Article August 2, 2004 Issue

Sudan—the value of ONE

Beverly Goldsmith

For post–world War II baby boomers like me, living in the comfort and security of Australia, news of the atrocities that have been perpetrated on the black African tribes in the Darfur region of western Sudan would once have been shocking. But today, the scenes of torture and murder that reach into our homes via TV and the Internet are commonplace, and it can be hard to feel more than a flicker of dismay at where civilization is heading. That's why I'm grateful for the example of humanitarians such as Dr. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish international lawyer who worked diligently for human rights and was nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1933, Lemkin, disturbed by news of the continuing massacre of Christian Assyrians in the Middle East (as well as the memory of Armenians massacred during World War I), began to examine these atrocities as crimes, in an effort to prevent and outlaw what he called "such acts of barbarism." To this end, he drafted a resolution and presented it to the Legal Council of the League of Nations. His proposal failed. Then in 1939, when Poland was invaded by Germany, he was forced to flee to Sweden where he continued with his work.

As a refugee in Sweden, Lemkin analyzed the laws and systems that had been put into place in Nazi Germany, which had allowed for the systematic elimination of a people. During this time, Lemkin coined the term "genocide" from the ancient Greek word genos (race or tribe) and Latin cide (killing) — meaning the deliberate extermination of a racial, national, religious, or ethnic group as an intentional strategy. The next year, his analysis was used as one of the bases for the Nuremberg trials program. He then presented a draft convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide to the Paris Peace Conference in 1945. Once again his proposal failed.