(or watch it over on blip)

More soon on SF and LA (where I will be at the Media Re:Public conference at USC Annenberg tomorrow)…

As well as images of continuing violence from the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, shot by our Kenyan partners Cemiride, we’ve also got footage from Licadho, a group that participated in last year’s Video Advocacy Institute (applications open for this year, folks…). Licadho’s short video, shot on a Flip camera, shows one example of the daily indignities suffered by residents of Dey Krahorm village in Phnom Penh “in a three-year campaign of harassment and intimidation of the community to coerce them to surrender their land to 7NG in return for new apartments on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, 20km away, or cash payments of far below the market value of the land.”
And after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a historic apology to the country’s indigenous communities, we have a video from EngageMedia taken on Australia Day, or what some have taken to calling Invasion Day, marking the impact of colonialisation on those communities.

Further links:

Keeping on the Australia theme, I like this audio/photo slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald, which weaves together photographs taken of the stolen generations by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board with interviews with some of the individuals depicted in them. It’s particularly interesting as an example of how individuals can re-appropriate their oppressor’s archival images of themselves and their histories. More to come on this theme later…

Cemiride // Licadho (background on the Dey Krahorm story here and here) // EngageMedia (Read Kevin Rudd’s historic apology. And if you don’t know the work of Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, you should. His latest book, Terra Nullius, takes his recent theme of European-driven genocides to Australia – read an extract here, et ici en francais.)

Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…

Video / Audio / Photos:

The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.

It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.

Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:

As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.

Kenya Indymedia is beginning to upload some brief audio interviews, including one with a Somali man considering returning to Somalia (mp3) after the recent violence. Slum-TV is blogging, but yet to upload video.

As for photographs, there’s some extraordinary photojournalism online – Reuters and Panos Pictures (click through to the News section for their latest pictures from Kenya), for example – and a quick scan of Flickr reveals a handful of users such as Kenyan photojournalist DEMOSH, blogger Afromusing, and other individuals who witnessed events while in Kenya, but as with video, the lack thusfar of citizen or activist images online has been striking. Blogger Joseph Karoki has been pulling together images from a variety of news sources to provide visual updates.

Mapping:
The UN provided some striking images via satellite, showing the worst concentration of violence by looking at the number of fires burning, available in lo-res (1, 2) and hi-res (1, 2) (via IRIN).

Perhaps the most promising and practical initiative to date is Ushahidi (via White African), a Google Maps mashup enabling individuals to report incidents of post-election violence, including some video already (taken by Afromusing). What’s particularly interesting about this is that the incident reports are being verified with local civil society before being posted, but individuals visiting the site can also submit further information related to particular incidents.

It also demonstrates how rapidly these new tools can be adapted and updated. One commenter asks that “rape” be added to the list of incidents, and lo, there it is. As a basic template for tracking this kind of crisis, it’s a very good start. Inclusion of some kind of timeline, a la Oakland Crimespotting, would be a useful addition, but for 2 days’ work, kudos goes to the team (Kenyan Pundit, Mental Acrobatics, and White African).

Ways to act:
Pambazuka has been active in coordinating with a wide cross-section of civil society, calling for assistance in establishing Rape Crisis Centres, setting up an international petition, and posting regular updates on its Action Alert Blog, including a planned March for Peace, Truth and Justice today.

Avaaz has a tool to help individuals to write to their Foreign Minister to call for a transparent inquiry into the disputed election.

On Sunday morning I sat in on a conference call with three of The Elders – Graça Machel, Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – and 5 bloggers from Global Voices (including Solana Larsen, who blogged here and here). The odd technical hiccup aside, it was fascinating to hear these titans of international human rights speak so passionately of the power of individual stories of human rights to create change – and, in the words of Graça Machel, of the role that sites like the Hub can play in “helping the world to know.”

Desmond Tutu kicked off the call, marking International Human Rights Day as “the beginning of a year-long commemoration, a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.” [UPDATE, 10 Dec: audio versions of the UDHR here] The Elders hope, he said, in what would comfortably be the largest sign-up/pledge/petition ever, to “encourage [and] persuade a billion people to sign the declaration to take possession of what is an incredible legacy.”

That’s an astonishing target – and Tutu was clear that “if the people are not engaged, then you can forget it. [...] When we were struggling against apartheid, we talked about people power – galvanising what are usually called ‘ordinary people’ – there are no ordinary people, everyone is extraordinary.”

