Lemkin himself cited the speech in his later works, namely his paper “Genocide: A Modern Crime” and, as stated before, it makes for an excellent narrative. But the lack of a proper word to define a concept is not enough cause to necessitate the creation of a word. Many

languages have untranslatable words which would make excellent additions to the English language and yet do not find their way into the dictionary, let alone concepts which have yet to be defined in any language. Why did Lemkin decided to invent a word? Lemkin the philologist

28 John B. Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 4.

explains himself in his unfinished massive textbook he hoped to publish: Introduction to the Study of Genocide. Here Lemkin explains that he understands genocide as a phenomenon which has existed throughout human history, yet remained unnamed. He then claims that it is necessary to produce a new word for this ancient phenomenon, as the current state of affairs has seen this phenomenon unleashed on humanity with a new ferocity as seen in both the recent world wars.

“It was necessary, however, to coin this new word because the accumulation of this evil and its devastating effects became extremely strong in our own days.”

He points out that the Second World War gave us other neologisms, notably from the much more adaptable and inventive German language, such as blitzkrieg.

Lemkin justifies the creation of a new word in a rather beautiful way, yet unfortunately it is not necessarily the must intellectually rigorous justification.

He states,

Although words can be created spontaneously, like poetry they are essentially the reply of man [sic] to a social need. As these needs emerge and become

crystallized the necessity arises to describe them as shortly and as poignantly as possible.

As if he knew when writing this that justifying neologisms as a form of poetry is not the most analytically rigorous of justifications, he then proceeds to offer fourteen different scenarios which can produce new words; including scientific development, the needs of social movements, simple desire for novelty, the work of private authors to name a few. Curiously he mentions George Eastman and his invention of a brand name, “Kodak,” which Lemkin claims provided the guiding principle for the creation of his neologism: “First. It is short. Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It does not resemble anything in the art [sic] and cannot be

associated with anything in the art except Kodak.”

29 Jacobs, 20.

30 Jacobs, 21.

31 Ibid.

32 Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 41-42.

The concept of “Acts of Barbarity and Vandalism” certainly did need some clarification and brevity. The narrowing down of these concepts to wars waged on national groups was first publicly expressed by Lemkin in 1943, where Lemkin presented the concept of ludobojstwo which is the mashing of the Polish words ludzie, meaning people, and zabicie, meaning killing.

Unfortunately, little in the Polish language is as succinct and clear as “Kodak” and ludobojstwo had little chance of catching on in the international stage. Instead, Lemkin worked on a series of attempts to find a word that could work. Some of the other options which Lemkin considered, as well as his thought process behind genocide, can be found in a newspaper article which was likely one of the first introductions to the word “genocide” for many people in the United States.

While the word genocide had been used earlier in a Washington Post article from November 1944, it was only used in passing; “the Germans have committed genocide in virtually all of the countries of Europe which they have occupied.”

The New York Times introduced the public to Lemkin himself and explained his word in much further detail. On October 20

, 1946, the New York Times ran a small story by Waldermar Kaempffert entitled; “Genocide Is the New Name for the Crime Fastened on the Nazi Leaders.”

The article explains that the word genocide was necessary, as the Nazi leaders had not attempted to kill individuals, but rather entire groups. The article notes that the word was used in the courtroom, and that both Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Sir Hartely Shawcross leveled

accusations of genocide orally at Nuremberg. The article then introduces Professor Lemkin as the originator of this word; Kaempffer explains that “mass murder” was not an appropriate accusation as the targets were not individuals or handfuls of individuals, but entire populations.

33 John Q Barrett “Raphael Lemkin and “Genocide” at Nuremberg, 1945-1946,” in The Genocide Convention: Sixty Years After its Adoption, ed. Christoph Safferling and Eckart Conze (The Hague: T.M.C.Asser Press, 2010), 37.

In addition, simple conquest and colonization was not appropriate, because unlike in, for instance, Latin-America which produced multiple mestizo, blended and unique cultures;

“Populations have been ‘germanized,’ ‘italianized’ and ‘magyarized,’ but only in the sense that a conqueror has imposed his will on another people without actually destroying them. Besides Germany made no attempt to ‘germanize’ Jews and Poles. A new word was needed to define the particular crimes of which the leading Nazis were found guilty.”

