L-r: Philippe Sands, Julian Borger, Adam LeBor, Milan Dinić & Kemal Pervanic. Photo by Tolly Robinson.

On Wednesday 9 March, the Guardian‘s world affairs editor Julian Borger was joined by a panel of experts to discuss the search for Balkan war criminals as detailed in his new book, The Butcher’s Trail – How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt. 

The Butcher’s Trail is a factual account of the pursuit and capture of former Yugoslav war criminals under the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) which, according to chair Adam LeBor, an author and journalist, “reads like a thriller.”

Borger said that he wrote the book because “it struck me that this [capturing the criminals and bringing them to justice] was finally an extraordinary achievement and there was lots that hadn’t been told.”

However, he admitted that when it came to researching the book he found it difficult to encourage people to comment: “I got used to a great amount of rejection.”

Milan Dinić, a Serbian journalist who has worked in the region for a decade and assisted Borger in producing the book, said it offered “a very good revelation of what actually happened, in the sense that it provides an insight about the people.”

Typically brilliant & engaging event this evening @frontlineclub with @julianborger @KemalPervanic @adamlebor @MilanDinic1 & @philippesands

— Steven J Fowler (@stevenjfowler) March 9, 2016

Philippe Sands, a lawyer at Matrix chambers and a Professor of International Law at UCL, praised Borger’s “fascinating book” and said it raised interesting questions about the reasoning behind the creation of a dedicated war crimes tribunal.

Sands asked: “What was the point of creating a Yugoslav war crimes tribunal? Was it a place to tell stories, was it a place to write history books, was it a place to do justice, was it something different? Was it all of the above?”

He told the audience the tribunal was: “A creature of a political settlement that was part of a response to a feeling of guilt and inadequacy… and as part of the mechanism for delivering a political solution.”

Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, spoke about the impact of the tribunal for him personally: “The tribunal, in a way, has enabled me to go back… my work [as a human rights activist, peace builder and filmmaker] is possible because of the tribunal.”

However, Pervanic added that today Bosnia is “not doing well.”

He put this down to the fact that: “The international community has instigated a system that keeps criminals in power in perpetuity.”

Dinić furthered this in saying that the war itself had four sides, with the fourth being the “international community, which played a high role.”

LeBor asked the panellists to expand on the “role of individuals” in bringing the war criminals to trial.

Borger said: “The role of individuals was key… They acted as mavericks, all of them.”

Sands took the opportunity to makes links with current events and injustices. Speaking about the process of bringing about justice, and the two-pronged strategy of prevention and the prosecution of perpetrators, he said: “Why is this not happening in relation to what’s going on in Syria?”

He warned that justice was a long process: “Memories are very long, and the idea that in just 20 years you can bring to an end the kind of conditions that have given rise to the horrors we know about, I think is an illusion. Justice is a sticking plaster.”

Sands went on to say: “What Julian has done is explain to us the mechanics of delivering a justice system. The question that we now have to ask ourselves is what was the point of it all?”

Bringing the discussion to an end, Pervanic reflected on his personal experience and his hope for justice in Bosnia: “For a lot of people justice means so many different things, because for most of them it’s a very personal thing. We need to rise above personal feelings to see this.”

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras following the preview of their new film, The Great European Disaster Movie

“We are in an aeroplane, and we don’t know who is driving the aeroplane. We are in a storm and we don’t know what is happening to us…”. This was the idea that Annalisa Piras wanted to entertain in her new film, The Great European Disaster Movie, which previewed at the Frontline Club on Friday 23 January.

The film combines a fictional narrative, set in a dystopian future without a European Union, with interviews and analysis to demonstrate how both the political and financial union is gradually pulling itself apart. The film will be aired across Europe by eight different broadcasters, a feat Piras described as her “impossible challenge”.

Bill Emmott

Whilst the film was first and foremost an analytical exploration of the current problems that Europe faces, Piras said she felt that something more was needed to engage audiences in the subject.

“The attempt was to experiment a little bit with fiction, with graphics, with other elements in trying to make very complex issues such as the European Union crisis available possibly to a wider public than the one normally interested in reading The Economist or the Financial Times,” she said.

