World Working Harder to Stop Genocide, Annan Says

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Saturday, November 24, 2001

World Working Harder to Stop Genocide, Annan Says

The world has begun slowly to step up its efforts to halt genocide and other war crimes, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a message to be delivered to a gathering of holocaust survivors in Rwanda this weekend.

"Painfully and belatedly, the international community is trying to do more to prevent and punish genocide and crimes against humanity," Annan says in a prepared message, released here Friday, to Sunday's International Conference of Survivors of Holocaust and Genocide.

He noted that tribunals are hard at work convicting at least some war criminals, while the Statute of the International Criminal Court is gaining more ratifications. "At last, the world is seeking an end to the culture of impunity," he said.

In the past decade, in Rwanda and the Balkans, "we have witnessed mass killings, ethnic cleansing, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of warfare, and other atrocities visited upon men, women and children solely because of the ethnic, religious or national group to which they belonged," he said.

Rwanda "has much to show the world about confronting the challenge of recovery," he said, adding that the African country is working hard to tackle the legacy of the past, "demonstrating that it is possible to reach beyond tragedy and rekindle hope."

Annan also pointed out that genocide shaped the U.N.'s founding. "The men and women who drafted the Charter did so as the world was learning the full horror of the Holocaust perpetrated against Jews and others by the Nazi regime, giving added urgency to the task of building an institution intended not only to preserve world peace, but above all to protect human dignity," he said.

Noting that the conference would aim to transform trauma into action to prevent a recurrence of war crimes, he pledged that the U.N. "will continue to be your close partner in this vital effort. "

Genocide survivors from Cambodia to Armenia will convene in Rwanda next week for a six-day conference aimed at sharing their experiences.

"The aim of the conference is for survivors' groups to share their experience of genocide and coping with post-genocide life," Antoine Mugesera, chairman of Ibuka, a coalition of Rwanda's genocide survivors' associations, said.

The Kigali conference, which will be officially opened on Sunday, has been jointly organized by Ibuka and the New York-based Holocaust Survivors and their Children.

Representatives of the Rwandan, Armenian, Cambodian, Bosnian, and Jewish communities have been invited to the conference, as well as institutions and researchers dealing with genocide studies.

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