Читать книгу A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide - Samantha Power, Samantha Power - Страница 6

Soghomon Tehlirian, the young Armenian survivor, knew little of international treaties or geopolitics. He knew only that his life had been empty since the war, that Talaat was responsible, and that the former minister of the interior would never stand trial. Since the massacre of his family and injury to his head, Tehlirian had been unable to sleep and had been overcome by frequent epileptic seizures. In 1920 he had found a cause, enlisting in Operation Nemesis, a Boston-based Armenian plot to assassinate the Turkish leaders involved in targeting the Armenians. He was assigned to murder Talaat, a crime that earned him everlasting glory in the Armenian community and brief global notoriety.

While Tehlirian awaited trial in Berlin, Raphael Lemkin, a twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, came upon a short news item on Talaat’s assassination in the local paper. Lemkin was intrigued and brought the case to the attention of one of his professors. Lemkin asked why the Armenians did not have Talaat arrested for the massacre. The professor said there was no law under which he could be arrested. “Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens,” he said. “He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing.”

“It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?” Lemkin asked. “This is most inconsistent.”¹

Lemkin was appalled that the banner of “state sovereignty” could shield men who tried to wipe out an entire minority. “Sovereignty,” Lemkin argued to the professor, “implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads…all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.”² But it was states, and particularly strong states, that made the rules.

Lemkin read about the abortive British effort to try the Turkish perpetrators and saw that states would rarely pursue justice out of a commitment to justice alone. They would do so only if they came under political pressure, if the trials served strategic interests, or if the crimes affected their citizens.

Lemkin was torn about how to judge Tehlirian’s act. On the one hand, Lemkin credited the Armenian with upholding the “moral order of mankind” and drawing the world’s attention to the Turkish slaughter. Tehlirian’s case had quickly turned into an informal trial of the deceased Talaat for his crimes against the Armenians; the witnesses and written evidence introduced in Tehlirian’s defense brought the Ottoman horrors to their fullest light to date. The New York Times wrote that the documents introduced in the trial “established once and for all the fact that the purpose of the Turkish authorities was not deportation but annihilation.”³ But Lemkin was uncomfortable that Tehlirian, who had been acquitted on the grounds of what today would be called “temporary insanity,” had acted as the “self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind.”⁴ Passion, he knew,would often make a travesty of justice. Impunity for mass murderers like Talaat had to end; retribution had to be legalized.

A decade later, in 1933, Lemkin, then a lawyer, made plans to speak before an international criminal law conference in Madrid before a distinguished gathering of elder colleagues.⁵ Lemkin drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler’s ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, a crime that most Europeans either had ignored or had filed away as an “Eastern” phenomenon. If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here. Lemkin offered up a radical proposal. If the international community ever hoped to prevent mass slaughter of the kind the Armenians had suffered, he insisted, the world’s states would have to unite in a campaign to ban the practice. With that end in mind,Lemkin had prepared a law that would prohibit the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups. The law hinged on what he called “universal repression,” a precursor to what today is called “universal jurisdiction”:The instigators and perpetrators of these acts should be punished wherever they were caught, regardless of where the crime was committed, or the criminals’ nationality or official status.⁶ The attempt to wipe out national, ethnic, or religious groups like the Armenians would become an international crime that could be punished anywhere, like slavery and piracy. The threat of punishment, Lemkin argued, would yield a change in practice.

“Barbarity”

Raphael Lemkin had been oddly consumed by the subject of atrocity even before he heard Tehlirian’s story. In 1913, when he was twelve, Lemkin had read Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? which recounts the Roman emperor Nero’s massacres of Christian converts in the first century. Lemkin grew up on a sprawling farm in eastern Poland near the town of Wolkowysk, some 50 miles from the city of Bialystok, which was then part of czarist Russia. Although Lemkin was Jewish, many of his neighbors were Christian. He was aghast that Nero could feed Christians to the lions and asked his mother, Bella, how the emperor could have elicited cheers from a mob of spectators. Bella, a painter, linguist, and student of philosophy who home-schooled her three sons, explained that once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life.

As a boy, Lemkin often grilled his mother for details on historical cases of mass slaughter, learning about the sacking of Carthage, the Mongol invasions, and the targeting of the French Huguenots. A bibliophile, he raced through an unusually grim reading list and set out to play a role in ending the destruction of ethnic groups. “I was an impressionable youngster, leaning to sentimentality,” he wrote years later. “I was appalled by the frequency of the evil…and, above all, by the impunity coldly relied upon by the guilty.”

