babes and arms children of darfur

Babes and Arms: The Children of Darfur

Photo from Human Rights Watch

It's a common practice - giving children paper and crayons to keep

themselves occupied for a while. Human Rights Watch workers did just

that when visiting a refugee camp in Chad while they interviewed adult

survivors of the Sudan genocide. The unexpected results were reported

on television last night by BBC World, and are described here in the

The Scotsman:

" Dr Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault wanted to concentrate on

the adults in the group, so they provided the children with crayons

and paper to keep themselves amused.

When the researchers had finished their interviews, they looked at

what the children had drawn. Unbidden, they had drawn what was

uppermost in their minds: scenes of unmitigated horror.

There in the notebooks were pictures of the Janjaweed, the

Khartoum-backed Arab militia which has terrorised the western

province of Darfur, and the Sudanese government helicopters and

bombers. There, too, were the burning villages, the escape to Chad

and worse: the rapes, the gunshots to the genitals used by the

militia to emasculate their victims and the bodies of the dead."

The child's drawing at the top of this post is of Sudanese government

helicopters bombing a village. It was drawn by Taha, Age 13 or 14, who

describes her picture:

"In the afternoon we returned from school and saw the planes. We

were all looking, not imagining about bombing. Then they began the

bombing. The first bomb [landed] in our garden, then four bombs at

once in the garden. The bombs killed six people, including a young

boy, a boy carried by his mother, and a girl. In another place in

the garden a women was carrying her baby son, she was killed, not

him. Now my nights are hard because I feel frightened. We became

homeless. I cannot forget the bad images of the burning houses and

fleeing at night because our village was burned..."

The child's drawing below, also from Human Rights Watch, is of women

being taken from their village at gunpoint by the Janjaweed militia:

Darfur village drawing

The drawing, by Doa', Age 11 or 12, is described: Janjaweed descend on

a village on horses and camels, a woman flings her arms in the air as

she is targeted for sexual violence or execution. A soldier takes a

woman to be raped. She has a cell phone next to her head: "She wants

to call the agencies for help."

As the Human Rights Watch workers continued their tour of the refugee

camps in Chad, they gave crayons and paper to more children. The Sudan

Tribune reports:

"Schoolchildren from seven refugee camps and the border town of

Tine, Chad, offered Human Rights Watch's researchers hundreds of

drawings in the hope that the rest of the world would see their

stories as described in their own unique visual vocabulary of war.

Magda [name changed for protection], age 9, describes her drawing,

"We were running from the burning houses. Janjaweed and soldiers

with guns and planes and bombs came, all together, quickly. They

were shooting. My uncle was shot. I saw them taking women and girls

away."

It is estimated that at least 100,000 people have been killed in the

Darfur genocide (some sources estimate 400,000 people), and another 2

million people are now refugees. Refugee camps in neighbouring Chad

are not entirely safe and are sometimes targeted by militia.

The Sudanese government has denied complicity in the genocide and mass

exile of it's own people - but as the childrens drawings show, and as

many adult witnesses have already stated, they have worked with the

Janjaweed militia in a program of ethnic cleansing. As the Sudan

Tribune notes:

"Human Rights Watch said that the government of Sudan is

responsible for "ethnic cleansing" and crimes against humanity in

Darfur, one of the world's poorest and most inaccessible regions.

Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres,

summary executions of civilians-including women and

children-burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible

depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur,

Masalit, Zaghawa, and other ethnic groups."

Currently, about 2 million people live in refugee camps in Chad, one

of the world's poorest countries, with no hope of returning to their

native homeland. International intervention in response to their

plight has been minimal, and the mainstream media have barely reported

what is in fact the worst humanitarian crisis currently taking place

in the world.

Several of the refugee children's drawings are available online here

at Human Rights Watch.