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CONTRIBUTE BLOGS
04/02/2009 18:22
by Marcia Stepanek
When in Britain last week at
the Skoll World Forum, I was
referred to a recent article
in The Observer written by
Joss Garman, the 24-year-...
03/02/2009 22:35
by Marcia Stepanek
As the recent copyright woes
of Obama poster artist Shepard
Fairey show, there's a war
raging over what some now are
calling a new art form in ...
02/16/2009 07:24
by Marcia Stepanek
I just finished reading an
advance copy of "The Blue
Sweater: Bridging the Gap
Between Rich and Poor in an
Interconnected World,&qu...
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Top Stories:Catalysts
STEPPING UP: AT KNIFE'S EDGE
On the ground in Darfur to raise
awareness of ethnic genocide  Winter Miller in the Gaga refugee camp, holding the baby of a woman
whose village was attacked by the Janjaweed militia.
Since
2004, playwright Winter Miller has helped New York Times columnist
Nicholas Kristof research his groundbreaking columns on how Sudan’s
army and Arab Janjaweed militias are rampaging the Darfur region of
Sudan to clear it of non-Arabs. Miller, wanting to do more to raise
awareness, wrote a play about a Darfuri woman’s search for safety. At
New York’s Public Theater last year, “In Darfur” raised $5,000 for
Darfuri activists. In the region with Kristof and NBC News Anchor Ann
Curry, “I saw stuff that nobody else was able to see,” Miller says. An
edited version of her interview with CONTRIBUTE’s Marcia Stepanek
follows. From the start of my work with
Nick, Darfur was one of those issues that was absolutely gripping,
something from which it was impossible to turn. So when Nick said he
was taking a trip to the Chad-Sudan border, I asked him if I could go
along. He wasn’t thrilled; he said it could be dangerous, a suicide
mission, and he said no for a good long while. He knew why he was
going, he said: he could write about it on the pages of the New York Times.
But me? I didn’t have that chance. I was his researcher, not a Times
columnist. But I wanted to write the best play that I could. Finally,
he relented. We flew from New York to Paris and Paris to Chad, and when
we arrived in N’Djamena in Chad, we took a small plane to Abéché and
rented a car, a driver, and an interpreter — and that was that.
Driving south along the Chad-Sudan border, it’s easy to be struck by
the flat, desert barrenness of the landscape. I recall looking down
from the plane and thinking, Have humans ever walked here? It was eerie
to see villages of burned-out huts and broken teapots left by people
who had to flee or who were burned out of their homes and slaughtered.
Our car would often get stuck in the sand, but children would suddenly
appear to help push us out. That’s how it is there. People would just
appear out of nowhere, as if the whole population had learned to hide
as suddenly as it would appear. On
the ground in Darfur, the overwhelming emotion is not so much fear as
it is a mix of sorrow, frustration, and disbelief that what is
happening is not being stopped somehow. Six or eight months ago, it was
more common to hear someone ask what Darfur was, or to have no idea.
That seems to be growing less common, but it’s still pretty messy over
there. Since African Muslim rebels
took up arms in 2003, in protest against what they felt to be years of
discrimination and neglect at the hands of the Arab Muslims in Khartoum
(Sudan’s capital), some 300,000 civilians have been killed and two
million more have been forced to flee their homes. The Africans have
not been safe, even in the refugee camps. An Arab militia backed by
Sudan’s government — known as the Janjaweed — has done most of the
killing: it has been targeting three black African tribes, in
particular, though some Arabs also have been attacked and some Africans
have been spared. There was one time
when I felt in significant danger. We had stopped at a village that had
just been attacked, and met a man who had run from the Janjaweed with
his wife and their baby. He told of how the Janjaweed had spotted his
baby, checked to see if it was a boy and then, seeing that it was,
bayoneted him. Then they shot his wife. The man was showing us where
his child had been buried when he suddenly stopped talking and told us
to leave. “They’re in the trees. They can see us,” he said through our
interpreter. It didn’t occur to us that the Janjaweed were watching us
so closely. The idea that we were in shooting range and that they knew
precisely where we were was alarming. We got back in the car and drove
away. In another village, we met two
young girls who were, maybe, about 16 years old and who had been
gang-raped just 48 hours before we met them. I was struck by how they
weren’t doing this sort of American- style form of televised grieving,
but just calmly retold how they’d been dragged away. It’s taboo to talk
about rape, so women don’t always say what happens to them. Abortions,
prohibited under Muslim law, are not offered; there are women who don’t
want to hold their own babies. Two Darfuri sisters describe how they were captured and
gang-raped by the Janjaweed 48 hours earlier, then released.
In the Gaga and Farchana refugee camps, we
saw rows and rows of U.N. tents and people waiting for hours in the hot
sun to get inside. But once inside, there is fear. Women form teams to
go out and get firewood, and the question that’s asked of them each
time is, who can go out of the camp? If they send their sons, the sons
will be killed, and if they send their daughters, they will be raped.
It’s an unfortunate choice; often, mothers go and are attacked, raped,
or killed. Another problem with the
camps is that there is malnutrition. There is diarrhea. There is not
enough potable water and no clean facilities, so people are getting
sick. The fact of the genocide is that it isn’t just about the act of
raping and murdering and burning and looting. It’s also about people
inside the camps dying of malnutrition.
Just before we left the region, we drove to a village called Koloy, in
Chad, and met a man who was lying on the ground, a bullet wound to his
shoulder. His two wives were fanning him, nearby. We spoke with two men
who had been shot in their nearby village, who told us that all of the
surrounding villages had been attacked and that the Janjaweed would be
coming for them next. I remember taking a picture of all of their faces
and wondering if those photographs would be the last documentation, the
only proof that these people had ever lived. It felt awful to leave
them there. They all wanted to be saved, they all deserved to be saved,
and we weren’t going to be able to save them.
What inspired my play was a column that Nick had written, about a
Darfuri woman named Hawa, who had been raped and went to a medical
clinic, where the doctor filed a report detailing what happened.
Afterwards, the Sudanese police showed up and arrested her for adultery
and handcuffed her to the bed. People
who see my play tell me they didn’t realize the violence was so bad. I
think that awareness is the first step in stopping it. I think that a
lot of people, once they’re aware, don’t want to be bystanders anymore.
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