The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Poulsen, moderated by Katie Arnold, a freelance journalist who has reported on Myanmar’s political and social development.

Speakers: 

Karen Stokkendal Poulsen is a writer and director with a background in foreign affairs and political science. Her 2014 documentary “The Agreement” was nominated for Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg Film Festival, Best Medium-Length Documentary at the Krakow Film Festival, and the F:ACT Award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. She is currently working on developing a fictional television series based on the film. “On the Inside of a Military Dictatorship” premiered at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in April 2019.

Katie Arnold is a freelance journalist previously based in Yangon, Myanmar where she covered the country’s political and social development. Her main area of specialism is the Rohingya crisis – having produced videos, articles and photography for Al Jazeera English, CNN and the BBC among others. She has also provided live TV commentary to BBC Radio 5, TRT World and France 24.

The Frontline Club will screen a short documentary, made by journalist Shafiur Rahman on the current crisis, followed by a panel discussion on the ongoing atrocities that are afflicting the region.

Shafiur Rahman’s documentary on Rohingya women uses harrowing footage from the border with Myanmar as well as devastating testimony from Rohingya refugees. The panel will further help to decipher whether this is an ethno-religious conflict or something more?

Chair

Professor Penny Green

Professor Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London. Professor Green has published extensively on state crime theory (including her monograph with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption), state violence, Turkish criminal justice and politics, ‘natural’ disasters, transnational crime, mass forced evictions/displacement and resistance to state violence. She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, Palestine/Israel, Tunisia and Myanmar. Professor Green is Founder and Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) – a multi-disciplinary international initiative to collate, analyse and disseminate research-based knowledge about criminal state practices and resistance to them. Professor Green’s most recent projects include a comparative study of civil society resistance to state crime in Turkey, Tunisia, Colombia, PNG, Kenya and Myanmar); Myanmar’s genocide against its Muslim ethnic Rohingya; and forced evictions in Palestine/Israel.

Speakers

Shafiur Rahman 

Shafiur Rahman is an independent documentary maker. His projects highlight issues around human rights, migration and poverty.  Filming in a wide variety of contexts and countries from Bangladesh, Libya, Italy,  South Africa,  Kenya, the US, his work has taken him most recently to the Myanmar/Bangladesh border. He has been documenting  Rohingya refugee stories since 2016

Dr Azeem Ibrahim

Dr Azeem Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He is also author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has previously been appointed an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale University. Over the years, Dr Ibrahim has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development. In his most recent roles, he served as National Security and Defence Policy Advisor to the Leader of the (UK) Labour Party, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, and the Shadow Cabinet from 2012 to 2015, and as Strategic Policy Advisor to the Chairman of Pakistan’s PTI party, Imran Khan. Read his recent interview in New York magazine here.

Dr Thomas MacManus

Thomas MacManus is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the International State Crime Initiative in the Department of Law. Thomas is admitted as an Attorney-at-Law (New York) and Solicitor (Ireland). Thomas is an Editor in Chief of State Crime journal, and Joint Editor of Amicus Journal: Assisting Lawyers for Justice on Death Row. He is also a Director of the Colombia Caravana.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind 

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist who has been working on issues relating to women, population and war for over a decade. She is a Harvard Nieman Fellow 2016, and recently finished a year of research at the university on war, and how we tell stories about modern conflict. She has written about her experiences as a photojournalist for The New York Times, TIME LightBox, Nieman Reports and National Geographic. As a photographic storyteller, her focus has been on long-form narrative reportage for monthly magazines. Anastasia is currently in Bangladesh covering the Rohingya crisis for Human Rights Watch.

L to R: Richard Cockett, Hkanhpa Sadan, Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, Robert Cooper, Paul French

Meanwhile certain regions of Burma are about to learn how to cast a ballot on November 8, ethnic minorities in rural areas are fleeing their homes that are being burnt by the military forces.

On Tuesday September 22, a panel of experts and activists discussed the uncertain future of the country that has been suffering the longest ongoing civil war.

Shortly after Paul French, commentator on Asia chairing the panel, invited the speakers to make their pitch about the current situation, it became clear that opinions about the value of recent reforms value immensely.

Meanwhile general secretary of the Kachin National Council Hkanhpa Sadan and campaigns officer at Burma Campaign UK Wai Hnin Pwint Thon said they can be hardly excited about the election, The Economist correspondent Richard Cockett  and adviser to EU representatives Robert Cooper sustained that the progress has been palpable.

“What western community did was they gave us furniture so far and television, but we still don’t have a roof to live under. They gave us the furniture, because they want the garden,” Mr Sadan outlined the perspective of the Burmese.

