The exhibition, The Smallest Witnesses: the Crisis in Darfur through Children’s Eyes will open at the Holocaust Memorial Center on January 2, 2008 and remain until January 31. The exhibit is organized and circulated by Human Rights Watch.
Since February 2003, Sudanese soldiers and government-backed armed militia known as Janjaweed have waged a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” and forced displacement. An estimated 2.4 million people have been forced from their homes and at least 200,000 are dead as a result of the violence.
Shortly after the conflict began, two Human Rights Watch researchers – one a pediatrician, the other a lawyer – traveled to refugee camps along the Chad-Sudan border. While interviewing refugees, they gave children paper and crayons to draw whatever they wished. Without any instruction or guidance the children, some as young as 8, began to draw vivid and disturbing scenes of the violence and atrocities they had witnessed: the attacks by the Janjaweed militia, the aerial bombings by the Sudanese government, the rapes, the burning of entire villages and the flight to Chad.
There are virtually no publicly available photographs and little footage of these attacks. But thanks to the children of Darfur, there are now graphic representations of the atrocities. The drawings corroborate what is known of the crimes. From the point of view of humanitarian law, the drawings illustrate a compelling case against the government of Sudan as the architects of this man-made crisis in Darfur.
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