A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power Read Free Book Online

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 Tunes 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"' 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"' 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.' 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 precur sor 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.' 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 ofWolkowysk, 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