UN declares January 27 as international Holocaust Day
By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and Reuters
NEW YORK - The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday approved a proposal to set January 27 as a world Holocaust Day. The decision was made at the end of a special General Assembly session that began at UN headquarters in New York on Monday.
January 27, 1945 is the day the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated.
As the world marks the 60th anniversaries this year of both the founding of the UN and the end of World War II, Israel's UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman said the Nazi slaughter of six million people, the vast majority of them Jews, must never be forgotten.
The resolution asked UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to establish a special public relations plan within the next six months, which will work to advance Holocaust commemoration so as to prevent genocide from taking place.
The resolution also urges individual countries to develop educational programs to try to prevent future acts of genocide.
It also rejects any denial of the Holocaust, condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity, and calls for the UN to establish an outreach program to encourage the public to engage in Holocaust remembrance activities.
The resolution, introduced Monday, was sponsored initially by Israel, the United States, Australia, Canada and Russia. Since the draft resolution was distributed for the first time in August, 91 UN member nations have added their names, including eight Muslim countries and several countries in Africa and South America.
The resolution is the first of its kind, spurring diplomats in New York to call the move "historic." Before the decision was made, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, told the General Assembly that the major contribution the United Nations and its members can make to memorialize the Holocaust victims is an assurance that such an event will never take place again.
In addition to setting a world Holocaust Day, the resolution calls on member nations to develop educational programs to teach the next generations the lessons of the Holocaust, in an effort to prevent acts of genocide in the future. The resolution also includes a clause opposing any steps to deny the Holocaust as a historical event, in whole or in part. The resolution also expresses appreciation for all countries that acted to preserve and maintain sites that existed during the Holocaust, such as death camps, concentration camps and forced labor camps.
The effort to declare an international Holocaust Day is consistent with the UN commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, which coincides with the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, say those who drafted the resolution. In January the United Nations held a special session dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
"The UN bears a special responsibility to ensure that the Holocaust and its lessons are never forgotten and that this tragedy will forever stand as a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice," said Gillerman.
General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said it is important to remember that the UN's founding and the end of World War II are inextricably linked.
The UN was "erected from the ashes of the Second World War," he said, and part of its original mission was to make sure such an "unspeakable atrocity" as the Holocaust never occurred again.
Eliasson and other speakers noted, however, that the Holocaust and World War II did not mark the end of crimes of genocide. The Holocaust "must, therefore, be a unifying historic warning around which we must rally," Eliasson said. "We can't continue to repeat saying 'Never again.'"
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