Elie Wiesel spoke for Darfur at the UN Security Council

Person: Elie Wiesel
Lived: 1928–2016
Field: Writing
From: Romanian-American

The story

Elie Wiesel drew one central lesson from the Holocaust: silence in the face of persecution helps the persecutor. As a teenager in Auschwitz and Buchenwald he had felt that the world did not care, and he later said he wanted the victims of his own day to know that somebody did. In his Nobel Peace Prize speech of 1986 he declared that when human lives and dignity are in danger, national borders become irrelevant and people must interfere.

He applied that lesson far beyond the Jewish world. Over the decades he spoke out for Soviet and Ethiopian Jews, against apartheid in South Africa, and for the victims of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. He took up the causes of Argentina's disappeared, Nicaragua's Miskito people, the Kurds and Sri Lanka's Tamils, and he campaigned against denial of the Armenian genocide. In 1999, in Washington, he gave a celebrated speech on the perils of indifference, arguing that staying neutral in the face of suffering amounts to abandoning the victims.

By the mid-2000s the war in Darfur, in western Sudan, had become a major humanitarian crisis. Fighting that began in 2003 led to a government campaign of ethnic cleansing against the region's non-Arab peoples. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died from violence, hunger and disease, and millions were driven from their homes into camps. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, described what was happening as genocide.

In September 2006 Wiesel appeared before the United Nations Security Council with the actor George Clooney to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and urge the world to act. The appearance brought the moral authority of a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace laureate to the UN's most powerful body. Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, was later indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

When Wiesel died in 2016, Clooney paid tribute to him as a champion who had carried the world's pain, guilt and responsibility on his shoulders for generations.