These Satellite Images Document an Atrocity

THE ORIGINS OF THE AMNESTY/AAAS COLLABORATION DATE TO OCTOBER 2004, when Nelson's boss, Ariela Blätter, the director of Amnesty's Crisis Prevention and Response Center, got an invitation to a panel discussion on the crisis in Darfur. AAAS had invited speakers from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department to discuss how they'd used high-resolution satellite imagery to map refugee flows. A few years before, the Amnesty group in Denmark had tried using satellite imagery to analyze fire patterns in Darfur, but the imagery had proved too ambiguous to have much of an impact. The State Department's shots, it turned out, were much clearer -- and they came from a commercial satellite, presumably one anyone with funding could access.

"Is this something the human rights community could use?" Blätter remembers raising her hand to ask.

Lars Bromley, a tech-savvy AAAS geographer, was also in the audience. The then-29-year-old understood exactly what the State Department had done to create its report and what it would take for him and AAAS to do the same thing. All he needed was detailed knowledge of where problems were unfolding -- the kind of information researchers at Amnesty could provide.

"He dragged me off of the conference for this intense conversation," recalls Blätter, now 33. "It quickly became clear that they had been looking for me, and I had been looking for them."

Hoping to appear serious about technology herself, Blätter asked him if he'd seen Amnesty Denmark's study. "He told me it was cute," she says.

With Blätter's help, Bromley got funding from the MacArthur Foundation for a pilot project. Darfur was on both their minds, but it was too complicated a situation to try as a test case. So they decided to look at Zimbabwe. In the summer of 2005, President Robert Mugabe's government forces had razed settlements around the country, leaving thousands homeless. The areas targeted had been those that had voted heavily for the opposition, opposition leaders said. Amnesty and the United Nations issued a small mountain of reports describing the nature and scale of the destruction, and documenting the government's subsequent denial of access to aid organizations. Still, the Zimbabwean government insisted that the operation was an urban renewal project with no political agenda.

Blätter and Bromley decided to get satellite images of the settlements before and after the razing. There were plenty of archival shots available for purchase and, through his MacArthur grant, Bromley had money to commission new acquisitions. The only obstacle was getting exact locations: Amnesty has traditionally focused on the personal stories of eyewitnesses, not latitudes and longitudes. So the duo had to be resourceful. Amnesty's London researchers were able to map a settlement called Porta Farm by scanning Google Earth for a site fitting its description: on the main road out of Harare, going toward Bulawayo, between two lakes. For harder-to-find locations, Bromley created a map of the area and e-mailed it to local activists, who e-mailed coordinates back. Bromley placed the order and crossed his fingers.

"You sit there and wonder, 'Did I just waste X amount of dollars on images of the beautiful Zimbabwe countryside?'" he says.

But the shots were spot on. Porta Farm, for example, had consisted of more than 850 buildings that had housed at least 6,000 people. Now, except for dim traces of old dirt tracks, it was an empty landscape. In May 2006, Amnesty issued a news release and, with AAAS, put the images online. Their power quickly became clear. Even though the attacks had happened the previous year and were well-documented, this publicity push generated more coverage for the situation in Zimbabwe -- from outlets including the BBC and al-Jazeera -- than Amnesty had in the previous 10 years. Amnesty's Zimbabwe campaign staff started giving interviews at 1 a.m., coinciding with the news release, and kept going till 10 that evening.

Then that summer, a group called Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, which through Zimbabwe's court system had been unsuccessfully fighting the forced evictions, submitted the images as evidence in a complaint filed before the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. Mugabe's government seems to have been caught off-guard; officials requested a delay to have the images independently analyzed.

In the aftermath, both Amnesty and AAAS agreed enthusiastically to support the continued partnership, and the MacArthur Foundation funded an expansion. This grant covered Bromley's salary for the next three years. (Researchers at AAAS, like those at most scientific institutions, are expected to cover part or all of their salaries through research grants.) It also allowed Bromley to bring on interns to focus on new areas, including Darfur. A smaller grant, from the Open Society Institute, would pay for a look at Burma. Blätter got a grant from the Save Darfur Coalition, and committed Jeremy Nelson to the project. She also started thinking about using the technology to explore other regions that Amnesty researchers couldn't physically reach. In Eritrea, for example, satellite images might help to locate makeshift jails deep in the interior, where she has heard that political prisoners are held in secret.

ON FRIDAY, BROMLEY, NELSON AND BLÄTTER ARE ON A CONFERENCE CALL. The Amnesty International and AAAS offices are only a few minutes from each other, but this is how most of the group's work gets done.