If you will permit me to make just a couple of introductory remarks: for the past five years, I have been the President’s and Secretary of State’s Special Envoy -- in addition to my other responsibilities -- on Holocaust-related issues. We have been dealing heavily with restitution of assets, trying to bring some measure of justice to surviving victims in everything from communal property to art to Swiss bank accounts to German slave and forced labor and insurance. These are all important and we are making progress in each of those areas. The significance of this historically important conference is that it begins, as we enter a new century, to move us away from what is important and immediate -- money and assets -- to what is enduring and lasting -- memory and education. Financial restitution, while critical, cannot be the last word on the Holocaust. This conference assures education remembrance and research will be. The need for this conference and Holocaust education is, I think, very evident from this conference because the Holocaust, although a uniquely Jewish event, has universal lessons.

This conference will help us fight historical revisionism, combat neo-Nazi efforts in all of our countries, and educate future generations about the Holocaust when there will be no living witnesses. But it will go further. It will also provide ethical, moral and practical lessons that we can apply in the 21st century to real-time matters. The US has taken Holocaust education seriously: both for what it can tell us about the past in honoring the memory of its victims, and for the guide it can provide to us for the future, as individuals and as nations. For the lessons of the Holocaust to be applicable, we must have open and accessible archives. There are still too many archives which are closed or which are inaccessible. There is simply no excuse for any country or any institution at this point not fully declassifying their archives and their documentation.

One of the lessons from this conference is the toleration of differences; but we also learned about dangers of indifference by countries and individuals. If we talk about indifference, how can we tolerate continued secrecy and obscuring of documents that would shed important light on the events we are here to look at and that would allow us to draw important lessons? In that respect, we support all efforts to make available all information that would shed light on the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

I believe that the issues have demonstrated that we still have a steep learning curve. But it would be a mistake to think that we have not made progress in absorbing some of the lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has indeed resonated in a good deal of the work that we have done in the last decade and this conference will help us make it resonate even more in the future.

Although the international community was very late to react in Rwanda -- 800,000 people were slaughtered --there is nevertheless now a UN-Rwanda Tribunal in Tanzania. There are forty people in custody, including large elements of the former Rwandan government. There is an International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that was created at the beginning of the Clinton administration for crimes from 1991 to the present -- with no statute of limitations. There are seventy active cases of people being indicted. The actions that NATO itself took in Kosovo are another application of the lessons of the Holocaust. In 1998, President Clinton established a new US inter-agency working group and created the position of Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues – the only country that has such a position. This working group is aimed at preventing atrocities by building into the decision-making of senior officials in our government ways to prevent mass killing as part of their normal policy-making judgements in places like Burundi, Angola, Sierra Leone, East Timor and Kosovo. We have also come a long way in codifying international law since the Nuremberg Trials; but now the key is to apply and effectively implement those laws. So again, we still have a long way to go. The international community acts imperfectly in many of these situations but, clearly, the Holocaust resonates in much of what we have done at this past decade. I am absolutely convinced that continued Holocaust education and awareness will continue to raise our sensitivity and consciousness to mass slaughters and genocide, and impel us to prevent them or try to stop them as early as possible.

The challenge now is to build upon the political commitments we have heard from so many world leaders. Each country should find its own ways to strengthen its Holocaust education, research and remembrance efforts, and to apply the darkest event of the 20th century to make the 21st century a century with more justice, tolerance and security.

A central vehicle for carrying out Holocaust education is the nine-member Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.

This conference produced concrete results:

Argentina, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and, we believe, Romania, will join the Czech Republic in building a relationship with the Task Force by joint liaison projects for Holocaust education and remembrance.

Holocaust education, 55 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has finally come of age. This conference has brought together the widest range of Holocaust education in one place in history, creating an enduring network that will be reflected in schools around the world.

The Stockholm Declaration commits forty-six countries making firm commitments to fight racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia; to promote education, remembrance, and research about the Holocaust; to develop annual Days of Holocaust Remembrance; to facilitate the opening of archives and documents bearing on the Holocaust.

The final nail in Holocaust denial and revisionism was hammered in time and again: over twenty heads of governments and states gave moving speeches testifying to their nation’s relationship to this catastrophic event. Their commitment made this a truly remarkable and historic event.

The Israeli, German, and U.S. delegations have affirmed the importance of international support of Yad Vashem’s efforts to compile the names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as well as the importance of international cooperation to compile and make available over the Internet the names of the many millions of other victims, such as refugees and displaced persons, of the Nazis. This might done in part through the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.

Prime Minister Pearsson is to be complimented for making this possible. The challenge now is follow-through and implementation.