humanitarian.info

Uh-oh … events overtake blogging. After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened:

Zimbabwean rights activist Jestina Mukoko and 14 other people were ordered freed on bail Wednesday after the president and the prime minister forced a judge to reverse the previous day’s decision that had sparked outrage.

I guess this sort of rapid turnaround is what the otherwise wholly wretched Twitter was invented to report. Anyhow, this is far far better news, although the political intervention clearly shows the Zimbabwe legal process for the sham it is.

As feared, the Zimbabwean state continues to press its shonky case against my colleague Jestina Mukoko, National Director of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, and 14 other Zimbabwean political and civil society activists. From Violet Gonda at SW Radio Africa:

The courthouse was packed Tuesday with journalists, members of civil society and the diplomatic community, who were left shocked after the Magistrate remanded the accused persons in custody. Eyewitnesses said Mukoko looked pale and dejected when she heard the news. The accused persons were all abducted and tortured between the months of October and December last year.

It’s  going to be little comfort to Jestina as she is taken back to prison, but the authorities have only managed to delay, not stop the work of ZPP and others in monitoring what is going on in Zimbabwe’s hinterland. Just in is the meaty February report from ZPP:

Since January 2009, a total record of 2410 cases of politically motivated human rights abuse have been recorded: 1125 in January and 1285 in February showing  an upsurge by 160 cases. Although there were no reported cases of murder since 2009, cases of harassments, assaults, looting, displacement and unlawful detentions continue to maintain a stubborn presence.

It’s pretty clear to me that Zimbabwe’s resilient communities are making for resilient organisations too. This numerical analysis doesn’t really mean anything, but the datatrail and the paper beneath it – combined with the quiet work of many others in country writing down and photographing what is going on – is there for an eventual reckoning.

The Humanitarian Futures blog asks:

What if the humanitarian expulsion from Darfur also involved sophisticated efforts to cripple aid groups at their core, vis-a-vis target denial of service attacks?

They already were. When I looked at connectivity in Darfur for the ECB Information and Technology Requirements Assessement, it was clear that the government was pulling mobile and internet communications whenever there were “security actions” taking place in the region. Aid agencies (and everybody else) would be disconnected for days, sometimes weeks – and nobody seemed to be that bothered by it. Unfortunately the human tendency to habituate to new situations meant that the more often this happened, the less people were bothered by it. In some environments, it doesn’t take an army of hackers to have a serious impact, just some bloke in the Ministry of Telecommunications with his finger on the lightswitch.

Michael Kleinman poses the question:

how best to secure sensitive information and communications in the field. A post which could just as easily be titled “how to try and keep the Sudanese Government (or insert other oppressive regime) from reading everything on your computer.”

It’s no secret – here at humanitarian.info, we believe that the humanitarian community is criminally negligent when it comes to protecting its information, particularly when it comes to beneficiary information. Dear NGO: although the Sudanese government is wading through your computer files right now, it probably had access to them even while you were still in the country, usually by applying pressure to your national staff to co-operate, so it’s a bit late to start complaining.

Still, there are solutions: Michael points to NGO Security in a Box, a product which I have no hesitation in endorsing, so download it today and use it immediately. You might also want to check out the McCumber Cube as a useful analytical tool, and get your IT and security staff sitting around the same table for once. How else can you start?

• Encryption. GnuPGP is free – why not use it on documents and communications that you wouldn’t like the secret police to see? Even Windows can manage PGP encryption, although you’ll probably need to budget for it.
• Anonymisation. There are some great resources for activist bloggers – start with the Handbook for Cyberdissidents, the chapter Technical Ways to Get Around Censorship to help you shield key communications.
• Physical partition. Keep sensitive data – for example, personal information about beneficiaries – physically and digitally separate from non-sensitive data. Why not make different staff responsible for different datasets?
• Backup. At least two backups of all vital data – one onsite, one offsite, preferably both updated daily. Go and do it now. You can use services like DropBox to synch across machines.
• Geek out, and work entirely from a portable USB stick that never leaves your key-chain.

There’s literally hundreds of steps that you can take to inform yourself and improve digital security for yourself and your organisation, but I’m comfortable saying that most international NGOs working in Sudan weren’t doing any of them. I’m ranting again, aren’t I? I’ll go and lie down.

BBC and Alertnet are echoing the wires that the bail applications of ZPP’s Jestina Mukoko and Brodrek Takawira, and others have been granted.

The Police have routinely ignored previous court orders, so I hope that this is true. The lawyers seem to think so though. I await some confirmation from colleagues and if so, it’s terrific news.

