Commentary On Night By Elie Wiesel

Survivor of the Holocaust and author of the well-respected memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel invites humane action with this statement: “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe” (1). One of the various “center[s] of the universe” presently is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a struggling nation in which thousands of innocent civilians die each month from war-related causes and governmental forces. In the last decade alone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo suffered through two severe wars, one in 1996 and the other in 1998. The first resulted from ethnic tensions and, in particular, perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, who,

“Of course, indifference can be tempting…, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims… to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes…,” Wiesel, in his speech “The Perils of Indifference,” explained. He goes, admonishing that “for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor[’s]… lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction” (2). When the international community responded indifferently toward the Rwandan genocide, “labeling it an ‘internal conflict’,” as the U.S. Holocaust Museum states, perpetrators could commit those genocidal crimes with little constraint; this directly led to the genocide later in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Adding fuel to [the Congo’s] unstable mix, some one million refugees, mostly the Hutu fearing the… Tutsis, fled into [the Congo]… at the end of the Rwandan genocide” and before the first war of the Congo. Additionally, leaders of that genocide followed, and “Organizing themselves in the fertile grounds of the massive refugee camps in Eastern Congo,... [they] began preying on the local Congolese population and making incursions back into Rwanda” (The U.S. Holocaust Museum 1). The unacceptable decision to neglect, and the failure to intervene and terminate, the Rwandan Genocide, falling into a trap of indifference, only led to continued genocidal violence. The world must overcome this indifference, because “to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman… in denying their humanity, we betray our own” (Wiesel 2). Therefore, the international community has an obligation to take action and help the Congolese, to prevent ignorance towards future annihilations; this responsibility falls upon the world not only because the growing