Auschwitz : Military and tsunami Jan. 26, 2005, The Daily Telegraph, London Tomorrow the world will commemorate the 60th anni-versary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. Despite everything we have learnt since 1945, the occa-sion is pregnant
Auschwitz : Military and tsunami
Jan. 26, 2005, The Daily Telegraph, London
Tomorrow the world will commemorate the 60th anni-versary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. Despite everything we have learnt since 1945, the occa-sion is pregnant with a horrific sense of incomprehension. How could it have come to this? How could as highly cultivated a nation as Germany have descended to such depths? …
While tomorrow’s anniversary should be a cause for general contrition, there is particular interest in what Germany’s present leaders have to say. In a speech to the Auschwitz International Committee in Berlin yesterday, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder rightly exonerated the overwhelming majority of living Germans from blame for the Holocaust. But he added that they bore a special responsibility: never to forget the war and genocide un-leashed by Hitler. “Remembering the Nazi period and its crimes is a moral duty,” he said. “We owe this not only to the victims, the survivors and their families, but also to ourselves.” Addressing the UN General Assembly on Monday, Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister, said this responsibility meant that Israel’s right to exist and secu-rity would for ever be non-negotiable fixtures of German policy.
Both men belong to that post-war generation of lead-ers who see no reason why their country should be psy-chologically crippled by guilt for what happened under Hitler, but realise the danger of succumbing to the temp-tation to forget. Their words are a valuable antidote to the rise of far-Right parties in the eastern Länder, to the Holocaust deniers and to those who play on the German sense of victimhood. As the chancellor said yesterday, Germany is facing up to its past.
Jan. 26, 2005, Taipei Times, Taiwan
One month after the catastrophic Boxing Day tsunami that killed nearly 175,000 people in Indonesia, foreign and national militaries continue to be a major source of relief for many victims in the devastated province of Aceh.
The strong, public military presence, however, has not come without headaches for Indonesia’s leaders. …
The presence of foreign troops, especially from the US, on Indonesian soil is a thorny issue for some in nationalis-tic Indonesia, and particularly in Aceh, a devoutly Muslim province.
Nevertheless, tens of thousands of foreign troops re-main in the province, providing critical logistic support for the humanitarian mission. Helicopters operating from five aircraft carriers based off the coast of Sumatra are still heavily relied upon to deliver aid, often to remote ar-eas still unreachable by land routes. …