Ms Pwint Thon criticised the constitution introduced in 2008, which in her view gives a fake illusion of a legal state. “The aim of the constitutions is to create an appearance of change while still holding on to military power and while giving the military the power to decide on economy and politics of the country,” she said.

Mr Cockett underlined that the reforms should be considered in a relevant context. “You should judge Burma against the standards of the region, not against standards of western democracy or British parliamentary democracy,” he said numbering increasingly oppressive countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia.

According to him, the idea of restoring order in the country is inaccurate. “This country has never experienced order. It’s never experienced peace. Indeed, it’s never experienced an existence as a coherent country at all,” Mr Cockett said referring to the conflict ongoing since 1948.

Mr Cooper reckoned that the upcoming election might become the fairest that the country will have witnessed. “It’s been contested by a large number of parties. It’s got a large number of observers, very large number of local monitors and a large number of international observers there. And it’s not happened before,” he said.

Nevertheless, all the speakers concluded that the way towards genuine democracy, peace with ethnic minorities and complete freedom of expression will be long and bumpy.

Ms Pwint Thon criticised the western “wait and see” approach and Mr Cockett admitted that the economic withdrawal from Myanmar didn’t help the situation either. “It meant that the best practices left the country and they were left with Chinese companies who didn’t care or ever thought about human rights,” he said.

The panel also agreed that the anticipated election might not be that key in the transition. One of the root causes of the conflict is oppression of the country’s minorities.

Mr Sadan underlined that Myanmar has introduced one of the most discriminative religious laws in the world. Ms Pwint Thon added it is not only Muslims, but also women who are not treated equally.

Mr Cockett spoke about a “very poisonous sectarian atmosphere” that he considers one of the real dangers of the election. “It could be a real flashpoint that they exploit all this in the run-up to the election and even after the election. It’ll be extremely explosive in Rakhine state itself where the Rohingya have been entirely disenfrenchised and the buddhist Rakhine nationalists will use this to rally opinion and if the attack Muslims,” he said.

On 8 November, the people of Myanmar will go to the polls in an election that is being seen as a step towards full democracy after nearly half a century of military rule.

Myanmar has seen reforms come into effect since 2010, when military rule was replaced by a military-backed civilian government, but how far have these reforms gone and what more needs to be done?

One of the largest and once one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia, what impact have successive military regimes had on Myanmar?

With a panel of experts we will explore what life is like in Myanmar, the political and ethical divisions, and what change the election will bring.

Chaired by Paul French, an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international bestseller Midnight in Peking.

The panel:

Hkanhpa Sadan is general secretary of the Kachin National Council, Kachin National Organisation. He is one of the founding members of the exile Kachin political movement based in the UK with branches across Europe, the US and Asia.

Dr Richard Cockett is editor and correspondent at The Economist. He is the author of several books, including Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African state and Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma.

Robert Cooper worked for ten years for the European Union High Representative, Javier Solana and later Catherine Ashton. From 2012 he served a further year as a special adviser on Myanmar. He served as a diplomat from 1970 to 2002, his posts included Tokyo, Brussels, Bonn, head of the policy planning staff and Asia director.

Wai Hnin Pwint Thon is a campaigns officer at Burma Campaign UK. She is the daughter of Mya Aye, one of the leaders of the 88-generation Students Group. Born in Rangoon – because of her father’s activities she faced harassment and discrimination and left the country in 2006 to continue her studies.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Photo: Htoo Tay Zar. Aung San Suu Kyi greeting supporters from Bago State in 2011.

By Nicole Hunt

The day after the Bahrain Grand Prix, 21 Bahraini activists, including hunger striker Abdulhadi al Khawaja, are due in court in Manama on Monday to hear the outcome of their appeal against life sentences handed down in June 2011 for conspiring to overthrow the government during last year’s protests. The decision to schedule the hearing after the Grand Prix was a controversial one, as al Khawaja’s deteriorating health two months into his hunger strike raised the very real possibility that he could die before the race took place. UK supporters said al Khawaja’s death would be a ‘stain on Bahrain’.

Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is set to take up her seat in the Pyithu Hluttaw (House of Representatives), following a landslide victory by her National League for Democracy in 1 April by-elections, though there have been suggestions that NLD MPs will boycott the opening over an oath of allegiance that forces them to swear to safeguard the constitution. Suu Kyi’s parliamentary debut comes amid news that she may travel to the UK and Norway in June, where she would be able to see her grandchildren for the first time and finally pick up her Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1991.

