Paris, January 26 – UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura delivered a video message to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust wich opened this afternoon in the capital of Sweden. Recalling UNESCO’s role in science, education, culture and communication, "the bulwarks of human rights", he highlighted the importance of education in learning the lessons of the Holocaust so as to prevent the repetition of genocide and preserve democracy.

Here is the full text of Mr Matsuura’s message to the Forum:

"As Director-General of UNESCO, I am pleased to address a warm message of greetings to all the distinguished participants in this International Forum, dedicated to the advancement of Holocaust education, remembrance and research.

May I take this opportunity, to congratulate Prime Minister Persson and his Government and the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Israel, Poland, the Netherlands and France on their courage and determination in making Holocaust research and education a priority in their own countries. The Task Force and the International Forum are outstanding examples of the association of political will with the talents and insights of the scholarly community to fight ignorance, intolerance and racism which are the enemies of democratic societies and of peace.

Indeed, this was the insight of UNESCO’s founders immediately after the war. They wrote, in the Preamble to our Organization’s Constitution that: "The great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races". Our founders, including Léon Blum, understood that education, science, culture and communication are the bulwarks of human rights, democracy and security among nations.

UNESCO, with its half centery of commitment to tolerance and human rights, stands ready to work with you on this crucial issue. Over the years, UNESCOS’s Member States have daopted crucial normative instruments such as the Declaration Concerning the Right to Education, and the landmark 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice. This year we are celebrating the International Year for the Culture for Peace, proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

The Holocaust – the Shoah – is defining event of the centery we are leaving behind. Its horrendously large number of victims – men, women and children – must be remembered, not only by historians, but by all of us, and especially our young people. The Holocaust may have been the apogee of state-sponsored genocide in our time, but campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing have erupted in our contemporary world: Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor are warnings for the future. Their lessons, together with the lessons of the Holocaust, must be learned very carefully and taught very well if we are to prevent intolerance, prejudice and fanaticism from threatening our security in the future.

As we have seen in the case of Holocaust and recent exemples of ethnic cleansing, genocide is only possible when freedom or expression and human rights are trampled on and other cultures are presented as threatening of inferior. Working at national and regional levels, the Organization has helped its Member States to revise history and geography text and to improve teaching methods in these crucial fields. Support for free and pluralistic media is the priority of UNESCO`s communication programme. And nothing symbolizes the cultural richness and pluralism of our world more, in the Organization’s work, than the World Heritage Programme. As you know, the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland has been inscribed on the World Heritage List for many years.

As Director-General of UNESCO, I give you my personal assurance that UNESCO will work with you to achieve our shared goal of educating the children of the new century in a spirit of tolerance an mutual respect.