Читать книгу A Problem from Hell - Samantha Power - Страница 20

Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

Articles 1–9 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

On October 16, 1950, thanks largely to this behind-the-scenes prodding, the twentieth country ratified the genocide convention.² Thus, seventeen years after Lemkin had first proposed it, the attempted destruction of national, ethnic, and religious groups became an international crime. He told reporters, “This is a day of triumph for mankind and the most beautiful day of my life.”³

The tougher challenge was the more important one: securing ratification in the U.S. Senate and then enforcement by the United States. When the convention cleared the General Assembly in 1948, few doubted that the United States would be one of the first countries to ratify it. The UN passage had been an American effort in many respects. In 1946 Lemkin had teamed up with several State Department lawyers to prepare the first draft of the treaty. It had been U.S. delegate at the United Nations John Maktos who chaired the Ad Hoc Committee of the Economic and Social Council that assembled another version of the text in Geneva. The United States had been the first country to sign the pact at the General Assembly in 1948.

In June 1949 President Harry Truman heartily endorsed the genocide convention, calling on U.S. senators to ratify it because America had “long been a symbol of freedom and democratic progress to peoples less favored” and because it was time to outlaw the “world-shocking crime of genocide.” Dean Rusk, then deputy undersecretary of state, stressed that ratification was needed to “demonstrate to the rest of the world that the United States is determined to maintain its moral leadership in international affairs.” Securing the two-thirds Senate vote seemed a mere formality.

But American spokesmen for the convention had to look outside the realm of human rights to find examples of treaties that earned U.S. support. Rusk testified, “It should be noted that the Genocide Convention does not represent the first instance in which the United States has cooperated with other nations to suppress criminal or quasicriminal conduct which has become a matter of international concern.” He went on, anticlimactically, to list those instances of international cooperation: “The United States is party to the multilateral Convention for Protection of Submarine Cables of 1884…The United States is party to a convention of 1911 with Great Britain, Russia, and Japan for the preservation and protection of fur seals in the North Pacific Ocean.” Treaties that obliged signatories to punish those who injured submarine cables or pelagic seals did not exactly constitute the same challenge to international policymakers as the ban on genocide. Thus, there was something absurd if admirable in Rusk’s attempt to build the case that genocide convention ratification constituted the natural culmination of previous campaigns. “The United States has cooperated in the past with other nations in the suppression of such lesser offenses as the killing of fur seals,” Rusk noted. “It is natural that other nations look to the United States for cooperation in the suppression of the most heinous offense of all, the destruction of human groups.”⁴ Rusk would later admit in his testimony that there was no evidence the seal convention had ever been violated.

The Critics

The early U.S. leadership on the genocide treaty largely evaporated in the months and years that followed. Some of the opposition to U.S. ratification was rooted in legitimate grievances about the text of the law. The convention’s plain wording was not terribly specific about the nature of the violence that needed to occur in order to trigger a global or national response. Lemkin had wanted to create a sacrosanct category of crime that the world would team up to prevent and punish. But the new convention did not clear up confusion about the meaning of “genocide.” Far from constituting a high-bar trigger, critics claimed the genocide pact offered a low-bar trampoline.

“Genocide,” as defined in the UN treaty, suffered then (as it suffers now) from several inherent definitional problems. One is what might be called a numbers problem. On the question of how many individuals have to be killed and/or expelled from their homes in order for mass murder or ethnic cleansing to amount to genocide, there is—and can be—no consensus. If the law were to require a pre-specified percentage of killings before outsiders responded, perpetrators would be granted a free reign up to a dastardly point. The law would be little use if it kicked in only when a group had been entirely or largely eliminated. By focusing on the perpetrators’ intentions and whether they were attempting to destroy a collective, the law’s drafters thought they might ensure that diagnosis of and action against genocide would not come too late. The broader, intentbased definition was essential if statesmen hoped to nip the crime in the bud.

But some U.S. senators feared the expansive language would be used to target Americans. The law’s most potent foe in the United States was the respected American Bar Association (ABA). Alfred T. Schweppe, chairman of the ABA’s Committee on Peace and Law Through the United Nations, challenged the convention’s definition of “genocide” before a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in 1950:

Certainly [the convention’s definition] doesn’t mean if I want to drive 5 Chinamen out of town, to use that invidious illustration, that I must have the intent to destroy all the 400, 000, 000 Chinese in the world or the 250, 000 within the United States. It is part of a racial group, and if it is a group of 5, a group of 10, a group of 15, and I proceed after them with guns in some community to get rid of them solely because they belong to some racial group…I think you have got a serious question. That is what bothers me.⁵

Senator Brien McMahon (D.–Conn.), the chairman of the first Senate subcommittee, who himself supported ratification, wanted answers, and this often resulted in a quest to pin down numbers. He asked, “Let us assume there is a group of 200, 000. Would that have to mean that you would have to murder 100, 001 before a major part would come under the definition?” Lemkin stressed that partial destruction obviously had to be “of such substantial nature that it affects the existence of the group as a group” and wrote graphically that partial destruction meant that “by cutting out the brains of a nation, the entire body becomes paralyzed.”⁶ In the end the McMahon subcommittee recommended including an “understanding” that the United States interpreted “in part” to mean “a substantial portion of the group concerned.” Even though this should have satisfied the senators’ need for reassurance, many ignored the proposed compromise language and continued to complain.⁷ Years later, when the Khmer Rouge, the Iraqi government, and the Bosnian Serbs began eradicating minority groups, those who opposed a U.S. response often ignored the genocide convention’s terms and denied genocide was under way, claiming the number of dead or the percentage of the group eliminated was too small.

