United Nations, Sept 20: Marking the international day of peace, Muhammad Ali, Elie Wiesel, Michael Douglas and other well-known UN peace ambassadors tried to answer tough questions from a young and demanding audience. To Wiesel, the holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, the question was this: how could the world have done virtually nothing to halt the 1994 genocide in Rwanda? The questioner was a young woman from Rwanda whose parents, four brothers and two sisters were among more than 500,000 people slaughtered in Rwanda in a campaign that targeted their Tutsi minority. "We knew and we did nothing. I have no answer ... Except that we must now learn the lesson that indifference is never the answer. Indifference to evil is evil," Wiesel told the young audience gathered in a hall at UN Headquarters.

And then he made a promise that appeared to bring his questioner nearly to tears.
"I would like you to write your story ... And I will help you," he said. "Nothing can replace testimony."
Wiesel also presented a challenge to another of the UN's "messengers of peace," the actor Michael Douglas, with so many films that glorify war, how about using your talent to make "a great movie on peace, to celebrate peace"?

Douglas didn't get a chance to reply amid the applause, but he had earlier answered a question beamed in from Sierra Leone from a young man who had been a child soldier during his country's decade-long war and who wanted to know what the movie star thought about war.
"I think we should focus on disarmament," Douglas replied. Bureau Report