MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Michael Graham is the coordinator of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative, which launched Crisis in Darfur, a joint effort with Google to illuminate the genocide in Darfur using Google Earth. He speaks to Jerry Fowler about his recent trip to Eastern Chad as well as the Museum’s unprecedented online mapping initiative.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is my colleague, Michael Graham. He’s coordinator of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative and has just returned from Eastern Chad where he met with Darfur refugees and humanitarian workers. Michael, welcome to the program.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Thank you.
JERRY FOWLER: Michael, you went to refugee camps and you were meeting refugees now who have been there for years, going on maybe three years in some cases. What was the mood of the refugees?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: The mood was subdued I would say. As you said, they’ve been there three years, at least a thousand days, and the monotony of the camps I think gets to them and when we sat down and talked about the situation they would complain about water being cut down, to the rations they get not being enough, and just the boredom of not being able to know what their situation is and where they’re going to go from here. They kept asking, “When can we go back to Sudan? Tell us when.” And obviously I had no answer for them.
JERRY FOWLER: And when refugees first started coming into Chad in late 2003, 2004, one thing that a lot of people remarked on was the fact that by and large the Chadian population was welcoming. There were in some cases ethnic ties across the border and there was a certain amount of open arms but I think that’s changed over time. What was the relationship between refugees in the local population and the Chadian authorities?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It seemed generally okay with the two camps we went to, Gaga and Farchana. You didn’t see any large-level fighting between the local populations and the refugees. That said, I think, there were certainly some issues and some tension between the local populations and the refugees. They’ve been there three years. They take resources from Chadians to go out and collect firewood so the same pool of resources that the local Chadians depend on the refugees in some ways are kind of edging in on and specifically with the Chadian authorities. There were some specific issues when we arrived. About three days before there was a problem in Gaga camp during one of the food distributions and according to a couple of the people we talked to, one, a young boy of 18 who witnessed the event, the WFP, those that were distributing the food along with the soldiers-
JERRY FOWLER: World Food Program.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: --the World Food Program were distributing the food but stopped for some reason after a day and the soldiers said, “We’re just going to leave,” according to the people we interviewed, and those that were receiving the food, the refugees, said, “No. That’s not acceptable. We need our rations,” and started throwing rocks at the soldiers. And the soldiers I guess took that badly and started shooting into the crowd allegedly hitting at least one person, not killing anybody but wounding one or two people, and then left, leaving the food. The refugees seized the little food that was there at that moment but apparently it wasn’t enough to feed everybody. And that was the situation as we came on it in Gaga and I’m really not sure if it’s been resolved or what’s happened. Apparently, about 18 people from Gaga were taken down to the local prison, interrogated, and abused according to some people that visited them there in that jail.
JERRY FOWLER: What about the health situation? Obviously, when refugees started coming across there were a lot of problems with malnutrition. Now there’s a relatively steady food supply but what did you find about the health situation in the two camps that you visited?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: In Gaga camp I think it was a little tenser than in Farchana. Obviously, the conflict over the rations may be part of a pattern that those refugees in Gaga are dealing with in terms of not getting enough food, having issues with the Chadian authorities in getting that food, and they complained of not having enough to eat. And whether that’s from simply not getting enough food or other issues including selling some of the rations in the market to get other necessary items or to build houses or whatever they use it for is- I’m not sure. However, in Farchana I think the situation was represents probably of many of the camps in eastern Chad. We talked with a doctor in Doctors Without Borders who was working in the local clinic there. They have a maternity ward. They have a malnutrition center. They have the basic facilities needed in that camp and in regard to malnutrition he said- the doctor said that it was very cyclical, that in the month after a food distribution the malnutrition- the rates of severe malnutrition among children, which are really those that are- really feel the brunt of issues of nutrition. The rate of malnutrition was only about six cases for that month, which is I think below the average of camps, but the second month without- after a food distribution the cases went up to 16. Then in that month, in July, the cases were at 27. So in terms of the food distribution, it’s done every three months and the doctor at MSF said that that last month the refugees sell some of the food in the markets and try to stretch the remainder of the millet, of the milk, of the fortified food they get and try to make it last the rest of that month but oftentimes it doesn’t happen and it results in no food for children. In the malnutrition center we came across about 27 children and their mothers that would go in every day to that center and be fed fortified milk, a substance called Plumpy Nut which is made of nuts and is high protein and high fat, and were being treated for malnutrition. And it seemed that the MSF doctors and staff members were doing a very good job of getting those malnourished children back into good shape. We watched several of the weightings of the children and they were all gaining weight so I think they’re cyclical issues and endemic to those camps. I don’t feel like there are a lot of severe issues of severe health issues. You see diarrhea. You see parasites. You see in the dusty season problems with eye infections and that sort of thing but I think for the most part it’s the standard fare.
