Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
January 26, 2005, Wednesday
ILHAM ALIYEV: WHETHER PEACEFUL OR MILITARY SETTLEMENT OF THE KARABAKH
CONFLICT IS TAKEN DEPENDS ON THE TALKS
“Azerbaijan would never reconcile itself to the loss of territories;
we’d reclaim them at any cost. Whether peaceful or military ways are
used, it depends on the talks, as well as other factors,” President
Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan stated at the media briefing for Russian
journalists in Baku last Saturday. According to the president, the
world community finally recognizes now that Armenia has occupied the
territories of Azerbaijan. “The fact of occupation has been
recognized, the UN and almost all the world has recognized the
territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. We think this problem should be
settled in compliance with international laws, rather than according
to someone’s fantasies, wishes or assumptions,” Aliyev said. (…)
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
January 26, 2005, Wednesday
10:34:20 Central European Time
Turkey wins removal of Armenian genocide from German schools, report
Berlin
Pressure from Turkey has resulted in the removal of a reference to
the Armenian genocide from a German school curriculum, reports said
Wednesday.
The eastern German state of Brandenburg has eliminated half a
sentence on the Armenians included in ninth and tenth grade history
classes after a Turkish diplomat complained to state Prime Minister
Matthias Platzeck, the newspaper Die Welt reported.
In a chapter entitled “War, Technology and Civilian Populations” the
school book text said “for example, the genocide of the Armenians
population of Anatolia.”
That passage has now been removed from school textbooks, the
newspaper said.
Platzeck met regularly with Turkish diplomats and was “steeled”
against their influence, the newspaper quoted him as saying. The
prime minister added that genocide was too important an issue to be
dealt with in just half a sentence.
“Brandenburg’s curriculum was the only one in Germany which up until
now included a reference to the murder of the Armenians,” said Die
Welt.
Most historians say that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians
were killed in 1915 and 1916 under the Ottoman Turks during World War
I. The Turkish government, which denies that a genocide took place,
speaks of 200,000 dead.
A Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin declined to comment directly on
the report, but noted the initiative had come from the Turkish
consulate responsible for Berlin and Brandenburg – not from the
embassy itself.
Prime Minister Platzeck is a member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s
Social Democrats (SPD). Schroeder is a strong supporter of Turkey’s
bid to become a member of the European Union. Germany has almost two
million resident Turks – the biggest Turkish minority in the E.U.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which serves as junior
coalition partner in Brandenburg’s government, is infuriated over the
change to the state’s schoolbooks.
“The impression created is fatal,” said Sven Patke, the state CDU
secretary general.
The head of the Central Committee of Armenians in Germany, Schavarsh
Ovassapian told Die Welt the move was “a scandal.”
“It is depressing, if what’s in schoolbooks in Brandenburg can be
dictated from Ankara,” he said. dpa lm pb

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
January 26, 2005 Wednesday 2:52 PM Eastern Time
Armenian president decorates Ilya Klebanov with order
By Tigran Liloyan
YEREVAN
Armenian President Robert Kocharyan decorated Ilya Klebanov, the
Russian president’s envoy in the North-Western Federal District, with
the St. Mesrop Mashots Order on Wednesday.
Klebanov received one of Armenia’s highest state awards to commend
his contribution to developing and strengthening Russian-Armenian
economic ties at a time when he chaired the Inter-governmental
commission for economic cooperation with Armenia.
The Klebanov-led Russian delegation comprises the leader of the Komi
Republic Vladimir Torlopov and representatives of the business
circles of the North-Western Federal District.
The Russian and Armenian sides discussed Russian-Armenian economic
ties. Kocharyan noted that they had become more intensive. He thinks
that ties between entrepreneurs in both countries have also grown
stronger.

ANSA English Media Service
January 25, 2005
IRAN-AZERBAIJAN: ALIYEV VISIT MARKS NEW AGE IN RELATIONS
TEHRAN
By Alberto Zanconato

(ANSA) – TEHRAN, January 25 – Iran and Azerbaijan, both
oil-rich Shiite countries on the Caspian Sea but divided by
contrasts in interests were trying to turn a new page in their
relations as Azeri President Ilham Aliyev visited Iran on Tuesday.