The subject of slaughter had an unfortunate personal relevance for him growing up in the Bialystok region of Poland: In 1906 some seventy Jews were murdered and ninety gravely injured in local pogroms. Lemkin had heard that mobs opened the stomachs of their victims and stuffed them with feathers from pillows and comforters in grotesque mutilation rituals. He feared that the myth that Jews liked to grind young Christian boys into matzoh would lead to more killings. Lemkin saw what he later described as “a line of blood” leading from the massacre of the Christians in Rome to the massacre of Jews nearby.⁷

During World War I, while the Armenians were suffering under Talaat’s menacing rule, the battle between the Russians and the Germans descended upon the doorstep of the Lemkin family farm.⁸ His mother and father buried the family’s books and their few valuables and took the boys to hide out in the forest that enveloped their land. In the course of the fighting, artillery fire ripped their farmhouse apart. The Germans seized their crops, cattle, and horses. Samuel, one of Lemkin’s two brothers, died in the woods of pneumonia and malnourishment.

The interwar period brought a brief respite for Lemkin and his fellow Poles. After the Russian-Polish war resulted in a rare Polish victory, Lemkin enrolled in the University of Lvov in 1920. His childhood Torah study had sparked a curiosity in the power of naming, and he had long been interested in the insight words supplied into culture. He had a knack for languages, and having already mastered Polish, German, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, he began to study philology, the evolution of language. He planned next to learn Arabic and Sanskrit.

But in 1921, when Lemkin read the article about the assassination of Talaat, he veered away from philology and back toward his dark, childhood preoccupation. He transferred to the Lvov law school, where he scoured ancient and modern legal codes for laws prohibiting slaughter. He kept his eye trained on the local press, and his inquiry gained urgency as he got wind of pogroms being committed in the new Soviet state. He went to work as a local prosecutor and in 1929 began moonlighting on drafting an international law that would commit his government and others to stopping the targeted destruction of ethnic, national, and religious groups. It was this law that the cocksure Lemkin presented to his European legal colleagues in Madrid in 1933.

Lemkin felt that both the physical and the cultural existence of groups had to be preserved. And so he submitted to the Madrid conference a draft law banning two linked practices—“barbarity” and “vandalism.” “Barbarity” he defined as “the premeditated destruction of national, racial, religious and social collectivities.” “Vandalism” he classified as the “destruction of works of art and culture, being the expression of the particular genius of these collectivities.” ⁹ Punishing these two practices—the destruction of groups and the demolition of their cultural and intellectual life—would occupy him fully for the next three decades.

Lemkin met with two disappointments. First, the Polish foreign minister Joseph Beck, who was attempting to endear himself to Hitler, refused to permit Lemkin to travel to Madrid to present his ideas in person.¹⁰ Lemkin’s draft had to be read out loud in his absence. Second, Lemkin found few allies for his proposal. In an interwar Europe composed of isolationist, nationalistic, economically ailing nations, European jurists and litigators were unmoved by Lemkin’s talk of crimes that “shock the conscience.” The League of Nations was too divided to make joint law—never mind joint law on behalf of imperiled minorities. The delegates talked at length about “collective security,” but they did not mean for the phrase to include the security of collectives within states. Besides, in the words of one delegate, this crime of barbarity took place “too seldom to legislate.” Most of the lawyers present (representing thirty-seven countries) wondered how crimes committed a generation ago in the Ottoman Empire concerned lawyers on the civilized Continent. Although the German delegation had just walked out of the League of Nations and thousands of Jewish families had already begun fleeing Nazi Germany, they were also skeptical about apocalyptic references to Hitler. When Lemkin’s plan was presented, the president of the supreme court of Germany and the president of Berlin University left the room in protest.¹¹ As Lemkin put it later in his characteristically stiff style, “Cold water was poured on me.” ¹²

Lemkin had issued a moral challenge, and the lawyers at the conference did not reject his proposal outright. They tabled it. Lemkin noted, “They would not say ‘yes,’ and they could not say ‘no.’” They were not prepared to agree to intervene, even diplomatically, across borders. But neither were they prepared to admit that they would stand by and allow innocent people to die.

