UN: World needs the will to stop genocide
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-25 10:43

If the world had listened to the horrors of the Nazi death camps, perhaps genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda could have been avoided, speakers told the first-ever U.N. General Assembly session on the Holocaust of World War II.

Yehudit Inbar (L), the museums director of Yad Vashem, shows UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his wife Nane Annan (R) photographs in the exhibit "Auschwitz - the Depth of the Abyss," at the United Nations in New York, January 24, 2005. January 27 marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the United Nations held a special session commemorating the liberation of all the Nazi concentration camps. [Reuters]

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate author Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor, both questioned whether the nations had the will to stop mass murder 60 years after the massacre in Europe.

"If the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," Wiesel said.

Annan told the assembly that at this moment, "terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan." He asked the U.N. Security Council to take action once it receives a new report determining whether genocide had occurred in Darfur and identifying gross human rights abuses.

The special session, at which some 40 nations spoke as well as survivors, included the foreign ministers of Israel, Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg. It was held as a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest death camp.

"The tragedy of the Jewish people was unique," Annan said. "Two thirds of all Europe's Jews, including one and a half million children, were murdered. An entire civilization, which had contributed far beyond its numbers to the cultural and intellectual riches of Europe and the world, was uprooted, destroyed, laid waste."

MIDEAST CONFLICT

Still, the session was linked by both Israel and Jordan to the Middle East conflict. The General Assembly voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, leading to Israel's creation a year later.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan speaks during the opening of a photo exhibit, entitled "Auschwitz - the Depth of the Abyss," at the United Nations in New York, January 24, 2005. January 27 marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the United Nations held a special session commemorating the liberation of all the Nazi concentration camps. [Reuters]

"What sense can we make of this important commemoration, when we allow through our inaction, year after year, one people to dominate another, to deny the latter many of its most basic rights, and so, with the passage of time, also degrade it as a people," said Jordan's U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the only Arab speaker.

Israel's Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, in an obvious reference to Palestinian suicide bombers, said: "Today again, we are pitted against the forces of evil, those for whom human life -- whether the civilians they target or their own youth who they use as weapons -- are of no value, nothing but a means to their goals."

And China's U.N. ambassador Wang Guangya reminded the assembly that invading Imperial Japanese troops in 1937 killed 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing.

The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on Jan. 27, 60 years after Soviet Red Army troops liberated the camp.

Up to 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone. A total of six million Jews and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Russians and Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis during the war.

Wiesel asked how "intelligent, educated men, or simply law-abiding citizens, ordinary men" could fire machine guns at hundreds of children every day and read Schiller and listen to Bach in the evening.

Italy's Marcello Pera, speaker of the Senate, was blunt. "How was it possible that Europe, at the peak of its civilization could commit such a crime? How could Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, collaborationist France and many others become responsible...of such an immense massacre?"

To warm applause, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called the Holocaust "barbaric. "For my country it signifies the absolute moral abomination, a denial of all things civilized without precedent or parallel," he said.

He assured Israel that it could "always rely" on support because "the security of its citizens will forever remain nonnegotiable fixtures of German foreign policy."

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who lost most of his extended family in the Holocaust, said if there was one thing the world had learned, it is that nations "cannot close their eyes and sit idly by in the face of genocide."

"We know that there have been far too many occasions in the six decades since the liberation of the concentration camps when the world ignored inconvenient truths so that it would not have to act or acted too late," Wolfowitz said.

Wiesel also drew attention to the indifference of the West during the war to accept more refugees, allow more Jews to go to Israel, or bomb the railway lines to the vast Auschwitz-Birkenau camp site. "This shameful indifference we must remember, "he said.

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