This article was taken from the March 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
The sign hovers over the city like a marquee, in gleaming white Arabic letters painted directly on the side of the mountain. "Welcome to Kadugli," it reads. "Town of Love and Peace".
On 6 June, 2011, however, there was little of either. Already scarred by decades of civil war, ethnic cleansing and famine, this city in lower Sudan, with a population of 100,000, was about to turn another dark corner in its history. Many citizens now refer to it simply as "Day One". It was the day that Ahmed Khatir, 30, found himself running for his life. Truckloads of gun-toting soldiers and militia roared into town, setting fire to buildings and shooting up homes. Above them, the sky filled with military aircraft. In an attempt to crush a rebel force that had gained a foothold in the Nuba mountain region that cradles Kadugli, the Sudanese government had turned its forces on its own people. Six months before this, a referendum had paved the way for the secession of South Sudan, which was admitted by the UN General Assembly as the world's 193rd nation in July 2011. But on Day One, death squads armed with voter lists went from house to house, slitting the throats of those who had supported the opposing Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
Ahmed Khatir, a softly spoken man who had lived in Kadugli his whole life, worked at the ministry of information and had just married when they came for him. "Bullets and bombs were exploding and we were all scared," he says, by email from Sudan. "Our house and all of our possessions were destroyed." So he -- together with his wife, mother, father, brothers and sisters -- fled. It took them 16 days to reach the Yida refugee camp across the mountains to the south. The violence lasted three days and displaced an estimated 50,000 Nubans. Many others died along the way. After all Sudan's troubles, it was now experiencing genocide.
But, high above the Nuba mountains, the people of Sudan had gained a guardian angel of sorts -- three of them, in fact -- in the form of high-powered satellites trained to scope out atrocities on the ground with a half-metre resolution. The constellation collectively orbits the Earth 45 times a day, recording images in eight spectral bands that can pierce darkness and cloud cover. The satellites bridge the distance between crimes against humanity and policymakers who have the power to act. Launched in December 2010, the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) was the idea of two influential Americans with a history of working in Africa -- one, a former state department staffer in the Clinton administration named John Prendergast; the other, George Clooney.
The previous October, Prendergast and Clooney had visited the Sudanese village of Marial Bai. Prendergast, now 49, who has waves of greying shoulder-length hair, had spent 30 years working as a human-rights activist and in 2007 cofounded the Enough Project, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that focuses on genocide and crimes against humanity. Clooney, together with film stars Don Cheadle, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, had founded the Not On Our Watch charity, aimed at stemming mass atrocities worldwide.
Three months ahead of the January referendum that would make South Sudan the world's newest country, virtually none of the region's experts expected the transition to go smoothly. Following atrocities in Darfur, Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, was the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court. "We'd spent days doing interviews with people,"
Prendergast says. "We were hearing about the Nuba mountains, where there's [not only] aerial bombings, militia raids and village burnings, but human trafficking. So we're hearing stories of all this stuff and we limp back to the little compound of mud huts where we were staying. Then George got pretty animated in terms of the irony of how he can be followed and watched from the sky by people who are interested in his movements, but no one seems willing to do the same for an indicted war criminal who has potentially the most blood on his hands of any head of state in the world today."
Clooney remembers the frustration that sparked the idea at a wooden table in a dusty courtyard that evening. "My thinking was,
'How come you can Google Earth my house, and you can't Google Earth these fuckers?'" he recalls. "And John was like, 'Maybe you can...'"
In the weeks that followed, the two got to work. Prendergast enlisted a communications director, Jonathan Hutson, and arranged high-level meetings at Google. "We wanted to see what could be brought to bear on potential and past human-rights violators so we have evidence for what crimes have been committed. But, more importantly, if we can show deployment patterns of helicopters and we know an attack is imminent, then maybe, just maybe, by turning a spotlight on them, we could actually prevent it," Prendergast says. "We knew right away that this isn't something we would want to do privately. You wouldn't just want to give it to a government or the UN because they usually just sit on this stuff. It has to be energising to the public and media such that it shames or forces the hand of external actors to respond."
Hutson contacted Lars Bromley, former head of remote sensing and the human-rights programme at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a war-crimes investigator named Nathaniel Raymond at a Massachusetts-based NGO called Physicians for Human Rights. Back in 2009, the three of them had used satellite imagery to show what appeared to be the destruction of the site of a mass grave in Afghanistan. Bromley had recently joined the United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) and Raymond was developing data-management systems that could handle the complexity of humanitarian disasters.
Then, the world's largest imaging satellite company, DigitalGlobe -- based in Longmont, Colorado -- offered the services of its three-satellite constellation and 40 man hours of analysis by its team. Raymond became the first director of operations for SSP, and soon it had managed to enlist the help of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), led by Charlie Clements, executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. There, a team of more than a dozen graduate students and volunteers started working around the clock analysing imagery.
Clooney had raised $250,000 (£160,000) in seed money for the project -- a figure he later managed to triple. Just three months after he had pointed up at the night sky above Sudan, wondering why there couldn't be a paparazzi for warlords, on 29 December, 2010, SSP was up and running. SSP wasn't the first human-rights organisation to use satellite imaging. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights had all relied on the technology to document war crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan and elsewhere. "We're standing on the shoulders of giants," Hutson admits. But this was the first time anyone had ever attempted to analyse non-classified satellite imagery to predict conflict before it had even begun.
"The [US] government has been collecting these images for years, but only in their purview to hold and distribute," says Stephen Wood, VP of DigitalGlobe's analysis team. "However, it's now become much more commercially available because of an explosion in a satellite's capabilities. I believe that this is the beginning of an open era in which events around the world become more transparent -- not only because the ability to see has increased, but how it's distributed has changed."
DigitalGlobe's three satellites orbit the Earth at 27,000 kph -- taking in 2.4 million km squared of imagery a day from their vantage point 500 to 600 km above the Earth's surface. Each is about the size of a van. "Think of it as a giant telescope that is housed on what we call the bus," says Stephen Wood, whose desk sits among the cubicles on the second floor of DigitalGlobe's low-slung Longmont headquarters, outside Denver. Solar panels provide energy for the satellites in orbit, and antennae broadcast all the imagery they collect to ground stations to free up memory for continuous data collection. Roughly 80 per cent of the business for the commercial satellite industry in the US comes from Washington and other governments. It's used for intel, national security, tracking planes or boats, looking for oil or population shifts. Next year DigitalGlobe will add another satellite. Working with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative for the first 18 months, DigitalGlobe's team catalogued and analysed the precipitators of mass violence from their campus in the sleepy suburbs of Longmont, trying to understand the patterns. Like CCTV, SSP stores imagery until it's needed -- for example, when the Enough Project receives information from sources on the ground. DigitalGlobe gathers the information and tries to come as close as possible to pinpointing the location.
Then it compiles an official request to fit the shoot into its satellites' schedules, while Mark Andel, an analyst at DigitalGlobe, runs feasibility checks to make sure the questions can't be answered by imagery the company already has -- or if the images even exist. Then, if he approves it, Andel adds the request to a "target deck" of scheduled images that are beamed up to the constellation of satellites. Every time the satellite goes past a "hot spot", it photographs up to 300 km squared, and two to 40 gigabytes of data flood the satellite's memory. DigitalGlobe has been increasing its ground infrastructure in order to give its satellites more places to dump data so they can capture more images.
The extra infrastructure doesn't just add storage -- it helps DigitalGlobe's satellites see the otherwise invisible. Their "birds" can photograph the same point up to 30 times in eight minutes. As they orbit the Earth, their angle to the Earth becomes more acute, so they can peer into, and under, hard-to-reach places.
When the images are strung together, they create a kind of high-resolution "flip book," offering previously undiscovered insights. "That means they can see over the edges of bridges, or determine the speed of vehicles in the air and on the ground,"
Andel says. The imagery offers such detail that the team has been able to determine the exact model of Antonov responsible for aerial raids on civilians. A decade ago, it took two days for those images to appear on Andel's computer screen -- today, it's three hours. As he sips his coffee, Andel keeps an eye on four flat-screen monitors that are tracking real-time data. One monitors natural and man-made disasters around the world, plotting them on a constantly updated map. Another displays Trendsmap, which tracks keywords in Twitter feeds. "We do a lot with Syria now," Andel says, "Twitter can tell us that this bakery on this street is getting bombed, and then we can go right there." The third displays a black-and-white wireframe of the Earth called ArcMap, which is overlaid with hundreds of tiny coloured squares -- each of them is a single image from a satellite, which orbits the Earth almost twice an hour. On the fourth is the satellite imagery itself. Today, Andel is looking at wildfires in the US. Each image contains layers with as many as eight spectral bands, including near-infrared. Andel can detect the still smouldering huts of razed villages, and can pierce the darkness to see the heat coming from the engines of even the most carefully camouflaged tank.
SSP issued its first report in January 2011. By the time the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) moved into Abyei, SSP's 500km-high lenses caught every detail. Analysts saw jets and helicopter gunships within striking distance of Abyei. The images showed something else: the World Food Programme facility had been looted.
The SAF wasn't just killing civilians: it was cutting off their food supply.
All that technology is meaningless, though, without reliable information from the ground. That's where citizen journalism comes in. Nine years ago, a university graduate named Ryan Boyette made his way into the Nuba mountains to build schools and churches. He ended up staying in Kadugli. On Day One last year, when all foreigners were ordered out of Sudan, Boyette stayed behind with his Nuban wife. But the 31-year-old from Florida lost friends in the conflict and, ten days later, after watching repeated government attacks on civilians, he decided to do something about it. "I'm asking myself how am I going to contribute to this situation and help people," says Boyette in a Skype interview from his home in Kadugli. When the war broke out, he found himself one of only two expats who stuck around in the area. The other was a doctor. "I looked at him and he's obviously providing a great service as a doctor in wartime. We were the only expats. I saw a gap. There was basically no reporting going on in the region. So I created Eyes and Ears Nuba."
Using donated equipment, Boyette trained a handful of locals in basic reporting skills and fitted them out with digital cameras.
Because foreign journalists are banned in Sudan, Boyette's team became a complement to SSP's imagery. These elements -- reports from the field, analysis in Cambridge, Massachusetts by HHI and in Colorado by DigitalGlobe, and co-ordination from Prendergast's team in DC -- mean that SSP can get reports into the hands of policymakers in less than 24 hours from the time the satellites take the photos. What until very recently would have been the invisible machinations of vengeful warlords had become visible. "A lot of NGOs have field researchers on the ground, and a lot of NGOs have people who formulate policy recommendations," Hutson says. "SSP is a game-changer because we fuse our eyes in the sky with boots on the ground, along with the policy context, and the high-level access to decision-makers. Plus we can work with the traditional media as well as social media, so we're putting out things in real-time. Then we have the inside game to talk at the highest levels, to the White House, to Congress, to the UN, to missions of other countries. So it's not one single tool in the toolbox, it's that we have a bigger toolbox, and we're coordinating the use of all of these tools simultaneously."
Last April, Boyette had a taste of just how much of an effect he was having, when a plane tried to drop six bombs on his house (he and his wife survived the attack from the foxhole he had dug behind the house). "Obviously they're not going to bomb me unless there was a decision from high up," Boyette says. "It made me angry because they just wanted to shut me up. But it also made me think what we're doing is important, because in the last war no one was reporting on what was actually taking place because it was too hard to get in -- not until after the fact, or in refugee camps, or people who were able to get out."
SSP's effectiveness soon got back to Clooney as well. "One of Bashir's mouthpieces came out and says, 'How would George Clooney like it if he had satellites following him everywhere?'" Clooney recalls. "I say, 'That's my life, you dumb shit.' Every time I leave my house there's something waiting for me. And I would like warlords to enjoy the same quality of life I have."
After SAF and militia forces tore into Kadugli last June, SSP analysts identified what, in a report issued by HHI, was described as "a cluster of white, irregular-sized objects consistent with the reported collection and transport of corpses". What they had stumbled upon turned out to be body bags, buried over time in various sites around Kadugli -- in other words: mass graves. The report would mark the first time that public satellite-imagery analysis had documented mass graves in what was close to real-time.
Later, eyewitness reports would confirm that since 8 June, the Sudanese Red Crescent had quietly been disposing of bodies, wrapping many of them in white tarpaulins.
Ahmed Khatir and his family had been among the lucky ones to have avoided the death squads.
In 2011, SSP turned a corner. Revealing what appeared to be an imminent attack on the town of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile province (3,000 troops bolstered by tanks, artillery and helicopters), SSP issued a warning, allowing civilians to flee. The Kurmuk warning was a decision that both Raymond and Clements at HHI have referred to as a "splitting-of-the-atom moment". It meant that SSP's team were no longer passive observers -- they were becoming participants. "Last spring, we would release a report on Mi-24 helicopters at Muglad," Clements says in a phone interview, "and three hours later, the birds were gone and Bashir was saying it was not lawful for us to go and look at what they were doing." And that, Clements says, is when he knew everything had changed -- and the rules would have to be rewritten. "This isn't just a traditional human-rights report where you take it up to Congress, to the editorial board at the New York Times and then bleed it to everyone. This is now happening in a 24-hour cycle where you have direct interface with the alleged perpetrator you are monitoring and appear to affect his decisions. The question for so long used to be: are we right? The bigger question is: are we safe?"
Clements says that now, every time SSP looks at a crater, it has to think about whether or not it's helping the perpetrator refine his artillery fire and hit better next time -- or, conversely, whether a rebel group fighting on behalf of those civilians will use the information to kill the soldiers firing that artillery. For Clements, after working around the clock to file 28 reports in eight months, it was a time to pause. Last June, HHI parted ways with SSP to focus on generating new standards for a kind of warfare that is only just emerging: when is it the right time to act? When we map a crisis, are we engaging in human-rights advocacy? Or are we providing a humanitarian necessity? "Your relationship to the population changes if they're relying on it to make decisions that may or may not get them killed,"
Clements says. "We must have answers to these questions." Clements recalls watching atrocities unfold in Kadugli in June 2012. "It was the most agonising month of my life, because we had to wait until there was enough evidence to prove something that we were sure was already happening." Which is why he continues to support the work of the SSP.
In July 2012, Clooney and Prendergast returned to the Nuba mountains. The occasion marked the first anniversary of Sudan's campaign in the mountains. Food shipments and humanitarian aid had been blocked off, aid workers were being expelled, villages were still being burned and bombs dropping on civilians. The Nubans had grown so fearful of air attacks that they'd begun living in caves.
Clooney was trying to film the destruction when fighting erupted. "There were a lot of dead bodies around," Clooney recalls. "The week before we visited, a van had been pulled over on the same road we were on and the throats of everyone had been slit. We hit the same road after it had been cleared, but it got too hairy. When we get up in to the Nuba mountains it was a fucking dangerous time and rockets were being fired at us. We're filming this thing and suddenly, the Nuban villagers start running. I'm trying not to look like a panicked actor from Hollywood, but all of a sudden, 'Boom!
Boom! Boom!' -- giant fucking rockets. And I'm like, 'OK, let's get the fuck out of here.' They're literally flying these planes over the top of villages and just rolling rockets out of the cargo bay."
The Satellite Sentinel Project's methods have overturned the idea of what investigating human-rights abuses means. A year ago, Clooney was part of a march to the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC, demanding an end to attacks on civilians ( he was arrested). And Ahmed Khatir -- a year after fleeing Kadugli -- had the kind of happy ending that might not have been possible without the efforts of SSP. His first baby was born in Yida, and he has translated his harrowing memories of Day One into becoming a citizen journalist with Eyes and Ears Nuba, "to tell the world the truth about what is really happening in the Nuba mountains," he says. "Fame is a funny thing," Clooney says. "You can't make policy.
There's a lot of things that you can't do with it. But you can sure make things loud and you can put things in the spotlight. And we put a spotlight there."
So I created Eyes and Ears Nuba
Ian Daly wrote about documenting glaciers in 06.12
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
