ICTUpdate - a current awareness bulletin for ACP Agriculture

Frustrated by the lack of mainstream media attention, international human rights organizations are using the internet to maintain focus on the conflict in Darfur.

‘When the plane came I was five months pregnant. I lost my baby because of the bombing. When the plane bombed I was outside the house, I saw that my husband was inside. I ran to the house. The smoke from the bomb made me cough, then I lost blood and my child. My body still hurts and my stomach is still big despite the fact that I lost the baby.’

Nura Rahma Abdu comes from the village of Kornoy in North Darfur. When she reached the relative safety of a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in neighbouring Chad, she told her story to a representative of Amnesty International. Her testimony is shocking, but is only one of many presented in the project Crisis in Darfur, launched by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) on the satellite image viewing application, Google Earth.

Alongside the testimonies of people who have been driven from their homes by the violence in Darfur are photographs and videos from a variety of sources, plus links to the websites of humanitarian organizations working in the region. To view the information users first have to download a file from the USHMM website. When opened in Google Earth, the file displays icons on the satellite images of Darfur showing the exact locations of damaged and destroyed villages. Other symbols show the positions of towns, roads, administrative centres, and refugee and IDP camps.

By working together with Google Earth, USHMM hope to give people living at a safe distance a chance to glimpse the destruction from a conflict that, according to John Holmes, the United Nations head of humanitarian affairs, has so far claimed the lives of an estimated 300,000 people and caused a further two million to lose their homes and livelihoods.

USHMM asks us all to bear witness to current threats of genocide across the globe. ‘When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible,’ says USHMM director, Sara J. Bloomfield. ‘We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.’

Vigilance

Amnesty International is running a similar campaign, also using satellite images. Eyes on Darfur focuses on 12 villages in areas deemed vulnerable to attack by the Sudanese government and militia forces. Some of the villages, for example, are located along the usual migration routes of nomadic farmers in the area. According to information on the Eyes on Darfur website, grazing land in the north of Darfur was shared by everyone, Arabs and non-Arabs alike. But these days, because of the conflict, non-Arab farmers are no longer able to travel safely to these areas.

The village of Malam al Hosh, in particular, has excellent grazing land. Farmers from the region take their herds to these pastures every February and can remain there for up to six months during the dry season. If members of the Janjaweed militia took control of Malam al Hosh they could move in their own animals and restrict access to grazing land and wells. This would deprive the neighbouring communities and their livestock of essential food and water resources and weaken support for local opposition forces.

Amnesty commissioned high-resolution satellite photos of the villages, which they, and expert researchers, regularly analyze to check for any signs of destruction by government or militia forces. Anyone visiting the website can also check the photos, look at satellite evidence of previous violence in the area, and read reports on each of the 12 villages. ‘We are taking advantage of satellite technology to tell [Sudanese] President al-Bashir that we will be watching closely to expose new violations,’ said Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International. ‘Our goal is to put pressure on Sudan to allow the peacekeepers to deploy and to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable civilians in Darfur.’

Serious game

While the Amnesty and the USHMM campaigns present the hard facts of the conflict in Darfur, mtvU, a TV channel and website for college and university students in the USA, tries to show what life is like in an IDP camp with their online game, Darfur is Dying. Each player chooses one of eight characters – two adults and six children – to represent them in a virtual Darfur. At the start of the game the character leaves the camp to fetch a container of water from the well, but on their way they are likely to come across armed Janjaweed militias. The aim of the game is to see which characters can collect water and return safely.