Satellite Images Catch Human-Rights Violations = Myanmar violence

Friday, September 28, 2007
Satellite Images Catch Human-Rights Violations
By David Talbot
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19456/?a=f

Analysis of photos shows scenes of razed villages and forced-relocation sites in Burma.

Backing up human-rights reports that the Burmese military is razing villages of ethnic minorities and herding people into areas under tighter military control, an analysis of satellite images shows chilling scenes of bare ground where villages once stood, new settlements near military camps, and swelling refugee camps just across the border, in Thailand. The new analysis was done by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and human-rights groups.

"What we did was essentially draw from a set of commercially available imaging satellites to see what we could see in the locations where said attacks were taking place," Lars Bromley, who heads up the AAAS's Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights project, said in a news conference. "When they got a report out of a region, we would do our best to precisely locate the coordinates where the events took place." The images were provided by two firms: GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.

In one case, reports that villages were razed on April 22 of this year were backed up by a satellite picture snapped on June 24, Bromley said. "We feel that information matches up fairly well with the reports," he said. A dozen or more people were killed during that incident--one of more than 70 instances of human-rights violations reported from mid 2006 through early 2007 in eastern Burma's Karen State and surrounding regions.

What's more, satellite images show that large numbers of people have been moved closer to military centers. ...............

at least then our government might give a rat's ass.