Zimbabwe democracy and human rights advocacy group Sokwanele created this Google maps hack to visualize first-hand news reports of election-related human rights violations in the embattled Southern African nation. (more at this cheesebikini post. Thanks, Sean savage)
Update: Sean clarifies:
It's important to note, however, that this service doesn't illustrate *first-hand* violence reports, as you state in the boingboing post… It shows incidents reported in the media. As the map site stipulates:
"The breaches shown on this map represent a small sample of those gathered during our Zimbabwe Election Watch (ZEW) project, which set out to monitor the Zimbabwean government's compliance with the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections.
The breaches identified under ZEW are based on information derived from media sources. It is very important that the map is viewed with this in mind.
Zimbabwe has a highly restricted media environment, and fuel shortages make remote rural areas inaccessible to journalists who do manage to circumvent the legislation and report regardless. This means that urban areas have a greater representation on the map. Blank areas on the map do not indicate 'uneventful' areas; they are more likely to represent stories we are unable to tell and incidents that have not been reported.
The map aims to give an impression of the scale and range of challenges facing Zimbabweans as we head towards the March 29th elections. Even though this is based on a small sample of information we have logged since July 2007, it clearly shows that conditions in the country are not conducive for a free and fair democractic elections."
