Activist honored at UNO for defending the dying in Darfur

Five years ago, Brian Steidle took a picture that changed his life forever.He had traveled to a village in Darfur as an unarmed military observer to gather photographic evidence for the African Union and monitor the progress of the cease-fire between the Sudanese government and African rebel groups.

However, as Steidle told an audience of more than 300 people at the UNO Alumni Center on Oct. 28, what he caught on film was anything but peaceful.

"The government troops and Janjaweed air militias had just come in and attacked this village, and they had driven most of the people out, killed scores of people, burned half the village down," he said. "We started looking around for people, we found a few elderly individuals left in the village. They were too old to flee, so they just stayed there. We asked this one gentleman, 'Where's everyone gone?' and he said, 'You know, north, south, east, west, they've all just left.'"

Hours later, they found the displaced villagers.

"There was a small group of women and children huddling under this tree," Steidle said. "When I say small, about as many people as are in this room right now. We went up to this group and we said, 'Hey, who here's wounded?' We had to split up because we had this limited time of day and we had to move fast. Half the people raised their hands. I looked down at the woman right in front of us, and she holds up her child for us."

The 1-year-old girl had been shot in the back, Steidle said, pointing out her injuries in the photo during his "Hope for Darfur" lecture. He explained that the woman holding her was actually her aunt, who had scooped the infant and her 3-year-old brother from their dead mother's arms and fled.

"This to me was a symbol of the senselessness of what was happening," he said. "She was holding her because she thought I was a doctor, because why would a white man show up in her village and ask about wounded people? I was supposed to heal her. I didn't have any cures for her, I took my pictures, and that was what started me on the documentation of this genocide."

Steidle shared this and many other stories of horror and hope during UNO's 11th annual Shirley and Leonard Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights.

Described in the program as "a soldier turned human rights activist," Steidle was honored for his service in Darfur and as the executive director of Helping Other People Everywhere. He founded the humanitarian non-profit organization with his wife to promote artists involvement in social campaigns, programs and educational projects.

"We're here on behalf of Darfur people to honor a Darfur hero, a man who sacrificed his own life to save Darfurians," said Bakheit A. Shata, founder and executive director of the Darfur Community Organization. "He left his own family and country and went to Darfur and has done a great job."

Steidle has spoken at more than 500 national public awareness events in universities and cities, testifying in the U.S. Congress and the United Kingdom Parliament and meeting and working with U.S. and international officials and agencies to shed light, raise awareness and demand political action to save the people of Darfur from their government.

However, Steidle feels his efforts are eclipsed by the magnitude of the problem. In 1998, he said, 258,000 people starved to death in Sudan, in addition to the 250,000 people who were killed in the North-South wars due to ethnic cleansing. The 22-year-old Darfur conflict is not one of religion, as the government projects it to be, Steidle said, but one of ethnicity and a struggle over depleting resources and land.

The Sudanese government has been recruiting people from outside of Darfur such as Arab militia groups and the Janjaweed to kill civilians, according to the evidence he and others gathered and presented to the United Nations, .

He is frustrated with the UN's slow and ineffective policies to find an effectively forceful ultimatum, which stems from the lack of cooperation with China. Evidence has been reported by news sources such as BBC News and organizations like Human Rights First, which target the Chinese government as responsible for supplying the government weapons in exchange for oil.

"I do not believe that any other country in the world will be able to change their lives," he said. "We are the only ones that are strong enough to stand up against China at the UN and say, 'Hey, this is what we're going to do, we're going to make a difference, we're going to save people's lives, because it's right. Not because we get anything from it. We don't want their oil, we don't want their resources, only because it's right.' It's hard for a government to make that decision if it doesn't benefit us somehow."

Two of the biggest problems in refugee camps are gathering firewood and finding water. Forced to leave the camps, many women are often attacked by bandits, raped and killed. Women who admit being raped often get thrown into prison for having sex outside of marriage. In jail, he said, they are beaten and raped again.

Steidle said an estimated 90 to 95 percent of all villages in Darfur have been destroyed, forcing refugees to form makeshift camps with no food, water, medical care or other necessary resources.

"The majority of the people do not die in the conflict, they don't die from soldiers killing them, they don't die from them burning these villages," he said. "They die in these camps. They die of starvation, they die of dehydration, they die of dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, all things that are treatable in our countries, but they are without medicine. Without clean water, without food, people die.