On June 24, 1900, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer, human rights activist, the genocide concept creator, one of the first who offered to qualify the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide, was born.
He was born into a Jewish family of farmers, in Bezwodne village, near the city of Volkovysk, the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Vawkavysk, Grodno region, Belarus). After World War I, this territory passed into a renewed Polish state. He received secondary education in Bialystok, studied law at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (1919 – 1920) and at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv (1921 – 1924). In parallel, he studied foreign languages at Heidelberg University and other European universities.
Lemkin has chosen to study international law under the influence of the murder of Talaat Pasha in 1921, one of the Turkish statesmen who were responsible for the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He regretted that there was no international law and an appropriate judicial system for punishing offenders responsible for mass killings. After receiving his doctorate (1926), he worked as a prosecutor assistant in Berezhany (now Ternopil region), since 1929 – as a lecturer and free lawyer in Warsaw. At the same time, he continued his study of international law on crimes against human communities. In October 1933, Lemkin’s innovative ideas were presented at the fifth conference on the unification of international criminal law in Madrid. “Acts of barbarism” – the destruction of human communities, one of the five crimes described in his report, subsequently became the basis for developing the concept of genocide. Since 1934 he has lived in Warsaw.
At the beginning of World War II, he emigrated to Sweden, taught at Stockholm University and gathered documents on German repressive laws. In early 1941, he emigrated to the United States. He taught at the Law School of Duke University (North Carolina). Since 1942, he has worked as a legal adviser to the US government (Washington). In 1944, he published the book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” – a detailed documented disclosure of Nazi crimes in Europe. In this work, the term “genocide” first appeared and its concept as an international crime was introduced. In 1945 – 1946 he was an adviser to the Supreme Court of the United States at the Nuremberg Trials. The term “genocide”, introduced by him, has received international recognition. Thanks to his book and efforts the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948.
After the overthrow of the Nazi regime, Lemkin considered communist power to be the main enemy of mankind and accused it of genocidal acts. In the 1950s, he became close to the Lithuanian and Ukrainian communities in the United States. The New York Times and Ukrainian Weekly wrote about his speeches in defense of national minorities in the USSR. On September 20, 1953, in New York during commemorative events on the occasion of the Great Famine in Ukraine anniversary, he made his landmark speech “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine”. In the concept of genocide, Lemkin defined this term much broader than the definition of the relevant United Nations Convention. He reckoned in possible genocide victims not only national, ethnic, religious and racial groups, punishment for a crime against which the UN Convention provides, but also political, social and other human groups. However, Lemkin argued for the Ukrainian people genocide based on the UN definition. In the Ukrainian people genocide, he identified 4 components: 1) the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia – “the mind of the nation”; 2) the liquidation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church – “the soul of Ukraine”; 3) starvation of peasants - carriers of Ukrainian culture, language, traditions, etc.; 4) the settlement of Ukraine with foreign elements in order to change the population composition.
Raphael Lemkin was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (1950, 1952). He died in New York on August 28, 1959.
In 2009, his work “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” was published in 28 languages.
On November 11, 2017, an information plate was installed on Zamarstynivska Street in Lviv to perpetuate Raphael Lemkin’s memory.
Dilfuza Hlushchenko