Gore Compares Nazi Atrocities, Bosnia Killings

NEW YORK —  Vice President Al Gore on Sunday compared the killings in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Nazi atrocities during World War II.

“Dictators refuse to learn the bitter lessons of history,” Gore said in an emotional speech at a memorial service honoring Holocaust victims on the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

“Fifty years after the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, petty tyrants around the world smother their people and seek to blind and confuse them with the clumsy lies of dictatorship.”

Gore, who is scheduled to arrive in Warsaw today, said he was haunted by a photograph of a little boy being herded to a Nazi concentration camp that he saw at the recently opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

He said he was equally struck by a recent image of a 10-year-old boy slain in Sarajevo.

The Bosnian capital has been shelled for more than a year by ethnic Serbs.

“And this happened in our time, only weeks ago,” Gore said of the slain boy. “Must such horrors go on and on? They must not.”

Gore was the keynote speaker at Sunday’s event, which was one of dozens around the world.

In Warsaw, visitors from Israel, North and South America, the former Soviet Union and all over Europe were joined by representatives of the Polish state and its dominant Roman Catholic Church in a sign of solidarity with the Jewish victims of Nazi terror.

The uprising began on April 19, 1943, when German forces moved to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto. It lasted nearly a month.