Why I risked my life to expose a government massacre | Anjan Sundaram
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2017
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
A war zone can pass for a mostly peaceful place when no one is watching, says investigative journalist and TED Fellow Anjan Sundaram. In this short, incisive talk, he takes us inside the conflict in the Central African Republic, where he saw the methodical preparation for ethnic cleansing, and shares a lesson about why it's important to bear witness to other people's suffering. "Ignored people in all our communities tell us something important about who we are," Sundaram says. "A witness can become precious, and their gaze most necessary, when violence passes silently, unseen and unheard."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features journalist Anjohn Sundaram, recorded live at TED-2017. |
| 0:08.0 | What does it mean to be a witness? |
| 0:13.0 | Why is it important to bear witness, to people suffering, |
| 0:17.0 | especially when those people are isolated from us. And what happens when we turn away? |
| 0:24.6 | Three years ago, I traveled to the Central African Republic |
| 0:30.6 | to report on its ongoing war. |
| 0:33.6 | I'd heard warnings of massacres in the country's jungles and deserts. |
| 0:40.3 | But no one could locate these massacres or tell me who was killed or when. |
| 0:48.3 | I drove into this war with little information. |
| 0:58.0 | I witnessed scenes that were tragic and unreal. |
| 1:03.0 | And only at the end did I realize that I had witnessed the slow preparation of ethnic cleansing. |
| 1:10.0 | The Central African Republic is a country of about 5 million people, |
| 1:13.6 | the size of Texas, in the center of Africa. |
| 1:16.6 | The country has known chronic violence since French colonial rule ended in 1960. |
| 1:22.6 | The war I reported on was between the minority Muslim government, called the Sileca, |
| 1:29.3 | and citizen militias, |
| 1:33.3 | mostly Christian, called the anti-Balaka. |
| 1:39.3 | The first sign of the impending cleansing |
| 1:42.3 | was the breakdown of trust within communities. |
| 1:47.7 | Three days after I arrived in the country, |
| 1:50.6 | I watched the small city of Gaga be abandoned. |
| 1:55.2 | A battle was about to break out. |
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