What makes a smart, curious young woman from the UK, Germany or Tunis leave her life behind to join the most brutal terrorist regime of the twenty first century? Where is the line between victim and collaborator and how do we judge these young women who have been both victims and perpetrators of harm?

Moaveni, who has covered instability and violence in the Middle East as a journalist for two decades, will talk about what drove her to cover this challenging, complex and controversial story, and the closeness she felt to its places, characters. What do the stories of these ISIS recruits reveal about the portrayal and identity of muslim women in the west?  And is this problem called terrorism far more complex, political, and relatable than we generally admit,?

Moderated by journalist Razia Iqbal.

Speakers:

Azadeh Moaveni is the author of Lipstick Jihad, and the co- author, with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. She has lived and reported throughout the Middle East, and speaks both Farsi and Arabic fluently. As one of the few American correspondents allowed to work continuously in Iran since 1999, she has reported widely on youth culture, women’s rights, and Islamic reform for Time, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, and the Los Angeles Times. She lives with her husband and son in London. 

Razia Iqbal is a BBC News journalist and special correspondent, reporting for outlets across the BBC. From 2011 Iqbal has presented Newshour on the BBC World Service. She has also presented Talking Books on the BBC News Channel. She was previously the corporation’s arts correspondent. She has also worked as a political reporter, and as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Press cards are an essential part of a professional journalist’s kit. They provide proof of a journalist’s legitimacy and credibility, enabling access to essential news stories and events. They also play a key safety role. Carrying a press card can prevent detention or arrest and alleviate suspicion over a journalist’s presence at an event, location or situation. They can make it safer to negotiate difficult checkpoints and can help protect a journalist’s equipment from confiscation. Without a press card, journalists can be exposed to greater risk, especially in critical situations.

But for many freelance journalists, press cards are difficult to obtain.

Freelancers who are not a member of a national union, who work internationally and who are not based in the country of their nationality can often struggle to obtain press cards, especially those who work for multiple clients. The Frontline Club Press Card will ensure that these freelance journalists are better able to secure professional accreditation.

The cards are currently available to registrants of the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR), a representative body for freelance journalists created and run by freelancers. 

All FFR registrants are professional and active journalists who abide by a recognised industry code of conduct. By doing so, they support an increasingly important but vulnerable international reporting community.

Freelancers who are not members of FFR can register their interest at:  presscards@www.beta.frontlineclub.com

In FFR’s soon to be published survey, The State of Freelancing in 2019, 60% of respondents from 70 countries confirmed that press cards are vital to their safety while working. The many comments related to press cards and safety from respondents include:

• “Security forces in Mexico repeatedly ask for press cards and it helps our safety if we have them, since they are one of the main aggressors against journalists.”
• “I am a journalist who has been working in Syria for over a year. Because of the existence of large groups with different ideologies there must be a card explaining to all of them that I am a journalist and neutral”
• “Authorities in the parts of the world where I work generally dislike journalists, but they at least understand the nature of our work. A press card is extremely necessary.”“I work in a country in which it is illegal to operate as a journalist without press accreditation and it is often necessary to show one’s press card. Journalists who are denied a press card are liable to be arrested”
• “Tense checkpoints and authorities have demanded press cards before and backed off when they were provided.”
• “A press card is helpful, particularly in tense protest/riot situations but it’s hard (and sometimes expensive) to have an up to date accreditation. No outlet I work for is willing to issue one to a freelancer.”
• “Without a press card it would be impossible to obtain the necessary permissions to work safely in a hostile environment like Iraq or Syria. More than that, it makes foreign reporters recognizable by security forces.”
• “Police, authorities, government officials and non-state actors always want to see some official documentation to identify me when I’m photographing events/people and showing them a press card lends legitimacy to why I am at a certain place at a certain time.”

Frontline Club Press Cards will only be issued to verified professional journalists. They are not part of the UK Press Authority scheme.

For further information please visit the Freelancer Hub at the Global Media Freedom Conference, Printworks, London SE16 7PJ on 10th and 11th July or contact Vaughan Smith, Founder, CEO & Trust Executive Director: vaughan.smith@www.beta.frontlineclub.com.

Endorsements

Under the Wire tells the story of US war correspondent Marie Colvin’s last assignment, and photographer Paul Conroy’s incredible escape of the besieged city of Homs. Despite knowing the dangers, Marie made it her mission to enter Syria, with the motive of telling the world of the ‘slaughter’ its citizens are subject to at the hands of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. As quoted by Lindsey last night, Marie said; ‘it’s what we do’.

