UN on Holocaust: Evil Wins When the Good Are Quiet

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UN on Holocaust: Evil Wins When the Good Are Quiet


Jan 24, 10:55 AM (ET)


By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Those who incite hatred and mass murder are not always extremists but men of culture, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told world leaders in opening the first-ever General Assembly commemoration of the World War II Holocaust.

The special memorial, at which survivors and the foreign ministers of Israel, Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg are scheduled to speak, is a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi Germany death camp.

The session began with a minute of silent prayer.

"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," Annan asked. "Truly is has been said: "All that is needed for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing."
"The purveyors of hatred, were not always and may not be in the future, only marginalized extremists," he said.

Although the world rightly says "never again," action is harder. Since the Holocaust genocide has occurred in Cambodia, in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, he said.

And at this moment, "terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan," Annan said. He asked the Security Council to take action once it received a report on Tuesday determining whether genocide has occurred and identifying gross violations of human rights.
During World War II, the word "concentration" camp was a euphemism for exterminating an entire people, including Roma or Gypsies, Poles, Soviet war prisoners, homosexuals and political opponents, Annan said.

A MILLION CHILDREN

But, he said the tragedy of the murder of 6 million Jews was unique, with two-thirds of European Jews including 1.5 million children murdered.

Jorge Semprun, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, addresses the session as the representative of Spain's Foreign Ministry, as will Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, a survivor.

Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. deputy secretary of states, is leading the U.S. delegation. Italy sent its speaker of the senate and Russia, whose troops freed Auschwitz at the end of the war in 1945, is represented by its human rights commissioner.

The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on Jan. 27.

The major powers knew of and discussed the Nazi mass murder of Jews but did not take measures against it, such as bombing the railways leading to the camps. Holocaust researchers have pressured the Vatican to open its archives, hoping to learn whether such information reached the pope from priests in the field."

To accompany the assembly session, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom opens an exhibit of photos and sketches from the Auschwitz camp, called "The Depth of the Abyss," including some 60 sketches by Zinovii Tolkatchev, a private in the Soviet Red Army who drew them at the time of the liberation of the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps.

They were donated to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance, documentation, research center, by his daughter and son in Kiev, Anel and Ilya Tolkatchev.

At a breakfast for survivors New York's two U.S. senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Shumer attended, along with Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of state and a German refugee.

Also at the event was Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who was saved from death by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary. Wallenberg is the uncle of Annan's wife, Nane.

The meeting was requested by U.S. Ambassador John Danforth in a letter on Dec. 9, and backed by Russia, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Annan polled member states and 138 nations in the 191-member assembly agreed.

So is old Kofi finally coming clean and facing up to his sins? When the slaughter in Rwanda was going on, the UN peacekeepers were forbidden to intervene, thus threatening their status as "monitors". After tens of thousands were killed, old Kofi made a statement condemning the killing but carefully avoiding the term "genocide", as the use of that term might put the UN under duress to actually do something.

And exactly what has the UN done so far to keep the Sudan from turning into another Rwanda?