The late Malawian President Bingu wu Mutharika, who died of a heart attack on 5 April, is laid to rest at his family farm in Thyolo. There is speculation that close ally Robert Mugabe and Sudanese President Omar al Bashir could be among attendees at the state funeral; Malawi came under fire from the International Criminal Court last year when it failed to arrest Bashir during a visit to the country for a regional summit. Bashir is wanted by the court for alleged war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region.

All eyes stateside on Tuesday as a pre-trial hearing begins at Fort Meade, Maryland, for Private First Class Bradley Manning, who has been charged with a variety of offences, including aiding Al Qaeda, for his alleged role in leaking sensitive military material to WikiLeaks, among which was a video which later became WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder film.

In New York, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is due to give the keynote speech at the Time 100 Gala Dinner, being held in honour of those named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People list on 18 April. In addition to Clinton and President Barack Obama, this year’s list also included the likes of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and, of course, Kate and Pippa Middleton.

And, just for good measure, Republican primaries also take place in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut, though now that everyone is agreed that Mitt Romney will win everything, it’s a less exciting race.

Why will journalists be fighting for a place at the Scottish Parliament’s Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee meeting on Wednesday? Because US property tycoon Donald Trump – who at one point pictured himself being the focus of those Republican primaries – is scheduled to appear to give evidence on government plans to build an offshore windfarm near his £1bn golf resort. In written evidence submitted ahead of his appearance, Trump said the plan would destroy Scotland’s countryside and coastline, and was tantamount to ‘committing financial suicide’ – a jibe that would have stung even more after the controversial Skintland issue of the Economist.

Charles Taylor’s nine-year war crimes case comes to a head on Thursday as the Special Court for Sierra Leone announces its verdict. While media coverage in the summer of 2010 suggested that perhaps Taylor was on trial for giving Naomi Campbell a diamond or two, the former Liberian President has actually been tried for crimes against humanity, violations of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law – including, of course, allegedly giving Sierra Leonean rebels arms in exchange for so-called ‘blood diamonds’.

In a less groundbreaking trial – though one that receives headlines whether models are involved or not (and they frequently seem to be) – former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi returns to court in Milan on Friday to face charges of paying for underage sex. While the trial is now over a year old and coverage has been relegated to the Italian press for some time, recent hearings have reignited international interest as the lurid details of Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ parties have been disclosed.

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton begins a three day trip to Myanmar on Saturday, where she is scheduled to meet with government officials and opposition members (including Aung San Suu Kyi) and is expected to open the EU’s new embassy in Yangon. Her visit follows a meeting on Monday of EU foreign ministers, during which they are expected to relax sanctions on Myanmar in the wake of recent political improvements.

Guinea-Bissau had been scheduled to hold its presidential run-off vote on Sunday, following first round polls on 18 March, but as front-runner Carlos Gomes Junior was arrested as part of a military coup d’état on 12-13 April, the election will not be going ahead. The military junta has announced a two-year timeframe for new elections, which has been agreed by opposition parties but not Gomes’ ruling party.

Sunday also marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Los Angeles riots, which left 53 people dead and over 2,000 in three days of violence following the acquittal, by an all-white jury, of four police officers who were videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King. The anniversary comes amid heightened racial tensions in the US following the delayed arrest of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

When the trouble started I was in Bangkok. With colleagues from both the Thai and international press, I read the wires and watched the television screens with mounting apprehension. Few of us doubted where it would lead, if protesters continued to demonstrate on the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay and other Burmese cities. The regime does not brook dissent, and never has. Even so, there were flickers of hope.

Everything turned on whether the army rank-and-file would open fire on Burma’s clergy. On September 20th an astonishing thing happened. A group of monks was allowed to proceed to the gates of 54 University Avenue close by Rangoon’s Inya Lake–the compound where Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is held under house arrest.

‘The Lady’ made a brief appearance, stepping out of her dilapidated colonial villa, tears bathing her iconic features. Were the generals about to restore her liberty at last?

It was a false dawn. The barbed-wire coils in University Avenue were  back in place, soon reinforced by machine gun emplacements. Senior General Than Shwe, known to fly into a rage at the mere mention of Suu Kyi’s name, had not relented. Whichever  officer  was in charge at University Avenue had maybe allowed himself to be persuaded by the monks, only to have his initiative quickly reversed.

There have been other reports of soldiers, especially in Mandalay, refusing orders. But the bulk of the Tatmadaw (Burmese armed forces) remained loyal to the SPDC, and carried out its dirty work during the following week. From the flashes they wore, it was clear that units hardened by decades of fierce fighting against querulous ethnic insurgents, particularly Karens and Karennis, had poured into Rangoon.

