Za Mir NET - Peace, Human Rights Activists and Journalists

Peace, Human Rights Activists and Journalists

This network connected and provided training and technical support to more than 1700 peace, human rights and humanitarian workers and independent journalists from all the countries in war, including dozens of local and international NGOs that used this communication channel to assist in the search for the missing persons and tracing relatives stuck in war zones, plan joint peace-building projects, political campaigns and send out independent news reports and access more than 150 regional and international news conferences.

Two international volunteers, Kathryn Turnipseed and Cecilia Hansen, under a project name “Electronic Witches”, created the first ZTN training manual for women-users ensuring that gender specific barriers to use of ICT would be overcome in the trainings they delivered to hundreds of women activists throughout Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As the intense war period in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia passed, the telephone lines and direct Internet access became more viable, ZTN did not manage to achieve its goal of adjusting its system to more advanced technology, due to lack of resources and weariness of the core groups of volunteers who kept it going during the difficult war years.

Several web-based networking and media outlets have in the meantime emerged in the post-Yugoslav region—such as Ljudmila, Kontrapunkt, out of which ZaMirNET in Zagreb has built on—in terms of values, activist networks and human resources of ZTN.