Tehran and Baku should remain side by side, Supreme Leader of
the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Aliyev on
receiving him in Tehran.

Aliyev is on a state visit to the Islamic Republic only five
months after Iranian President Mohammad Khatami visited
Azerbaijan.

The bilateral relations were strained for several years, both
for the support which Tehran gave Armenia in the war for Nagorno
Karabakh, an enclave of Armenian majority in Azeri territory,
and for the division of the waters in the Caspian Sea, 13 years
after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The problem on the partition of the oil and gas deposits in
that basin brought the two countries on the brink of an armed
conflict four years ago when an Iranian military unit intervened
to block drilling by the Azeris in a contested sea territory.

“All the problems, including the one on the Caspian Sea, can
be resolved in a amicable way,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

He warned Azerbaijan to beware of efforts of foreigners to
ruin the bilateral relations. That was a reference first of all
to the United States but also to Israel with which Baku has good
relations.

Azerbaijan keeps good relations also with Britain given the
fact that oil giant BP will lead the consortium of companies
which will exploit the Azeri oil. That deal should bring in the
next few years up to $90 billion to the country of eight million
which went out devastated from the disintegration of the USSR
and the war for Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia.

It is exactly on the Nagorno Karabakh issue that the
bilateral relations could make a decisive improvement.

Receiving his guest, Khatami used hard words to defend Baku’s
right to regain control of that enclave where more than 10 years
ago the Armenian majority proclaimed an “independent republic”
which no one has internationally recognised.

Answering a question of an Azeri journalist who compared the
Armenian occupation of Nagorno Karabakh with the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian Territories, Khatami said there
were obvious differences but the occupation of only one
centrimetre from other’s territory should be condemned and the
international community should help put an end to the occupation.

That statement was a decisive step ahead after Baku had
accused Tehran for years of having lined up with a Christian
country in a conflict against a Muslim Shiite nation which cost
Azerbaijan at least 30,000 deaths and one million refugees who
moved to other parts of the country.

The war and the fall of the USSR made the Azeri gross
domestic product (GDP) fall by 60 percent between 1990 and 1995.

Aliyev thanked the Iranian authorities but also underlined
the complexity of the issue when he wished peace and stability
would return to the region but only after the rights of the
Azeri people will be recognised.

Azerbaijan has still to settle the issue on the Caspian Sea
with Iran which has not recognised the agreements between
Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan to which Turkmenistan could
also join.

Tehran was further annoyed by Azerbaijan’s decision to export
crude oil via a pipeline for $3 billion which will run through
Georgia and arrive at Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. That project
which has to start operation next summer excluded Iran as a
possible route for Azerbaijan’s oil sales abroad. (ANSA).

PanArmenian News
Jan 26 2005
PACE RESOLUTION ON GEORGIA TOUCHES UPON JAVAKHK PROBLEMS
26.01.2005 15:38
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ January 24 PACE session participants adopted a
resolution, which maintains items immediately related to the
Armenian-inhabited Javakhk. As reported by A-info agency, the
resolution urges Georgia to sign and ratify the European Charter on
the languages of the national minorities or regions by September
2005. Let us remind that the new bill on languages in Georgia almost
deprives the national minorities of the possibility of receiving
education in native tongue. Within the same terms Georgia is to
ratify the convention on national minorities’ protection.

PanArmenian News
Jan 26 2005
“WE CANNOT SOLVE PROBLEM INSTEAD OF PARTIES TO CONFLICT”, OSCE MINSK
GROUP RUSSIAN CO-CHAIR STATED
26.01.2005 17:36
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ During the discussion in PACE of the report on
Nagorno Karabakh the parliamentarians called to OSCE Minsk Group
Co-Chairs to activate steps for the Karabakh problem settlement. MG
Russian Co-Chair Y. Merzlyakiov stated in the interview with RFE/RL,
“sometimes we are more active than the conflicting parties but we
cannon solve problems in their place”. He expressed opinion that
considerable progress in the negotiation process will be observed
this year. “NKR is party to conflict as the Defense Minister of
Karabakh of that time put his signature to the agreement on armistice
next to the signatures of the representatives of Armenia and
Azerbaijan”, the Russian diplomat said.

