The Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights at Colby College has announced its preliminary fall program, starting with an address by Didier Kamundu Batundi, the second Oak Fellow. All events are free of charge and open to the public.

Kamundu Batundi will give an address on Thursday, September 16, at Colby College. The 7 p.m. lecture will be in the Robins Room on the second floor of Roberts Building. A reception will follow. His talk will be in French and interpreted into English. Kamundu Batundi, 29, received the 1998 Reebok Human Rights Award for founding and running a human rights organization in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that promotes peace and protects human rights across ethnic lines. He and his organization have secured medical care for torture victims, confronted an angry mob to save a busload of ethnic Tutsis from violence, documented rights abuses by the national army and local militias, and petitioned for the release of political prisoners.

At 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 23, Emmanuel Dongala-Boundzeki, a writer from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, will read from his fiction and present "An African View of Human Rights." The presentation will be in the Pugh Center, Cotter Union, and is co-sponsored by Colby's Amnesty International group and the Oak Institute for Human Rights.

At 7 p.m. on Monday, October 18, Carolyn Nordstrom of the University of Notre Dam'es Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and department of anthropology will present "War, Peace and a Dog Called Remember" in the Pugh Center, Cotter Union. A reception will follow. Nordstrom has worked in several war zones, including Sri Lanka, Mozambique and Angola, studying local-level impacts of global militarization and civilians' experiences of and attempts to mediate terror-warfare. She also served as a 1994 United Nations Elections Observer in Mozambique's first post-war election.

The one-semester Oak Human Rights fellowship was established to allow a front-line human-rights worker to take a sabbatical for research, writing and teaching as a scholar-in-residence at Colby. In addition to the fellowship, the institute supports human rights programs on campus and scholarships for international students at Colby.

Note: As of 9/10/99 Kamundu Batundi's lecture has been postponed until further notice.