Imagine you are a 10-year-old boy anticipating a day like any other when suddenly your village is raided by men riding on horses and camels, carrying machine guns. They ransack your home and drag your mother out by her hair, then beat and rape her. Moments later, planes fly overhead and bomb your village while unarmed people flee. Your three brothers and father perish in a blast that destroys your home.
Now you have no home, no food, no money, and no clothes but the ones you’re wearing. You just became a refugee and your only choice is to cross the border into Chad, a poor country neighboring Darfur, to find a refugee camp.
Children like Ibrahim Yousef from Kornol live this nightmare every day. He and his mother are just two of thousands that have become victims of the violence in Darfur, Africa, a region in western Sudan about the size of Texas.
Their stories were part of “Darfur Diaries: Message from Home,” a documentary shown Sept. 22, at Marple Campus, which tells of the horrific experiences people from Darfur have endured.
Adam Shapiro, Jen Marlowe and Aisha Bain created “Darfur Diaries” to show the personal human tragedies of the victims of this crisis which began in the winter of 2003.
The Genocide Intervention Network says that more than 100 people die each day and 5,000 die each month; more than 2.5 million are displaced. The death toll is now over 400,000. Eighty-eight percent of the people killed are civilians, according to the GI-Net.
The crisis began when a frustrated Sudanese Liberation Army attacked the Sudanese government because of poverty and starvation. The government of Sudan responded with one-sided attacks on civilians.
The Sudanese government and janjaweed, (devils on horseback) have caused 79 percent of the civilian deaths, according to the GI-Net. First, villages are attacked by the janjaweed -Arab militia equipped by the Sudanese government with money and weapons who rob, rape, torture and murder civilians. Then the Sudanese army bombs the villages with aerial attacks.
Shapiro says one reason for the conflict is global warming, which has caused land and water in Darfur to become precious commodities, creating tensions between the farming settlers, identified as Africans, and the nomadic herders, identified as Arabs.
“The government of Sudan is trying to control much of the resources of the country and maintain power for a small ruling elite,” Shapiro says. “That basic logic drives virtually all its decisions, including policies of war and destruction, and ultimately crimes against humanity.”
An arrest warrant was issued for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court on July 14, 2008 for running a campaign of genocide and crimes against humanity, according to Citizens for Global Solutions.
Bashir is also keeping aid groups from trying to intervene and help the displaced Darfurians. His strategy has been to divide and conquer, Shapiro says. Reports of these attacks began in the winter of 2003 when Bain worked as the deputy director at the Center for the Prevention of Genocide in Washington, DC. She was shocked at the lack of media coverage of this crisis.
She shared her concern with Shapiro, a fellow graduate student and activist, and together they decided they would cover it themselves according to the film’s Web site, www.darfurdiaries.org.
Marlowe, who is on the board of directors of the Friends of Jenin Freedom Theatre, joined the project before the group left for Chad. The group snuck across the border into the Zaghawa region of Darfur in 2004 to document people living in refugee camps and the horrific stories they had to tell of their experiences.
Because education for children is very important to the Darfurians, the filmmakers travel around showing their documentary to raise money for schools.
There was a “Walk for Darfur” fundraiser in Philadelphia May 2007, and the film has been shown in colleges in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. It was also featured at the Continent American Independent Film Festival in Paris, Oct. 22, 2007.
“The crisis will only truly end in all of Sudan,” Shapiro says, “when this regime is finished and something that more genuinely represents all the people of Sudan is in place.”
For more information visit www.darfurdiaries.org.
Contact Leslie McDonnell at
communitarian@mail.dccc.edu
