A 13-year-old's drawing of a Janjaweed attack on his village in Darfur. Source: Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch calls it the "unique visual vocabulary of war". Drawings created by children in refugee camps along the Darfur/Chad border and collected by visiting HRW researchers in February 2005 have been published on HRW's website along with each child's explanation of what they were depicting: villages bombed by planes, women and girls being dragged away to be raped and Janjaweed militiamen shooting people from the backs of camels and horses.
The picture that accompanies this blog post was the work of 13-year-old Abd al-Rahman. He said:
I am looking at the sheep in the wadi [riverbed, or oasis]. I see Janjaweed coming - quickly, on horses and camels, with Kalashnikovs - shooting and yelling, 'kill the slaves, kill the blacks.' They killed many of the men with the animals. I saw people falling on the ground and bleeding. They chased after children. Some of us were taken, some we didn't see again. All our animals were taken: camels, cows, sheep, and goats. Then the planes came and bombed the village.
In an audio account, researcher Dr Annie Sparrow explains the drawings' importance:
We have very few pictures of the Janjaweed. These children have drawn exactly what the Janjaweed look like very clearly ... seeing it through the eyes of children you see what they saw, which is very different from hearing testimony because children don't talk a lot ... they draw it out for you.
Blogger and BlogAfrica co-editor Ethan Zuckerman, who has seen the images at first hand, points out that the drawings provide visual evidence that is hard to obtain from Darfur, where press freedom is extremely limited. He writes:
What amazed me was how details in the children's drawings echoed details from the photos - the stocks of the automatic rifles, the round shape of the houses, the posture of two gunmen riding on horseback. It was immediately clear to me that these drawings weren't of weapons imagined by children, but eye witness accounts.