Back in Poland, Lemkin was accused of trying to advance the status of Jews with his proposal. Foreign minister Beck slammed him for “insulting our German friends.” ¹³ Soon after the conference, the anti-Semitic Warsaw government fired him as deputy public prosecutor for refusing to curb his criticisms of Hitler.¹⁴

Jobless and chastened by the reception of his draft law, Lemkin still did not question the soundness of his strategy. History, he liked to say, was “much wiser than lawyers and statesmen.” The crime of barbarity repeated itself with near “biological regularity.” ¹⁵ But Lemkin saw that people living in peacetime were clearly going to have difficulty hearing, never mind heeding, warning pleas for early action. The prospect of atrocity seemed too remote, the notion of a plot to destroy a collective too inhuman, and the fate of vulnerable groups too removed from the core interests of outsiders. Yet by the time the crimes had been committed, it would be too late for concerned states to deter them. States would forever be stuck dealing with the consequences of genocide, unable to see or unwilling to act ahead of time to prevent it. But Lemkin did not give up. Over the next few years, at law conferences in Budapest, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cairo, Lemkin rose in his crisply pressed suit and spoke in commanding French about the urgency of the proposal.

Lemkin was not the only European who had learned from the past. So, too, had Hitler. Six years after the Madrid conference, in August 1939, Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books. He declared:

It was knowingly and lightheartedly that Genghis Khan sent thousands of women and children to their deaths. History sees in him only the founder of a state…The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?¹⁶

A week later, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. In 1942 Hitler restored Talaat’s ashes to Turkey, where the Turkish government enshrined the fallen hero’s remains in a mausoleum on the Hill of Liberty in Istanbul.¹⁷

Flight

If Lemkin had been in a position to utter a public “I told you so” in September 1939, he would have done so. But like all Jews scrambling to flee or to fight, Lemkin had only survival on his mind. Six days after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, he heard a radio broadcast instructing able-bodied men to leave the capital. Lemkin rushed to the train station, carrying only a shaving kit and a summer coat. When the train was bombed and set aflame by the German Luftwaffe, Lemkin hid and hiked for days in the woods nearby, joining what he called a “community of nomads.” He saw German bombers hit a train crammed with refugees and then a group of children huddling by the tracks. Three of his traveling companions were killed in an air raid. Hundreds of Poles marching with him collapsed of fatigue, starvation, and disease.

Under the terms of the secret Soviet-German deal known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets invaded Poland just after the Germans, and the country was divided into a Soviet and a German zone. Lemkin kept on the move until November 1939, when he wound up in a small town in Poland’s Soviet-occupied half and persuaded a devout Jewish family to shelter him for a few days. There, despite the warmth and generosity of his hosts, Lemkin was frustrated by their passivity and wishful thinking in the face of Hitler’s brutality.

“There is nothing new in the suffering of Jews, especially in time of war,” the man of the house, a baker, insisted. “The main thing for a Jew is not to get excited and to outlast the enemies. A Jew must wait and pray. The Almighty will help. He always helps.”

Lemkin asked the man if he had heard of Mein Kampf. The man said he had heard of it but that he did not believe Hitler would follow through on his threats.

“How can Hitler destroy the Jews, if he must trade with them?” the baker asked Lemkin. “I grant you some Jews will suffer under Hitler, but this is the lot of the Jews, to suffer and to wait.”

Lemkin argued that this was not like other wars. The Germans were not interested only in grabbing territory. Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews completely.

“In the last war, 1915–1918, we lived three years under the Germans,” the baker said. “It was never good, but somehow we survived. I sold bread to the Germans; we baked for them their flour. We Jews are an eternal people, we cannot be destroyed. We can only suffer.” ¹⁸

This disbelief, this faith in reason, in human contact, in commerce, convinced millions to remain in place and risk their fates. Only a small number of Jews had Lemkin’s foresight. The vast majority expected persecution and maybe even the occasional pogrom, but not extermination.

