Darfur

“I was sleeping when the attack on Disa started. I was taken away by the attackers, they were all in uniforms. They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day we were beaten and they told us: ‘You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no god.’ At night we were raped several times. They guarded us with arms and we were not given food for three days.”
       - A female refugee from Disa, a Masali village in West Darfur,
         in Goz Amer refugee camp, Chad, May 2004

In 2003, while the world’s eyes were anxiously trained on the war in Iraq, the first genocide of the 21st century was brewing in one of the most remote places in Africa – Darfur, a region in the largest African nation, The Republic of Sudan. It began in February 2003, a storm of violence that went virtually unnoticed by those outside of the region. In the first two-and-a-half years of what has clearly become genocide, nearly 400,000 people were destroyed by violence, disease, and malnutrition. This human slaughter continues today.

Proof’s book Darfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan traces the conflict through a series of photographs that commemorate those who have died and those who have survived. The book’s stirring photographs, taken during the past two decades by prominent photojournalists Lynsey Addario, Pep Bonet, Colin Finlay, Ron Haviv, Oliver Jobard, Chris Steele-Perkins, Sven Torfin, and Kadir van Lohuizen; essays and testimonials from prominent writers, actors and humanitarians such as Jonathan Alter, Larry Cox, Mia Farrow, Colin Finlay, Ryan Gosling, Susan Myers, Nicholas D. Kristof, and John Prendergast, put a human face on the atrocities committed in Darfur and will hopefully inspire the public to take action against the ongoing violence.