UN asks if world can stop future genocide

If the world had listened to the horrors of the Nazi death camps, perhaps genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda could have been prevented, speakers told the first-ever UN General Assembly session on the Holocaust.

Both UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate author Elie Wiesel, a World War II death camp survivor, questioned whether the nations had the will to stop mass murder in the future.

"If the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda," Mr Wiesel said.

"We know that for the dead it is too late. For them, abandoned by God and betrayed by humanity, victory did come much too late," Mr Wiesel said. "But it is not too late for today's children, ours and yours. It is for their sake alone that we bear witness."

Mr Annan told the assembly that at this moment, "terrible things are happening today in Darfur, Sudan". He asked the UN Security Council to take action once it received a new report determining whether genocide had occurred in Darfur and identifying gross human rights abuses.

The special session, at which survivors and the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg spoke, is a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp.

The meeting was first called by the United States and backed by Mr Annan, who polled the 191-member assembly. More than 150 nations agreed to the session, including Islamic nations. But among Muslim nations, only Afghanistan and Jordan's UN ambassadors are scheduled to speak to the General Assembly, often accused by Israel of being anti-Semitic.

The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on January 27, exactly 60 years after Soviet Red Army troops liberated the camp. Up to 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone, dying in gas chambers or of starvation and disease. During the war, six million Jews overall were exterminated and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Russians and Gypsies were killed or used as slave labour, at several Nazi death camps.