Brian Steidle, humanitarian and former U.S. Marine, answered a job ad on the
Internet after serving four years as a marine. At age 27 he was sent to
the Sudan as an observer for the African Union in 2004 and saw things that he
won't soon forget. Steidle talks to The Popcorn Reel about the ongoing
genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan. The new documentary film "The
Devil Came On Horseback" tells the story of the ongoing mass murders of men,
women and children in north eastern Africa's Sudan and its Darfur region, a
genocide which is slowly but surely on the way to becoming a 21st century
Holocaust on the African continent. The film also chronicles the United
Nations and other governments' apparent indifference and reluctance to act to
end the genocide in Darfur.
A group of village huts burns to the ground. The rest of the huts,
where African villagers make their homes, will also be burned down by the Arab
militia group the Janjaweed, which is funded by the Sudanese government and
murders the villagers. The
poster for the film "The Devil Came On Horseback" makes Brian Steidle its principal focus, something he said,
that he didn't want where the story of the documentary's focus was concerned.
(Photo courtesy: International Film Circuit; poster: Break Thru Films)
"I wasn't looking for a cause
or anything. It just happened to find me."
And Brian Steidle hopes the day comes when the world at large will find it
within its collective self to mobilize in numbers of millions to prevent the
atrocities in the Darfur region in the Sudan from continuing. "I don't
ever want to talk to you people at a rally ever again! The people have the
power to stand up and say, 'never again!'", thundered Mr. Steidle to thousands
attending a Save Darfur rally in April 2006, which is featured in the
documentary "The Devil Came On Horseback" by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.
The film opened in New York City at the IFC Center late last month and will make
its way to venues around the country, including San Francisco (August 24).
A former United States Marine, Steidle went in September 2004 at age 27 to the
Sudan as an observer for the African Union, then ventured to the country's
western region, Darfur, with only a pen, paper and camera. What he saw
changed him forever. The thousands of dead, bodies strewn across entire
villages of people who had been killed by the Janjaweed, a group of Arab
Africans funded by the Sudanese government of Omar al-Bashir were killing
Africans, raping women and children and castrating men and destroying families.
Steidle had taken thousands of pictures of these inhumane acts. As the
deadly violence persisted, the African Union, the United Nations, and
governments around the world, including the U.S. government did not send armed
military soldiers to end the violence. Mr. Steidle sent reports and
first-person accounts of what he saw to both the African Union and to those in
the State Department in the U.S., but the reports were not acted upon, he said.
When Steidle, who comes from generations of men proudly serving in the U.S.
military and defending the United States with honor, saw that nothing was being
done, he ended his mission in Sudan with the African Union in January 2005, and
left the country the following month.
Returning home to the United States, Mr. Steidle, a former
Marine Captain, who lives in California, faced a second battle. With some
convincing from his sister Gretchen Steidle Wallace -- who is also his closest
friend, whom he acknowledges gave him the courage and strength to come forward
publicly with what he saw -- went public with his journals, photos and e-mailed
accounts, first through journalist and op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof at The
New York Times in early 2005, and then himself on the international
interview circuit. He was told by people in the U.S. government not to
show his pictures and to stop providing access to them.
There were also other battles that Steidle, who had broken his leg three times
in combat missions while a Marine, had to fight once back on American soil.
"When I first came back it was quite difficult to, one, deal with the way we are
so privileged here in the United States and in the western world as a whole, to
try to assimilate back into that society. That was a difficult part for
me. And then talking about this issue -- a genocide that's going on in
Africa -- and to me it became very frustrating when I'd run into a few
individuals and they would say, 'so what?', and 'I don't really care.'
That to me was extremely frustrating," recalled Steidle.
Former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle as an observer with the African Union during
a ceasefire in the civil war in the Darfur region of Sudan. He was sent
there in 2004, at age 27. Steidle is in the new documentary "The Devil
Came On Horseback", directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern. The
documentary recently opened in New York City and will make its way to various
select American cities, college towns and film festivals over the next few weeks
and months. (Photo courtesy: International Film Circuit)
The images and the murders that Steidle witnessed during his seven months in
Darfur spanning late 2004 -- when a ceasefire ended a 20-year-civil war in the
Sudan -- and early 2005, continue to haunt him, and it is a post-traumatic
stress that any soldier now fighting in Iraq or elsewhere in the world knows
only too well. Mr. Steidle's new role as a humanitarian and speaking out
in lectures and appearances nationwide, urging people around the world, but
specifically in the United States, to contact their local, state and national
political leaders to bring the genocide to a halt, has likely been a form of
therapy for the former marine. But his first concern is with getting the
world's attention focused on the people of Darfur. Brian Steidle has
co-authored a book with his sister Gretchen (who asked Brian the question that
titles this story, when he initially told her that he could not share the
thousands of powerful and graphic images of villagers being killed.) The
book, from which Ms. Sundberg and Ms. Stern's documentary borrows its title,
recalls an episode of indifference. In a local pub, one man said to him,
"so what -- what do I get out of it? If I help these people out, what do I
get?", when Steidle had spoken to him about the genocide in the Darfur region of
the Sudan.