JERRY FOWLER: You traveled to two refugee camps kind of in the central part of Eastern Chad and lot of the insecurity that we’ve heard about, violence, has been mostly south of that although earlier in the year the town of Abeche was briefly occupied by rebels. In your time there in talking to either the refugees or humanitarian workers, UN people, did you get any sense of the security situation?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Definitely for the humanitarian workers. There are severe issues of insecurity that really hamper their ability to get to a lot of the areas in eastern Chad. The area right around Abeche is relatively secure although there have been banditry- acts of banditry, carjackings, some humanitarian workers getting beaten up. There was a Doctors Without Borders staff member killed in their house in Abeche, in that regional capital, in July, but I don’t think it’s a targeted approach by the Janjaweed that are coming across the border or by rebel groups to do that. I think it’s more low-level banditry. In other parts though I think it’s really more severe in terms of the access by humanitarians in Goz Beida in the Dar Sila area. There are serious issues with Janjaweed coming across the border and attacking convoys, attacking humanitarian workers, stealing their vehicles, beatings and in some cases killing them as well as I think in the northern- in some of the northern camps like Oure Cassoni. So it’s gotten worse. In talking with some of the staff members of Doctors Without Borders, of IMC, they’re seeing more attacks and not less relative to the past couple of years.
JERRY FOWLER: Let’s change gears for a minute. As I mentioned in the introduction, you are the coordinator of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative, which is a joint effort with Google Earth that was rolled out a few months ago. For starters, for people who may not have seen it, what is this mapping initiative?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Well, to step back a little bit, Google Earth is a three-dimensional representation of the earth which combines satellite imagery with data overlaid on top of it so that you get a seamless visualization of the- what the earth looks like from any angle and what this lets you do is zoom down and see your house. It lets you search for restaurants or hotels or plan a trip or do a lot of sort of mundane day-to-day things but the other thing it lets you do is see the impact- the physical impact on villages, on towns, on the landscape during a conflict like Darfur which has used very severe methods of destruction in the genocidal campaign by the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed which included the burning of huts which is visible in satellite imagery taken from space. So the idea behind the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative and the partnership with Google was to connect with the huge audience, the user community of Google Earth, which is 250 million people worldwide in almost every country in the world and connect this audience to information about Darfur. So we worked over the past year on collecting data on attacks against villages, on damaged and destroyed villages, on displacement of refugees, of the 2-1/2 million living in Sudan as well as Chad, as well as the 230,000 living in the camps we visited, and stories and photos, testimonies, video, and put it all together in a single package that lets a user zoom down and really get a sense of what’s happening, what has happened in the last three years in terms of the impact on the people and the villages in Darfur. And this wouldn’t have been possible without Google stepping up to the plate and putting in huge amounts of high-resolution satellite imagery into their program so that nearly all of the 1600 damaged and destroyed villages as identified by the State Department, which you can now see in Google Earth, nearly all of them, when you zoom down to each one, you can see the hollowed-out remains of individual buildings, of schools, of mosques, of homes, hundreds of these blackened foundations of huts in villages across the entire region of Darfur, north, west and south. So it’s really been an incredible relationship with Google, unprecedented, working with an organization like that which does very few things like this with these sorts of topics, with genocide or human rights. It’s much more organizing the world’s information but of course this is just one more aspect of the world’s information that doesn’t see the light as much as it should and they really jumped on board to make it more accessible and to illuminate the situation using Google Earth.
