The art of genocide

>> Images of mass murder are captured through children’s eyes at a new exhibit at McGill

DRAWINGS OF DARFUR HOME: “Dark Attack”

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

All genocides have different icons. The Holocaust had Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge the Killing Fields, Rwanda the machete. The genocide in the western Sudanese province of Darfur is still unfolding, and images from that sprawling desert charnel house have yet to sink into the public’s consciousness.

But that does not mean that there are no arresting visuals. On Monday, Oct. 1, the McGill faculty of law’s Centre for Human Rights & Legal Pluralism will open its “Imagining the Unthinkable: L’exposition du génocide,” a sobering multimedia art show of works dedicated to the mass slaughter of innocents over the past decades. The exhibit opens before the Centre hosts their Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide from Oct. 11–13. A large part of the show is set aside for a handful of hundreds of children’s drawings from Darfur, each showing images of devastation and suffering meted out by the hands of the Sudanese government or its sanctioned militias, the dreaded horse- and camel-mounted janjaweed.

“Bombing”

What’s unique about these drawings isn’t so much what they portray—tragically, these images aren’t new, only the setting is—but the good they might actually do. According to Karen Crawley, a McGill Ph.D. candidate and one of the exhibit’s organizers, drawings similar to the ones on display at McGill are being used as legal evidence at the International Criminal Court in Holland. “These young children are artists as well as witnesses,” she says. “The drawings break down the barrier between law and art, while acknowledging the centrality and artificiality between them.”

The story behind the drawings is just as fascinating. In 2004, Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, an American pediatrician working with Doctors Without Borders, went to Darfur with 25 boxes of crayons and 400 pages of sheets of paper, and asked the children he was treating to draw what their homes looked like. When he came back, he smuggled with him 125 drawings of armoured personnel carriers, machine-gunners, attack helicopters and airplanes—and dead bodies.

“Janjaweed”

“You’ll notice they are all very similar,” says Arezou Farivar, a second-year law student and event co-organizer. “They’re almost all identical. They’re the same images, just from different crayons.”

“The sheer impossibility of that being a coincidence” is what is being used as evidence, adds Crawley.

As compelling and newsworthy as the Darfur component is, it is only one of several. The destruction of the Roma communities in World War II is also addressed. “The Roma are the unsung story of the Holocaust,” says Nandini Ramanujam, the Centre’s executive director. “There are various estimates on the number of people who were killed. But we do know that, when the Nazis came, people were happy to get rid of them…. There was a big difference between the Jewish and Roma communities. The Roma were always marginalized, they were never empowered, they never had a voice or an opinion. They were completely disenfranchised.”

Other elements reflect the experiences of Cambodia, Rwanda and Guatemala. Local comics artist and Rwandan refugee Rupert Bazambanza will also show some works.

KILLING FIELDS REVISITED:
Exhumation at Choeung Ek, Cambodia

“There are so many different definitions of genocide,” says Farivar. “Not all of them are as well-documented [as the Holocaust], and the victims never got the justice they deserve.”

“Imagining the Unthinkable” opens on Monday, Oct. 1 at McGill’s Chancellor Day Hall (3660 Peel) and runs until Oct 14. For more info, see www.mcgill.ca/humanrights.