Lincolnshire Echo, UK
January 25, 2005
Six holocausts of the modern age
The Holocaust is not an isolated event in history. Throughout the
20th century millions of people were killed in the name of religion
and ideology.
In 1915 1.5 million Armenians were killed under the orders of Turkish
ministers Enver and Talat Pasha.
>From 1929 to 1953, Stalin executed 42.7 million Soviet people.
Under the rule of Chairman Mao from 1923 to 1976, 37.8 million
Chinese perished.
Hitler ordered the death of 20.9 million Jews and other peoples from
1933 to 1945.
>From 1975 to 1979, 2.4 million Cambodians died under Pol Pot.
In 1994, 0.8 million Rwandan Tutsis were massacred under Jean
Kambada.

IRNA, Iran
January 26, 2005 Wednesday 3:45 PM EST
Death symphony in search of justice staged
Tehran, January 26
On the sixth day of the 23rd International Fajr Theater Festival,
Wednesday, Antigone from the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles was
staged at Tehran Vahdat Hall.
The play was directed by Hacoup Ghazanchian from Armenia and was one
of the selected plays of the international section.
Antigone, the third part of the trilogy about Oedipus the King is the
story of the Greek monarch and the horrible destiny his family is
doomed to face.
The first part of the trilogy deals with the tenure of Oedipus, the
second one is about the ominous destiny awaiting him and the final
one relates the incidents his family are destined to face.
Besides `Oedipus at Colonus` and `Oedipus the King`, Antigone is
considered as one of the world most charming classical tragedies.
Some 2,500 years after it was created, the play still attracts the
attention of art lovers.
This time, however, the version of Antigone staged by the Armenian
theater group displays a death symphony in search of justice in a
vehemently oppressed land.
Here Antigone, gets involved in an uprising against a hypocrite
bloodthirsty monarch seated on the throne and ruling the people.
However, his efforts to seek justice in a spellbound land are in vain
and he fails to attract any assistance to the effect.
A young man in love is the only one supporting him.
But the monarch who is against modern thoughts gets into conflict
with him and eventually hangs Antigone for his quest of justice.
Finding himself single-handed, the young man puts an end to his life,
in the hope of meeting his beloved in the other world.
Given his good know-how on the basic principles of theater, the
director of Antigone has succeeded to establish a reasonable relation
with the Iranian spectators.
Making use of technical and theatrical gestures at the beginning and
end of the play marks the director`s good expertise in the field.
The play script provides the director with the opportunity to present
a successful performance played by professional actors, despite the
fact that some of the acts are quite out of rhythm and irritate the
viewers.
In spite of the minor flaws, Antigone was quite appealing to the
Iranian spectators attending Vahdat Hall on the sixth day of the 23rd
International Fajr Theater Festival.

