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Spertus in the News
From the Chicago Tribune Magazine
About the Spertus Museum exhibition
Smallest Witnesses: The Crisis in Darfur Through Children’s Eyes
at Spertus Museum
Published March 5, 2006
Editors Note
ABOUT THIS ISSUE
Elizabeth Taylor
Published March 5, 2006
"I Never Saw Another Butterfly," the book of drawings and poetry from some of the 15,000 children who passed through the Terezin concentration camp, near Prague, informed thinking about the Holocaust.
An exhibit at the Spertus Museum, "Smallest Witnesses: The Crisis in Darfur Through Children's Eyes," promises to exert a similar influence on another generation witnessing more atrocities. This week in our story, "What the children saw," we feature the illustrations of youngsters who faced terror-the slaughter in Sudan's western Darfur region-and were compelled to express themselves with crayons and paper.
Laurie Goering, the Tribune's Africa correspondent, placed these images in context, drawing on her decade as a foreign correspondent. "We always hear about the suffering of adults in war zones and we forget sometimes what the kids are going through too," says Laurie. "Conflicts way off in Africa can seem a bit distant for Americans at times; this exhibit makes that far-off war immediate and moving. Imagine your own kids seeing and drawing these kind of things!"
And imagine what kind of world it would be if a generation of young people never sees an exhibit like "Smallest Witnesses." It would be like being deprived of "I Never Saw Another Butterfly."
Article
What the children saw
Spertus exhibit is a powerful record
of the slaughter in Darfur
By Laurie Goering
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published March 5, 2006
When Human Rights Watch researchers began conducting interviews with adult victims of atrocities in Sudan's western Darfur region, they handed out crayons and paper to the victims' children to keep them busy while their parents talked. The distraction technique is nothing new, an old pediatrician's trick, but what it produced, purely by accident, was something remarkable: The first visual record of one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
The children, some of them as young as 8, drew pictures of Janjaweed raiders astride galloping horses, their automatic rifles spewing bullets at unarmed villagers. Helicopters, their details carefully reproduced, hover overhead, and government tanks and armored personnel carriers disgorge uniformed soldiers. In one particularly poignant image, a mother carrying a baby and guiding another small child by the hand hurries away from a group of small houses, their straw roofs aflame from falling bombs.
The images were "a side effect of the mission," said Olivier Bercault, one of the Human Rights Watch investigators, in a phone interview. "We were making an investigation of sexual violence linked to the conflict in Darfur. We didn't ask the kids anything-we gave them no direction at all-and they produced these amazing images of war." The drawings, now part of a traveling exhibition, will be on display in Chicago from March 5 to April 2 at the Spertus Museum, 618 S. Michigan Ave. The exhibit marks the opening of a permanent Human Rights Watch office in Chicago.
Ellen Alberding, president of the Joyce Foundation, which along with the Polk Foundation is sponsoring the exhibit, says the works are important because "They're such a compelling visual depiction of what is, for many people, an abstract problem that's happening far away. The emotional impact of the kids' expression is really powerful."
Bercault said he'll never forget the first of the drawings he saw in the Darfur refugee camps, one of a Janjaweed fighter-a government-backed Arab militiaman-mounted on a camel and firing on civilians.
"I've been documenting this war for two or three years and have talked to hundreds of people," he said, "but I never had such a graphic, visual representation of the crimes, of what it looked like. I was shocked . . . that the kids had gone through it, and that it was total confirmation of what we had been documenting."
Since the conflict began in February 2003, when Darfur rebels launched an uprising against the Arab-led government in Khartoum, tens of thousands of people have died in Darfur and at least 2.2 million have been left homeless. Janjaweed militiamen, backed by the government, have burned and looted hundreds of villages and raped, tortured or murdered their inhabitants. Many survivors have fled to refugee camps, or across the border into Chad. A small African Union monitoring force now patrols the vast region, but attacks continue on the camps and have recently spread into Chad, said Bercault, who continues to work in the region. "It's a very bad situation, and it's getting worse now with the war coming to Chad," he said.
The Janjaweed militiamen, Sudan's government and some of the Darfur rebels are under investigation by the International Criminal Court, but the international community has so far been unable to stop the violence.
After collecting the pen and crayon drawings made by refugee-camp children during interviews with their parents, Human Rights Watch researchers then approached teachers at UNICEF-run refugee schools in Darfur to see if they had come across any similar images.
"They said, 'Of course,' " Bercault recalled, and they showed the investigators school notebooks full of pictures of war, drawn alongside Arabic lessons and math problems. Some of the images included graphic representations of rape, of villagers gunned down and bleeding, and of families fleeing the fighting.
Those images, along with the ones drawn during Human Rights Watch interviews and photographs of military equipment that show the faithfulness of the childrens' recollections, now form the basis of the traveling exhibition, which the rights organization describes as a "unique visual vocabulary of war."
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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