Paul Conroy with Marie Colvin

Representatives from the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), an NGO dealing with international Human Rights issues also attended the evening. CJA is the organisation currently representing the Colvin family in Colvin V. Syrian Arab Republic, working to bring to account the members of the regime responsible for the targeted assassination of Marie. Scott Gilmore, Staff Attorney at CJA, was asked about what the case aims to achieve. Scott stated that this could cost the Syrian regime millions; enough to have an effect. Since Assad’s money is his power, as pointed out by Gilmore, suing the regime and seizing some of the president’s assets could make a real difference.

Under the Wire is being released this weekend and will be available to watch at home on Sky and iTunes, with other providers including Amazon instant video coming soon. The film is also being screened in cinemas across the country starting this Saturday in Glasgow.

A number of Marie’s relatives, friends, and colleagues attended the evening, including her sister Cat who spoke on the panel, her niece Justine, Lady Wellsely, Sunday Times editor John Witherow, friend Lyse Doucet and many more. The Club would like to thank everyone who joined us for such a historical event. We wish the Colvin family and CJA the best in their case for justice for Marie.

Watch the full video here

On Tuesday 1st November, in an event organised in partnership with the London Press Club and Index on Censorship, six journalists met at the Frontline Club to redefine Foreign Correspondence.

“Where once we were seen as neutral observers, now we are targets” said Caroline Lees, author of Index’s recent article ‘Under The Wires’. Backed up by a deterioration in journalistic safety and evidence supplied by Assad defectors, it is clear that journalists are now firmly in the military’s crosshairs.

Freelance photojournalist Paul Conroy attributed this to the rise of the use of truth “as a weapon of war”. Kim Sengupta, Defence Correspondent at The Independent noted that the use of kidnapping and public beheading by rebel groups has led to “a huge tranche of Northern Syria not being covered”.

However, this tactic of limiting press freedom through violence is not limited to terrorist organisations.

Conroy is in a court case against the Assad regime after documents smuggled out of Syria proved that he and his colleague Marie Colvin were a victim of an assassination operation. These documents state that “international journalists were to be treated the same as combatants”.

The rise of untrained freelance journalists in the field worsens the problem. Freelancer Samira Shackle mentioned that she had come across numerous “horror stories” of young journalists arriving in hostile zones without even basic precautions. She cited the dangers of young reporters travelling without insurance or basic cyber security.

The problem is exacerbated by the increased role of ‘fixers’. As local employees who offer on the ground support to the international press, these freelancers run many of the same risks as Western journalists but with little of the support. They also must cope with increased hostilities and accusations of being a spy or traitor.

They are also often left out in the cold when it comes to kidnap or imprisonment.

Caroline Lees mentioned the case of Jovo Martinović, the Montenegrin investigative journalist arrested whilst researching a gun running story. Despite the dubious charges, the French station he was working for has done little to help him.

Dr Haider Al Safi formerly of The Independent, said that in many cases, these employees were being exploited: “They are overworked, not getting paid well and also not introduced to their rights”.

There was consensus on how the journalistic world could respond. This included major organisations taking more care in training all it’s employees. Some attempts have been made towards this end.

However, Lees mentioned sources from news organisations who said they didn’t support fixers because it was “too complicated, too expensive and they don’t want to accept liability”. With statements like this it is clear a sea change across journalism is a long way off.

Denis Delestrac‘s ‘Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping’, screened at the Frontline Club on 18 October, seeks to shed light on the 60,000 container vessels supplying goods to seven million people around the world; the ‘blood flow’ of the global economy. In the Q&A after the screening, Delestac revealed how the film originally came about by ‘pulling the thread’, trying to find out where his clothes, and the objects around him, came from. The scope quickly expanded, however: ‘What’s the real story behind this industry?’ the film’s narrator asked, ‘what’s its impact on the environment? And how does it influence our lives?’

The fact that most of our consumer goods come from container shipping aside, the influence this industry has on our lives is significant, if not immediately apparent. The shipping industry makes up a significant chunk of the global economy, with an annual turnover in excess of $500bn. Delestrac’s film describes some of the largest companies that make up the industry as ’empires’, and ‘omnipotent’. One such company, the Danish conglomerate Maersk, employs over 90,000 people in 130 countries. In addition to container shipping, Maersk is also in the oil industry, and operates ports across the world. Yet the owners of such ’empires’ prefer to ‘avoid the spotlight’.

