The evening will begin with a drinks reception in the Clubroom followed by a sit down dinner 8.30pm served in the Forum.

The Frontline Fund (formerly the Fixers’ Fund) is an adjunct charity of the Frontline Club which offers emergency financial assistance to local producers and their families in situations of proven distress, such as inprisonment, injury, forced exile, or death.

It was initiated by Jon Lee Anderson in 2007 following the murder of Ajmal Naqshbandi in Afghanistan.

The Fund’s disbursements are intended as a first-stop expression of material solidarity by the Frontline Club and its members on behalf of some of the most invaluable, yet vulnerable, of media workers.

Without the support of local producers, foreign journalists could not operate in the field. They are the unsung heroes of the industry and too often pay the highest price, remaining in the field once the foreign journalists have left.

Join us to support this important cause. Donations to the Frontline Fund can also be made online through the following link: http://www.beta.frontlineclub.com/donate/

On Wednesday 4 November, the Frontline Club marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement – the peace agreement that marked the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – by welcoming a panel of those who helped shape negotiations at the time, and who reported on the three year conflict.

The discussion was moderated by Allan Little who reported on the war for the BBC. Anthony Loyd, foreign correspondent for The Times who reported on the Bosnian war in 1993 and wrote about his experience in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, recently returned to Bosnia for the first time in 20 years and kicked off the discussion.

Describing Bosnia as two countries, Loyd said: “In most of the towns they seemed as depopulated as they had done in the war… Sectarian divisions were more glaring than ever before and had been entrenched by Dayton. It seemed a sad and zombified place.”

Kemal Pervanic survived the atrocities of the Omarska concentration camp and has since dedicated his work to education and reconciliation in Bosnia. He painted a picture of a country whose youth are seeking to heal the wounds of the past and look to the future. “There’s a crop of new people, born towards the end of the war, a small group of people who want to see real change.”

Describing the often tortuous reconciliation process, Pervanic told of a fellow volunteer who had tried to kill him during the war. “We reached a point where he kind of apologised to me,” he said. He also blamed the government for the country’s division, saying: “Politicians are driving a wedge between us and young people.”

Zrinka Bralo was a radio journalist in Sarajevo and came to London in 1993 where she has fought for social justice and refugees’ rights. She described how “consumerism and capitalism [had] moved in and glossed over” many of the country’s issues, particularly the lack of democracy in the Bosnian constitution which reserves the highest political positions, including the Presidency, to three “constituent peoples” – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

Paddy Ashdown served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 2002 until January 2006. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of Dayton in the early years. His outlook for the country’s future was bleak. “The sky is darkening in Bosnia, by the day, by the month and by the year,” he said.

Ashdown was particularly critical of the international community for failing maintain peace and stability in the country. “It takes a long time to wash away the aftermath of conflict. You need strategic patience to see it through and the international community has failed to see it through.”

He described the first ten years after the Dayton agreement as “brilliant” but through neglect, the progress of the country “has been allowed to unravel.”

"The international community is going to do f*ck all for us," @KemalPervanic on Bosnia's problems @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/gZZM92W2Uw

— Harriet Agerholm (@HarrietAgerholm) November 4, 2015

Bralo and Ashdown both spoke of a country returning to a “three mono-ethnic state” – Bosniak, Serb and Croat – in which multi-ethnicity is in “severe danger.” Bralo lamented the fact that Jews and Protestants are blocked from standing for president.

Among the audience questioners was Clive Baldwin, a lawyer for Jakob Finci, a Bosnian Jew who successfully launched an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that Bosnia’s Constitution violates the European Convention on Human Rights. Baldwin pointed out that six years later nothing has been done and the constitution has not been changed. “It’s because Europe has given up on Bosnia,” Ashdown said.

Bralo agreed, saying: “Bosnia wanted to become more like Europe but Europe is becoming more like Bosnia.”

Pervanic, to the agreement of the panel, identified the youth and grassroots level initiatives as the key to the country’s development. Ashdown added: “They need time and need to get rid of generation that ran the war. The people in charge are exactly the same people at Dayton and they use peace for the same purposes of the war. They need to create a state were younger people can break through.”

Your wonderful and kind messages mean so much to us, as has your friendship, council and support over so many years. There is no prize in our trade that we could ever value as much as your belief in us.

