Biography:
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lucian Perkins is an independent photographer and filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. Lucian’s focus on documenting human-interest stories encompasses daily life and social issues...
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Oil fires set by retreating Iraqi troops raged throughout Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In the al-Burgan oil fields just south of Kuwait City a young donkey, blackened with oil, seemed oblivious to the fiery landscape surrounding it as it pulled some bedding from an Iraqi trench and playfully tossed it in the air. I stood and photographed the animal in amazement until the late afternoon light began to drop. As I walked back to my car, I felt that I was being followed and turned around to see the donkey standing nearby, gazing at me. I felt a wave of guilt, thinking to myself that there was no way it could survive long out here in this oil soaked and burning desert. About a year later I received a call from John Walsh of the World Society for the Protection of Animals. He had seen my photograph and told me that he was in Kuwait at the same time to help save the zoo animals in Kuwait City. He too had driven out to the oil fields. And he too had seen the donkey. He had put it in the back of his pick-up truck and later had given it to a family in Kuwait City. That was one call I never dreamed of getting.
At the risk of getting killed by sniper fire a mother comforts her son as they visit the grave of a loved one. During the war in the former Yugoslavia UNICEF studied Sarajevo's 65,000 children. It found that 76 percent of the children believed they were going to die soon; at least 40 percent had been shot at by snipers; 51 percent had seen somebody killed; 39 percent had seen one or more family members killed; 19 percent had witnessed a massacre; 48 percent had their home occupied by someone else; 73 percent had their home attacked or shelled; and 89 percent had lived in underground shelters.
"Forceful intervention in Chechnya is unacceptable. If we violate this principle, the Caucasus will rise up. There will be so much terror and blood that afterward no one will forgive us." --Russian President Boris Yeltsin August 1994.Four months later Russian troops invaded Chechnya.
Forty Kilometers outside of Moscow gypsies find they have no place to run as their camp is raided by Moscow's special police force "the Omon." After their site was destroyed the gypsies were put on a train back to their homeland in the Ukraine.
A woman frantically waves us down while driving her car toward us. She tearfully cries out, pointing just down the street, "Over there, by the mosque. They just shot a boy in the head. His brains are still on the wall. Please hurry!"We jump out of our car, run past a group of Israeli soldiers and head toward a tiny alley on the side of a plaza. There a group of wailing women and children stand in front of a large pool of blood.An old woman comes up and tells me she had seen the whole incident from her window: Two Israeli jeeps, filled with soldiers looking for stone throwers, trap a young Palestinian in the alley. A soldier jumps out of his jeep and shoots the youth in the head, she said. Later, we heard the Israeli Army's version: Three soldiers in a jeep were trapped in the alley by stone throwers. One of the soldiers, while cocking his rifle to fire in the air, was hit by a stone; as he fell, his rifle went off, accidentally killing the boy.Both versions were hard to believe. But after being in the West Bank for a week, I had concluded that much of what I saw made no sense.
In the Kasbah of Nablus Israeli soldiers round a corner only to find themselves confronted by a mob of Palestinian youth angered by the death of one of their own and ready to challenge soldiers with rocks and sling shots.
The streets of Nabulus turns to chaos as Palestinians prepare to bury 20-years-old Ragheb Abu Amara who was killed during one of the many clashes between Israeli and Palestinians.