On November 22nd 2017, the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for The Former Yugoslavia in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison.

Mladic was one of the most infamous figures of the Bosnian war of the 1990s, synonymous with the merciless siege of Sarajevo in which 15,000 people were killed or wounded, and the murder of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 — the worst crimes in Europe since World War II.  Mladic was an active participant in these crimes – he was in Srebrenica when his Serb forces took control of the town and looked his victims in the eye and promised that no harm would come to them. 

Filmed over five years, Directors Henry Singer and Rob Miller were given exclusive and unprecedented access to film behind-the-scenes with prosecution and defence lawyers in Mladic’s war crimes trial – one of the most important since Nuremberg — as well as with witnesses from both sides who came forward to give evidence. 

The result is an epic story of justice, accountability and a country trying to escape from its bloody past.

Running time: 100 minutes

The Directors:

Henry Singer is one of Britain’s most critically acclaimed documentary directors. He has won or been nominated for every major British documentary award, including the BAFTA, Royal Television Society, Grierson, Broadcast, Broadcasting Press Guild, the Televisual as well as the Emmy, and his films have been screened at festivals around the world.

Rob Miller began his career working for a human rights organisation before crossing over into documentary. He has over fifteen years experience of developing and producing documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four in the U.K, collaborating with Henry Singer on ‘Last Orders’, ‘On A Cold Friday in November’ and ‘The Betrayed Girls’.

When people think of diaspora populations, their first thought tends to be of refugee populations, the migrant crisis, and communities fleeing conflict as a result of what’s reported in the media. However, this is only part of the story. Often these scattered populations across the globe continue to have an enormous impact on their homelands.

The European Research Council has sponsored 5 years of extensive research and close to 500 first-hand interviews among Kosovo, Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Kurdish, Iraqi and Palestinian diasporas, and a large-scale survey. These displaced, real, diverse people, living in European countries from the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France give us a unique insight into the homelands from which they originate.

This resourceful, entrepreneurial section of the population are important actors in the conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction processes of their homelands, be that Iraq, Palestine, Bosnia or Armenia.
Conflict-generated diasporas can have a huge influence on war and peace, and it is often something that is under reported in the media.

Dr. Maria Koinova, Principal Investigator for the ERC Project implemented at Warwick University, and her team will present their paper “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”, and be joined by journalists to discuss the wider importance of their work and how it can influence public policy today.

For more information on the project, visit their website here.

Chair

Chris Morris – BBC Correspondent

Morris regularly contributes to BBC News, Today and From Our Own Correspondent, and is the author of the 2005 Granta publication The New Turkey. He was BBC Turkey Correspondent from 1997-2001 based first in Ankara and later opening the BBC’s new bureau in Istanbul covering the 1999 İzmit earthquake and the arrest and trial of the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. From 2001-2005 Morris was the BBC Europe Correspondent based in Brussels covering the European Union, the proposed European constitution, and other European stories.

Speakers

Dr Maria Koinova – Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”

Before joining Warwick University in 2012, Dr. Maria Koinova held research fellowships and visiting scholar positions at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., the European University Institute, and Uppsala University, among other academic institutions. Koinova is the author of Ethnonationalist Conflict in Postcommunist States. Since 2006 Koinova has worked on topics related to diasporas, conflicts, post-conflict reconstruction and democratization, and has conducted multi-sited fieldwork among the Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Croatian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Serbian, and Ukrainian diasporas in the US and/or in Europe.

Tony Barber – Financial Times Europe News Editor

Tony is a columnist and specialist writer on European political, economic and business news and currently the Europe editor for the Financial Times. From 1990 – 1997 he was the East Europe Editor and Europe Editor at the Independent. Before that, he worked as a Reuters Foreign Correspondent from a range of cities from New York, Vienna, Moscow, Warsaw to Belgrade.

Dr Ben Margulies –  post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Warwick 

Ben’s research background is primarily in comparative and European politics. He is also interested in the way that nations and party systems respond to migration and globalisation. His Ph.D. “Liberal Parties and Party Systems” used data taken from European party manifestos to track when parties moved left or right, and showed how these movements affected vote shares that liberal parties received. Ben joined this project to help develop a large-scale survey among conflict-generated diasporas in Europe.

