KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 4 (NNN-BERNAMA) — The German community in Malaysia marked the 30th anniversary of its Unity Day with a grand dinner hosted by the country’s ambassador to Malaysia Nikolaus Graf Lambsdorff at a hotel here Thursday evening.
Also known as the National Day, the Day of German Unity is celebrated on October 3 every year to commemorate the unification of east and west Germany following the historic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The day also marked the 70th anniversary of the republic’s Constitution, famously known as the Grundgesetz or the Basic Law.
Speaking at the event, Lambsdorff said the Germans valued human rights and dignity greatly just as it is stated in Article 1 of the Grundgesetz: “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (“Human dignity shall be inviolable”).
“Obviously, this has to do with our horrific history of the first half of the last century. The fathers, and very few mothers of our constitution wanted to make sure that we learned our lessons from two world wars. When our founders drafted our Grundgesetz in 1948 /1949, the protection of human rights was a rather new concept.
“Their first concern was to draw the right conclusions of their own, often very personal, experiences of what war with all its atrocities does. They also had the millions of refugees in mind, including many displaced Germans towards the end of the war,” he said.
Seventy years later, even though Germany now has to deal with other groups of refugees and migrants, it is still doing so on the basis and in the framework of the constitution, Lambsdorff said.
“It is our duty to protect “human dignity”. This is the reason why we have a particular interest in human rights, in democracy, in the rule of law. Not just at home but worldwide,” he said.
The celebration in Kuala Lumpur was attended by some 1,000 guests including foreign diplomats, the business community and local community leaders.
Deputy Transport Minister Datuk Kamarudin Jaffar was the guest of honour, representing the Malaysian government at the event.
— NNN-BERNAMA