Instead a new word had to be created, and the basic principle of ludobojstwo was translated into the classical languages.

Genocide in the public sphere:

Genocide would be this new word. The ninth chapter of Axis Rule in Europe introduces and defines the concept of genocide, along with its manufactured etymology.

New conceptions require new terms. By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc.

Taken at face-value this definition has two important characteristics. First, it implies that

genocide is the total physical destruction of a group, which is what genocide commonly refers to in everyday parlance. Second, Lemkin identifies the potential targets of genocide national and ethnic groups. Lemkin also proposed ethnocide,

which now is sometimes used as an alternate version of cultural genocide, as a synonym or alternative to genocide. Lemkin then goes on to describe genocide, and in his description it is clear that the concept is much broader than his stated, simple definition. First of all, he defined genocide as a two-staged phenomenon. This nuance has been lost in modern legal language, and modern conception of genocide which

34 Waldermar Kaempffert, The New York Times, October 20^th, 1948, E13.

35 Emphasis on the manufactured, during the Genocide Convention there would be arguments based on the etymology of a word, created by a living and present individual.

36 Raphael Lemkin Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Clark: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2005), 79.

37 Presented as an alternative in the footnote of the philological explanation of genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

usually focuses entirely on the physical killing. This though, was only the first stage in Lemkin’s conception of genocide; “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group,”

the second was “the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.”

For Lemkin, then, genocide was a process wherein one group is not only destroyed, exterminated, or made to disappear, but are then replaced by the oppressing group. This has happened many times throughout history, and is associated with colonization. Conceived like this, the conquest of Europe by the Proto-Indo- Europeans and the destruction of the Celtic hegemony of Western Europe would be the prime examples of genocide, along with the colonial escapades of the European nations; the settler colonies of South Africa, Australia, and the North American colonies which make up the commonwealth, the colonialization and suppression of the American Indian throughout North and South America, and the American conquest of Northern Mexico represent other more recent examples. With this in mind, it is not surprising that Lemkin did write extensively on

colonization. Lemkin again argues that “denationalization” was not an appropriate word making three points; first, that it fails to describe biological destruction, second, that it only describes the destruction of the oppressed people and not their replacement (which is essentially the modern definition of genocide) by the persecuting group, and finally, that denationalization already has a definition, “to strip one of their citizenship.” Other words which are specific to the oppressor groups, “Germanization” and “Magyarization” for example, also fail because they do not apply to the generic human phenomenon he was attempting to define. In addition, they fail because

“Such a term is much too restricted to apply to a process in which the population is attacked, in a physical sense, and is removed and supplanted by populations of the oppressor nations.”

In the

38 Lemkin, 79.

39 Ibid.

40 Lemkin, 80.

world’s introduction to the concept of genocide, the fact that Lemkin was envisioning a process of extermination and plantation is repeated mentioned and emphasized by the author.

The word “genocide” is one of the most successful neologisms in recent memory. A word that began in the mind of a young Polish philologist turned lawyer, the existence of the act was brutally demonstrated to the world with both the scale of the Nazis civilian casualties, but also in the shock that the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust produces. It was at that time that Lemkin was there, publishing Axis Rule in 1944, giving the world a word to use to describe the indescribable. The rapid success of the word can be seen in its rapid spread throughout the public sphere, first, in newspapers and editorials, then later into the world of international law. The Allies decided to try the Nazi war criminals, and there genocide would make its first official appearance.

Nuremberg, the Holocaust on Trial:

While Lemkin would not actually play a central role in the United States’ and Great Britain’s prosecution of Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, the trials themselves would have been quite different if Lemkin and his work did not exist, and he influenced both parties. When President Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to represent the United States in Europe, Lemkin wrote to the Justice pointing to both his article “Genocide-A Modern Crime” and also to the publication of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and its availability in the Supreme Court’s library. Jackson did indeed take Axis Rule with him to London, and spoke highly of the book. Lemkin had also been appointed as his adviser.

