Translating Global Refugee Movement to song

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Listen to this unusual, fascinating and deeply moving experiment: four decades of global refugee movement translated into a three-minute music video. 

Brian Foo, a New York City-based programmer and visual artist who calls himself a 'data-driven DJ,' has generated this song using refugee data from the United Nations from 1975 to 2012. 

"The quantity, length, and pitch of the song's instruments are controlled by the volume of refugee movement and distance traveled between their countries of origin and asylum," Foo writes in a blog post, explaining the methodology behind the video. 

“The song composition is entirely algorithmic and is composed of the following building blocks: 
• Each year between 1975 and 2012 correlates to a 4-second segment in the song. 
• The annual global aggregate volume of refugee migration controls the quantity of instruments playing. The higher the volume of refugee migration, the more instruments are added to the song. 
• The annual average distance of refugee migration controls the duration and pitch of the instruments. Longer distances yield instruments that play longer and lower-pitch notes (e.g. long distances: , short distances: ). 
• The annual amount of countries with 1000+ refugees control the variety of instruments playing, where the more countries with 1000+ refugees, the more variety of instruments are playing in the song.” 

Foo decided to limit the song to these four components and not add additional context, such as the reasons for displacement, civil wars, invasions, coups, elections, as he believed it would add too much complexity. He wanted “the listener to intuitively and viscerally experience the sheer volume of displaced populations and the distance they travel from their home country.” And you can really feel this: the song starts gently, then sweeps you along and makes you dizzy as the numbers of refugees grow.

Four seconds in the song correlate to one historical year. In 1975, which is the first year of Foo's visualization, there are about 1.6 million world refugees. Fifteen years later, the number of world refugees has increased by 900 percent and the refugee movement has become truly global. 

 His song was largely inspired by The Refugee Project, an interactive web project and map of refugee migrations since 1975. For more context behind some of the numbers for each year, go to The Refugee Project website and click through their interactive temporal map. And for more information on Foo’s song, click here. 

End Sexual Violence in Conflict: #TIMETOACT – Global Summit

"Rape was a reward the leaders gave those who killed. This is why I didn't love my daughter – her father was the one who killed my family. I wanted to kill her, too,” said Levine Mukasakufu about her daughter, Josiane Nizomfura. 

Levine is one of the half a million women raped during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when the country's ethnic Hutus tried to wipe out the minority Tutsis.

Two decades after the genocide, television journalist Lindsey Hilsum returned to hear the extraordinary testimony of women who were raped during the violence – and of the children born as a result.  It is estimated that some 20,000 children were born of rape during the genocide. 

Although rape occurs in all wars, it was especially widespread in Rwanda, and the consequences are felt to this day, Hilsum wrote in a moving, thought-provoking article in the Guardian. The International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda concluded that rape was an integral part of genocide. "Sexual violence was a step in the process of destruction of the Tutsi group … destruction of the spirit, of the will to live, and of life itself," said the verdict on the Hutu leaders who organised the genocide in the Butare region.

This week's Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, hosted by the British foreign secretary, William Hague, and actress Angelina Jolie, Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, aims to put victims such as Levine and Josiane at the centre of war crimes investigations.

The summit, which opens tomorrow and runs until Friday  (10- 13 June) at ExCel London will be the largest gathering ever brought together on this subject. Over 100 countries and over 900 experts, NGOs, survivors, faith leaders, five Nobel laureates and international organisations from across the world will participate. Governments are expected to sign a new protocol for documenting wartime sexual assaults and adopt programmes to educate their soldiers that rape is a war crime rather than an inevitable consequence of conflict. The summit also aims at taking practical steps to reduce the dangers women face in conflict zones and increasing support for survivors of sexual violence and for human rights defenders.

There will also be three days of free public events taking place in the Summit Fringe. 

“For the first time in history, a world summit highlights and denounces a crime that is normally made invisible and is often silenced by the majority of States,” said journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima, a survivor of sexual violence in Colombia’s conflict. 

Alongside journalists and human rights defenders from Egypt and Mexico, Jineth will speak at a fringe event on 12 June organised by ABColombia and Peace Brigades International (PBI) looking at the risks entailed for those who speak out on the issue.

