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Saturday, April 08, 2000
By Jack Kelly, Post-Gazette National Bureau
One of the most important people in providing humanitarian assistance is a good mapmaker, according to State Department geographer Bill Wood.
Wood and three of his subordinates spoke about their experiences in Kosovo during a panel discussion sponsored by the Association of American Geographers, which is holding its annual meeting this week at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
Geographers must prepare geographic information systems, which present relevant data in map form for the government and private sector agencies involved in humanitarian interventions, Wood said.
"The power of the GIS is not the map, it's the data behind the map," he said.
For Kosovo, Wood and his staff worked with the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, to produce a geographic information system for use by international organizations and private relief agencies. Key data included locations of buildings that had suffered damage, suspected locations of land mines and unexploded cluster bombs, and sites of mass graves.
The first step in getting a good fix on locations is to get agencies to agree on place names, Wood said. In Kosovo, most villages and key terrain features have both Serbian and Albanian names.
Future humanitarian crises are likely to flare up in places where ethnic and religious groups overlap, so the place name problem is not unique to Kosovo.
A lot of agencies are usually involved in humanitarian interventions. In Kosovo, they included NATO, the U.N., the European Union, the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the governments of the NATO countries and of Albania and Macedonia and hundreds of private relief organizations.
All need to know where help is needed most; how to get supplies to where help is needed, and the location of potential dangers.
A good geographic information system can provide answers to these questions at a glance, according to Woods and his team.