"I was like, 'man, this guy, I mean' -- at that point the conversation's over,
and I'm not even talking with these people anymore, because they're
unreachable," Steidle said. In Steidle's travels, people like this, he says, are few, and
he added that most people want to help stop the ongoing genocide which has taken
close to half a million lives so far.
With the continuing murders of civilians in Darfur, and the mass killings that
took the lives of a million people in Rwanda during the nineties, and with little or
no world military opposition present in either African country, does Steidle
sense that the world's citizens generally care about Africa?
"I think the majority of people care about Africa and care about people that are
in a more desperate situation than we [in the U.S.] are. I think that
people want to help other people out if they can. It's definitely I would
say, more difficult with Africa than elsewhere in the world, because people
continue to hear about Africa again and again and again and they kind of get
tired of hearing about it and say, 'wow, man, Africa's a mess. The whole
continent is just a mess.' And there may be some issues and there may be
some problems there for sure, but I think that it's everybody's responsibility
in a better position to help those out that can't help themselves, whether it's
here at home, or whether it's abroad."
The world's media often views Africa as a continent full of disaster, with its
coverage of famines, civil wars and other political unrest, but often obscured
from global view are the positive stories about African businesses, scientists,
doctors and other aspects of life of the continent, the birthplace of human
civilization, as well as the place from which medicine, science, technology and
astrology began. Steidle himself admitted that if the continuing violence
and genocide going in right now in Darfur was instead occurring in an Eastern
European country -- as it did in Kosovo in the mid-to-late 1990's -- action by
governments of the world, spearheaded by the United Nations, would have taken
place already to put an end to the violence. "Absolutely. I
definitely think it would be different, and it would be different because there
would be more mainstream press covering the issue and I think that as a result
the public of these different countries from around the world would be more
interested in it."
A map of Africa. Sudan is in the north east, with the Darfur region
(unmarked on this map) in the western part of the Sudan, bordering the nation of
Chad. (Courtesy: Map of Africa U.K.)
Steidle said that "one of the biggest issues" about Darfur was that it was "hard
to understand and it's hard," Steidle said, "to cover this issue." He
reiterated this statement. "Darfur is a long ways away from anything."
(It is irresistible at this point to note to Mr. Steidle that Iraq is further
away from the United States in distance than Darfur is, depending from what part of the U.S. you
travel to get to it, yet many journalists from around the world have been sent there to
cover the ongoing situation in that country -- yet the chance to point this out escapes a
reporter's mind.)
What makes the Eastern European hypothetical more urgent, more actionable and
more palatable to people, Steidle says, is that that region's countries are more
accessible, and, "it's also because they look like us, they live like us.
They are similar to us. We can look at them and we can say, 'wow, that
person looks like me, that person lives like me in a house, they have a car . .
. it's all of those things that make them closer to home, whereas we look at
Africa, and we look at Darfur, I mean these people, they're living in grass
huts, they don't have electricity, they're walking several miles to get water.
That's something that most of the people in the western European countries, and
in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and other places in the world --
they don't understand it, and they don't get it. And they look at it . . .
and think all the time, you know, 'why are they living there? It's
terrible, they should move somewhere else,' and I think, 'it's their home!'"
Beyond this reality is the reality of historical context. For centuries
preceding this volatile moment in time on the African continent was the
onslaught of colonialism from numerous European countries on what is called in
some circles as "the dark continent", which still has an irreversible effect and
grip on Africa, a continent rich with history, royalty and dynastic empires
past, and bountiful in natural resources like oil, and minerals
like diamonds, cobalt and copper, among others. When the discussions of
famine and civil war take place on the nightly news, rarely is context and
overall history mentioned. Sudan was partly under British rule for
until as recently as 1955. The following year Sudan gained its
independence. Sudan is an oil-rich nation and less than ten years ago
began exporting oil. Its largest partner nation is China, which heavily
depends on the Sudan for its oil reserves. China has been pressured to be
vocal about trying to stop the bloodshed in the Darfur region.