“Female reporters and activists suffer sexual abuse ranging from virginity tests conducted by the state, to group attacks on women during protests, and to the sexual violence practiced on women (and men) who are detained for protesting or opposing the state, all of which are escalating in Egypt", said Rana Allam, Editor-in-Chief at Egypt’s Daily News.

International Women’s Day – stop violence against women

This year’s theme for International Women’s Day, celebrated all over the world today (8 March) is: “A promise is a promise: Time for action to end violence against women.”

Commemorations under way across th world are focusing on ending violence against women, which affects up to 7 in 10 women. It occurs in multiple forms in all countries and settings. It impacts women and their communities, hampering development, and also costing countries billions of dollars annually in healthcare costs and lost productivity.

UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet stresses that discrimination and violence against women and girls have no place in the 21st century. “Enough is enough”, she says in a message of both outrage and hope that discrimination and violence must end.

To celebrate International Women's Day, the UN is launching its first ever song “One Woman” - a rallying cry to inspires listeners to join the drive for women's rights and gender equality. This musical celebration of women worldwide features 25 artists from across the globe. It reminds us that together, we can overcome violence and discrimination: "We Shall Shine!" 

And now a bit of history:

The United Nations began celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March during International Women’s Year 1975. Two years later, in December 1977, the General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace to be observed on any day of the year by Member States, in accordance with their historical and national traditions.

International Women’s Day first emerged from the activities of labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century in North America and across Europe. Since those early years, International Women’s Day has assumed a new global dimension for women in developed and developing countries alike. The growing international women’s movement, which has been strengthened by four global United Nations women’s conferences, has helped make the commemoration a rallying point to build support for women’s rights and participation in the political and economic arenas.

Increasingly, International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities.

IFJ presses UN for action on media killings – 106 journalists and media staff killed in 2011

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wan-ifra.org

Last year has been another bloody one for the media. In 2011, 106 journalists and media personnel were killed – many of them targeted and murdered expressly because they were journalists. In 2010, 94 were killed.

The situation is so alarming that the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which compiled the list, is urging the United Nations Secretary General BanKi-moon to take drastic action against governments of the most dangerous countries for media.

The Federation believes journalists have been specifically hunted down and blames governments’ failure to uphold their international obligations for the ongoing violence targeting media.  

The deadliest region in 2011 was the Middle East and Arab World with 32 journalists and media personnel killed – and Iraq had the region's highest death toll with 11 dead.  Among countries with high numbers of media fatalities are: 

Pakistan: 11 

Mexico: 11 

The Philippines: 6 

Libya: 6 

Yemen: 6

Honduras: 5 

India: 5   

This year’s list confirms that journalists are among the primary victims of violence in armed conflict, ethnic and religious tensions, as well as political upheavals, which erupted in many countries during the past twelve months.  

Media professionals are exposed to serious risks as they report from the frontline of conflicts, such as in Pakistan and the Arab world, or crime prevention in the lawless parts of Mexico, where they are considered unwelcome witnesses. 

In a letter to the UN Secretary General, the IFJ calls for effective implementation of international legal instruments to combat the prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against journalists. 

“It is abundantly clear that deadly violence against journalists is not just a blip due to conflicts around the world but has become a regular cycle in many countries where journalists are hunted down, targeted and murdered by the enemies of press freedom,” said the letter signed by IFJ President, Jim Boumelha. “In a situation where governments are in denial or indifferent to what has become a regular pattern of targeted killings of journalists, it is incumbent upon yourself and the United Nations to remind them of their responsibility to protect journalists.” 

The IFJ says that violence targets not just journalists but also colleagues from all sectors of the industry, including cameramen, drivers and fixers and other support staff which are all recorded to underscore their crucial role in news gathering and reporting. 

An additional 20 journalists and collaborators also died in accidents and natural disasters incidents. 

The list of journalists and media personnel killed in 2011 is available here.

The IFJ is the world’s largest organisation of journalists, representing more than 600,000 journalists in 131 countries around the world.