When a legal team was put together in London in preparation for Nuremberg and prosecutions, Lemkin’s work was used as

41 Bartrop and Jacobs, 1301.

a good scholarly overview of the Nazi legal code, which, being fundamentally a survey text of Nazi legal codes in each occupied country with a specific analysis of that country’s legal situation, Axis Rule primarily was.

Lemkin himself was invited to London by the War

Department, where he played a minor role for the O.S.S (the Operations of Security Services, the Central Intelligence Agency’s forerunner),

Shea and Alderman [of the American delegation to London to prepare the case work against the Nazi war criminals] subsequently chose Lemkin to serve on a

‘control squad’ that would, by commissioning from OSS a micro-trial brief or some other sample of its work, take ‘test borings’ on what it was doing.

Unfortunately for Lemkin, these men were reluctant to bring him on fully as he was considered, by U.S. Navy Commander James Donovan, to have “an emotional approach to problems, personality difficulties, etc.” which was probably fair assessment of his temperament. While Lemkin would be cruelly slandered as an idealist many times throughout his life, the accusation is based on some merit, and the O.S.S. and United States armed forces, especially at this time, were primarily focused on a pragmatism and winning the peace, rather than justice necessarily.

As stated earlier, the word “genocide” was levelled as an accusation at the trials itself on two occasions, both coming from Englishman. Genocide, though, was still not an international crime, it was only a neologism making its first appearances on an international stage. But, the word did appear in the Nuremberg trail itself. It can be found in the Third Count of the indictment, which covered war crimes,

They [the Nazis] conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz. the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others.

Genocide had finally been leveled in an official indictment in an international trial. At this point, Lemkin’s idea, in a specifically named international crime, was used in an official

42 Ibid.

43 Barrett, 41.

international court of law which carried out real justice on a select few men. But there was still one serious flaw, the men were not convicted of genocide, as such a crime was still only a concept appearing in the press and in legal circles. For the concept to reach real success, it had to be codified internationally, as Lemkin had stated in Madrid over a decade earlier, and he would spend the next few years doing exactly that.

Chapter Two: Codifying an Idea

While Lemkin was successful in turning the concept in his mind of ending a people’s

ability to continue their existence into a single word, and was that word’s successful advocate to

the point that it was actually used in the Judgement of Nuremberg, the word was still not codified

into international law. For that, the 1948 Genocide Convention had to occur which would codify

the young term genocide into the law that exists today, and has been adopted by the legal codes

of hundreds of nations. The Genocide Convention did not occur in an historical and political

vacuum though, and the world of 1948 influenced the formation of this law. While the post-war

period was a short window of time where the world came together to pursue and form such noble

institutions and ideals as the United Nations, the Human Rights Declaration, and the Genocide

Convention, this peace was very fragile, and the tensions can of the Cold War and between the

West and what would later be called the “third world” are apparent. To trace the history of genocide it is necessary to go into the minutes of the meetings, commissions, debates and votes which comprised the Genocide Convention, and follow how the concept went through a number of drafts and revisions. This is not just necessary to follow the history of the word as an

intellectual exercise, but also because it is in this Convention that the roots of many of the later criticism of the definition of genocide can be found, and this chapter will follow the creation of these “gaps,” as Schabas put it. In this chapter, the word “genocide” will go from Lemkin’s two- part definition, and eventual emerge as a codified law entirely which is entirely different from the one Lemkin proposed, and how and why that occurred will be, hopefully, illuminated.

While genocide had become a legitimized neologism, it was best understood in the context of the recent Nazi crimes, or the general concept of attempting to exterminate a peoples.

While the term had been included in the indictment, it was not included as an official charge as

“it [genocide] would ultimately be removed by the jurists themselves; they concurred that they were bound by the statue of the International Military Tribunal, which did not contain a charge of genocide.”

This troubled Lemkin greatly, and he would later describe later as “the blackest day.”

Genocide also would not be entered into a dictionary, Random House’s American College Dictionary, until 1948, though later that year it was entered into the more authoritative American, Webster’s New International Dictionary. The British being more conservative with their most successful export, their language, the Oxford English Dictionary would resist entering the word until the mid-seventies.