Mary Robinson referred to the “extraordinary power of communication”, and she had kind words for not only the Hub, but also openDemocracy, Global Voices, and Business & Human Rights. “We want to amplify marginalised voices, that tend not to be heard,” said Desmond Tutu, stressing the importance of “people being able to tell their own story – of human rights abuses, of human rights being recognised and enjoyed” and “people’s own journey in claiming their rights, and exercising their responsibilities and duties.”
Continuing the theme, Mary Robinson quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, and stressed her call for “concerted citizen action”:

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

But it was left to Graça Machel to speak particularly of human rights organisations at the grassroots. She made clear the Elders’ own feeling of “responsibility to bring forward the stories of the world,” but she recognised the power of new media to do the same with real immediacy, and she appealed to bloggers to bring out “stories of resistance and success.” And then she hit on what we see as one of the Hub’s most important roles: “For [the Every Human Has Rights] campaign to be global,” it needs to connect with “small organisations that don’t have the space or the resources to get recognition or power.” We’re looking forward to playing a role in helping those organisations tell their stories to wide audiences – and, in the process, in “helping the world to know.”

And you have a part to play too: Tell Your Story…

[Note: WITNESS' co-founder, Peter Gabriel, was also instrumental in forming the Elders project.]

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I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas…

disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!!

This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture…

Wael’s channel is, at the time of writing, still suspended. Clicking on any of the videos he uploaded results in the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Whether it’s only Wael’s account, or others too, now several videos showing police brutality embedded on the Hub from YouTube are no longer playing – including this one, this one, and this one, and more here, here, here, and here. Most of these clips have been propagated far beyond Wael’s own YouTube account, so it’s not really a question of stopping these videos from circulating. Only last week, Wael received an award from the International Center for Journalists in honour of his work to promote and advance human rights in Egypt.

Whatever the reason – a misunderstanding, a systematic campaign, something else entirely – it shows how vulnerable human rights-related media content can be in the online environment, and that the minimal extra work of uploading human rights media to dedicated sites like the Hub, or the Internet Archive, rather than just embedding it from other sites, is clearly worth it.

UPDATE on 27 November 2007:

Since this happened, I’ve been in contact with YouTube to find out why Wael’s account was suspended, and will post an update when I receive one. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker also reported the story (one commenter mentions the Hub) and now Reuters has covered the story too:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.

“I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish,” he said. “But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable.”

UPDATE on 29 November 2007:

Nothing to report from YouTube yet, but increasing speculation/coverage in the blogosphere: Amira Al-Hussaini at GV (pt/ar/de), Kevin Anderson at The Guardian (my comment here), and Stan Schroeder at Mashable.

I’ve just received the following message from blogger and friend Wael Abbas…

disaster: youtube disables my account claiming there were complaints about my police torture videos!!!

This is un-bloody-believable. YouTube has just disabled probably the most important channel for the Egyptian blogosphere. Wael’s videos have been central in the fight against police brutality, and YouTube should be proud the Egyptian anti-torture activists have been using its channels in the current War on Torture…

Wael’s channel is, at the time of writing, still suspended. Clicking on any of the videos he uploaded results in the following message:

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Whether it’s only Wael’s account, or others too, now several videos showing police brutality embedded on the Hub from YouTube are no longer playing – including this one, this one, and this one, and more here, here, here, and here. Most of these clips have been propagated far beyond Wael’s own YouTube account, so it’s not really a question of stopping these videos from circulating. Only last week, Wael received an award from the International Center for Journalists in honour of his work to promote and advance human rights in Egypt.

Whatever the reason – a misunderstanding, a systematic campaign, something else entirely – it shows how vulnerable human rights-related media content can be in the online environment, and that the minimal extra work of uploading human rights media to dedicated sites like the Hub, or the Internet Archive, rather than just embedding it from other sites, is clearly worth it.

UPDATE on 27 November 2007:

Since this happened, I’ve been in contact with YouTube to find out why Wael’s account was suspended, and will post an update when I receive one. The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker also reported the story (one commenter mentions the Hub) and now Reuters has covered the story too:

Elijah Zarwan, a prominent blogger and activist in Egypt, said he thought it was unlikely that YouTube had come under official Egyptian pressure, and was more likely reacting to the graphic nature of the videos.

“I suspect they are doing it not under pressure from the Egyptian government but rather because it made American viewers squeamish,” he said. “But to shut them down because some people might find the truth disturbing is unconscionable.”

UPDATE on 29 November 2007:

Nothing to report from YouTube yet, but increasing speculation/coverage in the blogosphere: Amira Al-Hussaini at GV (pt/ar/de), Kevin Anderson at The Guardian (my comment here), and Stan Schroeder at Mashable.