The conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan has raged under the nose of a complacent international community for the last five years. Last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to the US equipped with a “peace package” and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s blessing to end the conflict in Darfur. The package included a United Nations Security Council resolution, now adopted with some revisions, for an African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force.
Without a doubt, an AU-UN operation with a robust mandate allowing for civilian protection is critical. But even in the best-case scenario, it will be months before such a peacekeeping operation will translate into stopping attacks on the ground; not until Member States commit troops and they are physically deployed. In the meantime, Amnesty International is using satellites orbiting in space to monitor and help protect civilians in the region.
Satellite technology up to now has been employed almost exclusively by governments and their militaries, to help protect national security interests. Human rights monitoring has not been high on any government’s to-do-list, nor has sharing images of violations when they have been captured. To this day the U.S. government is still withholding satellite images taken during 1994 that displayed the Rwandan genocide in progress.
Amnesty International’s new Eyes on Darfur project is a telling example of how non-governmental actors can make a difference: Using powerful, commercially available satellites, we are watching over highly vulnerable villages in war-torn Darfur, to deter new atrocities by President al Bashir’s forces, the Janjawid or armed opposition groups.
Ultimately, to stop the ongoing death and destruction in Darfur, there is no substitute for active engagement by the international community, a durable peace agreement, and well-resourced peacekeepers. But until the new UN Security Council Resolution translates into boots on the ground, Amnesty will look to the skies to highlight what is not happening right down below.
Ariela Blätter, a human rights lawyer, is the Director of the Crisis Prevention and Response Center at Amnesty International, a Nobel Prize-winning organization with a global membership. Currently, she is engaged in using satellite technology to monitor human rights abuses.
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- Daniel Fallenstein on Darfur: Germans Should Get Involved
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September 19, 2007
Jeppe Plenge Trautner, Aalborg University / College of Europe, Bronze Contributor (14)
No amount of high-resolution satellite imagery of burning villages in Darfur will change any of the four conditions, which ensure the continuation of the atrocities there:
Firstly, the Sudanese army and air force, at the express will of the Government of Sudan, deliver combat support and logistics to the government-affiliated militias, which commit nearly all the atrocities (e.g. www.bloodhound.se). , The survival of the Sudanese regimes hinges on its ability to kill its challengers at will, and to pay off its militias and factions with the spoils of war.
Secondly, the Government of Sudan strategically controls the African Union. Sudan has a veto in the AU's 'Peace and Security Council', and is well protected by the majority of lethal non-democratic regimes dominating the AU (about 43 of 53 member states are dictatorships).
Thirdly, the mainly African UN/AU composite force now being inserted into Darfur will still be under AU and UN control. Neither organisation has any incentive to confront the Government of Sudan, and their peacekeepers thus cannot improve the situation.
Fourthly, the inability of most humanitarian NGOs (bar the International Crisis Group) to look into the politics underlying disasters such as Darfur. This blindness, willed or not, allows the NGOs and Western governments to repaint politically wrought disasters as ‘accidents’, the inevitable effects of 'the chaos of war', or even as the result of climate change (as UN SG Ban Ki-moon suggests).
So Western governments, prompted to ‘do something’, send ineffective peacekeepers with nonsense mandates to Darfur as this is infinitely less demanding than to confront the Government of Sudan and its powerful Arab, OIC, Russian and Chinese backers. And likewise, it seems befit most humanitarians to pretend that problems arise out of nothing and are non-political, and that aid is neutral and impartial. This absolves donors, NGOs and aid workers from facing the fact that their efforts have political effects, at least in public, they may bleed their hearts in private. As a result, the peacekeepers and humanitarians may end up benefiting exactly those militias and governments which created and sustain the mess.
Sadly, in spite of the hopes of Ariela Blätter, a technological fix is improbable. The near-inaction of the Western governments is not caused by a lack of awareness of the gravity of the abuses, as she implies. Rather, the problem is the lack of analytical intent and capability, also on the side of many NGOs, here Amnesty International. The non-analysis of the political motivations underlying the Government of Sudan, ignorance about the premises for and functioning of the African Union and the UN, and the ethos of blind humanitarianism gives rise to policies and pseudo-solution with the potential to do more harm.than good.
Jeppe P Trautner