humanitarian.info

(ZPP Director Jestina Mukoko, in red, and ZPP Provincial Coordinator Brodreck Takawira, in white shirt, entering court in Harare, 24 December 2008 [Source: BBC])

Earlier this month I wrote about my friend Jestina Mukoko, Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project, who on 3 December 2008 was abducted from her home near Harare.

Since then, despite a very loud international outcry from goverments and civil society, no information about her wherabouts was provided by the authorities. The Commissioner of the Zimbabwean Police denied they had her in any premises under their jurisdiction, and then ignored a High Court order to cooperate with her lawyers in finding her. One journalist reported that the Police were very polite to concerned citizens telephoning them to ask what was going on: “We will trace your call you sellouts, we will make you sh*** in your pants”. Nice.

Well, it now turns out the Police have had her all along! From Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, today:

Lawyers responded with a comprehensive but non-exhaustive search of a number of police stations, including Mabelreign, Marlborough, Avondale, Borrowdale, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Harare Central, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. By speaking to various police officials, examining Detention Books and requesting cell head counts, it was established that at least fourteen (14) individuals of the total number subjected to enforced disappearances, twelve (12) of whom appeared on the list of confirmed abductees, were being detained in custody at Mabelreign, Marlborough, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. These individuals include Jestina Mukoko and her two (2) colleagues from the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who are being held at different police stations.

I’m relieved that Jestina is alive, and her family must be totally overwhelmed. But it’s not going to be an easy road to getting her back home and back to work. There are reports citing The Zimbabwean Pravda saying that Jestina will today face trial for recruiting people to undergo military training for the purpose of otherthrowing the goverment. Because it’s so jaw-droppingly craven, I’ll clip a portion of The Herald’s story here, but read the rest yourself:

A statement from the Zimbabwe Republic Police yesterday said some time in April this year, Manuel allegedly recruited Ricardo Hwasheni, a police constable based at Waterfalls in Harare, to undergo military training in Botswana with a view to forcibly deposing the Government and replace it with one led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Manuel allegedly tasked Hwasheni to recruit four other policemen, promising them US$2 000 each. Later, the statement said, Manuel and Kaseke, who is Hwasheni’s cousin, went to MDC-T’s headquarters at Harvest House, where a man identified only as Josen interviewed Hwasheni.After the interview, Josen allegedly told Hwasheni that he would hear from him within two weeks or that Mukoko would contact him.

In June, the statement says, Hwasheni met Mukoko at her offices in Milton Park in Harare where she further interviewed him before handing him over to Takawira, who told him that he would be contacted within two weeks. The statement further alleged that a man who had been sent by Mukoko met Hwasheni at Girls’ High School in Harare and gave him 200 pula and some Zimbabwean dollars for transport to Botswana where he was to meet a man known as Special. Hwasheni crossed into Botswana in July through the Plumtree border post and met Special at Ramokgwebana Border Post. Special took Hwasheni to a military camp in Botswana where he underwent training in the use of FN and AK rifles, military tactics as well as political lessons together with five other MDC-T recruits. There were, according to the statement, 50 other recruits undergoing military training in the same camp. Hwasheni returned to Zimbabwe with specific instructions to study the mood of junior police officers inasfar as loyalty was concerned and the mood of the public towards Government.

What are the narrative elements here? So far, we have:

1. A single statement from a junior Zimbabwean Police Officer; from,
2. The same law enforcement agency that has openly lied on paper, participated in and failed to investigate a wave of abductions, and directly ignored the the courts; involving,
3. A mystery protagonist known only as “Special”, marshalling a cast of people from an organisation that squarely beat Zimbabwe’s dicatator at the ballot box; and,
4. Staff from organisation that has evidenced tens of thousands of incidences of politically-motivated violence and human rights abuses being kept incommunicado in secret detention facilities by known torturers; and,
5. The alleged support of the only government sharing a border with Zimbabwe that has sustained open and trenchant criticism of the regime’s behaviour.

