Two years ago, Al Arabiya producer Nabil Kassem was asked to put together a documentary film on Darfur.
What he witnessed there, and recorded in this film, were scenes of unspeakable brutality and untold suffering.
The movie never made it to the airwaves. That is why we publish it on our blog.
If you are interested in Darfur, check out Darfur Now!
More on The Road about Darfur, Sudan and genocide
Video courtesy europenews.dk
There is always something going on, somewhere in the world, that keeps us, aidworkers, busy. Here is what is on our mind these days:
The Sudanese president Al-Bashir got indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the country's western Darfur region. By now, everyone knows.
The international community, and the aid organisations working inside Sudan were weary of upcoming indictment since months.
Now the Sword of Damocles has fallen, they are dealing with the consequences: Sudan accused aid agencies of passing on information to the ICC and first expelled 10 NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations), followed by another three.
The impact goes beyond the expelled Darfur-based aid agencies themselves and their relief programmes. Many of these NGOs are implementing partners of other -often larger organisations-, who themselves were not expelled.
Concretely, this means that for non-expelled organisations, providing aid relief in Darfur will become even more challenging than it already was, with the security problems and logistical problems. More challenging, if not impossible for what is the largest humanitarian operation in the world.
So no wonder the aidworkers' blogosphere has been abuzz today on the ICC indictment and its consequences for the humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur. Check what Michael, Harry, Thirsty Palmetto, Paul, Scott, Peter and Rob have to say. (and check AidBlogs for more).
Add to that, what Rob Crilly, a reporter currently in Darfur, wrote on his blog a few days ago:
Today I met families who fled the fighting in Muhajiriya (..) One of them was Mariam Ahmed Abu. (..) She had survived six years of war but left when she realised she no longer had any children left to care for her. (..)All of that combined makes me think in how far the ICC indictment by itself will not cause a new genocide. Not one executed by AK47s and bombs dropped from helicopters, but a hidden genocide caused simply by blocking aid to flow to Darfur... Would we then have killed in the name of justice? Murdered those we should have protected?
She hadn't heard of the ICC until I asked her about it and I'm starting to think that taking Bashir to the Hague will be more of a victory for activists far away from Sudan than for the people stuck in this miserable war.
Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.
It is the first time the court has sought the detention of a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur.
Ever since international prosecutors began seeking an arrest warrant last year, opponents have pressed the United Nations Security Council to use its power to suspend the proceedings. But a majority of Council members have argued that the case should go forward, saying Mr. Bashir has not done enough to stop the bloodshed to deserve a reprieve.
Many African and Arab nations counter that issuing a warrant for Mr. Bashir’s arrest could backfire, diminishing Sudan’s willingness to compromise for the sake of peace. Others, including some United Nations officials, worry that a warrant could inspire reprisal attacks against civilians, aid groups or the thousands of international peacekeepers deployed there. (Full)
Interesting. Maybe the US will -for once- have a president who remembers his promises even after the election... Obama had vowed more direct action against the Darfur genocide. He now appointed Susan E. Rice, as ambassador to the United Nations.
The New York Times reports on her appointment:
The choice of Ms. Rice to represent the United States before the United Nations will make her one of the most visible faces of the Obama administration to the outside world aside from Mrs. Clinton. It will also send to the world organization a prominent and forceful advocate of stronger action, including military force if necessary, to stop mass killings like those in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years. (Full)
Colleague and fellow blogger Worldman is retiring. In this must-read post, Peter is saying good-bye from Darfur and Sudan.
He writes: "I have been living and working here for 4 years. In a few days I will leave. It is very hard to go. But a big part of my heart will stay behind."
Why do I call it "a must-read" post? Because it shows the heart and the essence of an aid worker.
After more than five years of genocide, the Sudanese government and its proxies continue to commit atrocities against civilians in Darfur. This is unacceptable to the American people and to the world community.