The Independent
January 27, 2005
AUSCHWITZ REMEMBERED: THE SHADOW OF AUSCHWITZ
by John Lichfield
The turn-off is just past a BP petrol station, close to a Leclerc
supermarket. You leave a roundabout and cross a concrete flyover. You
could be on the edge of any town in early 21st-century Europe.
Ahead, through the swirling snow, looms a single railway line,
disappearing through a tower in a long, red-brick building – the
terminus of a short branch line to Auschwitz-Birkenau built in the
spring of 1944. Beyond are three long railway sidings, tall
barbed-wire enclosures, wooden watch- towers, and dark huts in neat
lines. Some huts are ruined. Others stand pristine in freshly fallen
snow, as if enchanted by a curse and frozen for all time.
All is symmetrical and orderly, the product of rational, intelligent
minds – modern, Western minds.
If you stroll to the end of the railway tracks, you find the rubble
of two buildings strewn in front of a small birch wood (Birke means
birch tree.) Two other ruins stand a little way over to the right.
The remains of two cruder buildings can be seen in the distance.
Inside, or just outside, these six buildings at least one million
people, almost all of them Jews, were gassed and cremated during
1942, 1943 and 1944. Birkenau, only part of the Auschwitz complex,
was, among other things, a factory, a purpose-built human abattoir,
an assembly line of death.
The factory’s raw materials were men, women and children, whose only
crime was to be Jewish or Gypsy. The Jews came initially from other
parts of Poland and nearby Slovakia. Later, they were transported for
hundreds of miles across Europe, from Greece, from Hungary, from
France, from Belgium, from the Netherlands, to be reduced to ashes,
their gold teeth, hair, clothes, false limbs recycled into raw
materials for the Nazi war effort. These, however, were merely
by-products. The chief purpose of Auschwitz- Birkenau was to destroy
a race and to obliterate the 800-year-old Jewish- European
civilisation. (In this second task, the Nazis succeeded.)
Auschwitz was not, in itself, the Holocaust. There were five other
Nazi death camps in Poland, some of whose names are still scarcely
known to the general public (Belzec, where 550,000 Jews are thought
to have died; Sobibor, where 200,000 died).
Auschwitz has, nonetheless, become the prime symbol of the
bureaucratically organised, orderly frenzy of killing in which at
least five million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis (maybe as
many as six million) between 1939 and 1945.
Many other victims were also deemed unfit to live by the perverted
Darwinism of Nazi, racial ideology: not just Gypsies but also
homosexuals and the handicapped. Pre-planned Nazi mass murders were
also carried out – it is sometimes forgotten in the West – of
hundreds of thousands of Russians and at least 1,500,000 Polish
officers, intellectuals, students, priests and randomly seized
civilians. The Poles were slaughtered to reduce their country to a
slave state, permanently colonised by Germans.
On a first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the mind revolts against the
proximity of roundabouts and barbed wire, of supermarkets and gas
chambers; against the juxtaposition of the death camp and the
pleasant Polish town of Oswiecim, now as much part of the European
Union as Dorking or Macclesfield. In truth, this is no anachronism,
but a useful reminder. The Holocaust began three years after Walt
Disney made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; 20 years before The
Beatles and Swinging London. Auschwitz is part of Modern Times.
Today, politicians from 40 countries will travel to the Birkenau camp
to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of Auschwitz by
Soviet troops in January 1945. Up to 400 survivors – the remaining,
fit survivors of the maybe 60,000 survivors in 1945 – are expected to
be there.
The Queen will attend a ceremony to mark Holocaust Day at Westminster
Hall in London with other survivors.
Among those at the Birkenau commemoration will be Raphael Esrail, 80,
who was taken to Auschwitz from France in February 1944, at the age
of 19, and is now secretary general of the French association of
Auschwitz victims. “There have been other anniversaries and there
will be others still to come,” he said, “but this is maybe the most
important. First, because it will be the last big anniversary to have
so many living eyewitnesses. Most of us are already in our eighties.”
“But it is crucial also for another reason. The world has changed.
And not in the way we had hoped. After the war, we comforted
ourselves that this terrible experience might finally teach mankind
to love mankind, but what do we see now? We see again the rise of
anti-Semitism and we see a world torn apart by fanatical hatreds and
by absolute certainties.”
In other words, the most important, single lesson that we can learn
from today’s commemorations is that Auschwitz is not just part of our
history. It is part of our present. This is a lesson that seems to
have escaped the 45 per cent of Britons – according to a recent poll
– who have not heard of Auschwitz.
In truth, the story of the Holocaust is imperfectly understood, even
by many of us who think we know what happened. (I was astonished by
my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was
Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives
almost certainly died there.)
The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist
historians, because so much of the evidence was destroyed by the
Nazis themselves in 1943-44. The story was further muddied by the
Soviet domination of Poland up to 1990 – years when Auschwitz was
turned into an “anti-fascist” shrine and the suffering of the Jews
was pushed into the background.
Did 5,000,000 Jews die in the Holocaust or 6,000,000? Even now,
