The clip shows the Guinean Army firing indiscriminately on a crowd of civilians who were demonstrating their growing discontent with the increasingly autocratic ways of President Lansana Conté. Such eye-witness video footage is especially valuable because voices from the Guinean grassroots are difficult to find in the blogosphere. Most of the online commentary about Guinea in crisis has come from international news agencies and bloggers from elsewhere in Africa.

GV author Jen Brea last month put together an excellent overview of the unrest in Guinea. The crisis reached its climax when President Conté declared martial law and deployed government troops with instructions to use armed force to restore order. The ensuing stand-off led to the deaths of more than 110 people, many of them youths and children killed by gunfire on the streets of Conakry.

Organisations like the International Crisis Group warned that unless real change took place in Guinea, chaos would spread quickly with disastrous consequences. On the ground, civil society refused to back down. Further bold resistance to martial law from the labour unions and the wider populace – backed by the Guinean Parliament – brought about a renewed end to the general strike on 25 February 2007 and the appointment of new Prime Minister Lansana Kouyate, who appears to be a product of consensus.

As GV Francophone editor Alice Backer picked up last week, the Senegalese blogger Alex Seck (Fr) is now talking about Guinea exiting out of its crisis. But the prevailing general tone is still cautious: national union leaders (Fr) and their international counterparts are stressing that it is vital to remain vigilant about this so-called return of peace to Guinea…

There are many warning signs to be drawn from the recent history of conflict in the West African sub-region. For several years attention has been drawn to the risk that Guinea could be the next country to slide into violent unrest.

Wars in the neighbouring countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire had originally positioned Guinea as a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees. However, the enormous numbers of people migrating across Guinea’s volatile borders also included former fighters from neighbouring wars who are vulnerable to being recruited into new hostilities. Some international analysts have spent years contemplating responses to possible conflict in Guinea and the wider humanitarian crisis, while significant concerns have developed around the precarious position of Guinea’s Forest Region as a source of instability in its own right. Yet in essence the central causes of conflict in the sub-region have always been traceable to bad governance and failures of leadership.

So who holds a leader like President Conté to account when his tyrannical tendencies spiral out of control?

Here on the Human Rights Video Hub we’ve been trying to make the point that accountability can stem from ordinary citizens equipped with the technology to capture abuses on film – as the video clip in this piece demonstrates. The problem is that local media in countries like Guinea are still weak, with little access to the tools required to document or disseminate evidence of such abuses of state power. Nor is there much of a Guinean blogosphere to speak of, leaving most people reliant on news websites like AllAfrica.com and Guineenews (Fr), or blogs like Friends of Guinea, to receive reports or analysis about the latest developments.

These sources were supplemented in recent weeks by bloggers from elsewhere who were moved to drive the online debate. For example, Senegal’s Alex Seck (Fr) declared that Guinea was on the brink of imploding (Fr) and that the failure of the international community to condemn or put pressure on President Conte was “shameful”. East African blog Charcoal Ink said the turmoil was a reflection of familiar political trends in Africa: “there is a power struggle going on and power is that delicious elixir that my African leaders can’t get enough of”.

Finally, one of the most interesting responses to the unrest in Guinea was the defiant posturing of the national youth music scene, represented most prominently by the Fonike collective (Fr), which produced a hip-hop video (Fr) in solidarity with the citizens who protested against Conté’s “dictatorial regime”, as well as the following reggae clip:

Unfortunately these voices of the musical youth seem to have little genuine impact, partly due to the fact that much of West African politics is oblivious to grassroots opinion and only really responsive to its “big men”.

So now the most immediate challenge is for one such big man, Prime Minister Kouyate, to seize the momentum (Fr) that the emergence from this violent period has afforded him. To make tangible progress and to prevent Guinea slipping into conflict, Kouyate will need robust assistance from his national and international allies. And most importantly he’ll have to stand strong against the whims and excesses of power-hungry President Conté, in order that the clashes witnessed last month do not become the forebears of yet another devastating West African conflict.

The villagers being forcibly removed here are indigenous Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples, who claim this territory near Lake Izabal as part of their ancestral lands. They want to carry out arable farming, as their forefathers had done peacefully on these plantations until the 1960s. The indigenous perspective on mining is generally negative, fearing harm to the environment and destruction of the local culture and communities.

However, beneath these same lands lie rich seams of nickel, a metal whose scarcity on the world market has this week caused its value to reach a record high…

As reported in earlier dispatches from Rights Action, Canadian nickel-mining firm INCO first purchased the land from Guatemala’s military government of the 1960s, leading to violent evictions of the original Mayan Q’eqchi’ inhabitants. The current proprietor, another Canadian company called Skye Resources, acquired the land from INCO in 2004 and has announced its intention to recommence mining for nickel under the rebranded “Fenix Project”. The Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples feel that their views on use of the land have not been properly taken into account and decided to restate their claims to live and farm there before the “Fenix Project” got underway.