The genocide convention also earned criticism for stipulating that a perpetrator could attempt to obliterate a group not only by killing its members but by causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting damaging conditions of life, preventing births, or forcibly removing children. But in order to constitute acts of genocide, these crimes could not be carried out in isolation. They had to be a piece of a plan to destroy all or part of the designated group. The aim of including acts besides murder was to ensure that the international community looked to—and reacted against—such “lesser” crimes as minimassacres, population transfers, and sterilization because they were evils in their own right and because they fell on a continuum that often preceded the physical elimination of a people. In criminal law an intent to commit a crime is generally hard to prove, and intent to commit genocide even harder. Only rarely would those planning a genocide record their intentions on tape or in documents. Proving an intent to exterminate an entire people would usually be impossible until the bulk of the group had already been wiped out. The convention drafters believed it would be better to act too soon rather than too late. When one group started expelling another group from its midst, as the Turks had done in 1915 and the Serbs would do in Bosnia in 1992, it could signal a larger plan of destruction.

The law’s opponents ignored the reasoning that lay behind the ban’s provisions. Instead they zeroed in on the possibility of stretching the new law’s language to apply to practices too mild to warrant interference in another state’s domestic affairs. Some suggested that U.S. ratification would license critics of the United States to investigate the eradication of Native American tribes in the nineteenth century.⁸ Southern senators feared that inventive lawyers might argue that segregation in the South inflicted “mental harm” and thus counted as genocide.⁹ Legislators warned that the convention would empower politicized rabblerousers to drag the United States or the senators themselves before an international court.

Reckoning with American brutality against native peoples was long overdue, but the convention, which was not retroactive, could not be used to press the matter. And although the United States’dismal record on race certainly exposed it to charges of racism and human rights abuse, only a wildly exaggerated reading of the genocide convention left the southern lawmakers vulnerable to genocide charges. Lemkin himself addressed the issue: “In the Negro problem the intent is to preserve the group on a different level of existence,” he said, “but not to destroy it.”¹⁰ Eunice Carter, a spokeswoman for the National Council on Negro Women, agreed, testifying that “the lynching of an individual or of several individuals has no relation to the extinction of masses of peoples because of race, religion, or political belief.” The council supported the convention because women and children were often the first victims of genocide and because minorities would be safe nowhere if genocide went “unchecked or unpunished.”¹¹

Again, the 1950 Senate subcommittee had sought to soothe the senators’ fears by attaching an explicit, legal “understanding” that shielded the southern states by stating clearly, “Genocide does not apply to lynchings, race riots or any form of segregation.” The critics did not heed this (embarrassing) recommendation. Nor did they acknowledge that “trumped-up” charges could be filed regardless of whether the United States ratified the convention. The problem in the decades ahead would not be that too many states would file genocide charges against fellow states at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Rather, too few would do so. And as of late 2001 no state had yet dared to challenge the United States by filing genocide charges against it in the ICJ. The southern opposition was driven mainly by xenophobia and an isolationism that led it to try to exempt the United States from all international frameworks.

Lemkin himself became a target of xenophobic slurs. In 1950 Senate Foreign Relations Committee member H. Alexander Smith (R.–N.J.) was aggrieved that the “biggest propagandist” for the convention was “a man who comes from a foreign country who…speaks broken English.” The senator claimed to know “many people…irritated no end by this fellow running around.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R.-Mass.), who supported ratification, suggested that somebody tell Lemkin he had “done his own cause a great deal of harm.” Much of the criticism was rooted less in Lemkin’s tirelessness than in his Jewishness. Smith said that he himself was “sympathetic with the Jewish people,” but “they ought not to be the ones who are propagandizing [for the convention], and they are.”¹² Despite having invented the concept of genocide, Lemkin was not invited by the Senate subcommittee to testify in the congressional hearings on ratification.

Lemkin reflected upon congressional opposition to his convention by noting, “If somebody does not like mustard, he will always find a reason why he doesn’t like it, after you have convinced him that the previous reason has no validity.” Critics complained that the treaty was both too broad (and thus could implicate the United States) and not broad enough (and thus might not implicate the Soviet Union). Although it protected “national, ethnical or religious groups” that were targeted “as such,” the law did not protect political groups. The Soviet delegation and its supporters, mainly Communist countries in Eastern Europe as well as some Latin American countries, had argued that including political groups in the convention would inhibit states that were attempting to suppress internal armed revolt.¹³ Behind the Soviet position was the fear that the convention would invite outside powers to punish Stalin for wiping out national minorities throughout Central Asia, as well as his alleged counterrevolutionary “enemies.” Stalin, it came as no surprise, was not interested in creating a right of international intervention (or what he considered a right of unwanted meddling) to stop such practices. Because Lemkin recognized that including political groups would split the Legal Committee and doom the law, he, too, had lobbied for their exclusion.¹⁴ Instead of curing the law of its defects or supplementing it with other measures, American critics contended that a state had arguably committed genocide if it caused mental harm to five persons because of the color of their skin but had not committed genocide if it killed 100, 000 people because of the color of their party membership card. The exclusion of political groups from the convention made it much harder in the late 1970s to demonstrate that the Khmer Rouge were committing genocide in Cambodia when they set out to wipe out whole classes of alleged “political enemies.”

