Deseret News, UT
April 1 2007
‘Devil Came on Horseback’ details genocide in Darfur
By Dennis Lythgoe
Deseret Morning News
THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK: BEARING WITNESS TO THE GENOCIDE IN
DARFUR, by Brian Steidle and Gretchen Steidle Wallace, Public
Affairs, 230 pages, $29.95
Genocide, the systematic destruction of an entire race of
people – or an ethnic or religious group – has been practiced around
the world for centuries. Often it is ignored by the rest of the world
because it seems too complicated to intervene.
During the past century we saw documented examples of genocide
when the Turks killed more than a million Armenians in 1915, Hitler’s
Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, Indonesia
purged hundreds of thousands of alleged Communists in the 1960s, the
Khmer Rouge conducted huge massacres in Cambodia in the ’70s and ’80s
and tribe-on-tribe slaughter overwhelmed Rwanda in 1994.
Now it is happening again in Darfur.
Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine, was one of three Americans
hired by the African Union to document the situation in Darfur, which
had been classified as genocide by September 2004, the month he
arrived. He thought that if he witnessed and documented numerous
incidents of genocide, outside governments would intervene and stop
it.
When it didn’t happen, Steidle resigned his position and began
an effort to educate people around the world to the atrocities he has
seen. Essentially, "The Devil Came on Horseback" tells the story of
the Arab government’s systematic destruction of its black African
citizens, during which, allegedly, anyone of any age who is
considered "too dark" must be killed.
Steidle wrote the book with his sister, Gretchen Steidle
Wallace, as part of his campaign – and a documentary played at the
Sundance Film Festival this year. It’s a seamy, horrendous account of
massive killing with impunity.
The author swears to the accuracy of his descriptions of what
he witnessed, as recorded in audio journals, e-mails, recollections
of phone conversations from Sudan, still photographs, notes, maps and
sketches written in many notebooks.
In graphic terms, Steidle describes the huddling together of
children who were then burned alive; he saw large groups of men also
burned alive because they were trying to protect their families; he
met a woman carrying a wounded child, a child shot through the back
before her mother was brutally killed.
Incident after incident – and he had no power to stop it.
The question he asks is why doesn’t the United Nations and/or
the United States jump into this catastrophic situation before
millions more are killed?
The book is sobering and disturbing.