At the heart of the film was an attempt to understand why the European project was slowly falling apart, both economically and politically. Bill Emmott, the film’s executive producer, described it as two different battles: one fought in the head and one fought in the heart.

“The difficulty for the European Union is that so much of what it’s done is stopping you self harming, stopping you subsidise your steel or stopping you have trade barriers… So there’s too much ‘no’ in Europe, and what really the opportunity needs to be is the ‘yes’,” said Emmott.

The film was well received by the audience, with particular praise for the way value was placed on social and identity issues in Europe, rather than exclusively on economic problems.

However, a number of those present questioned the film’s strong pro-European stance. One audience member commented:

“It was ideologically and intellectually highly loaded. You have a number of prominent journalists, intellectuals… all very explicit and putting the case very clearly. And against that you have a very narrow-minded councillor from Margate who is scared of foreigners.”

Annalisa Piras

“We thought if we went into trying to give both sides of the arguments for all these very complex issues we wouldn’t have survived. We would have died in the process,” Piras responded.

“What interested me was to make a provocation… To make it entertaining, to make it scary, to push people to think about this scenario. The tragedy about the current debate is that this [apocalyptic] scenario is never evoked”. In doing this, Piras hoped the film would make viewers consider the potential unintended consequences if the European Union were to dissolve.

The discussion also focused on how much of an impact a partial dismantlement of the Eurozone would have on the economy as a whole. Some commented that a Greek exit would allow both Greece and the rest of Europe to flourish, whilst others predicted economic disaster.

“I think that opportunity and hope really need to be at the heart of what the argument has to be,” said Emmott. “That an open Europe, a Europe that’s connected, that a Europe that’s cooperative has provided, and will in the future provide, opportunities and hope for the people. That’s the argument from the heart surely.”

There was also criticism of the argument that a Europe without the European Union would slide back into war. One member of the audience described this idea as “the old bogeyman” of Europe. However, Piras was confident that this argument had a legitimate place in the film.

“I think that Ukraine is proving that, the fragile peace in the Balkans is proving that. We wanted to finish with the Balkans because we thought that remembering that only twenty years ago people were actually massacring each other on the borders of Europe… They remember the blood and they see Europe as a solution to not going back to the past,” she said.

Asked why the film did not feature comment on the current threat that Russia poses to Europe, Piras commented that she wanted the film to be an introspective analysis on Europe, without too much focus on external developments.

“The film at the end wanted to concentrate more on us, the Europeans, what we think we should do about what we have built in the last 60 years… The attempt was to make a very provocative, intense and strong film about who we are now in Europe, we Europeans, and what we want to do in the future.”

Follow Annalisa Piras and Bill Emmott on Twitter for updates on future screenings of The Great European Disaster Movie.

Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras

On Monday 27 January a large audience gathered at the Frontline Club for a screening of Mark Cousins’ contemplative essay-film Here Be Dragons, followed by a Q&A with the director, via Skype, and with producer Don Boyd, founder of HiBROW.

Producer Don Boyd

Here be Dragons assumes the form of an intimate travelogue, tracking the director’s week-long stay in Albania as a jury member of Tirana’s 13th international film festival. Cousins explores Albania’s current cinematic culture, notably the plight of the national film archives, which sit in a state of disrepair, whilst reflecting on wider questions of trauma, history and memory in the context of post-communist Albania. Here Be Dragons interweaves shots of Tirana, namely the Pyramid of Enver Hoxha and other architectural remnants of the former totalitarian regime, with old film clips – emphasising Cousins’ sentiment that “to look is to travel”.

An audience member opened the post-screening discussion by noting the sense of “sadness” and “greyness” that, in his opinion, pervaded the film, and asked Cousins whether this was representative of present-day Albania.

Cousins responded that his aim was to document the “emotional landscape” of the nation and to capture the “balance between happy and sadness which you find in many places”.

“If you spend time in Albania, you do find that it is a kind of post-traumatic world. . . . It has had so many dreams thrust upon it, and so many of those dreams ended up to be empty dreams. And so people aren’t sure what to believe.”

