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ISTORIA MAGISTRA VITAE - LEARN FROM THE PAST. WORK FOR A FUTURE WITHOUT WARS.

by PROF DR PIERMAURO CATARINELLA

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he topic of this conference is really important and events like this one should be held very often in every community, small or big such as schools, universities, parliaments and the United Nations because the international community and us, as part of it, in my opinion, should never forget what wars have produced in the past and the aftermath on people’s lives. I think that everybody agrees that children are the most innocent members of our family, are our future and must have the right to grow up in a peaceful environment and should not experience any kind of violence, physical or mental or whatsoever. I chose three topics (unfortunately, very sad topics) that I would like to share with you today: the atrocities committed on children by the Nazi’s regime during the Second World War in Europe (1933-1945), by the Serbian troops in the region of East Europe that was known as Yugoslavia before it collapsed and was divided in many single individual states (1991 – 1995) and by the Zionist State of Israel from 1948 till today.

I know Europe is far from this region (South East Asia) but the wars, all the wars, no matter where they take place, are very similar. At this moment, when we are sharing something together in this comfortable and peaceful hall, in many parts of our world, wars are ongoing and children are tortured, killed, raped, used as soldiers, weapons or human shields.

Debates like the one we are having now in Kuala Lumpur can be an important tool for everyone, but especially for the younger generation, to understand that wars have never solved human problems. If we understand this, one day, hopefully, wars will disappear. I know this might be like a dream but I like to think (and I want to believe) that sometimes dreams can become true.

Atrocities towards children committed by the Nazi’s regime during the Second World War (1933- 1945).

I was not born yet when the Second World War took place in Europe but I was told many stories about this dark period of our history by witnesses who were able to survive in the so called “concentration camps”. The wounds that the World War II left are still alive even if that war ended 70 years ago and it is always good and positive to remind ourselves of the atrocities that were committed in that period.

We hope that it will not happen again and we take a lesson from the past. Historia magistra vitae. It has been proven that the Nazi regime tortured and killed more than 15 million people from different European countries (France, Greece, Italy, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Holland and Germany itself) and one third of these 15 million were innocent children. Children who did not belong to that particular race that the Nazis called “Aryan” and for this reason did not deserve to live. The World War II and the killings committed by the Nazis are often associated with the term “Holocaust”.

The Nazi nomenclature targeted million people from all over Europe. Some were Jews (who were considered a menace for the German economy and for this reason

had to be exterminated and kicked out from the society) but the majority of the victims were killed only because “undesirable” according to the fanatic “nazi doctrine”: for instance they were not pure “Aryan”, belonged to some ethnic groups that the Nazis judged “inferior” (such as Rom, Sinti, Jenisch) or simply because handicapped. Nazis’ victims were deported from the country where they were born and brought to the concentration camps that the Nazis built all over Europe. They were called concentration camps because they were used to physically concentrate all the ethnic groups that were not “Aryan”. There were about twenty thousand concentration camps where children from 4 to 15 years old were used as slaves and forced to work at least 14 hours per day, without medical assistance and poor nutrition.

Those who were able to arrive alive to the final destination (the concentration camp where they were assigned) were taken away from parents and those who were still in good health were selected by the Nazis who were running these concentration camps. Many of these children were used as human cavies for medical experiments. In the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, both located in Poland, Dachau, 15 km from Monaco of Bavaria, Germany, there were German medical doctors, like Josef Mengele, Erwin DingSchuler, Karl Brandt, Helmut and Edward Wirths, Carl Clauberg, Horst Schumann, Sigmund Rascher, Carl Peter Vaernet, who conducted many types of unhuman experiments on children. Another infamous concentration camp was Buchenwald established in July 1937; it was one of the largest camps in Germany.

It takes its name from a village on the hill Ettersberg, about eight kilometres from Weimar, in Thuringia, in eastern Germany. It was built on a hill covered with a dense extension of beech trees (Buchenwald literally means beech forest).

Some of these experiments were aimed at studying if and for how long a child could survive without oxygen.