Genocide would remain a neologism until it could be codified and receive the force of international law, though the ability of that force to act as a deterrent or effectively prosecute transgressors is a contentious issue. Lemkin understood this, and

44 Bartrop and Jacobs, 1302.

45 Korey, 25.

46 Ibid., 25-26.

understood the dangers of not codifying the crimes of the Nazi State. In a handwritten note, Lemkin states

Furthermore, the Nuremberg cases are not yet closed, and the Tribunal is trying several cases on the basis of the so called Nuremberg principles. It might be unwise and even dangerous to give the defense lawyers of the Nazi war criminals a powerful weapon in their hands. They might say that the law of Nuremberg on the basis of which, their elites are prosecuted is not clear enough [illegible] it requires codification…moreover the argument that the crime of genocide is a crime against humanity is incorrect. It is basically an international ethics which is independent of war.

This, the codification genocide required, would come with the passage of the Convention. The fact that the Convention exists has been attributed personally to Lemkin by many, in fact his epitaph declares him to have been “the father of the Genocide Convention,”

and this assessment is not without merit. Lemkin made two attempts to get the international community’s attention on passing a law banning genocide. The first was at an international legal conference in

Cambridge, where his proposal was dead on arrival, and the second was in Paris, where he was essentially told that genocide was not a priority.

He became severely ill in Paris, which was ultimately fortunate as he was able to hear on a hospital radio about the first General Assembly of the United Nations in Lake Success in New York.

He left France as soon as possible to go to the General Assembly and petition the United Nations to address genocide. Here, Lemkin did find success, and on November 2

, 1946 Cuba, Indian, and Panama officially petitioned the United Nations to Draft Convention a Genocide Convention.

The Beginning of the United Nations Process:

This petition is the official beginning of the Genocide Convention and the first document in the legal history of genocide. The document itself (A/BUR/50) is extremely short, and

47 Raphael Lemkin, The Raphael Lemkin Collection, Box 6, Folder 9, “Criticism of the Nuremberg Judgement,”

undated.

48 Korey, 3.

49 Ibid., 26, 27.

50 Ibid., 27.

interestingly enough, does not define genocide. Instead, the word is used as if the reader already has an understanding of the concept, which was, of course, very likely. The petition does

describe genocide though, and its wording is important. First of all, the petition names groups which can be victims of genocide; “Whereas throughout history and especially in recent times many instances have occurred when nation, racial, ethnical or religious groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.”

Which groups can and which groups cannot be the victims of genocide has been an issue of contention, and so it should be noted that in the very first legal mention of genocide, the implication is of national or religious groups, and appears to have the same spirit as the current Convention’s definition. The potential for political groups or political ideas to be victims of genocide is not mentioned. The petition is also clearly referencing the Holocaust and the crimes of Nazi Germany in all but name, which is understandable and demonstrative of how the Nazi crimes forced the world to become open to Lemkin’s ideas.

Finally, though, this first paragraph does mention cultural genocide. “…but also resulted in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups.”

This sentence appears heavily influenced by Lemkin, particularly in regard to his writings on the value to human existence that diversity of culture represents, which seemed to be one of the driving forces in his campaign against the destruction of nations. Finally, this petition asks the United Nations to define and ban genocide, and provide a system by which to prevent and punish the crime, “in the same way as other international crimes such as piracy, trade in women, children and slaves, and others.”

Again, Lemkin’s hand seems quite heavy as this reads essentially the same as his 1933 Madrid proposal.

51 William Schabas Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

Armed with this petition, Lemkin’s task was much easier and he was able he continued to petition members to adopt a resolution. He was successful and on December 11

, United Nations Resolution 96(1), the Draft Convention Resolution for a genocide convention (essentially a declaration of intent to write a draft for the Genocide Convention), was adopted without debate.

