• Giovanni Porzio

Stories

Rwanda

Rwanda genocide of 1994, planned campaign of mass murder in Rwanda that occurred over the course of some 100 days in April - July 1994. The genocide was conceived by extremist elements of Rwanda’s majority Hutu population who planned to kill the minority Tutsi population and anyone who opposed those genocidal intentions. It is estimated that some 200,000 Hutu, spurred on by propaganda from various media outlets, participated in the genocide. More than 800,000 civilians - primarily Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu - were killed during the campaign. As many as 2,000,000 Rwandans fled the country during or immediately after the genocide.

Sudanese refugees from Darfur

The Darfur conflict, which began in 2003, saw rebel groups fighting against the Sudanese government, which was accused of oppressing the region's non-Arab population. The government's response was a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, resulting in the deaths of some 400,000 people and the displacement of two million, amounting to outright genocide.

Despite the official end of the conflict in 2020 with the Juba Accords, ethnic tensions remained. With the resumption of violence in 2023, the RSF, Sudan's paramilitary forces, struck again in Darfur targeting African communities and whose actions qualify as crimes against humanity according to Human Rights Watch.

Currently, there are 8 million internally displaced people and 4 million refugees in neighboring countries (Chad, Uganda, Egypt, Ethiopia, Central African Republic). Sudan is in full collapse: essential services absent, health system destroyed.

Since 2023, over 600,000 refugees and 180,000 Chadians have fled to Chad, with 115,000 new arrivals in 2024. About 630 people cross the border every day, fleeing a war that has driven the country toward famine.

Portfolio

porzio_archivio2021_001 Benghazi, Libya, 2011
porzio_archivio2021_010 A former policeman inhales heroin. Drugs are cheap and the number of addicts is rapidly increasing: tens of thousands of addicts drag themselves through the city's streets and under its bridges. After two decades of war and foreign occupation, Afghanistan continues to be the world's leading producer of opium and exports nearly 90 percent of global heroin consumption. Kabul, Afghanistan, 2018
porzio_archivio2021_004 In the space of just 24 hours, insurgents defy the army and the barricades, storm the parliament, oust the president and drag Europe and Ukraine into a risky confrontation with Moscow. It is the beginning of a crisis that will mark a return to a creeping cold war between the West and Valdimir Putin's Russia. Kiev, Ukraine, 2014
porzio_archivio2021_006 A young mother of Yazidi ethnicity in a refugee camp near Sulaymaniah. Persecuted and slaughtered by the Islamic Caliphate fanatics, the centuries-old Yazidi religious community was almost erased in a barbaric genocide. Their villages have been destroyed. Their women were raped, sold as sex slaves or forced to marry their executioners. The survivors took refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdistan, 2014
porzio_archivio2021_007 Kharrar, 9, killed with other children by shrapnel from a rocket in the Shiite neighborhood of Shu'ala, during ritual ablutions before burial. A few days later the US marines entered Baghdad and knocked down Saddam's statue in front of the Palestine Hotel. "Mission accomplished" announced George W. Bush. But the war had just begun and it's not over yet. Baghdad, Iraq, April 2003:
porzio_archivio2021_008 Abdoul Wahid Haidara with one of the precious manuscripts in his family's library. When Timbuktu fell into the hands of jihadists in 2012, local librarians devised a risky ploy to save hundreds of thousands of ancient desert manuscripts: a race against time that ultimately succeeded. Timbuktu, Mali, 2018
porzio_archivio2021_002 The port of Aden shows the scars of a devastated city, crumbling buildings, displaced persons, electrical blackouts, flying bullets and militias chewing khat. Yemen, 2017
porzio_archivio2021_011 The gruesome morgue at Port-au-Prince main hospital. Every Thursday Father Rick, an American priest, goes there to collect the unclaimed bodies: with his staff of volunteers he loads two trucks with the dead, takes them outside town to a field, digs the graves, celebrates a funeral rite and lays them in the ground at the sound of a local band. Haiti, 2012
porzio_archivio2021_005 A murder scene. The Barrio 18 gang and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) are feuding over control of territory and the extortion racket. The bloody conflict has plunged the tiny Central American country into an abyss of violence unprecedented since the civil war of the 1980s. With an average of nearly one death every hour, El Salvador is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. San Salvador, 2015

Giovanni Porzio
Writer, journalist, photographer

Born in Milano in 1951, he has been for over three decades the Foreign Editor and the Senior Special and War Correspondent at Panorama, the leading Italian newsmagazine. He now contributes to il Venerdì, the weekly magazine of the Italian daily la Repubblica. Since 1980 he has covered all major conflicts around the world and has travelled in more than 130 countries.
In 1991 he was among the first journalists to enter Kuwait City during operation Desert Storm and a few days later he was taken prisoner by Saddam’s revolutionary guards while he was covering the Basra uprising. In the following years he has covered Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Algeria, China, Indonesia, South Africa, Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan, Kampuchea, Colombia, Haiti, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, Zaire. In 2001 he was in Afghanistan with the mujahiddin of the Northern Alliance and entered Kabul the day the Taliban left. In 2003 he was Panorama Baghdad Bureau Chief during the war and witnessed the fall of Saddam and the arrival of the American forces. In 2006 he was in southern Lebanon during the Israeli attack on Hezbollah.
Since 2003 he has been regularly covering Iraq, Afghanistan and several hot spots around the world.
More recently he has covered the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia and Syria, where he has been every year since the start of the war. His recent assignments include Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Mali, United States, Mexico, Mozambique, Honduras, Cuba, Iran. As visiting professor, he has teached journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has received several national and international awards and has published ten books on Iraq, the Philippines, Somalia, Africa and the Middle East.
His photos have been exhibited in Italy and in Cuba.

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Stories

Rwanda

Sudanese refugees from Darfur