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Darfuri children's drawings offer evidence of war horror
Written by: Rebecka Rosenquist
Drawing by a boy who was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003. The attackers, on camel, horseback and in armed vehicles, are setting houses on fire and shooting at civilians from all directions. The villagers are fighting back with spears and arrows.
Photo courtesy of Waging Peace.
The voices of the people uprooted by the violence in Sudan's Darfur region are struggling to be heard amid the storm of media coverage on the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan's president. The conflict in Darfur has uprooted some 2.9 million people. Most are displaced inside Darfur while nearly a quarter of a million live as refugees in neighbouring Chad. Among them are countless children, many of whom have witnessed horrific brutality during their short lives. The perspectives of children affected by war rarely filter through to the outside world. Aid agencies like the U.N. Children's Fund and Save the Children were founded with the aim of protecting the rights of children and giving them a voice. But in a move that challenges the image of children as helpless victims, around 500 drawings from Darfuri refugee children have been accepted by the ICC as contextual evidence to be used in any trial of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. This has come about thanks to the work of Britain-based rights organisation Waging Peace. The advocacy group sent a researcher to eastern Chad, originally to collect testimony from displaced Darfuri and Chadian adults. While there, the researcher was struck by women's stories of how their children had witnessed horrendous events when their villages were attacked. The children, aged six to 18, were given drawing materials and asked to depict their dreams for the future and their strongest memory. Waging Peace's website explains: "While a handful of children had submitted drawings of daily life in the village or in the refugee camp, the majority of the drawings described the attacks on their village by Sudanese Government forces and their allied Janjaweed militia. "Many of the drawings depict adult men being killed, women being shot, beaten and taken prisoner, babies being thrown on fires and Government of Sudan helicopters and planes bombing civilians." The site has a selection of images that came out of the "Drawings of Genocide" project and have now been submitted the ICC. This is just one step towards enabling Darfuri children to speak for themselves about the conflict and their region's future, but it's a striking and powerful one nonetheless.
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