He concluded that while the overall melody of Here Be Dragons was one of sadness, “there is a hopeful tune there, especially amongst the young people”. Cousins later pointed out that compared to all the Albanian films produced in the last five years, which he had watched in his capacity as a jury member of the Tirana International Film Festival, Here Be Dragons remained less bleak.

Boyd then paid tribute to the “phenomenal knowledge of the cinema” in which Cousins’ rooted his work, adding that the director balanced his filmic enthusiasm with “his considerable intellect . . . which is so rare in modern cinema”.

Director Mark Cousins joins the Q&A via Skype

Another member of the audience, who had travelled to Albania on numerous occasions, asked whether dealing with a little-known subject matter involved a greater responsibility on the part of the filmmaker, as film plays a crucial role in the shaping of a nation’s identity. Cousins echoed this sentiment with his statement that “film legacy is a kind of autobiography of a nation”. The audience member also enquired as to the reaction that the film provoked in Albania, in particular from viewers outside of the creative community.

Cousins responded that Here Be Dragons had inspired an extremely positive reaction from Albanian viewers, with one critic naming it “the best film ever made by a foreigner about Albania”. Boyd confirmed the film’s positive reception, and stated that he found the Albanian people to be “sensationally not bleak . . . and really positive about what they call their ‘experiment’ to do with the future, and they felt that Mark’s film was a metaphor for what had gone before”.

A member of the audience asked Cousins to comment on the level of engagement of young Albanians with their national history, and their relationship to Albania’s past and future. Cousins responded:

“Most people [in Albania], young and old, realise that they have a toxic history. But one of the reasons why I think that I felt strongly that I wanted to make this film, was that I realised that every country has a toxic history. . . . England, Ireland and Scotland all have toxic histories. Right down the road from me there are big, fancy houses built from the slave trade . . . so I think there is a sense of solidarity in common humanity.”

Cousins concluded from his ‘study of looking’ that, with regard to the future, young Albanians had “a degree of optimism, but a massive amount of caution, and that’s what I tried to capture in the film”.

Cousins closed the discussion with an impassioned response to an audience member’s suggestion that the film expressed a certain sympathy for Hoxha’s communist dictatorship:

“I absolutely believe in equality, I absolutely believe that . . . the idea of serfdom . . . is one of the biggest crimes in history. Anything that tried to redress that, started out good. However, I ended up furious with Hoxha before I went there. . . . He poisoned this principle which is so important for emancipation and equality around the world.”

To find out more about the current plight of the Albanian Film Archive, and the work of activists to restore it, visit the site of the Albanian Cinema Project.
To watch the trailer for Here Be Dragons, and to keep up to date on upcoming filmic collaborations between Mark Cousins and Don Boyd, visit the website of HiBROW, and click here to follow the film on Facebook.

“Only superhumans could be as good as them.” On Monday 8 July, the Frontline Club screened SMASH & GRAB: The Story of the Pink Panthers. With unprecedented access to the most successful diamond thieves in history, director Havana Marking took viewers on a candid journey into the minds of the Pink Panthers.

“What was in it for them?” This was one of the first questions from the audience, who wanted to know why such a secretive group – still on the run from Interpol – agreed to be interviewed.

Marking explained:

“In terms of why they did it I think each person had a different reason. Ego definitely played a part. Being the best at anything, you want recognition for that. … What I realised from Mike and Leila is that these are huge parts of their lives that they aren’t able to talk about. And actually, sitting down for two days talking to someone completely focused on them is in fact incredibly cathartic.”

Following on, the audience asked if there were any direct consequences because of the film.

“I don’t think so,” replied Marking. “You realise that actually, people know who everyone is anyway. It’s whether you’ve got the evidence to do them for it, whether you can actually prove that they did it via fingerprint or whatever you need for court. So I don’t think I know any more than Interpol knows.”

The film set the context of the Pink Panthers’ formation in the chaos of the Yugoslav Wars. An audience member asked if there was a direct correlation.

