US introduces UN resolution on Holocaust deniers

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 (Reuters) The United States has introduced a U N resolution condemning denials of the Holocaust, weeks after Iran sponsored a meeting dominated by speakers questioning the extermination of 6 million Jews in World War Two.

A total of 72 nations so far are sponsoring the resolution in the 192-member General Assembly, including all countries in Europe, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The United States and its allies hope for a vote in the General Assembly on Friday.

The aim is to get more than the 104 sponsors of a November 2004 resolution making January 27 the International Day of Commemoration for victims of the Holocaust, diplomats said yesterday.

Iran is not mentioned by name although the resolution is clearly aimed at a Tehran conference convened in December by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Most speakers expressed doubt about the Nazis' mass extermination of Jews.

The operative part of the resolution has only two paragraphs. It ''condemns without any reservation any denial of the Holocaust'' and ''urges all member states unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part, or any activities to this end.'' But the text is slimmer than one adopted by the General Assembly in 2004, which also criticized racial and religious discrimination.

Since that resolution was adopted, Ahmadinejad came to power in August 2005 and has caused an international outcry by terming the Holocaust a ''myth'' and calling Israel a ''tumor'' in the Middle East.

At the urging of former U N Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the General Assembly in January 2005 held its first ever session on the Holocaust to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

Up to 1.5 million prisoners, most of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz alone. A total of six million Jews and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Russians and Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis and their allies during the war.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement last Friday said ''the Holocaust was a unique and undeniable tragedy.'' ''The ability of the Nazis to command a following, despite their utter depravity, still strikes fear,'' Ban said, adding that the commemoration was ''an essential response to those misguided individuals who claim that the Holocaust never happened, or has been exaggerated.'' REUTERS PDS RN0440