The UN General Assembly marks on Monday its first-ever commemoration of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as a reminder that the evil of mass murder still threatened the world, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. The special session, at which the foreign ministers of Israel, Germany, France, Argentina, Armenia, Canada and Luxembourg, representing the European Union, are scheduled to speak, is a memorial to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest death camp.
Jorge Semprun, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, addresses the session as the representative of Spain's Foreign Ministry.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, will lead the US delegation, Italy is sending its speaker of the senate and Russia, whose troops freed Auschwitz at the end of World War Two in 1945, is to be represented by its human rights commissioner.
"The evil that destroyed 6 million Jews, and others, in those camps is one that still threatens all of us today," Annan said before the event. "It is not something we can consign to the distant past and forget about it."
Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone, dying in gas chambers or of starvation and disease.
Six million Jews overall were exterminated in Nazi camps and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies perished or were used as slave labour in the camps.
The liberation of Auschwitz is to be observed this year as Holocaust Memorial Day, with world leaders attending ceremonies in Poland on January 27.
To accompany the assembly session, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom opens an exhibit of photos and sketches from the Auschwitz camp, called "The Depth of the Abyss", including some 60 sketches by Zinovii Tolkatchev, a private in the Soviet Red Army, who drew them at the time of the liberation of the Majdanek and Auschwitz camps.
They were donated to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance, documentation, research center, by his daughter and son in Kiev, Anel and Ilya Tolkatchev.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the camps, is attending the memorial along with Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who was saved from death by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary. Wallenberg is the uncle of Annan's wife, Nane.
The meeting was requested by US Ambassador John Danforth in a letter on December 9, and backed by Russia, the European Union, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Annan polled member states and 138 nations in the 191-member assembly agreed.
Israel's UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, who has accused the General Assembly of operating with an "immoral majority" against Israel said last week he believed there was a change in atmosphere that even allowed nations who did not recognise his country to vote in favour.
Still, Annan expected the session to be linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The General Assembly, which dominated the United Nations at its inception, voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. This led to Israel's creation a year later.
"I think whether I like it or not, it is linked in the minds of many people," Annan said.
Speeches by Islamic countries are to be given by the UN ambassadors of Jordan and Afghanistan.
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