The core American objections to the treaty, of course, had little to do with the text, which was no vaguer than any other law that had not yet been interpreted in a courtroom. Rather, American opposition was rooted in a traditional hostility toward any infringement on U.S. sovereignty, which was only amplified by the red scare of the 1950s. If the United States ratified the pact, senators worried they would thus authorize outsiders to poke around in the internal affairs of the United States or embroil the country in an “entangling alliance.” It was hard to see how it was in the U.S. interest to make a state’s treatment of its own citizens the legitimate object of international scrutiny. Genocide prevention was a low priority in the United States, and international law offered few rewards to the most powerful nation on earth.

In May 1950 McMahon’s Senate subcommittee reported favorably on the treaty, but the North Korean invasion of South Korea the following month caused the Foreign Relations Committee to postpone its vote. The war unleashed an anti-Communist panic. Republican senators Joseph McCarthy and John Bricker criticized the United Nations as a “world government” that had dragged the United States into war. They were champions of states’ rights, which they said the federal government was trampling by joining international treaties. The genocide convention represented a stronger UN at the expense of American sovereignty and a stronger federal government at the expense of the states. Senator A. Willis Robertson, a conservative Democrat from Virginia and a Bricker supporter, wrote that he already had “enough trouble with do-gooders in our own country” who demanded a federal government role in regulating human rights. The American people certainly did not need the United Nations applying “that same type of pressure.”¹⁵ In 1952, hoping to limit the federal government’s power and backed overwhelmingly by Senate Republicans, Bricker introduced an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have reduced the president’s authority to approve foreign treaties.

When Eisenhower succeeded Truman in 1953, Lemkin viewed the former U.S. general as a natural ally. After his troops had liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eisenhower had fired off a cable to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall denouncing the Nazi savagery: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” Eisenhower said, reflecting on the piles of corpses. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” But generals are taught to choose their battles, and Eisenhower quickly dropped the fight for the genocide convention. In 1953, in the hopes of appeasing Bricker’s supporters, the president disavowed this and all human rights treaties.¹⁶ Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pledged that the administration would never “become a party to any covenant [on human rights] for consideration by the Senate.” He also flatly abrogated the Nuremberg precedent, charging that the genocide convention exceeded the “traditional limits” of treaties by attempting to generate “internal social changes” in other countries. The United States would advance human rights through education, Dulles declared, not through law.

The genocide convention was far from perfect. But whatever its ambiguities, its ratification in the U.S. Senate would have signaled to the world and the American people that the United States believed genocide was an international crime that should be prevented and punished, wherever it occurred. It would have required the United States to prosecute genocide suspects who wandered onto American shores. And it would have empowered and obligated American policymakers “to undertake” to stop future genocide.

The Home Front

Just as he had earlier tried to drum up international support, Lemkin here tried to create a U.S. constituency for ratification with speaking tours, op-eds, and mass mailings. Hoping to get Eisenhower to reverse his position, Lemkin borrowed stationery from supportive community organizations, applied for grants to pay for postage, and sent thousands of letters to absolutely anybody whose moral heartstrings he felt he might tug or on whose connections he might prey to get the ear of a U.S. senator. Although most of his letters contained a mix of flattery and moral prodding, he sometimes slipped into bluntly bullying his contacts and demanding that they acquire a conscience. Thelma Stevens, a volunteer at the Methodist Women’s Council, was probably startled one summer to read this portion of an otherwise grateful letter from Lemkin urging her to coordinate a campaign on behalf of Senate passage:

This Convention is a matter of our conscience and is a test of our personal relationship to evil. I know it is very hot in July and August for work and planning, but without becoming sentimental or trying to use colorful speech, let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.¹⁷

Humorless though he was, Lemkin knew it was essential for him to win over elite opinion. He struck up his most fruitful correspondence with Gertrude Samuels of the New York Times editorial board. Samuels’s editorials, which appeared in the paper throughout the ratification fight, often seemed to flow right from Lemkin’s pen. At first they echoed his conviction; later they reflected his frustration. One editorial termed the criminalization of genocide “one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century” and lambasted the Senate for its “indifference and delay.” Another used the same words that Lemkin had penned to Samuels in a letter dated June 6, 1950: “Humanity is our client,” the editorial proclaimed. “Every day of delay is concession to crime.”¹⁸ Lemkin was eager to be plagiarized.

