Author Archives: Christoph Amthor

About Christoph Amthor

Co-founder of Burma Center Prague, presently project manager at the "India Project" and author of countless unnoticed scribblings.

Shangri-La? Nein. Delhi.

Indien. Nun habe ich also begonnen, auf Deutsch zu schreiben. Die Reise steht unmittelbar bevor und in der exponentiell zunehmenden Verwirrung inmitten akuter Reisevorbereitungen hat es mich zunächst einmal sprachlich nach Hause verschlagen. Morgen besteigen wir eine Maschine der Tyrolean Airways, was allein ich schon herrlich amüsant finde, befinden wir uns dann doch auf dem Weg von Prag nach Delhi, von der kleinen in die große Metropole. Mit Grüßen aus Tirol.

Gestern Abend habe ich mir beim Training noch einmal ordentlich das rechte Handgelenk verdrehen lassen, so dass ich zunächst dachte, ich könnte bei den anstehenden Besprechungen meinen Worten mit einem gipsgestützen Schlag auf den Tisch den nötigen Nachdruck verleihen. Fehlalarm. Ich kann sogar mit Rechts tippen. Schläge auf den Tisch werden mir hoffentlich erspart bleiben.

Abflug am Samstag. Die tschechischen Prager, wenn es sich nicht um Rentner oder andere Angehörige der sozialen Unterschicht handelt, haben also schon die erste Nacht des Wochenendes auf dem Land verbracht, in der chata, einer Art profanen Refugiums in Form einer mehr oder weniger kleinen Hütte, in die gewöhnlich mehr Geld und Liebe investiert wird als in die Stadtwohnung. Prag wird also leer sein. Leer die Straßen. Leer die Tram. Voll nur der Bus der Linie 119, der Reisende in einer Fahrt, was eine normale Straße nur an Achterbahnqualitäten herzugeben vermag, zum Flughafen bringt.

Völlig anders dann Delhi. Ich erinnere mich an die Ankunft letztes Jahr. Tief in der Nacht. Während der Pilot beim Ausrollen der Maschine in offenbaren Anflügen von Irrsinn noch dazu auffordert, bis zum Erlöschen des Zeichens angeschnallt zu bleiben, sind die indischen Reisenden schon fast mit dem Ausräumen der Gepäckfächer fertig. Draußen dann hinter einer Schutzreling ein Spalier von enthusiastischen Hotelchauffeuren.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N52wVyqucHc[/youtube]

Delhi bei Tag ist ein immerwährendes Gewimmel, Prinzip gewordene Überfüllung, hausgemachte Hektik, alles muss ununterbrochen in Bewegung sein. So wie Wärme aus der Bewegung von Molekülen besteht, so besteht Delhi im Durcheinander von Menschen, Verkehrsmitteln und Geräuschen. Die Ächtung der Leere geht sogar so weit, dass kein Inder, nach dem Weg gefragt, eingestehen wird, dass er ihn nicht weiß. In Delhi nach dem Weg zu fragen ist die einfachste Weise, um die Stadt zu Fuß kennenzulernen.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7I2U-7ZMbI[/youtube]

Die Taj Mahal erspare ich mir diesmal. Ein höchst beeindruckendes Gebäude von atemberaubender Schönheit, verpackt jedoch in eine schmierigen Schicht postkolonialen Kitsches und umgeben von einem klebrigen Netz ausgeklügelter Touristenfallen, deren Betreiber skurpellose Meister psychologischer Kriegsführung sind. Wenn ich Beispiele für  Größe suche, dann fallen mir ein: Das Meer. Die Berge. Und die Slums von Indien. Ich weiß nicht, was ich weniger vertrage: den bloßen Anblick der Slums, oder die lächelnde Selbstverständlichkeit, mir der sie hingenommen werden.

So viel zum Tag “Minus Zwei”. An die sprachliche Rückkehr habe ich mich mittlerweile gewöhnt. Auf Tirol freue ich mich. Auf Delhi bin ich höchst gespannt.

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Czech meets Burmese journalism: ready, steady, blog!

In a recent post I have explained the reasons why we decided to set up this mentorship program. Now it is time to tell you something about the planned activities.

Through an application procedure we selected three Czech journalists who will accompany us in India to learn about Burma, the work of Burmese exile media and the living conditions of Burmese refugees, and to share their experiences with their Burmese colleagues. Among the many highly qualified applicants, we chose three who represent TV, radio, and Internet media. All of them have professional experience of working and traveling in Asia.

These journalists would not be journalists if we wouldn’t expect from them some later output about the things they have seen during their trip. But you won’t have to wait until their return if you want to know about what is going on in India. We are excited to announce here that you will be able to follow their steps through Delhi from day to day – even though, I admit, there might be one or another day missing. Continue reading →

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Check out our new campaign video

We have published a new campaign video and you can watch it right here:

Enjoy!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioj2eJQmyjc[/youtube]

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Our special thanks go to Jakub who produced that awesome film! It was certainly not an easy task to pack the Burma Center’s restless activism into 10 minutes brimming with images and information.

