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Since 2006, the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program, through its Geospatial Technologies and Human
Rights project, has begun compiling high-resolution satellite images to verify and corroborate reports of
human rights violations against the civilian population in Karen State and other regions of Burma.
AAAS is working with the US Campaign for Burma,
Amnesty
International, Human Rights Education Institute of Burma,
the Free Burma Rangers,
the Karen Human Rights Group, and the
Thailand Burma Border Consortium on this initiative.
Primary funding comes from the Open Society Institute, with significant
resources provided by the MacArthur Foundation as well.
In Burma, also known as Myanmar, the ruling military government, the State Peace and Development
Council (SPDC), has a particularly active campaign of oppression against Karen State located in the eastern part of Burma which borders
Thailand. In recent years, the SPDC has stepped up attacks reportedly burning villages and raiding
them for food, as well as burning agricultural fields during the dry
season harvest. Thousands of Karen have escaped as refugees over the Thai border, but tens of
thousands more remain internally displaced in Burma, many often conscripted into forced
labor acting as porters or human landmine detectors. The conflict is largely unreported in the
general media and of low priority in most diplomatic circles. According to human rights organizations
familiar with the conflict, this lack of international attention has allowed the ruling military government to carry out an
unrestricted ethnic cleansing campaign.
The U.S. Campaign for Burma assisted AAAS in reaching out to organizations, such as the Free
Burma Rangers, the Karen Human Rights Group, and the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, based in the region.
These groups provided AAAS with information, concerning attacks on civilians in
Karen State occurring from 2005 through the present, via email and through
carefully documented publications accessible from their websites.
Project staff reviewed these reports and compared them with a set of geospatial data and maps
to identify specific villages and areas (see Figure One). The attack locations were then compared
with pre-existing high-resolution satellite imagery. Visual inspection of the imagery
is the primary methodology in use, although more sophisticated methods are employed at times and
when necessary.
Figure One: All Karen State Case Study Areas
AAAS has obtained and analyzed high-resolution commercial satellite imagery covering an area
of 2,956 square kilometers, mostly of Karen State with small areas of Shan State and Thailand also included.
This imagery covers 1,931 square kilometers on the ground, and 2,085 square kilometers were
purchased from the archives, while 871 square kilometers were new collections ordered by AAAS over
the last year. By obtaining before-and-after image sets, AAAS visually documented sites where human
rights violations involving housing and infrastructure destruction have taken place. By comparing the
newer imagery with images collected several years ago, features such as villages and structures
that have been removed in the intervening years are relatively easy to identify. Likewise, new
construction such as military camps, are also relatively easy to identify. According to reporting,
military camps have proliferated in the northern Karen State in recent years.
These are relatively easily identified in images as many of the camps exhibit layers of fencing around them.
AAAS uses several types of imagery in this analysis, each with one meter or better spatial resolution.
Most of the 'before' images, showing the areas in 2000, 2002, and 2004, were purchased from the
GeoEye company's commercial satellites
Ikonos and OrbView-3. Current 'after' images of the areas are purchased from the QuickBird satellite
operated by DigitalGlobe.
All the satellite imagery used by AAAS to analyze Burma is available online using the free software
Google Earth that allows for layering of
information (requiresGoogle Earth Release 4 or later version).
Project staff produced these visualization layers using the regionator code made
available through Google. Staff used ERDAS Imagine, ENVI, and Global Mapper software to
process images and GIS software ArcView throughout the process.
Karen State Google Earth Layers:
http://www.aaas.org/international/geotech/ge/burma/burma_results.kml
The process of precisely locating attacks based on reporting from human rights groups in the region is
relatively laborious and difficult given the necessary translations and transliterations between local
languages into the Latin (English) alphabet, as well as the general paucity of highly detailed maps
and geospatial data for the region. In some cases, coordinate information was communicated directly
by the sources in the region, greatly easing the process.
Using commercial imagery for conflict assessment in Burma faces numerous challenges.
