The former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid chaired the conference which was organised in a very discreet fashion. Known as Gus Dur, the moderate Islamic leader is notorious in Indonesia for his outspokenness.

He described the conference as: "a meeting of various religious leaders, with Buddhists from Japan, Hindus from India and Christians, Jews and Muslims from all over the world."

He said the question asked was: What is the truth about the Holocaust? All the experts in attendance had come to the conclusion that the "the Holocaust really did happen," he affirmed.

Counter-conference

The conference was supposed to be a counter-conference to last December's meeting in Tehran at which the Iranian president Mahmood Ahmadinedjad dismissed the Holocaust as a "myth".

This time, Holocaust survivors were also invited and gave eye-witness reports about their experiences. One Israeli rabbi underlined the importance of letting survivors express themselves in an Islamic context, since most of the Holocaust had taken place in the West and there were hardly any witnesses in Muslim countries who could verify the facts.

According to Rainer Adam from the German Friedrich-Naumann-Foundation in Jakarta, the venue of the conference was also highly significant: "Until now, nobody has tried to organise a counter-conference," he said.

"Now the Indonesians have given the other side a chance to explain their point of view."

Clarification of facts

Some experts explained that the conference was important for clarifying the facts about the Holocaust. They said that many Muslims in Indonesia didn't exactly know what the Holocaust was, except those who had studied in the Middle East.

And these also didn’t really know the truth because they mostly relied on Egyptian and Iranian sources:

The conference chairman Abdurrahman Wahid spoke of the importance of religion as a uniting factor: "Politically we all have our own views. But it's religion which unites us in our quest for truth and only through inter-religious dialogue can we promote tolerance and understanding for mankind."