Sunday, September 28, 2008
News

Ga. Tech’s kiosk of African peace

“It doesn’t require you to have an Internet connection, which Liberians within the country don’t have. You can record your story at the kiosk and watch the stories of your peers.”—Michael Best on Geor...

By Phillip R. Barea and Stephanie Ramage

    Michael L. Best was, in his own words, a “straight-up technology guy” as he worked toward his doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But today, Best, who teaches information technology and international development at Georgia Tech, uses technology for social justice in Africa.

    “I was trained in computer science, but at MIT we were working in Thailand and Costa Rica on how to use technology to enhance the learning experience and environment of primary school students, and I was working on social justice on the side,” he says. “My hobby became my vocation.”

    These days, that vocation takes him to Liberia, where his team of Georgia Tech undergrads and grad students works closely with the Carter Center to promote reconciliation in a country that has been torn by two civil wars in the past 20 years.

The first civil war, fought from 1989 to 1996, pitted the Liberian government, led by Samuel Doe, who had gained power through a coup in 1980, against the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, led by Charles Taylor. Eventually, a faction of the NPFL split off to form the guerilla group, the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The INPFL, led by a man named Prince Johnson, captured Doe and tortured and killed him, all of it captured on video.

 The war was characterized by child soldiers raping and killing other children in one of the world’s worst bouts of ethnic cleansing. By 1996, about 200,000 Liberians had been killed, a sad state of affairs for a country established by Americans; Liberia was settled by freed slaves in 1822. Their passage to Africa was funded by the American Colonization Society.

In 1999, a second civil war raged into life, promoted by the government of neighboring Guinea, which backed a rebel faction called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. Eventually, Sierra Leone and the Cote d’Ivoire became involved in the conflict, as well. Taylor resigned in 2003 at the ostensible end of the war—Vice President Moses Blah replaced him—but Liberia is in danger of falling back into conflict.

“Countries that emerge out of civil conflict routinely return to civil war unless—and until—there is a national dialogue about what has happened,” says Best. “In other words, until some sense of a core reality is shared.”

That’s where Georgia Tech comes in. For those Liberians who have fled to other countries, Best and his students maintain a Web site, www.trcofliberia.org, that allows them to watch hearings held by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

“Most of the testimonies given in the hearings are the testimonies of victims,” says Best. “It’s kind of the process of ‘remembering so you can forget.’”

For those who still live in Liberia, the Tech team transports a video-sharing kiosk in the back of a Toyota 4Runner all over the country so that Liberians can record their own stories of the civil wars and their efforts to build peace.

“It doesn’t require you to have an Internet connection, which Liberians within the country don’t have,” he says. All of the videos available on the Web site are available on the mobile kiosk.
“You can record your story at the kiosk and watch the stories of your peers,” says Best. “We intend, ultimately, to stick the stories from the kiosk on the Web site, but we haven’t yet perfected the process of doing that.”

Both the Web site and the kiosk basically require getting everyday people to talk with, forgive and admit the reality of the situation to each other. The idea is to rectify common misperceptions that may have helped start the conflict in the first place. In the meantime, the United Nations has committed about 5,000 soldiers to a peacekeeping mission in Liberia.

The Tech team is also in the initial stages of a technology-for-social-justice program in Uganda. There, the Lord’s Resistance Army, a self-described “Christian” guerilla group guilty of abducting children and forcing them to be soldiers or sex slaves in 2005, formed in 1987. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony, who believes himself to be a prophet of God, and his generals. Kony’s deputy and one of his generals have since been killed, but Kony remains at large.

The LRA is most active now, says Best, in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Student participants in Best’s projects in Africa are chosen according to their performance at Tech and their willingness to work.

“It’s a life-changing experience,” he says. “More than half of the students who go come back and change the direction of their research or their career plans.” SP