MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, details the legacy of Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer from Poland who coined the term genocide. He also discusses whether mass violence is different today than earlier in human existence as well as the significance of the codification since the Holocaust of international prohibitions against genocide.
This interview is the first of three that Voices on Genocide Prevention is producing in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves. Professor Bartov will participate in an online discussion on March 12th and 13th which you can join by registering here.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. This interview is the first of three that we are producing in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves. Professor Bartov will participate in an online discussion on March 12th and 13th. You can find more details on the Voices on Genocide Prevention blog: www.vogp.org. Today we will be considering the legacy of Raphael Lemkin. Omer, who is joining us from Berlin, welcome to the program.
OMER BARTOV: Thank you.
JERRY FOWLER: We wanted to talk about the legacy of Raphael Lemkin. This term, genocide, even as widely known as it is, was only coined in the 1940s, and Raphael Lemkin was the man who coined it. Tell us a little bit about who Lemkin was.
OMER BARTOV: Raphael Lemkin was a Jewish-Polish Professor of Law who graduated from the University of Lvov or Lemberg in the 1920s and became interested in the question of genocide following the genocide of the Armenians during World War I by the Ottoman regime. Being Jewish, he fled from German occupied Poland and then ended up in the United States. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust, and during the 1940s, he became increasingly engaged in an attempt to codify genocide and to give a name to what had been called, “a crime without a name.” And it was indeed the term that he coined, which is a combination of Latin and Greek, meaning “killing of the people,” that was ultimately accepted by the United Nations in 1948.
JERRY FOWLER: Lemkin was coming up with this word in the 1940s and he had this idea that what was happening in Europe at the time was something very new, or happening in a new way, but on the other hand, it was a human practice that was very old. You have written that genocide has been part of human history for millennia, but that somehow its nature and scale have changed in the last hundred or so years. In what ways do you see the practice of mass violence having changed?
OMER BARTOV: Yes, we know of course that there were crimes of genocide that were committed long before the modern period -- the idea of exterminating peoples, whether the entire peoples or at least a culture. What happened from the late 19th century on was that several new factors were grafted onto this. The first and most important is nationalism; that people started being identified as belonging to a nation. This was something new; it did not exist before. The second was the creation of the nation state; that is nations that identified themselves as the political organization of the people; and the third was the introduction of science and technology, biology, anthropology; according to which, in the late 19th century, one could divide peoples into groups that were distinct from each other. By doing so, this became modern racism, or so called “scientific racism,” and one could also say that some were better than others. This happened at a time of vast European colonialism, where Europe ruled over most of the world, which meant that those who ruled tended to think of themselves as superior and tended to think of those they ruled over as inferior, and they were legitimized into thinking that way by the signs of the times.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me push on that for a second; they were legitimized in thinking they were superior in the science of the time, but that was hardly a new thing in human relations. Is it not pretty age old that one group of people would think of themselves—whether on a scientific basis or not—as superior to another group?
OMER BARTOV: Yes and no in the sense that what we have here was a combination, a period where science became the arbiter of what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, just as religion declines. This is the age of positivism, where what scientists say is truth. It is also a period in which technology makes it possible to implement certain policies and ideas to an extent that was never possible before. What you have is, of course, there were always prejudices between different groups—one village thought that the village on the other side of the hill was inferior or evil—but here, one goes to the scientist and gets legitimacy for this notion, and one goes to the general and can easily wipe out that other village, and that made an enormous difference. One has to remember that when Europe ruled over much of Africa, a large part of Asia, a large part of the Americas, the number of Europeans who went there and ruled over other peoples was rather small, and what they had was a technological edge, and particularly, military technology and organization. This creates something that is entirely new.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess what I may be stumbling on a little bit is that modes of human destruction have some new aspects to them in the last hundred years, for the reasons you have just identified. But on the other hand, this impulse towards destruction, and destruction on a large scale, just seems deeply rooted in human nature. If you go back through the Crusades and the Thirty Years War, back to antiquity and the destruction of Carthage, or the destruction of Melos by the Athenians, questions of technology or science are relatively peripheral to something more fundamental to human existence.
