RWANDA

The lead prosecutor of the Rwanda Genocide gave a speech at a law school here in the U.S. recently.  The school's Law Journal contacted me about doing a cover, an opener, and a smaller image that would accompany  the exact text from his speech.

The Rwanda genocide of 1994 was a horrible episode for the entire international community.  I had just begun working at TIME magazine at the time.  I was 23 years old.  I would see pictures that came in, unedited, and they were the worst things I've ever seen.  People were killed with clubs and machetes.  When it was all over, an estimated 800,000 people were dead and many other atrocities were comitted.  The UN pondered about what to do as all of this occurred.
Much of this is documented in the article I read.  The prosecutor explained how he will go about jailing the people that comitted these crimes.  I was allowed total freedom in depicting my thoughts on this period of history.

The first image is the article's opener image.  Civil war, depicted as a dog whose limbs have been cut but continues the killing by tying machetes to its body and using it as it's legs.  The dog walks along the landscape, continuing the killing.  Some of the pictures I saw at the time depicted people who had been cut themselves grabbing machetes and chasing down other people.  This is where the idea for this image came from.