Janet Haven

Irrawaddy, a print and online magazine covering all things Burma, ran a great article earlier this week on the American Association for the Advancement of Science's project on Human Rights and Geospatial Information. The article cited the work the AAAS team has undertaken to document the destruction of villages in Zimbabwe. Click on the thumbail image at right to see the images, taken three years apart. This is evidence that is stark, and very difficult to argue with: in the first shot, a village is clearly visible and in the second, only foliage remains in what is clearly the same location. Where did the village, and the people who live there, go? Amnesty International answers this in last week's press release :

Amnesty International today released the first-ever satellite images of the wholesale destruction of a large community in Zimbabwe -- providing the clearest possible evidence to date of the devastating impact of the Zimbabwean government's policy of house demolitions.

"These satellite images are irrefutable evidence -- if further evidence is even needed -- that the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities -- completely erased them from the map, as if they never existed," said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa programme.

The organization commissioned the satellite images to demonstrate the complete destruction of Porta Farm -- a large, informal settlement that was established 16 years ago and had schools, a children's centre and a mosque. The organization also released graphic video footage showing the forced evictions taking place prior to the demolitions.

Irrawaddy's interest in the Zimbabwe story is close to home: the AAAS team is looking to using satellite technology and geospatial information to shed light on village destruction in Burma's Karen State, according to the Irrawady article. The technology could potentially also be used to look for secret prisons in Burma, or document the illegal destruction of hardwood forests allowed by the Burmese military junta. The geospatial team at AAAS is also looking at Sudan as a possible case study.

For organizations that work to shed light on human rights abuses in places where observers can rarely go, this type of documentation is priceless -- not only because it documents what the outside world cannot see, but because the documentation is visual, and can be used to create a compelling and graphic story.

That said, satellite imagery can be thwarted. Clouds, it turns out, are the enemy of satellite imagery, and so monitoring time-sensitive events can easily be scuppered by cloud cover. The creation of satellite imagery is of course not constant, so capturing a specific, single event may also be difficult, particularly when factoring in weather and nighttime. The AAAS' website on this project has a good set of resources to learn more about the use of geospatial information in the human rights context, including satellite and data resources and organizations that work with GIS.