OMER BARTOV: Certainly, and there is no doubt about it; it is just that one has to—at least in my mind—one has to beware of this idea that human beings were always inherently violent and will always tend to destroy each other, demean each other or rule over each other. It is part of human history; there are, of course, many other parts of human history. You can see that in the 19th and 20th century; this was also an era of great progress, of conquering many diseases, of providing much better housing and food for millions and millions of people, so it is not only one thing or the other, it is often both; and the only thing that distinguishes—as I argue—that distinguishes our period, particularly the 20th century and the century that we have entered now, is that we both have a technological means to destroy larger numbers of people faster, and we have, unfortunately, with the same kind of science that has made it possible for many people to live better lives, have also found a way to legitimize, to feel that we are right, in subjugating or destroying other peoples, and that is a new organization of politics in which people identify, in much of the rest of the world with a nation, a nation that is defined by tradition or by race or by color or by religion or by all of the above.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me push just a little bit farther on that. I have heard some people argue that we would have less genocide and mass violence if we did not have the nation state.
OMER BARTOV: Maybe, but we do have it, and there is nothing we can do about it. The nation state is changing, as we speak; whether this will bring more or less violence is hard to say. In Europe, of course as we know, which is where the nation state began, there is now an attempt to erode, or at least, to change the importance of the nation state in favor of the larger unit called Europe that did not exist for centuries. Will this create less violence? Possibly; Europe is a much less violent continent now than it was, but it is very hard to say when that will happen and what the consequences will be. Right now, we are still living in a period where this is a reality that we have to face and learn to live with.
JERRY FOWLER: You have pointed out, importantly, that looking back through history, there has been violence but there has also been progress. Recently, in the years since the Holocaust, there seems to have been particularly focused attempts to try to curb genocide, to try to end genocide, and of course, as we started out by saying, those attempts began with the creation of the very term by Lemkin, and then his effort in the wake of World War II to have that codified into international law. I wonder if – as an historian – if you could reflect for a minute, on the context of Lemkin’s place, on the role individuals play in bringing about change.
OMER BARTOV: Let me say two things. First, regarding progress after 1945, we all know that at the end of World War II, many monuments were built in which people wrote, “Never again” in many languages, and the United Nations passed a Resolution on the Prevention of Genocide in 1948. Having done so, and having codified that, nothing much happened, and it was not until the 1990s that in fact, the Genocide Convention was invoked. The United States did not ratify the Genocide Convention until the late 1980s, and without the United States ratifying it, there was very little chance that anything would happen because they had become the policemen of the world. As long as the Cold War persisted, there were many genocides; for instance, in Cambodia, during which the Genocide Convention was not invoked. In the 1990s alone, after the fall of Communism, when everyone was talking about the end of history, over a million people died in Bosnia and Rwanda, and in Rwanda, no one intervened, and in Bosnia, intervention came only after two and a half years when about a quarter of a million people were already dead. We have to put that into context; the act of actually codifying genocide did not mean that it would be prevented. It has to be enforced, and it cannot be enforced without the international community actively doing so.
As for individual intervention, of course; Lemkin was an extraordinary man. He did not work entirely alone; he persuaded others to help him, but he was an extraordinary man, and he did show that if you are committed and as obsessed—and he indeed was a lonely, obsessed, compulsive person—you may, under the right circumstances, and those were the circumstances at the end of the war that everyone recognized was terribly destructive to everyone, you may be able to make a huge difference, and he did so, but as I say, doing that alone did nothing as such; it was a beginning, not an end.
JERRY FOWLER: I think you make a very good point, and I wonder, again taking the view of the historian; it has been just over sixty years since the end of World War II—we are coming up on the sixtieth anniversary of the Genocide Convention—sixty years in historical years is just the blink of an eye. How would you assess the things that you have just described—the attempts at codification, but the lack of enforcement—is it such that we can say that we are making progress, or is it too soon to tell, or is this just the normal flow of history?
