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Attendance at centennial commemoration of the first use of weapons of mass destruction
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Mr. Yasuyoshi Komizo, Secretary-General of the Mayors for Peace (and Chairperson of this Foundation), visited the city of Ypres in Belgium, one of the vice-president cities in Mayors for Peace, from April 21-24, 2015.
He attended the international conference "A Century of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Enough!" that was held there as the centennial commemoration of the first use of weapons of mass destruction.
This conference was held to mark the first attack in history using poison gas in a suburb of Ypres in April 1916 during World War I.
The conference started with a speech by Ms. Virginia Gamba, Director and Deputy to the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, expressing gratitude for the activities by the City of Ypres and Mayors for Peace to educate people on the abolition of weapons of mass destruction.
There were also speeches by poison gas attack experts and survivors, and the mayor of Halabja City in Iran, which is one of the vice-president cities of Mayors for Peace and was a victim of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War.
Professor Peter Kuznick of American University gave a presentation proving that the atomic bomb did not need to be dropped on Hiroshima to end the war, and there were also video messages from A-bomb survivors travelling on the Peace Boat and giving A-bomb testimonials.
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Mr. Komizo gave a presentation on the topic of "The Impact of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima".
Using a large number of images, including photos of the survivors, and paintings such as Mr. Goro Shikoku's Human Shadow Etched in Stone, he explained the actual damage from the bomb and the reconstruction of the city that came later.
He also presented the message of the hibakusha － "no one should ever again suffer as we have."
As global concern for the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons grows, he appealed strongly that the people of the world need to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and reach a common awareness that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil.
This was a multi-lateral and multi-faceted conference, with various experts in the fields of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical weapons and nuclear weapons speaking from their respective positions, in addition to victims of poison gas attacks providing testimonies.
At this conference, it was taken as a particularly significant thing by participants that Mr. Komizo attended as the representative of Hiroshima, which has continued to work to abolish nuclear weapons and achieve perpetual world peace.
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Mr. Komizo giving a presentation
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| (Peace and International Solidarity Promotion Division) |
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