Omar Bongo Quotes

I think humanitarian organizations should acknowledge the progress more than they do. I think that one reason people are reluctant to provide more help to Africa, for example, is this sense that it's just hopeless, in a way that I think is untrue.

Effective intervention ended Sierra Leone’s civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide.

Nothing seemed more important to me than to make the world aware of the senseless death and starvation in South Sudan. I wanted people to see through the eyes of the suffering so my photos might motivate the international community to act.

There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.

Yet, only years after the Nazi-era, millions were sent to their deaths in places such as Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda, and the world once again took too long to act.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

Twelve hundred people died last week in Darfur. Their lives are just as important is yours and mine. The Foley story is a big story but in the interest of pursuing a sex scandal we are ignoring life and death problems all over the planet.

I wish I had intervened in Rwanda. I will spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t.

The government is now unable to restrain the horrible massacres that have made that country a graveyard….Armenia is to be redeemed!

We seem to have an obligation to protect if a dictator is going to rapidly kill many of his people on CNN. We do not seem to have the same obligation if he will kill his people slowly and not on CNN.

The Coalition for International Justice estimated that 450,000 people in Darfur have died since the deadly genocide began some three years ago.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

For President Clinton, according to this discussion I had with him, Rwanda was a marginal problem.

I have made my living bearing witness to some of the most horrific events of the end of our century, at the end of the 20th century.

In countries where innocent people are dying, the leaders are following their blood rather than their brains.

If the president of the United States says that attacks on civilians, starvation, and denial of religious freedom in Sudan are important international issues, they become so.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.

In their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda.

On the human rights side, administration policy has been marked by indifference. When the people of Iran flooded the streets to protest the theft of their presidential election in June 2009, President Obama was silent for 11 days.

The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.

While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction.

Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the rebellions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, are evidence of this problem.