OMER BARTOV: It is very hard to tell. There has obviously been progress; there has been progress in codifying rules of law. There has been progress in finally creating what the Genocide Convention had called for, an international court, the International Criminal Court, which again is still toothless because the United States is not part of it. There have been several international tribunals as a result of the 1990s, both for Rwanda and for Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia. In that sense, there has been progress. On the other hand, if you look at what is happening right now, in Darfur, with some people squabbling about whether it is genocide or not, thousands of people are dying there all the time and nothing has happened. The United States, curiously, has recognized that this is genocide, and that was something that the Clinton Administration refused to do during the Rwandan genocide, but at the same time, has said that it does not mean that it needs to interfere in anyway, to intervene in anyway. There has been progress. There has been an attempt not to allow impunity which is the greatest motivation for all the genocidaires ever in history, but by and large, many nations are still getting away with murder, as is the case right now in Darfur. It is very hard to say. I think the most important point to be made is that it is really up to citizens, particularly in democratic states to make their voices heard and say that this is their own national interest to stop such events from occurring, even in countries that are very far from them, happening to people with whom they do not speak.
JERRY FOWLER: Could you just expand on that a little bit? What is the role that citizens—either individually or in groups—play in affecting the formation of policy and what happens in response to genocide?
OMER BARTOV: If you think for instance about what happened in Cambodia; in Cambodia there was a genocide that was not very hard to tell after a relatively short period of time. The United States had just fought a very costly and disastrous war in Vietnam. The American public had no interest whatsoever of ever getting involved in that region again, and therefore, whatever an American administration would have wanted to do—whether it wanted to act in one way or another—it would not get any public support. If there is public support—it was built up very slowly and gradually during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia—then government which would try and say that it is not in our national interest to intervene or to do anything, would change their minds because the public would tell them, we believe it is. Governments, after all, it takes them quite a while to recognize it, but they depend on the will of the people. If people do not have trust in their government, and the governments do not listen to them, they may be checked out. This is not just people in the street; this has to do with the media, this has to do with academia, this has to do with anyone who has some access to public opinion, and when that happens, then policy can change. If it does not happen, it does mean that people do not care, and if they do not care then their governments will not act.
JERRY FOWLER: One paradox that you have identified in your writing is that the citizens that are in some cases most likely to speak out and urge response to genocide are often the ones that are most suspicious of military intervention in the affairs of other states. The first question is how can that paradox be overcome, or do you see it being overcome, for example in relationship to Darfur?
OMER BARTOV: I am not sure about Darfur; I am not sure about Darfur because Darfur is a perfectly complicated case, but in a general sense, no, this is not a paradox that can be overcome. It is an inherent paradox, and maybe it is good that it is a paradox, but at some point, one has to face it and to say, “We know that in many, if not all cases of genocide, ultimately, governments that are willing to commit genocide do not become persuaded by rhetoric; they are persuaded by power. They are persuaded by some sort of intervention,” and of course those people who one might say act more as a conscience of their nation or the conscience of humanity, they rightly are extremely troubled by the use of force because the use of force is often inaccurate and leads to the killing of many innocents, even if it ultimately might bring good as well. To advocate the use of force, in the name of humanity, is always a very difficult thing to do, and it should be difficult, but it does mean that such voices are often used or abused by those who want to do nothing, who really do not care and will then say, “Well, we should not use force because it is not in our national interest,” rather than we should not use force because we may hurt the wrong people. It is a paradox, it always was a paradox, it should remain so, but we have to be aware if it reaches a point, as it does now in Darfur, or as you might say was happening during the early phases of World War II, then one has to hope that people will say, “We may have to use force, even excessive force, but we have to put an end to this kind of genocide.” The United States did not get into World War II, unlike what our voices would like to say now, because there was a Holocaust. It got into World War II because it was in our national interest to do so, and it did also cause the deaths of many innocent people. But it did bring to an end the regime whose existence would have destroyed Europe entirely and came very close to doing so.
JERRY FOWLER: Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, and he will be discussing the issues that we raised today in an online discussion on March 12th and 13th. You can find more details on the Voices on Genocide Prevention blog: www.vogp.org. Omer, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
OMER BARTOV: Thank you.
