An American reacts to Darfur

WE inhabit a brave new world indeed, when a pair of Hollywood personalities can apparently achieve within weeks a goal that years of international diplomacy and pressure could not. Hats off to Ms. Farrow and Mr. Spielberg, for their apparently effective insistence that Beijing trade warmongering for peace-brokering in Northern Africa. The case at hand, of course, involves the apocalyptic scandal of Darfur, a vast region peopled mostly by black Africans that was allocated, by opaque post-colonial reasoning, to the mostly Arab-ruled country of Sudan.

Four years ago, in this near-desert territory shared since biblical times by nomads, herders and farmers, the Arab-led (Muslim) government of Sudan launched a policy aimed at the eventual extermination or ejection of the (Muslim) black African population. Since then, a centrally planned genocide, spearheaded by paid janjaweed (loosely translated as “devil on a horse”) militia, has ramped up to full terror mode with impunity and increasing audacity. The People’s Republic of China, practicing ruthless realpolitik, showered the necessary modern weaponry on the Sudanese government in exchange for present and future oil favors.

Despite the best efforts of outraged humanitarians, outside intervention in Darfur currently consists of the deployment by the African Union of about 7,000 underfunded peacekeeping troops and a few hundred hamstrung “observers.” Meanwhile, the rest of the world pulls a pillow over its head, exhausted by the noise of distant misery. As a chance drinking pal put it to Brian Steidle, the former Marine whose experiences as an AU observer in Darfur are chronicled in “The Devil Came on Horseback”: “So, like, isn’t everyone in Africa killing each other, if they’re not starving already?”

Capt. Steidle was initially hired into the Sudan to join an internationally contracted cease-fire-monitoring team stationed in the northern plateau, where for roughly 20 years the government had been waging a separate campaign against a black -- in this case, mostly Christian and animist -- population. Fresh from a peacekeeping stint in Kosovo, where he had completed his Marine Corps service, Steidle remained “eager to be involved somewhere in the field, using my military background.” Packing a camera instead of an M-16, anticipating exotic African adventure, he arrived largely uninstructed on the local situation, “with the enthusiasm of a boy invited to Disney World for the first time.”

Young but well trained, the son of a career naval officer and brother of an international rights activist (Gretchen Steidle Wallace, who is coauthor of “The Devil Came on Horseback”), Steidle didn’t need long to get his bearings in Sudan. In the northern plateau, he sensed what lay beneath the surface: “We heard baboons at night.... We loved being surrounded by wildlife, but its very existence was due to a darker circumstance.... [M]ost of the tribes had been driven out of the area by war and, thus, there were significantly fewer people hunting animals for food.”

Frustrated in the face of continued infractions by government forces, jolted by incoming reports of far more brutal and effective genocidal violence in Darfur, he opted for a job change. As a newly recruited AU observer, he moved to Darfur -- or, as his smiling predecessor summed it up, hell.

Steidle’s narrative is not overlong, but at some point the reader may begin to feel a bit bleary-eyed. Again and again, the formally balanced observer team (including a Sudanese government representative and representatives of rebel groups, along with Steidle as the U.S. member and several AU officers) sets out to investigate a murder or massacre, the burning of a village or a helicopter and/or horseback raid on a DP (displaced person) camp. They walk on bone fields and among scraps of ordnance, often of Chinese origin. The janjaweed pillage in plain view, unperturbed by witnesses. Although rape is routine and children are discovered shot point-blank and killed in less merciful ways, the team’s official reports are watered-down compromises. Local civilians, at first hopeful and helpful, turn bitter and angry toward the outsiders, who appear powerful but inexplicably refrain from giving them any protection.

As writers, Steidle and Wallace are adequate yet somewhat flat stylists. And they do not pretend to be offering an in-depth analysis of the sociopolitical roots of the Sudanese dystopia. But for six months this American member of an AU observer team served the truth, channeling his horror and anger into scrupulous documentation of the hell of Darfur in photographs, notes and e-mails. (His efforts were also chronicled in a recent documentary of the same title.) His work in Darfur lends this absolutely necessary book its compelling immediacy and irrefutable authenticity, as a testament now and for years to come.

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground” and “Out After Dark,” and the story collection “Belong to Me.”