E-mail a friendBrian Steidle
airdate June 27, 2007
Brien Steidle is a former U.S. Marine captain who served 6 months in Darfur as an unarmed military observer for the African Union's peacekeeping mission to stop the ongoing genocide. He shares his experience in a book and documentary film, both titled The Devil Came on Horseback. Steidle has met with various State Department representatives and works with his sister, Gretchen, founder of Global Grassroots, to raise public awareness about the atrocities in Sudan and seek international support.
Brian Steidle
Tavis: Brian Steidle is a former U.S. Marine captain and a former military observer, and representative to the African Union, a role which placed him in the middle of the continuing genocide in Darfur. His acclaimed book about his time in Sudan is called "The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur." Here is a scene from the documentary of the same name.
[clip]
Tavis: Brian, nice to meet you.
Brian Steidle: Hey, pleasure, thank you.
Tavis: Glad to have you on the program. Everybody can obviously see the front of your t-shirt -- what footprint will you leave? But the back of it is even more effective. Will you show the back of your t-shirt?
Steidle: Mm-hmm, sure, sure.
Tavis: The back's even more fascinating. Stop out genocide. Save Darfur. Thank you for doing that.
Steidle: Thank you.
Tavis: This book starts with a very powerful story about a one-year-old girl who is shot. We have a copy of the picture, but why don't you tell the story about why you chose to start the book with that story?
Steidle: Sure. Well, it was one of the first opportunities I had to use my camera to take pictures of what was happening. And we showed up in this village of Alliet, the government had burned most of it down, people had been displaced. We went to that village to investigate how many people had been wounded, where the displaced were going, what was the story -- what had happened.
And we asked this large group of women and children, mainly, refugees now sitting under this tree who here was wounded. And a bunch of people raised their hand, but the woman right in front of us, walked to her and she held up this child for us to see, and it was a one-year-old girl. Her name's Mihad Hamid, and she'd been shot in the back.
And she was wheezing, and she was handing me this child because she thought, as a khawadja, a foreigner -- specifically a white male in her country -- that I must be a doctor. And so she was handing me this child to treat, and of course I didn't know what to do. I just took my pictures, and wrote a report.
Tavis: Tell me how you came to take pictures. Let me go a bit before that. How did you end up in Darfur? Let me start there before I -- because it's a fascinating story about how you got there, and even as fascinating a story about how you ended up taking pictures while you were there. But tell me how you got there.
Steidle: Well, I'd gotten out of the Marine Corps at the end of 2003. I was a captain, and I was looking for some adventure. Something that paid well, something somewhere outside the United States. And so I found a job on the Internet that said, patrol leader, Sudan, and I thought it sounded interesting.
Applied over the weekend, I got a FedEx package in the mail on Tuesday with a plane ticket and instructions, and I headed off to Sudan about two weeks later to go monitor a cease-fire in the north and south that had just newly -- it had been enacted for a few years and they were getting ready to sign a peace treaty, ending a 21-year civil war between the government and rebel groups. And after working there for seven months, I volunteered for a mission over in Darfur doing the same thing, but working underneath the African Union.
Tavis: Tell me how you end up taking pictures. So you're there to witness a cease-fire which doesn't, to my knowledge, normally include taking photos.
Steidle: Well, part of the mandate was to monitor a cease-fire. And as I say in the movie, what does that really mean? We're monitoring a cease-fire. There really wasn't a cease-fire. It was called a cease-fire but there was open fighting between both the parties. So any time there was any type of violation of this cease-fire agreement, we were to go write reports, do investigations of it.
Part of that was taking pictures to put those pictures in our reports as evidence of what had happened. And so, that's how I became the official photographer for the team.
Tavis: These photos, though, to extend the point, are not supposed to be released in "The New York Times," though.
Steidle: No, these photographs, as the African Union looks at it, that it's their property. Because I used my own camera and because I took the pictures myself, under international copyright laws, they are mine. If I'd used an African Union camera to take the pictures, it would have been different. But I took a little more than a thousand photographs while I was on the ground, documenting the atrocities that were happening.
