Janet Haven

I've been in Istanbul for the past week (again!), this time at an OSI information program coordinator's meeting. My colleagues from Soros foundations across the former Soviet Union and Africa joined the international staff for several days of discussions. And as the meeting wound down at two this afternoon, a total eclipse of the sun crossed Turkey. Istanbul was not in the one hundred percent path of the eclipse. What we got, at about 87% eclipsed, were a good fifteen minutes of the sort of watery, pale sunlight I associate with swimming along the bottom of the pool holding my breath, or dawn in the middle of Nebraska.

I and a number of my colleagues stood on the roof terrace of the Hotel Armada in Sultanahmet to watch the eclipse. Not a bad spot: looking in one direction we could see the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia; in the other direction, the Bosphorus. We were joined on the roof by a crowd of Turkish hotel guests and staff, some of whom got very excited that the shadow cast by the sun during the height of the eclipse looked remarkably like the image on the Turkish flag (right). More enthusiastic observers starting pulling out pens and pencils to add a drawn star next to the sun's shadow, which was being projected onto a piece of paper in the center of the crowd. Soon enough, several stars had been added to the paper, and by reflecting the sun's shadow just right, the image stopped being just an eclipse, and also became a naturally appearing Turkish flag. It's not just beauty that's in the eye of the beholder, after all.

Posted by Janet at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is cool. Soyapi Mumba, a software developer from Malawi, has created SearchWith, a plugin for the Mozilla family (Firefox, Flock, and Thunderbird). What SearchWith does is allow users to highlight a word on a web page you're reading, and then search for/look up that word in a range of online sources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, the web itself, etc.) For those of us who read widely about technology, this is a great little tool, since new terms come up so often. For the rest of the world, it's pretty darn useful as well.

To use this tool, go to SearchWith website, download the plugin, and install. Easy-peasy.

Thanks, Soyapi! I'm your new biggest fan.

Posted by Janet at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (83)

The EU and the US have agreed that Lukashenka and other Belarussian officials have to go to Moscow to buy their Prada handbags. The truly embarassing thing about this is Luka's quite legitimate unflappability over the issue:

"If the United States and European Union countries respect the people of Belarus, they should respect their choice," Andrei Popov, a ministry spokesman, said on national television. "The Republic of Belarus retains the right to take retaliatory measures.'

The threat seemed to expand on a remark earlier in the week by Mr. Lukashenko, who said Europe would hardly be able to restrict its trade with Belarus, a main transit route to the West for Russian gas and oil.

Oh, right.

Posted by Janet at 06:00 PM | Permalink

Hello, is this the EU? It would be super-great if the kids over in Brussels would act on the public outrage over the fraudulent election that has just occurred on your borders. Yes, you told the press that you were very, very, very angry indeed over how mean Lukashenka was to his populace, and that you might even do something really quite serious like banning visas to the EU for Belarussian officials. The only problem is, you guys already did that back in September 2004:

“In view of the apparent obstruction of justice and the absence of an investigation as requested, the European Union has decided today to restrict admission to its territory of those high officials who are considered primarily responsible for failing to initiate such an investigation and prosecution of the alleged crimes, as well as those who are considered by the Pourgourides report key actors in the disappearances and subsequent cover-up.”

“The EU calls once more on the Belarusian authorities, including on the President of the Republic of Belarus, to undertake the actions as requested by the EU.”

The EU reacted to the flawed elections and referendum by increasing visa restrictions (Council Common Position on Visa Ban - 6 December 2004):

“The scope of the restrictive measures imposed by Common Position 2004/661/CFSP should therefore be expanded to persons who are directly responsible for the fraudulent elections and referendum in Belarus on 17 October 2004 and those who are responsible for severe human rights violations in the repression of peaceful demonstrators in the aftermath of the elections and referendum in Belarus."

It didn't work so well, apparently. As it turns out, it's easier to fly to Moscow anyway if a Belarussian official has a hankering for a Gucci handbag, and besides, it gives him the opportunity to pay loving tribute to the overlord in person.

So maybe it's time to try something that hits a little closer to home, like banning bilateral trade with Belarus or figuring out serious ways to support the opposition through public inclusion in EU human rights/democracy activities.

