‘Devil’ in Darfur

“Lost Boys of Sudan” and “God Grew Tired of Us” showed us the hardships that Sudanese civil war survivors faced when they relocated to the United States. Now, “The Devil Came on Horseback” turns the tables and turns up the heat, revealing the horrors that an American man discovered when he took a job in Sudan’s Darfur region as a cease-fire monitor.

That man is former U.S. Marine Capt. Brian Steidle, and he tells his harrowing story here with the help of filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.

It’s a film with an agenda, for sure, and given this, the directors made a wise choice in selecting Mr. Steidle as their protagonist. He’s likable, well-spoken, and has all-American good looks — plus, he served in the Marine Corps and boasts a family military history that dates back to the American Revolution. With this combination of attributes, he’s somehow able to strike that nerve — the one that may make some of us uncomfortable enough to ask, “Why aren’t we doing something to save Darfur again?” — in a way that no other cinematic spokesman has to date.

The directors pieced together the movie from Mr. Steidle’s materials (videos, photos, letters home, etc.), news clips, graphics and maps, and footage that their cameramen and other “renegades” on the ground in Darfur took. Occasionally, the timeline gets a bit hazy, but the images never lose their sting.

In 2004, Mr. Steidle went to work with the African Union as an unarmed military observer in Sudan. His job was to document any violations of the fragile cease-fire that had just put an end to the country’s 20-year civil war. Several months after his arrival, he transferred to the western region of Darfur.

There, groups of men called the “Janjaweed” (or “devil on a horse”) were torching villages, ripping bodies apart, burning children, raping women and committing other unspeakable acts.

Publicly, the Arab-dominated government denied supporting these raids on black Africans, yet the information that Mr. Steidle and his team gathered told a different story. He and his men believed they were watching a government-sponsored genocide, an ethnic cleansing, yet they were powerless to defend people from it. All they could do was perform body counts, write reports and recommendations, and snap photographs.

At the end of his contract, Mr. Steidle returned to the U.S. in hopes of raising awareness. New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof broke his story and published several of the 1,000 photographs that Mr. Steidle had taken in Darfur and smuggled into this country.

Mr. Steidle soon found himself swept up in a torrent of speaking engagements and political rallies, and also returned to Africa to visit refugee camps in Chad and attend the genocide memorial in Rwanda. He had intended to retire several years after his stint in Darfur, but life turned him in a different direction.

His plea is for military intervention from the United Nations or the U.S., so that forces can do what he wasn’t able to. Small gains toward his goal have been made, but it has yet to be achieved.

Will “Devil” win over enough converts for the save Darfur cause? That’s uncertain. Will moviegoers be haunted by what Mr. Steidle saw? Almost surely.

***

TITLE: “The Devil Came on Horseback”

RATING: Not rated (highly disturbing images)

CREDITS: Directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern

RUNNING TIME: 85 minutes

WEB SITE: www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS