Spectator to genocide: U.S. Marine captain in Darfur ends up mapping crimes in progress

Brian Steidle's only weapons against mass killing were his pen, paper, and camera. The former Marine captain catalogs what they caught in Darfur, Sudan, with quick-fire urgency: toddlers with their faces smashed in, men castrated and left to bleed to death, charred bodies of villagers locked in huts later burned down. Charged only with monitoring ceasefire violations in the war-wracked region, he soon grew weary of playing spectator to genocide.

So after six months, the 28-year-old Mr. Steidle returned to the United States a month ago and launched his own offensive to stop the killing. In mid-March he criss-crossed Washington, meeting with lawmakers and Bush administration officials and sandwiching media appearances in between. His eyewitness accounts—bolstered by hundreds of photographs—provide some of the most damning evidence yet of the Sudanese government's murderous campaign against the Darfuris.

Darfur's conflict began two years ago, when the Islamic government launched an ethnic-cleansing campaign against blacks. It backed Arab militias called the Janjaweed, which cleared out villages, raped women, and plundered livestock. With rebel groups fighting back, the conflict has killed some 300,000 and displaced a further 2 million from their homes. And as far as Mr. Steidle could see, the attacks have not abated, despite international scoldings and a ceasefire signed a year ago.

Mr. Steidle, one of three U.S. military observers on contract with the African Union, is part of a monitoring and protection force that can neither prevent nor fight an attack nor shield its intended victims. The African Union has almost 2,000 monitors in Darfur. Its only mandate is to protect civilian contractors and write reports.

The earnest-looking Mr. Steidle speaks determinedly about stopping the violence in Darfur. He first went to Sudan in January 2004, working on the North-South ceasefire with the U.S. military. Within months he went from team leader to senior operations officer, and soon found himself in Darfur. But even southern Sudan, emerging from a 20-year civil war, equipped him little for the almost daily atrocities he saw in Darfur.

Relegated to scribe, Mr. Steidle mapped the general pattern of attacks. First the government shut down cell-phone systems so villagers could not warn each other of a coming attack. Government-owned Antonov aircraft then flew over a village doing reconnaissance. Helicopter gunships soon followed, firing purposefully on terrified and scattering Darfuris. That the aim was to kill and wound civilians was evident, Mr. Steidle said, in their use of anti-personnel rockets. Each rocket contained 500 flashettes, small nails with stabilizing fins to make sure their point punctured the target first. He saw one child hit by the devices. His wounds, Mr. Steidle said, looked like "someone would have shredded your back with a cheese grater."

After the aerial strafing, militiamen known as Janjaweed invaded the villages, killing as many inhabitants as they could and dispersing the rest. To delay any return, the militiamen usually set fire to food stores and tampered with water wells. That way, villagers could never be sure if their desert lifeline had been poisoned. Then the militiamen looted what was left behind, piling mattresses, furniture, bicycles—often the villagers' only possessions—onto waiting government trucks. "One of the most amazing things about this is if you talk to the Janjaweed, they accept that this is payment," Mr. Steidle told a gathering at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on March 18.

The Janjaweed then burned villages to the ground. Mr. Steidle saw no difference between the government's actions and theirs: One supported the other. "We looked at them as if they were two different units of the army," he said. "The regular army, with special forces [working] at the same time." The Janjaweed also divided into the "Mujahideen battalion," who were paid and always wore uniforms, and a mercenary-like group that received payment more often via looting.

Even the African Union monitors Mr. Steidle traveled with in South Darfur were not always safe. One of their well-marked, white helicopters was shot at in December while monitors were on their way to investigate new violence. The Sudanese forces also devised ways to thwart what little authority the monitors had. The government was not allowed to make troop movements without first notifying the African Union and obtaining its permission. Once the division commander in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, complied in part and wrote a letter saying that he was going to reestablish his troop positions.

"He was basically giving us notification that he was going to attack a village," Mr. Steidle said. "And that's exactly what he did. The next day they attacked a village." Often when the African Union tried to investigate such attacks, fuel for their helicopters suddenly became unavailable. The government fuel company offered bland excuses: "We are out of fuel" or "Our fuel pumps are broken." Sudanese helicopters, however, were never deprived enough to stop their aerial attacks. Sudanese troops also skirted around their movement restrictions by shuttling around Darfur "escorting" fuel convoys, supposedly to ensure their safe passage.