And when I left the mission, I made sure that I kept all of them on my computer, and brought them back and trying to share them with the world so they can actually see what's happening.
Tavis: You started to share them with the world, as I referenced a moment ago. Some of them ended up in "The New York Times" and other places, and you tell the story that once you started putting these photos out, you started catching a little heat from certain circles about sharing those photos so liberally. Where was that heat coming from?
Steidle: Well, a few sources. First of all, the State Department initially had asked me not to show my photos. They thought that it was going to hinder their relationship with the Sudanese government. And as a result of me, who -- the Sudanese government looks at me as an official U.S. representative. someone from the United States government. I was working for a private contracting firm.
So they looked at it as the United States was releasing these photographs. It caused a little bit of a stink between the two governments. Instead of getting visas in 24 hours now, they have to wait two weeks or so to get them. But in addition to that, the African Union, my former employer, all of them threatened lawsuits against me to keep me quiet. And of course, none of them had any standing. They were just trying to scare me to close my mouth. And of course, that's not what I've done.
Tavis: In your mind, what was the strategy for releasing the photos? What were you trying to accomplish by releasing the photos?
Steidle: Well initially I didn't really have any intention to release these photos. I just wanted to keep them and share them with my friends and family to let them know where I'd been and what was going on there. And then after I met with Nicholas Christoff of "The New York Times," he said "If we want to make a change, if we really want to help these people out, we've got to share these photographs with people. Everybody has to see what's going on if we want this to stop." And so I said, "Okay, let's do it."
Tavis: What's it feel like when you're there to monitor a cease fire -- that's all you're supposed to do is to monitor, as you said a moment ago; write reports when you see it being violated. And yet to your earlier point also, you said there really isn't a cease-fire, but you're monitoring this cease-fire that doesn't really exist.
Beyond that, though, you're seeing all kinds of atrocities take place in front of your eyes, and you've got pictures to prove some of what you have seen. But you're an ex-Marine. How do you square what you're seeing with not being in a position -- and I might add, you're unarmed. You're an unarmed observer. So how do you square what you're seeing with being unable to do anything about it?
Steidle: Well, it's a difficult thing. When you're on there on the ground and you're in the act of monitoring -- watching what's happening, writing down notes, taking pictures -- you're there because you're hoping that those reports that we write are going to go somewhere and influence some government to actually make some change on the ground.
Until the point where I realized that it's not. I can't stop 3,000 government troops from attacking a village with 1,500 Janjaweed -- have a pocketknife. I can't do that. But by writing these reports and sharing this information with these embassies, we all hoped that we were doing what we could to stop what's going on on the ground. And in reality, it wasn't doing anything at all.
Tavis: So how do you navigate that feeling? How do you process believing that what you're doing can make a difference, but knowing that, to your point now, it really isn't?
Steidle: For me, it was leaving the mission, because I felt that I couldn't do anything more where I was. Leave the mission, come back, and then try to share it with the world so that we can build this international pressure, this grassroots movement that we're seeing now in the United States, to see that build up so that we can put influence on governments of the world to actually stop what's going on.
And so that's how I do it. I do it by going out to speak to people. If I can speak to an audience, a couple hundred people, and if one person leaves that room with some action points, something that they can do -- write a letter, call 1-800-GENOCIDE, check out a website and educate themselves and spread the word, then I feel like I've done my part and then I can move on and do it again and again.
Tavis: Finally, what do you think would have changed -- how different might things have been or be if the American government and the American people saw what you saw?
Steidle: If they were to see it firsthand, I think that everybody would most likely dedicate their -- everything and every resource they have and every connection they have into stopping it. And that's what I'm trying to do by bringing the book and the documentary, is to try to get them as close as I can to what was actually going on on the ground.
Tavis: His name is Brian Steidle. The book is called "The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur." Brian, thanks for your work. I'm glad to have you on the program.
Steidle: Thank you, pleasure.
Tavis: Thanks for raising the issue.
Steidle: Thank you.
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