Survivor recounts his experiences

GLENDALE — Sudanese genocide survivor Valentino Achak Deng talked about a life that seemed to be always at the heels of war Tuesday at the Glendale Public Library.

Deng walked several hundred miles after he was separated from his family in the second Sudanese Civil War in the mid-1980s. He witnessed corpses, killings and tragedy and even came into contact with the murahaleen — which is the same type of militia massacring people in Darfur today. As Deng journeyed from his hometown in Sudan to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, he found that war had come to plague Ethiopia as well.

Social aid workers arranged for him to come to the United States to pursue an education and career, which was an exciting prospect, Deng said. But his flight to California was scheduled Sept. 11, 2001 — which was a precursor to this country's involvement in a war.

His story inspired writer Dave Eggers to make Deng the subject of the book, "What Is the What" — a novelized version of Deng's personal story of survival.

But on Tuesday night, the now 25-year-old man declined to talk much about the book.

Just days after Sunday's Holocaust remembrance commemoration and a week before the Armenian genocide commemoration day, Deng recognized the coincidental significance of telling his story between the two days of observation.

"The coincidence will remind us what desperate measures have been taken against genocide, yet it still happens," Deng said.

Father Vazken Movsesian, pastor of St. Peter Armenian Church, who introduced Deng to the crowd of more than 150, said that while other crimes against humanity are part of history, the situation in Darfur is something existing today and can be stopped.

"For [the event] to be on the eve of genocide commemoration events, it serves to remind us no one is deprived of hatred and no one is deprived of suffering," Movsesian said. "But no one is deprived of compassion at the end as well."

Venessa Micale, 25, said she had not read the book, but felt that this was a good way to get informed about the inhumanity that is going on today.

"It's important and nobody really talks about it going on, and I think it's important that people get together and recognize it," she said.

Being knowledgeable about the Armenian genocide, Ovaness Ovanessian, 68, saw the word genocide on a flier and thought he would see what Deng had to say.

"This is a kind of awareness, to come here and learn," he said. "To be able to live with each other and know each other's cultures — this is the whole subject matter of being a human being."

Deng's address focused on his first jobs in the states, the things he learned in school and the people he met over the years — spending little time on the actual horrors of war he witnessed. Though his own story is told at length in the book, Deng still deferred the countless others' tales.

"Their stories are more horrible than mine," he said.