‘Most of them are privately owned, most of them are family businesses,’ Rose George said, ‘we are dependent on a very private, in both senses, industry’. The flag on many ships can be used to a ‘wrap a veil of secrecy’ around a shipowner and their business, allowing them to ‘vanish from the legal frame of his country of origin’. Whilst certain areas of the sea are under the jurisdiction of coastal states, whether within their territorial waters, or an Exclusive Economic Zone, no state exercises law over the high seas. So, when sailing the high seas, a ship is subject to the laws of its flag country. This leaves the door wide open for less than scrupulous shipowners, eager to circumvent taxation, regulations, or minimum wage laws, to register their vessels in countries with little regulation. These ‘flags of convenience’ see scores of ships registered in Panama, Liberia, and even the landlocked Mongolia.

On average, according to the film, one shipping accident occurs every three days. Whether this leads to lost containers scattered across the seabed or an oil spill, the environmental impact of shipping is considerable. Accidents aside, massive amounts of pollution are generated from burning dirty fuels every day. ‘Shipping has a carbon footprint equivalent to a country like Germany…’ the narrator explained. Shipowners have had little incentive to make their vessels more environmentally friendly, said Alastair Pettigrew (an interviewee from the film, who joined Delestrac on stage for the Q&A). With each vessel having an economic life time of up to 30 years, significant change in the industry will take sometime. The film gravely asks, ‘Can the planet wait 30 years?’

Vulliamy spoke with Néstor Osorio Londoño, Colombia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom and Charlotte Gill, the director of the Caravana charity which promotes and protects human rights in the country. The audience all had the same question in mind – why did 50.2% of voters choose to reject the offer of peace?

In a war that has killed 250,000 and displaced more than 6 million, Gill thinks that “victims’ voices were lost” as the peace deal was debated in the build up to the referendum. Colombia’s largest cities largely rejected the deal offered by the government.

“It’s not just putting down your gun, it is looking at the systemic reasons why that violence occurs, why impunity exists for that violence, and really tackling those.” For the victims peace means truth, justice and guarantees of no repetition. “It’s not necessarily about retribution,” Gill said.

Londoño is optimistic that the negotiations have opened the doors to peace, and to an understanding of the conflict.

“One of the biggest revelations of this process has been to witness the personalities of the Farc leaders and for them to discover the personalities of our negotiators. They are very articulate, intelligent people that have been genuinely fighting for a cause but with the wrong methods. I think that this [peace] process has allowed them to become closer to society.”

Yet, Londoño is the first to admit the process had its flaws, as – he reminds us in the wake of the British vote on the EU – referendums do. “Many of the people who vote No just vote against the government, and wake up thinking ‘Oh my goodness, I voted No but I didn’t know we were going to win’,” he said, “It’s like the Brexit feeling.”

Gill agrees, “If you feel totally isolated, vulnerable and attacked by the state then engaging in a process that’s driven by the state may not be something you want to be part of.” She believes this could also explain the extremely low turnout of 38% – along with complacency as polls pointed to support for the peace treaty. With Hurricane Matthew tearing through the country on the same day people may have been reluctant to go out and vote.

Nor did all people understand the terms of the vote. They were given very little warning, Gill said. Especially in such a polarised and dispersed society, six weeks was not enough time to reach the people.

“People were not sufficiently educated and informed about what was going on,” Londoño agrees. He wonders how many people read the 297-page peace accord, and accepts the government should have done more: “If you are thinking about consulting your people you have to educate, inform. This vote wasn’t very well informed. It was a reactive passion.”

Yet, Londoño does not regret putting the decision to the public, when it could have easily been passed through Congress with a majority. “It is important to give the people the last word on a matter of crucial importance to the country,” he said. After all, “peace belongs to the country and to the people of Colombia.”

The result must not lead to another dragging peace negotiation, Londoño insists. Nor can it be solved through minor changes. “There must be real and concrete modifications to political participation and justice,” he said.

The audience sat in stunned silence. Roman Borisovich continued, “there is an army of UK bankers, accountants, lawyers, trustees, and other professionals assisting Russian corruption.”

Facilitating such dubious financial transactions should be ‘socially unacceptable behaviour,’ he argued, ‘just like child pornography.’

September 14th marked the Frontline Club’s inaugural Kleptoscope; the first in a new series of events investigating corruption and dirty money in London.

“Klepto as in kleptocracy,” award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough explained, “scope as in looking at it under a microscope”. Their aim, he elaborated, was not just looking at those ‘stealing money from their budgets’, but also the ways in which that dirty money is laundered and then spent. Kleptoscope’s debut event certainly delivered on this promise.

