2010

No water, no light, no fuel, no food, no money - or ‘How to run a university in Zimbabwe’.

“History can be well written only in a free country,” French writer Voltaire famously remarked in a letter to Frederick the Great in 1737.

“We have very consciously shied away from any risk of writing a celebratory kind of new ‘European’ history,” Katherine Isaacs says.

“When I met this guy from East Sarajevo and we could not understand each other’s jokes, I realised how much we are growing apart,” says Naida Mandic, a young Bosniak video journalist, about her meeting with a young Serb.

“Our role is to fill the gaps in knowledge, know-how and publishing when it comes to media related issues,” says Tarik Jusic, programme director at the Mediacentar in Sarajevo.

“Our family home was only a few kilometres from one of the border check-points where some of the armed clashes occurred,” reveals Sabina Mihelj, a media researcher who recently participated in a transnational project on the Yugoslavian war.

Russia and Norway have shared a border for centuries, but the differences between the two countries are vast. The relationship is now being explored by historians on both sides.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, for representing and fighting for the rights of the indigenous people of war-torn Guatemala. However, this decision was later to be questioned, especially by the American anthropologist David Stoll.

In 1989, as civil war raged throughout southern Sudan, the Senate of Juba University arrived at a controversial decision. In a few short weeks, staff and students abandoned their campus in Juba and travelled 1,600 kilometres north to Khartoum, the capital of an increasingly divided country. “We arrived to find some tents and basic shelters that had been built for us,” recalls Samuel Lewa, a staff member. “Like so many southerners, we were displaced persons.”

“To see this makes my heart happy,” says Emma Bello, as she discovers the new borehole in the Malawian village of Katchakhwala.

“In Zimbabwe, everybody is a dancer,” says Simbarashe Norman Fulukia.

“NOMA is not only a cooperation initiative, it also gives us tremendous development prospects,” says Professor Mohammed Tamim of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

“This has been the most inspiring task we have ever taken on,” says Grete Helle Rasmussen with a smile.