Genocide Without Borders
Genocide Without Borders
The Darfur region of Sudan, Eastern Chad and north-eastern CAR are experiencing one of the most serious human rights disasters in the world today.
For more than three years, Sudanese government forces and government-backed ethnic militias known as Janjaweed have committed attacks of extraordinary brutality against civilians including: massacres, executions, acts of sexual violence, the burning of towns and villages, and the forced displacement of over two million people.
Many of the displaced now live in refugee camps along Darfur's border with Chad. Thousands of people have been killed and millions more are at risk.
One Hundred Years of Darkness
One Hundred Years of Darkness
Twenty years after first reading Heart of Darkness I found myself sitting on the banks of the Congo River revisiting Joseph Conrad's words.
Waiting in Brazzaville for my first ferry to Kinshasa, I looked up from the page. Drunken police and soldiers were whipping travellers who strayed out of line with the chicotte, a legacy of the Belgian Colonial rule; Rifle butts found a home in the backs and temples of a group of suspected looters, later hauled screaming into jail. Chickens squawked and polio victims shouted as they dragged themselves along the ground toward the ferry for their free trip to Kinshasa, their capital of Hell.
During that first trip up the river Congo I was struck by the enduring accuracy of the images Conrad described. With every step I took and every boat I travelled on I could hear his words. It is in the shadows of cells, of hospitals and of riverbanks where I began to witness Congo's true horror. The Congolese leadership has assumed the guises of their colonial predecessors and life for the Congolese people is as desperate and dire as it was in the time of Kurtz.
Now, I've spent five years following, not Conrad, but the Congolese. Seeing their shadows as he first saw them, recording with each frame their anonymous lives, witnessing through the lens of Conrad the imprint of One Hundred Years of Darkness.