Incidentally, the Vice-President of the European Parliament agrees with me, even more damningly referring to the EU's relationship til now with Belarus as "friendly". However, he sees Belarus as a security problem for the EU, which seems a little far-fetched. What Belarus is for the EU is a public relations problem; it's darn embarassing to have a Soviet strongman sitting on the other side of Poland. And that, I think, is one of the main reasons why Belarus has been invisible until the last week or so -- no one wants to talk about it. It also points to one of the major things that the EU can do in the coming months. Quite obviously, no one inside or outside of Belarus is going to care or remember if the Belarussian Deputy Minister of Agriculture can't make it to Paris for the weekend; people will remember if the EU and the European Parliament keep the issue of Belarus alive through public shaming and public reminders of the situation just to the East. Maintain the outrage, or Belarus will go invisible again.

Posted by Janet at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Speaking of the EU's troubled boarders, one of Hungary's (many) neighbors is Ukraine. One of Ukraine's more unfortunate distinctions is the rate at which HIV is being spread efficiently across its populace. Currently Ukraine has an exploding HIV-positive population, rivaled in Europe only by the Russian Federation. Human Rights Watch released a report at the beginning of this month called "Rhetoric and Risk: Human Rights Abuses Impeding Ukraine’s Fight Against HIV/AIDS". The report argues that while Ukraine has passed some of the most progressive (and controversial) HIV policies around (supporting anti-retroviral treatments, needle exchange programs, and drug replacement therapies), in practice, abuse of drug addicts and sex workers by police -- usually their first line of contact with the government -- essentially renders those protections null and void:

It is a tragic and deadly irony that for most Ukrainians, these protections exist only on paper and are systematically undermined by chronic human rights abuse within the criminal justice and health systems.

Now, I know very little about the HIV and Ukraine; it's an issue that I'm aware of, but don't really follow. I'm writing about it now not because I came across the Human Rights Watch report in the normal range of my online reading, but rather because I came across something far more arresting: the photography of Brent Stirton. Stirton is a South African photographer whose work shows up on the BBC, in international competitions, and so forth. His website is a collection of photojournalist projects he's undertaken around the world. A recent addition is called "Ukraine: Sex, Drugs, Poverty, & HIV" (to find this and other photo essays, go to Stirton's site, then choose "Projects". Note, however, that a number of the images are gruesome, and nearly all of them are disturbing). The Ukranian collection includes both photographs and a short narrative explaining who each person pictured is. Stirton favors people; most of his photos are essentially portraits meant to establish not just a set of circumstances but an impression of the person existing in those circumstances. And the stories that unfold are in his sets of pictures are terrifying, largely because they are told not just visually, but extremely personally. Perhaps most arresting to me is the subset of images that tell a story of an older Ukrainan woman living with her two grown sons, both of whom are HIV-positive, and are dealing heroin out of her apartment. She is dependent on them, being elderly, and so cannot either throw them out or curtail their activities. The juxtaposition of the familiar Eastern European babushka in the flowered dress with youthful, damaged sons is deeply troubling, and illustrates powerfully why the cycle of drug addiction and HIV effects a populace across generations and far beyond the addict themselves.

The reason, more generally, why I find this interesting is from an information perspective. Because OSI and other international organizations support moniitoring and investigative work of the sort that Human Rights Watch does regularly, there is a tremendous amount of information -- and high-quality information at that -- generated. The vast majority of it ends up in reports, like the one I've linked to above; those reports are picked up by and quoted by more socially concious news agencies (the BBC, Radio Free Europe, and so on tend to quote HRW reports frequently). They're printed up, filed in offices of intenational development workers, and that's generally it. The information that has been so carefully dug up for these reports is simply not very persistant -- it hits once, and sinks. Aligning the careful reporting that HRW and other monitoring organizations do with other media, easily distributed over the internet, seems like an excellent way to give that information a longer life and wider distribution. Images and visual representations of information are powerful, and cause people to "get" an issue in a way that they never will from skimming (or not, as the case may be) a lengthy report. HRW has done this in other reports -- tying some of their work on Darfur to images drawn by childen in refugee camps, or creating maps to accompany their report on civilian casualties in Iraq ("Off Target"). Clearly, these kinds of combinations make human rights reporting and research much more accessible to the layman, and subsequently more persistant as an issue of concern.

Posted by Janet at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (44)

Belarussians go to the polls tomorrow, although all the information coming out of the country seems to suggest that no one is actually taking the election seriously. Nor should they; both br23 and the NY Times report that totalitarian dictator Lukashenka has choked off all independent publications, closing the final window yesterday with the seizure of at least 200,000 copies of Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") arriving from a publisher in Russia. Luka has also outlawed public demonstrations, threatening 25 years in jail or death. The opposition is planning exactly the kind of demonstration that the Belarussian government fears tomorrow night, after the polls close.