Lemkin also attempted to mobilize American grassroots groups. The international human rights organizations familiar to us today did not yet exist. Amnesty International was not founded until 1961, and Helsinki Watch, which later grew into Human Rights Watch, was set up only in 1978. But four decades ahead of the dramatic power shift toward nongovernmental organizations that occurred in the 1990s, Lemkin enlisted a panoply of American civic organizations, churches, and synagogues.¹⁹ The U.S. Committee for a United Nations Genocide Convention was formed, made up of representatives and leaders from a wide range of organizations, from the Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the American Association for the UN to the National Council of Women and the American Federation of Labor (AFL).²⁰ The American Jewish Committee, the American Zionist Council, and B’nai B’rith gave some financial support to Lemkin as he tried to chip away at U.S. opposition.

Lemkin was at a disadvantage in the immediate postwar period because the singular genocide so well known today was barely discussed.²¹ American Jews who would later became a potent force in promoting Holocaust commemoration and education were reticent, eager to assimilate, leery of fueling further anti-Semitism, and determined not to be depicted as victims. Other Americans were uncomfortable with the topic of extermination.

In the rare instances when Hitler’s genocide was mentioned, American television and film revealed a desire to inform viewers without alienating them. In one example, a May 1953 episode of This Is Your Life introduced many American television viewers to a Holocaust survivor for the first time. Host Ralph Edwards profiled Hanna Bloch Kohner, a woman in her thirties who had survived Auschwitz. “Looking at you it’s hard to believe that during seven short years of a still short life, you lived a life-time of fear, terror and tragedy,” Edwards declared, telling her she looked “like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.” Never mentioning that 6 million Jews had been murdered, Edwards adopted a tone of renewal that characterized the optimistic age: “This is your life, Hanna Bloch Kohner. To you in your darkest hour, America held out a friendly hand.Your gratitude is reflected in your unwavering devotion and loyalty to the land of your adoption.”²²

The dramatization of the Diary of Anne Frank, which began running in 1955, garnered huge crowds, rave reviews, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Tony Award for best play, but as both critics and fans of the play have noted, young Anne embodied the American mood by refusing to lose her faith in humanity.²³ The film version of the Diary, which premiered in 1959 and won three Academy Awards, largely omitted the Holocaust from the narrative. Director George Stevens, who had served in the U.S. Army and entered Dachau with the American liberators, screened an early version of the film in San Francisco. The last shot depicted Anne in a concentration camp uniform swaying in the fog, but after the preview he cut the scene because he thought it was “too tough in audience impact.”²⁴ Instead, the film adopted the hopeful ending of the play, in which Anne declares, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Anne actually went on to write in her diary: “I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.” But this was omitted, as it was far too somber a tone for Stevens or play director Garson Kanin, who said that he did not consider the infliction of depression on an audience “a legitimate theatrical end.”²⁵

Hollywood eased into more realistic accounts of the horrors. The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, starring Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy, jarred millions of viewers by including actual graphic footage from the camps, but the film contained few references to the specific victim groups.²⁶ When a major network sponsor, the American Gas Association, objected to the mention of gas chambers in the 1959 teleplay version of the film, CBS caved in to pressure and blanked out the references.²⁷ The word “holocaust” did not appear in the New York Times until 1959.²⁸

Only in the late 1960s did people who had spoken of a holocaust and then the holocaust begin to use the capital letter to specify the German destruction of Europe’s Jews. The references to the Holocaust had become sufficiently widespread that by 1968 the Library of Congress had to create a class of work called “Holocaust: Jewish 1939–1945.”²⁹ The Readers’Guide to Periodical Literature did not include the subject heading until 1971. American memorials to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews did not exist. Even such celebrated works as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz had trouble finding publishers.³⁰ It was not really until the 1970s that Americans became prepared to discuss the horrors.

With America unwilling in the 1950s to confront Hitler’s Final Solution, it is not surprising that Lemkin, with his briefcase bulging with gruesome parables and his indefatigable, in-your-face manner, earned few friends on Capitol Hill.

Picking Fights

Lemkin took out much of his mounting frustration on an unlikely target: spokespersons for the cause of human rights. At the 1945 conference in San Francisco where the UN charter was drafted, smaller nations of the United Nations, as well as American church, Jewish, labor, and women’s groups, had helped secure seven references to human rights in the UN founding charter. Because the content of these rights and the enforcement mechanisms were left open, a Human Rights Commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt was formed to draw up an “international bill of rights” that would consist of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as well as a pair of binding legal conventions.

Lemkin initially fumed less over the substance of the human rights agenda than over its timing. He had worked since 1944 to get his word embraced in official circles and since 1933 to get the crime banned. Lemkin was upset that the General Assembly had passed its historic universal declaration on December 10, 1948, the day after the genocide convention’s passage. He felt the association of national celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt with the UDHR had overshadowed the vote on the genocide convention.³¹

The UDHR was a nonbinding, thirty-article declaration of principles of civil, political, economic, and social justice.³²This aspirational set of principles was only a “date,” Lemkin said, whereas the convention, which required states to behave a certain way, was more like a “marriage.”³³ He naively believed that unanimous passage of the convention meant that states intended to live up to their legal commitments. Thus, he feared respect for “his” law would be lessened by association with “her” declaration.