The Draft Convention Resolution was then picked up by the Economic and Security Council on March 12

, 1947, issuing itself two goals;

1. To undertake the necessary studies with a view to drawing up a Draft Convention in accordance with the resolution of the General Assembly,”

and

“2. After such consultation as may be deemed necessary with the General

Assembly Committee on the Development and Codification of International Law to submit to the Economic and Social Council a Draft Convention on the crime of genocide.

The question then became who would prepare the Draft Convention. At first, it was suggested that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights should be given the task, but it was pointed out that that Commission was currently working on the Declaration of Human Rights, and would not have the time to also write the Genocide Convention.

The next best option was to put together a small group of international lawyers to draft the resolution, Cuba suggested that five would be enough, and France insisted there be more views present.

The body of

international legal experts would be comprised of Lemkin, along with University of Paris’

Professor M. Henri Donnedieu de Vebres, and Professor Vespasian Pella from Romania, and would produce the Secretariat’s Draft Convention.

The Secretariat’s Draft Convention:

The Draft Convention which Lemkin and his colleagues produced would probably be very surprising to somebody familiar with the current Genocide Convention. This Draft

54 United Nations Document E/342.

55 Nehemiah Robinson The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Conference, 1960), 19.

56 United Nations Document E/AC.7/8.

Convention was twenty-four articles long, and contains a much different structure than the current Convention. The first major differences can be found in the first article. First of all, protected groups listed are different.

Groups-

While the current Genocide Convention claims that genocide can be committed against

“national, ethnical, racial or religious group,”

the Secretariat’s Draft Convention protects

“racial, national, linguistic, religious or political groups of human beings.”

The difference between these two lists of protected groups represents large political differences in three ways.

First, there are the obvious omissions in the 1948 Convention definition. Linguistic groups have been removed as a protected category. This omission would occur fairly quickly in the debate over the Draft Convention, and was related both to the rejection of cultural genocide as an idea, but also in a move to focus almost exclusively on the physical death of physical persons. This shift occurred during the debates over the Draft Convention and the effects of this conceptual transition can be seen today. The idea that by banning the use of a language you are committing

“genocide” would be a strange notion to anybody not well versed in genocide studies or ethnic conflicts in the world, as “genocide” brings to mind an idea related to physical killing.

The other omission is much more glaring: political groups. The Secretariat’s Draft Convention explicitly labeled political groups as a protected group, and therefore codified political genocide as an international crime. This should seem surprising in the context of Lemkin. None of his earlier definitions or writings on genocide mentioned above refer to political genocide, or genocide based on opinion. The inclusion of political genocide was not Lemkin’s idea and he actively argued against it. Lemkin insisted, as many have done since and

57 United Nations Genocide Convention, 1948, Article II.

58 Secretariat’s Draft Convention, 1947, U.N. Document A/AC.10/42, Article I, Section I.

would do at the Sixth Committee (the United Nations meeting which would revise and vote to adopt the 1948 Genocide Convention officially), that political groups were neither permanent nor stable (meaning individuals were not being killed for inescapable aspects of their identity) and that they were not intended as protected groups when genocide was coined. His two colleagues, though, disagreed and he was out-voted. In addition, the word “ethnical” is included in the modern definition. This represents the actions of the representative from Sweden who proposed the use of the word “ethnical” instead of “cultural” or “linguistic” in a veiled attempt to protect States from genocide charges on account of discrimination, and was successful in this endeavor.

Finally, in the first section of the first article, there is a slightly different emphasis of the Convention’s mission. The Secretariat’s Draft Convention simply states that “The purpose of this Convention is to prevent the destruction of racial, national, linguistic, religious or political groups of human beings”

whereas the final Convention not only seeks to prevent genocide (and it only uses the word “genocide” rather than describe it as the destruction of certain groups) but also to punish it. Though perhaps a minor difference, it may be taken as prophetic as the

international community has appeared only interested in this task since 1948.

Acts-

While the differences in the different groups protected are important, a more significant difference can be found in the second section of the first article. This section outlines “Acts Qualified as Genocide.”

