Google maps the Darfur crisis

Internet users can now interactively view satellite images of individual devastated villages.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
and Rob Crilly | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 13, 2007 edition

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa; and NAIROBi, Kenya - Keeping an eye on the crisis in Sudan's troubled Darfur region just got a little easier, thanks to a new satellite-mapping service offered by Google Inc.

Now anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can zoom in on satellite images of any of the 1,600 devastated villages and get detailed information provided by the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The collaboration is an effort to raise awareness about the three-year-old conflict that has killed more than 200,000 and displaced more than 2.5 million people by giving ordinary people access to images generally available only to spies, diplomats, and heads of state.

Nobody questions whether Google Earth's new service is – in the specialized terminology of the Web – "cool." The question is: Will it will make a difference?

"It is an important contribution that makes it a bit easier for the average citizen to get his or her head around the enormity of the crisis," says John Prendergast, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group in Washington and an expert on Darfur.

"It's our hope that by combining this up-to-date satellite imagery with authoritative data and evidence from the ground in Google Earth we can make it harder for people to stand idly by when genocide happens,' " said Lawrence Swiader, spokesman for the Holocaust Museum, at a press conference.

But how up-to-date are the images? They are not in real time. Google Earth's images are photographs "taken by satellites and aircraft sometime in the last three years" and "updated on a rolling basis," according to Google's website. The Holocaust Museum's website says the satellite imagery of Darfur and Chad was taken between 2003 through 2006.

Also, aid workers in or near Darfur who might be in the best position to use satellite imagery to keep tabs on their projects often don't have the speedy Internet access that Google Earth's service requires. Government officials in Sudan are famously thick-skinned about Western criticism about Darfur, which they regard as an internal and spontaneous ethnic conflict. Will Google Earth succeed where Condoleezza Rice and actress-activist Mia Farrow have failed?

"The problem in Darfur is not a lack of information, and it's not a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the problem," says Peter Kagwanja, a senior analyst at the Human Sciences Research Council in Tshwane, South Africa. "[The problem is] a lack of action by the international community," he says.

"If this is updated day by day, and you can detect that something is happening, then it might stop [Sudan] from doing some things, because you do things differently if you know that someone is watching you," says Mr. Kagwanja.

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