UN on Holocaust: evil wins when the good are quiet

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 (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 Two 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 Two, the word “concentration” camp was a euphuism 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.

01/24/05 14:08 ET