General Assembly Session 60 meeting 42

The President

The report of the Fifth Committee on the programme budget implications of draft resolution A/60/L.12 is contained in document A/60/528.

Ms. Liu Zhongxin (China)

I should like to make the following statement on item 72 on behalf of Ambassador Wang Guangya, Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations.

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the anti-fascist war and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Allow me to express, on behalf of the Chinese Government and people, our profound condolences in connection with the 6 million Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust and our sincere sympathy to all the bereaved families and the survivors of the Holocaust.

The Second World War was unprecedented in human history. During that war, Nazi forces planned to wipe out the entire Jewish nation step by step through extremely brutal and sanguinary acts -- a gross and massive violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms and an assault against civilizations.

The judgments of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal handed down at the trials of Nazi German war criminals upheld international justice and safeguarded human dignity, reflecting the common aspiration of peace- and justice-loving people throughout the world. It was a historic judgment, and a just one. It is irreversible and beyond contest.

Sixty years ago, military aggressors also inflicted untold misery on Asia. Casualties in China alone reached 35 million, of which more than 300,000 died during the 1937 Nanjing massacre. Like the Jewish people, the people of Asia will never forget that chapter in our history.

Our purpose in emphasizing such an indelible memory is not to perpetuate hatred but to use history as a mirror and to look into the future. The bitter lessons of the Second World War and the tragedy of the Nazi concentration camps have taught us that the basic values of freedom, democracy, equality, justice and peace cannot be denied, and that the civilizational process cannot be destroyed.

All evil, dark and reactionary forces are bound to be swept aside by the torrents of history. We hope that the countries concerned will draw lessons from history, pursue peaceful development and prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy.

The Chinese delegation is in favour of adding the item entitled "Holocaust remembrance" to the agenda of the current session of the General Assembly and of adopting a draft resolution bearing the same title. We believe that the United Nations has the responsibility to teach succeeding generations the profound lessons of the Holocaust, refute any words or acts aimed at reversing the verdict on the Holocaust, and prevent the recurrence of such acts of genocide. We are convinced that substantive and consistent deliberations on this item in the General Assembly will reinforce the efforts of the United Nations system to realize the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, advance the dialogue among civilizations and religions, and promote respect for global diversity, thus enabling countries and peoples worldwide jointly to fulfil the historic mission of maintaining world peace and promoting common development.

Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein (Jordan)

It is appropriate for us to have another discussion on the Holocaust within the context of the work of the General Assembly, for we should never cease to draw the relevant lessons from that astonishing and terrifying period of human experience. The Holocaust was, and is, a different genocide -- a genocide during which wickedness fell into union with human organization and efficiency of a sort hitherto unheard of, one which turned a continent into a slaughterhouse, with twentieth-century specifications.

In sum, it was a crime of the most colossal proportions. Therefore, in our invocation of history, which is what this draft resolution is all about, we must be precise and accurate. While most delegations here would view this topic as the historical narrative of others, for Europeans, the narrative is memory, as was stated most eloquently by the representatives of Norway, Austria, Hungary and Romania in this Hall on 24 January 2005.

It is certainly not the intention of this delegation to cast any aspersions in the direction of any particular quarter, for the Europe of today is not the Europe of the first half of the twentieth century. But there can be no sound discussion of this most serious issue without acknowledging the context in which it occurred.

The Holocaust was, in its broadest sense, a crime inflicted on European soil, by Europeans against Europeans. The administrative and logistical exertions in the commission of the crime were undertaken not just, as we know, by the Nazis of Germany, but also by several other sympathetic Governments from across Europe, Governments who arrested their own nationals when no crime had been committed and seized their estates and titles and virtually all that those people owned, before transporting them -- men, women and children, the elderly and the infirm -- to other parts of Europe to confront an uncertain and often terrible fate, while other Governments invoked policies amounting to indifference.

Sixty years on, we live at a time when it is still difficult for the vast majority of Member States to examine their own national histories to their very limits, particularly their modern histories. And while we should continue to feel great pride in what good we find in them, we must also begin to reckon with what in our national memory is distasteful or perhaps even criminal or terrible. It is therefore extraordinary and encouraging how a few European States have started to follow the example set by Germany many years ago, in beginning a process of recovering memory and in beginning a painful and critical, although ultimately liberating, self-examination where their part in the Holocaust is concerned.

But to what other purpose must we all draw on our memories generally and, in this instance, the memories of others? First and foremost, we must remind ourselves of the extent to which chauvinistic nationalisms and philosophies of negation can be pernicious. In the context of Europe in the 1930s, those feelings were channelled in the form of a virulent and abhorrent anti-Semitism. Today they could fan a revived anti-Semitism, or they could appear in the form of other expressions, akin to what we all have witnessed recently in the Balkans and in certain parts of Africa.

Given the historical suffering of the Jewish people and in view of the fact that European Jewry was the principal victim of the Holocaust, there has been a tendency by some to view the refrain "Never again" solely within that understanding: the context of the Jewish people and their future.

The concentration of evil found within the historical experience that is the Holocaust does, however, bring the point home for all peoples everywhere, Jewish and otherwise. And the principal lesson drawn by 100 members of the General Assembly is that if we are ever to make genocide and the like truly unthinkable in the future, not only must we squarely confront the philosophies of negation within our own societies, wherever and whenever they occur, but, if we are to give true meaning to the phrase "Never again", we must also collectively support the existence of the world's only permanent judicial body designed to end impunity for the gravest of crimes -- and that body is, of course, the International Criminal Court.

Unfortunately, and by contrast, "Never again" is also sometimes used as a form of moral justification for the implementation by one State of policies the effect of which is the continued domination of one people by another and the continued degradation of one people by another. And that is deeply unfortunate.

Ultimately, we hope this occasion and ones like this will enable us to derive the right lessons from the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their accomplices to ensure that such crimes will not come to blight the twenty-first century as it begins to unfold before us.