The 1948 Convention defines five specific acts that qualify as genocide. They are;

(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;

59 Ibid.

60 Secretariat’s Draft Convention, 1947, U.N. Document A/AC.10/42, Article I, Section II.

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

While it may appear that these five listed acts cover extensive ground, they (the defined acts of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention) appear paltry when juxtaposed with the Secretariat’s Draft Convention. This is namely because the above list, with the exception of the forcible transfer of children, focuses exclusively on physical destruction of or physical harm to persons.

As will be demonstrated, the Secretariat’s Draft Convention presents a broader definition of genocide which is not simply focused on physical action. In addition, the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as a singular phenomenon: the five acts listed. The Secretariat’s Draft Convention specifies three different versions of genocide and defines each of them individually.

The second section of article two in the Secretariat’s Draft Convention define those actions which constitute genocide. They are defined as “criminal” and not violent, and the reasons for this become apparent very quickly. The first glaring difference is that the

Secretariat’s Draft Convention identifies three different subsections, or types, of the phenomenon of “genocide.” The Draft Convention differentiates between “physical genocide,” “biological genocide,” and “cultural genocide,” and fleshes each of these concepts out. This definition with three subsections is accredited to Lemkin in the explanation attached to the Draft Convention given to the Economic and Security Council.

Professor Lemkin distinguished between “physical” genocide (destruction of individuals), “biological” genocide (prevention of births), and “cultural” genocide (brutal destruction of the specific characteristics of a group). Then, it curiously appears to predict that cultural genocide will be contentious as it then states;

“Should all these notions be accepted or only the first and second? That is the second general question to be decided.

61 United Nations Genocide Convention, 1948, Article II.

62 United Nations Document E/447, “Secretariat Draft.”

This strange statement, pointing out the weakness of cultural genocide, was no doubt included by both Lemkin’s colleagues who opposed the inclusion of cultural genocide, arguing against the existence of culture genocide and that its inclusion would weaken the effectiveness of a genocide convention, as it could be invoked too often.

The first subsection of acts is entitled: “Causing the death of member of a group or injuring their health or physical integrity by:”

and proceeds to list four categories of actions.

This category is the most similar to the 1948 Genocide Convention in place today. The first action is the most obvious example of genocide, “group massacres or individual executions.”

The second closely resembles the (c) category of the 1948 Convention’s definition, but it goes into more detail. Rather than simply saying “conditions that will create death” (paraphrased), specifics are listed, including an absence of certain necessities; food, hygiene, shelter, clothing, medical care, but also working individuals to death. From this point the two documents diverge completely. The third act prohibited is medical experimentation and mutilation. The impetus for this addition to Lemkin’s writings is harrowingly self-evident. While biological experimentation has not, fortunately, been particularly pertinent since the Second World War, mutilation,

particularly in the form of sexual torture, has appeared in recent genocides and mass-violence situations, and has been appearing more frequently. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia- Herzegovina both included sexual violence on a large scale and these crimes were included in the trials that followed.

The fourth point in the Secretariat’s Draft Convention is “deprivation of all means of livelihood, by confiscation of property, looting, curtailment of work, housing, and supplies otherwise accessible to the other residents of the State.”

In other words, “economic genocide”

63 United Nations Document A/AC.10/42, “Secretariat’s Draft Convention,” Article I, Section II, 1.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

or even, perhaps, economic discrimination. While the first part of this statement is clearly indicating that it is referring to extreme examples of theft, “all means of livelihood,” the final sentence “work, housing, and supplies otherwise accessible to the other residents of the State”

could be interpreted to prohibit ordinary and standard institutional discrimination. In 1947, there were a number of States which banned certain racial, linguistic, and national, political, and religious groups from holding certain professions, and many states certainly did not allow the same access to work and employment for all groups. In the explanation provided to the

Economic and Security Council, this is even mentioned. After explaining that individuals cannot exist without trading “services” in exchange for “help” from the “community” (an incredibly broad definition),

If the State systematically denies to members of a certain group the elementary means of existence enjoyed by other sections of the population, it condemns such persons to a wretched existence maintained by illicit or clandestine activities and public charity” [emphasis mine].

