Month of Oktober, 2007

Après un bon petit déjeuner à l’hotel, nous continuons notre voyage vers les temples de Prambanan. Il s’agit d’une collection de temples hindou, dont les plus grandes atteignent une hauteur impressionnante d’environs quinze mètres. Malheureusement, il y avait un tremblement de terre en mars 2006 proche de Yogyakarta. Des milliers de personnes étaient blessés ou morts. Les temples de Prambanan montrent encore aujourd’hui la force de ce tremblement: la plupart des bâtiments sont dommagé et fermé, et nous voyons des efforts de réparation partout.

Sunday Morning: It’s only a short drive to the Borobudur temple. We arrive around 11 o’clock, buy our tickets and hire the services of a wonderful guide. He takes us to the temple and first explains that it was built in the 8th century, by the buddhistic dynasty on java (the name of which i could not remember). Uncountable reliefs surround the lower levels of the temple, depicting stories of the holy books of buddhism.

For days ago, only a few hours after coming back from holidays in Indonesia, my roommate asked me whether I had heard about the conflicts in Burma, especially the fact that internet had been shut down there. “No”, I replied, and silently thought where exactly is Burma?

Since then, I read a lot about the demonstrations against the military regime of this south-east asian state. And that is exactly what I would like to encourage you to do. There have been many discussions about how bloggers should take part in these events. The Idea of an International Bloggers’ Day for Burma was proposed and also critisised. The debate made me think, and I agree that just crying Free Burma! is too simple.

But what can a blog, what can the internet do? Is not its principle function to transmit information? Isn’t it called web due to the fact that we can create hyperlinks to other sources of information? Aren’t blogs the major source of information we have for Burma, in these days where journalists prefer to stay anonym or cannot work at all?

Here, then, is a list of links to the Burma conflict which I have found helpful. Read them critically, but first of all read them, so these violations of human rights will not go unnoticed. And if you have other interesting bits and peaces to add, feel free to write a comment to this article.

• Wikipedia’s entry about Burma and specifically about the recent conflicts
• The dossier about Burma from Spiegel Online (German)
• A list of blogs reporting about Burma from Startupblogger
• Burma at news.ch (German)

Zusammen mit sieben weiteren Austauschstudenten düste ich letzte Wuche im Minivan durch Indonesien. Was wir in dieser eindrucksvollen Woche alles erlebten, berichtet euch dieses Blog. Dieser Artikel erzählt von unserem Abreisetag, dem 22. September 2007. Weitere Artikel in verschiedenen Sprachen werden folgen…