Some speculate that the violence in Kasai is threatening to overshadow the fighting in 2012 when the M23 rebel movement took over the city of Goma.

Aid agencies claim it is the worst-affected area of conflict displacement in the world. Yet in a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey, it was named the most neglected conflict in the world in 2017. Civilians bear the brunt of the violence in the fighting and displacement.

Is 2018 a year without hope for the country? Have the media and aid agencies neglected the brewing conflict turning instead to the Syrian Civil War and the Rohingya exodus from Myanmar? Our panel discuss and report on the ongoing catastrophe.

Chair

Ben Shepherd  is a leading specialist on African politics and conflict, policy formulation and applied analysis. He has a broad range of experience across West and Central Africa, with a particular focus on the DRC and wider Great Lakes region.

Speakers

Mélanie Gouby  is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker based in London. Her work focuses on conflicts, politics and the impact of corruption on social cohesion, development and the environment. She was the East Africa correspondent for the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2014-2016, and has contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, National Geographic, France 24 and Vice, among others. From 2011 to 2014, Mélanie lived in Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she covered the rise and fall of the M23, the latest rebellion in Congo’s protracted war. She led the investigation into a British oil company’s illegal activities in the Virunga National Park for the Oscar-nominated documentary Virunga, winner of a Peabody and duPont-Columbia Award for outstanding journalism. Her interest for the Great Lakes region began while she covered the trials of Congolese warlords at the International Criminal Court in The Hague from 2009 to 2011. Mélanie studied Politics and International Relations at the University College London.

Jean-Roger Kaseki is a human rights campaigner in the UK and the DR Congo. He is a Labour councillor for Tollington Ward, Islington and a human rights and social justice research institute associate at the London Metropolitan University.

Tom Wilson is a journalist with Bloomberg News. He’s worked on Congo for the last 10 years. From 2015 to 2017 he was based in Kinshasa and traveled the country reporting on business, politics and conflict. His investigations have plotted the vast business empire controlled by the president’s family and the relationships between members of Congo’s political elite and some of its biggest investors. In doing so he’s sought to consider how and why Congo’s president and his entourage might seek to hold on to power. Now based in London he continues to write about Congo. 

Alex Ntung was born and grew up in a semi-nomadic, pastoralist and cattle herding tribe in South Kivu (DRC), he has experienced conflicts and violence, and lost many close relatives. He is a political and security analyst (DRC), a Member of the UK Expert Witness Institute and author of Not My Worst Day: A personal journey through violence in the Great Lakes Region of Africa (EARS Press, 2013). He is an international speaker, human rights advocate and fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  Alex is a PhD research candidate at the Centre of Conflicts Research Analysis, Kent.

 Photo: Junior Kannah—AFP/Getty Images

Rania’s new book is published to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of  protests in Syria. Cinematically crafted, it weaves a tapestry of rebels and exiles, radical Islamists and their victims amid the deadliest conflict of the century thus far.

Extending back to the first protests in Damascus in 2011, and based on more than five years of clandestine reporting on the frontlines of the war, No Turning Back presents an unforgettable portrait of a shattered country that “has ceased to exist as a unified state except in memories and on maps.”

Rania Abouzeid is a journalist with well over fifteen years experience in the Middle East and South Asia. A print and television journalist, fluent in Arabic, she has won numerous international journalism awards including the 2014 Frontline Club Print Awards and the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Rania regularly writes for the New Yorker and National Geographic and she has been published in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Australian, CSM, and a host of other outlets.

Lyse Doucet is an award winning Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. She is regularly deployed to anchor special news coverage from the field and interview world leaders. Lyse also reports across the BBC including for BBC Newsnight. She played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and has covered all the major stories in the region for the past 20 years.

Credits

Directed and reported by: Nawal Al-Maghafi
Filmed by: Mohammed Al-Mikhlafi
Produced by: Darius Bazargan

• Disclaimer: this film contains graphic content. Please enquire if you are booking tickets for adolescents or children.

Chair

Dr Gabriele vom Bruck is a Senior Lecturer on Social Anthropology of the Middle East at SOAS university.  She has conducted extensive research in Yemen and published on elites, religious movements, consumption, gender and photography.  She is the author of Islam, Memory and Morality in Yemen (Palgrave 2005) and co-editor of The Anthropology of Names and Naming (Cambridge UP 2006).  She is currently completing a biography of a Yemeni woman.