Sounds like a trustworthy, watertight case to me, and I’m sure that the Harare courts will scrub the bias from it, and test the evidence with their customary rigour. After all, Mugabe was right about the Wonga Coup, wasn’t he? Saracasm aside, a few days after Jestina’s abduction, one sharp commentator and Zimbabwean political insider argued that this would be the likely outcome of the this wave of abductions:

I now believe strongly that the next time we see Gandi Mudzingwa, Jestina Mukoko and the two staff members from the ZPP will be in the company of the eleven or 15 MDC activists who were also abducted as I explained above and as widely reported elsewhere. They will be appearing together as either “co-conspirators or architects of the insurgency” in the evidence to be put forward [to SADC] by Mugabe.

And there’s more, before today’s news:

…[the Attorney General's office] is being readied to carry out the mass prosecutions of MDC “terrorists” (I am taking bets on how long it will be before we start hearing this word, reading it in the Herald). From the silence of SADC on the matter, it would appear that there is nothing much anybody can do about it, except maybe shout a bit now and again.

I disagree. This conspiracy is convoluted even by the desperate standards of Mugabe’s regime, and will fall as flat in the courts as it will in the public’s eye. The question is whether this will matter, and how we can make it matter.

(Jestina in Geneva, 2008)

In Norton, just outside of Harare, in the early hours of yesterday morning, 15 armed men identifying themselves as police surrounded and broke into the house of Jestina Mukoko, the National Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP).

They abducted Jestina in her nighty, without her glasses, which she needs, and without some prescription medication. Her teenage son reported the abduction to human rights organisations in Harare a few hours later. As at 0830 this morning, when I texted with ZPP staff, Jestina’s location remains unknown. Lawyers from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights are now going from police station to police station to try and find her, or a paper trail leading to her.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just read “On the Brink of the Precipice: A Human Rights Account of Kenya’s post-2007 Election Violence” (.pdf, 169 pages, ~2mb), an ambitious report by Kenya’s national human rights institution, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) with the technical help of my alma mater No Peace Without Justice.

The bulk of On the Brink is a detailed narrative overview of the violence that occured in Kenya between December 2007 and March 2008. Whilst there is some discussion about the antecedents of the political crisis, the most solid stuff is in the analysis of the recent violence. Here, the authors slice the same source material different ways to give nuanced assessments of the violence through the lens of Kenyan criminal law, international criminal law, and Kenya’s commitments under international human rights law.

KNCHR find ample evidence of crimes against humanity, but note that they din’t find enough information to sustain the argument that these were in furtherance of any state or organizational policy. They also found that whilst much of the violence was motivated by ethnicity, genocide was not committed since “the intent was not to destroy but to create means by which to leverage political power following the disputed presidential election results.” The report’s standout recommendation for action is likely to be highly unwelcome, particularly now everyone’s friends again:

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should open investigations on Kenya to determine who bears the greatest responsibility in the commission of crimes against humanity detailed in this report.

This is the fourth major outing for “conflict mapping”, the investigation methodology behind this report. In 2004, I co-wrote a similar report for Sierra Leone using the same method. Investigators take lengthy statements from a key persons in all areas affected by violence throughout the country. From the statements, data analysts draw out references to unique “episodes”, simple information about which is then put into a database.  Episodes can include a wide range of topics, from a source’s recollection of specific acts of violence, to information about gangs, troop movements,  public statements of local politicians, and other sit-rep style information. It also includes hearsay, or information about things that the source was not a direct witness to. From the 1102 statements collected by KNHCR in the early part of this year, 7500 distinct episodes were separated out and databased. From these, it’s possible for analysts to build a “low resolution” picture of a mass event, and identify its scale, severity, major incidents and overall dynamics.

This wide not deep approach is designed to look for evidence of policies, planning and systematisation, all critical to the judgement about whether patterns of violence can be framed as crimes against humanity. As Kenya is a State Party to the International Criminal Court, this is something Kenyan policy makers and activists must consider anyhow, but other information available to help them with this is likely too narrowly focussed, raw or detailed, to be useful to this particular decision. In this respect, conflict mapping is fit-for-purpose; at this early stage, attempting to individually investigate every incident, of which there will be tens of thousands, is not.

The immediate deployment of investigators across across a wide geographical area is a good demonstration of capacity which might help a national human rights instituation fend off attempts to marginalise it.  It also creates an immediate context to the severity and significance of criminal incidents, something that it is hard to assess as events are unfolding. The popularly known atrocities aren’t necessarily either the most sure-fire winners for prosecutors, or the worst things that have happened. This, and the mapping exercise’s rapid generation of leads, can help prosecutors later by giving them a guide to where to invest investigative resource.