Dr Dženta Karabegović – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Dženeta’s Ph.D. research project analyses diaspora influence on a weak state in post-conflict environments. Her work has looked into Bosnian diaspora mobilisation in Europe around issues of transitional justice, genocide remembrance, and political participation. This research was undertaken in the form of interviews, participant observation and process tracing with multi-sited fieldwork. Dženeta holds an MA. from the University of Chicago and was a visiting scholar from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Dr Oula Kadhum – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Oula Kadhum’s research investigates in a comparative perspective diaspora mobilisation for state-building following the 2003 intervention in Iraq. Her work explores how the diaspora in the UK and Sweden mobilised towards this end and why there were differences in their approaches to building the state. Oula completed her Masters degree at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, a postgraduate certificate in Education at Kings College London, and a Bachelors degree from Queen Mary University of London.

Featured image: protestors demonstrating against Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to Strasbourg. France Oct 4th, 2015

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.”

Almost 20 years ago, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina came to an end. Children born after the fighting stopped are entering adulthood today, but are still facing violence, abuse and abandonment. Through the stories of four remarkable young people, filmmakers Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott capture the hopes and dreams of this new generation, forced to live with the ongoing effects of the war.

Ante is struggling to define his own identity after his father was convicted of war crimes, for which he is now serving a 20-year sentence. Magdalena’s abusive father struggles to recognise his post-traumatic stress disorder. Ilija has been rejected by his mother who refuses to tell him who his biological father is.

In the Shadow of War is a poignant account of the ongoing consequences of war – of its psychological effects that can last for decades and the great strains it imposes on society as a whole.

Directed by Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott
Duration: 89′
Year: 2014

An event at the Frontline Club on 25 September saw a discussion focused on the recently published book by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, When Reporters Cross The Line, examining the ethics of reporting in high pressure situations.

L-R Frederick Forsyth, Jeff Hulbert, Martin Bell, Stewart Purvis, Penny Marshall. Photo: Greta Hofmann

Assembled for the discussion were Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University, Hulbert, a media historian, Penny Marshall of ITV News, former journalist and renowned novelist Frederick Forsyth and veteran journalist Martin Bell in the chair.

A wide-ranging talk took in Marshall’s defence of a story on Bosnian war atrocities, Forsyth’s experiences of reporting the Biafra massacres in Nigeria, and a variety of other issues associated with reporting under pressure.

The product of meticulous archive research, Purvis and Hulbert’s book covers a range of situations in which lines might be crossed.

“No one has ever defined what the line is,” said Purvis. “We found that there are lots of lines.”

“We felt that there was a need for certainty in regulations, but found that regulatory precision is unlikely and that there are grey areas all over the place. . . . The subtitle for the book was heroes, villains, hackers and spies. Some of the villains turned out to be heroes and some of the heroes turned out to be villains.”

Touching on the issue of protection of a journalist’s sources, Hulbert suggested that while this is important, there was also a responsibility for a journalist to be held accountable for their reporting:

“It’s a little debatable from the archives whether the stories actually held water. . . . At no point have lawyers said to journalists ‘you made it up mate’. They just allowed the innuendo to percolate.”

In 2000, ITN won a libel case against left-wing magazine Living Marxism that had claimed that Marshall, along with others at ITN, had fabricated a report about a Bosnian detention camp.

“The supposed motives were variously that we were in it to win it, were vain, wanted an award, or worse had an anti-Serb agenda and had gone out to see what we wanted to see and wasn’t there,” she explained. “What ensued some of the bravest defending of our journalism.”

Marshall admitted though that in the heat of a situation the lines are not always clear cut:

“In the field the lines are blurred,” she said. “It’s easy for regulators and for academics who are not in high stress situations. But in these situations you have to rely on the seasoned judgement of journalists. I held hands with a lost child. I showed I cared . . . we’re not robots. If you don’t care, don’t be a journalist.”

A more difficult line, said Marshall, was the extent to which sources of stories should be put at risk:

“I’ve always worried that some of the people who were in our report lost their lives because of our endeavours to show what was happening.”

Forsyth said that he had crossed “three lines” during the course of his career. The first was taking a job as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent at the age of 28 and realising he had not only “inadvertently joined the establishment”, but was also “expected to serve it”.

The coverage he was expected to produce of the Nigerian-Biafran war in 1967, he said, was “strongly biased”. The second line was his decision to walk out on his post without notice and board a plane to Biafra, where he witnessed what he described as “a deliberately concocted and organised famine.”

“It was the only time our government has assisted a foreign government killing its own citizens,” he said. “Why? Because of the massive vanity of senior civil servants who could not and would not be proved wrong.”

Others on the panel agreed that journalists are often under the pressure of editorial agendas.

