NEW YORK – Ukrainians in North America have honored the Jewish human rights campaigner who first coined the word “genocide,” and who in 1953 applied it to the country’s 1932-33 Holodomor artificial famine, heartening Ukrainians struggling against the Soviet cover-up of Joseph Stalin’s ghastly crimes.
In 1948, Raphael Lemkin’s legal definition of genocide, a crime against humanity, was formally recognized in a United Nations convention.
Now the achievement of Lemkin, who was born into a Polish-Jewish family in 1900 and spent much of his life studying law and working in Lviv and other parts of what is now western Ukraine, is being recognized in a memorial dedicated to him.
Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation
Lubomyr Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation led the drive to raise $20,000 to design and create the bronze memorial, which bears Lemkin’s face and an inscription in four languages – Ukrainian, English, Hebrew and Yiddish (Lemkin spoke nine languages fluently.) Luciuk said most of the money came from small Ukrainian and Jewish donors in the United States and Canada, but also from several large benefactors.
The site for the plaque is a magnificent Gothic Revival mansion that is home to the Ukrainian Institute of America, which overlooks New York City’s Central Park. The date for unveiling the plaque, Sept. 20, 2018, was chosen because it was exactly 65 years after Lemkin had given a speech before an audience of some 15,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, in a Manhattan hall not far from the institute building.
In that speech, Lemkin unequivocally labeled the Holodomor famine as deliberately planned by the Soviet authorities, and put the number of Ukrainians that had starved to death between 1932-33 at five million. He said: “What I want to speak about is perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, it’s longest and broadest experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”
Lemkin warned that “as long as Ukraine retains its national unity, as long as its people continue to think of themselves as Ukrainians and to seek independence” it would pose a threat to the Kremlin, which would seek its “destruction.”
Lemkin’s interest in the mass murder of specifically-targeted groups started with the massacre of an estimated one million Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War 1. He worked as a lawyer and prosecutor for newly-independent Poland, formed after that war, representing his country at international conferences, something that deepened his interest in the concept of laws encompassing the world.
In 1933 Lemkin was gripped by the massacre of thousands of Christian Assyrians by Iraqis and formulated a proposal to the League of Nations, fore-runner to the United Nations Organization between the world wars, to create laws dealing with what he called “acts of barbarism.”
Lifelong commitment
Despite that proposal failing, it became the start of Lemkin’s lifelong commitment to introduce international legislation outlawing what he termed “genocide” – from the Greek word “genos” for race and Latin “cide” denoting killing.
Lemkin watched as the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler came to power and began to persecute German Jews. After Germany invaded Poland and later the Soviet Union that persecution brutally hit home as Lemkin’s family was sucked into the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews. A total of 49 of his relatives – everyone except himself and his brother – were killed.
Lemkin managed to escape to Sweden and then to the United States, where he worked for the War Department as an expert on international law. In 1945 and 1946 he contributed to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials.
However, the process of enshrining the concept of genocide within the international law was complex and filled with obstacles. Lemkin’s proposal to do so at a 1945 peace conference also failed, but while working as a law professor at U.S. universities he continued tirelessly lobbying the newly-created United Nations to accept the term. Finally, in December 1948, his concept was incorporated, by a unanimous vote, in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Lemkin ‘made the world a better place’
The institute president, Daniel Swistel, addressed an audience of around 50 attending the unveiling ceremony, which was blessed by Ukrainian Orthodox and Greek Catholic clergy and a rabbi. Swistel said the plaque will serve “now and far into the future as a reminder of all Raphael Lemkin did for us, for his initiatives to try to make the world a better place to live for all mankind.”
Luciuk added: “The father of the United Nations Genocide Convention had to compromise on the definition because political groups were excluded from the definition, and for many years people would say that the Holodomor – the famine in Ukraine – could not be considered genocide because it wasn’t about a nationality but about political groups – kulaks, nationalists, anti-Soviet individuals and so on.”
Luciuk was sure Lemkin wanted his 1953 speech “to set the record straight” by clearly stating that the famine “was intended and deliberate, was politically orchestrated and created to smash the Ukrainian nation.”
Other speakers included David Scheffer, an expert on human rights who was America’s first ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues and who helped create the International Criminal Court, Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine’s Consul General in New York, playwright Catherine Filloux, who in 2005 wrote a play called “Lemkin’s House,” and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, who appeared via video link.
Luciuk told the Kyiv Post he hopes the commemoration will help strengthen ties with Ukraine’s Jewish community. At the world Holodomor conference in Kyiv in November he will propose that a street in the capital be named after Lemkin, who died in 1959 and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