As you have noticed, we have decided to combine both Czech and English language into one film, true to our idea of multinational cooperation in the light of international responsibility.

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501(c)(3) – Why not in Europe?

“United in diversity” is the motto of the European Union.

source

In the European Union, considerable efforts have been made in terms of a unified economy, a monetary union and even consumer protection. It seems, however, that the EU has not managed to overcome being a mere representation of national governments. Simply look at the European Parliament’s limited power.

But I want to point out something different now. If you run a charity outside the U.S.A. you probably have more than once encountered the situation that you want to register your NGO on Internet, say, for eBay Giving Works or search sites with a charitable side effect, but the conditions require your charity to be based in the US with a 501(c) status.

Sure, eBay and others cannot be experts on all the world’s national non-profit legislations. Neither do they have the language skills to understand the evidence of charity status of each country.

This, I think to myself, is actually the prime example where we would need something like the European Union. Well, the EU is interested in administering their citizens and facilitating the access of European corporations to the global market. But where the heck is the EU’s support of their NGOs on the global scene?

It would be dead easy for the EU to provide an EU charity certification to go along with that of 501(c). Verification can be done on national level. Does it exist? At least I don’t know about it.

What is worse, the EU even lacks the will to enact a unified system among its member states. When a Czech charity, for instance, asks individuals in the UK for financial support, it cannot offer that donations are tax refundable. Fund-raising remains a deeply national matter and countries even have their national certification systems for transparency, their charity seals and the like. A transnational recognition does, however, work for marriage certificates, for driving licences and for academic titles. So why should it be impossible to implement an EU-wide charity status?

It seems, that systematic support of NGOs is not really a priority of EU policy. I just don’t hope that EU leaders perceive NGOs as their enemies.

In Vielfalt geeint, in Einfalt gefehlt.

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Software for NGOs with an undersized budget

Since over 4 years I am struggling with the contradiction between a Central-East European, absolutely-non-profit budget and the need to work efficiently, to present ourselves as professionally as possible and to keep software security in a good shape. This a particularly tricky job where private contributions to office running costs are even lower than the local bank charges, which you pay both for holding the account and for every incoming money transfer and which are extra high for charities. It probably goes without saying that software and Web administration are increasingly rejected by donors as budget items in projects, which are requested to be tightly goal oriented, understaffed and cost efficient and which are supposed to promote the donor’s brand.

IT work is of a kind that is well done if you don’t see it. I have experienced, however, countless nerve-wracking problems with inaccessible pages and countless breakdowns after updates, and many of them were caused by my stupidity. In fact, if you decide to run your own NGO without the budget for a webmaster, you need to allocate at least ten or twenty hours per week for installation, updating and in-house service, and easily more.

Better safe than sorry. I know. But we cannot afford to have a duplicate web site where we thoroughly test updates in a sand-box before doing “the real thing” on our production site. We simply have to take the risk that, as a worst case scenario, visitors will see for 5 or 10 minutes a horrible error message, while I am returning the system into the state before the unfortunate update.

Taken to the extreme, non-profit means to cope with these and similar flaws all of the time. There is no way out unless you can pay for it.

When I read the manuals and discussion forums of software, both proprietary and free, I quite often come across remarks like: “If you don’t get it working on your cheap provider, simply migrate to a better one”. Or: “Go to your local computer store and upgrade your hardware”. Well, it’s not that easy if you have just spent your last coins for printing 50 leaflets that you desperately need on your next public event. And, after all, yes, you also need some spare money for your lunch tomorrow.

You will have to learn how to operate with moderate means. Don’t expect wonders, but you will survive. You can consider yourself successful when people don’t notice that you do your Web all alone as self-taught volunteer.

Sometimes I stumble upon places where you find recommendations specifically for non-profit users. But still, most of them were written in North America and West or North Europe and they assume that your supporters are able and willing to pay a membership contribution, that technology is affordable with average NGO-incomes, that you have 20 hours per week of free time to fine-tune the code and that companies in your town grew up in a tradition of corporate responsibility. I personally often feel too disillusioned (or should I say: embarrassed?) to reveal that our organization cannot even afford a super cheap 50$ non-profit subscription, let alone the offer from one company in reply to my request: They have decided, they wrote me, to support our good work by offering their software with 50% discount, hence reducing the price to only 200€. With sincere thanks I have had to reject.

So back to the roots. And if you are a bunch of inveterate optimists and don’t want to steal software (even though society often takes your work and “forgets” to pay for it) you have to resort to free software.

I have started here to write down my experiences and try to extract some advices. Hopefully they will help my fellow volunteers out there to avoid the same mistakes and to make their lives easier. Even though we work for free, it doesn’t mean we have time to waste.