honest historians disagree. The generally accepted figure of
1,100,000 dead in Auschwitz alone (including 960,000 Jews, 75,000
Poles and 21,000 gypsies) is a “conservative estimate”, according to
the head archivist of the Polish state museum on the site, Piotr
Setkiewicz. “It was almost certainly more than that. These are just
the people that we can say with absolute certainty died here.”
One of the perverted oddities of the Final Solution is the mixture of
brazen pride and shame with which it was implemented. Intelligent,
educated men believed that they had a right to destroy millions of
fellow human beings. At the same time, they felt it was necessary to
lie about, and cover up, what they were doing. The same twin impulses
– denial on the one hand, and pride in the Holocaust on the other –
persist among Nazi apologists to this day.
The 60th anniversary has brought an abundance of new studies,
including the excellent BBC television series on Auschwitz, and the
accompanying book by Laurence Rees. All the same, confusions remain
in many educated and unprejudiced minds: confusions which are often
exploited by Holocaust- deniers and relativisers. There is,
especially, an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps
which existed in the Nazi archipelago of evil.
Broadly speaking, there were labour camps, concentration camps and
death camps. Life in the labour and concentration camps, such as
Belsen, south of Hamburg, and Dachau, north of Munich, was barbaric.
Life expectancy was short. These camps had tens of thousands of
political prisoners, and resistance activists, from Germany and from
occupied countries – and some high-profile Jews.
Much of the confusion, in the West, arises because these camps, in
the western part of Germany, were liberated by the British and the
Americans. They provided the images which were first seared onto the
world’s memory and conscience: images of walking skeletons in striped
uniforms and heaps of emaciated bodies being cleared by bulldozers.
But these were not the death camps. There were no planned mass
killings – no gas chambers or crematoria – in Belsen or Dachau or
Ravensbruck or Mauthausen or anywhere within Germany’s pre-war
borders.
The Holocaust happened further east, in Poland, notably at Auschwitz
but also in five other camps, some of which were no larger than three
or four football pitches: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and
Majdanek.
The unfamiliarity of these names – apart from Treblinka –
is significant, and deliberate. They were dismantled, and the ground
ploughed over and planted with trees, by the SS at the end of 1943.
By that time, it is estimated that 1,700,000 people had been murdered
there, mostly Polish Jews, mostly killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning
(Zyklon- B gas was an Auschwitz speciality.)
Mr Setkiewicz says: “We have very, very little direct information on
what happened in these places. There are few records, few eyewitness
accounts, no survivors. We know only that transports took Jews out of
the ghettos established by the Nazis in Warsaw and other cities and
they took them to these camps, which were set up as extermination
centres. There was no room for people to live or work in these
places. No one came back.”
Auschwitz was unique. It was the only site which contained both an
extermination camp and a labour camp (in fact 40 different camps,
spread over an area covering 40 square kilometres, the Auschwitz
“zone of interest”).
Because both kinds of camp existed side by side, there are survivors,
Jewish survivors and Polish survivors, to tell us what happened in
Auschwitz. But the existence of both kinds of camp on one site, or at
one complex of sites, is also fertile ground for the negationists.
Look, they say, Auschwitz had a swimming pool; it had a brothel for
inmates, an orchestra, a sauna. How bad could it have been? Yes,
Auschwitz had an orchestra but most of the 1,100,000 people who died
there never heard it play.
The complex has two main camps: the original Polish army barracks
taken over by the Nazis in 1940, and the much larger Birkenau camp,
three kilometres away, built by slave labour from October 1941.
The original Auschwitz camp – which looks like a pleasant army base
or a university campus – has its own horrific tale to tell. It was
here that the first mass killings of Poles and Russian prisoners of
war took place. It was here that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss,
devised methods of mass slaughter with Zyklon-B in the first of the
Auschwitz gas chambers (built at the end of the garden where his
children played).
It was here that the SS doctor Josef Mengele conducted medical
experiments on twins and pregnant women. It was here that the
orchestra, comprised of musically talented inmates, played merry
dance tunes and waltzes as the half-starved work groups – kommandos –
struggled in and out of the gate marked Arbeit macht frei (work makes
you free).
The swimming pool and brothel also existed – but only for the kapos
or inmates promoted to be overseers.
Tens of thousands of people died in the original camp but the greater
slaughter happened down the road at Birkenau, conceived originally as
a labour camp but then developed into an industrial killing-machine.
Another grim distinction needs to be made. The Belsen-generated image
of the Holocaust – emaciated people in striped uniforms being herded
into gas chambers – is largely false. Most of those who died at
Auschwitz never wore camp uniforms. They never received a number
tattooed on their forearm (another Auschwitz speciality which did not
occur elsewhere). Most were led, or taken in trucks, directly from
the trains to the chambers. They died, not as dehumanised skeletons,
but as people looking and feeling like citizens of the mid-20th
century.
When a train arrived (from Hungary or Holland or France), the
