Remembering Raphael Lemkin on the 106th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

April 24 Armenia and all its inhabitants scattered in the diaspora commemorate the start of the Armenian genocide.

On this date, in the year 1915, the Ottoman Empire it was in its twilight, detained hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, accusing them of “fifth column” in their war against Russia, executing them in the days that followed.

So began a bloody bleeding which in three years has led to physical annihilation of around 1.5 million Armenians and the creation of large numbers of refugees who have been displaced from their lands.

Coinciding with this sad anniversary, we would like to highlight the figure of a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “Genocide” in 1943, applying it to the Armenian tragedy, when the Jews of Europe were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime.

Lemkin was born on June 24, 1900 in Anhydrous, at the time part of the Russian Empire and today Belarus. He grew up in a Polish Jewish family and from an early age Raphael was fascinated by these history chapters in which atrocities have been committed. His mother, who was an intellectual, tried to address his concerns, urging him to read history books.

With particular emphasis, Lemkin deepened his knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians from 1915.

After completing the career of Philosophy at the University of HeidelbergIn Germany, Raphael returned to Lvov in 1926 and began to study law.

After graduating, he alternated his duties at the Berezhany prosecutor’s office in Ukraine and Warsaw, with his career as a private lawyer in Warsaw.

In September 1939, Lemkin escaped from Warsaw in northeastern Poland, remaining caught between the Nazis in the west and the Red Army troops in the east, in a Poland which would lose its independence after the agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany.

Eventually he managed to escape for Sweden, where he started teaching at Stockholm University.

Lemkin was able to save his life, but many of his relatives were killed during the Holocaust. His brother Elias managed to survive but was transferred to a Soviet forced labor camp from which he was released thanks to Raphael’s intervention.

Lemkin emigrated to the United States and became Professor at Duke University School of Law in North Carolina, where it stands out. After the end of World War II, Lemkin served as Professor of Law at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark and later became the promoter and mentor of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN on September 12, 1948.

The word “genocide” first appeared in his book: “Axis rule in occupied Europe” (1944).

Lemkin defined “genocide” as “The destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. The word comes from the Greek “Genos»(Race, tribe) and Latin “Cide” (slaughter). Lemkin adds that “generally, genocide does not imply the immediate destruction of a nation … but rather a coordinated plan, consisting of various actions aimed at destroying the fundamental foundations of the life of national groups, in order to annihilate said groups“.

Lemkin died in poverty in New York at the age of 59, the victim of cardiac arrest. Your adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention, which caused him a deep sense of failure.

Although the word genocide was coined after the massacre against the Armenian people, it is necessary that this tragedy is recognized not only by the descendants of the authors, but by the whole world.

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