War and peace through a child's eye

Though they might appear to be typically gruesome war scenes of any child's imagination, these sketches from southern Sudan are based on the real experiences of children in the region, writes BRIAN O'CONNELL

ON FIRST look there appears little to differentiate between the surrounding images and those drawn by children in any classroom across the western world. Children, particularly boys, have long been drawn to military representations and war sketching. The images contain representations of executions and shootings, burning houses and limbs spurting blood, of large cargo aircraft, matchstick figures and machine guns.

What marks them apart is that the children who drew them have never watched television or seen a Hollywood war movie.

The images are drawn directly from their real-life experiences, and represent an accurate reflection on their traumatic lives. Last October, Irish researcher Aoife McCullough joined a team from the London School of Economics on a trip to southern Sudan in order to assess the impact of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement on the lives of those in the region. As part of their efforts to gather information on how society was adapting to the peace accord, they asked children in local schools to draw what their life was like before and after the agreement. The children questioned were from the Upper Nile, Eastern Equatoria and Bahr el Ghazal regions of Sudan, and the majority of the children are now back in regular education.

While much media coverage since the accord has focused on the inter-tribal rivalry still plaguing the region, the project, funded by the British department for international development, is an effort to illustrate just how much some lives have changed. The images also serve as a reminder of how the brutalities of war affect the most vulnerable, in a country where close to two million civilians have been killed.

Dublin-based child psychologist Kate Byrne viewed the images and draws comparison between them and regular childhood drawings. “These children are drawing from their own experience and observation. The representations are in direct proportion to the experience they have had. The actual images of the people being killed or shot or having their heads cut off are incredibly graphic. When children draw war and death they are usually very stylised images. These though are very specific.”

In one image, by 10-year-old Marko Ngor Mawien, a large cargo aircraft drops bombs onto the ground below, as civilians trample each other as they try to flee the carnage. In another, by nine-year-old Atong Lual Makuc, a rebel soldier shoots the hand and head off a person in bloody detail. “The boy who drew this is a member of one of the tribes who were most active in the war. Yet he is in school now,” says Aoife McCullough, “You can see the carnage before the war and the relative calm and order in the pictures after. These images bring to the fore how things have changed.”