What would it be like actually to lose everything, to be torn from anything and anyone familiar and to spend months or years living in fear of leaving the safety of home, where people cannot trust the authorities or rely on the normal avenues of help? On Wednesday, March 23rd, 2001, the audience at the Human Rights Film Festival in Winnipeg had the chance to hear first-hand accounts of survivors of war and genocide and to gain a new perspective on how lives are disrupted by war and persecution, not only in the past, but also today.
The Human Rights Film Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba
The Human Rights Film Festival began in 2010 as a means of increasing awareness of social inequality and racial discrimination, as its history page on the Manitoba Association of Rights and Liberties website states. The hope is that the issues raised in the festival will prompt discussion and lead to greater understanding of the issues and to actions that could help bring an end to discrimination or at least help alleviate the problems. The session on Wednesday evening focused on three of the major atrocities of the last century: the Holocaust, the civil war in Sudan that has killed or displaced over two million people, and the ongoing slaughter of thousands of people in Darfur, Sudan.
The evening began with the viewing of On Our Watch, a documentary about the ongoing genocide and terrorization in Darfur, Sudan. As the Public Broadcasting Corporation’s web page on the documentary states, Darfur has been the object of a brutal government-supported campaign to terrorize and subdue the population. While people are killed and brutalized, the rest of the world is doing little to stop the violence. After detailing the problem, however, the film ends on a note of muted hope.
Personal Stories of Survival in Poland and Sudan
Following the film came personal accounts, beginning with a Holocaust survivor from Poland, who talked about his experiences as a Jewish child in Europe, hiding in apartments and in underground shelters to escape the Nazis. His eventual move to Canada brought safety and the chance to pursue a career, but he never saw his family again, a fact that continues to weigh on his mind.
The second story came from a Sudanese student currently at the University of Manitoba. Although he is now settled in a home, working towards a career, he was once one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, fleeing from the army through Africa to a refugee camp and finally to Canada. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Children in War web page on the Sudanese war, among the hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes by the war, which began in 1983, are about 20,000 children, mostly boys between seven and seventeen, who left their families and homes to avoid being conscripted into the army. Many of these “lost boys” died along the way to Ethiopia and then to the refugee camp in Kenya, but some of those who survived have since been reunited with their families or found new homes in the west.
How can people survive when they have to escape from a government apparently bent on destroying its own people? Many people might never personally experience a situation like that, but through the stories of Darfur, the Holocaust, and the Lost Boys of Sudan, they could get a glimpse of what many people around the world continue to experience today.
Susan Huebert - My name is Susan Huebert, and I'm a writer and editor from Winnipeg, Manitoba. I've always enjoyed words, and I graduated with a Bachelor ...
