Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum announced an initiative on April 10 to bring more attention to the ongoing crisis in Darfur. Google Earth, a satellite mapping service, began providing a detailed view of the ongoing devastation and human rights violations in Darfur.
By clicking on Crisis in Darfur, satellite pictures of destroyed villages and refugee camps scattered across Darfur can be viewed by a global audience after Google Earth puts the images online.
It is the first time the Holocaust Museum used Google Earth technology to highlight the problem of genocide worldwide. Google Earth enables 200,000,000 users, who have signed on, to visualize an ongoing genocide with the aid of satellite imagery, 3-D mapping technology, and Search. Viewers can zoom into a region and see more than 1,600 damaged and destroyed villages. "The remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed by the janjaweed militia and Sudanese forces are clearly visible," says the Museum news release.
Speaking at the Museum's location in Washington, D.C., Eliot Schrage, Google Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs, said how Google Earth technology can "empower" an organization like the Museum to leverage the information it collects, to engage large audiences and move them to action.
Schrage said he was excited about the power of sharing information among users, and has expectations that new forms of action will arise that may create new projects to end the destruction in Darfur.
"This technology did not exist even two years ago," said Lawrence Swiader, who oversees the Museum's web applications and who walked the audience through the steps to view the genocide prevention mapping initiative. Mr. Swiader referred to the blogging going on today in contrast to two years ago as "a different world," where someone who has a cause or urgent situation can put the information in the hands of others who are interested in it. It's "using information, just in time, when you're ready to use it," Swiader said.
Sarah Bloomfield, the Museum's Director, spoke of the Museum as being a "living" memorial, and quoted Elie Weisel that "a memorial unresponsive to the future world would violate the memories of the past." So, the Museum engages in outreach, preventing genocides, and creating a "community of conscience."
The participants at the news conference admitted they didn't know how the information would be used, but were hopeful that in the hands of the Internet users, genocides around the globe will be prevented or stopped sooner.
Bloomfield conceded that the best information will not ignite the political will to stop genocide, but hoped that out of the enhanced visualization of the atrocities, people will acquire "empathy" for the victims. This has been her experience at the museum, where new visitors say "intellectually," they already knew about the Holocaust, but when seeing the artifacts in the Museum, the visit "personalized" the Holocaust for them.
Genocide by Attrition
Leading the effort by the Museum to educate the public of the crisis in Darfur is John Heffernan, who in February 2006 was made Director of the Genocide Prevention Initiative of the Museum's Committee on Conscience (COC). Heffernan before his Museum appointment was working with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and led three investigations to the Darfur region. He said over 2˝ million people have lost their homes, hundreds of thousands have died, and over 1,600 villages have been destroyed or damaged.
Heffernan explained how the genocide in Darfur is different from Rwanda in 1994 where 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in 100 days. In Darfur, since 2003, it could be called "genocide by attrition," said Heffernan. More people die from disease and starvation than actual violence. The government and its militias raid a village and besides the killing and raping, they go house to house taking everything of value—e.g., carpets, beds, livestock. The survivors find themselves in a "dessert death trap," with no resources to survive. Forced to travel long distances from their homes to refugee camps, they have to rely entirely on humanitarian aid in order to survive.
The Museum is organizing the contents of this project from a wide range of sources, such as the U.S. State Department, non-government organizations, the United Nations, individual photographers, and the Museum too. In the course of demonstrating the tool, Swiader chose from among the list of massacres, the village of Touloum, and then zooming in, he found the village ruins and eventually came upon a photograph by Brian Steidle of a one-year old girl who had been shot and was not likely to live. Steidle's verbal report could be heard.
The family stories of a village destroyed, family members killed or raped, a photo of what is left of the house, the fleeing to safety, a map of where their refugee camp is located—all of this information and more is on Google Earth.
The participants at the news conference wondered aloud whether the enhanced understanding of the atrocities in Darfur would change anything. Will this kind of specificity invite the "empathy" that the designers of this project are hoping for? And then, will the users do anything about it?
A user is invited to click on "What you can do" and find a wealth of information and contacts. The site recommends communicating with decision makers and lists a wide range of contacts in the U.S. government and the African Union, for example. Under supporting Education and Relief work," the site gives contact information for humanitarian relief organizations (e.g., Oxfam, UNICEF) and for Human Rights organizations (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights First, Physicians for Human Rights). The lists are quite comprehensive; even the relatively unknown "Sudanese Organization Against Torture" (SOAT)'s information is listed.
The Darfur crisis is not the only humanitarian project that the Museum and Google are working on together. A similar mapping project on Holocaust history is on the Museum's website: www.ushmm.org/googleearth. Also, Schrage spoke of other partnerships that Google Earth has begun, which address a wide range of issues such as the environment.
Downloading Google Earth is free from http://earth.google.com. You need to fly over Africa to find Crisis in Darfur.
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