Refugees – Solvency – Co-op

Genocide – Solvency – Prevention

This folder contains two additional folders of JPEG image products created in ArcGIS using the enclosed GIS files and image mosaics. The /GSP/final_cambodia_products/ folder contains JPEG images of Cambodia, western Cambodia, and south-central Cambodia and the burial grounds, prisons, and memorials from the genocide time period. These image products contain legends for easy identification of map items. The /GSP/products_no_legends/ folder contains similar images without legends. These files may be more useful for backgrounds or other projects where images, rather than maps, are required. /key_GIS_files_cambodia/ This folder contains a subset of the available GIS data related to the Cambodian genocide. The GIS files in this folder are the files used to create the image products in the /Cambodia_products/ folder. The files map prisons, memorials, burial grounds, rivers, roads, and the Cambodian country boundary.

Remote sensing is broadly defined as the act of obtaining images or data from a distance, typically using a manned spacecraft, a satellite, or a high-altitude spy aircraft. The term was invented in the 1950s to distinguish early satellite images from aerial photographs traditionally obtained from fixed wing aircraft. As such, remotely sensed images can be considered to be one kind of geospatial imagery. Although the application of unclassified remote sensing images to civil and criminal investigations has been limited, they have proven to be useful for documenting international atrocities in areas that are otherwise inaccessible to outside observers. Sufficiently detailed satellite imagery has been used to document international crimes such as possible genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan and the existence of concealed mass graves in Iraq. In Iraq, potential gravesites were identified with the help of satellite image and aerial photograph interpretation and then investigated in more detail using ground-penetrating radar and other methods. A total of 270 mass graves were reported, of which 53 had been confirmed by early 2004, with some 400,000 bodies discovered. Features such as mass graves are generally not directly visible. Instead, analysis reveals features such as otherwise inexplicable areas of freshly moved earth or signs of heavy construction equipment used to excavate the graves. Comparison of publicly available Landsat satellite images obtained in 2003 and 2004 was also used to document the burning of 44 of the villages in the Darfur region of Sudan during a period of civil strife, which some observers believe amounted to genocide. Burning was inferred in areas where the albedo, or amount of radiation reflected by the ground surface, had changed significantly during the times at which the two images were obtained. This was accomplished by using a computer algorithm to calculate albedo from the satellite data, then subtracting one albedo map from the other to calculate the change. This kind of mathematical operation on entire maps or digital images, as opposed to single numbers, is known as map algebra.

Following up on Amnesty International’s “Eyes On Darfur” initiative, launched in 2007 and “generally credited for breaking ground” on use of satellite technology “to monitor, perhaps deter, humanitarian abuses” (Richard Solash, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, 12 January 2011), the Satellite Sentinel Project — a collaboration between Google, the UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and various NGOs — was formed in hope of watchfully discouraging violence related to the January referendum in southern Sudan. Satellite imagery used to have “an almost exclusive, military connotation,” notes Patrick Meier, co-founder of the Crisis Mapping Project at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “Now it’s demystified. I think what we’re seeing… is going from this kind of state-centric, proprietary, extremely expensive technology that then is classified and only limited to a few individuals to a more opensource, open-data, very public, non-state approach to employing and leveraging these technologies, in a way, for some of the same ends — to really monitor and do surveying and [derive] in some form or another some accountability.”