The death of Stéphane Hessel
by Abbas Aroua
Stéphane Hessel died three days ago. He died too young. For in his head and his heart he never lost the flame of youth, kept alive by his love of justice and his unceasing struggle for the deprived, the oppressed and the assaulted of the earth – of all the earth.
“Truth and justice preserve the human body,” a friend likes to say; I have seen this dynamic at work in the late Abbé Pierre and in Professor Noam Chomsky, as well as in my teachers and friends Maître Abdennour Ali-Yahia and Professor Johan Galtung – may God grant them long life – who are eternally young.
Hessel belonged to that category of free intellectuals who are able to escape the weight of academic stature and the constraints of university status, giving free rein to their indignation and devoting themselves to spreading good around them, without letting themselves be held captive by any vested interest.
Departing at 95, Stéphane Hessel had a full life. From his birth in Berlin on 20 October 1917 to his death in Paris on 26 February 2013, he saw war and its horrors, resistance, deportation and detention, before dedicating himself to the cause of human rights.
A diplomat at the UN from 1948 and actively involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he was anything but an ordinary UN official like the thousands who fill, day in day out, the offices, cafeterias and hushed lounges of the Palais des Nations.
Stéphane Hessel summed up his struggle well in his “ Time for Outrage! (Indignez-vous !) ” and described his life in a fine phrase: “It is I who have lived, and not a sham being created by my pride and my boredom” (quoted by Alain Beuve-Méry in Le Monde of 28 February 2013).
Abbas Aroua, 1 March 2013
