Children draw real Darfur
Young refugees’ artwork bears witness to attacks Agency sponsors travelling exhibit of 46 drawings
Children’s drawings tell the story better than any research report.
Annie Sparrow, a pediatrician on a fellowship from Harvard University, went to Africa in February to question rape victims fleeing the Darfur region of Africa’s western Sudan. While she was interviewing, she let refugee camp children entertain themselves by drawing with paper, pens and crayons she brought for the purpose. Sometimes they drew flowers and animals. Sometimes they drew camel- mounted men with assault rifles marauding through villages of round mud houses. Those images didn’t surprise her — “ African children drawing pictures of war is not uncommon at all,” she says. But sometimes they also drew helicopter gunships, lines of soldiers in green uniforms and caps, and two different models of the Russian-built Antonov transport plane, complete with men rolling bombs out the back. Such depictions could not possibly represent the Arab Janjaweed gangs, known since February 2003 to be raping and pillaging the Fur, Zaghawa and Maasalit village peoples of the Darfur provinces, an area bigger than Yukon. They must represent Sudanese government weaponry and troops, belying steadfast denials of government involvement, Sparrow said yesterday prior to a public showing of the pictures downtown. “What is really remarkable about these drawings is that they bear witness to the Sudanese government’s complicity (in attacks on Darfur’s black population),” she said in an interview. “They corroborate the testimony that Human Rights Watch has taken over the years of the atrocities.”
Smallest Witnesses: The Crisis in Darfur Through Children’s Eyes, opens todayat the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower (concourse level) of the TD Centre and runs until Friday.
It is a travelling exhibition of 46 drawings by Darfur children 8 to 15 years old now living as refugees near Tine, a border town inside Chad. Eight blackandwhite photos by Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin are also included.
Sparrow collected the pictures and gave them to Human Rights Watch, the show’s sponsor, an aid agency dedicated to exposing human rights abuses and advocating an end to them. Other stops so far include New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and the German cities of Hamburg and Munich.
“ The drawings are so credible, so easy to understand,” Sparrow said.
“ Anyone can look at them and see what’s going on.” Sometimes she also asked a
child to tell her about
what they were drawing.
“ We saw the planes,”
replied a 13- or 14- yearold child identified as
Taha, of a particularly horrific scene of a village being destroyed from the air.
“ Then they began the bombing,” the child said. “ 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 woman was carrying her baby son. She was killed, not him.” So far an estimated 180,000 people have died in what Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups have called acts of “ ethnic cleansing.” An estimated 2.4 million others are thought to be homeless and displaced. Now is a crucial time to raise public awareness of the crisis and for nations to act, said Georgette Gagnon, the Torontobased deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Africa division. “(Otherwise) this could turn into another forgotten African crisis — years and years of low- level conflict, chronic instability and people living in camps, their lives absolutely wrecked,” she said in a separate interview. The most urgent job is to get peacekeeping troops deployed, both Sparrow and Gagnon said.
Various African countries have pledged a total of 7,700 troops to an African Union peacekeeping force. Canada must do “ whatever it takes to accelerate the process,” Sparrow said. Prime Minister Paul Martin has committed to doing just that.
In May, he promised up to $ 170 million toward peace building in Darfur. The aid package includes a one- year loan of 105 armoured vehicles, shipped in July to the West African country of Senegal, along with 80 Canadian Forces personnel to help train African Union peacekeeping troops. Last month, the equipment was due to reach Darfur itself. The package also includes increased food and medical aid to the region, and heightened diplomatic activity with the creation of Martin’s three- member special advisory team on Sudan. The team consists of Robert Fowler, a former Canadian ambassador to the U. N., Senator Mobina Jaffer, Canada’s special peace envoy to Sudan, and retired Lt.- Gen. Romeo Dallaire, former U. N. force commander in Rwanda.