Wednesday, 02-01-2006

The Smallest Witnesses: The Conflict in Darfur through Children's Eyes - Panel and Reception

This panel discussion is part of the children's drawings on display at UW's Odegaard Library from February 1 - 22, 2006.

This event features Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Olivier Bercault, who collected the drawings. Bercault has documented human rights violations in Sudan, Chad, Afghanistan, and Iraq; Nancy Farwell, Chair of the African Studies Department and Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, UW, who has studied extensively the impact of war on children; Amna Ibrahim, a UW fellow from Sudan, who has worked with relief organizations in Sudan, including those that specialize in traumatized children; and Fred Abrahams, senior emergency researcher for HRW (moderator).

February 1-22 – Exhibit
Odegaard Library

The exhibit, which has traveled throughout the world and been featured in the New York Times and on NPR, features 27 drawings by children from Darfur who escaped air raids, ground attacks and ethnic cleansing in Sudan (see http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/).

The children, some as young as 8 years old, witnessed the destruction of their homes, and now live in refugee camps in Chad. HRW researcher Olivier Bercault and his colleague gave the children crayons and paper while interviewing their parents last year in Chad. Without instruction or prompting, the children produced disturbing and vivid images of the atrocities they had seen. The drawings, with their unique visual vocabulary of war, give a forceful voice to the youngest victims of the war.

A region in western Sudan the size of Texas, Darfur is one of today’s gravest human rights and humanitarian crises. Under the pretext of suppressing an internal rebellion, soldiers and Janjaweed militias backed by the Sudanese government have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians, displacing an estimated 2.4 million people. According to the U.N., as many as 200,000 people may have died in the past two years.

The exhibit and reception are co-sponsored by Human Rights Watch, SaveDarfurWashingtonState, American Jewish Committee, the WA State Holocaust Education Resource Center, and the World Affairs Council.