The concept of genocide came to light at a conference in Madrid in 1933. And it is still relevant today

On August 22, 1939, at a meeting in his Obersalzberg chalet in the Bavarian Alps, encouraging his trusted men to invade and massacre Poland, Hitler proclaimed: “Who is talking today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” .

Raphael Lemkin, Polish Jewish jurist, had not forgotten that.

During World War I, the Armenian population in Turkey suffered forced deportation.

More than a million people died, but those mainly responsible for the crime escaped justice.

That shocked Lemkin, then a law student in Lviv (formerly Poland, now Ukraine).

He was young, but he already had “a movement of ideas in search of justice” in his blood, writes Philippe Sands in

Calle Este-Oeste: on the origins of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity'

(Anagrama, 2017).

Lemkin was the father of the concept of genocide: he described it publicly in 1944 in his book

Axis Domination in Occupied Europe

(Prometheus Books), published for the first time in the United States, where he detailed under that name the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.

Until then there was no legal word to describe crimes like this, but the world changes and, as Lemkin noted, “new concepts require new terms.”

In 1948 the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which applies to acts such as intentional subjugation of the group that lead to its total or partial physical destruction, or serious injury to physical or mental integrity.

On January 26, the Court in The Hague demanded that Israel take measures to prevent a genocide against the Palestinian population.

Together with the concept of crime against humanity, coined by Hersch Lauterpacht, another jurist trained in Lviv, the concept coined by Lemkin marked the development of international law and human rights.

“As a legal concept it is innovative.

Before him, the world could not think of a crime worse than individual murder,” reflects Hilary Earl, professor of Modern European History at Nipissing University (Canada), a specialist in war crimes trials.

“The Holocaust changed all that, and collective destruction is now the worst crime we can imagine,” she stresses.

Genocide is already a known concept, but Lemkin did not have it easy in the beginning.

For years he alone studied the most terrible stories: the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the violation of law in Soviet Russia and the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany and Poland.

He also immersed himself in the work of Vespasian V. Pella, a Romanian scholar who promoted the idea of ​​universal justice.

Furthermore, in Lviv he saw how German troops began to organize the isolation and marking of the Jewish population.

“What Lemkin, his family and his environment experienced was a determining factor in developing the concept of genocide,” explains Manuel Ollé, professor of International Criminal Law at the Complutense University of Madrid.

In October 1933 Lemkin was invited to attend the V International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law, held in Madrid.

He could not attend because the Polish Government denied him a visa, but his document was read at the Conference.

Under the title of

Acts that constitute a general (interstate) danger considered as crimes against the law of nations

, the presentation spoke of the existence of “a legal conscience of the civilized international community” that should be attentive to the crime of “barbarism.” with the desire to harm not only the individual, “but, first of all, to harm the community to which the latter belongs.”

Concerned about the rise of Nazism in Germany, the jurist also warned about “the contagious nature of all social psychosis.”

Six years after that writing, Lemkin had to flee Poland and seek refuge in several countries until arriving in the United States in 1941. There, in a small office at the University of Durham (North Carolina), without news of his family, He continued to document Nazi barbarism, partly thanks to the help of his contacts in Europe, who sent him ordinances and circulars from Hitler's regime.

Among many papers, he studied the minutes of a January 1942 meeting in Berlin where Adolf Eichmann recorded the agreement to “purge the German living space of Jews by legal means.”

He also analyzed the decrees of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor in Poland, who wrote phrases such as “I am going to approach Jewish affairs with the perspective that the Jews disappear.”

Those guidelines drew a meticulous landscape of destruction, and were the basis on which Lemkin coined the term genocide, formed from the Greek

genos

(tribe or race) and

cide

(from the Latin

cidere

, to kill).

After the end of the war in 1945, the Nuremberg trials became his main focus.

“The truth is that he carried out a titanic task to create and spread the concept.

Not a day went by without him insisting that genocide be recognized as a new crime,” says Ollé.

With the support of some high-ranking Allied officials, and sometimes against their advice, over several months Lemkin relentlessly approached prosecutors, soldiers and lawyers (even the legal defense of the Nazi leaders) by telephone, by letter or in person.

He sometimes ended up so exhausted that he said he suffered from “genociditis.”

In December 1945, in

Le Monde

, Lemkin detailed his concept, stating that “if in the future a State acts in a manner aimed at destroying a national or racial minority within its population, any of those responsible may be arrested if they leave the country.” ”.

It was in Nuremberg where documented evidence of the systematization of terror, the so-called Final Solution, was seen.

Victoria Ocampo, who attended the trials, described in a letter that those tests filled her heart with “a kind of atomic silence.”

In the trials there was some reference in the prosecutors' oral accusations to Lemkin's termination, but it was not formally accepted nor used in the sentences.

The Nazi leaders were accused of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

When the trials ended, Lemkin did not give up his efforts: he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then president of the United States;

to the Secretary of the United Nations, Trygve Lie, and to many other people, until his perseverance finally paid off in 1948. “Law is not static, but dynamic, and sometimes utopias end up becoming reality.

We need many Lemkins to legislate today's problems,” reflects Ollé.

Until now, the Holocaust, the extermination of Hutus and moderate Tutsis in Rwanda, the crimes of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, the massacres of Yazidis in Iraq and those of Rohingya in Myanmar have been considered genocide.

Genocide does not prescribe: it remains in the attention of the courts and also in memory.

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