Villagers who managed to flee the violence have not found sanctuary in internal displacement camps. Sprawling camps often shelter tens of thousands of Darfuris, who duck under squalid shacks made from sticks and plastic bags where disease and malnutrition are thrusting mortality figures higher. If they live on the periphery, they are still open to Janjaweed raids.

The government also has not relented: Officials announce they must relocate refugees to new camps, then use bulldozers to flatten existing settlements, often in the middle of the night and without warning. On one such occasion they did not allow Western media photographers to snap pictures, ripping the memory cards from their digital cameras. Mr. Steidle, however, was able to keep his and record the abuse.

As it stands, the African Union has too few monitors and too few powers to stop the killing. Mr. Steidle said the most violent months of the whole conflict were in December and January, but he has learned quieter periods do not signal the end. He estimates Darfur, which is about the size of France, needs some 50,000 African Union troops with an expanded mandate authorizing them to protect civilians and secure roads for humanitarian aid. That is roughly the same figure another seasoned witness to genocide offered: former General Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN peacekeeping mission to Rwanda in 1994. Crucial in the short run, Mr. Steidle believes, are weapons sanctions against Khartoum and a no-fly zone over Darfur.

Even with its weakness, Mr. Steidle has seen the good even small AU forces can accomplish. After an attack on the town of Labado, which had a population of 20,000, a Sudanese general said his mission was to clear the road all the way to Khartoum, several hundreds of miles away. Knowing that the village of Mujaheryia would be next in line—which had double the inhabitants of Labado—the African Union stationed 35 soldiers there to protect civilian contractors.

Even this gesture deterred the government and Janjaweed, making up a few thousand soldiers, from attacking. The AU then deployed 70 protection-force soldiers and 10 military observers to Labado, drawing back 3,000 villagers within a week. "I was very impressed with them," Mr. Steidle said. "They have ownership of this mission, they want to help their fellow Africans."

Nonetheless, the African Union still needs logistical aid and training, and probably NATO-quality troops to augment their mission if they are to be effective, said Sudan expert Eric Reeves. Part of the problem is Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo, mediator between Darfur rebels and the Sudanese government. He stated Darfur is an "African" problem meant for Africa to solve alone, and recently claimed conditions are improving in the region even as they deteriorate.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers introduced the Darfur Accountability Act in March, which calls for the arms embargo and African Union assistance Mr. Steidle advocates. While the act is worth backing, Mr. Reeves said, it is unclear how much the United States is willing to act unilaterally. "Congress is not an ideal means of responding to foreign crises," he told WORLD. "I think it's a sign of how far from the front burner Darfur has slipped for Bush." Successive UN Security Council resolutions have also failed to rein in the Sudanese government.

Mr. Steidle hopes raising Americans' awareness will help dispel international torpor over Darfur. A self-described Navy brat with no "home port," he currently lives on a sailboat in Annapolis, Md. Now he is on a publicity mission he believes cannot afford to fail. —•

Thanks for posting. How does one characterize the non-responsiveness of the international community (including the US) to this genocide. Combine the possibility that Sudan may have been the recipient of some of Saddam's WMDs prior to the war to oust him, I wonder how we justifying turning a blind eye to this.

I heard this guy interviewed on PBS radio. It had to be chilling and horrid to witness this holocaust and only be able to watch and record. Interestingly, he is the only credible western observer to personally see and officially witness and record these events. Folks in Washington, and esp. Condie Rice, showed a keen interest.

This disturbs me. Blame for the slaughter in Rwanda in large part belongs to Kofi Annan, the French, and Bill Clinton, and I have never been shy about saying so.

The destruction in South Sudan has been worse, and other than expressing the proper sentiments, and daring (daring!) to use the word "genocide", I can't say that the Bush administration has done much more than did Clinton in his day.

I realize that Bush has a lot on his plate, but if you slow-walk this thing, the South Sudanese will be dead. A slow-motion response on the part of the US, UN, et al, is to be complicit in mass murder.

Standing by and taking notes gives the appearance of action, but at the end of the day, the dead are still dead.

The United Nations and indirectly our government are protecting China's oil interests in the Sudan by not intervening.

But, even if China wasn't involved in the Sudan, the United Nations has a track record of inaction and overt action that has caused the deaths of millions of Africans in the last 15 years.

