A Second Hand Conjecture

(photo: Sam Ouandja | Nicolas Rost | UNHCR via HDPT)

The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur by Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace
(Public Affairs, 230 pages, $16.47)

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius observed in his Meditations, that it was absurdly wrong that man’s spirit so often surrenders before his body has begun to. There are few occasions where that sad reality is as true as in Darfur, where systematic genocide by the Government of Sudan (GOS) was dismissed as inevitable, hopeless, or irrelevant by the world long before even the most minimal efforts had been made to confront or stop it. The international community’s body was strong, but its spirit was hollow.

But what has been largely true of international politics, was not true of everyone. In 2004, a young man named Brian Steidle was hired by the African Union as an international observer in their mission to document enforcement of the then tentative ceasefire agreement in the war in Darfur. This book is a product of his experiences there, as that ceasefire (never genuinely observed by Sudan), collapses and open violence spreads.

The title is a rough translation for Janjaweed, what the black civilian villagers of Darfur call the Arab militias who descended upon them: “devil on horseback.” These militias –as Steidle demonstrates beyond any reasonable dispute– are funded, trained, armed and provoked to murder and plunder by the GOS. But it’s only early in the story that these nomadic raiders occupy the proxy role for the state. It’s not long before regular Sudanese troops give up the fiction entirely to indulge in the slaughter themselves. They claim retaliation often, but their lies are easily exposed by cursory investigation.

The purpose of Sudan in this war, is to eradicate the ancient native African tribes that live in Darfur. The Arabs who control the government in Khartoum, despise these indigenous peoples despite their sincere Muslim faith. They want an Arab society for Arabs and thus they have perpetrated one of the cruelest race wars in modern history, wholly without provocation and solely by malicious intent.

The catalog of the Janjaweed’s barbarity and the indifference and complicity of Sudan in their crimes, will leave you appalled. The list of horrors is extensive and utterly inhuman. Whole villages put to the torch, then the refugee camps the villagers have fled to are bulldozed. Hind gunships strafe civilians with barbed flechettes. Livestock is slaughtered, crops are burned. In Suleia, little girls were chained together, doused with gasoline and ignited to draw their parents to their rescue, so they can be shot. In Donkey Deressa, a 75 year old woman is savagely gang raped and then shot in the head. In Baraka, men have their eyes plucked out while they’re still alive and a man is raped from behind, castrated and left to bleed to death.

In the midst of recounting the above stories, Steidle pauses and reminds the reader that he has only been in Darfur up to this point for one week and scarcely covered any of the crimes on display there. It’s a shocking moment. Even in the reading you feel like you’ve been exploring the cumulative account of a year’s worth of findings. But the density of horror is such that you’ve merely scratched the surface.

Steidle is a former Marine officer and that plays a crucial dimension in his narrative. Principally, because he’s able to distinguish between war and war atrocity. This is something that many (if not most) civilian observers are unable to do. Thus the kind of breathless indignation at the world that permeates other accounts of Sudan’s race war is meaningfully absent here. You don’t see combat between the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA, the principal opposition) and the GOS bundled in with accounts of genocide. He focuses in instead, on the inexcusably criminal actions of Sudan in the war. In any war in history, the actions of Sudan would stand out as among the most ghastly.

The killers are often familiar to the victims. Villages often use the given names of the Janjaweed who have attacked them, testifying to old trading relationships that preceded the violence. It is the GOS that broke these peaceful relationships, for its goal of racial purity.

After reading this book, you’ll never be able to listen to a smooth Chinese or Algerian defense of Sudan with anything other than shouting rejection. Worse, Steidle offers several hints at broader complicity with Sudan in the Muslim world. A captured document reveals Iran is supply the GOS with arms; a secretly kept manifest at the airport reveals dozens of C-130s laden with ammunition arrive from Saudi Arabia. These are both countries that have sought to deny that Sudan is engaged in mass murder. It’s not coincidental that they are facilitating what they deny publicly, hidden from public view. The canard that oil provides the motive for these apologists of Sudan, also would naturally fail to carry water in this instance.

It’s often cynically remarked that it’s impossible to make an antiwar film, as the fighting always ends up looking exciting and heroic. So too is it impossible to write a story about a great travesty in Africa, without a bit of exotic adventure creeping into it. The dramatic and parched landscape, chaotic land rover drives over worn out mountain roads and whole regions that have never seen white skin, put you in a foreign adventure of the first rank. And there is easy peril for even the diplomatically immune in this moral and physical wasteland of a country.

At one point in remote Ghazawal Jawzet, Steidle’s helicopter descends into a nest of 200 armed Al Qaeda fighters. He asks his translator what’s going on:

I whispered to Ahmed, “Where do you think they come from?”

“Yemen or Syria, probably for export,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘for export’?”

“They are trained here to go to Iraq to kill people like you.”

It’s at that point that another member of his team, Ibrahim, who is talking to the Al Qaeda men, turns, points to Steidle and says proudly “Ameriki.” You sweat through the subsequent pages of this encounter as tensely as Steidle lived those moments.

There are other moments of fear. Moments when you become acutely aware you are in a premodern society that is feeling its way along without aid of education or logic. Among the Janjaweed, Steidle is almost shot by them for taking pictures of a boneyard, then shortly afterwards almost shot a second time, for not taking them. The commander of these militia singles Steidle out and tells him “You bring George Bush here and…” he draws his finger across his neck and smiles.

Steidle’s digital photography is often a menace to his own safety and he confesses, the camera wasn’t quite the security of his M16. But it’s these photographs that awakened the United States to Darfur more than anything else. When Senator Brownback took to the floor of the Senate to demand action, it was photographs supplied by Steidle he used to drive his point home. Many are included in the book’s plates. Most are hard to look at. Some moments in the text, you’re however relieved aren’t among them. In Hamada for example, the heads of infants were cracked open with rifle stocks in a ditch. An old tire was used as a chopping block to decapitate others with an axe. Mercifully, you only read about these particular events.

Many of these moments will live in your memory forever and to read it, is to vandalize any reason you may have sheltered behind for ignoring the immeasurable crimes of Sudan.

Character development is particularly strong in the case of Steidle’s team leader, Joseph, described as a senior Kenyan officer but whose name and point of origin have doubtlessly been changed for security purposes. Like many good managers and military commanders, Joseph at first seems aloof, arrogant, distant and even incompetent. But as you experience more of his decisions, you realize you were completely mistaking strong competence and leadership for their opposites. This is something that you commonly notice in life, but seldom see developed so well in a work of nonfiction.

The book forms one component of a multimedia campaign that includes a new organization, photographic exhibitions and a feature film to awaken the world to a situation that persists to this day. The trailer for the movie looks particularly intense and we’ll have to follow up this review, with a review of it in the near future:

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The book is highly recommended.

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