Oskanian: genocide must be prevented, not commemorated

PanARMENIAN.Net - "When Darfur becomes shorthand for hopelessness, we in the small corners of the world realize that power has become a substitute for responsibility," Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said in his address to the UN General Assembly.



"The ubiquitous language of human rights cannot compensate for political will. Genocide must be prevented, not commemorated. Generation after generation, we find new names for man's appalling tolerance for what we think are inhuman machinations, new names for the places of horror, slaughter, massacre, indiscriminate killing of all those who have belonged to a segment, a category, an ethnic group, a race or a religion. Nearly 100 years ago, for Armenians it was Deir-El-Zor. For the next generation, it was Auschwitz, then the killing fields of the Cambodians. And most recently Rwanda. If in each of those cases, together with genocide, these names evoked ignorance, helplessness, wartime cover, today Darfur is synonymous with expediency, evasion and simple inconvenience. Darfur is synonymous with shame," he continued.



"My appeal, on behalf of small countries, is that the international community tackle each of these problems in their own right, for their own sake, and not as pieces in a global power puzzle. When tensions among the world's great powers grow, there is an increase in polarization and a decrease in the effectiveness of the hard-earned - and costly -policies of complementarity and balance of small countries. Our own room to maneuver, to participate in global solutions, diminishes," the Minister said.