“Maybe they would have done it anyway, and it’s a convenient excuse,” responded Marking. “But there’s no doubt that sanctions at that time had a huge effect. People love sanctions because it’s a non-violent response to something, but in the long run it’s very interesting to see the effects they have, and are probably having all over the world. In Serbia and Montenegro, just the geography meant the sanctions were catastrophic on the economy.”

The Pink Panthers’ network is integral to the monetising of their stolen goods. An audience member asked if diamonds are stolen to order, or if there is an open market.

“Before you do a robbery you know who is going to buy it.” According to Marking, “Anyone, really, can do a smash and grab. It’s not difficult. You just need to be incredibly.. you need to be like that [the Pink Panthers]. What’s really difficult is what you do with diamonds worth 50 grand. How do you sell it in a market which is supposed to be very controlled? That’s where the Panther network is genius, and that’s why they’ve survived so long. Because they’ve got those networks and those networks have been developed since the conflict era.”

In the audience was the Croatian actor and musician Tomislav Benzon, who played the Pinker Panther member Mike for the animation scenes. He shared an anecdote about happening to return from Dubai at the same time as the Wafi City robbery:

“They questioned me at Heathrow for 8 hours … they kept my passport for two weeks. I thought this was to do with immigration, but when I saw the film, I realised they were probably following me for two weeks. I was an innocent musician, not a Pink Panther, which I later on became involved with!”

Saw ace doc @SmashandGrabDoc at @frontlineclub earlier about 'The Pink Panthers' – the world's best diamond thieves. Great director Q&A too.

— Gavin May (@gavinmay) July 8, 2013

A final question from an audience member asked, “Did you think you’d be romanticising them, what were you moral feelings about that?”

In Marking’s experience: “That has been more of an issue in other countries, the Brits don’t seem to mind that so much! I think a Hollywood heist film, a Hollywood diamond thief film romanticises completely. The George Clooney, Oceans Eleven type thief. And then in documentary you seem under incredible pressure just to make them out as complete demons and you have to have the moral high ground.”

In conclusion Marking further elaborated:

“What I wanted to do was to get to the truth, which was really down the middle. That crime can pay, that it is quite exciting, there is action and adrenaline in these things; but I hope by the end you realise that a) they’re damaged people and b) it’s not just a disconnected group who aren’t hurting anyone, which is how they sell themselves. Actually, they’re connected to much deeper and darker forces. They’re connected to the whole diamond trade, which is connected to blood diamonds, they’re connected to smuggling routes and the people who do the smuggling, they’re also connected to sex trafficking and cocaine smuggling. It’s dark, and I hope that comes through by the end.”

(c) Roast Beef Productions

In the words of Pink Panther member Mike:

“There’s no panic when you do the job, the panic begins when you run. … This is the consequence of this job, paranoia.”

Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers was produced by Roast Beef Productions. Like their Facebook page to find out more about upcoming screenings.

The Pink Panthers are the world’s most successful jewel thieves. For Smash & Grab – The Story of the Pink Panthers, director Havana Marking (Afghan Star 2009) gains access to the group and interviews five of them. They talk openly about sealed-tight safes, robberies that took years of preparation and constant physical transformations. As the interviewed Pink Panthers are still on the run, Marking makes clever use of animation.

Those who have followed the uncompromising criminal careers of the Pink Panthers, like journalist Milena Miletic, also appear in the documentary. Chief Inspector Yan Glassey of the Swiss Central Brigade explains: “It’s like a game, they know we are hunting them.”

Beneath the glitz and excitement of the stings, lies the dark truths of the illicit diamond trade and the war-shattered ruins of the Balkan states. As the thieves blatantly commit their crimes across the world – Europe, Asia and the UEA – Interpol and global police forces are tightening their grip.

Directed by Havana Marking
Duration: 90′
Year: 2012

For 25 years photo agency Panos Pictures has been covering stories the mainstream media won’t. The commercial arm of the development NGO the Panos Institute (now Panos London) has had photographers documenting history as it unfolds, with a focus on social and development stories globally.

“We like to poke around in corners other people don’t go,” said Adrian Evans, Director of Panos Pictures.

“Photography is the idea of ‘don’t look over there, look over here’, and we’re not afraid to take a stand. 

 

“We step aside from the main news and can pursue stories when they are not under the media spotlight. We cover stories we think are important.”

“In media terms, there is this attitude that once the UN goes in, everything finishes. I think staying longer in a place and covering the aftermath [is important].

 

"After the war in Kosovo there was an orgy of violence.”

“It shows the passing of time, and how things are not being resolved in a quick way,” Testa explained. 

 

“In Kosovo everything has moved on, but for these mothers they are frozen. For the soldiers who killed [the missing] it only took a second, for the mothers, time has stopped.”

 

“With ideas of oil companies being corrupt and evil, to see it as a health remedy… well, a photograph can make you reassess your views.”

 

“Photographers are like little NGOs themselves, they have to be able to write proposals and go out there,” he said, adding that many photographers now look to displaying their work in galleries for a fee. 

“Nowadays it’s not just about the photographs. It’s about who you’re working with and why. 

 

“We communicate to the world our interest, our passions, our desires. I’d like to think Panos does this.”

It was a full house at the Frontline Club, the audience gathering to mark two decades since the ill-fated weekend in April 1992 when first shots were fired in Bosnia. The worst carnage in Europe since World War II was about to unfold. Over 100,000 people were killed, out of whom about 11,000 in Sarajevo, which was under siege from Serbian forces for almost four years.

Ed Vulliamy, writer for the Guardian and Observer, was on the ground from the start.

By July 1992 the Bosnian Serbs “unleashed a hurricane of violence” across the land, burning Muslim and Croat villages and towns to a cinder.

Vulliamy, together with Penny Marshall of ITN, was first to discover concentration camps in the far north-west of Bosnia – Omarska and Trnopolje – into which thousands of non-Serbs were gathered like cattle. Many were killed, countless tortured and raped. Survivors were deported.

Vulliamy‘s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning charts this discovery. What is even more illuminating is that he has kept in touch with many of the people he met two decades ago, who are now scattered all over the globe trying to come to terms of what has happened to them.

It is an insight into what life is like for the survivors now, long since the attention of the world’s media shifted elsewhere.

Vulliamy writes about the Bosnian war’s aftermath, revealing the human consequences as well as the traumas, joys and challenges of exile or homecoming.

His message is that only through the eyes and memories of the survivors and the bereaved – and, in different ways, the perpetrators – we can really understand the bloody catastrophe in Bosnia.

Vulliamy was keen to stress that he does not see the Bosnian war as “civil war,” as it signifies a “perpertratorless war” where all parties are as “bad as each other.”

He also offered a damning assessment of the (lack of) involvement of Western countries,in particular the UK, which he believes should have protected the persecuted, mainly Muslim and Croat population.

“It is a typical British thing, to side with the local bully. Because, after all, that is stability old boy!”

“We found concentration camps, we saw people being slaughtered and deported. We saw the mass rapes, the sexualisation of war, the shelling of civilian towns. This went on for three years before we got to Srebrenica. And somehow, this was OK, while the repulsive political and diplomatic class contrived yet another pointless peace plan.”

“This is not a prescription for Iraq, but in 1995 NATO basically sacked the UN and they bombed some Serbian forces, damaging basically a couple of chairs and a garden shed, and Karadzic and Mladic caved in immediately."

“I am convinced, and I am not the only one, that had NATO conducted moderate air strikes earlier things would have been different.”

When asked about the aftermath of war and what the ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia – in Hague achieved, Vulliamy called it “an act of ambition and contrition.”

“It is also a great big tax free bonanza for some international community types. But, some really great people work there and prosecute there.”

What was on most people’s minds was the question of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s present and future.

Its fairly complex political structure was created in 1995 during the Dayton peace accord, which ended the Bosnian war.

Two separate entities were set-up; a Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, each with its own president, government, parliament, police and other bodies.

Overarching these entities is a central Bosnian government and rotating presidency. And to complicate things further there exists the district of Brcko which is a self-governing administrative unit, established as a neutral area placed under joint Serb, Croat and Bosniak authority.

