Echoes of history in race conference walkout

GENEVA (Reuters) - When dozens of Western diplomats walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denouncing Israel as genocidal, echoes of the 1930s rang through the Assembly Hall of the U.N.'s European headquarters.

In that decade, the same marbled chamber of the Palais des Nations saw the mountingly acrimonious debates and mutual denunciations that led to the League of Nations' effective collapse at the start of World War Two.

On Monday, just as they did 70 years ago after similar controversial statements from the podium, angry envoys gathered in the Room of Lost Steps -- Salle des Pas Perdus -- outside the Hall to exchange views on what to do next.

Inside, as at the time of the League, other delegates broke into resounding applause for the speaker who had sparked the departure -- a sign that the international community remains deeply divided today, though on different issues.

The League, created in 1920 as a forum for cooperation between nations amid hopes for a new era of peace after World War One, struggled -- sometimes successfully -- with a range of territorial disputes in Europe and Latin America.

But by the mid-1930s, it was foundering amid challenges from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and an expansionist Imperial Japan, all of which stormed out not only from conferences but from the organization itself, one after the other.

Ironically, Monday's opening of the U.N. racism conference and speech from Ahmadinejad, which was condemned as "disgracefully anti-Semitic" by Western ambassadors, came on the day extreme right-wing groups celebrate as the birthday of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

April 20 is also marked by Jewish communities worldwide and by Israel -- which did not exist at the time of the League -- as Commemoration Day for the World War Two Holocaust, in which millions of Jews, and many others, were killed by the Nazis.

Hitler's withdrawal, soon after he came to power in 1933, followed a rebuke from the League over a German Jew who lost his job because of his racial origin, which the organization said was a violation of minority rights.

Israel, which is not attending the racism meeting, says Ahmadinejad -- who on Monday called it a "racist perpetrator of genocide," founded in 1948 "on the pretext of Jewish sufferings" -- holds views on Jews similar to those of the Nazi leader.

The Assembly Hall, opened in 1937, never hosted any of the great dictators of the period, and proved powerless to halt them in their drive to expand territory under their control -- as Arab states say the U.N. has failed to do with Israel.

Its last major act was to break its own voting rules and expel -- by decision in the Hall -- the then Soviet Union for its attack on Finland in December 1939, two months after Nazi Germany attacked Poland, starting World War Two.

During that six-year conflict, a handful of officials in the Palais des Nations on the territory of neutral Switzerland maintained the fiction that the League was still functioning, but in 1946 it was dissolved and absorbed into the U.N.

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Mark Trevelyan)