The perpetrators of this event have caused deep and profound personal damage to a lot of decent people. If I were somehow involved in the abduction and torture of a fantastically eloquent, popular and relentless globally-known campaigner, who then became one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience, and she were released, knowing my identity, with the world’s media baying for information, I’d consider the following:

a) Packing my bags (of money, that is),

b) Booking a ticket to  Hong Kong,

c) Trying to get that dirty amnesty agreement sorted out double-quick time.

Update 3 March 2009:

Seems to be true. From hospital, though looking unwell, Jestina is reporting as saying:

I am free now and I must concentrate on my health … The time will come for me to comment to the media. I am still being attended to by the doctors and I might be in here for some weeks to come.

(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 »

What’s interesting about the ReliefWeb Client Outreach statistics?

Quite a lot. ReliefWeb is the single most information portal for the humanitarian community, so it’s worth paying attention to how that community uses online services, what sorts of information it values, and so on. It’s also interesting because ReliefWeb went through a huge overhaul a couple of years ago, described in Sebastian Naidoo’s valuable article from the Information Management Journal, “Redesigning the ReliefWeb” – a redesign which I think was more interesting for the process (described by Sebastian) than the final result – but unfortunately there isn’t really any available baseline comparison to judge whether that investment has been worthwhile.

I’d love to promise you that this is going to be really exciting, but it isn’t. All I can give you is an impressionistic take on the stats…

A large proportion of users are coming back at least once a week, if not more often. This is an impressive result which demonstrates how critical ReliefWeb is for the sector. It’s also a tremendous opportunity for ReliefWeb to create a real community around the site, which is something that hasn’t really been explored properly yet. This question is particularly important because the achievement needs to be qualified – the main reason why people visit ReliefWeb is “Job Searching”. This isn’t a surprise to anybody who knows ReliefWeb – the Vacancies section has always been the most popular section of the site – but it remains problematic. How can ReliefWeb use the popularity of the vacancies to direct users towards more interesting and/or useful parts of the site.

It’s very obvious how narrative-driven ReliefWeb users are: the five most valuable types of information are all textual (Situation Reports, Country Background Information, Analysis and Evaluation, News and Assessments). Most of these resources, in my opinion, offer a very low return on investment for the reader – they’re lots of work to plough through, with very little substantive content for most of them. So what about non-narrative information? Maps are sixth in line, most valuable to 9.2% of respondents, and Financial Reports and Appeals are most valuable to a miserable 2.9% of respondents. That’s not a bad % for maps, but are people getting maps from other sources – UNOSAT, MapAction, HICs? It would be useful to know exactly what maps they’re downloading – this would be a very useful stat for ReliefWeb to release.

There are some interesting open questions tucked away at the end of the survey (what technical features would you like, what is the main weakness of the site) but they haven’t been crunched into anything useful. The pop-up box just gives me a long, long, long list of responses, many of which are gibberish. I used to speak gibber, but my language skills are rusty – it may take me some time to get anything useful out of them. A quick glance at the responses demonstrates a sad truth of surveys – never, ever ask an open question, because you’ll only get a useful answer about 30% of the time.

ReliefWeb’s position as the single most important online resource for the humanitarian community isn’t going to be challenged any time soon – but it will be challenged. While it is an effective portal site – breakdowns by country / disaster / theme – I’m not convinced that ReliefWeb is really using its position to shape the way the sector uses online tools, to represent the sector to the outside world, to provide critical operational information in a wide range of formats.

The only way that will change (particularly since ReliefWeb suffers from being trapped inside OCHA) is if enough people lobby OCHA to enable ReliefWeb to be more responsive both to the needs of users – but also to the changing technology available to us. In many ways ReliefWeb reflects the problems facing the UN as a whole, in danger of being overtaken by faster and more flexible organisations. This user survey is a good starting point for ReliefWeb – and it’s especially impressive that they’ve made the entire results of the survey available if you want to see for yourself.

As well as the recent problems with public transport schemes, there’s been no small concern about whether biometrics are as secure as our governments tell us. Now The Register tells us that a hacker group in Germany has published the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister, and promises that this could be used to fool any fingerprint-based identification system. That’s not why I noticed this article – trust me, there’s going to be a lot more examples of people demonstrating that ID schemes aren’t going to deliver. What stood out from the article was this quote from Karsten Nohl:

The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place. It’s basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore.

“It’s like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go” – I’m going to have that made into a T-shirt. When cast in those terms, it makes me think dark thoughts about how these sorts of systems might be used to commit fraud against relief distributions, where any system would have to skew towards false positives rather than false negatives. I will try to flush these thoughts out in a longer post soon…

Chris Albon leads us to UNOSAT’s latest and frankly greatest production – a map of Somali pirate activity. Pirates are no laughing matter, but all this map lacks is a big X to show where they buried all the WFP food shipments they’ve been hijacking. I have no idea how this post provides any insight into how technology can support the humanitarian community, but hey – pirates.