Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
MALE SPEAKER: Let me illustrate this even better by
telling the story of Abdul and his mother from
the village of Shattay.
This is from a report by BBC correspondent Hilary
Andersson in 2004.
One morning before dawn, Abdul's mother was sleeping in
her village, Shattay, when they came.
The Janjaweed.
A word that carries tremendous fear.
She heard chaos breaking out and ran with her children.
The Janjaweed were firing, killing men and shooting and
hurting children too.
Her husband fled also.
She does not know he was killed.
This is what Shattay looks like.
Note the empty circles that were once homes.
Again, these darkened circular areas that you see all over.
That and that.
One of these homes belonged to Abdul and his mother.
The next day, Abdul, his mother and his brothers and
sisters began their three-day journey to the displaced
persons camp of Kalma in searing, Sahara heat.
Now, I drew a line here to make it easier to
follow their path.
And this is something that anybody can do on their own in
the Google Earth interface.
This path is over 73 miles long.
On her way to the camp, her seven year old child could not
cope and he died.
Here, in this view, you can see tens of thousands of tents
that make up the camp.
And you'll see those again too.
We don't know what happened to Abul and his mother, but think
about this.
It's just one story.
When you zoom to a 40 mile stretch along a riverbed in
west Darfur, marked by my blue line here, you can see more
than two dozen villages that lie in ruin.
There are more than 11,000 homes and other buildings
destroyed here alone.
11,000 homes.
That's one story, 11,000 times.
More even.
Village after village, throughout Darfur, has been
systematically attacked and destroyed.
This one that we're zooming in on now is the village of
[? Gubanga. ?]
And again, you can see the hollowed,
blackened out circles.
So where are the more than 2.5 million Darfurians who have
lost their homes?
I'll turn on a 3D map of displaced people in Darfur and
the more than 200,000 refugees in Chad.
And you can do that by going to the interface, and where
the displaced persons area is on the left, you can turn on
the 3D columns.
It allows you to see something that is not
otherwise easy to see.
Each bar represents the relative population sizes of
all the camps and the other places
that people have gathered.
By clicking on each, you can understand the population
sizes and understand what each bar refers to in terms of the
number of people.
This Zalingei and you can see there are 95,000 people
represented by that bar, that height.
I'm going to go back to the legend for a moment and show
you that here, it describes that you're looking at
relative sizes of bars and that the light blue are
refugee camps over the border in Chad.
Here's the border.
And that the dark blue are internally displaced persons
camps in Sudan.
One of the camps in this view is Tulum.
The icons of the cameras that you see--
and again, you can see the tents here in this camp.
The icons of the cameras in this interface represent
pictures that are clickable.
I'm going to click on this picture.
The caption reads, "list of massacres compiled by refugees
in Tulum refugee camp, Chad.
The refugees are desperate to have their stories told.
They want the world to know where, when, what, and who."
Another camp is Abu Shouk, now crossing the
border back into Sudan.
And again, I'm going to click on the photo icon
to bring up a photo.
The photos and testimonies available in the map
illustrate not only the destruction, but the suffering
beauty, dignity, and resilience of the people
Darfur, which you can see in this photo.
The photos that you see are from a collection of seven
acclaimed photographers, including Ron Haviv, actress
Mia Farrow, and former African union monitor Brian Steidle,
as well as the photos from museum staff Jerry Fowler and
John Heffernan.
They relay the stories of refugees struggling to survive
and evidence of atrocities on the ground.
I'm going to go to a picture now that Brian Steidle took
that's available in the interface.
It's right here.
The caption reads, "one year old Mihad Hamid.
Mihad Hamid, a one year old girl, whose mother had
attempted to escape an attack from helicopter gunships and
Janjaweed marauders on their village,
Alliet, in October 2004.
Mihad had been hit by a bullet puncturing her lungs."
I can go to the clipboard available in the interface you
see here which will bring up another kind of resource,
which leads you to a video of Brian Steidle telling the
story on our website, which I'm going to play for you now.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-This was one of the first photographs I took in Sudan.
Her name is Mihad Hamid.
She's one years old.
A government attacked the village of Alliet.
Her mother was carrying her, wrapped around the side of her
with cloth as they often do.
And she was shot, entry wound in the upper right side of her
back and the exit wound in the lower left.
She wasn't breathing very well at that time.
She wasn't expected to live.
Often, when you encounter the people out in the IDP camps
from the villages, because I'm a white male, they
automatically assume that I'm a doctor.
And this day, she had thought I was a doctor, and she holds
Mihad up to me to take a look at, Here's a baby laying in
your lap, barely breathing.
And I had to motion to her to please, put
the baby down, relax.
And that actually solidified in her mind that I was a
doctor because I was telling her what to do with her child.
Instead, all I was able to do was write my report and take
the photograph.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
MALE SPEAKER: Every balloon available in the interface
allows the users to learn more by clicking on this link,
which will bring you to the website, to the museum's
website, and to find out how they can help by
clicking on this link.
All this information is visible over the arid
landscape of Darfur.
Where the aid effort has had some success, but that aid
effort is in peril.
In the past year, a dozen aid workers have been killed,
compounds robbed, and workers beaten, harassed,
and sexually assaulted.
A map of an area where conditions have become too
dangerous for workers shows a shrinking arena of operations
with wide swaths of territory off limits.
The orange areas here in this map represent areas that are
consistently inaccessible.
And the yellow represents frequently limited access.
More than 900,000 people are living or
hiding in these areas.
And you can see that pretty clearly just by looking at the
amount of camps that are in those areas.
People have been driven from their homes, and all that
sustains them was destroyed.
The lucky ones have made it to the camps where they must rely
on outside assistance.
And that outside assistance has been consistently hampered
by the government and the proxy militias.
It's our hope that by combining this up to date
satellite imagery with authoritative data and
evidence from the ground in Google Earth, we can make it
harder for people to stand idly by when