BOSNIA from F 1
Villanova law Professor Henry H.
Perritt Jr., who is overseeing the
project, said it stemmed from a visit
to the university in January by two
law Professors from the University
of Sarajevo. Perritt instituted Villanova Law School's extensive legal-information site on the World Wide Web (http://www.law.vill.edu/vcilp),
and in showing it to the Bosnian
professors, they all began to wonder
how Internet technology could be
useful in Bosnia, he said.
Perritt then enlisted the help of
several law students, led by Stuart
Ingis, 25, of Moorestown. Together,
they have traveled to Washington
and New York to meet with U.S. and
Bosnian officials to identify contacts in Bosnia, and define the hardware, software and training needs
of judges, lawyers and law students.
"Our mission," said Ingis, "is to
figure out where all the legal Institutions are, and get them connected
to the Internet."
That's a mammoth task, though,
given that so much, of Ihe region's
intrastructure - from telephone
and other utility lines to roads -
was targeted for destruction during
four years of war, and that rival ethnic and religious factions remain
suspicious of each other under a
risky peace accord.
Even some of those who already
use e-mail in the former Yugoslavia
have been reluctant to participate
in online discussions because
"somebody could attack you, not
only verbally, but physically," Eric
Bachman, a Germany-based peace
activist, said in a meeting at Villanova last week with 16 Project Bosnia participants.
In 1992 Bachman, 47, helped found
ZaMir Transnational Net, an e-mail-service for hundreds of peace activists in the Balkans who had no
other means of exchanging uncensored infornuaion about the political Situation across hostile borders.
ZaMir means "for peace" in Serbo-Croatian. Bachman was at Villanova
to advise the Project Bosnia group
on the benefits of - and obstacles
to - their cause.
"I get upset about the hype that I
see here [in the United States]"
about the Internet, Bachman said in
an interview. With only three telephone lines serving some parts of
Bosnia, and just one Internet-linked
host computer, at a university in Sarajevo, "Infrastructure is a very big problem, even before the war began.... This is something we forget
about when thinking of other
areas."
He told the group that, for the
time being, when there is talk of
bringing the Internet to the Public
in Bosnia, "this public we're talking
about right now is elite."
Still, he said, any effort to
improve communications is going to
help in the long run. "A free flow of
Information is necessary for any
growth or the resolution ol conflicts," he said.
Perritt and Ingis will travel to
Bosnia in August to meet government and legal leaders and to assess
how best to steer their effort. They
believe the country's new ninejudge high court could use the Internnet to confer, and that the Internet could be used by monitors in
elections scheduled for September.
Their goal is not to impose American ideas, but to help the Bosnians
restore their own "rule of law", said
Ingis.
The legal System in Bosnia is patterned after the European
"civil law" model, rather than on the
"common law" that forms the basis
of American justice, said Nicholas
D. Mansfield, who heads the
American Bar Association's Central and
East European Law Initiative.
Considering the differences, he
said, "we present as many options as
we can, and not simply spoon-feed
American ways of doing things."
Mansfield's organization - a legal
reform assistance project for former
communist countries - has
taken Project Bosnia under its
wing.
"In all of the peacefull scenarios,
there is a significant contribution
that the Internet can make. ... It's
only if they go back to war and ethnic cleansing that what we do will
be irrelevant;" said Perritt.
Philadelphia Inquirer, 18. Juli 1996