The report certainly won’t stand up in court, but it’s not designed to, and it wouldn’t be possible to produce a document of that sort in anything like a useful timescale. This is designed to provide timely analysis as part of the complex decision making process of bringing to account those most responsible for the violence.  Framed this way, On the Brink may have lost a lot of impact due the long period of drafting. I hope the recent appearance on Wikileaks of an embargoed confidential annex to the report (.pdf, 59 pages, ~2.5mb) containing the names of 250 alleged leaders, planners, faciliators and perpetrators of the violence makes up for this.

The ingenuity of Julian’s undemocracy.com, which slices-up debates in the UN General Assembly and Security Council into a usable form, is making it ever harder to put up with some of the UN’s websites.

One particular offender is this portal set up by the Human Rights Commissioner to provide information about the sessions of the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights (UPR), a diplomatic speed-dating process for states to assess each other’s overall record on human rights. The UPR’s novelties are the “interactive dialogue” between states, and the direct, mandated involvement of civil society organisations in the review process of individual states.

So, with all this novelty going around, might we see some innovative thinking about how to communicate the proceedings in a modern, web-savvy way? Hardly. Staffers have resorted to the double-sin of scanning in the draft statements of delegations and dumping them onto the portal as a PDF. Here’s a clip from the statement of the Bangladesh delegation in Brazil’s first review session:

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Perhaps a graphologist can help us read between the lines here, giving us unprecedented access into the minds of diplomats.

Stuff I should have blogged at the time:

• What if? - New York emergency housing competition results: Last September, New York City launched “What if? “, an open competition to find innovative designs for high-density emergency provisional housing for 38,000 households in the aftermath of a hurricane and flood disaster in afictional, one square mile neighbourhood of the city called Prospect Shore. Ten winning entries would get US$10k to develop their ideas further. The competition issued some useful materials about NYC’s vulnerability to hurricanes, and created a really rich scenario for designers to get stuck into. All submissions are now online, and it’s a headfunk of gorgeous design and ingenuity. The ten winning entries were announced in January, and can be viewed here . My own favourite is the gloriously mental S.C.A.F.F.O.L.D. , designed by Jay Lim.
• Intravenous Facebook : Takes all Types is a US charity which has developed a Facebook app for supporting blood donation drives. The idea is to give Facebook your blood type and zip/postcode, and Takes all Types will email you when a local blood bank needs you. What tweaks humanitarian.info’s curiousity is their claim that the app will be “a powerful way to save lives in a blood emergency”. I think that’s overcooking its potential to improve on existing systems in a meaningful way, particularly given the enduringly complicated motives of blood donors. Thanks to sociologist Richard Titmuss, it’s conventional wisdom that paying money to blood donors decreases both the quality and quantity of blood in a bank. This isn’t set in stone though. For example, blood donation schemes in parts of the Former Soviet Union have never been run on a voluntary basis, and renumeration remains necessary to sustain bloodbanks; there is also some research suggesting that non-direct rewards for donors, such as tax credits, may encourage more blood donation. I wonder if the indirect rewards gained through online networking sites can provide sufficiently compelling motives for people to do more than simply sign-up; it seems to lack a “ladder of engagement”, and asks too much of people too early.
• Church and solid state : 400,000 mosques in Malaysia are to get high speed broadband, delivered over the power lines. This “Smart Mosque” project is being delivered by Velchip Sdn Bhd, will cost US$14 billion and aims to provide affordable Internet access to 60 million people. Breathtakingly large aggregate numbers, for sure, and I leave it to better minds to look at the possible effects this may have. Out of interest, in England Anglican churches outnumber broadband exchanges by a factor of 2.88 (16,157/5,600): perhaps the Church of England should be cutting a deal with British Telecom.

As we discussed before (see Electoral Geography and Political Violence in Zimbabwe), Zimbabwe goes to the polls this Saturday. The long term field monitoring efforts of Zimbabwe Election Support Network and many others should ensure that the government’s tight restrictions on accreditation of international journalists doesn’t create an information draught. Whilst the usual international outlets (HRW, Economist, ICG) have already released rich contributions about the election, it still remains challenging to get a feel for ongoing events. Perhaps the lack of international media on the ground will widen the space for citizen journalism, and force observers to rely more on non-traditional sources of news.