The question at the heart of this story is to what extent the Mayan Q’eqchi’ peoples have a right to influence the use of the land they have traditionally lived on. It is a question that has yielded increasingly bitter disputes in Guatemala over several decades and is widely regarded as a legacy of the country's history of conflict and military rule, as well as a facet of the society's broader discrimination against its indigenous communities.

Guatemala has signed up to an important multilateral human rights treaty dealing with the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples. Known as Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organisation, the treaty covers a range of contexts, including land rights, respect for indigenous customs and traditions, and eliminating socio-economic gaps between indigenous peoples and the rest of the national population.

Moreover, at the end of a 40-year armed confrontation in which 83% of the victims were Mayans, the Guatemala Peace and Reconstruction Plan, agreed in 1996, places responsibilities on the government to protect its most disadvantaged communities and is supposed to enshrine the right of indigenous peoples to meaningful consultation on land use. The right to consultation is expressly formulated to give indigenous peoples a voice in negotiating fair outcomes to legislative or administrative processes that affect them – including land rights decrees. In this instance, the government’s decision to grant a mining licence to Skye was seemingly taken without “dialogue and negotiation”.

And so it transpired, in a campaign to receive viable farming land from the Guatemalan Government, the indigenous Mayan families reoccupied parts of the intended Skye mining plots in September 2006. After initial clashes with the police in November 2006 had left these families in what Upside Down World described as a “cycle of landlessness, poverty and repression”, they were finally forced off the land unceremoniously when Skye obtained a legal order for their eviction.

The evictions themselves were captured in a compelling photo-journal on the MiMundo blog, depicting the anguish of the residents, the burning of homes by Skye Resources, and the deployment of armed force by the state. As GV Latin America Editor David Sasaki picked up earlier this week there’s a podcast on the Rabble Podcast Network in which the evictions are described by Canadian journalist Dawn Paley, who was at the scene and who had earlier written a provocative article entitled: “this is what development looks like”.

An immediate letter-writing campaign condemning the evictions drew a telling response from the CEO of Skye Resources, in which he spoke of “land invasions” by “squatters” who were removed “in the best possible manner while respecting human rights”. However, Dawn Paley responded with a further open letter to Skye claiming that many of the CEO’s assertions were “simply not true” and seemed to “betray the horrific reality of these evictions”.

In analysing a contentious issue such as land rights, regular, balanced blogging from civil society groups such as the Guatemala Solidarity Network becomes all the more important because of the starkly divergent views that emerge from the actors involved.

By way of example, Skye Resources’ carefully worded press release on the day of the evictions couched the company’s efforts in terms of trying to “help local communities step into a more certain future by helping to define their land rights”, and working to “find a peaceful resolution to the dispute”…

… while in contrast, quoted in an open letter by a researcher who visited the affected communities in September 2006, one Mayan community leader interpreted the relationship somewhat differently: “To them [Skye Resources] we are garbage… they walk all over us.”

In the wake of these comments, the time seems ripe to consider how video fits in to the quest for post-conflict justice. How does the use of video relate to such concepts as truth, reconciliation and accountability? It's an especially interesting question in a region like the Former Yugoslavia, where the population remains so starkly divided in its interpretations of the recent past.

As the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) noted, video of historical atrocities is being used as part of the continuing propaganda war in the Former Yugoslavia, and few debates around video footage in 2006 have been as highly-charged as the one that accompanied this video clip, first broadcast by Serbia's B92 television station in August 2006.

Warning: the following video contains graphic imagery of human rights abuse

The video depicts events that took place during so-called “Operation Storm” in August 1995. It came to light almost exactly eleven years later - the most recent example of video footage apparently released to coincide with the anniversaries of major atrocities committed by different sides in the Balkan wars.

On this occasion, the victims on video are Serbs - a civilian shot by Bosnian soldiers and a convoy of refugees harassed by Croatian Army units. When B92 and stations in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia broadcast the footage, political shockwaves quickly spread across the region. Serb leaders demanded prosecutions of the men responsible, while one Bosnian politician called on Serbia to do more to bring its own alleged war criminals - particularly Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic - to justice.

While some Croat and Bosnian representatives derided the video as a “montage” or a misrepresentation of history, a Croatian opinion poll released a few days ago shows that a growing number of Croatians, nearly 70%, were aware that Croat troops committed atrocities against ethnic Serbs between 1991 and 1995, a far higher figure than previously supposed by the Croatian media. The poll also revealed that 80% of those polled - including both Serbs and Croats - believed that these atrocities were war crimes, and that the perpetrators should face justice. Most respondents also felt that justice could not be delivered through the Croatian courts, and would prefer war criminals to be handed over to the International Criminal Court at the The Hague. It's not yet clear to what extent the release of the Operation Storm videos influenced this perceived change.

Similarly, in June 2005, many Serbs were shocked into re-evaluation when a video depicting Serb atrocities was broadcast close to the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Bosnian civilians at Srebrenica. On that occasion, international media attributed great importance to the video's emergence and profiled the Serbian activist Natasa Kandic who had traced and exposed it.

