Beyond the Multiplex

"The Devil Comes on Horseback": The first Holocaust of the 21st century, as a ratings flop
This shouldn't be a competitive sport or anything, but I'm pretty sure that Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback" has the most horrifying images I have ever seen in a motion picture. There aren't words to describe them, really. There are pictures of people who have been tortured and burned alive, children who have been chained in place and hacked to pieces, corpses reduced to ghostly outlines of ash on the ground, people so badly mutilated you can't identify them as male or female, child or adult. You won't sleep well after you see this movie, and I don't suppose you should.

One could argue that Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah," which includes very few images of atrocity, is a more chilling exploration of genocidal history. But "The Devil Came on Horseback" has galvanized audiences at film festivals around the world precisely because it presents, in its calm, measured fashion and without much ceremony, pictures that nobody really wants to see.

Most of those photographs were taken by Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine Corps captain who served for six months as an unarmed military observer in and around the Sudanese province of Darfur, not realizing at the time that he was one of a tiny number of documentary eyewitnesses to the ongoing massacres that have resulted in about 450,000 deaths and perhaps 2.5 million refugees, according to some estimates. In 2003, the long-running civil war between Sudan's Arab-dominated government and the largely black southern rebels sputtered to a close, freeing the government to focus on a few unrelated bands of ragtag rebels in Darfur.

As everyone except Sudan's government now admits, the Arab militias known as "janjaweed" (linguistic experts differ, but Steidle says it means "devil on a horse") who have been killing off or driving out the black population of Darfur are funded, supported and egged on by Sudanese authorities, often with air support from Antonov bombers. The African Union sent a tiny group of observers to Sudan, with the faint hope of quelling the violence, toward the end of 2003. Among them was Steidle, who snapped away with his telephoto lens as he watched janjaweed raiders shoot children, rape women, massacre men and burn entire villages to the ground.

Of course "The Devil Came on Horseback" is about a big issue, a horrifying conflict most of us, including our highest officials, have chosen not to learn too much about. But it's also about a smaller, exemplary issue, the transformation of an ordinary, jocked-out military dude into a crusader. Steidle says he joined the African Union's observer force mostly out of a taste for travel and exotic adventure; he was hoping to retire soon, at age 35, and spend the rest of his life on his sailboat. He came back from the Sudan partway through 2004 and tried to forget about the whole thing.

But after realizing that he was virtually the only American who had seen the Darfur massacres personally, and could prove it, he became something of a national conscience and gadfly, testifying before Congress, speaking at rallies, talking to journalists whenever and wherever he could. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times published several of his pictures to accompany an Op-Ed, which created a brief wave of media interest in Darfur, and in the question of whether the West could or should do something.

Steidle says he often had the thought in Darfur that if Americans could see what he was seeing, Marines would be there inside a week. Fearsome as they are to Darfur's villagers, the janjaweed are bands of a few dozen men with automatic weapons and Toyota pickup trucks. Two or three battalions of Western troops with helicopters and armored vehicles would suffice to stop them; a few more could disperse or kill them. (And believe me, after you see this movie you won't feel too many scruples about using force against those people.)

But the people of Darfur, predictably, have become more collateral damage in the bottomless fiasco documented in Ferguson's film. Both in the political and financial senses, U.S. policy makers believe they cannot afford to intervene in another overseas conflict, and the tense racial politics that affects all interactions between the West and the developing world, between the United Nations and the barely functioning African Union, has meant that bureaucrats continue to dither in big cities while the killing goes on.

Steidle and his activist sister continue to work for Darfur-related charities and visit the refugee camps across the border in Chad (for obvious reasons, he can't return to the Sudan). He has written a book, and testified before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, giving names, dates and places of the massacres he observed. But if the court hands down indictments, who's going to go into that hellhole and arrest the suspects? To paraphrase Gandhi's famous quip, international justice sounds like a good idea, but we haven't seen it yet. Ultimately, if the American people are too numb, too infotained and too narcotized to care, then we don't have anyone to blame for Darfur, or for the next Darfur, whenever and wherever it happens.

"The Devil Came on Horseback" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Aug. 17 in Boston and Helena, Mont., Aug. 24 in San Francisco, Sept. 7 in Nashville and Sept. 21 in Seattle. Other screenings include July 28 in Philadelphia, July 29 in Rochester, Minn., July 31 in Sedona, Ariz., Aug. 6 in Wilmington, N.C., Aug. 23 in Huntington, N.Y., Aug. 28 in Norfolk, Va., Sept. 7 in St. Louis and Sept. 20 in Milwaukee. See Web site for complete schedule.

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