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About the drawings

The Children’s Drawings are evidence of the dignity and agency of children who have endured unspeakable horrors, from Darfur’s genocide starting in 2003, to the near total destruction of Sudan in the war which started April 2023.

These resilient, resourceful artists made it clear to us that they were survivors, not victims.

We have sought to honour their legacy through the drawings’ regular use in museum exhibitions, by lawyers, educators, researchers, and media professionals. The children’s drawings were accepted as contextual evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur at the International Criminal Court (ICC) when former President Omar Al-Bashir and three other high-level accomplices were indicted by the Court. Originals of the drawings now reside on permanent loan at The Wiener Holocaust Library.

In April 2024 we launched a book featuring the children’s voices.

DARFUR CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS

Over 500 Darfur Children’s Drawings were obtained in 2007 by Waging Peace researcher Rosemary Monreau. Rosemary conducted a three-week fact-finding mission to a refugee camp in eastern Chad, to which hundreds of thousands of Darfuris fled during the height of the genocide in 2003 in their home region.

The aim of the mission was to assess the humanitarian, human rights, and security situation in the region, and to collect testimonies from Darfuri refugees.

For fuller details about the origins of the Darfur children’s drawings listen to Waging Peace’s podcast with Rosemary Monreau, formerly operating under the pseudonym Anna Schmitt.

NUBA CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS

The Nuba Mountains Children’s Drawings were obtained in December 2018 by Waging Peace Co-Executive Directors Sonja Miley and Maddy Crowther on a trip to a refugee camp on the border of Sudan and South Sudan, where tens of thousands of individuals from the Nuba ethnicity have fled from war and conflict in the Nuba Mountains since 2011.

Replicating Rosemary’s methodology 11 years earlier, Sonja and Maddy distributed pencils and paper to children from the Nuba Mountains, asking them to draw anything they wanted to show the world.

The Co-Executive Directors returned with 60 images of the children’s experience of the war, and images of Nuba culture. The Nuba drawings, like the Darfur drawings, depict targeted persecution against black African civilians at the hands of the Sudanese government and their proxy militias.

KHARTOUM CHILD’S DRAWINGS

A further child’s drawing, from Khartoum, was obtained in 2019 after the massacre in the capital on June 3rd outside military headquarters.

The massacre was perpetrated by Janjaweed militia (rebranded as the Rapid Support Forces) and the Sudanese Armed Forces, and was intended to disperse peaceful protesters during the people’s peaceful revolution of 2018/2019.

What the children drew