We deplore all violence against the people of Darfur. There can be no doubt that the Sudanese government is chiefly responsible for the violence and is able to end it. We condemn the Sudanese government’s consistent efforts to undermine peace and security, including its repeated attacks against its own people and the multiple barriers it has put up to the swift and effective deployment of the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force. We further condemn the Sudanese government’s refusal to adhere to the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the conflict in southern Sudan. (Full)
More posts on the Road about Darfur
Picture courtesy Save Darfur
I read hundreds of articles and blog entries about Darfur. Few have impacted me as much as this article, covering a book, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur" written by Daoud Hari.
Daoud Hari is a Dafur tribes man who assisted journalists travelling in his region as a translator. A translator of horror stories.
 Sleepless during nights of exile in Chad, Daoud Hari stared at cracks in his room's mud walls. The lines formed random shapes that reminded him of drawings from thousands of years ago -- of horned beasts, of women, men and children. He had seen them in the cool mountain caves of Darfur, where he played as a boy. They triggered an urge to sketch scenes of the savagery and starvation he had witnessed in the once-tranquil lands of his childhood.During those uneasy nights, he picked up pencil and paper to turn his torment into tolerable numbness. He drew the woman who had hanged herself from a tree with her shawl because she could not feed her children. Hari had found their tiny corpses around her, their skin like "delicate brown paper, so wrinkled." He drew the story he had heard of a militiaman lowering his bayonet into the belly of a 4-year-old girl as she ran toward him, impaling her. The gunman pranced around as her blood drained down upon him. He remembered the girl's father, his sobbing, his horror, his shock: "What was he? A man? A devil? He was painted red with my little girl's blood and he was dancing. What was he?" His wakeful consciousness felt the pain of these images. His drawings, he says, were "stick pictures of scenes I needed to get out of my head. History. History. History. The people. The little girl. The woman," he says in his memoir, "The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur." (Full) |
The Paris based fashion house Louis Vuitton has filed charges against Nadia Plesner, a Dutch 26 year old student artist for selling posters and t-shirts of a Darfur victim, holding a designer bag inspired by a Louis Vuitton design. All of the profits were going to charity.
Nadia said: “I started this campaign because of the distorted way the media prioritizes between big and small world news. How can Paris Hilton make more front covers than the genocide in Darfur? So, I “pimped” a victim, to see if it worked. And it did!”
Louis Vuitton now demands $7,500 (5,000 Euro) for each day she continues to sell Simple Life products, $7,500 for each day their letter is published on the website and $7,500 a day for using the name “Louis Vuitton” on her website. In addition they want her to pay their lawyer costs and $15,000 to cover other expenses they have incurred in protecting their ‘intellectual property’. (Full)
More posts on The Road about Darfur.
Source: Torrent Freak
Picture courtesy Nadia Plesner.
This photo by Kevin Carter won the “Pulitzer Prize” in 1994 and became a symbol of the Sudan famine at the time. The picture depicts stricken girl crawling towards an United Nations camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so that it can eat her.
This picture shocked the whole world. No one -including the photographer- knows what happened to the child.
Here is the story behind the picture:
In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with [his colleague] Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane ) touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter." (Full story)
Three months later Kevin Carter committed suicide.
This was Sudan in 1994. We are now 2008. Five years into Sudan's Darfur conflict. The humanitarian situation is just as desperate. Maybe with less famine, but with just as much despair, as I wrote in several posts about Darfur over the past year.
Many, including celebrities like George Clooney (watch his video diary), Mia Farrow (Pictures and video), Angelina Jolie (Articles), Steven Spielberg (Article) and others have done efforts to raise the awareness over the problems in Darfur.
There are groupings like the "Save Darfur Coalition", an alliance of over 180 advocacy and humanitarian organizations representing 130 million people, and the Darfur Genocide movement. Amesty International created Eyes on Darfur.
Numerous fundraising websites (like The Darfur Wall), campaigning, video advocacy and education , awareness sites and Online Info Centers were created.
