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 Back on March 27th 1994, when Schindlers List
won seven Academy Awards, it seemed that the film - giving an entire
generation a glimpse of the full scale and horror of the holocaust -
would help ensure such genocide would never happen again. Yet over the
next three months, while the world and news media largely turned the
other way, over 800,000 civilians were killed in Rwanda.
A decade later Terry George's brilliant Oscar-winning depiction of that genocide and Paul Rusesabagina's heroic struggle, Hotel Rwanda,
was released and the subject finally got the mainstream recognition and
the media coverage the subject had previously lacked. Yet the world and
media seemed to be turning away again, this time from Darfur, Sudan
where some 400,000 people are believed to have been killed since 2003.
Aisha
Bain from the Center for the Prevention of
Genocide in Washington began tracking alarming reports in October 2004
coming out the region and began to alert news agencies in the US about
a possible new major genocide. She believed the fact the stories were
not being covered was because the agencies were unaware of the issue.
In fact, she was told, the story was not important enough to cover.
Refusing
to give up or leave the issue unreported, Aisha, fellow activist
filmmaker Adam Shapiro and peace-bukilder Jen Marlowe decided to raise
money, buy equipment and head to the region themselves. The resulting
film is Darfur Diaries.
Looking at the clip of the film on their website, one wonders what it
will take for the media to report on - and the public to speak out against -
state-sanctioned mass killing of civilians which dwarf any act of terrorism. Asides from
Oscar night, of course.
For more information - see this BBC special section, Wikipedia and the Darfur Genocide website.
Background to the project (from darfurdiaries.org)
After decades of oppression,
marginalization and increasing violence at the hands of the Sudanese
government, the Sudanese Liberation Army in Darfur (the western region
of Sudan) took up arms in 2003. The government and allied militias,
known as Janjaweed, answered the rebellion with large-scale murder of
civilians, mass rapes of women and girls, and destruction of
villages—resulting in one of the world’s largest current political and
humanitarian crises.
- Up to 400,000 civilians have died since 2003
- Over 2 million people have been displaced inside Darfur or have become refugees outside Darfur
- Thousands of villages in Darfur have been burned to the ground
Aisha
Bain was the Deputy Director at the Center for the Prevention of
Genocide in Washington, DC in the winter of 2004. There had been
alarming reports about thousands of refugees streaming across the
border from Sudan into eastern Chad, yet very little was known about
what was going on or why. She began a massive research campaign, making
contacts in Darfur to discover that villages were being attacked and
burned to the ground. Alarming information continued to flow in - there
were mass rapes of women, large scale murder of civilians, and reports
of bombing and torture. Civilians from certain tribes in Darfur seemed
to be targeted by members of other tribes. Some said these militias
were backed by the government of Sudan and the Sudanese military. She
continued her intensive research campaign to try to determine
reportable facts – names, numbers, places, dates, and confirmable
stories.
Aisha began calling news agencies to alert
them to this critical news story. If media outlets weren’t covering
this, it must be because they didn’t know what was going on, she
thought. Again and again, she was told that it wasn’t important enough
to cover. Aisha shared her mounting frustration with Adam Shapiro, a
fellow graduate student and activist, who had recently returned from an
independent documentary film project in Iraq. “Let’s cover the story
ourselves,” Adam suggested. “If the media isn’t going to do it, we
will. We can raise the money, buy the equipment…and go.”
“We’ll
never get in,” Aisha said, “It’s a total mess in there, all the borders
are closed…” She shook her head, trying to imagine how this could work.
Adam had some experience getting in and out of difficult places. “There’s always a way,” he said calmly.
Aisha looked at him, and then smiled. “Let’s do it,” she said.
Jen had lunch with Adam in May as he and Aisha were trying to raise
funds and make plans. He told her about the project. Until then, she
hadn’t even heard of Darfur. She was appalled; both because of the
atrocities he described and that she hadn’t known about this travesty.
She asked Adam if he and Aisha needed help. But their fundraising
efforts were slow; too many other people had not heard of Darfur. Two
weeks before leaving, with funding finally secured, Adam invited her to
join the team. The plan was to document via film what no one else was
covering: the conditions of the refugees in Chad and the displaced
people in Darfur and the atrocities they had survived – not as
statistics, but as the experiences and lives of people with a history
and culture undergoing a great catastrophe.
In mid October 2004, Aisha, Adam and Jen traveled to the refugee camps
in eastern Chad and the Zaghawa tribal region of northern Darfur. They
snuck across the porous border between Chad and Sudan and remained
behind rebel lines. They met refugees living in camps in the harshest
of conditions, who built their own schools to educate their children
although they had no resources whatsoever. They walked through the
charred and broken remains of destroyed villages, trying to imagine the
vibrant life that once was there. They were welcomed hospitably by
displaced people as they tried to find a way to survive in Darfur. They
spoke to leaders of the rebel movement resisting the Sudanese
government. They conducted interviews with dozens of men, women and
children whose strength and resilience in the face of horror was
inspiring. They left Darfur and eastern Chad after almost a month with
over 45 hours of footage and incredible stories, images and testimonies.
Screen the film
The film was completed in November of 2005 and is currently screening
widely at festivals, university campuses and human rights groups
worldwide. If you are interested in organizing a screening of the film,
please write to: info@darfurdiaries.org. If you are interested in
organizing a screening of the film with the filmmakers present to talk
and answer questions, please contact CreativeWell, Inc at info@creativewell.com.
The filmmakers are now writing a book which will be published by Nation
Books in October, 2006. If you are interested in more information about
the book, please contact us at info@darfurdiaries.org.
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