Speakers 

Nawal Almaghafi is a BBC Correspondent/ filmmaker   specialised on the Middle East. She has reported extensively from Yemen, focusing on the humanitarian situation and the West’s involvement in the conflict. In her latest investigation, The Funeral Bombing, she crossed the frontline in Yemen from areas under rebel control to areas under government control to find out who was responsible for the deadliest attack in Yemen’s 21 month conflict. She was also amongst the BBC team that revealed BAE’s sales of sophisticated mass surveillance technology to repressive states in the Middle East for the BBC production: Weapons of Mass Surveillance.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons like cluster bombs. For the Huthi armed group, it has included recruitment of child soldiers, arbitrary detentions and impeding the flow of humanitarian aid.
Outside Yemen, she has also been very active in pushing for more rigorous arms control policies to be adhered to by governments who fuel the conflict by transferring arms to Saudi Arabia and its allies. In particular, she has been involved in work to lobby the Brazilian, US and UK governments over their arms supplies to the coalition, and her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

Dr Glen Rangwala is a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Trained in political theory and international law, he completed a doctorate on political and legal rhetoric in the Arab Middle East. His focus on the politics of the modern Middle East, especially the Levant (including Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine) and the northern Gulf region are on the forms of political debate in these regions; and the character of the state and state-building processes. He work also includes theories of contemporary conflict, particularly the political economy of modern war.

The discussion will be preceded by a UNICEF supported press briefing at 5:00 PM for all members of the media.

Chaired by William Patey, former British Ambassador to Sudan.

Speakers

Chris Trott is FCO special adviser on the Sudans

Peter Martell has reported on South Sudan for more than a decade. He lived in Juba from 2009-2011 for the BBC, helped set up one of the South’s biggest radio stations, and was AFP’s East Africa deputy bureau chief from 2011-2016. He is now writing a book on the history of South Sudan.

Mawan Muortat is a South Sudan political analyst, with an interest in development, democracy and peace issues. He has lived in the UK since 1984, and has travelled back and forth to South Sudan since 2008.

Marianna Zaichykova is a researcher for UNICEF South Sudan

Saudi Arabia remains the UK’s most important arms client, and the government has granted export licences for more than £3.3bn of aircraft, munitions and other equipment. The British government has stated the Saudis must conduct an investigation into allegations of humanitarian crimes. But many are urging that Saudi Arabia’s investigation of its own alleged humanitarian violations is not an adequate inquiry.

At the same time, the US has become more involved in the conflict, including a failed commando raid that caused the deaths of multiple civilians and a U.S. service member.

Is enough consideration of humanitarian contexts being taken in arms export licensing and counter-terrorism? With a judicial review aiming to halt UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia beginning in February, we will discuss the role of foreign powers in Yemen’s civil conflict.

Chaired by Yemeni/ British journalist and filmmaker Nawal al-Maghafi. Nawal’s work has featured on Channel 4, BBC Newsnight, BBC World and BBC Arabic, amongst others.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

David Wearing has just completed his doctoral thesis on Britain’s relationship with the Gulf Arab monarchies. He teaches international relations and Middle East politics at SOAS, and has contributed articles for The Guardian, CNN and the New Statesman. He sits on the steering committee of Campaign Against Arms Trade, and is the author of their recent report: “A Shameful Relationship: UK Complicity in Saudi State Violence”.

Iona Craig is a British-Irish independent journalist and Orwell Fellow. She was previously based in Sana’a from 2010 to 2015 as Yemen correspondent for The Times. Since Yemen’s civil war began Iona has been the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict, travelling over 3,000 miles across the country since March 2015 to file reports for TV, radio and print. During her time in Yemen Iona has reported for over 30 publications and broadcasters worldwide including most recently The Intercept, Harper’s, IRIN and RTÉ radio.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons. Her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

Syrian radio host Obaidah Zytoon and her friends are caught up in the euphoria of the 2011 Arab Spring. Cameras in hand, these artists and activists take to the streets to protest Bashar al-Assad. But as they film over the next several years, their hopes for a better future are tested by violence, imprisonment and death.

Working with acclaimed Danish director Andreas Dalsgaard, the film’s protagonists narrate and edit years of footage into a deeply moving personal narrative. Rather than dwelling on the violence of the conflict, The War Show focuses on what the revolution meant to individual people. Zytoon and her friends share similar aspirations to young people all over the world: to live free of repression.

Yet their dreams of revolution turn into the reality of civil war. Zytoon takes road trips to the centre of rebellion in Homs, to her hometown Zabadani near Lebanon, and to the north of Syria. Through poignant first-person narration, The War Show awakens audiences to understand how the conflict in Syria has impacted everyday people.

Host:

Razia Iqbal has worked for BBC news for more than 25 years. She presents Newshour on the BBC World Service and the World Tonight on Radio 4. She was the arts correspondent for a decade, and has worked as a reporter on both television and radio.

Directed by: Andreas Daslgaard, Obaidah Zytoon
Produced by: Miriam Nørgaard, Alaa Hassan
Country: Denmark
Year: 2016
Runtime: 100 mins

Di Giovanni is no stranger to conflict, with work spanning the first Palestinian intifada, the Bosnian war and much of the upheaval of the Arab Spring. Her latest book is the result of numerous official and unofficial visits to Syria, weaving accounts of human tragedy into the country’s wider political picture. For di Giovanni, focusing on those trapped in a war beyond their control was the most striking and impactful way to cover the conflict.

