Elie Wiesel, religious leaders want more action on Darfur

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (AFP) — Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and a delegation of religious leaders met UN Secretary General Kofi Annan here on Wednesday to press for more action on the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur.

“We met with the secretary general … to tell him of our pain, of our anguish, of our outrage at the situation in Darfur,” said Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, writer and activist who frequently takes the spotlight to underline human suffering around the globe.

“People are dying day after day, in the hundreds, in the thousands,” he told reporters.

He praised Annan and US Secretary of State Colin Powell for drawing international attention to Darfur, the vast western region in Sudan where an estimated 70,000 people have died over the past 20 months.

“Some of us belong to the generation that has seen the indifference of the world. For me the indifference of the past is a source of anguish and despair,” Wiesel said.

“Therefore if we speak today, it’s because we say: No more indifference.”

His delegation proposed the publication of a daily death toll for Darfur, where Sudan called on Arab militias to put down a rebellion by indigenous blacks.

But the militias went on a scorched-earth campaign that the United States has termed a genocide, leading some 1.5 million people to flee their homes and take refuge in squalid camps dotted across the mostly desert region.

UN officials have said that despite steps taken by the government to ease the access of international aid workers to Darfur, many people are still suffering from shortages of food, water and sanitation.