It’s never been easy to chronicle the conflicts in the Sudans. The intimate and gruesome civil war that has killed at least fifty thousand people and displaced more than two million, in South Sudan, stops and starts, again and again, fuelled by political rivals unwilling to compromise. The violence in the Darfur region, where government troops and rebel fighters have long clashed over access to land and resources, has mutated in recent decades, as government-recruited Arab militias have committed mass killings—and, in several instances, ethnic cleansing—of black Muslim populations accused of supporting rebel groups. The rebel movements have splintered, and the government of the defiant Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who in 2009 was indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, continues its offensives in Darfur, driving hundreds of thousands of Sudanese from their homes. The area is both difficult to access and dangerous.
Photographing the Sudanese presents its own set of challenges. Many of the non-Arab residents of Sudan have skin that ranges in tone from deep brown to pitch black. They are shades found everywhere on the African continent, but the people of Sudan in particular have not always been photographed with a sensitivity that captures their true likenesses. In too many pictures from the region, they are dim figures in the background, unlit to the point of being shadows, their faces blank or distorted. When the camera does capture their expressions, they are often inscrutable, hinting at despair yet kept at a remove. But the American photographer Adriane Ohanesian, who spent time with some of the thousands of Darfuri women and children who have escaped ground and aerial government attacks by hiding in Darfur’s Marra Mountains, has produced photos that are striking in their closeness to the people at the conflict’s center.
For a series shot on panoramic film last year, Ohanesian also followed rebel fighters of the Sudan Liberation Army in the Marra Mountains. The images are vast, stretching the expanses of sandy, shrub-spotted volcanic peaks in an earthy kaleidoscope of vivid brown, green, pink, and yellow. The rebels in Ohanesian’s photos look alternatively focussed, bored, and bemused—ordinary boys and men caught up in war. Armed with heavy weaponry, they ride camels, smoke cigarettes, patrol, idle, and waste time, getting ready for whatever battle may come. Her photos of the women and children who have made a home in the caves of the Marra Mountains are similarly humanizing: mothers hold their children tightly, waiting expectantly (or maybe exhaustedly) and, in one image, even smiling among themselves. (A tender portrait of a seven-year-old boy severely burned by a government bomb won a prize at this year’s World Press Photo Awards.)
“Even as the ethnic cleansing continues, it seems that no one is watching,” Ohanesian said. When she was in the Marra Mountains last year, the territory was rebel-controlled, providing one of the last sanctuaries for Darfuris. But in recent months, the Sudanese government has said it has taken control of most of Jebel Marra, leaving the fate of those refugees uncertain. Still, no one seems to be watching.
