OSKANIAN: GENOCIDE MUST BE PREVENTED, NOT COMMEMORATED
PanARMENIAN.Net
04.10.2007 15:14 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ "When Darfur becomes shorthand for hopelessness,
we in the small corners of the world realize that power has become
a substitute for responsibility," Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan
Oskanian said in his address to the UN General Assembly.
"The ubiquitous language of human rights cannot compensate
for political will. Genocide must be prevented, not
commemorated. Generation after generation, we find new names for man’s
appalling tolerance for what we think are inhuman machinations, new
names for the places of horror, slaughter, massacre, indiscriminate
killing of all those who have belonged to a segment, a category, an
ethnic group, a race or a religion. Nearly 100 years ago, for Armenians
it was Deir-El-Zor. For the next generation, it was Auschwitz, then
the killing fields of the Cambodians. And most recently Rwanda. If
in each of those cases, together with genocide, these names evoked
ignorance, helplessness, wartime cover, today Darfur is synonymous
with expediency, evasion and simple inconvenience. Darfur is synonymous
with shame," he continued.
"My appeal, on behalf of small countries, is that the international
community tackle each of these problems in their own right, for
their own sake, and not as pieces in a global power puzzle. When
tensions among the world’s great powers grow, there is an increase in
polarization and a decrease in the effectiveness of the hard-earned
– and costly -policies of complementarity and balance of small
countries. Our own room to maneuver, to participate in global
solutions, diminishes," the Minister said.