Satellite images show Burma's plight

Harnessing high technology to the cause of human rights, a prominent organization of American scientists yesterday released satellite images showing charred villages, an increasing military presence, and swelling colonies of displaced people in rural regions of Burma, the violence-wracked southeast Asian nation also known as Myanmar.

The photographs, taken over the course of the past year and not directly related to the bloody anti-government protests that have convulsed the main city of Rangoon and other centers in recent days, seemed to support assertions by refugees and dissident groups of human rights abuses by the country's military dictatorship.

The analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, marks the first time satellite images have been used to document human rights violations in Burma. The world's largest scientific society has previously used satellites to identify abuses in Sudan's Darfur region and in the African nation of Zimbabwe.

The AAAS said it is now switching the focus of lenses borne by three satellites to Burmese cities in hopes of obtaining new information on clashes between soldiers and pro-democracy crowds led by Buddhist monks. The regime this week shut down international telephone connections and imposed harsh limitations on Internet use, restricting the flow of information from a country that has also largely succeeded in keeping out Western journalists.

A leading antigovernment dissident yesterday praised the release of the photos and the accompanying analysis by the scientific body as a sign that the junta will not be able to conceal human rights abuses, even those occurring in remote areas.

"This is science applied to uncovering atrocities," said Aung Din, policy director of the US Campaign for Burma, a dissident group. "The world is watching from the sky. Satellites are recording evidence of the junta's abuses. There will be no blackout on human rights."

Support for Burma's new democracy protests was voiced worldwide yesterday. President Bush and Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, discussed strategies for keeping international pressure on Burma's State Peace and Development Council, the name of the shadowy junta of military officers that has controlled the impoverished nation for nearly half a century.

"The crackdown on peaceful protesters there is quite barbaric," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

The AAAS said analyses of high-resolution photographs - able to identify objects measuring only 2 feet - taken by commercial satellites whizzing over Burma at altitudes ranging from 125 to 150 miles show evidence of destroyed villages, forced removals of local populations, and a proliferation of army bases in eastern Burma.

The images represent important corroborating evidence of human rights abuses, Lars Bromley, director of the AAAS's Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project, told a news teleconference. The regime has long denied accounts by refugees fleeing the isolated nation, who tell of atrocities occurring in regions inaccessible to outsiders.

"We've used satellites to see what we can see in regions where attacks were said to be taking place," Bromley said.

The satellite shots provided evidence of razed villages matching accounts given by refugees, according to the AAAS.

"We found evidence of 18 villages that essentially disappeared," Bromley said. "We were able to identify burn scars on the ground where villages should have been, and squares of burned houses."

Although urban clashes between troops and Buddhist monks have made for international headlines, the junta for years has been accused of waging a much quieter and more deadly campaign against opposition groups in tribal hinterlands. An estimated 1.5 million people have fled eastern regions, many of them subsisting in wretched refugee camps just across the border in Thailand.

Verifying their stories is difficult because often their razed villages are not recorded on maps. Even the names of the places are hard to confirm - with one name existing in a tribal tongue, another existing in a regional dialect, and still another (often phonetic) recorded in musty old British colonial archives. Also, few refugees are able to give geographic coordinates for their ruined home places.

The AAAS team scanned a roughly 800-mile swath of eastern Burma for a year, then exhaustively searched databases for any mention of place names used by refugees and Burmese human rights activists. All told, it was able to pinpoint "evidence consistent with village destruction, forced relocations, and a growing military presence" at 25 sites, Bromley said.

At most of the sites, the AAAS was able to find "before and after" evidence - that is, images of a village one day, followed later by images of burned-out huts and other structures. Meanwhile, the scientists also found evidence of new army bases surrounded by population centers appearing as if out of nowhere - strongly suggestive of rural people forced to move to locales directly under the military thumb.

The scientific sleuths faced formidable obstacles - monsoon clouds covering much of the area, the very short time sequences shot by fast-moving satellites ("Picoseconds at any one place," Bromley said), and, above all, fast-growing jungle that quickly obscures evidence.

Colin Nickerson can be reached at nickerson@globe.com.