Google Earth Maps Show Crisis In Darfur "Genocide"

Satellite pictures of razed villages and squalid refugee camps scattered across Darfur can now be viewed by a global audience after Google Earth put the images online.

Users of Google Earth, a satellite mapping service that attracts hundreds of millions of viewers, will see the war-torn region of western Sudan highlighted with yellow boundaries and labelled "Crisis in Darfur". Blue marks scattered across the pictures of Darfur's harsh, arid landscape indicate refugee camps, which are holding some two million people; red flames denote villages, which gunmen have destroyed.

Google Earth also carries graphic photographs and eyewitness testimony of atrocities committed during the civil war, which broke out in 2003 and has claimed about 300,000 lives through violence, starvation or disease.

Links are provided for users to contact their governments and urge action over Darfur.

Human rights workers commended the project, a joint venture by Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

But Google Earth has adopted a highly controversial view of the Darfur conflict. It unquestioningly labels the war a "genocide" even though a United Nations investigation ruled in 2005 that the term did not apply to the events in Darfur.

The atrocities detailed on Google Earth are overwhelmingly attributed to the Janjaweed, a brutal militia raised by Khartoum's Arab-dominated regime and unleashed upon Darfur's black African tribes.

Rebel armies have also committed atrocities in Darfur, but these are not detailed on the website. Sudan's regime may also ask why Google has chosen to highlight this war and not other crises. A spokesman said Google tried to highlight other crises "but we can't do it for every single one".

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Google Earth Focuses on Sudan Atrocities