Exactly 65 years after Dr. Raphael Lemkin, known as the “father of the U.N. Genocide Convention,” addressed a Ukrainian rally in New York City that marked the 20th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, a plaque honoring Lemkin will be unveiled in that great city.
The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation (UCCLA), with the support of the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA), will unveil the plaque at the UIA on Thursday, September 20, at 4 p.m. Notably, the UCCLA says, it will be “the first English, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Hebrew historical marker in the world.”
Back in 1953, on Sunday, September 20, some 15,000 Ukrainians attended a manifestation in remembrance of the genocide that we today know as the Holodomor. As this newspaper reported on the front page of the issue dated September 26, 1953, the marchers gathered at Washington Square and then marched up Fifth Avenue. At the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street, a capacity crowd of 5,000 was addressed by several speakers, including Lemkin. The Weekly wrote: “Prof. Lemkin [Yale University] reviewed in a moving fashion the fate of the millions of Ukrainians before and since 1932-1933, who died victims to the Soviet Russian plan to exterminate as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian rule and occupation, and to Communism.”
Lemkin, who had an extensive background in international criminal law, coined the word “genocide” in 1943 from the words “genos” (Greek for race, tribe or people) and the suffix “-cide” (from the Latin word “caedere,” to kill), and he initiated work on what came to be called the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
“Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” was the title of Lemkin’s 1953 speech in New York, a typewritten text of which was preserved at the New York Public Library. In a historical introduction to a 28-language publication (Kyiv: Maisternia Knyhy, 2009) of that historic address, Dr. Roman Serbyn writes: “Ukrainians have a particular reason to be grateful to Lemkin. The prominent legal scholar was the first expert in international law to qualify the atrocities committed by Stalin’s Communist regime against the Ukrainians as genocide and to analyze the crime in terms of the international convention.” Dr. Serbyn, a historian at the University of Quebec at Montreal, also points out: “Lemkin was the first Western scholar to give a comprehensive presentation of the communist regime’s destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a whole, and to treat the decimation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the obliteration of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, not as side issues, but as integral parts of the genocidal operation.”
More attention was focused on that landmark speech last year during Anne Applebaum’s tour promoting her latest book, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.” The award-winning author, historian, professor and columnist told her audiences that “Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word ‘genocide,’ spoke of Stalin’s assault on Ukraine as the ‘classic example’ of his concept.” She added that Lemkin said of the Holodomor: “This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.” An entire generation was wiped out, Ms. Applebaum commented, as “Stalin tried to destroy the Ukrainian national identity” as part of a larger plan to get rid of the “Ukrainian problem.”
This year, on the 85th anniversary of the genocide of the Ukrainian nation, it is fitting and just that we remember with reverence Raphael Lemkin, who understood the Holodomor’s enormity and spoke out about it with such clarity and conviction.