prisoners – 1,200 to 1,500 on each train – were divided into columns
of men and columns of women and children. The SS doctors and guards,
often behaving with extreme politeness, selected maybe 200 young men
and women from each train to be admitted to the camp as slaves for
the Nazi war machine. The remainder were taken to the far end of the
site – to the place where tomorrow’s ceremony will take place. They
were made to undress and told they had to take a shower. They were
led into the gas chambers and murdered as they huddled in family
groups.
Their bodies were removed by the members of the sonderkommando – the
Jews and other prisoners forced to do the most horrific work to
protect the minds of the SS guards. Gold teeth, rings and hair were
cut from the bodies before they were burnt. (The hair was made into,
among other things, socks for submariners.)
It is estimated that Birkenau, when functioning at its most
efficient, could murder and burn 20,000 people in a day.
How do we know all this? The Holocaust deniers say we don’t know;
that it is largely made up or exaggerated; that no evidence exists
that the gas chambers – destroyed by the SS in January 1945 – were
gas chambers. (On surviving plans they are described as “morgues”.)
In truth, the amount of direct and circumstantial evidence of what
happened in Auschwitz-Birkenau is huge. Twenty-five photographs were
taken by an unknown SS guard, discovered in an album when the camp
was liberated, showing the process of “selection” of trainloads of
Hungarian Jews in 1944. Eyewitness accounts have been given by SS men
and by survivors, including members of the sonderkommando, the few
who survived and others who buried their testimony in the earth of
the camp.
Plans show the “morgues” were designed to be gas-tight and have a
high ambient temperature – counter-productive for a morgue but
necessary to activate pellets of Zyklon-B. (One plan also exists
which labels the gas chamber not as as a morgue, but as a “gas
chamber”).
Mr Setkiewicz says: “Do we have one piece of evidence which proves
beyond all doubt that the Holocaust happened? No. We have a
thousand.”
The museum at the original Auschwitz camp presents this evidence in
crushing, disturbing mass. Human hair is piled behind a glass window
and covers the area of two tennis courts. Similar picture-windows
display heaps of shoes, spectacles, suitcases, false legs and arms,
crutches and clothes found when the camp was liberated six decades
ago.
A newer exhibition has also been opened in the “sauna” at Birkenau.
This was, in fact, the building where the few selected to work and
suffer, rather than to die instantly, were stripped, shaved and
tattooed. This display speaks of the individual ordinariness of
thousands of obliterated lives. It shows hundreds of photographs,
mysteriously found in a suitcase at the site – all of them pre-war
family snaps taken by Jews living in the town of Bedzin: snaps of
weddings and walking trips, grinning young men acting the fool,
brothers arm in arm, happy picnics and shopping expeditions.
In the next room is a display of objects, confiscated from Jews as
they arrived at the camp: banal objects, precious objects, objects
which suggest that many of those who arrived here had no conception
of the fate awaiting them. There are cigarette lighters and
cheese-graters, picnic baskets and kettles, razors and chess sets,
hairbrushes and cameras.
Once again, you are reminded that the Holocaust happened in a time
like the present, to people like you and me. Visiting Auschwitz, and
seeing sights like these, you wrestle with an impossible question.
What makes Auschwitz and the Holocaust different? Are they different?
Massacres and genocides have been carried out throughout history,
from Genghis Khan to the Crusades, from the American Plains to
Turkish Armenia,
Lebanon, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Even the numbers killed in the
Holocaust are not unique. Stalin killed more, for reasons of
expediency and terror, than Hitler killed for reasons of race and
ideology. Studies in comparative evil are barren and pointless: all
of these crimes are monstrous.
And yet there is something about the Holocaust which sets it apart,
in its essence, if not its enormity. Here was a genocide willed and
planned by a modern industrial state, using all the paraphernalia of
modernity, from trains to toxic gases. Here was a genocide, willed
not just because a people were occupying space coveted by another
people but because of a self-induced, obsessive, racial fear and
hatred.
In no other genocide, before or since, have hundreds of thousands of
people been sought out and shipped hundreds of miles, at great
expense, to their instant murder. In no other genocide have bodies
been treated as industrial raw materials, coldly denying the humanity
of the victims even in death.
It took a very modern and advanced state to conceive and organise
such an elaborate, bureaucratic genocide. It took all the resources
of modern politics and mass media to brain-wash an entire people so
that they were complicit in murder on an industrial scale.
What is the way to Auschwitz? The road does not just start beside a
roundabout and a BP petrol station.
Teresa Swiebocka, the senior curator at the Auschwitz museum, who
also teaches on the meaning of the Holocaust, said: “The Holocaust
did not begin in 1939 or 1941. It began many years earlier. It began
with an obsession that one nation, one race, had absolute wisdom and
absolute rights, superior to those of other races or religions.
“The question people should ask when they come here, or watch the
anniversary ceremonies, is how can civilised people in a modern state
be brought so far and so low? How does it begin? At what point do you
take a turning which leads you eventually on to a road marked
Auschwitz?”