Continue reading →

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For a change, engage with the engaged

A quote worth being noted by many Western institutions and governments, not excluding the European Commission:

No government or local or external actor can claim to support genuine democratic change while disengaging from dissidents at best and quietly undermining them at worst.
It is, however, dissidents—monks, civilians, student activists, labor activists, ex-army men, ethnic resistance fighters and so on—who have risked life and limb to keep their uphill battle for real change going against all odds and pressurize the paranoid regime by their mere existence and their refusal to capitulate.
If dissidents didn’t matter why would the regime keep several thousands of these citizens locked up and push thousands more into permanent exile?
Building the capacity of Burma’s so-called civil society and the presence of humanitarian INGOs are valuable and to be welcomed, but neither is a substitute for a political struggle.

Read the full commentary/analysis here: Six Reasons to Welcome US Support for War Crimes Probe

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Learning from students: Czech-Burmese mentorship

“Insufficient resources, a lack of proper identification and a need for further professional training are just a few of the deficiencies that Mizzima and its staff are forced to confront on a regular basis.”

This quote, taken from the article Who knows what the day may bring, describes some of the problems faced by Burmese exile media who have set up headquarters just behind the frontier, yet still inside the danger zone. Since the film Burma VJ has swept through film festivals and reaped an Oscar nomination, the self-sacrificing work of clandestine journalists in Burma has found its due recognition. Few people realize, however, that these undercover correspondents need to have a base in a safer country that enables them to work.

But how safe is a country that is safer than Burma? Even if an organization existed solely on the Internet, how protected could it be?

A heck of a hack

While the Internet was originally designed in such a way as to make it the least vulnerable to military attacks on particular nodes, it still seems to be quite easy to turn off specific critical web servers, for example by hacking the site or, if you cannot get access, by creating an avalanche of fake visitors so that the server will break down or take the site offline for its own protection. This form of attack is comparable easy, since all you need to do is to hijack a huge number of ordinary computers that are insufficiently secured.

Herdict on Burma

Why send the crackers 'round when it's easier to block access to a critical site? This chart compiles user submitted accessibility reports from Burma. Source: Herdict.org

These scenarios have repeatedly occurred to Burmese exile media such as the Irrawaddy, the DVB, and the New Era magazine. If you cannot afford huge servers around the globe, you have to resort to guerrilla tactics by reappearing at a new place whenever a site has been stamped out by brute cyber-force. Attacks like these should make us rethink our conviction that the vast virtual landscapes of the Net constitute a safe place for citizen engagement. Domination on the Web does not only materialize through huge corporations, controlling privacy and infrastructure; it can also mean to target disliked critics. This cyber war is led without faces, by “rogue hackers” hired from the anonymity of the Internet. Cyber hitmen don’t kill their victims. They zero them.

The Internet, however, has hinted a possible solution to us: Similar to the infrastructure, content can also be multiplied and redistributed, and every node is made redundant. If you search the Web, you will find a huge number of blogs and discussion groups about Burma: in English, in Burmese, in Burma’s ethnic languages. Burmese migrants have instinctively established networks as form of resistance, which are too messy to be controlled by a single force.

Of course, the face of journalism is changing when everyone can have his or her own blog and reproduce information with the dynamics of rumors. The ubiquitous availability of media technology requires the formation and adaptation of skills. Remember the dawning of the video cam, when the cheapness of material brought about long screenings of deadly boring films.

Two-way teaching in a mutual mentorship

Expertise online: Don't ask me. Ask Mizzima.

Many projects for developing countries have attracted criticism for following a top-down approach. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we have designed our project from an early stage of planning together with our on-site project partner Burma Centre Delhi. Activists, grassroots workers, and journalists from the exile community have a lot of experience to share, and only they know the situation both inside their country and in their present homelands.

When we plan to transfer expert knowledge to Burmese exile media, we therefore seek to use this opportunity to increase awareness among Czech and Indian journalists. For those who will go to India to exile media it will mean the same thing as for their Burmese counterparts: They will have to learn from their students. It is not an internship, it is a mutual mentorship.

We have selected the mentors from a choice of applicants whose high quality and past engagement made it difficult to reject anyone. I won’t tell you more about them for the moment. Soon enough, they will have their say in their own words.

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Burma Center Prague: ready for the future

We have received the news that our web site has been archived by the Czech National Library. The condition for being accepted in the archive is that the content be considered relevant for preservation.

In the Web Archive’s words:

This website has been chosen by the National Library of the Czech Republic as a quality resource to be preserved for the future and become part of the Czech cultural heritage. It is archived several times a year and its record is included in the Czech National Bibliography and the National Library catalogue.

We are grateful and proud that we are able to contribute our share to the Czech cultural heritage and, aware of our responsibility, will continue to deliver best services drawing from our local support and helping the people of Burma.

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