The United Nations has a two-fold interest in the Sudan, in that they unquestionably support China and the deaths of millions of human beings only helps them to their goal of significant global population reduction. In other words the deaths of innocents fits in the UN agenda for population control. Population levels that are satisfactory to the UN are found in their Global Biodiversity Assessment. There you will see that the UN generally supports the deaths of 5 billion innocent souls to achieve their goal.

Co-created by Julian Huxley, the devout eugenicist and social Darwinist who served as the founding director-general of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization,* In 1947 Huxley wrote that among UNESCO's most urgent tasks was "to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." Accordingly, it is appropriate that the IUCN produced the UN's Global Biodiversity Assessment, which suggests that the human population should be reduced to one billion.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/621506/posts?page=32#32

The "somebodies" who don't give a damn about human rights in Dafur, much less in their own country, are the Chinese. Thousands of Chinese engineers are in Sudan to help their one-party state build the infrastructure for their next big oil projects. And yes, you guessed it, many of those projects are in the Dafur region.

What's going on in Dafur is just like Sadaam did in the Iraqi swamp lands - getting the rif raf out of the way for the foreign oil investors. Only, for Sadaam, it was the French. And you wonder why the French and the Chinese are so cozy.

You can forget any humanitarian resolution of Dafur. Any form of "tribunal" will only be a delay tactic until there is no opposition left in the Dafur region. The French and the Chinese will veto any "action", even sanctions against Sudan.

Unfortunately, we are not about to beef up the African-Union sponsored peace-keepers on our own.

There should be a daily prayer list for the people of Dafur.

It is disturbing, and has been going on for 20 years as the article mentioned, not just the two years the conflict has been brought to the Darfur region.

(Ironically, the article calls this government sponsored genocide of the arab government in the north against the people in the south "a 20-year civil war" but calls this newest front in Darfur an "Islamic government launched an ethnic-cleansing campaign against blacks". Its the same northern arab conquest against the blacks in the south, just expanded these last two years to the western Darfur region!)

I remember reading many an article about this very thing happening while Clinton was bombing Kosovo to smithereens. Articles pointed out the irony of allowing this massive genocide and yet taking on the Serbia cause so enthusiastically.

I think more should be done. This is terrible. But one more comment, you mentioned:

"I can't say that the Bush administration has done much more than did Clinton in his day."

You may be right saying not much more. Though not as much as I'd like to see, we do have observers there now, and the U.S. has aided many southern Sudanese refugees in corning to the U.S. since Bush's administration. What Bill Clinton did: ZIP!!!

I agree with you, we should do more though. Observers will slow it down from as an aggressive a genocide, and we have and will relocate many refugees here, but that doesn't solve the problem.

I did notice that when they were killing african christians in the far south, no one could be roused from slumber. It was only when they began attacking african muslims in the Darfur that it became politically possible to do even what little they are doing.

Still, as you say, little is better than nothing.

It is fitting symbolism that security for the camps is provided by Rwandan troops. But unless we start offering material help in terms of arms and training, the ethnic cleansing, slaughter, and expulsions will continue. Remember that it was not the UN that ended genocide in Rwanda, it was armed Rwandans that ended it.

For years, the rebels have attacked oil installations, seeking to deprive the Sudan government of the wherewithal to pursue a civil war that has killed more than 2 million people and displaced 4 million from their homes over the past two decades.

But the Chinese laborers are protected: They work under the vigilant gaze of Sudanese government troops armed largely with Chinese-made weapons — a partnership of the world's fastest-growing oil consumer with a pariah state accused of fostering genocide in its western Darfur region.

China's transformation from an insular, agrarian society into a key force in the global economy has spawned a voracious appetite for raw materials, sending its companies to distant points of the globe in pursuit — sometimes to lands shunned by the rest of the world as rogue states. China's relationship with Sudan has become particularly deep, demonstrating that China's commercial relations are intensifying human-rights concerns outside its borders while beginning to clash with U.S. policies and interests.

Sudan is China's largest overseas oil project. China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have intensified Sudan's 2-decade-old north-south civil war. A cease-fire is in effect, and a peace agreement is scheduled to be signed. However, fighting in Sudan's Darfur region rages on, as government-backed Arab militias push African tribes off their land.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1309291/posts

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