A civil past and a political future?

COURTESY PHOTO
Pánek has traveled to an estimated 55 countries, including war-torn Afghanistan, where People in Need continues operations.



NGO chief mulls a move into government work, but sticks with global relief for now

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 17th, 2008 issue

MICHAEL HEITMANN/The Prague Post
After years on the road, Pánek plays an increasingly managerial role at People in Need.
The Pánek File


Age: 40
Birthplace: Prague
Family: Partner, daughter
Estimated number of countries visited: 55
Web site: www.peopleinneed.cz



Days after returning from a covert visit to a cyclone-stricken delta in south Burma, Šimon Pánek sits in his Prague office, awkwardly sipping coffee from a pint glass. His forehead is stamped with bruises, and a thick cast envelopes most of his right arm. “I fell from the attic,” he explains hastily, pre-empting wild conjectures about life-and-death scenarios in inundated villages and hostile encounters with the country’s repressive military junta. The quick confession marks a scarce moment during the 90-minute interview when Pánek voluntarily talks about himself. At 40, Pánek possesses the clout of a future president. His life is starred with all the distinctions of local greatness: a student leader during the Velvet Revolution, adviser to former President Václav Havel and the first Czech to receive the European of the Year award in 2003.


But, for Pánek, all these personal achievements take a back seat to his real drive: managing the global humanitarian efforts of the nongovernmental organization People in Need, where he has worked, on and off, since 1988. That year, a handful of local students, including Pánek, decided to organize a relief mission for an area in the Soviet south Caucasus (today’s Armenia) that had been devastated by an earthquake. By then, the perestroika had loosened the iron fist of the Czechoslovak communist regime, so obtaining permission for the project proved relatively simple. “First, we went to the Soviet Embassy. They told us that if we put together a relief package, they would send a plane,” Pánek recalls. “At the time, that was enough of a mandate to get started.”The team’s next steps led to the Kotva department store to negotiate storage space, then on to Czech Television, where they announced a public collection. In the end, the group amassed about 50 tons of sleeping bags, clothes and other donations, which were transported to the afflicted region by plane and train. Though regarded as the embryo of People in Need, the Armenia project was followed by a two-year hiatus, as certain political developments at home compelled Pánek and his friends to put humanitarian efforts on hold.As one of the organizers of the Stuha student movement, Pánek played an active role in the events leading up to the Velvet Revolution. It is therefore paradoxical that during the fateful Nov. 17, 1989, demonstration that launched the final cannonball at the crumbling regime, he was out of town. “I’d just returned from abroad and needed to make some money, so I was working,” he says. “To be honest, I never imagined that things were going to escalate so quickly — I had attended five protests before that, so I didn’t feel like I would be missing anything by not going to this particular one.” In retrospect, Pánek seems less irked by his absence at the Nov. 17 protest than his inability to link contemporaneous events abroad — particularly the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uprisings in Poland, Hungary and Romania. “We were preparing for years of dissent, which proves just how naive we were,” he says. “We completely failed to read the world trends.”A noble nicheUnlike the fall from the attic, two decades of leapfrogging to some of the earth’s most imperiled places have not left any physical scars. Pánek’s spirited speech, magnetic eyes and amiable smile are the same as that of the impassioned biology student whose infectious ideals and organizational ability earned him an election to the post-revolutionary National Assembly — an involuntary post from which he instantly abdicated. “I was 21 and a half,” he shrugs. “I felt energized by our newfound freedoms, and I wanted to travel.” Pánek would never complete his studies at Charles University. In 1992, he received a phone call from his mentor Jaromír Štětina, then a Russia correspondent for daily Lidové noviny. Now an independent senator, Štětina is described by Pánek as the “founding father” of People in Need. “I met Šimon Pánek more than 20 years ago, back when he was a skinny high-school student,” he says. “He came to see me and said he wanted to travel.” When ethnic violence erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh — a breakaway region in Azerbaijan — in December 1991, Štětina was dispatched to cover the conflict. “It was my first time in a war zone. It seemed the world had thrown this small, predominantly Armenian enclave overboard. People were dying and medicine was missing,” he says. “When I came back to Prague, I called Šimon and said, ‘We have to do something.’ ”After organizing a relief mission to the Karabakh, the group collaborated with Lidové noviny to establish a permanent foundation that would later evolve into People in Need. In the beginning, many of the students in charge of the fledgling organization regarded it as a temporary project. “We all had completely different career plans,” Pánek says. “Most of us thought we would return to our studies in one or three years. That never happened.” Instead of pursuing degrees in medicine, biology or philosophy, Pánek and his peers discovered a vital social service slighted by decades of communism. “It was an untapped niche in our society,” Pánek says. “The places that needed aid were many, and we felt there was a need to build up the civil sector.”Totalitarian legacyAs Štetina remarked, People in Need today is no longer that club of students collecting loose change from sympathizing locals. With operations in 41 countries focusing on emergency relief, humanitarian and developmental aid and human rights promotion, the NGO has matured into “an internationally respected organization the Czech Republic can be proud of,” Štetina says.After years of taking aid to global crisis zones — including wartorn Bosnia and Chechnya — Pánek’s ballooning managerial role now compels him to spend more time in the office. “It’s the tax we pay for expansion,” he says. “Instead of spending 50 percent of my time in the terrain in Africa or Afghanistan the way it was five or 10 years ago, I’m simply the director of a relatively large NGO.”He therefore regards his latest incognito “control visit” to the Irawaddi Delta in south Burma — whose stilted villages were deluged when May’s Cyclone Nargis ruptured a nearby dam — as “a bit of a reward.” “If you don’t waste too much time respecting the pointless laws of the illegitimate regime and get right to it by administering aid to the people who need it most, a lot can be done with relatively small resources from the Czech Republic to help tens of thousands of people in the most obscure and afflicted regions of the delta,” he says. Before Nargis hit, People in Need’s main objective in Burma was to advance human rights. Through long-term cooperation with exiled communities, the organization provides systematic aid to politically persecuted individuals in regions like Burma, Belarus, the Middle East and Cuba.Pánek regards these activities — which range from smuggling soap and computers to Cuban dissidents to arranging local internships for young Burmese journalists — as People in Need’s legacy. For an NGO sprouted in post-communist Czechoslovakia, fostering human rights in today’s totalitarian states is a moral obligation, he says.He recalls the international efforts behind the Charter 77, a 1977 human rights document that galvanized a wave of local dissent. “The people supporting the charter abroad could have also said, ‘what do we care about Czechoslovakia,’ ” Pánek says. “Back [in 1977], it seemed like complete naivety, and it would take another 12 years before the change came.”It is this communist experience that fortifies People in Need’s links to the persecuted inhabitants of remote totalitarian states. “Usually, we find common ground very quickly,” Pánek says. “The nuances are different for us than they are for someone from Britain. Our own experience allows us to orient faster in political systems that are based on lies.”What the world needs Listening to Pánek ponder solutions for global quagmires like the “quasi-communist” government of North Korea, poverty in sub-Saharan Africa or Russia’s recent aggression in Georgia evokes the visionary musings of Havel, another reluctant leader.After the post-Cold War breakdown of a bipolar global dynamic, the relatively staid 1990s depleted Europe of politicians with strong, principled visions, he says. “The world ceased being confrontational, and politicians morphed into administrators. In this emptied European world, there is Václav Havel, and maybe [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair. Perplexity and self-consciousness rack Central Europe. But maybe, new leaders will appear as tensions rise, because there will be more at stake.”While today’s petty, partisan political scene is not yet ripe enough for him, Pánek does not rule out the possibility of stepping up to the plate in future decades. “Of course, I consider it from time to time,” he says, and alludes to his former colleague and predecessor Tomáš Pojar, now deputy foreign affairs minister. “Although it’s not as common as in America, it is possible to cross over from the civil sector into politics.”“Never say never.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com