Yad Vashem urged the United Nations to stop the genocide in Darfur.
“It is not sufficient for the international community to issue condemnations, and statements via the United Nations, while this Khartoum-sponsored genocide is taking place,” Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev and the head of its council, Yosef Lapid, wrote Sunday in an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
“Concrete steps must be taken; we must do everything to ensure that the Security Council will decide to send troops to Darfur who will be able to restore security. Every day that passes adds thousands of names to the list of dead.”
Sunday is the Global Day for Darfur, where hundreds of thousands have been killed by government-backed militias in recent years.
“As the heads of the Jewish people s central organization for commemorating the Holocaust — a genocide that took place while the world was silent — we feel a special obligation, as we discussed with you during your recent visit to Yad Vashem, to raise the alarm on Darfur,” Lapid and Shalev wrote.
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.
