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Youth Organisation Kicked Out of its Premises
The Alter Art youth organization from Travnik faced total shut-down of its activities, after it got notice from the Travnik Municipal Cultural Centre to leave the premises of the Internet Club in 10 days time. The Internet Club is the only source of financing for Alter Art`s activities.
Alter Art says that they regularly paid the rent and other costs for the use of the Internet Club and managed, without the support by the Cultural Centre – in fact, in spite of pressure and obstacles presented by the Centre - to organize over 50 cultural events per year.
The first attempts to pressure Alert Art came in February 2007, when the Centre prohibited the use of its big hall for the concert of Croatian Bank LET3, which, Alert Art says, was just a test to see how they would react in crisis situations.
After that, the Centre moved to unilateral changes in the valid 10-year lease agreement, demanding that a new, one-year agreement is signed, with an ultimatum that the failure to sign within the short deadline they provided would mean that Alter Art doesn`t want to use the facilities any more.
-We didn`t have the funds to hire a lawyer, and we were forced to sign the new agreement, Alter Art says, commenting that new pressures followed when the Centre refused to extend the lease agreement and offered the organisation to use the former bowling hall in the basement, requiring huge investments in adaptation and reconstruction works, instead of the Internet Club.
Alter art, showing extreme good will, accepted that offer and prepared the necessary project documentation, secured donors` approval to redirect the funding to reconstruct the bowling hall, and filed the request with the municipal urban planning authorities to get approval for the start of works.
-To this day, more than 100 days after we filed our request, we have not received anything from the Municipal Bureau of Urban Planning and Construction, be it positive or negative decision. Not even our meeting with Mayor Tahir Lendo helped, says Alter Art.
-We will continue to fight for a long-term solution for the problem of use of facilities at the Cultural Centre and we will also fight to remove Emir Malicevic from the position of its Director. We don`t even think of leaving the premises we use now, comments the Alert Art web-site.
For additional information on the case, the chronology of pressure and the list of projects threatened by this decision, as well as the possibility to offer and provide assistance to Alert Art, visit their website at www.alterart.ba.
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