Of course most of the young victims died after 2 or 3 minutes and after the experiments, the dead bodies were sectioned and studied. Another cruel experiment conducted on children was to put them in cold water pools to see how long a child’s body could resist in the cold or frozen water. The temperature was between 2 and 5 degrees Celsius and these children were kept inside for about 50 to 95 minutes. Of course most of them died after a while and those who did not die even after 95 minutes in frozen water were reanimated with special drugs. Those who were reanimated did not die immediately even if they suffered heart disease or other different ones. New vaccines were tested on children in order to prove if they were effective or not because many Nazi soldiers were killed in Russia by the hepatitis epidemic and the doctors in the concentration camps wanted to test new vaccines. Another experiment was to test if it was possible to change the colour of children’s eyes because in the Nazi’s ideology, the so called “Aryan JUNE 2015 CRIMINALISE WAR

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race”, should only have blue eyes.

All these experiments failed and all the children became blind and were subsequently killed in gas chambers.

Children aged between 12 and 16 who looked a little bit effeminate were forced to consume massive doses of testosterone in order to find a “cure” against an alleged form of homosexuality. Infamous experiments were conducted on twins. The research started from meticulous measurements and absolutely precise comparison between the twins. After measuring and exploring every inch of the body of the twins and check for their differences, the subjects were put asleep with an injection of Evipan on the arm and then killed with an injection of chloroform. After the bodies were dissected and studied from the inside. 15% of the twins examined were killed in this way, or during any surgical operation.

I can never forget the stories that Rita Prigmore, an Italian woman who is now 72 years old and who escaped the Nazis trials in 1943, told me. The Nazis tried to change the colour of her eyes when she was 2 years old. She had a twin sister who was killed during a medical experiment. Rita Prigmore always visits schools and universities to tell the new generation about her experience and shows no rage towards anyone. She always ends her speeches with the following sentences: “No more, no more wars, no more violence towards children”.

Acts of war committed by child soldiers towards adults and other children during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the ex Yugoslavia, 1992 - 1995). The enrolment of children: a large phenomenon that is extended in many parts of the world.

Another war took place in Europe after the Second World War (in the ex Yugoslavia) between 1992 and 1995 and it was also a massacre of children. In this war that ended only twenty years ago, many children were used as soldiers and were taught to kill, to shoot, to torture and to use any kind of weapons.

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The reasons for this war are to be found in a sort of ethnic cleansing that the Serbians perpetrated towards the other population of the ex Yugoslavia. The three leaders of this infamous war are Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic who are now under trial now and charged in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. This war involved thousands and thousands of children as professional soldiers, some as young as only 6 years old.

More than 15 thousand were killed and those who survived face serious and incurable psychological and physical problems - problems that perhaps can be alleviated but not solved. All the protests that had been organized during this war (inside and outside the ex Yugoslavia) have not prevented the holding and the continuation of the war in Bosnia. Unfortunately the use of children of very young age during war is becoming very common in our modern wars. The Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits the recruitment of soldiers who are under the age of 15 years. This Convention was signed by virtually all governments of the world, except two: Somalia and the United States (which have signed, but not ratified).

The United States of America offer the international community poor examples: not only, together with Somalia, are the only ones not to have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989, but they apply, together with Australia, the UK and many other countries, the practice of accepting volunteers of sixteen years in the regular army.

The use of child soldiers is extended to a large part of the world. In Cambodia, a survey carried out in military hospitals on soldiers who were injured by land mines showed that 43% of respondents had been recruited between 10 and 16 years. In some cases, the boys did not enlist voluntarily, but were compelled by force to take this step, after being kidnapped.

For example, in Ethiopia, in the

90s, the police and the military went around the streets picking up young people and teenagers in the villages and in the poorest areas of the city. In Myanmar, whole groups of teenagers, aged between 15 and 17 years were taken while they were at school and made to enlist by force. The young soldiers recruited by force sometimes were released upon payment of a sort of ransom from the family.

