Myanmar’s Descent, Seen From 150 Miles Up

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

In the “before” shot, from May 2004, the village is there, a cluster of seven roofs near a small lake. In the “after” shot, from February of this year, the houses are gone.

Satellite photographs of rural Myanmar released yesterday show what seems to be evidence of human rights abuses gathered from space: villages wiped out, populations relocated and military encampments rising.

The images, of events long reported, were released by the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in coordination with the U.S. Campaign for Burma, a group working to end such abuses and bring democracy to the country known as Myanmar.

“We want to show the military junta that we are watching from the sky,” said Aung Din, the campaign’s policy director.

Myanmar’s ruling junta is in the middle of a violent crackdown on urban protests that were provoked by price increases and are being led by monks. The release of the pictures was hastened for that reason.

Those pictures show rural provinces that are home to the Karen and Shan tribes, but the director of the project, Lars Bromley, said it had now asked the satellite companies to train their cameras on monasteries, military camps and urban plazas where demonstrations form.

Mr. Aung Din said that because the junta had apparently cut Internet and telephone ties with the outside world to prevent pictures of the violence from getting out, “we’re trying to monitor them via satellite.”

The newly released photographs were taken from seven years to a few weeks ago by three commercial satellites that pass over Myanmar about twice a week, about 150 miles up. They give fairly clear pictures of objects down to about three feet across; roofs, fences and some trees are distinguishable, as are stretches of ground that look burned.

In recent years, a United Nations report found, 3,000 villages of the Karen and nearby tribes have been destroyed, and more than 500,000 people have been driven from their homes. Government troops are accused of systematically raping girls and forcing children to join their ranks.

In several images, all or parts of villages are gone. In one, a palm grove that once looked carefully tended appears overgrown. In others, rows of new buildings have sprung up in refugee camps, or military encampments have expanded and new fences and roads can be seen.

The targets were chosen to corroborate witnesses’ reports of attacks or troop movements gathered by advocates from the Free Burma Rangers, the Karen Human Rights Group and the Thailand-Burma Border Consortium, which have representatives in the area.

One of the hardest parts, Mr. Bromley said, was deciding where to tell the satellites to aim in the region, which is smaller than 1,000 square miles, because tiny villages are often not on maps and refugees shift location. Although global positioning system devices would solve that problem by providing coordinates, for a member of one of the rights groups to be caught on the ground with one “would be a death sentence,” he said. “They would be shot on sight.”

The science society’s human rights project began 30 years ago, helping forensic teams sift mass graves in Argentina.

Recently, it has used satellite photographs to document human rights violations in Darfur and in Zimbabwe. In May 2006, it showed that a Zimbabwean settlement that was a hotbed of political opposition to President Robert Mugabe had been bulldozed flat. It had had 850 homes, and at least 6,000 residents.

Myanmar Apologizes For Journalist's Death: Kyodo

By REUTERS

Filed at 11:33 p.m. ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan strongly protested to Myanmar over the killing of a Japanese video journalist during an anti-government rally, and Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win offered apologies, Kyodo news agency said on Saturday.

Fifty-year-old Kenji Nagai was fatally wounded in Yangon on Thursday, and pictures smuggled out of the country showed him clutching a camera as he lay dying.

Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura made the protest when he met his Myanmar counterpart at U.N. headquarters in New York on Friday.

The death of Nagai "was extremely regrettable and we will lodge a stern protest," Japanese officials quoted Komura as telling Nyan Win, Kyodo said.

Nyan Win told Komura he was indeed sorry for the death, telling Japanese officials: "Demonstrations are beginning to calm down, and we would also like to exercise restraint," Kyodo said.

Japanese Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.

Nagai was the first foreign victim of the protests that began as sporadic marches against fuel price hikes but have swelled over the past month into mass demonstrations against 45 years of military rule in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.

2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD, July 12 — Clashes in a southeastern neighborhood here between the American military and Shiite militias on Thursday left at least 16 people dead, including two Reuters journalists who had driven to the area to cover the turbulence, according to an official at the Interior Ministry.

