Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal has appealed to President-elect Bill Clinton to take the lead in aiding the victims of the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
He said this should include, if necessary, organizing an international coalition to stop the slaughter in the former Yugoslav republic.
In a letter signed as head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Wiesenthal described himself as a survivor who has “spent my entire life reminding the world of the consequences of indifference and silence.”
While granting that the United States could not be the world’s policeman, “it is equally true that an America concerned only about herself would not be the America that the whole world admires and looks up to,” he wrote in the letter, which was released here by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Wiesenthal also urged Clinton to liberalize U.S. immigration quotas to admit more refugees from Bosnia.
In his plea for a solution “to a great human tragedy that finds innocent civilians in concentration camps and women and children murdered daily,” Wiesenthal invoked a favorite admonition that “freedom is not a gift from heaven; it is something we have to be prepared to fight for every day of our lives.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
