Darfur Drawn

"The Conflict in Darfur Through Children's Eyes"

"On mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, Human Rights Watch researchers gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children’s parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.

"As Sparrow and Bercault visited schools in refugee camps in Chad, many children between the ages of 8 and 17 shared the drawings they had done in their school notebooks, often alongside their lessons in Arabic or math. Schoolchildren from seven refugee camps and the border town of Tine offered Human Rights Watch’s researchers hundreds of drawings in the hope that the rest of the world would see their stories as described in their own unique visual vocabulary of war."