Beyond geography and circumstance in the contrast between the situation in an
eastern European nation like Kosovo (where United Nations peacekeeping forces
and tactical armies went in to stop the bloodshed) and Darfur -- which to date
has not seen the military action that many in the world have appealed for -- the
inescapable specter of race and racism are issues that lurk like an elephant in
the corner of the room of the cocktail party, an elephant that everybody is too
drunk to notice. On this issue, Steidle says that he hadn't personally
seen or heard people in his travels speaking about race in the Darfur situation.
"I've run into the fact that they, they're not like us, but I've never run into
anybody that's mentioned anything about race and the fact that, 'oh, they're
black and we're white' - I've never run into that at all."
When asked whether race and racism were in his estimation an underlying factor
in the reason that world governments and the United Nations were slow if not
completely indifferent to the genocide in Darfur, Steidle said, "I actually
don't think so. . . I think it's just because they're different. I
actually don't think it has to do with skin color. And I may be completely
wrong about that. I don't look at that -- I normally don't even think of
things like that. I mean to me, they're people, and I lived with them for
more than a year. I look at them as Adam and John and Mohammed, you know,
and to me, it's just -- that's who they are."
The African Union observer force in Darfur. They were there to monitor
the ceasefire in the civil war in Sudan, which fell apart. Brian Steidle
was one of the African Union's observers. (Photo courtesy: International
Film Circuit)
Later, Steidle corrected something the reporter said during the interview.
"All the people in Darfur are Muslim. They're 99.9% Muslim. There's
very few Christians at all in the Darfur region. When [the Janjaweed] did
the war against the south (of Sudan), again, that was a racial, or ethnic
conflict, in addition to religious conflict -- that the south was mainly
Christian. But in Darfur, just ethnic -- because all the people are
Muslim, both the black Africans and the African Arabs, are Muslim.
Growing up, Steidle said he viewed Africa "as this giant, beautiful, outdoor
wildlife park." Steidle had traveled around the world after having this
view, though he added: "most of the people in the United States, view [Africa]
as that -- they view it as a place to go on safari. And that's what I
viewed it as. I didn't know much about what was happening on the ground
there. I remember hearing a little bit about apartheid but I didn't really
know. There's not much [mainstream American] press in Africa. There
have been increasing press and coverage on issues on the continent on the whole
within the last couple of years, but I viewed [Africa] as a wildlife park.
And as a matter of fact, I majored in wildlife resources in school because I
always wanted to go to Africa and see all the wildlife and things like that.
That's what I viewed it as. And now I realize that there are people there
and that they don't live the greatest lives, although most of them are happy and
they're wonderful, loving people, and that we should do whatever we can to help
them out." Steidle said that he stays in touch with some of the relief
workers and African Union team members who were in Chad when Steidle was there.
He has also met with some of the Darfurian refugees that Steidle met in the
United States he says, who would call relatives via cell phone in Darfur that
Steidle personally knew and met when he was there, and put him on the phone with
them.
In the documentary Steidle recalls his own naivete about the way governments
would respond when the light is shed on evil acts that have been perpetrated
against humanity. He mentions elements of this during the interview,
referencing the time about two or three years ago when after much debate and
deliberation, former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell declared that the
violence in Darfur constituted genocide. "To me, I thought, as well as
everybody else thought, that when our government would call it "genocide", that
would speed things up and that would make something happen, and obviously we've
shown that the Convention On Genocide that says that we have an obligation to
act . . . that 'act' doesn't mean military intervention as what I think is the
way it was intended when it was written. It means that 'now we can act
politically and involve ourselves in the UN process and all that other stuff.'"
The semantic parsing and etymologic variance where something as severe and
clear-cut as genocide is concerned is rendered meaningless to Steidle. "To
me, I don't think it is important to argue about what we should call it.
To me, it's kind of silly. I use the example often of an old lady walking
down the street being mugged by a bunch of kids. Here I am walking by and
I'm not gonna sit there and say, 'well, is this armed robbery? Is this
assault? Is this robbery? Is it attempted murder?' Try to
define what it is? No! What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna intervene
in the situation. I'm gonna stop it from happening. I'll give
her her purse back, I'm gonna grab these kids, hand them over to the cops, and
then determine what we need to call it. Because it's the most
urgent thing to do -- is we have to stop it. And so by debating
over what we should call it I think probably prolonged the situation and it
didn't help, it didn't help at all. What's happening is -- whether we want
to call it genocide, or human rights violations, or crimes against humanity, or,
whatever we call it -- doesn't really matter because what's happening is what's
happening. People are being killed, houses are being destroyed, women are
being raped, people are being displaced. That's what's happening. It
doesn't matter what we call it. We need to stop it."
