Annan calls for genocide monitor

Few high-profile leaders are at the conference

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for the creation of a commission to forestall future acts of genocide.

He told a world conference on the issue in Stockholm that the mass killings of the 1990s in countries such as Rwanda could not be allowed to happen again.

He said he longed for the day when "confronted with a new Rwanda... the world would respond effectively".

This week's forum is first conference of its kind since the UN's 1948 resolution against genocide.

Mr Annan called for the creation of both a UN commission and a special rapporteur on the prevention of genocide.

GENOCIDE Defined as any act aimed at the destruction of all or part of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group of people The word is a hybrid of the Greek work for race (genos) and Latin word for killing (cide) The International Criminal Court may technically prosecute any state suspected of genocide source: Amnesty International

The rapporteur would report directly to the UN Security Council to quickly identify links between "massive and systematic violations of human rights and threats to international peace and security", the UN chief said at the start of the three-day conference.

"The events of the 1990s, in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, are especially shameful," said Mr Annan.

"The international community clearly had the capacity to prevent these events but it lacked the will."

The forum is being attended by delegates from 58 states, including 13 international organisations.

Among those states represented are some with experience of mass killings such as Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda.

However, Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson is believed to be the only Western leader at the conference.

Israel has a delegation at the forum but its attendance was in doubt earlier when the Israeli ambassador to Stockholm attacked an art installation depicting a Palestinian suicide bomber, which he branded as anti-Semitic.

After threatening to pull out of the conference altogether unless Stockholm apologised for exhibiting the artwork, Israel instead downgraded the level of its delegation which was originally to include President Moshe Katzav.