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How We Identified Burned Villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo

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Militias Are Burning Villages in Congo. We Tracked the Toll.

We obtained satellite images that show how lakeshore villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been destroyed in recent attacks, forcing 140,000 people to flee their homes.

In a remote corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, armed militias are burning villages. Scores of people have been killed, and over 100,000 have been displaced. It’s often hard to tell what’s going on in distant parts of the world. But by using satellite data, we can monitor this conflict in almost real time and detect flare-ups that may indicate violence is starting to spread. What we’re seeing doesn’t look good. This was the scene in western Uganda in February: waves of refugees fleeing violence in the D.R.C. and crossing Lake Albert. “At the height there were between five and a half and six thousand people coming across per day.” Andrew Harper was on the shore. “They grabbed everything that they owned, which was basically nothing, and they brought it with them on the boat. All these very clear signs were indicative that whole areas had been basically cleansed.” The refugees said that armed men had burned houses, forcing entire villages to flee across the lake, most to the town of Sebagoro. Many came from here, in Ituri Province. But the scale of the violence was unclear. So we analyzed aerial data. NASA satellites captured the locations of active fires every day, and many were burning on the days that people fled. Now, most were probably forest fires, not acts of violence. So we used OpenStreetMap data to pinpoint populated areas and obtained new high-resolution satellite pictures of those villages. They tell a clear story. Here’s one village photographed before the violence began, and the same village on Feb. 17. Nearly every structure is burned. This pattern emerged in village after village, all along the lake shore. Humanitarian groups estimate that more than 2,000 homes have been destroyed. Now, while satellite data gives us a clearer picture of the unrest, Ituri’s history helps us understand why the violence has suddenly erupted at this time. In the early 2000s, two communities, the Hema and the Lendu, were involved in a bloody conflict. More than 50,000 people were killed before peace was restored. “Why this currently is happening now is fairly suspicious. These communities were reconciling. Relationships had improved.” Stearns says that this time, it’s not ethnic tensions, but political motivations that are most likely driving the conflict. “The country has been in a period of political turmoil as President Joseph Kabila fights for his political survival. It is one of, unfortunately, many, many different, often interlocking conflicts.” More recently, the violence in Ituri has spread inland. “The situation has escalated, with figures of displacement basically doubling in a week.” Our reporting suggests that after the lakeshore villagers fled, the violence spilled over this mountain ridge, driving people westward, many toward the town of Bunia. “Up to 100,000 people are displaced in the Ituri province. This is probably not a very good sign.” So, while it’s unclear what’s stoking this violence, it’s troubling how suddenly it flared. And for the many displaced, who knows when, or even if, they’ll be able to return home?

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We obtained satellite images that show how lakeshore villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been destroyed in recent attacks, forcing 140,000 people to flee their homes.

In mid-February a source in the human rights community told me that villages in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of Congo were being burned amid a renewal of communal fighting. People fleeing the violence told aid workers of arson attacks.

The clashes between the Hema and Lendu communities — on the eastern side of the Ituri province, bordering Uganda — started in December and escalated in early February.

Historically, these distant conflicts have been difficult to analyze. But new technologies allow us to investigate them in close to real time.

I immediately collected active-fire data from NASA — thermal anomalies, or hot spots, that are recorded daily. It showed dozens of fires on the densely forested mountain ridge and along the shoreline of Lake Albert, one of the African Great Lakes between Congo and Uganda.

(Human rights groups also used this type of data, in combination with other evidence, to document the military’s scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya in Myanmar.)

Active-fire data does not provide the cause of a fire, so one must exercise caution in interpreting it, especially when researching violence. It is more commonly used to track wildfires and agricultural fires.

The satellites that collect this information do not provide actual images; they only record the location of active fires, and very large ones at that. So don’t get your hopes up about watching your neighbors barbecue from space — we aren’t quite there yet.

Google and other online mapping platforms often show only blurry satellite images, or have no location names for remote areas such as the small fishing villages around Lake Albert. This makes it difficult to find places where people live. To deal with this challenge, I exported residential data from the online mapping site Openstreetmap.

I then overlaid the NASA data with this new data in Google Earth to look for recorded fires that were in or near populated places. This process gave me a shortlist of 10 locations to investigate.

Image
Location of satellite-recorded active fires (the flames) and residential area data (the white outlines) helped to identify remote locations that had possibly been burned.Credit...© Google Earth/DigitalGlobe

Next, the satellite company DigitalGlobe provided me with high-resolution satellite imagery and analysis of these places. The results were disturbing: All the villages I had identified were at least partially burned, with hundreds of destroyed homes.

As this was not a comprehensive analysis of the whole area affected by violence, the actual number of burned villages is probably much higher. Aid organizations are reporting around 70 burned villages and more than 2,000 destroyed homes.

This new visual evidence provided us with a strong basis to report out the whole story. We now had details from both sides of the lake, not just at the refugee landing site in Uganda.

Of course using technology to investigate stories has limitations. It cannot replace direct ground access. It does not capture the personal drama.

So our team did significant traditional reporting. We interviewed humanitarian workers in Uganda, and researched videos and photos online. We talked to experts about the violence in the wider context of Congo’s many conflicts and current political crisis.

In the end, it was the combination of novel research methodologies and proven reporting that allowed us to tell this story in the most powerful and visual way.

Keep up with Times Insider stories on Twitter, via the Reader Center: @ReaderCenter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: How We Identified Burned Villages In the Democratic Republic of Congo. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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