“One Day” aired on Current TV

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A newly edited version of our short film about the rebels in Darfur titled, “One Day with the S.L.A.,” is now being aired on Current TV under the name “One Day in Darfur.” If you don’t subscribe to Current TV, you can watch it online.

This piece was originally commissioned by Wholphin DVD Magazine , appearing on Wholphin No. 5. Current TV added some of our footage and interviews with David Martinez and I. I’m happy with the way it turned out. 

Darfur multimedia piece on Slate

Monday, May 05, 2008

“Darfur: Rebellion from the Margins,” is a multimedia piece I produced on the Darfur crisis and was recently published by Slate.  You can view the piece, here. To read a description of this project, read the full entry of this posting.

Darfur’s peace process is held back by pressure for a political revolution

Sunday, November 25, 2007

A UN/AU “hybrid” force is set to enter Darfur in early 2008, giving civilians the protection they have been demanding for years. On my last trip to Darfur, I visited several villages that were bombed by the Sudanese air force this year and others that had been attacked and looted by the janjaweed militias. If the 26,000 troop force actually does enter Darfur, civilians will surely be safer than they have been over the past several years.

But there are a lot of problems that international peacekeeping will bring. A popularly supported rebel movement is fighting for equal distribution of wealth and equal political participation but the UN and AU seem more interested in making a quick deal in order to bring about a much needed end to the violence. Darfuris still have high hopes for removing the junta from power and ushering in a new government, one with less centralized power, but international peacekeeping is likely to get in the way of this.

Read a piece that I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle on some of the issues around intervention in Darfur here.

Darfur’s Divided Rebellion

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Darfur’s rebel movement is trying to piece itself together after its implosion into over fifteen factions in the past year. Many commanders I met in Darfur and Chad blamed their political leaders for causing the factioning and are trying to sidestep the leadership that many say no longer represents them.

As rebel leaders met in Tanzania to talk about reunifying their movement in preparation for peace talks with the government, SLA commander Ali Mukhtar Ali, pictured on the right, prepared his battalion for an attack against government forces. 

I reported on rebel factioning for The Nation after seeking out rebel leader’s in N’djamena, Chad and entering Darfur for five weeks to spend time with the rebel groups themselves.

Back from Darfur

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

In the first week of September, David Martinez and I left Darfur at a walking pace, moving for one week on a horse and cart through valleys between stony green and brown hills with grasses whose sound in the wind reminded me of Minnesota corn fields. One week after we started, we were at the Chadian border, bribing the authorities who threatened to steal our passports. A week after that, I was back in California, adjusting to the universe of difference between Sudan and the U.S. that always seems impossible to understand. A couple weeks after that, we start sitting in front of our computers, watching the recordings of those two months that we spent between Chad and Darfur, wondering how we are going to make what we witnessed living with the rebels into a movie. Now we’re in the middle of it, crafting it all into a story for everyone to digest. We hope to make a movie that will provide political and economic context to what is happening in Darfur, while showing a slice of rebel and civilian life that is far from abject. We recently produced a rough, nine-minute short for Wolphin DVD. Look out for it early 2008.

I plan on posting segments of my travel logging from Darfur here soon. Come back to check it out.