JERRY FOWLER: You mentioned that Google Earth has somewhere in the neighborhood of 200, 250 million users worldwide but I’m willing to bet that at least a few of our listeners are not users. What does someone have to do in order to access this information? Where do you go? How hard is it?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: There are two ways to get to the crisis in Darfur, layers. The first is simply to download Google Earth. It’s a software program. You can go to www.earth.google.com and download the program. As soon as you open it up—.
JERRY FOWLER: Does that take a long time?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It takes about five minutes to download and install it. Most computers these days can run it. You need a pretty fast internet connection. A regular broadband connection’s fine. But once you open the program you zoom around. You can grab the globe with your mouse and zoom around to Africa and you’ll see instantly an outline of Darfur and you zoom down closer and you start to see yellow and red icons that represent damaged and destroyed villages and you can immediately start exploring that information. And by going to the introductory balloon right in the middle with a photo that was taken by Jerry Fowler you can read about the- an introduction about the conflict and download more layers from the Museum’s web site. The second way of reaching this content is to go to the Museum’s web site, www.ushmm.org, and go to the Google Earth page. There is a link to download the program as well as to download the additional set of information which includes photos, testimonies, videos, a lot of information about the attacks and displacement against the people of Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: All of this is totally free?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It’s completely free.
JERRY FOWLER: The information that is there now is focused on Darfur but this is kind of billed as an initiative related to genocide prevention more broadly. Where do you see this project going?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: The problem with Darfur and our project is that it looks to the past, it looks three years to the past, and we’re really coming far too late to the game to make a difference on the ground and part of it’s a catch-22 in that a lot of this information, the data created by the United Nations or the State Department and even the satellite imagery that Google incorporated into the program, is only available a couple years into a conflict like this once you have the capacity on the ground.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you that because some people have raised this question. Is the satellite imagery updated on a regular basis? Is there some real time aspect to it?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It’s not real time. The way Google ads it is very ad hoc. They work with a company called Digital Globe and they have access to their entire archive of imagery but really it’s a single satellite that’s going around the earth and so bits and pieces of the entire globe are updated every couple months by Google but there’s no real time dimension to it. The imagery of Darfur was taken between 2004 and 2006 for the most part. So you get a very broad sense of the destruction in the area but it’s very hard to pinpoint specific time frames of village attacks or to really get any sort of updated sense of where things lie right now. That’s just a fundamental problem with the lack of information available, imagery and data and that sort of thing. However, in terms of where we’re going in the future if we’re really looking at using this as a tool for prevention, as a tool to get to rally international support for intervention, or for other policy options made by decision makers in this country and abroad, we really need to start looking at how we get that information, how we get the satellite imagery, how we get information about where the village attacks are and where the displacement is much more early on as well as ways of telling the stories of people in a way that makes it very personal and lets people in the U.S., citizens, and those around the world connect with an evolving situation. So other places we hope to look at and we are looking at already with the Committee on Conscience is Eastern Chad of course with some degree of spillover from Darfur, also with some domestic issues with rebel groups that some actors warn could turn into genocide as well as areas like the Congo and places that are experiencing atrocities, systematic crimes against humanity, that may lead to genocide. So we want to get much more ahead of the curve and tell stories, get satellite imagery in very quickly after we hear about an attack and try to mobilize public opinion not three years later but maybe three days, three weeks later. I think that’s kind of the ‘holy grail’ that we’re looking for.
JERRY FOWLER: Michael Graham is my colleague at the Holocaust Museum where he’s the coordinator of the Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. Michael, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: My pleasure.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
