...the similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable...

[NNN0LHI]

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/conor_foley/2007/04/googling_genocide.html

Googling genocide

Unfortunately new technology can over-simplify complicated problems.
Conor Foley

About Webfeeds April 12, 2007 4:30 PM | Printable version

The news that Google Earth, the search engine's online mapping service, has entered a partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to publish new high-resolution aerial photographs of destroyed villages, displaced people and refugee camps in Darfur, has been hailed as another step forward for global citizen's advocacy.

Users scan over Darfur. Fire icons represent destroyed villages with flames and refugee camps with tents. Clicking on them will open windows with the village's name and statistics on the extent of destruction. As a gimmick, that will hopefully bring wider attention to the terrible suffering of the people of Darfur, it is a good initiative. It has some similarities with the citizen journalists, from the Stop Genocide Now (SGN) network, who went to the region over Christmas and blogged about their experiences.

The SGN network said they intended to "replace statistics with names, faces and stories" and, more grandiosely, that "we have entered an age of knowledge which empowers us to protect". In fact there is a long tradition of organisations such as Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) "bearing witness" to atrocities and the mainstream news media have long understood that that people, faced with information over-load, want their stories simple, direct and moving.

Unfortunately, as I wrote here a few months ago, real life is often just not like that and there are problems with trying to reduce every conflict to a story of good and evil.

Darfur has become a cause celebre in certain circles, particularly in the United States where a powerful lobby group of religious faith-based organisations has made common cause with human rights activists to demand international action to "stop the genocide". snip

But some questions do need to be asked about the politics of this activism. As Mahmoud Mamdani recently observed in the London Review of Books, "the similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?"

In September 2004 the US government labelled the killings in Darfur as genocide, but in February 2005 a UN commission of inquiry explicitly rejected this finding. It stated that there was evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed and suggested that the UN security council refer the situation to the International Criminal Court. It confirmed "massive displacement" of persons ("more than a million" internally displaced and "more than 200,000" refugees in Chad) and the destruction of "several hundred" villages and hamlets as "irrefutable facts"; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had "allegedly killed over 70,000 persons".

[Gregorian]

1. Oil.

Thanks for posting this. I think we need to realize the similarities. Big corporations that want their "stuff". They kill for it.