The lawyer who coined genocide considered the treaty banning it a failure
Raphael Lemkin invented the word genocide during the Second World War and spent years persuading the new United Nations to outlaw it. When a convention was finally agreed, it had been trimmed so heavily by powerful governments that Lemkin privately regarded the result as a failure.
Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, first grew interested in the destruction of peoples as a law student, prompted by the Armenian genocide. Between 1941 and 1943 he joined the Greek genos, meaning race or people, to a Latin root for killing. His book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, submitted in 1942, came out in 1944, just as news of the Holocaust was reaching the wider world. His aim went beyond banning mass murder: he hoped such a law would encourage more tolerant, plural societies.
For Lemkin, genocide meant destroying a nation or ethnic group as a group, not merely killing individuals. It could work by dismantling a people's institutions, culture, language, religion and livelihood, all facets of one process. He saw it as fundamentally colonial and later applied the idea to colonies, including the Soviet and Nazi empires. The contemporary scholar Hersch Lauterpacht took the opposite tack, arguing that law should shield individuals from atrocities regardless of group identity. Meanwhile the Nuremberg trials could prosecute atrocities only when linked to an illegal war of aggression, since the victorious powers were reluctant to police how governments treated their own citizens.
When Lemkin took his proposal to the United Nations in 1946, resistance proved stiffer than he expected. States feared their own policies, from the treatment of indigenous peoples and colonial rule to American segregation and Soviet nationalities policy, might be labelled genocide. The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union each sought wording that would catch rivals rather than themselves, and few former colonies had a voice.
The final text covered five specific acts aimed at destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Left out were political groups, a protection the Soviet Union is especially blamed for blocking, along with cultural genocide and mass forced migration. The definition remains disputed among lawyers, historians and sociologists.
Source: Genocide
