MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Michael Graham, coordinator of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative, introduces new visual evidence of destruction in Darfur.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is my colleague, Michael Graham. Michael, thank you for joining me.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: It’s a pleasure to be here.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Michael is the coordinator of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping initiative, and as part of that, Michael’s been the key person creating layers-- now we have two-- on destruction in the Darfur region of Sudan that are visible within Google Earth. Michael, can you just give us a little bit of background on what exactly is a layer in Google Earth?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: First, Google Earth has been downloaded about half a billion times around the world. It’s used as a tool from everything from flying around to see your house from the air, to tracking hurricanes, and now to presenting information on conflict and other humanitarian disaster. So a layer is simply a data set that is overlaid on top of the satellite imagery that Google Earth provides.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What year was it-- I can’t remember now-- when we launched our first partnership with Google Earth, which was a layer showing destruction of villages in Darfur?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: I believe it was May 2007, and we launched with several layers, with photos, with data on destruction, with locations of refugee camps, and that initial layer had 1600 villages that were either damaged or completely destroyed.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So that’s just the roughest of backgrounds for listeners. That last point that you made though, what was shown, the 1600 villages that were destroyed, that directly leads into what is new about the information that we have only recently made available. Can you tell us what’s available now in that Google Earth layer?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Yeah, and it should be explained to the listeners that all these data on destruction come from the U.S. State Department. They’ve conducted surveys and assessments of satellite imagery. From that created maps and provided data, pinpointing the exact location of villages that have been damaged or destroyed. In the newest layer that we released last month, there are more than 3300 villages throughout Darfur that have been damaged or destroyed -- twice the number that had, that we knew of, two years ago. That’s not because these villages were newly destroyed; it’s more because the State Department was able to spend more time and money to do a very comprehensive assessment of much more satellite imagery. So they believe this is a much more comprehensive assessment.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: They essentially went back to imagery that they might have captured at a previous point, but had never previously analyzed.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Right. I mean we’re talking huge amounts of data to pore over. It takes a lot of hours and staff time at the State Department.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I think the key thing-- and you mentioned it, but I want to make sure that we really highlight it-- is how many more villages we now not only know about but have evidence of their destruction. How does that help us understand the conflict in Darfur better?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: In my viewpoint, it’s not only showing a map of destruction of 3300 villages. You’re able to see with the satellite imagery that Google Earth provides discrete evidence of the destruction. It’s not simply allegations by journalists or human rights activists; it’s visual evidence that the scope of destruction was even wider than we thought during the period of 2003 to 2005. I think that’s a pretty powerful statement.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What are some of the other new additions to what a visitor to Google Earth is able to see?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: I think for me, the most powerful builds on that argument of improving access to evidence, and that is the historical imagery that Google Earth has made available for Sudan. So that means you can go down to a particular village. They’re marked in our layer with a little clock or time icons, and you can see what that village looked like both before and after it was attacked. We have that for about a hundred-plus sites, where you can go around and see that. If there’s any doubt that the village was destroyed when we say it’s destroyed, you can go back and see that it was in fact intact the year before.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the other things that you mentioned was this new data shows more villages destroyed; you can see the evidence before and after. But it also indicates that a good deal of the violence happened in a very distinct time period. Can you comment just a little bit more about that information?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: More than half of the villages-- the majority of villages were destroyed between 2003 and 2005. The violence really tapered down, or at least-- maybe not the violence, but the rate of destruction-- really slowed down significantly after 2006. In 2008 and 2009, it was down to a dozen or two dozen villages a year. It really, I think, shows-- the assessment shows that the destruction of villages, at least as a tactic by the Sudanese government or rebel groups, has subsided.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I want to talk about another project that you’re leading as part of the Museum’s overarching Genocide Prevention Mapping initiative, and that’s World as Witness. Can you describe a little bit about how that’s different from these layers on Darfur?