Holocaust: If the world had listened to the horrors of the Holocaust, perhaps mass murder in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda could have been prevented, speakers told the first UN General Assembly session on the Holocaust.
Both UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor, also asked how some of Europe's most cultured people could participate in mass murder of Jews by day and read Schiller and listen to Bach in the evening.
The special session, at which survivors and the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg spoke, is a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp.
"If the world had listened we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," Wiesel told the 191-nation assembly, whose members agreed to the session.
"We know that for the dead it is too late. For them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory did come much too late," he said. "But it is not too late for today's children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness."
The author 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 large Auschwitz-Birkenau camp site where more than 1 million people were gassed to death or died of starvation and disease.
"In those times those who were there felt not only tortured, murdered by the enemy but also by what we considered to be the silence and indifference of the world," Wiesel said. "Now, 60 years later, the world at least tries to listen."
The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on January 27th, exactly 60 years after Soviet troops liberated the death camp.
Mr Annan told the assembly that at this moment, "terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan". He asked the UN Security Council to take action once it received a UN report today determining whether genocide has occurred and identifying gross violations of human rights.
Israel's Foreign Minister, Mr Silvan Shalom, warned that "the brutal extermination of a people began not with guns or tanks but with words systematically portraying the Jews and others as not legitimate, something less than human". He said one would never know if the UN, created after the second World War, could have prevented the Holocaust. But he said the UN as well as each individual member-state needed "to rededicate ourselves to ensur- ing that it will never happen again".
Mr Annan asked how could such evil happen in a cultured and highly sophisticated nation-state in the heart of Europe whose artists and thinkers had given the world so much. "All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing," he said, quoting 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke.
"The purveyors of hatred were not always, and may not be in the future, only marginalised extremists," he said.
Wiesel also questioned "how could intelligent educated men, or simply law-abiding citizens, ordinary men, fire machine guns at hundreds of children every day" and "in the evening" read Schiller and listen to Bach.
Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone, dying in gas chambers or of starvation and disease.
Six million Jews overall were exterminated in Nazi camps and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies perished or were used as slave labour.
The meeting was requested by the US ambassador, Mr John Danforth, in a letter on December 9th, and backed by Russia, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Mr Annan polled member-states and 138 nations in the 191-member assembly agreed. - Reuters