Yet it was when the human rights movement attempted to legalize this initial declaration of principles and turn it into a legal convention modeled on the genocide ban that Lemkin erupted.³⁴ He simply could not believe that diplomats, drafters, and concerned citizens would attempt to make low-level rights abuses the subject of international law, which he was convinced should be reserved for the most extreme crimes, which were most likely to elude national prosecution. Slavery and genocide were appropriate international crimes; abridgement of speech and press, which were patently unenforceable, were not. His more justified and far more urgent ends had to be distinguished from the human rights crowd’s largely prosaic concerns.

In an unpublished op-ed entitled “The U.N. Is Killing Its Own Child,” Lemkin warned against those articles in the proposed human rights covenant that “encroached” upon his convention: “The same provisions apply to mass beatings in a concentration camp and to the spanking of a child by its parents. In brief, the dividing line between the crime of Genocide, which changes the course of civilization on one hand, and uncivilized behavior of individuals on the other hand, disappears.”³⁵ If every abuse were to become a subject of international concern, Lemkin worried, states would recoil against international law and would not respond to the greatest crime of all.

Lemkin also predicted (quite accurately) that some critics of the genocide convention would use the human rights law to kill his law in a different way, arguing that there was no need for a genocide pact because the human rights law was so expansive that it covered the crime of genocide.³⁶ Indeed, some began to claim that genocide simply constituted an egregious form of discrimination. Lemkin was understandably adamant that the destruction of groups not be absorbed under the heading of prejudice. In a 1953 memo he snapped: “Genocide implies destruction, death, annihilation, while discrimination is a regrettable denial of certain opportunities of life. To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.”³⁷

Foreshadowing some of the turf warfare that has plagued nongovern-mental organizations since their formation, Lemkin began lobbying for the excision from the human rights law of those provisions that overlapped with his. Two clauses in particular gnawed at him: “Nobody shall be deprived of the right to life” and “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” If these were included in the human rights law, genocide convention critics would claim that genocide had already been “covered.” Lemkin urged dumbfounded U.S. officials to insist that the human rights law omit references to the right to life and the right to be free of inhuman treatment. He received a gracious letter back from Assistant Secretary of State John D. Hickerson, who observed, “Certainly it would be difficult to deny that these two rights are among the most basic of human rights generally recognized throughout the world.”³⁸Yet Lemkin thought international law should reserve itself for the base and not busy itself with the “basic.”

As he attacked the human rights treaty and its sponsors, Lemkin found himself mouthing the same arguments as notorious human rights abusers.³⁹ In his fury, he ignored all he had in common with his human rights rivals. René Cassin, a French Jewish lawyer who took the lead on the Human Rights Commission in drafting the Universal Declaration and who in 1968 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, had lost twenty-nine members of his family, including his sister, in Nazi concentration camps. Cassin’s response to Soviet critics who bristled at outside interference might well have been written by Lemkin. “The right of interference is here; it is here,” Cassin noted. “Why? Because we do not want a repetition of what happened in 1933, where Germany began to massacre its own nationals, and everybody…bowed, saying ‘Thou art sovereign and master in thine own house.’”⁴⁰

Lemkin, Cassin, and Roosevelt also squared off against the same opponents. Senator Bricker teamed with Senator McCarthy to deride all UN instruments as vehicles of world government and socialism that would swallow U.S. sovereignty and aid in a Communist plot to rule (and internationalize) the world. The bedfellows who united in opposition to the genocide ban and the human rights law were not only fierce anti-Communists like Bricker but also devoted Communists from the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc representing their countries at the United Nations.

But instead of seeing or seeking common ground, Lemkin chided human rights advocates for the very utopianism that his opponents ascribed to him. The draft human rights covenant naturally included a demand that signatories respect rights “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Lemkin found this laughably unrealistic: “History has tried to achieve this task through a combined travail of revolution and evolution, but never before has a philosopher or lawyer dreamed of this unique opportunity of replacing a historical process by fiat of law. In short, it is merely a description of Utopia, but Utopia belongs to fiction and poetry and not to law.”⁴¹

Back in the United States, the gatekeepers at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee quashed all prospective hearings on the genocide convention. After another wave of countries signed the convention in 1957, the New York Times again lauded Lemkin, calling him “that exceedingly patient and totally unofficial man.”⁴²

But Lemkin’s patience was thinning and his health worsening. He took each year’s delay personally, and the stress of the extended struggle took its toll. He began to disappear from sight for long stretches, cutting himself off from his few friends. A close friend, Maxwell Cohen, said Lemkin “was very warm to those close to him, but he antagonized so many people with his insistence and his impatience.” Although Lemkin spent weekends and summers with Cohen’s family, they always referred to him as “Dr. Lemkin.” Lemkin could woo people with his Old World gentility, but he always kept them at a distance. According to Cohen, “Women were attracted to him. He was a very charming man with an extraordinary inner dignity.” But Lemkin continued to make no time for them, telling Cohen, “I can’t afford to fall in love.”⁴³

