Cases - Forensic Architecture

Outsourcing Risk. Investigating the Ali Enterprises Factory Fire on 11 September 2012

Forensic Architecture was asked by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) to carry out an architectural analysis of the fire that destroyed the Ali Enterprises textile factory on 11 September 2012 in Karachi, Pakistan. Inadequate fire safety measures at the company, a supplier for the German clothes retailer #KiK, led to the deaths of 260 factory workers. This investigation uncovers the many ways in which design and management decisions not only failed to prevent injury and casualties, but in fact augmented the death toll.

Our findings have now been submitted to the Regional Court in Dortmund, Germany, where legal action against KiK is ongoing. Since March 2015, the Court has been examining a civil claim against KiK filed by four Pakistanis – one survivor and three relatives of workers killed in the fire – with support from the ECCHR and medico international.

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#risques #externalisation #Karachi #Pakistan #délocalisation #travail #industrie_textile #forensic_architecture #reconstruction_du_désastre

cc @reka

MARE CLAUSUM
The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case
6 November 2017.
▻https://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/sea-watch

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On 6 November 2017, the rescue NGO Sea Watch (SW) and a patrol vessel of the Libyan Coast Guard (LYCG) simultaneously directed themselves towards a migrants’ boat in distress in international waters. The boat, which had departed from Tripoli a few hours earlier, carried between 130 and 150 passengers. A confrontational rescue operation ensued, and while SW was eventually able to rescue and bring to safety in Italy 59 passengers, at least 20 people died before or during these events, while 47 passengers were ultimately pulled back to Libya, where several faced grave human rights violations – including being detained, beaten, and sold to an other captor who tortured them to extract ransom from their families. The unfolding of this incident has been reconstructed in a video by Forensic Oceanography in collaboration with Forensic Architecture.

To reconstruct the circumstances of this particular incident, however, Forensic Oceanography has produced a detailed written report which argues it is also necessary to understand the policies that shaped the behaviour of the actors involved, and the patterns of practices of which this event was only a particular instantiation. Before arriving on the scene, the LYCG liaised with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre of the Italian Coast Guard, which informed them of the presence of the boat in distress. The Ras Jadir, the very patrol vessel of the LYCG that engaged in reckless behaviour and thus contributed to the death of several passengers, was one of the four patrol boats that had been donated by Italy to the LYCG on the 15 May 2017, in presence of the Italian Minister of Interior. On board that vessel on the day of the events, 8 out of the 13 crew members had received training from the EU’s anti-smuggling operation, EUNAVFOR MED.

Based on these elements, the Mare Clausum report argues that this particular incident is paradigmatic of the new, drastic measures that have been implemented by Italy and the EU to stem migration across the central Mediterranean. This multilevel policy of containment operates according to a two-pronged strategy which aims, on the one hand, to delegitimise, criminalise and ultimately oust rescue NGOs from the central Mediterranean; on the other, to provide material, technical and political support to the LYCG so as to enable them to intercept and pull back migrants to Libya more effectively. This undeclared operation to seal off the central Mediterranean is what we refer to as Mare Clausum.

DRONE STRIKES. Investigating covert operations through spatial media

Although armed drones have been used in Afghanistan from the start of the US campaign in October 2001, the first known targeted assassination by the US outside a theatre of war took place in Yemen on November 3, 2002. Since June 2004 the main focus of the drone campaign has been in the frontier regions of Pakistan. The first Israeli drone strikes in Gaza also started around the same time in 2004, while in Somalia drone strikes began in 2007. The areas most imperilled by drone warfare are generally outside of the effective control of states but are still subject to the worst of their violence.

Waziristan, part of a region of Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is also effectively under a media blackout due to a siege that forbids the entry and exit of nonresidents, including journalists, and the taking of images or bringing out of recording devices. The targeted areas of Yemen and Somalia are likewise difficult for nonresidents to enter. Consequently, few images of the damage caused by drones and even fewer eyewitness accounts and survivors’ testimonies are available outside of these regions. News reporting has also been uneven and sometimes contradictory. This has meant that some aspects of drone warfare have been more present within public discourse than others.

One of the most under-researched aspects of drone warfare has been the spatial; that is, the territorial, urban, and architectural dimensions of these campaigns. Forensic Architecture has investigated several issues relating to the spatial mapping of drone warfare; for example, the geographical patterns of strikes in relationship to the kind of settlements (towns or villages) targeted and types of buildings targeted. Our aim was to explore what potential connections there might be between these spatial patterns and the numbers of casualties, especially civilian casualties.

The investigation has, to date, primarily consisted in mapping, modelling, and visually animating the data in order to explore this question. Our research and analysis were divided between two primary scales of drone warfare respectively; that is, on the one hand, studying the spatial and temporal patterns of drone strikes on the territorial level, and, on the other, a very detailed architectural examination of a few specific strikes in #Pakistan, #Gaza, and Yemen.

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