Burma is a mountainous, heavily vegetated region with frequent cloud cover. Such physiographic
and climate characteristics, exacerbated further during monsoon season from mid-June to September,
can combine to simply block observation satellites. The small feature size of the objects in question in Karen State,
specifically homes and small farms often built along treelines or beneath canopy, can
sometimes be a challenge to identify. Few archived high-resolution images of Karen State are available, making before and after
comparisons more difficult.
The military tactics in use likewise hinder detection of their effects via commercial satellite imagery.
Reports from Karen State indicate that villages are most often abandoned, not destroyed, with
residents driven out. Identifying an abandoned village can be more difficult than
identifying a razed village. Similarly, other reporting indicates mortar fire is common
in the area. Scattered mortar fire, however, will have relatively small impact areas that may not
be visible for long in the very dynamic ecology of the region. Lastly, much
reporting indicates that the majority of attacks in Karen State are interpersonal in nature,
often the killing of one or a few people, or rape and/or assault on a similar scale. Satellite
imagery is not appropriate for analyzing such attacks.
Reporting from the field provided specific locations and dates of more than 70 attacks in Karen State
and surrounding areas in mid-to-late 2006 and early 2007. Of these, AAAS positively located 31 of the reported attack sites.
A set of information on many attack locations without specific dates
over the last several years was also obtained, and used to corroborate other reporting and delineate
likely conflict areas and time periods. Within the areas of imagery analyzed, 25 sites of interest
are presented in this report. The bulk of these sites (18) are removed villages or villages with
removed structures, with other sites including military camps (4), possible forcibly relocated
villages (2), and one refugee camp on the Thai border. In addition, the possible forcibly relocated
villages are only a small sample. When areas proximate to an identified military camp in Papun
District were reviewed to corroborate reports of forced relocation, 31 new villages
were located that appeared between the image acquisitions of 2000/2001 and late 2006.
Specifically, in Papun District reports indicated that 33 miltary camps were built in the area in 2006
and existing camps were enlarged and used as bases for military operations and internment camps for
forced labor. AAAS image analysis located nine settlement areas that had been visibly disturbed, abandoned,
or destroyed. In addition, a military camp and an auxiliary military camp were also identified in that district. Reports on Toungoo District
indicate increased military activity in 2006 and 2007, including military camp development, and dam
and road construction. Three settlement areas that had been visibly disturbed, abandoned, or destroyed
were identified, as well as two military camps. Signs of settlement destruction and abandoned agriculture sites
were identified in the Dooplaya District. In Shan State, where relocation sites are reported, three areas where settlements or structures had been destroyed
or damaged were identified. Since 1996, nine refugee camps have been established along the border of Thailand.
AAAS analysis of one of these camps, Mae La Oon, shows dramatic build-up of the camp between 2002
and 2005. Details and images for all these areas are available in the following pages:
Papun District Image Analysis
Toungoo District Image Analysis
Dooplaya District Image Analysis
Shan State Image Analysis
Thailand Image Analysis
AAAS is continuing to acquire new satellite imagery of the areas thus far analyzed and
will identify other areas currently experiencing attacks so that new images can be acquired
for those as well. In order to make the geospatial technologies used in this analysis more
accessible, AAAS will begin to engage reporting organizations and other parties in the image
analysis process and encourage these organizations to summarize
their reported information in a simplified format that will help speed the AAAS geocoding process.
Further, AAAS will begin testing a web-based geospatial information portal on the Burma conflict and
make available online tools developed for matching village name spellings with coordinates and
available satellite imagery.
See the AAAS report on "High
Resolution Satellite Imagery and the Conflict in Eastern Burma" (2007).
For an extensive report and on-the-ground pictures from the attacks on the Karen
people in Burma, see the Karen
Human Rights Group and reports on BurmaNet
News.
For more on the forced labor and displacement of civilians, see the
Human Rights Watch report, "They Came and Destroyed Our Village Again: The Plight of Internally Displaced Persons in Karen State" (June 2005).
Back to Case Studies
Contact Us: To learn more about the Burma case study.
(case study posted 10/04/2007)
(site updated 10/04/2007)
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