ARMENIAN DELGATION WALKS OUT ON AHMADINEJAD SPEECH IN GENEVA

Diaspora politics

2009/04/21 | 12:22

According to an April 20 article in the Guardian News the Armenian
delegation in Geneva to attend a major United Nations conference on
racism walked out on a speech being delivered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
President of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Several minutes into his speech President Ahmadinejad stated,
"Following world war two, [powerful countries] resorted to military
aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish
suffering and the ambiguous and dubious question of the Holocaust
… and they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive
racists in Palestine."

It was at that point that the European delegates in the chamber,
along with the Armenians and the St Kitts delegation, rose in unison
and walked out.

President Ahmadinejad’s presence at the conference was controversial
from the start and the U.S. and Israel led a boycott followed
by Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and
Poland. Britain, France and other EU nations decided to attend but
were ready, with their "shoes on" as one British official put it,
to walk out if Ahmadinejad’s speech proved offensive.