When we drew up the concept for a new OSCE Magazine more than four years ago, I don’t recall any of us in Press and Public Information dwelling on how we could expand our coverage of “youth” — an amorphous term which the language buffs among us carefully avoided.
Thanks to serendipity and a bit of sleuthing, it wasn’t long before we discovered that stories about the older and younger members of “Generation Y” would provide rich fodder for many issues of the Magazine.
The cover story of the maiden number in March 2004 –– a retrospective on the six-year term of the first OSCE media freedom “watch dog” Freimut Duve –– would not have been complete had we not interviewed some of the 20 young people from Belgrade, Pristina, Podgorica, Sarajevo and Skopje who came to Vienna to surprise Mr. Duve with a hero’s send-off.
Between 15 and 21 years old, they had formed the core team of Mr. Duve’s brilliant brainchild: the “mobile.culture.container”, a travelling multimedia venue that wound its way through conflict-ridden towns and cities in south-eastern Europe. For more than three years, hundreds of young people flocked to a cornucopia of workshops and events, forgetting their ethnic backgrounds and losing themselves in intellectual thought and creativity.
“We had to do something for the younger generation in the Balkans, which had gone through what I had to go through as a young person in war-torn Hamburg,” Mr. Duve said, describing the eureka moment that hatched the reconciliation scheme.
An equally moving story fell into our laps for the following issue of May 2004 –– a first-person account by lawyer Carolyn McCool about the making of a Canadian documentary film spotlighting her work as Head of Democratization in the OSCE Mission in Kosovo.
It turned out that the film was just as much about Kate, her 20-year-old daughter, who had come to stay with her for six months in Pristina. Before she knew it, Kate found herself making Albanian and Serb friends and filming a video diary of Kosovo’s first central election, parts of which were edited into “Kosovo: Fragile Peace”.
Hardly a year into its existence, the Magazine was displaying a clear knack for getting up close and personal: The December 2004 issue focused on 16-year-old Malikha Soltiboldiyeva, who was about to graduate from an Uzbek-language high school in Sairam, a village in south Kazakhstan. To boost her chances of being admitted to one of the country’s universities, Malikha, with iron discipline, was studying Kazakh and Russian after school every day.
The excellent article and photographs by Igor Savin, Director of the NGO Dialog, made an effective case for multilingual education as advocated by the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities.
In the March 2005 issue, the Magazine got its second year off to a flying start with a contribution from world-class journalist Christopher S. Wren, a former New York Times bureau chief in Moscow. It didn’t take much persuading him to share his experience of giving journalism master classes for junior reporters all across Kazakhstan. Mr. Wren has a soft spot for the OSCE: He covered the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975.
As Kazakhstan prepares to take the helm of the OSCE in 2010, I sometimes wonder what ever became of the 350 young journalists, many as young as 18, who went through one of the 25 OSCE-sponsored master classes. What role might they play in reporting on the Kazakh Chairmanship?
Perhaps the most gratifying Magazine spread came in June 2005 in the wake of Kyrgyzstan’s dramatic “Tulip Revolution”. Not content with carrying the more “official” articles by the Slovenian Chairmanship and the Secretariat’s Conflict Prevention Centre, we also featured the sober reflections of ten candidates for the first master’s programme in political science at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek.
The personal essays by students from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ireland and the Russian Federation were so finely crafted and analytical that they fully deserved more pages than the Magazine could offer.
For the April 2006 issue, Ambassador Ivar Vikki, Head of the Centre in Astana from 2004 to early 2008, asked us to read the touching letters of “Samal of Semyonovka”, who desperately wanted to beautify the world around her. A 16-year-old girl from a village near the former Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan’s north-east, Samal became an ardent environmentalist after joining an OSCE-sponsored ecological summer camp.
There were more life-changing episodes in the December 2007 issue, which devoted a big splash to the OSCE’s first Junior Professional Officers. These three men and three women in their twenties from Albania, Azerbaijan, Greece, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Portugal described how their hopes and ambitions had been fuelled by their special assignments in Baku, Podgorica, Tbilisi, and Pec and Pristina in Kosovo.
The 20 issues of the Magazine from the past four-and-a-half years make two things patently obvious. Firstly, the rich narratives about the new “Helsinki Generation” are a mere trickle of the many stories out there, waiting to be told. And secondly, youth is definitely not wasted on the young.
http://www.osce.org/item/31555.html
