Google Earth helps raise Darfur genocide awareness

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Darfur refugee Daowd Salih estimates only 2,000 to 3,000 homes in his native Sudan have access to the Internet, but he just hopes one person there is web-savvy: Sudanese President Omar Bashir.

"President Bashir needs to understand he is being watched," Mr. Salih said. "He is not going to be changed, but he is going to know that 200 million people who didn't hear about the situation [in Darfur] before, they're going to know now."

Mr. Salih joined representatives from the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Google Inc. yesterday to introduce an online mapping initiative designed to call attention to conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Battles between well-armed rebels and government soldiers or paramilitary groups in Darfur have displaced almost 2 million people, sent about 235,000 refugees to Chad and resulted in a death toll of more than 350,000 people since winter 2003, according to Tim Irwin, spokesman for a U.N. refugee agency.

The Crisis in Darfur project will use Google Earth mapping service to provide high-resolution satellite imagery from the conflict-ridden area. Red and yellow symbols dot the site's map images of Darfur's landscape, representing more than 1,600 destroyed and damaged villages. Users can zoom in on the colored symbols to see satellite imagery of the destruction. About 20 of the villages include black tabs that users can click to hear personal stories from particular villages.

Project coordinators say the remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed in the conflict are clearly visible on the site.

The site's content comes from the U.S. State Department, nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations, the U.S. Holocaust Museum and individual photographers, including actress Mia Farrow.

John Heffernan, the Holocaust Museum's director of the genocide-prevention initiative, said the museum became involved to honor the memory of Holocaust victims by trying to stop atrocities today.

"You can see the scope and you can see systematic destruction on this site, but you can also access the personal nature of this through the pop-ups that give individual accounts of displacement," Mr. Heffernan said. "This is a work in progress but our goal is to have people zero in on a particular village and then you can find out what happened in that village through personal testimonies."

He described the situation in Darfur as a "slow genocide by attrition."