The trouble started back in August. On the 15th the regime enforced a previously unflagged hike in fuel prices, reckoned by some at 100 percent, by others at 500 percent. On the 19th small civilian protests started. By the end of the month some younger monks were joining in. The tipping point came on September 5th, when shots were fired over the heads of a body of monks in a township outside Mandalay. A handful of monks were also severely beaten. The Sangha (Order of Monks) took umbrage as a whole. Soon thousands of monks were participating in large-scale daily marches between the Shwedagon and Sule pagodas in Yangon. These processions attracted crowds of civilians.

For a while, aware that the outside world was watching through a variety of covert means, and perhaps cautioned by China, the regime showed uncharacteristic restraint. Only toward the end of September did government violence begin in earnest.

Inevitably comparisons have been made between this latest manifestation of Burmese discontent and the ‘people’s uprising’ of 1988, when several thousand were massacred, and Aung San Suu Kyi rose to prominence as the figurehead of the National League for Democracy (NLD).

Two striking differences in 2007 have been the mass involvement of monks, and the much smaller civilian turnouts. The latter is explained perhaps by the very memory of 1988. The Burmese know better than anyone what the Tatmadaw is capable of, and this must have been a deterrent.

Emphasis has also been put on the enhanced degree of media monitoring. The mobile phone, with or without a photographic component, and also use of the internet, kept newsgatherers in Thailand and elsewhere informed in a way that was literally impossible 20 years ago.

News was then fed back into Myanmar via the BBC, VOA and DVB (the Norwegian-based Democratic Voice of Burma)–‘external destructionists’, in regimespeak.

Far more so than in August 1988, this latest unrest was spontaneous. A group calling itself the 88 Generation Students were the prime movers. The NLD — generally hobbled since Suu Kyi was last detained in May 2003 — appears to have played a lesser part.

What lies ahead now is anyone’s guess. There has been talk of a general strike.
But the regime has acted promptly to detain potential leaders. My guess is that Burmese dissidents, made finally aware that non-violent opposition cannot work against determined and well-armed brute force, will increasingly turn to their own acts of force — sabotage, bombings and assassinations.

Western sanctions have failed. The way forward may be to induce change through greater economic engagement, and establishing multiple contacts at the mid and lower levels within Burmese society, even, if need be, through increased tourism.

This approach appears to be working, albeit slowly, in China and Vietnam — two other countries with poor human rights records.

At  Frontline, we should particularly mourn the loss of APF’s Kenji Nagai, the journeyman Japanese photojournalist killed in Rangoon. It is in the heat of the moment that some in our profession are unlucky enough to become heroes.

An updated paperback of Justin Wintle’s biography of Aung San Suu Kyi –Perfect Hostage (published by Hutchinson in April) will be released by Arrow early next year.

Highly-principled and believing in Buddhist pacifism, Aung San Suu Kyi rejected violence. In 1990, two years after the students were crushed, her party overwhelmingly won legislative elections. To no avail: the military reinforced their power. “The triumph of failure?” Wintle asks. “What needs to be acknowledged and continuously applauded, is Aung San Suu Kyi’s phenomenal ability to inspire others, not just in Burma, where her presence has underpinned the democracy movement since August, 1988, but around the world. Without her kind, we are all impoverished.” More than a political story, this is the human saga of two families, one Burmese and one British, who joined only to be torn apart by politics.

Aung San Suu Kyi was two when her father, Burmese independence hero General Aung San, was assassinated in 1947. She grew up in Burma and in India. At Oxford, she fell in love with and married the British Tibetologist Michael Aris. They had two children, Kim and Alexander. In 1988, she returned to Rangoon to nurse her dying mother. Students rose up and blood flowed in the streets. Her duty as Aung San’s daughter propelled her to stay and become politically active. Aris brought up the boys on his own, and the vindictive military never permitted him to see her. In 2000 he was on his deathbed with prostate cancer, and Aung San Suu Kyi made the heartbreaking decision to stay in Burma rather than risk permanent exile. On his 53rd birthday, Aris died without saying goodbye to the wife he adored. This human dimension gives Aung San Suu Kyi’s story added poignancy. Wintle was unable to communicate with his subject. But he has captured what are her essentials well – her courage and fidelity to truth.

At Suu and Aris’s wedding, someone recited  Kipling’s Mandalay: “I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay…” Aris loved those words, which perfectly described his Suu. Against all odds, she is still struggling to make Burma a better place. It is tragic that Aris will not be there when it happens.

Reviewer:  Jon Swain is senior foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.