As the IWPR reported, videotapes have played a conspicuous role in shaping perceptions of war in the Former Yugoslavia, often setting off cycles of ill-feeling and retraumatising the victims. Even some feature films have had a divisive impact. But are there ways in which this kind of video can be used constructively to aid post-conflict reconciliation and justice?

One initiative that gained a lot of international coverage is the Videoletters project, which has attempted to create video dialogue among people affected by war in the Balkans. It uses the video letter format used by many migrants to stay in touch with family and friends back home. Many of the videos created in this project were aired on public TV stations across South-East Europe and stimulated a vibrant exchange of perspectives, comment and discussion.

GV Eastern Europe editor Veronica Khokhlova has pointed to debates about video footage of atrocities in the past. However, in the realm of Balkan blogs, many of which are cross-linked on sites like East Ethnia, there seems to be something of a dearth of examples of vlogging or other home-grown initiatives dedicated to reconciliation.

How might video be used in this or other situations? As training or education materials? As evidence? To promote reconciliation? What role can citizen journalism play?

There are many other places where video might play a role in the path to justice, and eventually, reconcilation – Uganda, Colombia, East Timor, Rwanda, where Videoletters began working earlier this year, and Armenia/Turkey, where, as in the Balkans, the debate runs over into artistic expression, such as Armenian-Canadian film director Atom Egoyan’s feature film Ararat, or Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s comments to a Swiss newspaper magazine.

If you know of any examples of this kind of use of video anywhere in the world, let us know. Whether it’s the kind of video that tries to turn the tide away from war, towards a peaceful common future, or the kind of video that tries to stoke the embers of a conflict, we'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

[Additional research and reporting by Sameer Padania]

Yet this programme, along with the controversial new Military Commissions Act now awaiting the President's signature into law, has been heavily criticised on human rights grounds by everyone from jurists to academics to Senators to bloggers. Secret detentions actually deny prisoners any access to justice, making them vulnerable to torture and disappearance. As a recently published report for the Council of Europe revealed, hundreds of suspects have become trapped in a “global spider’s web” of illegal abductions, detentions and transfers.

And yet, despite widely-publicised revelations in media such as the Washington Post and ABC News going back nearly a year, exact details of where and how terrorist suspects are held in practice have proven difficult to come by. Most of us are familiar with images of the US-run facility at Guantanamo Bay, but we don’t really know what goes on away from the public glare.

Now, in this piece of video footage newly uploaded to blip, you can walk through a place where a man suspected of involvement in terrorism was secretly detained:

For those of you protesting “but it’s a hotel room!”, you’re absolutely right – an apparently normal, comfortable suite in a high-end hotel in Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia. But it was in this room that a German citizen, Khaled El-Masri, who has never faced any criminal charges, was kept incommunicado for 23 days in January 2004. It was here that he was tightly guarded by intelligence agents – even on his visits to the bathroom – refused legal or consular help, interrogated continuously about Islamic extremism, and threatened with a gun to his head when he tried to leave.

From this hotel room, El-Masri was handed over to the CIA and flown to Afghanistan, where he would spend the next four months in a squalid prison cell.

When El-Masri’s story was first reported in the New York Times last year, questions sprung up around the nature and extent to which intelligence agencies from various countries were involved. One popular explanation is that he was picked up as a result of a CIA mistake, which the Macedonians and Germans were drawn into. In December 2005, El-Masri filed a US lawsuit against the former Director of the CIA, which is due to be argued on appeal by the ACLU next month. Meanwhile a German Parliament inquiry is looking into whether the German secret services played a role – in spite of a government claim that it didn’t even know of the case until after El-Masri was returned home.

While many of the larger European nations have been able to engage in a systematic cover-up of their role as US “partners in crime”, Macedonia’s involvement now appears to have been laid bare. Along with the Macedonian Government’s predictable public denials have come private admissions from former officials that they held El-Masri on behalf of the CIA. Macedonian journalist Aleksandr Bozinowski, writing in Vreme, has reflected concerns that the level of ‘control’ exercised by foreign intelligence agencies over national security issues sometimes “brings into question Macedonia's sovereignty”.

In any case, believe it or not, the discovery of this hotel room provided a major piece in the jigsaw of this US-led operation. Journalists investigating for German TV channel ZDF’s “Frontal 21″ news show took El-Masri’s hand-drawn memory of the room (shown at this ACLU link as the third of three detention sketches) along to Skopje and found a match. El-Masri then postively identified several aspects of the hotel from its website.

Anyone who wants to know more can read Khaled El-Masri’s detailed statement to the US courts online. His moving and compelling video testimony also features in the 2006 WITNESS documentary “Outlawed”, which is a must-see film in these troubled times. We’d be happy to hear your comments on that film or on any other aspects of this post right here on the new Human Rights Video Hub.

El-Masri went on to suffer a deeply traumatic ordeal of rendition, torture, forced-feeding and other outrages to his dignity – most of which took place in the more typical surroundings of a “small, filthy, concrete cell” in Afghanistan. But no less significant was his detention in this mundane, unremarkable hotel room in Macedonia; for it shows us that hidden, silent, secret human rights abuses are not only going on behind barbed wire.