Lemkin’s enemies and disappointments were piling up. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1958, and 1959.⁴⁴ But journalists had stopped calling. And the “multilateral moment” where the UN and international law held promise had passed. Lemkin lived off small donations from Jewish and Eastern European émigré groups. He had begun a fourvolume history of genocide. The first volume, which he had nearly completed, would be entitled “An Introduction into the Study of Genocide” ; the second would cover genocide in antiquity; the third would focus on genocide in the Middle Ages; and the fourth would take readers through genocide in modern times. But if Lemkin saw the indispensable service to humanity such a collection would supply, American publishers foresaw only dim sales. The president of the John Day Company informed him that the company had concluded they could not “successfully sell a book about the history of genocide, whether condensed or at length.”⁴⁵ Charles Pearce of Duell, Sloan and Pearce replied to his inquiry by stating, “It would not be possible for us to find a large enough audience of buyers for a book of this nature,” and a Simon and Schuster reviewer described it as a “very dubious commercial risk.”⁴⁶ Lemkin next tried to market a full-length autobiography, claiming confidently in the introduction that “this book will be interesting because it shows how a private individual almost single handedly can succeed in imposing a moral law on the world and how he can stir world conscience to this end.” But for this book, to be called “The Totally Unofficial Man,” after the New York Times description, he received similarly dejecting feedback.

Accused of fighting the whole world, Lemkin used to insist, “I am not fighting the whole world. But only against an infinitely small part of the world, which arrogates to itself the right to speak for the whole world. What you call the whole world is really on my side.” If American critics of the genocide convention actually believed they had the American people on their side, he argued, they would freely admit that they opposed the genocide treaty and permit the measure to come before the full Senate for debate.

On August 28, 1959, after a quarter-century battle to ban genocide, Lemkin collapsed and died of a heart attack in the public relations office of Milton H. Blow on Park Avenue, his blazer leaking papers at the seams. His one-room apartment on West 112th Street in Manhattan was left overflowing with memos prepared for foreign ministers and ambassadors, as well as some 500 books, each read, reread, and emphatically underlined. He had published eleven books, most of them on international law but one volume of art criticism and another on rose cultivation. At the time of his death, he was fifty-nine and penniless. A New York Times editorial two days later observed:

Diplomats of this and other nations who used to feel a certain concern when they saw the slightly stooped figure of Dr. Raphael Lemkin approaching them in the corridors of the United Nations need not be uneasy anymore. They will not have to think up explanations for a failure to ratify the genocide convention for which Dr. Lemkin worked so patiently and so unselfishly for a decade and a half…Death in action was his final argument—a final word to our own State Department, which has feared that an agreement not to kill would infringe upon our sovereignty.⁴⁷

Lemkin had coined the word “genocide.” He had helped draft a treaty designed to outlaw it. And he had seen the law rejected by the world’s most powerful nation. Seven people attended Lemkin’s funeral.⁴⁸

“Successors”

After Lemkin’s death, the genocide convention languished unattended in the United States until the mid-1960s. Bruno Bitker, a Milwaukee international lawyer, sparked a second wave of interest when he urged William Proxmire, the wiry senator from Wisconsin, to take up the cause of the genocide ban. Nearly seventy countries had by then ratified the law, and Proxmire could not grasp what could be slowing the U.S. Senate.⁴⁹

Unlike Lemkin, Proxmire had led a privileged life, graduating from Yale, receiving two master’s degrees from Harvard, and marrying Elsie Rockefeller, a great-granddaughter of oil baron William A. Rockefeller, the brother and partner of John D. Rockefeller. But like Lemkin, Proxmire was a loner who had a habit of breaking with convention. Reared in a staunch Republican family in Illinois, he declared himself a Democrat in the late 1940s and moved to Wisconsin, home of the iconoclastic populist Robert La Follette and a state that columnist Mary McGrory likened to “a portly Teutonic old lady, full of beer and cheese, with a weakness for wild men and underdogs.”⁵⁰

When he lost the race for Wisconsin governor in 1952, 1954, and 1956, Proxmire turned up at Milwaukee factories the next morning to pass out “We lost, but…” cards to groggy workers.⁵¹ In 1957, when he ran for the late Joseph McCarthy’s Senate seat, instead of distancing himself from prior races, Proxmire embraced the “three-time loser” label. “Let my opponent have the support of the man who has never proposed to a girl and lost,” Proxmire declared in one radio broadcast. “I’ll take the losers…If all those who have ever lost in business, love, sports or politics will vote for me as one who knows what it is to lose and fight back, I will be glad to give my opponent the support of all those lucky voters who have never lost anything.”⁵²

If Proxmire intended to pick a loser on the legislative front, he could not have done any better then the genocide convention. Ever since Eisenhower had struck his 1953 deal with Senator Bricker agreeing to drop the pact from consideration, nobody in the Senate had cared to rein-troduce the measure. On January 11, 1967, Proxmire stood up on the Senate floor to deliver his first genocide speech. He casually announced his intention to begin a campaign that would not cease until the United States had ratified the pact. To a largely uninterested, deserted Senate chamber, he declared: “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame…I serve notice today that from now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and of the necessity for prompt action.”⁵³

