The Nature of Evil

When you read a book about other parts of the world, it really makes you thankful for the life that you have where you have plenty to eat, no worries about having to exchange sex for firewood, no thoughts of bombs attacking you during the night and where you don't have to watch your children suffer day after day. Last night I read this in the current book I'm reading about Darfur in Africa. Visualize this in your mind as you read these paragraphs describing Daoud, the translator, and the BBC reporters' journey into this traumatized region.

At the edge of one village, in a thickly forested place, the village defenders had made their last stand by wedging themselves high in the trees with their rifles. They were all shot and killed. It had been three days or more since the men in the trees had died, and on this steamy spring afternoon, their bodies were coming to earth. We walked through a strange world of occasionally falling human limbs and heads. A leg fell near me. A head thumped to the ground farther away. Horrible smells filled the grove like poison gas that even hurts the eyes. And yet this was but the welcome to what we would eventually see: eighty-one men and boys fallen across one another, hacked and stabbed to death in that same attack.

Reporters are so very human, wonderfully so, and they weep sometimes as they walk through hard areas. There is no hiding their crying after a time. They sometimes kneel and put their heads in their hands near the ground. They pray aloud and will often find a handful of soil to lay on the body of a child, or they may find some cloth to cover the dead faces of a young family -- faces frozen in terror with their eyes and mouths still open too wide. They will help bury bodies; we buried many on the BBC journey. But those eighty-one boys and men were too much for everyone.

People vomit when they get close to any long-dead body. You have no control of this, it just happens. And again at the next body. You will soon have nothing in your stomach, but still your body will retch at the sight and smell and of course the tragedy of life so monstrously wasted. But these eighty-one . . .

Some of the BBC people had to return to Chad, where they were in a medical clinic for three days to recover from what they saw, and smelled, and learned about the nature of what simply must be called evil.

(pgs. 112-113)


As shared by Daoud Hari in The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur