Jeff Gettleman of the New York Times makes the troubling suggestion that the violence ravaging Kenya over the last few weeks might have been planned.
At first the violence seemed as spontaneous as it was shocking, with machete-wielding mobs hacking people to death and burning women and children alive in a country that was celebrated as one of Africa’s most stable.
But a closer look at what has unfolded in the past three weeks, since a deeply flawed election plunged Kenya into chaos, shows that some of the bloodletting that has left more than 650 people dead may have been premeditated and organized.
Leaflets calling for ethnic killings mysteriously appeared before the voting. Politicians with both the government and opposition parties gave speeches that stoked long-standing hatred among ethnic groups. And local tribal chiefs held meetings to plot attacks on rivals, according to some of them and their followers.
Donald Rothchild, a professor at UC Davis and expert on ethnic violence, who sadly passed away last year, was said to have a favorite saying: There are no spontaneous rallies. Behind all mass violence lies the machinations of a society’s elite. With the situation in Kenya not getting any better, Don’s words are food for thought.
UNOSAT has release another map depicting Kenyan post-election violence. The new map shows damage in two areas of Nairobi: Kibera and Huruma. Interestingly, the number of buildings destroyed / severely damaged (shown in the yellow box) is estimated by dividing the total area affected by the mean building size. As with the first UNOSAT map previously discussed, I am impressed with the attempts to use satellites as a method for international actors to measure the level of violence. As this methodology develops and the cost of satellite imagery lowers, its applicability will only increase. Click the image to see the full map (PDF).
Over the summer Jen (my wife) spent three months in Kisumu, Kenya starting a sports-based HIV/AIDs education program. Sadly in recent weeks things have not been looking too good in Kisumu. Kisumu is in a Luo dominated region, the ethnic group of the Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, and experienced significant post-election violence. In the first few days my wife was glued to BBC. What struck me was that my wife faced an informational level of analysis problem. There was certainly news coming out of Kenya, but the news was at a national level. While any information is welcome, what my wife was really desperate to find was information about locations in Kisumu itself. That is, local level information. The information coming in over the mainstream media only mentioned Kisumu in vague one or two sentence blurbs about “violence in the city”. What Jen needed was information on the status of neighborhoods in Kisumu, not aggregate national level news.
So, you can imagine my happiness upon finding out that White African, Kenyan Pundit, and other bloggers got together and launched a site to facilitate the exchange of just such local information. Ushadhidi (Swahili for “witness”) is a mash-up between Google Maps and social networking. Visitors report the description and location of different types of violence over a map of Kenya. This information is then viewable by other visitors.
To my knowledge the earliest major use of a Google Maps mash-up focused on sharing local level disaster information was Scipionus. Scipionus was a much cruder use of Google Maps, but even so was very useful as an information exchange. Interestingly, the year after Katrina I eagerly mentioned the idea of using social networking websites as disaster information exchanges during a presentation for a graduate level international health seminar. The idea was met with almost universal skepticism amongst the students and professor. I knew they were wrong then and I hope projects like Ushahidi changes their mind.
Exploiting “smart mobs” to share information during disasters is undoubtedly part of the future of disaster management. After / during a disaster information is not so much scare but scattered. In Hurricane Katrina, SMS messages from victims sent to family California was not shared with the information from cell phone calls of other survivors to relatives in New York. Thus, information on the disaster ends up resembling a puzzle with geographically and socially scattered individuals each holding one informational piece each. The beauty of Ushahidi is in collecting these puzzle pieces and putting them together. They offer the both the possibility of providing local level information and a more comprehensive snapshot of its national level effects. So good luck Ushahidi, I hope you get some information from Kisumu soon!
Using commercially and publicly available satellite images, UNOSAT, a UN program working with satellite images and GIS (geographic information systems) tracked fires causes by post election violence in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province. The resulting map offers an aerial snapshot of Kenya’s political violence and one of the most poignant maps I have seen in a while (click on the image to view the whole map, PDF).
This map depicts the chronology of detected active fire locations within the Rift Valley Province in western Kenya following the national elections on 27 Dec.2007. These fire locations were detected by the MODIS satellites covering the time period from 27 Dec. to 3 Jan.2008, and organized into 4 maps each covering a 2 day period. An evaluation has been made of the chronology and spatial context of this data, and it is probable that a majority of detected fires (peaking on 1 January 2008) are directly or indirectly linked to the electoral civil unrest.
Hat tip: Ryan Sheely