I had hoped to have some of the maps from the Violations Early Warning System  (ViEWS) of Zimbabwe Peace Project, but these have not hit the Net. The next best thing is Sokwanele.com’s Google Maps mashup of election-related incidents:

You can also read their blog post introducing the project. Like with Ushahidi.com, Sokwanele’s map will drive human rights documentalists (myself included) mad: its primary sources are unverified from the media, its mapping is necessarily imprecise since Google gazeteer for Zimbabwe is far from extensive, categories are overlapping, confusing and sometimes hyperbolic (”political cleansing”).

But that’s really not the point: it’s attractive, accurate and expressive enough, and provides easy links into the source materials. It’s an example of where information design trumps documentation. In Sokwanele’s own words, in the caveat about their data:

The map aims to give an impression of the scale and range of challenges facing Zimbabweans as we head towards the March 29th elections. Even though this is based on a small sample of information we have logged since July 2007, it clearly shows that conditions in the country are not conducive for a free and fair democractic elections.

The only thing I would suggest adding to it is a filter-by-date widget, so we can see what happens on election day.
Via Zuckerman.

Earlier this week, Paul noted that computer network attacks could have an impact on future relief efforts. In the early days of NATO’s Kosovo air war in 1999, I remember chirpy NATO spokesman Jamie Shea saying that the NATO website was under attack by Serbian hackers. Who knows whether it was true, or just a ruse of some sort, but was it the first government-acknowledged mention of cyber-warfare? There are a few more interesting things to note about that story: the BBC still had an “Internet Correspondent”, reporting on events in that far-off planet of “cyber-space”, and it was filed on 1 April 1999. Hmm …

Anyhow, back to the important business of digital security. I prefer the blander term information assurance because the work we’re discussing has so many angles to consider beyond ICT. To illustrate this, marvel at the McCumber Cube, designed by security guru John McCumber in 1991:

[Graphic courtousy Munawar Hafiz, on Wikipedia]

Handy, eh? This clearly relates geeky technical and operational considerations to the purposes for which information is collected and used in the first place. There’s little point considering how to secure information before defining why it needs securing, which requires a consideration of who might gain/lose from possession of the information.

Likewise, as Kevin over at Patronus rightly pointed out, social engineering – or how an adversary relies on your politeness, habits and generally positive view of humanity to get you to hand over the jewels – is an effective way to break the most technically secure of systems. Commercial organisations have long been using external actors to test how vulnerable they are to theft of information. This penetration testing industry has become commonplace enough in the US to spawn its own reality television show. This service (and perhaps the reality TV show!) could easily be extended to NGO offices, should the need be demonstrated.

I wonder how McCumber’s information assurance model dovetails with common approaches to NGO security, and how current materials – like the ECHO Generic Security Guide - could be updated to take it into account.

Pass the cube around the office and start the discussion.

Since last year, I’ve been doing some work with Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP) on human rights monitoring stuff. In the course the work, one man Perl strikeforce Sam Smith coded a script which claws its way through ZPP’s Human Rights Monthly Monitoring Reports (MMRs) and makes the content more accessible.

The MMR is an information-rich rundown of politically-motivated acts of violence which its 240 field monitors investigated that month (here’s a sample, for July 2007). As you’ll see, the documents are structured along geographical and chronological lines: Region > Province > Constituency > Incidents ordered in date order. There are easily 500 incidents in each report, which has been produced monthly since late 2002: that’s more public domain information about Zimbabwe than you could shake a stick at, but its format makes it very hard to get at, even for the authors. Sam’s script takes this content and puts it into an Excel sheet, allowing a better measure of re-use and quick analysis than is possible from the document itself.

What’s striking in seeing this vast amount of retooled information (or spreadsheet of horror, as a colleague named it) is the absence of a stable, detailed geography underpinning the recording of incident information. Constituencies can be changed, so it’s probably short-sighted to use them as the main locational value when recording or processing data from incident reports.

Just such a thing has happened on quite a grand scale at least twice in the last five years in Zimbabwe. I have just seen the list of freshly updated constituencies for the forthcoming 29 March 2008 election in Zimbabwe. There are now roughly double the number of parliamentary seats up for grabs, but how have the boundaries changed? In the absence of accurate geographical data, though, it’s not clear to me how the constituencies differ precisely and which areas would now find themselves in different constituencies.