Musicians made songs like Living Darfur. And there is even a game (Darfur is Dying) created to advocate the Darfur issues.
Public pressure was raised against the countries in alliance with the Sudan government, focusing lately on China and its hosting of the Olympics.
Athletes, normal citizens, students, food lovers and bloggers on a global and a local level united to raise awareness and increase pressure on the Sudanese government.
You can buy items online through Yahoo! to show your support and you can even see how each US legislator scores on his or her support for Darfur.
Many governments responded with pressure on Sudan and several UN resolutions condemned the Darfur genocide (Overview).
The African Union sent troops, and UN Peacekeepers were deployed, eventually merging into one, called UNAMID.
And still, despite all of this, peace talks have failed to get off the ground, the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission will not be fully deployed for months to come, and two-thirds of Darfur's population is dependent on the world's largest aid operation.
"The situation is not better than it was five years ago," says Auriol Miller, head of Oxfam in Sudan. "We would still say the situation is getting worse. Humanitarian workers are being targeted and attacked (see this post) in a way that has got increasingly worse over the last few years."
A BBC reporter recently wrote:
"When I last visited the remote, arid region in November, destitute refugees lined up at the Abu Shouk camp, desperate to tell their stories so the world could find out what had happened to them.
They spoke of toddlers being burnt alive in villages as men on horseback razed their houses to the ground; of women being raped as they fled their homes looking for safety in the early stages of the conflict.
At night, people said they still found it hard to sleep - terrified of being killed while in their beds. (Full)
On April 9th, gunmen have attacked a UNAMID (UN African Mission in Darfur) police patrol, two kilometres (one mile) from the Zam Zam camp for internally displaced persons.
The officers were ordered out of their vehicles and the four gunmen stole their personal belongings and official identity cards. One officer was repeatedly hit in the neck by the back of an AK-47 when he hesitated in obeying instructions to get back into the vehicle.
"UNAMID police do not carry weapons and Wednesday's patrol was operating without protection", according to Noureddine Mezni, the UN African Mission spokesman. He added that "this was for confidence-building purposes and for easier contact with the civilians they aim to protect". (Full)
More posts on The Road, about Darfur and Sudan.
Picture courtesy Reuters
Five truck drivers delivering food for the U.N. World Food Program have been attacked and killed in Sudan over the past three weeks.
Four of the five were killed in southern Sudan and one was killed in the western Darfur region.
In the latest attack, two WFP-contracted drivers were shot dead in southern Sudan on Monday after returning from delivering food supplies.
Previously, three other WFP workers were killed in Sudan late March. (Full)
More posts on The Road, about Darfur and Sudan.
Update April 18 2008: "Attacks force U.N. to cut Darfur food relief": In the past three and a half months, 60 WFP-contracted food aid trucks have been hijacked in Darfur only. 39 trucks are still misssing and 29 drivers still unaccounted for.
Picture courtesy WFP
A United Nations peacekeeping police officer, holds the babies handed to hear by two refugee women, while on patrol in the Abou Shouk refugee camp in North Darfur. The patrol was one of the first to re-enter Darfur's refugee camps since the United Nations took over peacekeeping in Darfur this month to try to end five years of violence. (full post)
I might sound largely cynical, but the way the UN Peace Keeping Operations works, with often a too limited mandate and an intrinsic bureaucracy, I would not be surprised if the same mothers would take a shot at the guy in the middle, one year from now. Mark my words.
Photo courtesy AP/Alfred de Montesquiou. Source: International Aid Workers Today
Here is the full 1h37m "Darfur Now!" movie. This .wmv version is 426 Mbyte so - you need a highspeed Internet connection, and a bit of patience as the file downloads.
It requires the ActiveX plugin for your browser and is best viewed with Firefox.
How many more movies and documentaries are to be shown before the world has the courage to change anything about the situation in Darfur? This video shows why we should care!
