Andrew Stroehlein
Covering crisis
Journalist Andrew Stroehlein is Communications Director for the International Crisis Group, the conflict resolution organisation, where he promotes responsible coverage of current and potential conflicts and helps draw attention to forgotten wars around the world.
UN blocking release of Sri Lanka satellite images?
Fresh satellite images of the war zone in northeast Sri Lanka are available, but the UN agency charged with analysing them is not making them public. The images contain evidence of severe damage from heavy artillery and possibly air strikes, suggesting indiscriminate attacks in areas of high civilian concentration, which could be classed as war crimes carried out by the government of Sri Lanka. The photos were taken on 19 April, and UNOSAT produced its analysis in a ten-page PDF file on 26 April. ...
The other "100 days"
It seems the media have been gearing up for the 100 days milestone of Obama's presidency since election night -- not just in the US, but around the world. There's nothing like a long-predictable news peg for getting op-eds honed, reporters positioned and TV news graphics coordinated. Such extensive preparation creates a momentum of the mainstream news machine that is almost impossible to divert off course, even with a we're all going to die porcine pandemic story. But there is another 100 days story: on 20 January 2009, the same day as Obama's inauguration, the UN began tallying civilian casualty figures in the war in northeastern Sri Lanka. As government forces steadily constricted the rebel LTTE (Tamil Tigers) into a smaller and smaller zone, some 200,000 civilians were trapped, shelled by their own army and prevented from leaving with equally lethal force by the cult-like LTTE who claim to fight in their name. ...
Media: If you are not covering Sri Lanka right now, why not?
A mass slaughter of civilians will take place Tuesday at noon. And everyone knows it. These are the words my colleague used to describe what is happening in Sri Lanka today in his new article for Foreign Policy's online magazine. It is not an exaggeration: what's happening in Sri Lanka is a massacre in progress. There are over 100,000 civilians trapped in a tiny area, squeezed between the Sri Lankan government forces, who are shelling them, and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) who shoot them if they try to escape. The Army is advancing, and the death toll is rising rapidly. The situation has been compared to Srebrenica -- which many journalists reading this will remember first hand -- but the number of dead already exceeds that Balkan tragedy. ...
Welcome to a world without foreign correspondents
We've all watched the cutting of foreign news budgets for so long that we've become almost numb to it. Another bureau cut here, another three correspondent posts dropped there -- drip, drip, drip -- the dwindling capacity of overseas news gathering is constant background noise. Or ever-increasing silence, perhaps. But now we've come to two situations that show us what the world will be like when there are no foreign correspondents left. The first is Somalia, where the utter inanity of foreign news coverage in the West, particularly in the US, knows no bounds. Amid deafening hero-worship and chest-thumping, the US media machine was so proud that a new president with the world's largest military at his disposal can kill a couple lightly armed thugs that few seemed even able to grasp the most basic fact of the situation: piracy is symptom, not the disease, and lawlessness off the coast of Somalia will continue as long as anarchy is allowed to continue on land. If only a tiny fraction of the Western media ruckus of recent weeks could be dedicated to Somalia itself, then international political attention might start focusing on the roots of the problem. ...
News from Darfur
Getting information out of Darfur has always been difficult for news organisations, probably never more so than today. But one network of journalists has some 50 correspondents addressing the crisis from the ground in Darfur, as well as from South Sudan, eastern Chad and Khartoum. If you tend to roam only in the info-spheres of Western news sources, you may not be familiar with Radio Dabanga, a project supported by the Dutch media development NGO Press Now, because their broadcasts so far have only been in local languages. Plus, its shortwave output and podcasts are only a few months old, so its young footprint is not yet huge outside its primary target audiences. ...
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