SatelliteTechnology Helps Human Rights Monitors

April 25, 2011

Sri Lanka's Minister of External Affairs, Gamini Lakshman Peiris, reacts as he speaks to reporters during a media conference in response to a United Nations report released to the Sri Lankan government, Apr 21, 2011

In May of 2009, when the Sri Lankan army had insurgent Tamil Tiger forces flanked in the country's Northeast, analyst Lars Bromley pored over two sets of satellite imagery for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had turned to AAAS because they were concerned about the safety of civilians.

Two sets of images were captured - one at the start of a heavy battle on May 6, and one when fighting abated on May 10. Bromley says visible shell craters offered possible evidence Sri Lanka was firing into an area it had designated as a civilian safety zone.

"We were basically able to basically locate multiple mortar locations that corresponded with the locations of the craters and the pattern of the ejecta [material ejected] from the craters. They were Sri Lankan Army positions," he said.

Bromley says there was more disturbing visual evidence. "There were definitely significant expansions between May 6 and May 10 that were going on in the number of graves," he recalled.

Makeshift camps of people displaced by the Sri Lankan civil war were also gone from the second image. Bromley said it appeared the camps were being hastily dismantled by people in fear of their lives. "With all the other information that we were piecing together at the time, that was a pretty good call to make - that they were fleeing, and that it was a chaotic situation going on," Bromley said.