“I’ve become more sceptical about impartiality,” said Purvis. “You have to ask whether the coverage of Libya [of the overthrow of the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, in 2011] was really balanced. And yet the only channel that was criticised for bias was Russia Today, and that was for being pro-Gaddafi.”

Forsyth agreed:

“I don’t think there’s any major story where you can avoid bias. There’s almost always two sides to every story. The establishment is not the friend of dispassionate reporting because it wants its version to dominate and that may well be the wrong version.”

The issue of celebrity among broadcast journalists was also a source of concern.

“There are a number of celebrity journalists who have thrived through their celebrity,” says Hulbert. “Some I imagine would be able to gain entry to worlds that mere mortals such as I wouldn’t, so I think it helps. But whether it’s that celebrity emerges from the quality of your work or whether it emerges from a desire to be a celebrity depends on the individual.”

Marshall argued that one advantage of broadcast journalism is that many potential elements of bias are plain for all to see:

“You can see who I am and what I am. . . . You wear your history on your face, but I don’t think you can leave it behind.”

But the confines of the mainstream news agenda remain an issue, Marshall continued:

“The agenda is so narrow now which I regret. My children’s agenda is much wider than the news we’re feeding them. It’s part of a bigger disconnect between Westminster and the public and the media and the public.

The space for independent journalism, meanwhile, is shrinking. As Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times and Reuters journalist commented from the floor:

“It’s about how you see the world. If you go to an Angolan diamond mine with a diamond company, or with Oxfam, or on your own, you’re going to have three completely different experiences. There’s not really any room for independent journalists to cover a story now.”

In the end, says Marshall, it is down to the journalist to hold themselves accountable for their stories, and to be transparent about any lines they may have crossed.

“You want the sort of journalists who cross lines because the best journalists have the will to bring Biafra to account. But they also need to know that when they cross lines they can admit to doing it and are prepared to explain themselves.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/when-reporters-cross-the-line

On Friday 20 September, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of David Evans’ Pretty Village, which was followed by an emotional debate and panel discussion featuring protagonist and producer Kemal Pervanic and journalist at ITV News, Penny Marshall. The debate was moderated by Ed Vulliamy, writer for The Guardian and The Observer.

L-R: Ed Vuilliamy, Kemal Pervanic, Penny Marshall, David Evans. Photo: Doug Brown

The film is centred on the Bosnian village of Kevljani and follows author and youth worker Kemal Pervanic as he, amongst other things, revisits the site of his internment in the nearby Omarska detention camp, confronts a former teacher who sanctioned his torture and runs a reconciliation camp for the area’s youth.

The Muslim village in the north of Bosnia is surrounded by ethnically Serbian communities and as such was directly affected during the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Using archival footage along with personal testimonies from the surviving villagers, Evans manages to give a good sense of what pre-war life in the mixed Croat, Bosnian and Serb neighbourhoods was like; a place where Pervanic remembers that his “childhood was really beautiful”. This is an idea that the still visible destruction makes hard to imagine, especially when coupled with horrific accounts of torture, beatings, humiliation and deportation by former neighbours – the men who became the guards, torturers and perpetrators of many of the associated crimes against the six thousand strong Muslim community.

During the panel discussion following the screening, Vulliamy asked Evans why he made the film, to which he replied:

“The reconstruction from the war seems very very slow and there are lots of unresolved issues. . . . Just sitting in people’s houses and listening to people talk in ways I have never really heard people talk about war and how it affected them . . . for me, I just wanted to hear their voices and have the opportunity to tell their story, and its been a very moving experience for me, to have the privilege to be in these people’s homes, and hear them talk about these things. No one listens to their story; they have no one to tell their story to.”

This inability to talk about what happened during the war was a central theme throughout the discussion, with Pervanic stating that:

“This was so personal . . . what happened was so big that the perhaps the Serbs cannot recognise what they did. There is a lot of denial in our community”.

Left: director David Evans and journalist Ed Vulliamy Right: journalist Penny Marchall and protagonist Kemal Pervanic

When asked who else would want to see this film Pervanic replied:

“It’s a human story, it’s not just about a small village in Bosnia…I want everyone to see it. We must know our past. Without it we are nothing, we learn nothing.”

The audience – which included a number of Omarska camp survivors – was asked by Evans for their feedback, and while the loud applause suggested it was well received, the political tensions and divisions that the Balkan states are infamous for quickly rose to the surface. A number of questions focused on why the film didn’t cover how or why the war happened, or give a more balanced perspective – including more Serbian views – to which Evans repeated that he was not “interested in making  political statements or a  piece of journalism. . . it was never my intention to make a film about war in Yugoslavia”.

