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Satellite Images Used to Document International Atrocities
wikkedwoman wrote with a link to a Washington Post story about the use of satellite imagery to detect atrocities around the world. The story details Amnesty International's efforts to identify areas in the world that may have been subject to man-made disasters. By comparing and contrasting imagery captured over time, researchers can produce hard evidence to present to a hard-to-please international community. "Tonight, [Amnesty Researcher Jeremy] Nelson begins his work by making a copy of the [older] shot in the right-hand screen and pasting it directly over the [newer] one on the left. Then he makes the top one nearly transparent. A river that cuts through the scene becomes a marker to help him line up the two. Now he can easily flip back and forth to look for changes. Sudanese huts tend to follow a similar pattern: a solid base ring with a steep, thatched roof. In the earlier image, they show up as small circles, with a slight shading to the dome, depending on the direction of the sun. Nelson draws a small, green circle slightly larger than the area of the average hut and makes several dozen copies of it ... When he finishes, he moves the 2007 shot to the top and begins the analysis again ... parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar. If you didn't know that huts were there before, you'd have no idea they were now gone. 'Whoever did this did a good job,' he says quietly. 'Thorough, at least.'"
I don't think there is really much debate that there are massacres taking place in Sudan at the moment. However is it very easy for the Government to control the flow of information out of the country. Doctors without Borders, who are often the organization on the front line of these crisis, who are willing to speak up about atrocities, got kicked out in 2005. A UN diplomat (http://www.janpronk.nl/index288.html#290) was also expelled for blogging about the Sudanese government.
NGOs have a hard time bringing in any sort of communication equipment (satellites for internet etc etc) and I'm pretty sure that you need to have a permit to take photos in Sudan, and the government controls where people can go. This is the same for many conflict zones, especially those with dubious treatment of human rights.
What this article shows is that there are now ways of documenting what is going on in Sudan, which is beyond the direct control of the Sudanese government. However it is very expensive (the images are costing about $1600 each) and there was an issue, when they couldn't book satellite time over Sudan. Whether this was because the government booked it out to prevent them from taking photos is unsure - but it does show the limitation.
Part of the reason that the international community is dragging their feet (or can drag their feet) is probably the lack of reliable concrete information - and this is what this project provides.
That and the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
Look, I'm not against gathering more evidence, but I'm just pointing out that just one photo (satellite or not) can be massaged into meaning anything you want it to mean.
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese?
I'll also point out that history (some of it very near) is full of manipulation and selective confirmation. And often you just need to choose whose side propaganda you want to listen to.
E.g., if you would have asked German prisoners in '39, they would have told you that they're just fighting against the Polish aggressors. (The Third Reich propaganda massively broadcast news of the polish "aggression" and Germany just protecting its borders.)
I'll also point out that tribal warfare _is_ brutal like that. You can find archaeological evidence from the pre-columbian era where whole villages were razed. And most native tribes from all over the world were engaged in endemic warfare long before the Europeans got there. IIRC attrition rates in some areas reached 60%. Of the total population, not of the army. As in, really, if you were born in one of those tribes, chances would be about 60% that you'd die in combat, and not in your bed of old age. (By comparison, even the WW2 barely averaged 1% of the total population of the countries involved.)
As soon as humans invented missile weapons, suddenly in caves everywhere you have crude drawings of groups of archers shooting at each other, often led by some priest with some holy totem. And it didn't take much longer to invent flaming arrows.
Even in civilized nation warfare, the US secession war saw such things as the burning of Columbia. Or the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, in WW2.
Now think that 10-100 times worse, and you have an accurate image of tribal warfare, at least for some tribes. Humans needed some tens of thousands of years to get shocked by the horrors of soldiers dying of all sorts of diseases in the Crimean war, or by the brutal realities of WW1 and WW2, and start getting ideas that maybe we should all act a bit nicer. Whole areas of the globe just didn't get there.
And yes, it would be nice if we somehow dragged them into the 21'st century. But it also helps if you realize that neither side there got in the 21'st century, and it's usually not just one side massacring the others.
Basically, just from the pictures you don't know who did what to whom. And in retaliation to what. It's easy to pin the blame on just one side as the ones cleansing the others, but reality is rarely that neatly divided in the good and the evil. And such pictures can be used to create just such a one-sided view.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... how can you justify that troops are being used in Irak instead of Darfur4Z5TX
I'm surprised TFA does not mention the newly announced by Amnesty International "Eyes on Darfur" website. Oh, Beirut imagery has been updated to reflect the situation after the 2006 Lebanon War.
Here's a few stories in the same vein:
Documenting Humanitarian Crisis with Google Earth
New Google Earth Layers: Darfur and more
The Israel-Lebanon Conflict in Google Earth
Beirut Destruction Through Remote Sensing
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
Animoog.org
OK, so I'm pretty sure that this is flamebait, but you did it on my comment, so I took it...
Sudan is already in the top 30 oil exporters in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_exports_and _production_of_oil_by_nation), so rubbish about what you're saying about it taking decades to get the oil out of there. Admitted I don't think that it's coming out of Darfur, but it's still the same government.
I actually believe that the biggest problem comes as much from people with close minded views such as your. When people think like that it becomes a "war of civilizations", instead of just an peacekeeping-operation to end genocide, of course the Sudanese government is going to object. Your views of Islam and Muslims are incredibly narrow-minded, and I can only guess, very uneducated. By thinking like that you prevent peaceful dialog from happening.
I have personally spent the last 18 months living mostly in Pakistan and Indonesia - the worlds two largest Muslim countries. Despite standing out as a tall westerner, I didn't have any trouble at all, no terrorists, no jihads. Actually I found most of the people much friendlier than the people back home.
So please take some time to think about the situation, and what will make it better, before spreading such narrow minded rubbish.