Proxmire’s speech-a-day approach to ratification was one of many rituals he observed in the Senate. He made a point (and a show) of never missing a roll call vote during his twenty-two years in the Senate, tallying more than 10, 000 consecutively. A renowned skinflint, he became famous nationally for crusading against porkbarrel projects and passing out the monthly Golden Fleece Awards to government agencies for waste in spending. The first award in 1975 went to the National Science Foundation for funding a $84, 000 study on “why people fall in love.” Later recipients were “honored” for a $27, 000 project to determine why inmates want to escape from prison; a $25, 000 grant to learn why people cheat, lie, and act rudely on Virginia tennis courts; and a $500, 000 grant to research why monkeys, rats, and humans clench their jaws. The award infuriated many of Proxmire’s colleagues in the Senate, who deemed it a publicity stunt designed to earn Proxmire kudos at their expense.⁵⁴

Although Proxmire alienated some colleagues by “fleecing” them, a few joined him in fighting for the genocide convention. Claiborne Pell, a fellow Democrat from Rhode Island, was one who endorsed Proxmire’s pursuit.⁵⁵ Pell’s father, Herbert C. Pell, had served during World War II as U.S. representative to the War Crimes Commission, which the Allies established in 1943 to investigate allegations of Nazi atrocities. The elder Pell had hardly been able to get senior officials in the Roosevelt administration to return his calls. In late 1944 he was informed that the war crimes office would close for budgetary reasons. The Roosevelt team rejected Pell’s offer to pay his secretary and the office rent out of his own pocket, reversing the decision only when Pell publicized the office’s closing. When the younger Pell spoke publicly on behalf of the genocide convention decades later, he recalled those years in which he watched his father come to terms with the outside world’s disregard for Nazi brutality:

I remember the shock and horror that my father suffered—he was a gentle man—at becoming aware of the horror and heinousness of what was going on…I am convinced…that there was an unwritten gentleman’s understanding to ignore the Jewish problem in Germany, and that we and the British would not intervene in any particular way…We wrung our hands and did nothing.⁵⁶

Backed by Pell, Proxmire pressed ahead in an effort to resurrect Lemkin’s law. Proxmire’s daily ritual became as regular and predictable as the bang of the gavel and the morning prayer. Yet it was also as varied as the weather. Each speech had to be an original. The senator put his interns to good use, trusting them, in weekly rotations, to prepare the genocide remarks. The office developed files like Lemkin’s on each of the major genocides of the past millennium, and the interns tapped the files each day for a new theme. Anniversaries helped. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians and the Holocaust were often invoked.

But sadly, Proxmire’s best source of material was the morning paper. In 1968 Nigeria responded to Biafra’s attempted secession by waging war against the Christian Ibo resistance and by cutting off food supplies to the civilian population. “Mr. President, the need of the starving is obvious. Indeed, it cries to high heaven for action,”Proxmire declared. “And to the degree that the nations of the world allow themselves to be lulled by the claim that the elimination of hundreds of thousands of their fellows is an internal affair, to that degree will our moral courage be bankrupt and our humane concern for others a thin veneer. Our responsibility grows awesomely with the death of each innocent man, woman and child.”⁵⁷ But the United States stood behind Nigerian unity. Reeling from huge losses in Vietnam as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Johnson administration followed the lead of the State Department’s Africa bureau and its British allies, both of which adamantly opposed Biafran secession. Citing fears of further Soviet incursions in Africa and eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, U.S. officials stalled effective famine relief measures for much of the conflict. The United States insisted that food be delivered through Lagos, even though Nigerian commanders were open about their objectives. “Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,” one said.⁵⁸ In the end Nigeria crushed the Ibo resistance and killed and starved to death more than 1 million people

Beginning in March 1971, after Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan’s Awami League won an overall majority in the proposed national assembly and made modest appeals for autonomy, Pakistani troops killed between 1 and 2 million Bengalis and raped some 200,000 girls and women. The Nixon administration, which was hostile to India and using Pakistan as an intermediary to China, did not protest. The U.S. consul general in Dacca, Archer Blood, cabled Washington on April 6, 1971, soon after the massacres began, charging:

Our government has failed to denounce atrocities…while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government…We have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent.

The cable was signed by twenty U.S. diplomats in Bangladesh and nine South Asia hands back in the State Department.⁵⁹ “Thirty years separate the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Asian sub-continent,” Proxmire noted, “but the body counts are not so far apart. Those who felt that genocide was a crime of the past had a rude awakening during the Pakistani occupation of Bangladesh.”⁶⁰ Only the Indian army’s invasion, combined with Bengali resistance, halted Pakistan’s genocide and gave rise to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh. Archer Blood was recalled from his post.

In Burundi in the spring and summer of 1972, after a violent Hutu-led rebellion, members of the ruling Tutsi minority hunted down and killed tens of thousands of Hutu.⁶¹ The rate of slaughter reached 1,000 per day, and, in their cables back to Washington, U.S. ambassador Thomas Patrick Melady and his deputy, Michael Hoyt, routinely reported “extermination,” a “vast bloodbath of Hutu,” and “thousands” of executions (some by “sledgehammer”). Embassy officials also supplied a running tally of the burial pits being dug and filled nightly near the airport. In one confidential cable in May 1972, for instance, Hoyt noted:

