The announcement this week that the UN will be sending an international force of over 25,000 peacekeepers to the Darfur region of Sudan comes as a rare bit of positive news concerning a conflict -- long ago designated a genocide by the U.S. Congress, among others -- that has claimed between 200,000 and 400,000 lives since it began four years ago. The development comes at the same time that a new documentary about Darfur, The Devil Came on Horseback, opens in U.S. theaters with the explicit aim of raising awareness about the genocide and calling Western powers to action. But as with certain other elements of the "Save Darfur" movement, the film is much better at telling us what is happening in the region than what outside powers can practically do about it.
Focusing on the experience of former Marine Brian Steidle, who accepted a job as a peacekeeper in Sudan only to learn that the Khartoum government was authorizing attacks on civilians in Darfur, The Devil Came on Horseback is a moving piece of art as advocacy. It chronicles Steidle's shock at discovering swaths of dead bodies while patrolling the area and his decision to photograph the atrocities and eventually share the images with New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who had been calling attention the crisis in his pieces. Steidle comes across as a very sympathetic figure, a reluctant hero who went to Africa and was changed by the horrible things he saw around him. There's undeniably something off-putting about the structure of the film -- yet another depiction of an African crisis as seen through the eyes of a lone white protagonist -- but one cannot really fault the directors (Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern) for believing they'd reach a wider audience for their message with an American at the center of the story.
What one should fault them with is utterly neglecting the context in which this genocide has happened. Anyone who comes to The Devil Came on Horseback hoping to learn about Sudan will be disappointed to discover that, by the end of the film, they are far more knowledgeable about Brian Steidle's family than about the Janjaweed, the Bashir government, or the rebel groups in Darfur . There is hardly any mention of the origins of the conflict. Steidle's photographs of brutalized bodies are shown with little explanation of whom and what they depict or where they were taken. The Devil Came on Horseback is a catalog of horrors with far too little explanatory text.
The directors might argue that the film doesn't aim to be a primer on Darfur so much as a tool for raising awareness and an urgent call to action. But neither the filmmakers nor Steidle ever venture to suggest what action. Steidle constantly tells the film's audience to write their congressmen, but he does not say what should be put in the letter. Are we supposed to ask, say, for American troops to be sent to Darfur?
There was a time when human rights activists and liberal interventionists could pull at heart strings and urge such action from an unproblematic moral high ground, but the disaster of the Iraq war has made many people less comfortable with the prospect of deep U.S. involvement in complicated foreign conflicts. That may be a mistaken reaction to Iraq, but it's a contextual factor that ought to be engaged. More generally, for a film about Darfur to utterly ignore the question of what solutions are actually feasible seems startlingly obtuse -- particularly when one considers that the art-house viewers in urban centers who will be the primary audience for this film are likely to be fully aware already that horrible things are happening in Darfur. What is needed is a sense of what we can do about it beyond the rallies and the letters and the websites. The Devil Came on Horseback adds little to that conversation.
That the film is coming out at the same time that the UN Security Council has authorized this major new troop deployment provides a telling contrast. There is no question, after all, that activists who have been calling for action in the conflict are largely responsible for the news. But they have been working since 2003; a film coming out four years later that takes as its aim merely the raising of awareness seems insufficient. The UN force deployment offers a glimmer of hope in the conflict (though exactly who will be providing the troops and how much of a mandate they will have to stop the violence is still being debated). The next wave of activism should concern how to support such a mission and what we hope to achieve with it. The Devil Came on Horseback movingly answers the question of why we must do something in Darfur. It would have been a better film if it cared to address the questions that follow from that answer.
