By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Raphael Lemkin is probably the most influential figure of the Twentieth Century not widely recognized by posterity. Born in 1900 in a Polish village located in the Russian Empire, he had witnessed pogroms when he was growing up. Originally studying linguistics, he eventually became a lawyer. In the 1920s he was troubled when he read the news about an Armenian who had assassinated a Turkish leader to avenge the murder of his family and over a million other Armenians during World War One because the international community failed to punish anyone for this heinous massacre. Lemkin wondered, “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?”
He then embarked on his lifelong crusade to coin a legal term to define the state-sanctioned slaughter of minority groups and to lobby the nations of the world to criminalize such policies. At a League of Nations’ Conference in 1933, he proposed the word “barbarity” to outlaw what had happened to the Armenians and the current massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Barbarity constituted “acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.); for example massacres, pogroms, actions undertaken to ruin the economic existence of the members of a collectivity, etc.”
After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, he warned his parents to flee for their lives. They didn’t and they and most of his extended family perished in the Holocaust. Lemkin managed to immigrate to the United States. In 1944 he authored Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress in which he introduced the term genocide “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.”
As the revelations of Nazi atrocities emerged after the defeat of Germany, Lemkin drafted a resolution and then a convention for the new United Nations to outlaw and punish genocide. He worked indefatigably to secure the convention’s passage in 1948, but realized that the biggest stumbling block to deterring or punishing genocide was national sovereignty. Larger countries in particular, refused to accept such jurisdiction over indictments against their own leaders. Indeed, the United States Senate did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988 and has exempted itself from prosecutions by the International Criminal Court.
Watchers of the Night, directed by Edet Belzberg, pays tribute to Lemkin’s legacy by recounting his biography which ended with his death in obscurity in 1959. The film features quotations from Lemkin’s writing, interviews, newsreel footage interwoven with stunning animation, and the superimposition of images of inhumanity from the Holocaust with those of recent genocides like those in Bosnia, Darfur, and Rwanda.
Rather than structuring the film in chronological order, Belzberg effectively jumps back and forth from Lemkin’s saga to his contemporary heirs in the struggle against genocide. These include US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power who covered the civil war in Bosnia which motivated her to chronicle Lemkin’s role in securing passage of the UN Genocide Convention and American responses to genocide since 1948 in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell; Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg Benjamin B. Ferencz who still lobbies the UN to criminalize military aggression; prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo who convinced the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir for committing genocide in Darfur; and Emmanuel Uwurukundo, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in which his family was killed, who runs three camps in Chad for refugees from Darfur. It is still an uphill battle to prevent and punish genocide, but the lives of millions of potential victims depend on pursuing it.
Watchers of the Night will have its San Diego premier at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on this Wednesday March 4th at 6 p.m.. I will be conducting a question and answer session after the screening of the film. It is open and free to the public. The church’s address is: 334 14th Street in Del Mar.
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Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com