The two Reuters staff members, both of them Iraqis, were killed when troops on an American helicopter shot into the area where the two had just gotten out of their car, said witnesses who spoke to an Agence France-Presse photographer who arrived at the scene shortly after their bodies were taken away.

The Reuters employees were Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, a photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, 40, a driver.

“When we reached the spot where Namir was killed, the people told us that two journalists had been killed in an air attack an hour earlier,” said Ahmad Sahib, the Agence France-Presse photographer, who had been traveling in a car several blocks behind Mr. Noor-Eldeen but was delayed by the chaos in the area. He said he was in touch with Mr. Noor-Eldeen by cellphone until his colleague was killed.

“They had arrived, got out of the car and started taking pictures, and people gathered,” Mr. Sahib said. “It looked like the American helicopters were firing against any gathering in the area, because when I got out of my car and started taking pictures, people gathered and an American helicopter fired a few rounds, but they hit the houses nearby and we ran for cover.”

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

The military command offered condolences to the families of the civilians who were killed during the combat action, the statement said.

Officials at the Interior Ministry and at a Baghdad bank drastically revised their account of a large robbery at the Dar Es Salaam bank on Wednesday, saying that there had been confusion about how much of the stolen money was Iraqi dinars and how much was United States dollars. The robbers made off with 282 million Iraqi dinars, equal to about $225,000, and $366,000 American dollars; on Wednesday the police reported that $282 million had been stolen.

In Baghdad, violence racked the southern neighborhood of Saydiya, where the police picked up 17 of the 28 bodies found in the capital on Thursday. The neighborhood has become a battleground over the past several months, with Sunni Arab extremists controlling many of its streets and killing people who refuse to help them.

Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen allied with the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr have been attacking the area as well, residents said. They described sometimes arriving home after work and being unable to approach their front doors because of gunfights in the streets.

A suicide bomber attacked a wedding in Tal Afar, a town 30 miles north of Mosul, killing four people and wounding six, said Brig. Gen. Mohamed al-Wakaa of the Mosul police. The groom was an Iraqi policeman. A car bomb targeting a police patrol in central Mosul killed one policeman and wounded eight, General Wakaa said.

And in central Iraq, gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint on the road near Samarra, killing four policemen and two Iraqi soldiers.

In Diwaniya in southern Iraq, American helicopters fired on six men burying a roadside bomb, killing five of them, said Maj. Marc Young, a spokesman for the Multinational Force-Iraq. A hospital worker in the city said the five men were connected to the movement allied with Mr. Sadr. Later in the day, Mr. Sadr’s supporters walked through the streets mourning the death of their colleagues, chanting anti-American slogans and promising revenge, said witnesses who watched the procession.

An American soldier was killed Thursday east of Baghdad while involved in combat operations, the military said in a statement.

The two journalists who were killed Thursday had been gathering information for a report on weightlifting early in the day, and then they heard that something was happening in the Ameen neighborhood and drove there to learn more about it, according to a Reuters official.

According to a Reuters report after the incident, some people at the scene said that American troops fired into the area from a helicopter, and a police report stated that the American attack killed the two journalists and nine other people.

Mr. Noor-Eldeen, who was not married, was originally from Mosul and first worked for Reuters there, moving on to Baghdad after receiving threats. Mr. Chmagh had worked for Reuters since before the United States-led invasion in 2003 and had four children. He also supported his sister’s family after her husband was killed by insurgents.

“Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh’s outstanding contribution to reporting on the unfolding events in Iraq has been vital,” said the chief executive of Reuters, Tom Glocer, in a statement.

“They stand alongside other colleagues in Reuters who have died doing a job that they believe in,” he added. Six Reuters employees have been killed in Iraq since the invasion.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees made an urgent plea on Thursday for money to help it increase aid for Iraqi refugees, whose numbers continue to rise. Nearly two million Iraqis are displaced within the country and nearly two million more have left, fleeing primarily to neighboring countries. About 2,000 Iraqis a day flee their homes, according to the United Nations appeal.

Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diwaniya, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra and Diyala.