Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘elie wiesel’

A Reuters article, perhaps accidentally, stumbles on the true crux of the matter when it comes to North Korea:

North Korea has committed “crimes against humanity” against its own people according to an independent report published on Monday that made a long-shot appeal for the U.N. Security Council to deal with the issue.

Released after North Korea’s October 9 nuclear test, the report describes Pyongyang’s brutal treatment of its citizens, from the beatings of pregnant women to force miscarriages to the abduction, torture and execution of political prisoners.

Commissioned by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, former Czech president Vaclav Havel and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, the paper seeks to spotlight rights abuses that have been previously reported but are often overshadowed by concern about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

(Emphasis mine).

And that, after all, is the point. North Korea has been committing horrific crimes against humanity that beg the question of why, more than sixty years after swearing “never again”, the world sits back and allows them to happen.

The answer to that question can presumably be found in two little words: nuclear weapons. The theory is that, while in the midst of dealing with the nuclear crisis, there’s little that the world can do about anything else North Korea is doing.

So what’s our excuse, then, when it comes to (nuclear-less) Sudan?

Oprah Winfrey has selected Elie Wiesel’s “Night” as her latest book club pick, catapulting the famous book on the Holocaust onto the bestseller list over a half-century after it was first published.

“Night” was required reading in high school French class (though I seem to remember most of us cheating by picking up the English translation from the library). It’s a powerful book and Wiesel emerged as one of the key voices of conscience on the Holocaust. There was a time when Wiesel’s word would have carried more weight than Oprah’s.

Then again, with Holocaust-denial on the rise (from the usual suspects and the Left and the Arab world), and with the generation of survivors slowly disappearing, perhaps this was the right time to push the book back into the spotlight.

Elie Wiesel addressed the U.N. in the first time that the world body has ever commemmorated the Holocaust:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate author Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor, both questioned whether the nations had the will to stop mass murder 60 years after the massacre in Europe.

“If the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda,” Wiesel said.

A better question might be, when genocides are occurring, what will the U.N. do about it? So far, the answer seems to be not much

Being the U.N., of course, it was inevitable to hear things like this:

“What sense can we make of this important commemoration, when we allow through our inaction, year after year, one people to dominate another, to deny the latter many of its most basic rights, and so, with the passage of time, also degrade it as a people,” said Jordan’s U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the only Arab speaker.

There go those Jews-as-Nazis comparisons again. But hey, at least Jordan was represented. I suppose the other Arab countries would find it difficult to deny the Holocaust if they had attended.

Elie Wiesel spoke out yesterday in support of the war in Iraq. Speaking at an international youth leadership conference hosted here in Montreal called ImagineMontreal, Wiesel repeated his oft-quoted theory that peace is an ideal, but pacifism is the wrong way to achieve peace:

“The danger which threatens the world is terrorism; nuclear terrorism, chemical and biological terrorism,” Elie Wiesel said at a news conference in which he acknowledged his views on the Iraqi conflict are paradoxical.

“I believe war is a blasphemy, but I’m not a pacifist. A pacifist is someone who would never bear arms. I would have fought against Hitler. That was a just war.

”The last just war probably was against Hitler. Since then we have had necessary wars, not just wars,” he said during the IMAGINE International Young Leadership Conference organized by ProMontreal and the United Israel Appeal Federations Canada.

Wiesel said he supports the current military intervention in Iraq because he believes the “reliable sources” in Washington and Israel who contend weapons of mass destruction are concealed in the ravaged country.

“If not for that, I wouldn’t support the coalition for intervention. I support the coalition. I am not for war,” said Wiesel whose efforts to avoid deadly conflict in the world’s hot spots have earned him wide recognition.

Wiesel, the celebrated author of books such as “Night”, “Dawn”, and “A Begger in Jerusalem”, Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who remembers all too well the effect that appeasement had on Europe during World War II. He also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He claims to hate war – all war – but concedes that it is sometimes necessary. And this, he says, is one of those times:

The United Nations tried to disarm Hussein but didn’t – or couldn’t – succeed, he said.

“I believe that if certain European countries had applied as much pressure to Saddam Hussein as to (U.S. President George) W. Bush, there wouldn’t have been a war,” he said.

This was a powerful message, coming from a highly respected man. And it is a message that is gaining recongnition in many circles.

Elie Wiesel speaks out in support of war against Iraq. In an article in the Observer (via CJA), he says that while war itself is never a good option, sometimes – as in this case – it is the only moral option.

I find war repugnant. All wars. I know war’s monstrous aspects: blood and corpses everywhere, hungry refugees, devastated cities, orphans in tears and houses in ruins. I find no beauty in it. But it is with a heavy heart I ask this: what is to be done? Do we have the right not to intervene, when we know what passivity and appeasement will make possible?

Is President Bush’s policy of intervention the best response to an imperative need? Yes, it is said, and I am reluctant to say anything else. Bush’s goal is to prevent the deadliest biological or nuclear conflict in modern history.

If the US, supported by the UN Security Council, is forced to intervene, it will save victims who are already targeted, already menaced. And it will win. The US owes it to us, and owes it to future generations. As the great French writer André Malraux said, victory belongs to those who make war without loving it.

To all the people who protest war on principle, I urge them to read the article.