For any monitoring organisation, boundary changes are a nightmare. Obviously, an incident happens in a place irrespective of the constituency it’s in; if this precise location isn’t captured in a database or somesuch system first time, the original records - most likely paper monitoring forms - will have to be hauled out and re-processed. This radically increases the cost of making useful comparisons between patterns of violence currently being experienced and those observed in previous elections.

To avoid this problem, future monitoring efforts should make sure that precise locations are recorded first time. So, here are two questions for our five or so readers: what’s working well on this issue in the real world; and, what’s the most practical way to manage information about electoral boundaries?

Update - 25/02/2008:

On Disruptive Proactivity, Sam has responded in more detail about his part in this work, with some smart comments about how to resolve the geography issue.

Because Paul’s claiming to be too confused to write up some lessons learned from Ushahidi.com, I’ll have a go:

What’s cool?

• It’s timely: the number of people who actually get these kind of things off the ground, as opposed to jibber-jabber about them, is very small. Getting preliminary, lead information as close as possible to the time the incident happened is extremely valuable in every possible scenario and not just the “document now, prosecute later” one.
• It challenges the conventional view by providing an opportunity for people to read first hand accounts un-editorialised by the MSM, who seem intent on warping the events into the template of Generic Violence in Africa.
• It’s quite easy to use: the system focussed on getting raw information in the form of sit-rep narratives online without overburdening the person submitting the information.
• It links in with current monitoring processes: although I’ve noticed a few irrelevant submissions up there, it seems they’re making an effort to ask NGOS on the ground to verify the basic thrust of an incident. I am sure that the information from Ushahidi will find its way into other, formal efforts to document what is going on.

What could be cooler?

• Clarify the purpose of the system: Paul raised this in his earlier post - what exactly is this system for? Some of the published material is very general situation narrative unrelated to specific incidence of violence. Some of the incidents are also based on news reports from the international media, but this is a system that aspires to give the raw groundview and not information that’s been twice around the world first.
• Get just a little more structured information from people submitting reports: With all that narrative, I wouldn’t like to be the analyst for the raw info Ushahidi holds at this point. Whilst the whole “Who Did What To Whom” model for documenting violent acts might frighten the general public from actually using the online submission system, separating out the recording of information about the nature of the incident (deaths, theft, destruction of property) from the perpetrators and victims would be a step enabling a useful dimension of analysis. It’s not exactly clear what “names of the involved” really means. They could usefully take a browse through the HURIDOCS Events Standard Formats and Microthesauri for some inspiration.
• More transparent verification could increase its credibility: A clearer indication of how incidents are verified, and who is doing the verification, preferably with some kind of attribution. At present, a cross or a tick next to the incident isn’t going to satisfy anyone that the incident wasn’t fabricated.
• Build follow up into the system: you want people to continue using the site as an information resource. What will prompt them to return is features will give them updates: perhaps a daily email or sms digest. Not sure quite how this could work, but there you go.

Where’s everyone else at with this?

I’m Tom Longley, and for the next few months I’ll be guest blogging here at humanitarian.info. My own background is in law, and I have been working in the human rights sector since 1999. After NGO field work investigating crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and then managing Aidworkers.Net for a while, I’m presently consulting for a neat NGO called HURIDOCS.

A key theme of this blog is how international and governmental humanitarian agencies develop and incorporate ICT into their field work. Through his writing, Paul has tracked how they try to balance techno-optimism and the huge potential of new tech tools, with the reality of organisational cultures and relentless working environments. After listening to me rant and rave talk about very similar issues I was facing in my work with a group monitoring human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, he bravely handed me the keys to his blog to start a conversation about how they were handling these challenges.

In smaller human rights organisations, information workers usually do a bit of everything. They manage a clutch of processes including fact-finding, documentation of the results of investigations and production of public materials, management of the organisational email account, and more. In this context information management spans a wide range of disciplines: legal, library science, political communications, statistics, technology. As a result, doing this job better means we have to beg, borrow and steal knowledge from anywhere we can, and mash it together in practical, creative ways. Given the critical importance of this work to effective human rights advocacy, it’s clearly something worth writing about.

So, through a series of posts about information management and human rights - and with your comments - I hope to bring a little clarity to the resources available to organisations which investigate, document and analyse human rights violations.