Lemkin studied the man carefully and reflected:

Many generations spoke through this man. He could not believe the reality of [Hitler’s intent], because it was so much against nature, against logic, against life itself, and against the warm smell of bread in his house, against his poor but comfortable bed…There was not much sense in disturbing or confusing him with facts. He had already made up his mind.¹⁹

Lemkin took a train to eastern Poland, where his brother and parents lived. He begged them to join him in flight. “I have been living in retirement for more than ten years because of my sickness,” his father said. “I am not a capitalist. The Russians will not bother me.” His brother chimed in, “I gave up my store and registered as an employee before it was taken over by the new government. They will not touch me either.” Lemkin later remembered: “I read in the eyes of all of them one plea: do not talk of our leaving this warm home, our beds, our stores of food, the security of our customs…We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow.” He spent the next day feeling as if he was living their funerals while they were still alive. “The best of me was dying with the full cruelty of consciousness,” he noted.²⁰

Before Lemkin left Wolkowysk, his mother lectured him on the importance of rounding out his life. She reminded him that his goal of writing a book a year was not as important as developing “the life of the heart.” Lemkin, who had not dated, joked that maybe he would have more luck in his new capacity as a nomad than he had had “as a member of a sedentary society.” He told his parents that he planned to travel first to Sweden and then, he hoped, to the United States, because that was where decisions were made.

After waving goodbye to his parents with a determined casualness, Lemkin headed towardVilnius, Lithuania, a town bustling with refugees. He spent what was left of his money on two telegrams. The first the fastidious scholar sent to Paris to inquire whether his publisher had received a manuscript that he had mailed a week before the war’s outbreak. The second, a plea for refuge, he dispatched to a friend, the minister of justice in Sweden.²¹ As he awaited notification from the Swedish consulate, he visited with various Jewish intellectuals around town. None planned to leave.

The life of the vagrant was not agreeing with Lemkin. Although his acquaintances were generous, he felt his personality “disintegrate” as apathy set in. “There were three things I wanted to avoid in my life:to wear eyeglasses, to lose my hair, and to become a refugee,” he wrote. “Now all these three things have come to me in implacable succession.” ²² He busied himself by buying a dictionary and learning Lithuanian from the daily newspaper. But only the arrival of a package from his publisher in France cheered him up. The publisher enclosed galleys of his latest book on international finance regulations, as well as copies of Lemkin’s 1933 draft law banning acts of barbarity and vandalism. In his newfound free time, the lawyer immediately set out to improve them.

Lemkin’s request for refuge was granted, and he traveled to neutral Sweden by ship in February 1940. He was able to lecture in Swedish after just five months, an achievement he credited with enabling him to “rise spiritually from the ‘refugee’ fall of modern man.” ²³ While lecturing on international law at the University of Stockholm, he began assembling the legal decrees the Nazis had issued in each of the countries they occupied. He relied upon a corporation whose legal affairs he had once managed from Warsaw—as well as Swedish embassies around Europe, Red Cross delegations, and German occupation radio—to gather the official gazettes from any branches that remained open in the occupied countries. In compiling these laws, Lemkin hoped he would be able to demonstrate the sinister ways in which law could be used to propagate hate and incite murder. He also hoped decrees and ordinances in the Nazis’ own words would serve as “objective and irrefutable evidence” for the legions of disbelievers in what he called the “blind world.” ²⁴

Lemkin was desperate to leave the libraries of neutral Stockholm and get to the United States, which he had idealized. Thanks to a professor at Duke University with whom he had once translated the Polish criminal code into English, Lemkin secured an appointment to the Duke faculty to teach international law. He flew to Moscow, took the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, and then picked up a small boat, which he and the other refugees called the “floating coffin,” to the Japanese port of Tsuruga. He then took a bigger boat from Yokohama to Vancouver and on to Seattle, the U.S. port of entry, where he landed on April 18, 1941.

A New Beginning, an Old Crusade

Lemkin traveled by train to North Carolina, marking the end of what had been a 14,000-mile journey. The evening he arrived, he was asked to deliver a speech at a dinner with the university president. Without preparation or a full command of English, Lemkin urged Americans to do as Ambassador Morgenthau had done for the Armenians. “If women, children, and old people would be murdered a hundred miles from here,” Lemkin asked, “wouldn’t you run to help? Then why do you stop this decision of your heart when the distance is 3,000 miles instead of a hundred?” ²⁵ This was the first of hundreds of speeches Lemkin gave around the state. He bought himself a white suit, white shoes, white socks, and a dark silk tie for his appearances before chambers of commerce, women’s groups, and colleges. Members of the audiences approached Lemkin after his talks and apologized for America’s reluctance to join the fight against Hitler.

