August 31, 2006

Published February 8, 2006

What the Children Saw
Darfur’s refugee children tell their stories through crayons and paper

By LAURA CRUIKSHANK
Contributing Writer

Since February 2003, approximately 200,000 people living in Darfur, a large region in Sudan, have been murdered at the hands of the government-allied Arab militia group, the Janjaweed. Two million people have been displaced from their homes; more than half have been driven into camps in Darfur with very little resources for survival, and approximately 110,000 are now living in tent camps beyond the Sudanese border in Chad.

In 2005, Olivier Bercault, a Human Rights Watch researcher, undertook a mission to Chad. He says he wanted to talk with refugees in order to find out what was happening in Darfur. When he began to interview parents living in the camp, he gave their children crayons, pencils, pens, and paper to draw with. Without instruction or prompting, the children began to draw what they witnessed in their home country.

“And what we witnessed after that,” Bercault says, “was shocking and powerful.”

Some of those drawings are now an exhibit that has been traveling around the globe since July.

Seattle is one of five U.S. cities chosen to host the 27 drawings created by the refugee children. They’re displayed at the University of Washington until Feb. 22.

The pictures are a graphic depiction of the atrocities committed against the people of Darfur by the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed. They show bombings, rape, mutilations, shootings, and the burning of entire villages. Some of the artists are as young as 8 years old.

Despite the horror these people are going through, and the urgency that is needed to save Darfurians from their own government, nothing in the State of the Union address by George W. Bush last Tuesday gave mention to the genocide in Sudan.

“How do we bring to light the issues in Darfur?” asked Bercault at the exhibit’s opening-night reception. “This expression of human suffering is one that no child should have to witness or experience. Through these pictures, they are asking us to act.”

A better understanding of the drawings comes from more information about the complicated conflict, says Bercault.

“Where once this desert was a rich country full of farms and traders, it is now desolate,” he says. “The Africans and Arabs are both Muslim, so this is not a religious war; it is a racial war between tribes.”

The nomadic Arab herders and the Black farmers once traded cattle and grains; peaceful means of resolving conflict used to work.

But Darfur had been experiencing drought for lengthy periods of time. Competition for resources spurred clashes between the Arabs and the farmers. Lack of good governance and democracy did not encourage peaceful communication. Guns were easily available, and the clashes often became violent. In 1998, the Arab nomads moved their flocks earlier in the year; this was the beginning of the long-term violence.

Amna Ibrahim Ahmed experienced the turmoil firsthand. Recently relocated to Washington from Sudan for school, she’s also trying to save her people in Sudan. She says that the conflict escalated in February 2003 when two rebel groups comprised of darker-skinned Sudanese demanded an end to marginalization and sought power within the Arab-ruled government.

“The government sided with the Arab nomads, who organized as the Janjaweed militias,” she says, and their acts of ethnic cleansing target civilians of “the same ethnicity as the rebel groups.”

Complex as it is, the conflict is universally understood when seen through children’s eyes.

“When one artist child was asked why the people in his picture were colorless, he said ‘Because they are dead,’” says Bercault. A child describes one of the pictures depicting rape to Bercault: “They [the soldiers] take our mothers and sisters and make them wife.

“A little boy who was given a crayon at the camp in Chad looked at me questioning. His brother told me that he did not know how to draw; he has not been to school. The older boy took the crayon and drew the picture for him,” he remembers.

“When I asked the little boy if he had something to add, he said ‘Yes — I want to go home.”

[See the drawings]

“The Smallest Witness: the Conflict in Darfur Through Children’s Eyes” is on display in the lobby and on the second floor of UW’s Odegaard Library. Admission is free. The library is open 24 hours on weekdays and until 9 p.m. weekends. Cosponsored by Human Rights Watch, the American Jewish Committee, the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, and Save Darfur Washington State.

[Take action]

Find out how to help: www.savedarfur.org or www.highlyrefined.net/darfur/.