If the demonstration tomorrow goes forward, the government has essentially promised a bloodbath, blaming (in advance!) any government reaction, no matter how violent, on the opposition. The EU has counter-promised a "strong international reaction" if there is a crackdown on opposition rallies. I wonder if it will be as strong as the "international reaction" over the past ten years to the disappearances, murders, and crushing of political dissent under Lukashenka?

Posted by Janet at 06:43 PM | Permalink

Joi Ito notes that he's just joined the board of Witness, an organization that supports the use of video as a tool for human rights advocacy. This is great news: Witness is one of my favorite organizations, and (full disclosure) one whose work the Open Society Institute supports. Witness is now looking to expand their work from traditional film-making (using video cameras) to including more participatory, pedestrian tools and media -- videos made on digital cameras and cellphones, for instance-- which increasingly, these days, is the way activists and witnesses are able capture the dirtier work of repressive governments as it's happening. (For a recent example of the power of handheld media, see these six cell-phone videos of Belarussian protests in Minsk over the repression of opposition parties in their upcoming election.)

Gillian Caldwell, the director of Witness, notes in a recent interview with David Pogue in the New York Times that "our primary intention is not to capture human rights abuses in action, although that has on occasion happened. Instead, most of our footage highlights the aftermath." Capturing the aftermath of human rights abuses is vital and powerful, and Gillian absolutely right -- it's hard to get someone with a video camera to be in exactly the right place at the right time. However, it's a lot more likely that you'll get someone with a cell phone equipped with a camera at the right place at the right time, and I'm delighted that Witness is now thinking about how they can harness this kind of media to create change. Joi Ito is a great person to help move this part of their work forward.

The other good news is that a number of other organizations are also thinking about the power of participatory media in a human rights context. Three of them, EngageMedia of Australia, the Participatory Culture Foundation in Massachusetts, and OneWorld TV, are currently engaged in video platform projects that may actively complement Witness' vision for a web-based community of human rights abuse documentation. I'm a big fan of organizations working towards similar goals exchanging information, creating shared standards, and developing joint projects. If synergies exist between Witness' vision and some of the other work going on in this area, mores the better. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Posted by Janet at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Because I'm sitting in the Warsaw Airport waiting for a first-cancelled-now-scandalously-late Malev flight back home to Budapest, I'm missing the "Solidarity with Belarus" concert that everyone I know in Warsaw is at right now. After complaining last week about the invisibility of Europe's tragic child Belarus, it's been interesting to spend the last few days in Warsaw and discover how angry the Poles are about their neighbor to the east. My sample is, of course, biased; I've spent the last few days with Poles and varied expats in Poland who work for NGOs, and who care deeply about the spread of democracy in a region that hasn't seen enough of it over the past fifty years. That said, I've been interested to see that the front pages of local papers are carrying stories about the upcoming Belarussian election, and that central Warsaw was plastered this afternoon with the poster at the right, a call to Poles to attend at "Solidarity with Belarus" concert being held this evening.

Incidentally, according to a Polish friend, the "Solidarity" of the title is no accident: several of the Poles central to the campaign and the organizing of the concert are children of Polish Solidarity leaders. They grew up in the 1990's, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the relaxation of martial law in Poland. As my friend noted, they "missed their revolution". What their parents brought to Poland, they want to help bring to Belarus. Not a bad legacy for Solidarity -- not only a democratic country, but also a population with a sense of the job still unfinished.

Furthrer reading: for a good review of Poland's recent history, check out Timothy Garton Ash's recent useful article in the New York Review of Books, The Twins' New Poland.

Posted by Janet at 06:37 PM | Permalink

The European Union spends a lot of time sweating over its borders, notably that Turkey's potential inclusion means neighboring unsavories like Iraq. However, Europeans seem to easily forget that their borders now rub up again Belarus, land of Aleksander Lukashenka's totalitarian dictatorship. This is a country that rarely makes it into the news, that has few bloggers to amplify its plight, and that is currently experiencing an election run-up should make Europe cringe in shame.

