I recently expressed the opinion that the proposed Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg should not receive government support if it confined its condemnation of genocide to a single Holocaust Centre.

However, I wish to make it quite clear that I do recognize the very special place in history that belongs to the Holocaust. It was the deliberate, planned extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally impaired.

Either because they were ignored or deliberately swept under the rug, previous genocides such as Stalin’s starving of Ukrainian peasants were not widely reognized But as the Allies swept through Germany in 1945, the world recoiled in horror at the discovery of the Nazi death camps.

How do I know it really happened? My own brother served with the British Army’s 63rd anti-tank regiment. On April 15, 61 years ago, that regiment liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp and John Viccari was there as one of the first eye witnesses to record what happened.

It’s a tragedy that even this knowledge has not freed us from the horrors of genocide. Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Sudan and where next?

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