With a country so ethnically divided, where “ethnic-led corrupt” politics offers very little to the young people and where justice for minorities in their respective entities is still elusive – the question on everyone’s mind was: Is there hope for Bosnia?

“If there is any hope of redemption in Bosnia, it comes from the extraordinary strength of will of individual Bosnians, it has nothing to do with the UN, nothing to do with the diplomatic and political strata, which have established themselves as basically parasites earning nice tax free salaries there.”

“Women have been much better at it than men. Irrespective of their ethnicity, they come together and form organisations that help victims of rape and human trafficking. They have done some amazing work.”

“One thing is for sure, Bosnia as a way of life, Bosnia as a way of enjoying yourselves will never die.”

Twenty years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, Ed Vulliamy still rages against the powers that failed to act, the perpetrators not held to account, and the international organisations continuing to profit from the fractured regions sufferings.

“It’s not just about the war but about the peace after it… wars, and we talk about wars a lot in this room, come and go… but for the people whose lives are shattered by them, they never end.”

In August 1992, Vulliamy and Penny Marshall – also in the audience last night – were the first journalists to report on the Serb-run concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. Chair and Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith asked Vulliamy about this continuing controversial term, ‘concentration camp’.

“The first thing I saw were the shaven-headed inmates of Ormarska coming out of a hanger” said Vulliamy. “I think it is the right term. They were locations for the concentration of civilians for murder, rape, torture, deportation.”

Vulliamy described the international reaction at the time as “appeasement at best, encouragement at worst of continuing mass-murder”; while phrases such as ‘moral equivalence’, ‘perpetrator-less crimes’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ were used to shun involvement. He explained how the truth is in the ground, with 100,000 dead – the majority of which are Bosnian Muslims – and 10,000 still missing.

During the Q&A, Vulliamy was asked whether the current economic climate could spark another conflict.

“I can’t see another war like that one, but it is a fool that predicts… I can see it degenerating into something differently nasty – crime going into a whirlwind of part-ethnic, part-drugs… I can see it degenerating with all these things exacerbated by these open wounds of war. On the other hand it may take a small incident in a place like Srebrenica… But you hear more violence than you see. The physical violence hasn’t happened yet, but it might… I think it’ll be murkier – like other capitalist slagheaps.”

Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director at Amnesty International, asked whether there were any signs of reconciliation with the new generations.

Vulliamy said: “There is no sign at the moment that young Serbs have made any overtures. I think the reckoning will come through people falling in love, rock and roll, the social intercourse, as these monsters die off.”

Vulliamy’s great empathy for the people he wrote about 20 years ago was clear when asked about his book launch in Sarajevo last month.

“It was extremely moving… with old soldiers, old hacks, with a few comrades and renegades and alcoholics. It was great, with speeches I couldn’t understand, gifts that reduced me to tears. I’m a very, very lucky man to know these people and they’ve enriched my life more than I have words to say but my greatest wish would be that I’d never met any of them or that I’d met them by pure coincidence while on a train ride through Prijedor and not the way I did.”

In conclusion, Vaughan Smith said that for all their talk of missing monuments, perhaps Ed Vulliamy’s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning, goes some way to building one.

By Alan Selby

The advent of new media has seen an increasing pressure placed upon journalists to become multidisciplinary, but often to the detriment of each medium. During an evening moderated by David Campany, reader in photography at Westminster University, writer A. A. Gill and photographer Tom Craig mounted an impassioned defence of collaborations between photographers and writers. The duo were speaking in the lead up to a new exhibition of their work, a collection of 20 of Craig’s unseen photographs accompanied by text from Gill, which is opening at the Flaere Gallery in March.

The audience were guided through an eclectic series of images from Gill and Craig’s travels, which have taken them from the blistering heat of Chad to the freezing depths of the Arctic. As their presentation began, Craig explained that his dissatisfaction with the news media was a driving force behind their collaboration:

“I was becoming disillusioned with the imagery that I was seeing appearing in the news and feature print media. The reason for that was I felt increasingly individual photographers were going to places with very specific agendas. They had a photograph in mind before they even got there… I think it’s a dangerous place to be in, because it represents a place where it’s very difficult to be impartial.”