– Vaughan and Pranvera Smith

 

Thank you to Stewart Purvis, Richard Gizbert, Tina Carr, Emma Beals, Allan Little, Mani, Stuart Hughes, Richard Sambrook, Jon Snow, Marina Litvinenko, Martin Bell, Tom Fenton, Anthony Loyd, Lyse Doucet, Bill Neely, Lindsey Hilsum, Charles Glass, John G Morris, Salim Amin, Liz Palmer Gary Knight, Jon Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bowen, Matt Frei and Jean-Jacques Gonfier.

Inevitably there are a few slides which won’t mean much without the benefit of Hughes’s words overlaid but he has included several interviews with BBC correspondents discussing the nature of war reporting.

He speaks to Allan Little about eyewitness reporting, discusses the term ‘war correspondent’ with Caroline Hawley and hears Caroline Wyatt’s views on embedding with the military. 

Well worth taking a look…  

On 5 October 2000, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in a people’s revolution that ground to a halt 13 years of conflict. Watching half a million Serbians swarm the streets, the world had high hopes for Belgrade.

But ten years on those hopes remain largely unfulfilled, journalists speaking at last night’s event marking the anniversary of his fall. 

The Frontline Club’s Forum was packed last night for a discussion that focused on the unsettling past and uneasy future of the country one audience member described as having been “spectacularly let down by just about everybody”.

On the panel were Maggie O’Kane (editorial director of GuardianFilms), Steve Crawshaw (now Amnesty International’s international advocacy director), documentary filmmaker Norma Percy and BBC News special correspondent Allan Little. O’Kane, Little and Crawshaw covered the Balkans extensively during and after Milosevic’s rule, and Percy is the producer of The Fall of Milosevic. 

Chair Bill Neely (international editor for ITV News) opened by reading several of the day’s Serbian headlines:  Blic alleged that “Serbia could have done three times as much” and Danas simply proclaimed, “Serbia failed”. Neely also noted that commemorations were more muted this year than they had been even three years ago. So what happened?

Presenting a section from The Fall of Milosevic, Percy spoke of her hope whilst watching the revolution: 

When the main doors of parliament opened and the crowd surged in… for me, that was the moment when Milosevic was finished.

Crawshaw described a similarly uplifting moment at Serbia’s biggest mine, when miners turned to him and said:

He’s finished, we breathe differently now… we are finally living in a free Europe.

On the question of why, when it almost happened so many other times, Milosevic was overthrown then, Little reminded us that it’s not just about people: the old regime needs to give way. Just as the Soviet Union let go, Yugoslavia let go. Yet the optimism that fueled the revolution and was so apparent to Percy and Crawshaw then has faded over ten years in which Serbia has been regionally eclipsed by Croatia and struggled to come to terms with its own past. 

O’Kane, Little and Crawshaw described a sense of denial amongst the Serbs they had met. There was a refusal to engage with the questions of what had happened in Croatia and Bosnia. O’Kane recalled terrified people huddled in shelters, shocked that international community was bombing them yet still somehow blind as to why:

There was a lack of willingness to acknowledge.

These observations drew the strongest reaction from the audience, with some people accusing the media of perpetuating lies about the civil war, and others insisting the people of Serbia had done all they could to acknowledge the past, and simply needed aid now. O’Kane and Little asserted that the parties involved still don’t want to look the past in the face. Guilt, collective responsibility, and genocide – these issues drew an emotional, angry response.

The legacy of Milosevic, perhaps, was with us last night: unsettled, raw, plagued by dissent. A revolution that succeeded on some grounds, but has yet to succeed on others. 

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With crucial post-war elections due in October this year we will be discussing present-day Bosnia and asking what lies ahead: How fragile is the peace established by the Dayton Agreement that ended the 1992-1995 war?

With the 3 October elections and the trial of ex Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, at the Hague, the months ahead are likely to be critical for Bosnia.

Paddy Ashdown, former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina will be in conversation with Kemal Pervanic, founder trustee of Most Mira, who is a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp and author of The Killing Days: My Journey through the Bosnian War, and Allan Little, BBC correspondent in Former Yugoslavia 1991 – 1995.

Kemal Pervanic will also be talking about his return to the area with the Most Mira charity to bring together Serb and Bosnian Muslim young people in the Omarska Prijedor area for annual arts festivals.

 Photocredit: blandm via a creative commons licence 

The veteran BBC correspondent talks to Allan Little about the changes that have taken place in the ways in which wars are reported from the Gulf War to Bosnia, Afghanistan to Rwanda, as well as the changes in Jeremy himself.