In Bujumbira we were able to see [when] shouting men surrounded Hutus and clubbed them to death in the streets. The army throughout the land and revolutionary youth groups arrested and executed educated Hutus, including secondary school students. After a month we can assume only a relative handful of educated Hutus…are still alive. The [killing] toll may be above tens of thousands…Trucks ply the road to the airport every night with a fresh contribution to the mass grave.⁶²

Despite these graphic reports, neither Ambassador Melady nor his superiors in Washington believed the United States should condemn the killings. And although the United States was the world’s main purchaser of the country’s coffee, which accounted for 65 percent of Burundi’s commercial revenue, the State Department opposed any suspension of commerce.⁶³ Melady assured Washington that his response had been “to follow our strict policy of noninvolvement in the internal affairs and to associate ourselves with urgent relief efforts.”⁶⁴ Secretary of State William Rogers cabled that embassy officials were right to “avoid any indication [the] USG [was] taking sides in [the] current tragic problem.”⁶⁵ One State Department official met a junior official’s appeal for action by asking, “Do you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?”⁶⁶

U.S. policymakers placed their hope in the Organization for African Unity (OAU) and the UN. “Our general prescription is that Africans should settle African problems,”⁶⁷ Melady wrote. But the OAU pledged “total solidarity” with the genocidal Burundian government; the UN mustered only an ineffectual fact-finding mission; and the killings continued unimpeded. “So far, we have been able to maintain our two primary interests, that of not becoming involved and in protecting our citizens,” Melady reported, adding, “We cannot at this time say how many people have died…but figures of 100,000 no longer make us incredulous.”⁶⁸ In fact, somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Burundian Hutu were murdered between April and September 1972.

While the executive branch refrained from much public comment, Senator Proxmire criticized the OAU and the UN for failing to investigate and denounce the slaughter, and he called on the United States to do more to stop it. He noted that the genocide convention made clear that such a crime was not merely a matter of internal concern but a violation of international law that demanded international attention. “The United States has for too long blithely ignored the issues of genocide,” Proxmire said. “Evidence that genocide is going on in the 1970s should shake our complacency.”⁶⁹

Proxmire had no shortage of grim news pegs on which to hang his appeal. His staff drew upon a range of sources, but their creative juices sometimes dried up. Even the lugubrious Lemkin with his file folders on medieval slaughter would have struggled to devise a novel speech each day. One evening an enterprising intern in Proxmire’s office was struggling to prepare the next morning’s speech when a pest control team arrived to sanitize the senator’s quarters. The next morning Proxmire rose on the Senate floor and heard himself declare that the late-night visit of exterminators to his office “reminds me, once again, Mr. President, of the importance of ratifying the genocide convention.”As taxing as it sometimes was to diversify the ratification pitch, nobody on Proxmire’s staff considered slipping an old speech into Proxmire’s floor folder in the hopes he would not remember having seen it before. “Prox had a hawk-like memory, the sharpest mind I ever came across,” says Proxmire’s convention expert Larry Patton, “I never had the guts to try.”

Proxmire used his daily soliloquy to rebut common American misperceptions that had persisted since Lemkin’s day. Powerful right-wing isolationist groups would never come around. But most Americans, the senator believed, did not really oppose ratification; they were just misinformed. “The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals,” Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. “They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world—ignorance and indifference.”⁷⁰ He used the speeches to educate. As critics picked apart the treaty and highlighted its shortcomings, he responded, “I do not dismiss this criticism or skepticism. But if the U.S. Senate waited for the perfect law without any flaw…the legislative record of any Congress would be a total blank. I am amazed that men who daily see that the enactment of any legislation is the art of the possible can captiously nit pick an international covenant on the outlawing of genocide.”⁷¹

Proxmire believed the United States could be doing far more in the court of public opinion to impact state and individual behavior. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,”he said. “The pressures of the greatest country in the world could make a potential wrongdoer think before committing genocide.”⁷² But the United States neither ratified the UN genocide convention nor denounced regimes committing genocide. U.S. military intervention was not even considered.

Initially, Proxmire thought it might take a year or two at most to secure passage. “I couldn’t think of a more outrageous crime than genocide, “he recalls.” Of all the laws pending before Congress, this seemed a no-brainer.” On the floor he listed other treaties that the Senate had endorsed in the period it had allowed the convention to languish:

Included among the hundred-plus treaties are a Tuna Convention with Costa Rica, a bridge across the Rainy River, a Halibut Convention with Canada, a Road Traffic Convention allowing licensed American drivers to drive on European highways, a Shrimp Convention with Cuba…a treaty of amity with Muscat and Oman, and even a most colorful and appetizing treaty entitled the “Pink Salmon Protocol.” I do not mean to suggest that any of these treaties should not have been ratified…But every one…has as its objective the promotion of either profit or pleasure.⁷³

The genocide convention, by contrast, dealt with people. Because it did not promote profit or pleasure for Americans, it did not easily garner active support. Opponents of the treaty were more numerous, more vocal, and in the end more successful than Proxmire could have dreamed. Undeterred by failure, Proxmire would continue his campaign into the next decade. Indeed, nineteen years and 3,211 speeches after casually pledging in 1967 to speak daily, Proxmire would still be rising in an empty Senate chamber, dressed in his trademark tweed blazers and his Ivy League ties, insisting that ratification would advance America’s interests and its most cherished values.