San Antonio Express-News
June 7, 2007 Thursday
STATE&METRO Edition

‘Eye in the sky’ will put horror only a click away

Rebeca Chapa

It looks like some sort of macabre video game, but unfortunately,
these images are as real as it gets.

Amnesty International Wednesday launched , a
project dedicated to visually bringing the tragedy of the Darfur
genocide to people all over the world.

The site, called a "human rights eye in the sky," shows satellite
images of 12 villages that have been deemed highly vulnerable to
attack. The list includes villages such as Kafod, where the non-Arab
Tunjur people fear an attack is imminent.

New images will be added every few days, according to site
organizers, to allow viewers to track destruction over time. Project
leaders say the images of troop movements, for example, could be used
to warn potential victims of an oncoming attack.

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, said the site
will send a message to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir that the
world is watching.

"Our goal is to continue to put pressure on Sudan to allow the
peacekeepers to deploy and to make a difference in the lives of
vulnerable civilians on the ground in Darfur," Khan said in a press
release Wednesday announcing the site launch.

The site will also allow viewers to send messages to al-Bashir.

The project follows a similar one by Google Earth, in cooperation
with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Since the brutal civil war began in 2003, more than 200,000 have been
killed and more than 2.5 million displaced. Rapes, theft and
abduction are common, according to eyewitness accounts and reports
from the ground.

Some of the descriptions — men being forced to watch their wives and
other female relatives gang-raped, children fleeing villages, animals
being slaughtered — read like fictionalized social commentary.

That’s why sites like these are so important. They make us see
something we’d rather not.

Technology is an equal opportunity tool. It can transport us to
fantastical worlds and contort the political process into theater. It
can connect us with like-minded people from distant lands and allow
us to peer into the very building blocks of life.

It can also, in the case of the Darfur sites, reveal the raw
brutality of man’s inhumanity.

In a world that is increasingly ruled by the use of technology for
personal comfort and convenience (think the soon-to-be-released $600
iPhone), it’s energizing to see it employed in a way that seeks to
get us out of that very comfort zone. The only downside is knowing
that for every Darfur that gets intense coverage, there are others
that we’ll never know about.

I ask myself, must I have immediate access to satellite images of
faraway tragedy to place myself in the world?

I think the answer is no. Consider the Armenian genocide in 1915. As
controversial as it is tragic, the extermination of up to a million
people is considered one of the first such genocides for its
magnitude and ferocity.

There were no real-time images of the starving bodies and worn faces
beamed across space, only news accounts, photos and the specter of
something terrible happening across the ocean.

And yet, an American relief organization donated more than $110
million to the Armenian cause. The "starving Armenians" became a
rallying cry in this country. They cared. They did something about
it. What’s our excuse?

In truth, it’s not that information isn’t available; it’s that we’re
too wrapped up in our own selves to engage with the rest of the
world.

It’s only when we’re thrust into a global perspective that we begin
to see what else is out there.

"Out there" is now just a click away.