Despite all that Pervanic has experienced, his sober response to a somewhat antagonistic pro-Serb question provided a calming closing statement to the night:

“Generals don’t suffer, politicians don’t suffer; it’s people like me who suffer. . . . I don’t want to blame, that is not the point of the film”

More information can be found on the film’s website, and you can view the trailer of Pretty Village here:

In May 1992, 6,000 local Bosnian Muslim men, women and children were detained, tortured and raped in the cluster of villages around Kevljani. Many of these Bosniak were killed, and currently 1,200 are still missing.

In 2000 the first Bosnian survivors returned to Kevljani, where  they started to rebuilt their homes and lives. Most Serb neighbours remain silent about the past and continue to fight against an initiative to erect a memorial even after the discovery of mass graves in the village.

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 Nicole Hunt

Following the Friends of Syria (or Friends of the Syrian people, depending on who you ask) meeting in Istanbul on Sunday, UN-Arab League Special Envoy for Syria Kofi Annan is set to address the UN Security Council in New York on Monday to update them on the progress of his recent discussions with the Syrian government and the implementation of his six-point plan.

The recent rise in diplomatic sparring between the UK and Argentina can be attributed to the fact that the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the Falklands War has been fast approaching. Monday marks 30 years since Argentine naval forces landed on the Falkland Islands, sparking the 74-day conflict over the sovereignty of the archipelago.

South Sudan has invited Sudanese President Omar al Bashir to something of a peace summit on Tuesday, though it looks increasingly unlikely that he will attend (he’s said he won’t, but South Sudan says the invitation still stands). The two countries have been trying to iron out outstanding issues surrounding oil revenues, disputed border regions and citizenship since South Sudan became independent in July 2011, but ongoing armed conflict – with each country blaming the other – has stalled negotiations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Prague to meet with Prime Minister Petr Necas, partially to celebrate 20 since the signing of a treaty of cooperation between the two countries, and partially to discuss the EU debt crisis, following the Czech Republic’s decision to opt out of the new EU fiscal stability treaty alongside the UK. The meeting comes on the same day that the EU releases the third estimate of its fourth quarter GDP figures, and as the German, French and Italian statistics offices release their quarterly eurozone economic outlook.

Angola marks the 10th anniversary of the end of its 27-year civil war on Wednesday. Over 500,000 civilians are believed to have been killed during the conflict, and another 4.3 million people displaced. After several false starts, including the signing of the Lusaka Protocol in October 1994, the conflict was formally ended with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the government and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) on April 4, 2002.

Four police officers are sentenced in New Orleans after having been found guilty last August of opening fire on an unarmed family in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, resulting in the death of 17-year-old James Brissette. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Robert Faulcon and Anthony Villavaso were also found guilty of obstructing the course of justice and the shooting death of 40-year-old Ronald Madison, who had severe mental disabilities. Attention stays stateside and in the courts on Thursday, with two high-profile hearings scheduled to take place.

Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout is sentenced in New York, having been convicted of conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to South American terrorists, conspiring to kill US nationals, conspiring to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and harbouring or concealing terrorists.

In Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is due to appear for a pre-trial hearing ahead of his 5 June trial to face multiple charges of child abuse.

Christians around the globe observe Good Friday, though the conventional traditions of going to mass and eating fish pale in comparison to the rituals carried out in the Philippines every year, where dozens of people are nailed to crosses and hundreds of others whipped until their backs bleed in ceremonial re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

And in the last of this week’s war-related anniversaries, Bosnia marks 20 years since the siege of Sarajevo began. While the beginning of the Bosnian war, which lasted until December 1995, is officially recognised as 1 April, Bosnians generally observe 6 April as the starting point of the conflict. A range of events are planned, from a concert with empty seats for those killed in the siege to a gathering of war reporters at the Holiday Inn that became media headquarters during the war.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi hosts his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in Ningbo on Saturday for two days of talks ahead of a trilateral leaders’ meeting later this year. Discussions are expected to focus on regional cooperation, but it’s unlikely that the three ministers will make it through the weekend without the topic of North Korea popping up, especially ahead of a rocket launch planned for next week.

Sudan has set Sunday as the deadline for between 500,000 and 700,000 ethnic South Sudanese living in Sudan to obtain a residency or work permit to remain in the country or risk ‘being treated as foreigners’. Whether this deadline still stands by the end of the week may depend on how Monday’s summit goes – or whether it goes ahead at all.