Monday, August 06, 2007

Pictures Worth A Thousand Words

Neela Ghoshal

Lately, 24 Hours for Darfur has been collecting video appeals at film festivals and theaters at which Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s latest film, The Devil Came on Horseback, is screening.  The film chronicles the experiences of Brian Steidle, a U.S. Marine who worked with the African Union mission in Darfur from 2004 to 2005, and showcases hundreds of photos he shot there: unambiguous evidence of massive crimes against humanity.

The raw emotion elicited by the film – described by Pio J. Cabada, a graduate student of social work at Fordham, as “heartwrenching” – is testament to both the film’s effectiveness as a heartbreakingly visual assault on the senses and to the desire, on the part of many viewers, to be part of a polity that responds to genocide with more than symbolic gestures.

“I had been hearing about Darfur, but I had no idea of the extent of what happened there until I saw the film. There’s not words enough, actually, to describe the genocide that went on,” said Jacqueline Murdock, a dancer from New York.  Leonid Bezborodko, a native of Russia, said he was most struck by the Sudanese army’s use of Russian-made weapons.  “I was ashamed,” he admitted, suggesting that such weapons ought to be used for peacekeeping rather than for inflicting violence on innocent civilians.

Viewers were taken by Steidle’s nearly futile attempts to elicit a response from the U.S. government, which finally called the crisis in Sudan a “genocide” in 2005, but did little toward bringing a concrete resolution to the crisis.  Linda Blacken lamented, “I can’t believe that anyone in our government has seen one of those pictures and not done something, or not felt moved to do something.  That’s just horribly shameful.”

It is not that the U.S. has done nothing – it has provided funds for refugee assistance, implemented sanctions against certain companies owned by Sudanese officials, and pushed for UN peacekeepers in Darfur – but for most viewers, four years of ongoing atrocities speak for themselves.  By failing to commit adequate resources to peace in Sudan, the U.S. shares accountability for over 200,000 deaths there.  “This movie has opened up my eyes to a crisis that I thought in this day and age would never happen,” commented Mariela Sanchez.  A crisis that need not have happened – or that might have been nipped in the bud as early as 2005, when Steidle released his compelling photos – if Darfur had not early on been relegated to what John Prendergast calls a “second tier” rather than a “first tier” concern in U.S. foreign policy.

“I’m going to talk until no one will listen anymore,’’ Steidle says toward the end of the film after receiving a frosty reception from the State Department.  We encourage viewers of the film and visitors to this website to do the same.  Upload an email, spread the word, and make it crystal clear to the world’s power brokers that, as viewer Lucia Hermo insists, “we should not let anything get in the way … of stopping people from dying.”

For information on the film, including upcoming screenings, see www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com and watch Annie Sundberg’s video, below.