Briefly, a Belarussian primer: the country has been governed by the increasingly dictatorial Lukashenka since he was elected (in what are considered relatively fair elections) in 1994. Since then, the country has descended into an exaggerated version of the familiar horrors: disappeared (and presumably dead) opposition candidates and supporters, state harassment of all opposition political activity, three years imprisonment for organizing public meetings, a consitutional amendment to allow Lukashenka to hold office into eternity, a resurrection of the KGB with all best practices in place, and an army of un-uniformed government-supported thugs who attack and intimidate anyone working against Luka.

As the March elections close in, Luka is making sure that the opposition stands no chance. According last week's article in the IHT by Steven Lee Meyers, Luka has made it clear through televised addresses that the police have orders to open fire on opposition protests. "Any attempt to destabilize the situation will be met with drastic action," he is quoted as saying. "We will wring the necks of those who actually doing it, and those who are instigating these acts."

One of the few Belarussian bloggers writing in English, br23 reported the following on Friday::

In the morning, an opposition presidential candidate Alexander Kazulin (Kozulin) came to register as a participant in the so called All-Belarusian People’s Assembly, a Soviet-style “party congress” staged by president Lukashenka (which he uses to show in front of the TV cameras “massive people’s support”, in a Soviet way). Lukashenka and all his gang was there.

Alexander Kazulin entered the building, requesting to be registered as a participant because his party (Hramada) has nominated him for this. Almost immediately, Lukashenka’s guards attacked him. They knocked him down to the ground and started kicking him with army boots.

Kazulin was apparently bundled off to the police station, and eventually released after being charged with damaging a picture of Lukashenka, and trying to hold a press conference. A journalist who left the scene to file a story (bearing pictures) was apparently shot at by police, and then later arrested (according to br23) for "resisting arrest".

To be clear, this is happening in a country that shares a border with Poland.

Belarus' invisibility to both Europe and western media is amazing, although in line with the invisibility of other post-Soviet states that continue to suffer under leftover totalitarian systems. Presumably, the picturesque color revolutions of Georgia and Ukraine sell more papers than the struggling opposition movements of Belarus, Turkemenistan and Uzbekistan. Further, these countries are legitimately hard to write about -- interviews with relevant people are nearly impossible to arrange (and can endanger opposition leaders), in winter it's difficult to travel in these countries, and, of course, their respective dictators tend to kick the news agencies out and deny visas to journalists, which means that much reporting has to be done with external experts. This is, of course, all the more reason to cover these countries, but it doesn't make the job any easier for journalists. Which is why the bloggers like br23 and others blogging from inside these countries are invaluable. Let's hope they manage to stay online through the election.

Posted by Janet at 10:33 AM | Permalink

Declan Butler has written a great piece for Nature on the way scientists are starting to use Google Earth in place of far more complicated GIS software. Because Google Earth is easier to use than most GIS software (although doesn't include GIS analysis tools), scientists are finding they can "effortlessly" overlay mutliple data sets onto Google Earth, and use it as a visualization and live tracking tool. Butler writes that "increasing amounts of scientific data are becoming available, often in real time, in formats that can be displayed by virtual globes."

The good news here is not just for scientists, but also for citizens seeking to inform themselves on issues that are more easily grasped through data visualizations. Geographical display of advocacy data is one of my main interests -- from projects like Forward Track to Human Rights Watch use of maps to illustrate their study, " Off Target: The Conduct of War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq", I find the use of a geographical framework for data sets to be a powerful choice -- and one not employed often enough by advocates seeking to make an impression beyond reams of print. With tools like Google Earth, and an apparently increasing number of researchers interested in using these tools to track and visualize their data, the availability of these kinds of visual arguments is on the rise.

Google Earth is of course not open source, nor are its data formats. Other virtual globes, notably ESRI's coming free globe, will offer an open data format:

As part of the package, ESRI will also release a free visualization tool, ArcGis Explorer, which some GIS professionals are calling a Google-Earth killer. Data in Google Earth need to be in a specific format; ESRI's tool will allow users to view not only data from ESRI's own products, but also information in formats that are being increasingly standardized through the Open Geospatial Consortium. This international body is working to ensure that computers can understand descriptions of the spatial features of anything from highways and postcodes to icebergs.

And for those that are looking for open-source-only, Declan has highlighted (on his blog) a very useful and seemingly exhaustive list (in pdf format) of open source GIS and visualizations tools (this list spans the GRASS to GIMP -- there's a lot there).

Posted by Janet at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (44)