Despite the political parsing from the Beltway, Steidle has a cadre of support
from U.S. presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle on putting a swift
end to the crisis in Darfur. "Senator Sam Brownback [a Republican from
Kansas] was a huge, huge supporter of this issue -- gave me his press guy and
offered me up his second office for me to work out of when I was in Washington
for a few months or so because he felt that this was so, so very important --
got me numerous, numerous interviews . . . he was extremely, extremely
supportive of me and my efforts. I know that [Democratic U.S. senator]
Barack Obama has also been very supportive of this issue, and [Democratic U.S.
senator Joe] Biden's very outspoken about this issue. I would like to see
-- and of course [Democratic New Mexico governor] Bill Richardson has done a lot
. . . ", Steidle said.
While the support on ending the genocide in Darfur from the aforementioned
candidates is firm, Steidle wishes for more support from one candidate.
"I'd like to see more from Hillary Clinton [Democratic U.S. senator] on this,
which to me is a little bit -- I'd just like to see more, you know, being that
her husband was in the presidential position when Rwanda was going on and he
even apologized to Rwanda that his greatest regret while he was in office was
not stopping anything, and yet here she is . . . a presidential candidate that
has, in my mind, not spoken enough about this issue and has not taken this issue
on as one of the personal issues." While the former First Lady has not in
Steidle's estimation been an outspoken advocate on ending the massacre in Darfur,
Steidle make it clear that he wanted to issue to be front and center at next
year's presidential race and election in the U.S., and be as much a part of the
discussion as any other issue -- in fact to make Darfur a mainstream issue.
"The same way healthcare is an issue, the same way Iraq is an issue -- I'd like
to see Darfur and the ending of a genocide be one of the biggest issues, and
that can even go further to things around the world, and to trying to alleviate
poverty and help those less fortunate. I think that all of that can be put
into one and Darfur can be the tip of that sphere."
Former U.S. marine Brian Steidle said he would like to see Democratic U.S.
senator Hillary Rodham Clinton be far more outspoken about the genocide in the
Darfur region of Sudan during her presidential campaign. (Photo: Jason
DeCrow/Associated Press)
In a March 2005 piece in The Washington Post entitled "In Darfur, My
Camera Was Not Nearly Enough", the former marine offers his take on resolving
the urgent crisis in the Darfur region: "I believe this conflict can be resolved
through international pressure and international support of the African Union.
Weapons sanctions and a no-fly zone throughout Darfur are critical. I have
seen that the mere presence of A.U. forces can discourage attacks and, with more
support, they could stop the conflict." During the interview with The
Popcorn Reel, Steidle urges people to get involved and demand action from
political leadership to bring the mass death to a halt. Organizations like
the Save Darfur Coalition and Global Grassroots (Gretchen's organization), are
just a few of the many organizations who have been vigorously active in the
fight to stop the seemingly endless bloodshed. It is worth noting that
last December outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wondered aloud how the
world could allow the "horror" in Darfur to go on. In May 2007, U.S.
president George W. Bush announced new sanctions against Sudan. Things
however, have been slow. Following an agreement in June 2007 by the
Sudanese government to have a 19,000-member hybrid African Union-United Nations
peacekeeping force, the UN Security Council needs to authorize funding for the
force, which is will not be deployed before 2008.
* *
*
To hear Brian Steidle say it, "The Devil Came On Horseback" was originally going
to be a very different documentary from the finished product: "When we [Steidle
and his sister Gretchen] first approached Annie and Ricki and said, 'hey, we
want to make a documentary', we were looking to make a documentary about the
women in the refugee camps and some of their socially entrepreneurial ideas . .
. that's originally what we wanted to do. And then Ricki looked into my
story and said, 'hey look, we think we'd really like to cover your story . . .
we'd like to cover how came involved in this.' My concern from the
beginning was that I didn't want this to be a story about me. I wanted it
to be a movie about what was happening in Darfur. And Annie and Ricki in
the process had been able to convince me that that the best way to tell the
story of the Darfurians and what's going on there is to tell it through me . . .
people can look at me and they can say, 'this is the guy who lives down the
block from me . . . I might find myself in this situation one day.' And so
because of that, I think they become more involved in the situation than they
probably would if we just covered it from, the standpoint of, 'here's a bunch of
refugees who've just been displaced from their homes. People can't really
relate to that."