In Liberia, about a quarter of the soldiers of the various warring factions were minors, approximately 20,000 individuals, including children and adolescents.

The FNPL (National Patriotic Front of Liberia) had one of its units of minors, aged between 6 and 20 years old, involved in acts of war. Even opposition movements kidnapped children to get them to enlist in their army: this happened, for example, in Angola, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and Sudan. The reasons, for which a minor under the age of 15 joins the active armed force, whether governmental or relating to an opposition group, are many. The strongest motivation is economic but it is not the only one.

ATROCITIES TOWARDS PALESTINIANS CHILDREN COMMITTED BY ISRAEL (1948 TILL TODAY).

My last topic of my speech wants to deal with the barbarian atrocities committed by the State of Israel towards the innocent and helpless children of Palestine for more than 50 years (they started in the year 1948 and they are still ongoing).

After the end of the Second World War the winning powers, at the expense of the State and people of Palestine, decided to create the Zionist State of Israel. Israel, after its creation, started invading and conquering neighboring lands that belonged to other people (the Palestinians). These people, starting from the year 1948, were deprived of their own land, their fundamental and basic human rights, killed and slaughtered by the Israel troops, supported and funded by the all

the Israel leaders who were in power from 1948 until today (from David Ben Gurion until Benjamin Netanyauh), in defiance of any rule of the international law. The list of massacres committed by Israel, in which white phosphorus illegal bombs were used, causing the painful death of thousands and thousands of Palestinians children, is too long; also it is really unbelievable and unbearable that not even one Israel leader has been brought before the International Criminal Court at the Hague for crimes against humanity - not until the Chief Prosecutor of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission initiated charges against retired Israel General Amos Yaron and the State of Israel before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal in 2012.

for us, even if none of the victims can ever obtain justice in custodial terms or even war reparations. The moot point is simply this, the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal has established a principle of international justice that no state is above the law. The world and especially the young generation must know that too many innocent people were killed in atrocious ways by the Israeli soldiers in many Palestinian refugee camps and, once again, too many poor and helpless children were the victims.

Nobody can forget the horrible and inhuman Sabra and Shatila’s massacre (or slaughter) committed by the Israeli soldiers on September 1982 or the “Cast Lead” operation between 2008 and 2009. Until when do we have to stand these barbaric atrocities and these blatant violations of the international law?

It was a courageous panel of international and independent judges of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal who, on November the 25th 2013, returned a verdict of guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide against both the defendants. Granted that the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal is merely a tribunal of conscience with no real power of enforcement, we must salute the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal for its valour to do what no others have done before - take Israel to court and convict that state of the crime of genocide. This, in the words of Tun Dr. Mahathir, is a moral victory

CONCLUSION: All the wars, sooner or later, end and this is possible if there is the intervention of the international community through using the tools of diplomacy and politics but these tools should be expanded and modernised. Many world leaders recognise the procedures governing the Security Council are obsolete and not efficient and, therefore, should be reformed. The Second World War and the Nazi regime could be stopped much earlier if the international community acted faster. The same can be said about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The atrocities in the Palestine also can be stopped. The United Nations and the Security Council, the only existing bodies until today that put together the international community, need to introduce, in my opinion, other more profitable instruments.

Currently the Security Council, as recognised by many parties, is too slow and needs a deep and radical reform from within. The wars not only can be nipped in the bud but can also be avoided if there is the political will to do so and the international diplomacy has rapid and modern tools to do so. My appeal to all world leaders of today and to the young generation who will be the future world’s leaders is to act fast in order to make, with no further procrastination, reforms in the Security Council’s activity.

We do not want wars anymore. We want respect, care and love for the children of all over the world.

All depends on us as part of the human society but the younger generation can do much more (and better). Young people must study the history, know exactly what happened in the past, how cruel and barbarian we are (we as human beings) and learn from the mistakes done in the past. The younger generation is surely smarter than the previous ones and can succeed where others failed. This is my warm auspice that I want to express today.

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