Children's art exhibit shows horror of genocide

By MARA LEE
Scripps Howard News Service
December 28, 2005

WASHINGTON - Pediatrician Annie Sparrow tried to make sense of a drawing by a 9-year-old girl in a refugee camp. She asked why the woman in the picture has a red face.

"Because she was shot in the face," the girl replied.

"These drawings hurt your heart," Sparrow said. "These children have witnessed things children should never have to see."

Human Rights Watch, Sparrow's employer, has produced an art exhibit of the drawings now in Washington. The exhibit has been shown in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Toronto, and "Darfur Drawn" will continue to travel.

In Sudan, a rebellion against the government has triggered retribution against civilians in Darfur by "janjaweed," or pro-government militias with assault rifles on horses and camels. The Sudanese government denies it supports the janjaweed, but a United Nations report says it is arming the rebels.

Sparrow was in neighboring Chad earlier this year doing research on rape as a weapon of war. Chad houses 200,000 people who fled attacks in Darfur. About 2 million people have been displaced in the conflict.

Sparrow, who spent two weeks in Chad, said she gave the children crayons and paper "because it's a wonderful way of letting them draw what's going on inside their heads."

Rapes are part of the terror campaign against Darfur's residents, as janjaweed rape women during attacks, or rape women who walk for miles outside refugee camps gathering wood. Even inside the camps, women and girls are not safe, as other refugees sometimes force them into prostitution because they know soldiers have already forced them to have sex, Sparrow said.

"They don't all draw scenes of violence. Some draw flowers and birds," which are symbols of their past life, or how they'd like life to be now. But most of the drawings do show loss and horror.

"It was very frightening what they drew; the atrocities were so clear," she said. One drawing, which includes purple camels, is dominated by huge guns, one on a tripod.

The 12-year-old boy who drew it said he saw the janjaweed arriving on horses and camels with Kalishnikovs, "shooting and yelling, 'kill the slaves, kill the blacks.' "

Sudan is home to black Africans in the south, and lighter-skinned Arabs in the north.

Viewers can't help but be affected "by the sadness in the pictures," Sparrow said. "Many of these children are going to be stranded for years. This conflict shows no sign of abating. You can see how these children's lives have been ripped out from under them."

One of the drawings has faces with round "O" mouths, but instead of bodies, the faces are linked in a garland shape.

Sparrow didn't understand it until the little girl explained: "All of us, my family, we were screaming and running from the janjaweed to hide in the wadi, holding each other by the arms to keep together."

Those loops are their arms, desperately clinging to each other as they ran. Her father was lost, the girl said.

In Washington, the exhibit is in the national headquarters of Hillel, the Jewish organization on college campuses. Jewish organizations helped underwrite the exhibit because they see echoes of the Holocaust in the genocide in Sudan.

Sparrow said she never thought these little drawings would travel around North America. "Although they really spoke to me, I wasn't aware they would captivate other people."

The exhibit urges viewers to write letters to Washington asking for more money for African Union peacekeepers in Sudan, and to pressure the Sudanese government to stop interfering with aid workers. She said another way to act is to donate to aid organizations working with the refugees, such as the International Red Cross, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders or Human Rights Watch.


On the Net: www.savedarfur.org.