Today Darfur rebels threatened to attack West Darfur's state capital El-Geneina and told aid workers to stay in their compounds and away from government military bases. (Full Post)
Picture courtesy REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin
For updated humanitarian news, check out The Other World News
While this blog started as a channel to publish my eBook short stories, one day I decided to also blog about stuff happening around me. This is how the 'rumble posts' started, still mostly focused on 'travel' and 'adventure' subjects. As most of my travel is for work, and because the humanitarian cause makes a large part of my drive, I decided a while ago to also publish news items, or digests of news items ("News Round-ups") which come close to my heart.
So if you land at this blog for the first time, you must be confused. "This guy switches from an island in the Pacific, to fundraising in Dubai, to food convoys day by day", you might think. And this is correct. I do. It all makes part of my daily life, my memories.
Pete, whom you know from my transatlantic sailing stories, reminded me the other day, that my blog entries have become so 'serious'.. He was right. Time to also bring out the lunatic part of me. Again! Yuuuhuuu! So a couple of evenings ago, I decided to convert some light-hearted rumble posts into short stories like the one on Italian food translations, and the affair with my GPS lady.
While doing so, I got inspiration, and wrote some new short stories for the eBook. I published one yesterday, about the Pacific. There are a couple more coming about one of my Antarctic expeditions (in addition the the eBook story about the landing on Peter I, which I published earlier)... Oh, I have also a new short-story ready about a day in the Caribbean, to complement the "One Love" story. So... stay tuned... ;-)
In the mean time as we can not loose track of the humanitarian aspect in "The Road to the Horizon", I suggest you have a look at the excellent photo story which Peter (from the Worldman blog) posted straight from Darfur, Sudan. His pictures show a food distribution in one of the Darfur refugee camps. It is people like him who make a difference.
PS: You might also have noticed that in the right column, I updated the blogs I follow. Check them out... If you know of other unlisted blogs of interest, let me know!
April 17. The New York Times reports:
A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.
In one case, illustrated with close-up pictures, the report says the letters “U.N.” have been stenciled onto the wing of a whitewashed Sudanese armed forces plane parked on a military apron at a Darfur airport. Bombs guarded by uniformed soldiers are laid out in rows by its side.
Read the NY Times article with a copy of the UN report.
Read the full post...
A Chinese government delegation visited refugee camps and met officials in western Sudan's strife-torn Darfur province to "get acquainted" with the situation there, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. "Administrative officials said that life of some 50,000 internally displaced people (at the camp) was stable and natural."
Continuing their four-day official visit, the delegation also visited a refugee camp with 14,000 people in Nyala, South Darfur province, and met provincial governor Al-Haj Atta al-Mannan Idris. Idris said the general situation was "stable and improving".
Yeah, right! Read the full post here
April 8, 2007.
1. Darfur According to the Chinese State Media: "Stable and Natural" 
When last year, the UN Security Council is debated a US draft resolution on the Sudan crisis, based on colliding views whether a genocide is or is not happening in Darfur, the issue of Sudan's oil is became a key factor. If an oil export embargo was approved, China and India would have lost their influence over Sudan's vast oil reserves and a Khartoum regime change would open up these resources to the West. The US is in favour of sanctions (hey I wonder why!), China is against (surprise!).4. So.. What is the conclusion?
So, what should we conclude? The US has Iraq, China has its Darfur for main oil supplies and everyone should be happy? Or should the conclusion be that if we would use more alternative energy sources, the world would be a better place, not only for the environment, but also for the refugees, terrorism and civil unrest? One thing is for sure: the situation in Darfur is "NOT stable and natural" as the Chinese and Sudanese media reported today... Unless if we all accept an ongoing genocide is "stable", because it has been ongoing since so long, and "natural" as... well... as it is in Africa of course... That's where people kill each other naturally, no?
 Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. |
© Blogger template The Business Templates by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
The Road's Dashboard
Log in
New
Edit
Customize
Dashboard