Anti-corruption campaigner and ex-banker Roman Borisovich shared a former insider’s perspective. The UK, he argued, is the “single largest enabler of money laundering and corruption in the world.”

That dirty money, Chido Dunn of Global Witness claimed, is stashed in a ‘secret bank’. This bank, she said, is one without branches and employees, but which takes dirty money and cleans it: the London property market.

“If you were a corrupt politician and you wanted to buy a luxury property using stolen money,” Dunn asked, “how would you go about it?

Her explanation made it seem simple.

Imagine you’re a corrupt minister with the power to sell oil rights, Dunn urged. Using an anonymous company you’ve registered in the British Virgin Islands (‘Shady Incorporated’), you sell those rights to yourself at a fraction of their market value, and then sell them on for their full worth. With no trace left behind, you pocket the ‘profit’. But, Dunn asked, how do you clean that dirty money?

“Property is an excellent way to launder money,” she said, “you can drop a large amount at one time with very few questions asked and the value of that asset will steadily increase.”

‘Very few’ might even be an exaggeration. A excerpt ‘From Russia With Cash‘ screened at the event showed several London estate agents caught on camera blithely nodding along with Borisovich, who played the role of a corrupt oil minister, much to the entertainment of Kleptoscope’s audience.

But whilst the hapless estate agents’ actions were certainly laughable, the impacts of corruption clearly are not.

“Corruption threatens our economy and makes our country less safe’ explained Dunn. In Russia, Borisovich said with an air of resignation, corruption “has caused irreparable damage to the nation”

But, where does the money go from here? Describing the links between individuals associated with bribery, corruption, and violence in Ukraine and Azerbaijan and back-bench MPs in the UK, Bullough asked whether it is being used to buy influence and access. He couldn’t be certain that these links were crooked, he cautioned, “but it looks bad, it looks concerning.”

“By focussing the scope on these things” he reiterated, “hopefully we can push for greater and greater transparency so when the sunlight is shone on these deals we can say actually it was fine […] we need to know, this is a democracy.”

Mahboba, age 7, stands against a bullet-ridden wall waiting to be seen at a health clinic suffering from has a disfiguring skin disease called Leishmaniasis which is a parasitical bacterial infection transmitted from tiny sand fleas.

Interviewed by her friend and fellow reporter, the Sunday Times‘ roving foreign affairs correspondent Christina Lamb, Bronstein provided the audience an insight into daily life in Afghanistan. Spanning the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the country her photos showed was harrowing; a baby suffering from severe malnutrition, women widowed by war, heroin addicts huddled around a mass of burning clothes.

’A lot of these stories are hard, none of them are easy, none of them,’ Bronstein shared, ‘but they’re stories I feel it’s very important to tell.’

But underneath the worsening terror of war, life in Afghanistan goes on. People get married, they celebrate Afghan new year, children play football; conflict has become part of daily life. ‘Kids are gonna be kids (…),’ Bronstein said, ‘they’re not going to stop practising cricket on a Friday afternoon’. Her photographs and words share this side of the country too. Her work is deeply human, capturing incredibly expressive faces, from the tortured loss of a mother watching her child die, to the toothless joy of an old man atop a hill overlooking Kabul.

Bronstein’s work in Afghanistan captures a country living at both extremes. When she first arrived in the country in 2001, the walls ‘were all bullet ridden’. But ‘the mountains are gorgeous, the landscape is exquisite,’ she remarked, ‘and so are the people’.

Her work focuses strongly on the experiences of women living in a still deeply conservative Afghanistan. As a female photographer she has been able to get much closer to their stories than her male counterparts, in many cases behind the burqa. All of the women’s stories she has documented, Bronstein said, has been about ‘getting access, getting inside of the home’. But, she noted that her work was still limited by the question of ‘what will the man allow me to do?’

Afghan women in burqas walk in front of the Darulaman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan on February 3, 2002 on a breezy winter day. The palace lies in ruins, it once was the materpiece of Kabul built by King Amanullah.

But despite the more joyful moments captured in her work, both Bronstein and Lamb seemed despondent about Afghanistan’s future. With the Taliban resurgent, ISIS gaining a foothold, and a crumbling political process, they saw little to have hope in. Sharing the stories of colleagues and friends she had lost in recent years, Bronstein painted a picture of a country gripped by insecurity. And, as Christina Lamb pointed out, ‘The second biggest group of refugees after Syrians are Afghans – they’re not leaving the country because things are good in Afghanistan.’