Steidle has fielded more than a few questions about concerns about his filmed
story being just another white guy in a sea of black faces type of documentary,
with the native African population serving as a backdrop for the lone white
person who visits or is the centerpiece of a film or documentary, and he has
more to say about it when asked about it. "I think that some of the filming we
did for me specifically, was very difficult. For example, near Rwanda we
were taking part in the commemoration ceremonies for the twelfth year
anniversary . . . and there are tens of thousands of Rwandans [at the memorial],
they're mourning their family members crying and breaking down and everybody's
got candles . . . there's singing, and it's a really amazing powerful thing.
And [then there's] this camera, with a light on -- on me. Now this
is where I finally had it. I said, 'turn your light off, take your camera
off me. This isn't about me. [The response was], 'but Brian, we've
got to film this.' And I'm like, 'look -- I'm one of ten white
people here. And you've got a camera on me? This isn't about
me.'" Steidle recalled that everyone looked at him perplexed, wondering
why the cameras, in this midst of grieving African humanity, were being trained
on one white American male. You can hear Brian Steidle's anguish and
frustration with being the center of something like this, especially when he was
not seeking such a spotlight. Even if it was well beyond inappropriate to
train the lenses on him during such a poignant, grief-stricken event, one thing
that Steidle cannot help but acknowledge is that in his new role as an
humanitarian, he will fairly or unfairly get a lot more spotlight than perhaps
he would ever want. "I'm sensitive to those things," he said.
Steidle however, seems pleased with the resulting documentary.
This photograph to the contrary, humanitarian and former U.S. marine Brian
Steidle said that he did not want the new documentary "The Devil Came On
Horseback" to be a story about him. Steidle said that he had to be
convinced by filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern to allow them to tell the
story of the Darfur genocide using him as a vehicle. (Photo: International
Film Circuit)
"I think they've done a great job at it and so I'm happy with the end product,
but during the process it was very difficult for me to try and understand that
-- it was [always] to tell the story about Darfur and to not tell the story of
me." Inevitably in "Devil" though, Steidle is an unavoidable focus,
especially during the scenario of observing murder after murder after murder and
the burning of people, of villages and the mutilations of hundreds and hundreds
of young children -- many young girls -- as young as six or seven years old --
being handcuffed together and burned alive -- their last moments on earth, gone
too soon. Without the gun that he as a marine was so accustomed to,
Steidle was helpless. The only ammunition he had to point at the Janjaweed
marauding murderers was a camera that he pointed and shot at the killers armed
with machetes, guns, axes, knives and swords. More murder, more
photographs.
There are scenes in the film where Steidle's guilt overwhelms him. But was
there ever a time when that guilt turned to a feeling of being responsible for
the slaughter he witnessed, of feeling complicit in the crimes that are to this
day still being committed against the African villagers? Steidle considers
the answer to this question, and as he gives a "no" response, he stops
mid-stream. "You know, I guess you can say that if you see something
happening, and you have the ability to stop it, and you don't stop it, then that
does make you complicit. So, I guess you can put it that way. I
didn't really think about it at the time that I was pushed in it because I
thought that we were doing a good job. I thought that we were making a
difference. I thought that we would make a difference. And when I
finally saw that we weren't going to make a difference, that the African Union
[weren't going to be able to stop the genocide killings] that's when I finally
said, "well I can't be here anymore, or I will become complicit."
Right now, Steidle says "there are smaller military attacks on villages [in
Darfur], there is still continued bombings, but right now, since the Sudanese
government has destroyed 90% of the villages on the ground, they've switched to
denying aid access to these displaced persons and so now people are dying of
diseases and starvation and dehydration. All treatable and very, very
preventable . . . these people are now starving to death."
Brian Steidle appeals to people to do research on the Darfur-Sudan crisis, to go
on the Internet, to read books (including his own) and "then they can educate
themselves about the issue and then . . . find the tools that they can use to
make a difference." In the closing paragraphs of Steidle's Washington
Post piece, he writes, "[t]he attention paid to Darfur in Congress and at
the United Nations hasn't been enough. For the first time, we might be
able to stop genocide in the making. We must not fail the men, women and
children of Darfur."
Brian Steidle's book "The Devil Came On Horseback:
Bearing Witness To The Genocide In Darfur", is written by Steidle and Gretchen
Steidle Wallace. The documentary "The Devil Came On Horseback", directed
by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, is now playing in New York City at the IFC
Center through August 8, and will expand in numerous U.S. cities thereafter,
including San Francisco, where it will open on August 24.
