(2007) Another chance to redeem failure in Rwanda has become just another failure to halt genocide in Africa. A documentary of the devastation taking place in Darfur, Sudan, from filmmakers Annie Sunberg and Ricki Stern, features former Marine captain Brian Steidle's photographs and eyewitness testimony from his year in the devastated region.

After leaving the US Marine Corps, Steidle volunteered in January 2004 as an official military observer, armed with a camera, pen, and paper, to monitor a ceasefire, ending a 20-year civil war between the Sudanese government and rebels. "I was totally unprepared for what I would see." In charge of a three-man team, encountering official obstacles to carrying out his duties, he wondered: "What does monitor mean?"

By March the situation had begun deteriorating with the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). In Darfur, the western region of Sudan outside Steidle's area of operations, the Arab Sudanese government struck back in retribution for an attack in 2003 by the rebels on an airport. Possessed by a passionate hatred, the Janjaweed (devil on a horse) murdered black African villagers (including binding children and burning them to death), raped women, and left villages in ashes. By April 180,000 people had been killed in Darfur with two million refugees fleeing west into Chad.

In August Steidle volunteered with the Arica Union to assist in Darfur itself, receiving and investigating complaints of attacks then writing reports. Though Khartoum denied to the world aiding and arming the Janjaweed, commanders openly admitted to Steidle their training and weapons came from the government. Steidle captured on film evidence of the racial cleansing of black Africans or genocide (as defined by the UN: the intentional destruction of an ethnic people). Rape was being used as a tool of war, destroying families since men would abandon their wives if raped. "If we had a mandate to protect these people," he says he'd have been given a weapon, not a camera.

The reports produced no effective responses from the UN, the US, or the world. The Bush administration's initial uncertainty toward blaming the government of Sudan had to do with its expectations of anti-terrorism cooperation from Khartoum. Eventually, however, Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the Arab Sudanese of committing genocide; the US Congress and President Bush agreed. Under the accords of the Geneva Convention, such a declaration should have resulted in a full investigation and international intervention, but in Europe there was no willingness to impose peace in Darfur. Thus the murders, the rapes, the dead bodies with ears cut off and eyes plucked out, the wholesale slaughter without regard for human life, the evil continued.

Steidle took photographs of Bashum (an internally displaced camp), Labado village (a week to destroy the huts belonging to 20,000 people), Um Zaifa village, Hamada village (where slashes in tires indicated how babies and adults were hacked to death), among others. "We're not doing anything about it." Realizing that the AU was impotent, keeping its reports classified, Steidle left in January 2005 out of frustration.

Back in the US after his sister Gretchen encouraged him to wake the world up to the widespread atrocities, he went to Nicholas D. Kristoff at The New York Times. Before his photographs and testimony were published, no one else had been willing to reveal the scope of these horrendous acts. Nevertheless, after an initial flurry of attention from the media and politicians, public outrage waned. His meeting with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice produced a perfunctory political response.

Together Brian and Gretchen flew back to Africa to see the refugee camps in eastern Chad, already one of the world's poorest nations with thin resources. Having to walk long distances from the camp to collect firewood, women were often raped; NGOs brought in water; disease was rampant. The aid coming into the camps was mostly from Americans; Muslim countries offered nothing to their Islamic brethren.

Returning to the US, Steidle went on the road for the Save Darfur Coalition to educate Americans about the horrors he'd seen and their continuation. "I'm just the guy that tried to wake up the conscience of a bunch of people." Along with Steidle, Senator Barack Obama addressed the Save Darfur rally in Washington, DC: "We said 'never again'" - but we're saying it again.

Steidle flew to Kigali, Rwanda, to see if he could learn how the Hutu and Tutsi tribes survived and recovered from their clashes. He testified before the international court in The Hague, but without cooperation from Sudan's government the criminals cannot be brought to justice.

The documentary cites estimates of 400,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced in Darfur. So while compassionate, watching the latest reports of more bloodshed, burning, and raping, no one seems willing to do what's necessary to stop the crimes. Shocked first by the gruesome images, then shocked by the lack of response, we become numb.

Steidle and the documentary make almost no mention that the conflict in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan is largely a fight over land and conflicting cultures - farmers versus nomadic herdsmen - which has come about as climate change has begun to reduce arable land previously shared by both Africans and Arabs.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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