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Summary: Human Rights Watch researchers gave
children notebooks and crayons to keep them
occupied while they spoke with the children’s
parents. Without any instruction or guidance,
the children drew scenes from their
experiences of the war in Darfur.
The government of Sudan is responsible for “ethnic cleansing” and crimes
against humanity in the context of an internal conflict in Darfur, one of the
world’s poorest and most inaccessible regions, on Sudan’s western border
with Chad. Since 2003, the Sudanese government and the
ethnic “Janjaweed” militias it arms and supports have committed numerous
attacks on the civilian populations of the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and other
ethnic groups perceived to support the rebel insurgency. 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 and Zaghawa. The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the
groups they attack, have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious
leaders, and desecrated Qurans belonging to their enemies.
Countless women and girls have been raped. Hundreds of villages have
been bombed and burned; water sources and food stocks have been
destroyed, property and livestock looted. Mosques, schools and hospitals
have been burnt to the ground.
The United Nations estimates that more than 2 million people have been
left homeless in the fighting. There are almost a quarter of a million
refugees in neighboring Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa.
Abandoned villages have been destroyed. Even when the villages are left
intact, many refugees are unwilling to return to Darfur unless their security
is protected. “If we return,” one refugee told Human Rights Watch, “we will
be killed.”
Estimates of how many people have died as a result of the conflict in
Darfur vary widely. It is likely that at least 100,000 people have died from
violence, disease and other conditions related to forced displacement and
insufficient access to humanitarian assistance. The toll of death and
displacement continues to rise. Those left homeless are still at risk: camps
are poorly protected, and women and girls are frequently the targets of
sexual attacks when they venture from the camp to find firewood and food
for their animals.
The Drawings
Human Rights Watch researchers Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault
visited Chad in February 2005 to assess the issues of protection and
sexual violence in the refugee camps along the Darfur/Chad border. In her
work as a pediatrician, Dr. Sparrow habitually asks children to draw while
she talks to their parents or guardians. She did the same thing in Darfur.
While Bercault and Sparrow spoke with parents, teachers, and camp
leaders, the children drew. Without any instruction or guidance, the
children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the
attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces,
the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.
As Sparrow and Bercault visited schools in refugee camps in Chad, many
children between the ages of 8 and 17 shared the drawings they had done
in their school notebooks, often alongside their lessons in Arabic or math.
Schoolchildren from seven refugee camps and the border town of Tine
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.
To view the drawings, visit: http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/Owner: Human Rights Watchpdf: www.hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/