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ANKARA: The Lemkin Hole in the Swiss Case

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  • ANKARA: The Lemkin Hole in the Swiss Case

    Daily Sabah, Turkey
    July 31 2014


    THE LEMKIN HOLE IN THE SWISS CASE

    "When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the
    annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide." This is
    an entirely false statement as Lemkin did not mention Armenians even
    once

    Tal Buenos

    One name is found at the center of the Swiss case for a review of
    Perinçek v. Switzerland in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of
    Human Rights (ECHR): Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin is at the heart of the
    Swiss claim that the ECHR decision in December 2013 creates artificial
    distinctions, specifically between the Holocaust and the Armenian
    tragedy. The distinction between the two sets of events is relevant
    because the Swiss government is seeking to justify the decision of its
    Federal Court by pointing out that if Holocaust denial is a crime,
    then so should there be a reconsideration of the ECHR's ruling against
    the Swiss decision that DoÄ?u Perinçek was guilty of a crime for
    rejecting the term genocide as descriptive of the Armenian tragedy.

    Through reference to Lemkin - or, more accurately, the popularized
    unscholarly narrative on the man - the government of Switzerland is
    hoping to establish in the ECHR's Grand Chamber, for the appeasement
    of Armenian pressure and to the delight of anti-Turkish institutions
    in the West, that one man's application of the term genocide somehow
    blurs the recognizable differences between the Holocaust and the
    Ottoman reaction to Armenian rebellion in World War I.

    According to the Swiss government, "The present case is the first case
    which concerns the massacres and deportations¦ that Raphael Lemkin had
    in mind when he coined the term genocide." Furthermore, it notes as
    significant that "four of the seven judges of the Chamber stressed
    that Raphael Lemkin had precisely in mind the massacres and
    deportations of 1915 when he coined the term genocide," as if to
    suggest that the narrative on Lemkin somehow makes up for there having
    been no recognition of genocide by an international court in the
    Armenian case.

    The following questions beg to be asked: How is it that European
    judges and officials express themselves so confidently about what
    Lemkin had in his mind in 1944? How much difference would it make to
    learn the actual facts about Lemkin's life-story?

    Although he came to fame as an American and died an American, Lemkin
    is commonly described by the narrators of the genocide story as a
    Polish Jew, which gives his character a sense of internationality and
    dissociation from greatpower interests. According to some secondary
    sources he was born in 1900 and according to others in 1901. His birth
    town of Biazvodna in the vicinity of Vawkavysk was a territory of
    Imperial Russia that went under German occupation during World War I.
    Meaning, in addition to not being an Ottoman historian at any point in
    his life, as World War I broke out in 1914, Lemkin was merely a
    teenager in a rural area in today's Belarus and likely received
    distorted information on Armenians, Turks, and the war, through
    channels of Russian propaganda filled with hatred of Turks.
    Nevertheless, due to existing political influences, there are in the
    West, textbooks in which young Lemkin's impressions of World War I and
    Armenian suffering have the capacity to overshadow academic analysis
    of the complex political developments that explain the nature of the
    Turkish-Armenian conflict.

    The spotlight on an image of one individual, Lemkin, is designed to
    give the appearance that the term genocide and its use were the
    authentic hand-made creation of a morally committed Jew, thereby
    leaving in darkness any discussion on the political origin and
    utilization of the term, and in particular the political advantages
    gained by establishing an artificial connection between Armenian and
    Jewish suffering.

    While there are thousands of references to how genocide was "coined"
    by Lemkin in a book that he published in 1944, "Axis Rule in Occupied
    Europe," the actual big-name publisher of the book is typically either
    omitted or downplayed: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

    Who was Andrew Carnegie? For a time, he was the richest man in the
    world. He made his wealth thanks to the booming steel industry, and
    during a long period of retirement between the 1880s and World War I
    he invested a huge amount of money in trust funds that were aimed at
    changing global politics through a number of organizations. Being a
    Scottishborn American - and a close friend of Britain's most prominent
    politician, William Gladstone, and main organizer of the Armenian
    rebellion, James Bryce - he endeavored to use his money to establish
    an Anglo-American control of the international economy by employing
    "peace" as a mechanism to halt any other power's growing ambitions.

    In 1898, Carnegie wrote that the Anglo-American nation "would dominate
    the world and banish from the earth its greatest stain - the murder of
    men by men ¦ Such a giant among pigmies as the British-American Union
    would never need to exert its power, but only to intimate its wishes
    and decisions." To him, this was Britain's only chance to maintain a
    status quo that is favorable to its imperial success: "The only course
    for Britain seems to be reunion with her giant child, or sure decline
    to a secondary place¦"

    It was in Carnegie's mind, surely not Lemkin's, where the blueprint
    for laws of international peace were first drawn, and it was meant to
    extend imperial dominance; it was Carnegie's fortune that built the
    Peace Palace "so nations shall appeal to the Court at the Hague."

    Who set up, and was the first to lead, the Carnegie Endowment for
    International Peace in 1910? Unites States Senator, Elihu Root, a
    former secretary of war and secretary of state, whose idea it was that
    Carnegie create trusts for political and educational organizations,
    which would have an unprecedented influence on international politics.
    When "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" came out under Lemkin's name, the
    head of the endowment's International Law Division was George A.

