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Raphael Lemkin's view of European colonial rule in Africa: between condemnation and admiration

The Polish-Jewish specialist in international law Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was not “only” an influential jurist but also a historian, a fact that has been ignored by most genocide researchers up to now. Due to financial problems, deteriorating health, and lack of interest by publishers, Lemkin did not manage to complete and bring out his broad study on genocides from antiquity to the twentieth century which he had been working on for many years. A look at his unpublished manuscripts reveals that Lemkin’s historical scholarship was not only dedicated to well-known cases such as the fate of European Jewry or the persecution and murder of the Anatolian Armenians. Many of his unpublished works deal with atrocities committed by European colonialists and settlers in the various “New Worlds.” How has Lemkin’s intensive preoccupation with colonialism to be adequately understood? When Raphael Lemkin defined his neologism “genocide” for the first time, he emphasized that this term does not exclusively describe the immediate destruction of an ethnic or a religious group. Rather, he understood genocides as processes and distinguished between two phases, “one destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.” And Lemkin specified that this imposition “may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.” Colonialism, thus, plays a central role in Lemkin’s concept of genocide. And it was the study of colonial mass murders that provided him with a conceptual framework for analysing the German policy of occupation and extermination in Eastern Europe during World War II. The question whether the term “genocide” can be applied to cases of extremely bloody suppression of indigenous resistance or even to the colonial situation in general is discussed controversially in the historiography of colonialism. The political and legal explosiveness of this issue becomes apparent if one recalls the increasing number of claims for restitution by the descendants of victims Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(4), December, 531–538