When Brian Steidle left the U.S. Marine Corps in 2004, he went to Sudan, to monitor a ceasefire between rebel groups and the government. What he ended up monitoring was some of the worst violence of the Sudanese government’s ongoing carnival of genocide in Darfur.
“If the world really knew what was going on in Darfur, there would be troops here in a week,” Steidle wrote to his sister early in his tour. The Devil Came on Horseback, a feature documentary on Steidle’s witness, is a vivid presentation of what is still going on there.
For reasons that, the film explains, have something to do with resources and development and representation, black African rebels in Darfur attacked the Arab central government several years ago. In response, the government — using infrastructure built by Chinese oil companies — arms and trains local Arab militias, the janjaweed (“devil on horseback” is the translation). Then, with the Sudanese air force softening up their targets, it sets them loose on village after village of civilians.
Trying to sculpt the violence into a taut storyline, directors Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern employ faux-news b-roll and breathless, contrived radio reports. Though not terribly effective, it creates a prescient mood: the butchery in Darfur doesn’t seem to begin, or wax, or wane, or end. Nor does Steidle’s awareness of it slowly deepen or complicate. One day he hears rumors of this. Then he sees it firsthand. There’s no gradual, complicated reaction when looking at the bodies of schoolgirls who’d been handcuffed inside a hut and set on fire.
Immolation is a janjaweed favorite, along with looting, castration, rape and plucking the eyeballs out of unarmed civilians’ heads before shooting them. Truce-monitor Steidle would arrive afterward — when there were so many flies on the bodies, their buzzing sounded like high-voltage power lines — and take pictures. These are the film’s big reveal. Sudan takes care to make sure no journalists ever get close enough to snap comparable shots. Each might easily be worth a million words. But the transaction is so large it’s almost impossible to make. One not particularly memorable image is of a man who’d been burned to death. He was smeared across the orange dirt, in some places he’s solid charcoal, in other spots just loose ash.
Images of genocidal brutality aren’t easy things to compare and contrast. Still, Darfur’s are unique. They aren’t the rows of remote, fleshless skulls from Cambodia’s killing fields or the still, black and white architectural photos of Nazi gas chambers and ovens. They are action shots.
Steidle took extensive notes too, and filed reports, and sent them to — well, no one knows exactly. Wherever they went they didn’t accomplish much. Frustrated, Steidle knew what he wanted to do.
Thinking back on it, and bringing into sharp focus exactly what would be required to save Darfur, Steidle tells the camera he feels guilty “for not sticking my knife in the neck of the general who was burning villages.” Because he couldn’t, he quit.
In early 2005, shortly Nicholas Kristof published Steidle’s photos in New York Times column. Media outlets are calling left and right. He’s on all the talk shows. He testifies before Congress. He tours the country, showing his photos and reports with anyone who’ll listen.
No one who listens to him can claim not to know what’s going on in Darfur. The crowds he addresses seem genuinely affected. The people who have the power to do something about seem to be waiting for something more. Condoleezza Rice listens to Steidle and thanks him for his service. Then the State Department quietly asks him to stop showing his photos. When asked on a TV show what the United States can do to stop the slaughter in Darfur, Senator Barack Obama urges Americans to contact their senators.
Steidle realizes how naïve he was when he thought it was just a matter of getting the message out. He manages to keep hope alive though — even if, it’s sporadically on life support. The Devil Came on Horseback is a necessary and powerful work that rightly pricks a collective conscience that treats talking about genocide as more or less equivalent to stopping genocide. For all its moral convocation, The Devil Came on Horseback doesn’t summon a rousing feeling. Instead, it leaves a sensation of vast, moral emptiness and the almost imponderable distance between feeling and doing.
“Life goes on,” the cynic might say as the house lights go up. Yes it does. But — as the plain and unexpected scene that The Devil Came on Horseback closes on suggests — it’s precisely for that reason that there’s still hope for that we might to do the right thing by Darfur.
– Louis Wittig writes from New York.