The Independent
January 27, 2005
UNIQUE REMINDER OF INHUMANITY THAT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
THE SIXTIETH anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today has a
special sense of dignity. As with the D-Day anniversary last year,
there is inevitably a sense of a passing of the generation who
remembered and were part of it, a thinning of the cord that connects
the past with new generations who must learn about it afresh.
This is reason perhaps to feel a particular solemnity this year, to
stand in sorrow at the loss of so many lives and in appalled
knowledge of what man is capable of doing to man. Only those who
survived, those who witnessed the death camps or who had relations
who died there, can know the full extent of grief that the Holocaust
brought. But it remains in its scale and its full bureaucratic
ruthlessness a crime that had, and must continue to have,
reverberations through all humanity.
Auschwitz itself was not only an extermination camp for Jews, of
course. Tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, gypsies, homosexuals
and others whom the Nazis defined as subhuman, also died there. But
it has come to have a special meaning in the Holocaust, accounting
for up to 1 million of the 6 million Jews who died as victims of the
world’s most horrendous genocide.
Was the Holocaust then a unique event, an “exceptional” act of mass
murder that can only be understood in Jewish historical terms, or was
it part of a wider pattern of brutality, a peculiarly brutal part to
be sure, but one with implications for us all?
The answer must be that it was – and is – both. The anti-Semitism
that encouraged the persecution of Jews throughout Europe in the
Middle Ages and beyond and allowed the Nazis to define them as a
sub-species of mankind to be wiped off their lands has not
disappeared. It did not start with the rise to power of Hitler and it
did not end with his fall. Given that history, Jews have a special
reason for feeling that the Holocaust should be invoked as a constant
rallying cry to stamp out even the most isolated signs of a
resurgence in anti-Semitic propaganda and assault.
But the Holocaust was not alone as an act of genocide in a century
filled with massacres of civilians and ethnic violence. Armenians,
Tutsi, Chechens, Aborigines, Marsh Arabs, Nubian tribesmen – the list
of victims of race or colour is endless, not to mention the millions
of their own countrymen killed or starved by Stalin, Mao Zedong and
Pol Pot. In that sense the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
cannot be just an occasion to remember a uniquely horrifying episode
in history. Within five years millions of Hindus and Muslims were
being killed for their religion in the break-up of India. Half a
century later, Rwanda proved that virtually an entire people could be
slaughtered – and the world would let it happen.
There is reason for optimism as well as gloom. The reaction to the
horrors of Nazism and the World War it unleashed led to the creation
of both the United Nations and then the European Common Market. It is
now impossible to conceive of any resurgence of the national conflict
in Europe that brought with it two world wars. The collapse of the
Soviet Union has also brought with it an opportunity for countries
such as Poland, Hungary and Romania to face up to their past, and
particularly the Holocaust.
But faced with the ethnic violence and civilian massacres in Darfur,
no one could say that the lessons of the last century have been
learnt, or that the international community has yet found a way of
preventing them. Nor, listening to the debate about immigration, can
anyone say that all people have learnt generosity towards their
fellow men. Fear of the foreigner, suspicion of the outsider, lies
close to the surface of every society, ready to break out in calls
for action when pressures seem threatening. One man’s concern about
security all too easily becomes a crowd’s call to imprison or reject
a whole group. We will need to remember Auschwitz long after its last
survivor has gone.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress