Here There and Everywhere

Dharfur: We can No Longer Pretend We Don’t Know

Today, in his blog, Ogle Earth, which discusses new developments with Google Earth, Stefan Geens says the following about the new hi-res maps of the Sudan made public today in Google Earth:

Those circles aren’t animal pens. They’re burned-down gottias, circular mud huts that had straw roofs, and they’re what’s left of Dalia, a village in Sudan’s Darfur region, one of hundreds of villages that have been destroyed by the Janjaweed in a program of depopulation that has killed perhaps 400,000 civilians since 2003.

Today, Google added recent high resolution imagery of Darfur to Google Earth, taken by DigitalGlobe in January-March 2006. It serves as an unequivocal indictment of the Janjaweed, and of the Sudanese government whose implicit support it has enjoyed, because in these new images each and every burned-out gottia is visible. This is the kind of evidence that puts paid to the claims still coming out of Khartoum that the ethnic cleansing is not widespead, and that accusations of genocide are a mere pretext to wrest sovereignty away from Sudan with the deployment of UN peacekeepers.

Read the blog entry for yourself here.

He goes on to say “we can no longer pretend we don’t know.”

He’s right. It’s there, in high resolution, for all to see.

Props to the hard working young man at Google Earth who has been slaving to get all the detailed maps together. It’s a fine mission, ibn uckti, and we are all so proud of you and the hours you put in to make this possible.

October 4, 2006 - Posted by intlxpatr | Africa, Political Issues, Social Issues, Sudan, Uncategorized