Eyewitness: Brian Steidle

Eugene Oregon of the "Coalition for Darfur" posted this first-person account of Brian Steidle's presentation Friday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; it is reprinted here in full...

On Friday, I went to see a presentation by Brian Steidle hosted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience.

I have attended a handful of such events hosted by the Committee on Conscience, but this was by far the most important.

Steidle explained a bit about how he had come to end up serving in Darfur and admitted that though he had already spent several months monitoring the cease-fire in the South, when he was transferred to Darfur he had no real understanding of what has taking place in the region and that he was completely unprepared for what he was going to see.

A few weeks ago, Nichols Kristof published a column entitled "The Secret Genocide Archive" that contained photos Steidle had taken during his 6 months working with the AU in Darfur. This "genocide archive" served as the basis of Steidle's presentation as he showed dozens of photos on a screen behind the stage and meticulously explained where they were taken and what they showed.

Unfortunately, these photos are not available on line, but one of the first photos that he showed can be seen here. It is of a 1-year old girl who had been shot in the back as her mother fled a government attack. Steidle limited the graphic photos to about three (the others were of a man who had been shot in the head decomposing in the desert and a charred corpse trapped inside of a hut that had been burned down.) Steidle explained that he didn't want to focus only on the carnage but pointed to a series of binders stacked on the floor of the stage that contained hundreds more photos.

When the event was over, I went up to look at them and they were pretty horrific. The binders contained many, many more photos of destroyed villages, decomposing bodies and charred corpses. The most disturbing photo was one of a small boy, no more than 4 or 5, who had had his head smashed in by the butt of a rifle.

By my count, there were six binders full of such photos - and Steidle claimed that there were still 700 more photos out there that had not been included.

Steidle's eyewitness testimony was riveting, providing lots of detail and important evidence regarding what is taking place in Darfur. He explained how the government attacks villages, first cutting cell phone service and then strafing villages with helicopter gunships before allowing the Janjaweed to move in to kill civilians and burn the village to the ground. As payment, the Janjaweed are allowed to loot whatever they can. As evidence of this, Steidle showed several photos of government helicopters hovering over villages and Janjaweed militia men burning down villages and dividing up the looted goods.

The photos of the destroyed villages were really quite amazing and you cannot get an understanding of the meticulous way in which these villages are destroyed until you see them. In viewing them, it becomes clear that fires are not just being set and allowed to destroy what they will, but that huts and shops are burned in an attempt to completely destroy the entire village. In the villages, several huts are grouped together on small plots of land, forming small block and these blocks are separated by roads. During an attack, each one of the huts on a block would be reduced to ash, but the trees in the middle of the roads still stood unharmed. As such, it is clear that the fires are not simply spreading throughout the village but that each block of huts are set on fire and reduced to ash.

Steidle also showed several photos of IDP camps, some housing as many as 175,000 people. They are hellish places and terrifyingly insecure. Though the government of Sudan has placed police offices in some camps, there are far too few to provide any security and those who venture outside of the camps in search of wood or water are routinely raped and/or killed by the Janjaweed. Even those living on the outskirts of these camps are constantly at risk of being attacked by the Janjaweed.

The government is working with relief agencies to build newer, better camps for the IDPs, but of course the government intentionally undercounts the numbers living in these camps. They then insist that the IDPs must move to the newly built camps and come in at night with troops and bulldozers and destroy the camps, forcing thousands of people to flee toward camps built to house no more than a few hundred.

After seeing these photos and listening to Steidle's presentation, there can be no doubt that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed militia are intent on removing the black Africans from the region - and destroying them entirely, if need be.

It is genocide.

If you have the opportunity to see Steidle speak, I strongly recommend that you go. Hopefully, this one man's gripping eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence will serve as the long-needed catalyst for international action.