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: World as Witness is an online blog -- or rather online magazine -- that highlights stories around the world of places and people that are at risk or undergoing threats of atrocity. So we have stories written by staff and guest contributors from Sudan, Chad, Congo, Rwanda, and some new posts this week on Burundi. And they highlight really the struggles that people go through every day when facing threats of violence. And that’s connected to Google Earth because we mapped every one of those stories to the location. So a story on a survivor of genocide in Southern Rwanda, you’ll be able to see the location of that village, or even of that church where they survived. We present that both on the web and in Google Earth. You can access that by going to Google Earth and finding that layer, World as Witness, or you can go to the museum site and look for World as Witness.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For World as Witness, you’ve taken several trips for the Museum. You’ve been to Congo several times, to Rwanda, to Southern Sudan, your photographs, commentary are available in World as Witness on that. I wondered just from a personal perspective, when you look at a place, the difference between looking at it from the satellite and what you’re able to see at that level, versus the experience of being alone, wandering around these places, talking to individuals on the ground. How do you maneuver? Just personally, I’m trying to understand and then represent these conflicts to an audience.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: For me, it comes to two very different perspectives. Like you said, there’s the high-level perspective, looking at the satellite imagery, and trying to place a story or an event in the context of the rest of the world, and I think that’s what tools like Google Earth are very valuable for. They can show scope; they can show geographic, political context. But they’re very impersonal. They don’t really show what’s happening, the human impact. So that’s why I think it’s so much more powerful to combine the two. You have the really in-depth stories. You have the testimonies from the people themselves -- what happened to them -- connected to the rest of the world.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Is there a portion of that work that you find personally more fulfilling?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Definitely the latter part. On the purely selfish motivation, being able to meet and talk to people that have really survived intense hardships -- children that were abducted by a rebel group, enslaved for six months or longer, and finally being able to escape and seeing the look on their face when they’re reunited with their family. And being able to share those stories, I think is, for me personally, incredibly inspiring and powerful.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This combination of taking really new, dynamic technologies and applying them, not for commercial interest or entertainment, but to human rights issues-- do you have a sense of where this trend is heading? What do you think is the next stage of people being able to engage via technologies with ongoing crises?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: I think that’s a big question. I think you’re seeing, in combination of the mapping side or the satellite imagery side, you’re seeing sort of information from the ground bubbling up more and more, with the help of technology. Whether that’s Facebook or Twitter or blogging, I think technology is really empowering the victims of conflict and potential genocide to have their voice shared and expressed. I may be a little pessimistic about what that means in the short-term, especially with the over-saturation of some of these platforms-- YouTube and Twitter with junk-- but I think there’s enormous potential for them to be leveraged in the right way, and to really make a difference.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: One of the things that astonished me, and I think you were the one who first told me about it, was how wireless Rwanda is. It’s going to directly from not having that kind of connectivity to doing a wireless technology, and how that might change, how we can get more voices on the ground out to people who are concerned about such situations.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Yeah. It was amazing to see, when we landed this land trip, and I think the trip before, contrasting with when I’d been there last about five years before, big ads for mobile broadband wireless Internet access. Which, to be in the heart of Africa and to see that, is incredible, and I think that gives me a lot of hope. When you have all levels of a society connected, and all parts of the world, when you have what used to be the deepest, darkest part of the world -- at least in terms of the perception of the West -- connected and be able to share their stories, I think you debunk a lot of myths, and you make preventing crimes against humanity or genocide much more plausible. I know that as a trend that’s increasing; that gives some room for optimism. They just connected some fiber optic lines to Kenya and South Africa. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more connection coming from that part of the world. And then the cell phone side, again, is huge. I think Africa is the number one growing market for cell phones in the world.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For those of you interested in seeing the work that Michael’s been doing for yourselves, you can access both the-- well, the Google Earth layer is available if you download Google Earth software; it’s immediately available in there. You can also get additional information and access World as Witness on the Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org. Michael, thank you for speaking with me.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Always a pleasure.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.
