“No one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”- Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Language
September 27, 1973

Spending summer weeks at my mother’s parents conjures up other fond memories. There was no pool in town, so my grandma got out her old wash tub, filled it with water and I splashed in that. They grew raspberries (my favorite fruit to this day) and we enjoyed them with half and half or in a fresh pie. There were zoo trips and dinners out with other great aunts and uncles. Sometimes cousins visited and fun was had by all. I learned how to fry chicken and crochet. I showed my prowess around scrubbing out sinks after doing dishes. I helped bake bread and count the number of canned vegetables and jams in the basement. I learned how long it takes to polish a rock in a polisher. And yes, I did catch fireflies in on of grandma’s old mason jars for a nightlight, only to release them each morning to start again that night.

These memories are in stark contrast to the collection of drawings I looked at this week from children in IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps of refugees from the Darfur area of Sudan. Instead of pictures of family life and events of joy, children in these camps, witnesses to the ongoing genocide in that country, drew frightening and consistent pictures of homes being burned and people being attacked. For them, there is no peace. The drawings can be viewed in full here. Here is one of them.

The five hundred drawings collected by Waging Peace amount to a form of criminal evidence from silent witnesses. The killings, bombing and looting shown in the drawings directly contradict the Government of Sudan’s version of events over the last four years of bloodshed. The pattern that emerges from these drawings corroborates what we know has been taking place in Darfur and shows a worryingly similar pattern of attacks developing in Eastern Chad.

There have been 5 years of conflict in this region. Now there are school age children who are living in camps that no nothing of peace. Over 1 million of Darfuri children know only a life of destruction, not of home.

This young boy was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003 by Janjaweed and Sudanese armed forces. He is now 12 and living in a refugee camp in Eastern Chad.

In this drawing the attackers, on camel and hose backs and in armed vehicles, are setting the houses on fire and shooting at civilians from all corners (note how the bullets are crossing each others paths). The villagers are also fighting back with spears and arrows, while the Janjaweed and Sudanese forces are attacking them with machine guns.

The skin colour of the attackers is lighter than that of the victims, clearly denoting the ethnic character of the attacks.

The tribes of the Darfur region in Sudan are African, not Arab. As the Janjaweed rebels (backed by the Sudanese government) put it as they slaughter villages, “They are too black.” At the crux of this conflict we find race, not religion. More than 400,000 Black African people have been killed, and more than 2 million Black African people have been forced to leave their homes.

Do not deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. Deuteronomy 24:17

“Never again” was the rally cry after the Holocaust. “Never again” was shouted after the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990’s. Yet, it is happening again. A child is a child of God, no matter where they live, how they worship, or what color their skin happens to be. It’s time to LEARN about this conflict and genocide. DO something to help. TELL others.

Start here.

“We try and make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so a few can live as they wish.” Shane Claiborne