For these reasons this is a rather poorly worded and vague entry and too broad to, once codified, be of much actual consequence. But, the question of economic genocide is quite interesting, and the eventual inclusion of “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction…” is an effective improvement. Unfortunately, economic genocide was eliminated in the Sixth Committee when the Dutch representative argued that this would be an international ban on market forces and technological changes that would put large swaths of people and professions out of a job. This is certainly a strange and arguable point, but, it none the less was adopted quite quickly and arguably the most interesting genocidal act was removed.

The differences between the Secretariat’s Draft Convention and the eventual 1948 Genocide Convention play a large part in Martin Shaw’s 2007 work, What is Genocide? This work takes the position that the broader Secretariat’s Draft Convention, which Shaw interprets as

66 United Nations Document E/447.

being more sociological than legal in nature and, partially because of this, a more accurate description of the actual phenomenon of genocide than the five acts listed in the 1948 Convention. And that, because of this difference, the Secretariat’s Draft Convention is the stronger of the two documents and had it been in effect the past half-century, would have been a more effective Convention in preventing and punishing genocide. Regarding the focus on physical killing and harming, Shaw comments:

What he was concerned with was not a specific type of violence, but a general charge that highlighted the common elements of many acts that ‘taken separately’

constituted specific crimes. In contrast to later interpreters who focused on the specific crime of mass murder, Lemkin was always concerned with a broad process that included not only organized violence but also the economic destruction and persecution.

Shaw writes this passage based on his analysis of Lemkin’s writings on genocide, in which he concludes that Lemkin appears to be more focused on forms of cultural genocide, particularly eliticide and the killing of intelligentsia and political leadership, and the destruction of physical buildings, cultural institutions, religious centers and their (for lack of a non-Western word) liturgical objects. The broader definition of acts that can constitute genocide, which was actually a very broad array of actions implied by Lemkin’s teleological definition of a long-term

sociological action, makes sense in this context. For Lemkin genocide was, essentially, the act of one group attempting to eliminate another group’s ability to continue their existence as a culture or group, which expresses itself as a collection of actions taken at a society-wide and individual level, which is a fundamentally different concept than the 1948 Convention’s focus on groups exterminating the persons of another group.

The second category of acts of genocide is the shortest, with only three acts listed. This is

“biological genocide.”

This category remained the most intact after the Sixth Committee’s

67 Martin Shaw What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 25.

68 Secretariat’s Draft Convention, 1947, U.N. Document A/AC.10/42, Article I, II, 2.

debates. This section is described as “Restricting births by” and proceeds to list; “sterilization of individuals and compulsory abortion,” “segregation of the sexes,” and “obstacles to marriage.”

In the 1948 Convention’s definition, this section is simply surmised as “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” which, in the opinion of this author, does not add or detract significantly from the Secretariat’s Draft Convention.

The final section is described as “destroying the characteristics of the group.”

Shaw labels this as “cultural genocide,” and in the acts listed this description appears justified. The first act listed is “forced transportation of children into another human group.” The practice of forced assimilation of children is significant in recent history, particularly in the settler colonies of Canada, the United States, and Australia, and these states are only now starting to examine the human cost of their long policies of kidnapping and forced assimilation. As Raymond Kevorkian observes in his survey text of the Armenian Genocide, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, some children were taken and placed in Turkish homes, and certain young women were taken as brides for Turkish officers or officials;

What the “Ottomanism” that was characteristic of the beginnings of the Young Turk revolution had not succeeded in bringing about for lack of a common cultural base would be accomplished by physical elimination or coercion. The will to assimilate part of the victimized group constitutes one of the particularities of the Armenian Genocide.

As this was observed in the Turkish genocide of the Armenian this could also have been the impetus of its inclusion by the Secretariat Draft Committee, or a combination of these histories.

The second act listed, somewhat prophetically considering the contemporary and future history of the Soviet Union under Stalin, is “forced and systematic exile of all individual representatives of the culture of a group.” The third act is “the prohibition of the use of the national language

69 Ibid.

70 Secretariat’s Draft Convention, 1947, U.N. Document A/AC.10/42, Article I, II, 3.

71 Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2011), 757.