    Finch, who started off as a State Department employee. In the book,
    Lemkin thanks Eleanor Lansing Dulles, a career State Department woman,
    who at the time served as an economic officer in the Division of
    Postwar Planning, and whose brothers were Allen Dulles, director of
    the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953 to 1961, and John Foster
    Dulles, the chairman of the board for the Carnegie Endowment for
    International Peace before serving as secretary of state under Dwight
    Eisenhower. Another person thanked by Lemkin is Florence J. Harriman,
    who served as the U.S. ambassador to Norway, and moved to Sweden
    following the German invasion in 1940. She may have been the liaison
    who facilitated Lemkin's move from Stockholm to America in 1941.

    Robert R. Wilson, an advisor to the State Department, was also thanked
    by Lemkin in the book. Wilson was a recipient of the Carnegie
    fellowship in international law until earning his Ph.D. at Harvard
    University. When Lemkin first arrived in the U.S., he was offered a
    position at Duke University where Wilson was the chair of the
    department of political science. Already in 1939, five years before
    "Axis Rule," Wilson wrote in detail on the same topic of post-war
    reclamation in consideration of Germany's foul wartime conduct in
    Carnegie and Root's American Journal of International Law, stating
    that: "The taking of drastic measures against individuals as a matter
    of policy in certain countries, whether for reasons of racial origin
    or other motives, raises a new questions of the possible significance
    of these developments from the standpoint of international law."

    Lemkin's book simply echoed the writings of this distinguished
    government-affiliated professor who guided him into full-time
    employment by the U.S. government in 1942.

    Are we to believe that, despite this overwhelming association with
    professional policy-makers in the foreign affairs of the U.S.
    government, the book
    "Axis Rule" and the term genocide are in fact Lemkin's? Any reasonable
    person who has ever bothered to read through the book would be of the
    opinion that this is the work of several native speakers of English,
    and not the work of one foreigner who did not live in an
    Englishspeaking country until his 40s. Oddly, even an article written
    in perfect English under Lemkin's name in 1942, a mere year after his
    emigration to the U.S., - "The Treatment of Young Offenders in
    Continental Europe," in Law and Contemporary Problems - does not
    credit anyone for translating, proof-reading, or editing the work. It
    seems that Lemkin's real value lied in his image as a Polish Jew, for
    such a figurehead must have added much credibility to the
    Anglo-American campaign to establish international law according to
    Carnegie's vision.

    Lemkin began his government work as a chief consultant on the U.S.
    Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration before
    transitioning into being an eminent government lawyer who held offices
    in the Pentagon and the War Department. For this he received an annual
    salary, which today would near six figures in U.S. dollars. After
    parting ways with the U.S. government in 1947, he took a position at
    Yale in 1948 and helped pass the United Nations Convention for the
    Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

    In the 1950s, during a time of personal desperation marked by an
    unpublished autobiography, Lemkin became isolated from the government
    in his efforts to apply "genocide" around the world - such as calling
    the potato famine in Ireland a genocide - and reportedly became
    obsessed with its promotion as it became attached to his own name and
    reputation. It was during this time that he received interest and
    support from Christian groups. In return, he began to condemn as
    genocide the past treatment of Christian Armenians by the Ottoman
    state and Christian Koreans by Japan in order to find favor with
    nongovernment Christian lobbies of missionary agendas and enhance his
    legacy in this manner. In this state of mind, he claimed that he
    always had the Armenians in mind.

    Yair Auron of the Open University in Tel Aviv is often quoted for
    stating that "When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he
    cited the annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide."
    This is not even a half-truth, but an entirely false statement: The
    Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication under Lemkin's
    name in 1944 did not mention Armenians even once. If the honorable
    European judges in the Grand Chamber elect to structure their decision
    on the fables of promoters of genocide scholarship such as Auron - who
    suddenly began to write profusely on the Armenian issue in the 1990s,
    15 years after the completion of his doctoral dissertation on a
    completely different topic of Jewish youths in France - then there
    should be a much publicized questioning of their intellectual
    integrity.

    The Lemkin hole in the Swiss case is an important reflector of an
    overall imprudent statement by the Swiss government that the
    distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian tragedy is
    "questionable." The suffering of many Armenian communities is known as
    tragic because of the sense of inevitability brought about by the
    persistent attempts of the Entente and the irresponsible nationalist
    leaders of the Armenian people to utterly destroy the Ottoman state.
    For the European judges at the ECHR's Grand Chamber to say that there
    is no distinction between the German Jewish leaders during the
    Holocaust and the Ottoman Armenian revolutionaries in World War I
    would be inaccurate, insensitive, and, quite frankly, unnecessary.

    The story of genocide is not Lemkin's own story, and it must find
    itself a new symbol, which shall no longer project inaccuracies that
    conceal its real roots in powerful political minds. Only then, may the
    context of the Armenian pressure in the U.S. and Europe be revealed.

    * University of Utah

    http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/08/01/the-lemkin-hole-in-the-swiss-case


    From: Baghdasarian
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