Saw 'The Devil Came on Horseback' tonight for the first time.
I had some trouble indentifying with the narrator sometimes, this ex-Marine who found a job on the internet 'monitoring the peace' in Sudan in 2004-2005, who at one point wished for a gun and ten other men b/c he would surely then have been able to protect these villages in Darfur from being raided by the Janjaweed. While his obvious overestimation of the US Marines and underestimation of the Janjaweed annoyed me, what I did feel from him and what I totally understood was this sense of helplessness and increased disillusionment.
After he could no longer stand photographing the genocide day after day after day after day, this guy went back to the US armed with thousands of pictures, with reports that were faithfully sent to superiors in the AU central command and were sometimes forwarded to the UN or the State Department. He had unfathomable quantities of concrete evidence of the atrocities committed in Darfur, almost from the beginning -- and truly, these pictures will haunt your dreams -- so one can understand why he thought that if he shared this information, something might actually happen. And nothing has. Not a f-ing thing.
Since he is now persona non grata in Soudan (imagine!), he decided to go to Chad to talk to some of the refugees there. It looked like he was in Bahai or Farchana, not where I was, but the story is the same: All these people, looking to the UN, to the US, to anyone for help. And guess what -- it's not coming. These children who watched their families burn to death, these women who were raped repeatedly and mutilated, these men who managed to hide or run and actually escape -- these people are sitting by the hundreds of thousands, waiting.
But they're waiting for something that is not coming, they need to start to understand that and to rebuild where they are or where they can. Which is why when I was in Chad, I became so angry at the realization that the UN isn't helping these people, it is not being honest with them, it is not empowering them or helping these people make the most of the lives they had to work so hard to save: The UN and many of its implementing partners (not all, but many) are exploiting these people and their donors. They are making money out of a culture of dependency. They are taking advantage of one of the most horrific tragedies ever to stain the pages of human history.
The first crime occurred when the government of Soudan persecuted this vile campaign against the people of Darfur, and the Chadian government isn't too far behind its neighbor, as it does nothing to stop the Janjaweed from deranging their own citizens as well as the refugees that have flooded its borders. But the second and more insidious, despicable crime is that perpetrated by the people who are supposed to help. What are you helping exactly when, three years after these people fled their homes, you have yet to assist them in re-building the social networks they so desperately need now, or you have yet to encourage them to begin learning how to feed themselves through farming or bartering*, but instead leave them dependent on your irregular distributions of insufficient food?? What are you helping when you spend less money on education than you do on encouraging the government to draft Parliamentary bills and statements on human rights that mean *nothing* to these people?? Give me a break.
Toward the end of the movie, the narrator says that after doing everything he has done, he still feels like it has achieved very little and he says all he can say now when he encounters refugees is he 'supports' them, but that seems so empty to him. That's exactly what it feels like: empty. You want so badly to help these people and they need so desperately for someone to help them -- to *really* help them -- but you begin to lose hope. When you've tried so much for so long, and nothing happens, you begin to lose hope. But the part of the movie that really got to me was when the narrator was going back to the US and he assumed that of the thousands of NGO workers operating in the Darfur region at the start of the genocide, at least *some* of them would have been talking about it, would have been trying to make the press and the people know what was going on. But they weren't. In fact, when he got back to the US and started sharing his pictures and documentation, he was asked by the State Department to *stop* these activties, for fear of causing offense. No one in the system wants to talk about the problem, not really.
I was 'released from my contract' for trying to share this sort of information, for putting light on a situation so deplorable, no one should tolerate it. And I still don't know why people do tolerate this. But they do.
Knowing this, bearing the consequences of this, leaves a dark feeling in my gut, and my heart shrinks away.
*There is in fact a US organization that is attempting to do these sorts of activities, but they have met w/limited success b/c for the majority of refugees, it is easier to just go to WFP or HCR for handouts than it is for them to do the work themselves. And in case you thought this was just human laziness, get familiar w/learned helplessness -- people who once were able and willing to take care of themselves lose the will and/or the ability to do so after repeated traumatization, loss, and/or depression. It's not always that they're lazy, it's that they can't do anything else, at least not without a lot of help in the form of psycho-social counseling, skills training, etc.
