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=> Living in a Virtual Nation

Living in a Virtual Nation

Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Wednesday, July 19 2006, 14:50:44 (CEST) from 203.214.59.8 - 203-214-59-8.dyn.iinet.net.au Australia - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

Courtesy of SBS Radio’s latest publication, ‘Speaking My Language - Thirty Years of SBS Radio.’ It was the first week of the ongoing war in Iraq, and the Assyrian Aid Society (Iraq) was begging for help. Wounded, starving and freezing villagers were caught in the middle of the bombing, the fighting, even the looting. The plea went out across the Internet to the society’s branches in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, to the far corners of the world. Within days, David Chibo remembers, the Australian branch collected $35,000. New Zealand came up with another $10,000. The United States, heartland of the Assyrian diaspora, sent $200,000. “At a time when our people needed humanitarian aid, we didn’t have to beg strangers, or wait for them, to help,” he says proudly. “Ultimately, it saved numerous lives, largely because of the medicine, but, also, if the people had food and blankets, they didn’t have to journey out and risk being bombed in the search. So it was preventative medicine, too.” David Chibo at the British Museum standing before an Assyrian stela. If it was preventative medicine for Assyrians in Iraq, it was also a strong dose of feel-good medicine for the native Melburnian and his kind around the world. They are the Assyrians of the diaspora who have become linked to the land of their ancestors like never before – via the Internet. For a people with no country of their own, a people where two in three are believed to be scattered around the world, it was a moment of unity. It was proof that, in the 21st century, the Assyrians at least have, in a sense, a virtual nation. “Coordination along these lines was impossible before the Internet,” Mr Chibo says, relaxing at an Assyrian restaurant nestled amid the Middle Eastern eateries on the main strip of inner-suburban Brunswick. “The Internet has gathered Assyrians dispersed throughout the Western world and the Middle East. “It’s given them a focal point where they can gather together in cyberspace and interact,” he says, “where they can read news of what’s happening in the homeland as well as overseas, where they can exchange ideas, where they can politically challenge each other, where they can grow. The Internet has transformed Assyrian politics and Assyrian society.” To say Mr Chibo is relaxing is to stretch the word to its limit. The burly Telstra engineer’s well-worn blue jeans and casual, long sleeved T-shirt belie an almost feverish intensity when it comes to his people. He leans forward far more than he leans back, and his eyes leap at the listener, much like his words. At age 33, it’s an intensity born of, already, a quarter of a century working out just where he comes from. It was his early school days when he first noticed his skin was a shade darker than his classmates’. Why, he wondered. Who am I? What’s my story? He set out to learn his history – not easy when he couldn’t even find Assyria on a map. What he found was a culture more than 5,000 years old that, at its height, covered parts of nine countries in today’s Middle East. Iraq was the ancestral home, specifically an area called the Assyrian Triangle, along the Tigris River. Most estimates suggest around a million Assyrians still live in Iraq, with possibly two million more spread around the world. The Assyrian language has bound them together, along with their religion – Assyrians were among the first to accept Christianity. “The whole discovery search has allowed me to define myself, to understand where I stand and what I hope for the future,” Mr Chibo says. “It’s a little bit tough to be a minority in Australia and then realise you’re a minority in your ancestral home as well, but it’s forced me to apply myself more.” DAVID YOUKHANA ARIZONA Real Estate-Relocation-Investment Broker / Owner Certified Commercial Sales Specialist Babylon Realty Glendale, Arizona 85310 Click Photo For More Information 602-410-9555 He has applied himself, above all, to giving back to that culture. The year before the war, he spent four months in northern Iraq helping the Australia’s branch of the Aid Society do wide-ranging community work. He is the Australian representative for Internet-based Zinda magazine, the premiere publication in the Assyrian world. He has attended conferences as an Australian community representative in both Iraq and the United States, where Chicago alone has more than 80,000 Assyrians. Mostly, he was putting faces to names, the names from cyberspace. They are the fellow activists from around the globe he converses with late into the night, debating the Assyrian world’s political and social issues on the online forum PalTalk. It’s there that the Assyrian news is dissected piece by piece. “Because of the Internet, it’s SBS Radio’s Assyrian program that is very famous out there, in places like Chicago, in Iraq,” Mr Chibo says. “They have radio programs in Chicago where they take (the SBS) interviews and broadcast them on their own programs, because, with the resources of SBS, they’re actually able to contact people throughout the world. “The volunteer radio programs, they can’t afford to do those interviews,” he says. “And they’re not as professional, min you. So since SBS is putting them on the Internet, and with their permission, there’s a large dissemination of these interviews around the world.” Key Assyrian web sites, like Zinda, link to the program, too. It’s all part of the new flow of information and comment binding the world’s Assyrians. Mr Chibo jokes it is leading to a community starved for knowledge but drowning in information. Then more seriously he talks of a people becoming less parochial, more aware both at home and overseas. He talks of the Internet triggering a renaissance of the Assyrian culture, reviving a 3,000-year-old language from the brink of extinction. He talks of community leaders, be they politicians or priests, knowing they face scrutiny now. He talks of a culture of hiding things, of sweeping them under the rug, is being forced to change, with the community changing in turn. But unlike so many activist movements, none of the change is aimed at achieving an independent state. As Mr Chibo gazes around the empty, spacious restaurant surrounded in a blue-and-gold Middle Eastern décor, he struggles to put into words just what the goal is. “In the long run here,” he says finally. “I think we just want to better our people and our community, as well as provide a rich tapestry for all off Australian society. “What we seek to preserve in our culture, our language,” he says, “is a precious part of the Australian society.” What sets Zinda Magazine apart from any other Assyrian, or for that matter Middle Eastern magazine, is that it allows its staff to apply themselves to investigative and opinionated writing which may or may not agree with the central views of the majority of its readers and often its editor(s). Mr. David Chibo's investigative reporting from Australia has in the past shaken the foundations of the most revered Assyrian political parties, organizations and churches. Likewise, every week Assyrians in Australia are also invited to hear Mr. Wilson Younan's piercing and relative questions on his weekly radio program on SBS Radio (click here). Only through this type of professional and edifying journalism the public is inspired to demand accountability from its civic, political, and religious leaders. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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