While at Duke, Lemkin received a letter from his parents on a scrap of paper a quarter the size of a regular sheet. “We are well,” the letter read. “We hope you are happy. We are thinking of you.” Several days later, on June 24, 1941, he heard a radio broadcaster announce that the German army had declared war on the Soviet Union, abrogating the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that had divided the country into a German and a Soviet zone. Hitler’s forces were now storming into eastern Poland. Colleagues on campus asked, “Have you heard the news about the Nazis?” Lemkin, dazed and sullen, looked down. “Sorry,” they said, pulling away.²⁶

Although Lemkin was panicked about the fate of his missing family, he busied himself by proselytizing about Hitler’s crimes. The prevailing wisdom in the United States, as it had been in Lithuania, was that the Nazis were waging a war against Europe’s armies. When Lemkin told U.S. government officials that Germany was also wiping out the Jews, he was greeted either with indifference or incredulity. But with Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States, Lemkin, then fluent in nine languages, thought he might acquire more cachet. In June 1942 the Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington, D.C., hired him as chief consultant, and in 1944 the U.S. War Department brought him on board as an international law expert. But his horror stories were not a U.S. governmental concern. “My companions were mildly and only politely interested,” he remembered. “Their attention was rather absorbed by their own assignments…They were masters in switching the discussion in their direction.” ²⁷

Lemkin reached out to those at the top. He met with Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice president, and attempted to personalize his message. Ahead of the meeting, he had studied up on the Tennessee Valley Authority project on irrigation, which he knew would interest Wallace. Because the vice president had been raised in the cornfields of Iowa, Lemkin also slipped in references to his farm upbringing Lemkin met with Wallace on several occasions and introduced his proposals to ban the destruction of peoples. “I looked hopefully for a reaction,” Lemkin remembered. “There was none.” ²⁸

Lemkin next tried to approach President Roosevelt directly. An aide urged him to summarize his proposal in a one-page memo. Lemkin was aghast that he had to “compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death” in one page. But he managed, suggesting that the United States adopt a treaty banning barbarity and urging that the Allies declare the protection of Europe’s minorities a central war aim. Several weeks later a courier relayed a message from the president. Roosevelt said he recognized the danger to groups but saw difficulties adopting such a law at the present. He assured Lemkin that the United States would issue a warning to the Nazis and urged patience. Lemkin was livid. “‘Patience’is a good word to be used when one expects an appointment, a budgetary allocation or the building of a road,” he noted. “But when the rope is already around the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isn’t the word ‘patience’ an insult to reason and nature?” ²⁹ He believed a “double murder” was being committed—one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler’s extermination campaign but refused to publicize or denounce it. After he received word of Roosevelt’s brush-off, Lemkin left the department and walked slowly down Constitution Avenue, trying not to think about what it meant for his parents.

He was sure politicians would always put their own interests above the interests of others. To stand any chance of influencing U.S. policy, he would have to take his message to the general public, who in turn would pressure their leaders. “I realized that I was following the wrong path,” he later wrote. “Statesmen are messing up the world, and [only] when it seems to them that they are drowning in the mud of their own making, [do] they rush to extricate themselves.” ³⁰ Those Americans who had been so responsive to Lemkin in person were not making their voices heard. And most Americans were uninterested. Lemkin told himself:

All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren. Let me now tell this story to the American people, to the man in the street, in church, on the porches of their houses and in their kitchens and drawing rooms. I was sure they would understand me…I will publish the decrees spreading death over Europe…They will have no other choice but to believe. The recognition of truth will cease to be a personal favor to me, but a log ical necessity.³¹

As he lobbied for action in Washington and around the country in 1942 and 1943, he flashed back to a speech delivered by British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, broadcast on the BBC, which had urged Allied resolve. “The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis…As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated,” Churchill had thundered. “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” ³²

Suddenly Lemkin’s crusade took on a specific objective: the search for a new word. He replayed in his mind the Churchill speech and the response of the lawyers in Madrid to his proposal. Perhaps he had not adequately distinguished the crime he was campaigning against from typical, wartime violence. Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might get more exercised about stopping it. Lemkin began to think about ways he might combine his knowledge of international law, his aim of preventing atrocity, and his long-standing interest in language. Convinced that it was only the packaging of his legal and moral cause that needed refining, he began to hunt for a term commensurate with the truth of his experience and the experience of millions. He would be the one to give the ultimate crime a name.