Wiesel: who will stop the genocide?

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.