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Press Releases
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For Immediate Release
April 23, 2006 |
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Price Calls on International Community to Remember the Holocaust with Action on Darfur |
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Raleigh, NC - U.S. Rep. David Price (NC-04) delivered the following speech Sunday, April 23rd, at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC, in observance of the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust.
“. . . Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children . . .” (Deuteronomy 4:9)
On this Day of Remembrance we confront stark, unmitigated evil, evil that could and did impose starvation, torture, unimaginable cruelty, and – for six million human beings – death. On this day we remember those who suffered and died and we resolve to keep faith with them.
Keeping faith means empathizing with what they endured, mourning for their shattered and lost lives, and resolving that they shall not have died in vain – that their lives will continue to inspire and bear fruit in our own lives.
That is why each year during the Days of Remembrance we look back but we also look around us. Remembrance makes us vigilant, warning us of man’s capacity for evil. And keeping faith requires us to ask ourselves, how can we make “Never again” more than a noble sentiment? How can we recognize and confront man’s inhumanity to man as it manifests itself in our own time?
There are many parts of our world we should attend to during these Days of Remembrance, but none more horrific and desperate than the Darfur region of Sudan. And now the genocidal marauders who have decimated Darfur’s villages (with the complicity of Sudan’s government) have murdered, raped and pillaged their way into the eastern regions of neighboring Chad.
Last week I joined some 120 members of the House in again calling on the President and Secretary of State to appoint a special envoy for Sudan to maintain pressure for the full implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and for bringing the murderous janjaweed under control. There is much more that we, the French and other Europeans, the African Union, Arab and Muslim leaders, the UN and others can do.
Knowing what policies could make a positive difference is less the problem than gaining the world’s focused attention and determination to act. It is a story we have heard before; it is how the Holocaust raged unchecked and it is how genocides have occurred from Cambodia to Rwanda to Darfur. May these Days of Remembrance, 2006, be days of awakening and resolve, so that what Elie Wiesel once called “the silence of the bystander,” and with it the world’s halting response, may be overcome.
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