Gonzaga Debate Institute 2011 Gemini Landsats Neg

AT: Genocide – No Solve

Totten (2006) argues that “no single early warning system has been established whose express purpose is tracking each and every conflict simmering across the globe in order to detect the earliest signs of genocide in the making”9 , and stresses that even though it existed, the need for the political will to address the crisis from spiralling into a genocidal conflict is paramount. As a recent OECD report warns, “The humanitarian community is no better positioned today to prevent another Rwandan genocide than we were in 1994, (…) in sum, the use of technology in conflict settings requires a different set of solutions to overcome existing challenges, and lags some years behind the evolution of natural disaster early warning systems.”10 The report also notices that the field of conflict early warning is witnessing a shift away from stateUcentric, topUdown approaches to more decentralized, peopleUcentred initiatives, a shift which is further accentuated by the availability of digital technology and new media, which is more decentralized and distributed than traditional technologies. Here arises the challenge of leveraging these new technologies to empower individuals affected by conflicts. Here too lies great potential for the work of the Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide11 , the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Mr. Francis Deng12 and the related work of the Special Adviser who focuses on the responsibility to protect, Mr. Edward Luck13 . Meetings the ICT4Peace Foundation held New York over 2010 with both Mr. Deng and Mr. Luck confirmed the multifaceted challenges they face in establishing a more robust system able to prevent mass atrocity crimes. At the same time, they recognise the potential of new technologies to, inter alia, bring perpetrators to justice, complement UN alerts and early warning, focus, over the long term, scrutiny on precarious communities, report on ground conditions, help in confidential information generation, strengthen the protection of those who bear witness and disseminate their own critical output to the international community and member states.

Those images are much more than pretty pictures. They provide robust scientific information about a changing planet. The Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument on Landsat 5 was built in the late 1970s with a resolution fine enough to resolve blocks of land about 100 feet wide per pixel—at a time when most people didn't know what a pixel was. It was a second-generation imaging instrument in the Landsat program, flying alongside and eventually surpassing the older Multispectral Scanner System (MSS), which had a resolution of about 250 feet. TM cannot resolve individual houses or trees, but it can see areas where houses have been constructed or forests have been cleared. If the resolution were any finer, Landsat might not have been able to capture large-scale land changes. The satellite's resolution has been called "just-right" by Earth systems scientists.

As the protests in Burma escalated, he submitted an order for shots of Rangoon and Mandalay from two satellites. It takes a few days to program the cameras, and each satellite flies over Burma only once every five days, so he crossed his fingers and hoped that it wouldn't be too cloudy when they passed. Bromley received his first image a week later, and by then the cities were already in total lockdown. "The streets were completely empty," he says, "except for large vehicles surrounding the monasteries." To catch human rights abusers in the act, Bromley will need a heads-up from the NGOs, who usually know what's about to go down. "If enough groups learn of the satellites," he says, "the odds increase that we can collect useful pictures" — pretty much anywhere in the world. Though the impact of such photos is uncertain, in matters of human rights abuse, global attention is never a bad thing. "Right now, we take what the NGOs already know and prove it," Bromley says. "But my job's not done until we put a stop to it.

AT: Genocide – No Solve – AT: Political Deterrence

Genocide isn’t deterred as it isn’t triggered but prepared for over a long period of time
Sankore 4 (Rotimi, International Journalist, pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21207, 4/1, DA 7/6/11, OST)

In answering this question, the most important point to make is that genocide does not just happen. It is prepared for, consciously executed and is based on reasonably identifiable social, political and economic conditions. What differs is the extent to which these conditions apply or exist, and the degree of preparation by the perpetrators. The second most important point to make is that genocide is not ‘triggered’ by a single event that pushes the perpetrators over the brink. On the contrary, the so-called ‘trigger events’ are excuses for setting in motion the logical end to a process prepared for well in advance. Only when the world appreciates the fact of these processes can we collectively identify the signs or beginnings of what is likely to end in genocide and douse the fire before it becomes an all-consuming flame. In the case of Rwanda, it is a popularly held myth that the shooting down of the plane carrying the then Head of State Juvenal Habyarimana and the Burundian President Cyprien Ntayamira on 6th April 1994 triggered the genocide that followed over the next 12 weeks and left well over 700,000 dead (nearly 10% of the country’s population of over 8 million). Nothing can be further from the truth. Before the shooting down of the airplane by yet unidentified persons, the social and political conditions had been prepared by various factors. One key factor was the dictatorship established following the seizure of power by General Juvenal Habyarimana in 1973. Habyarimana ruled in the name of the “majority” and imposed a dictatorship on the entire country. In addition, the official discrimination against the Tutsi minority was so much that within two decades, half a million had fled the country.

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