Focus on Humanity

Former photojournalist’s advocacy work in war-riven Sierra Leone earns her a MacArthur “genius” award

Two days before Corinne Dufka left her post as an investigator for Human Rights Watch in Sierra Leone to return to a more conventional life in the United States, she received a phone call from an official at the MacArthur Foundation.

She assumed that like most calls from grant makers, it was to seek information about the state of violence in the West African country. Much to her shock she heard the voice on the telephone inform her that she had been chosen as a MacArthur Fellow and would receive $500,000 as one of 24 people named in the latest round of the foundation’s so-called genius awards. She became the third staff member at Human Rights Watch, a New York group, to win the prize.

“It came as a total surprise, and it was completely under my radar,” says Ms. Dufka, 46. “The entire process is quite shrouded in secrecy,” she says in an accent that reflects linguistic influences acquired from living abroad for more than 20 years in many different countries.

In its citation for the award, which is designed to recognize and foster creativity, originality, and exploration, the MacArthur Foundation focused on Ms. Dufka’s work in Sierra Leone as a photojournalist and human-rights campaigner who documented and investigated war crimes.

“Her interviews chronicle the plight of victims and the motivations of the perpetrators,” the citation reads. “By listening carefully to all perspectives she has earned a reputation for veracity [and] her photographs, distributed worldwide, expose with clarity but not sentimentality the trauma inflicted by Sierra Leone’s conflict,” the citation notes.

Social Worker

Ms. Dufka began her international career fighting injustice in Latin America. She earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked as a psychiatric social worker in San Francisco. She served as a crisis counselor in Mexico City after a devastating earthquake in 1985. “I was always drawn to doing foreign work,” she says.

In 1987, she moved to El Salvador, where she spent three years working as a social worker for the Lutheran church and local human-rights organizations; she also began photographing death-squad victims, which led to a two-year stint as a professional photojournalist for Reuters working throughout Central America. “I fell in love with documentary photography,” says Ms. Dufka. “It’s a very powerful medium to shake people into confronting issues they otherwise wouldn’t want to address.”

In 1992, another conflict beckoned: the war in Bosnia. While she managed to evade snipers for two years, one day her luck ran out. She was riding in an armored vehicle when it ran over an anti-tank mine, leaving her seriously wounded; she had to be flown to a hospital in London after emergency treatment in Bosnia. “I feel lucky to be here,” she says. “I lost a lot of friends who died in the process of covering conflicts.”

Her injury did not keep her off the battlefield for long. Reuters transferred her to Kenya, and from there she covered conflicts throughout Africa: the genocide in Rwanda, the famine in Ethiopia, and civil wars in Congo and Sudan, among others.

Ms. Dufka believes her photography exposed the visceral nature of war to people in a way they could not dismiss. “The strongest images in my repertoire are of how peoples’ lives were affected by conflicts. I have tried to move the public by photographing war crimes,” she says.

One of her most haunting images is a black-and-white photograph she took by sneaking into a death camp in Rwanda and documenting people who were locked in and waiting to be executed.

“I took a photo of a small girl holding her brother in her arms — they had no idea of how ominous the setting was and who the people around them were who were about to descend on them,” she says.

But as Ms. Dufka took aim with her camera, capturing the agonizing narratives of dispossession, suffering, and murder, she says she felt something was missing. “Intellectually I became frustrated by not being able to explore the root causes of conflicts,” she says. “It is like reading the first chapter of a book over and over again without gaining any insight.”

More important, she says, she discovered that she was turning into a person she couldn’t respect. She says she realized it was time to make a change on August 7, 1998, when she learned of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. Ten minutes before the bombing, Ms. Dufka’s plane took off from Nairobi for Rwanda and she missed covering the tragedy. “It was one of the most frustrating experiences, and I found I was far more upset about missing it than about what happened, than the human impact,” she says. “Eleven years of covering war was dehumanizing.”

‘Exposing Injustice’

Ms. Dufka left photojournalism in 1999 to pursue the next phase of her career. She moved to Sierra Leone and set up an office there to research and investigate war crimes. She says she is motivated by a sense of justice. “I believe people should be treated fairly so they can live their lives without repression or exploitation by other human beings,” she says. “Exposing corruption and injustice and shaming people into compliance is a big part of what we can do.”

Peter Takirambudde, who oversees Ms. Dufka’s work at Human Rights Watch, as well as the organization’s other efforts in Africa, says her varied career has helped her learn how to build trust with victims of violence and torture, and how to promote changes that will help suffering people. “As a journalist she has fine instincts and an ability to read the situation and understand what it takes to advance world understanding and how an event should be framed. She combined that with the discipline of a human-rights worker and the delicacy of a social worker with a sensitive touch — she never forgot she was dealing with victims who suffered terrible trauma.”

In 2002 Ms. Dufka took a year off from Human Rights Watch to work as an investigator for the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. She says she is most proud of helping to bring about an international awareness of Sierra Leone’s long-ignored war in the 1990s.

“It was a little West African country associated with expensive diamonds, and my work has helped to elevate an awareness of the conflict and to make the suffering real and important enough for the international community to contribute peace-keeping forces,” she says. “People can become numb, especially in the first world.”

Ms. Dufka, who is now living in Maplewood, N.J., is working from Human Rights Watch’s headquarters in New York, in large part because she wanted to raise her 4-year-old in the United States. She will continue to travel to Africa, however, to conduct research and promote human rights.

She says she is not sure what she will do with the money from the MacArthur Foundation, though she does have a couple of ideas. “There are a number of Sierra Leoneans whose educations I would like to pay for,” she says, “and some microcredit programs that I may contribute to anonymously.”