The Genocide Convention: Its Supporters and Enemies

Abstract

As his relationship with the United States Committee for a Genocide Convention and the American Jewish Committee deteriorated in 1951 and 1952, Lemkin gained the support of new allies among the Central and East European ethnic groups, the Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Hungarians. He utilized their friendship to ensure that the provisions relating to genocide in the draft Code of Offences against the Peace and Security of Mankind and the draft Covenant on Human Rights were not watered down. He further exposed fundamental flaws in the draft code which would have restricted the activities of the European émigré organizations in the United States. Every move Lemkin made was overshadowed by the strife between the United States and the Soviet Union. When these ethnic groups begged Eleanor Roosevelt to bring up charges of genocide against the Soviet Union in the United Nations at the end of 1951, she was reluctant to do so. She thus incurred Lemkin’s wrath. He also opposed an attempt by William Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress, a radical and with Communist affiliated body, to petition the United Nations, charging genocide by the United States government against their black population. In 1953 Lemkin made a rare public intervention on behalf of Soviet Jewry, an impending tragedy only averted by Stalin’s death.