Unfortunately, the four candles represent the number of speakers rather than the number of victims – the list totals 24 names headed by Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, UN special representative in Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello and papal nuncio in Burundi Archbishop Michael Courtney. Of the other 21 names, nine were Iraqi and most died with Vieira de Mello in a suicide terrorist attack in Baghdad last August 19.

Referring to the date of the ceremony (May 13, traditionally an unlucky date), Ströje-Wilkens called September 11 the new unlucky day after the Twin Towers attack of 2001 and Lindh’s assassination last year – she also mentioned September as an unlucky month for the night’s host, Chile, where she was serving as a young diplomat at the time of the 1973 coup. Centring on personal reminiscences of her ”unique” late boss, her numerological speech managed to include most famous Swedes meeting violent ends in the last century such as Count Folke Bernadotte (1948), UN Secretary Dag Hammaskjöld (1961) and Prime Minister Olof Palme (1986).

Valdés described seeing Vieira de Mello last May on the eve of his fatal mission to Iraq – as serious, intelligent and dapper as ever. The host envoy stressed the variety of victims to terrorism with the ”exceptional” Lindh and Archbishop Courtney (who died at the end of the year) giving the church a new martyr in the thirdmillenium of its existence.

García Hamilton said that the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s work involved remembering death but also life – two Budapest ghetto survivors saved by Wallenberg during the Second World War were in the audience. Reminding his audience that Argentina had also seen horror, the historian pointed out that the 24 deaths showed that diplomats were not always decorative or ”good people sent abroad to lie for their countries” in Samuel Johnson’s definition.

Sotelo made the briefest speech because he preferred the tributes to the victims from his organization to come from elsewhere.

Apart from the many people present, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and United States Congressman Tom Lantos (another Budapest ghetto survivor) among others sent messages endorsing the event from abroad while local greetings came from first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Supreme Court Justice Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni and Defence Minister José Pampuro, among others.

Among the Saviours of the Holocaust there were hundreds of diplomats from several countries that disobeyed immoral instructions in order to save the lives of thousands. It is worth mentioning here the names of Raoul Wallenberg (Sweden); Aristides de Sousa Mendes (Portugal); Monsignor Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) and Hiram Bingham IV (USA), among many others.

In the spirit of those courageous men and women, the IRWF remembered the diplomats who passed away recently.

Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdes, Swedish Ambassador, Madeleine Stroje-Wilkens; José Ignacio García Hamilton, Vice-President of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and the Resident Coordinator of the UN System to Argentina, ad-interim, Juan Manuel Sotelo, spoke on the occasion.

Each one of them lighted a candle as sign of respect and grief for all and each of the fallen.

The ceremony included an exhibition of memorial panels produced by the IRWF, and the projection of a documentary of the UN in homage to the officials murdered in Baghdad.

Prestigious Argentine sculptress Norma D´Ippolito presented to Ambassador Valdés her sculpture “Homage to Raoul Wallenberg”, a gift from the IRWF to the Chilean people.

Within the frame of a packed auditorium some of the most important adhesions to the ceremony were read aloud; among them the ones signed by the President of Chile, Ricardo Lagos; Nina Lagergren and Louise von Dardel, sister and nephew of Raoul Wallenberg, respectively; Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand; John So, Mayor of Melbourne; Christian Ferrazino, Mayor of Geneva; Pavel Bem, Mayor of Prague; Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin; Rabbi Adrian Herbst; Director of the Latin-American Rabbinical Seminar and Monsignor Justo Laguna, Bishop of Moron, Buenos Aires.

• Photo gallery

• Anna Lindh (Sweden). Murdered in Stockholm on September 11, 2003.
• Apostolic Nuncio Michael Courtney (Vatican). Murdered in Burundi on December 29, 2003.

UN Officials murdered in the Baghdad terrorist attack on August 19, 2003

• Sergio Vieira de Mello (Brazil)
• Riham Al-Farra (Jordan)
• Raid Shaker Mustafa Al-Mahdawi (Iraq)
• Leen Assad Al-Qadi (Iraq)
• Ranilo Buenaventura (Philippines)
• Richard Hooper (USA)
• Reza Husseini (Iran)
• Ihssan Taha Husain (Iraq)
• Jean-Salim Kanaan (Egypt/France)
• Christopher Klein-Beekman (Canada)
• Emaad Ahmed Salman Al-Jobory (Iraq)
• Martha Teas (USA)
• Basim Mahmud Utaiwi (Iraq)
• Fiona Watson (UK)
• Nadia Younis (Egypt)
• Saad Hermiz Abona (Iraq)
• Umar Kahatan Muhamad Al-Urfali (Iraq)
• Gillian Clark (Canada)
• Arthur Helton (USA)
• Manuel Martin-Oar Fernandez Heredia (Spain)
• Khidir Salim Sahir (Iraq)
• Alya Ahmad Sousa (Iraq)