Jan. 24


World leaders commemorate death camp liberation


The U.N. General Assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazi death camps with a special session Monday, and
survivor Elie Wiesel and world leaders confronted a question that has long
haunted the United Nations: whether the world body has the will to stop
future genocide.

The commemoration also was meant to eradicate the notion that the U.N.
General Assembly is anti-Semitic, an accusation frequently made by Israel.

But there were signs of division and clear evidence that much of the Arab
world was not participating. The General Assembly auditorium was less than
half full even for the start of the commemoration, while just one Middle
East country Jordan was scheduled to deliver a speech commemorating the
liberation of the camps.

Speakers at the General Assembly remembered the 6 million Jews who died in
the Holocaust and how the United Nations itself was founded in response to
the tragedy to prevent such acts from happening again.

"The Jewish witness that I am speaks of my people's suffering as a
warning," Wiesel said. "He sounds the alarm to prevent these tragedies
from being done to others. And yes, I am convinced if the world had
listened to those of us who tried to speak we may have prevented Darfur,
Cambodia, Bosnia, and naturally Rwanda."

The event was one of several United Nations commemorations Monday
beginning a week of events worldwide marking the anniversary of the
liberation of the camps.

In Vienna, Patrick Villemur, France's representative to U.N. organizations
based in the Austrian capital, reminded about 200 officials and employees
gathered in the rotunda of the U.N. complex overlooking the Danube River
that the United Nations was founded "as the world was awakening to the
full horror of the camps."

The United States had requested the commemorative session at the General
Assembly on Jan. 24, three days before a similar event in the former
Auschwitz death camp in Poland to mark its liberation by Soviet troops
Jan. 27, 1945.

Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners most of them Jews perished
in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz. Overall, 6
million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Speakers in New York, including Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and
Russia's commissioner for human rights, Vladimir Lukin, warned against a
rise in anti-Semitism around the world.

Shalom pointed to the strength of movements denying the Holocaust, asking
if there was anything worse than the destruction of an entire race.

"There is something worse: to do all this and then deny, to do all this
and then take from the victims and their children and grandchildren the
legitimacy of their grief," he said.

Sir Brian Urquhart, the retired U.N. undersecretary general who was among
those soldiers who freed the death camps, said the world must not forget
the Holocaust because it revealed what horrors humans can inflict and that
they may do again.

"This commemoration serves to recall what human beings driven by hatred or
fear or some perverse ideology are, against all rational belief, still
capable of doing to each other," he said.

(source: Associated Press)