Discussing the unique marriage of text and imagery that the pair have produced, Craig added:

“I believe that the power of the image and the written word are great on their own, but they’re a lot greater when they’re combined… I’m at an advantage, I can tell the quieter story because I know there are other things that will be said about it.”

Craig provided the foil to Gill’s inimitable sense of humour throughout the evening and, despite claiming that Craig’s interests amounted to taking photographs of people taking photographs, and of the backs of people’s heads, Gill praised his approach:

“What you want is a photographer who’s aware of himself, and aware of changing the dynamic he is in. Tom does that, he’s very sensitive.”

In response to questions from the floor, the pair discussed how they first met on assignment in Chad, and how they approach the assignments that they undertake. As the proceedings reached their conclusion, Gill offered up his own evaluation of their work together:

“What we do gets rarer and rarer, because a lot of journalists now are expected to take their own pictures. A lot of us are expected to have phones that can take print ready pictures. Then there’s everything that’s happening on the internet: everybody is a photographer, and everybody is a journalist. What you have is this babel of karaoke news. I feel like we’re a Farrier and a Thatcher, we’re doing two jobs that are from the last century, but that’s what we do, and we do it well. When we do it well I don’t think there’s anything else that can touch it.”

Watch the event here:

By Thomas Lowe

The panel painted a largely sombre picture of present-day Russia, overshadowed by a resurgent FSB secret service and their close allies, the oligarchs.

Author of Mafia State and Guardian correspondent Luke Harding began by explaining what it is like to be considered an enemy of the Russian state in the country.

“The sky fell in on my head… someone started reading my emails, strange people came round to the flat, I was summoned by the FSB to be interrogated… and suddenly my wife and two small kids found ourselves plunged into this rather surreal kind of Cold War drama.”

FSB agents often broke into his apartment as part of their psychological assault. The harassment took a number of forms, from setting alarms to ring in the middle of the night, to opening his son’s room window that looked over a ten-storey drop.

“At one point they left a sex manual… next to my bed which had been bookmarked to a page on how to have orgasms properly.”

After months of this Harding wound up in an airport deportation cell.

“I realised that the FSB, this vast, prodigiously resourced organisation is actually quite dumb, because by deporting me of course,” he said with irony, “they never thought I would write a book.”

Dumb and old-fashioned perhaps, but as Russian investigative reporter Andrei Soldatov suggested, incredibly influential.

The service is perhaps stronger now than during the Soviet era, even exercising control over corporations.

“There is no parliamentary control on security services in Russia… members of the FSB are accused of corruption because nobody controls them.”

The oligarchs maintain a tight grip over state assets, said former BBC Moscow correspondent Angus Roxburgh, himself expelled from the USSR in the late 80’s.

“They swap assets around, they sell bits of the media one to the other. It’s the same names that keep popping up.”

One of those names is of course Vladimir Putin, without whom, said Luke Harding, the country’s organisation and his party United Russia would fall apart.

Yet, “Putin’s biggest failure is intellectual. He’s actually failed to come up with a new national idea… There’s no driving concept to it, and in this vacuum what do we have? We have this stonking kleptocracy.”

Susan Richards, founder of Open Democracy, echoed this, saying that the wealth created by oil and gas had served to create an even larger gap between the rich and the poor across Russia, particularly since 2005.

“The elite just goes on getting more and more of the assets, and the rest of Russians are really back in the same kind of problems as they had in the 90s of making ends meet.”

Looking to the future, the panel expressed little doubt about Putin’s likely presidential longevity. There was also consensus that the volatile Caucasus region, including Chechnya posed a serious long-term problem to the stability of Russia.

Amongst bleak commentary on the coming years however, one glimmer of “moderate hope” came from Susan Richards:

“The consciousness of the Russian people is changing very fast now. For example 43% of Russians would see democracy as more important than order now. That’s a big change… People’s heads aren’t trapped underneath the bell jar of Soviet censorship the way they were.”