“For me, far more interesting than being on the frontline in Homs, was going to the military hospital of Assad’s soldiers,” di Giovanni said. “I went early one morning when they were having their mass funeral… These were the regimes soldiers so you would think that we could perceive them as monsters… They were kids, they were 18, 19 years old… they just found themselves in this time and this place, but they were basically just kids.”

Sackur asked di Giovanni what it was like to witness Syria’s “terrible descent into full-on civil war,” and the rise of Daesh.

“As early as 2013 we started seeing, or maybe even earlier in 2012, the radicalisation of Aleppo… My trips back there became increasingly difficult,” commented di Giovanni. She recalled one particular incident that made her realise how dangerous the situation had become for Western journalists, in which herself and photojournalist Nicole Tung were attacked by an angry crowd frustrated by the West’s failure to intervene in the war.

“In the worst days in Sarajevo, the population never turned on us… And now we were getting attacked, as women we were being subjugated even with our former colleagues, and worse than that, Steve (Sotloff) and Jim (Foley) were beheaded.”

A major focus was the West’s inaction over the Syrian war, and the frustration that this has generated. Referring to a recent spate of Russian airstrikes on hospitals and schools in northern Syria, one audience member asked if there was any hope of bringing Assad and Putin’s impunity to an end.

Di Giovanni responded by saying Assad shouldn’t be allowed to continue his reign of power, but also conceded that “the more that Daesh continue to push and do these horrific acts publicly… the more that people who before had been supporting the opposition went back to supporting Assad. If you pull Assad out right now – this is a man with blood on his hands, a war criminal – you’re going to have a power vacuum in Damascus… There is no one yet ready to step into his shoes.”

Sackur added that a more cynical view would “argue that for all of the hopes we had for street politics and uprisings… actually removing the Gaddafi’s, or the Assad’s, or the Mubarak’s unleashes a form of chaos that is worse.”

An audience member asked what Assad’s endgame might be, given that Daesh’s actions are bolstering support for his regime. Di Giovanni replied: “I think he’s won. The Russians are on his side. He’s managed to turn the UN into a laughing stock. The diplomatic channel has basically been made a joke.”

On a final note, an audience member asked di Giovanni if she had any stories of hope from Syria. She recounted meeting members of the White Helmets, a group of ordinary civilians in Syria who rescue people from the wreckage of airstrikes – despite the enormous risks to their own lives, particularly in light of Russia’s ‘double-tap’ bombing strategy. “In war time you get horrible things, but you also get the human spirit capable of doing good… I came away thinking superheroes really do exist.”

Click here to find out more information on the White Helmets.

Purchase a copy of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches From Syria here.

Florian Schewe

On Friday 10 April, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of We Were Rebels, which was followed by a Q&A with director Florian Schewe. The film focuses on the struggles of South Sudan, the word’s youngest country, following its independence and through the eyes of Agel, a former child soldier during the civil war. Agel was able to flee Sudan and become a professional basketball player in Australia. On his return to South Sudan following independence, he joined his national team as captain and, after injury forced him into early retirement, focused on helping to build the country through his new development NGO.

We Were Rebels was well received by the Frontline Club audience, with many wanting to know about the film’s key protagonist, Agel. The former child soldier, portrayed as an active and patriotic member of his community, was optimistic about the future of his new country but also reflective on its shortcomings and limitations.

Schewe explained that he had met Agel in 2010, and had originally intended to include him, as captain of the new national basketball team, in a series of short films about South Sudan. When this project fell through, Schewe and co-director Katharina von Schroeder decided to work on a new documentary focusing solely on Agel.

Despite his height, Schewe told the audience that the project felt more like a collaboration with Agel rather than a standard protagonist/director dynamic; they saw “eye-to-eye” throughout. However, Agel was also very conscious of the power of the media in relation to the portrayal of the conflict in South Sudan, and was motivated by using the documentary as a “tool.”

Schewe also discussed the many restrictions and obstacles encountered during filming. The team were forced to apply for endless permits in order to film in South Sudan, and every visit to a new village or town involved a substantial amount of bureaucracy before filming could commence. As the country was still so new, many of the areas requiring administration were still being developed. Schewe also told Frontline Club audience members that the government and the “foundation of the society” in the nation were largely ex-military.

In response to a question on the general attitude towards former child soldiers, Schewe said that he encountered very little bitterness or resentment from general society towards the ex-military members of the government. The South Sudanese instead targeted their anger at the attacking North, and viewed the use of child soldiers as legitimate. Schewe said:

“Every family was affected. In the society there are now many ruptures. The current ruling party was once the rebel army and every powerful government person was once in the military. But there is no blame on the military for making them child soldiers, it is viewed by most as a just cause.”

However, much corruption remains within the government in South Sudan. An audience member enquired into the infrastructure of the government. Schewe responded that, unfortunately, he had been witness to huge amounts of corruption and that, due to the lack of resources and the difficult relationship with Sudan, the country remained underdeveloped.

We Were Rebels also highlighted the re-starting of violence in the young country. This was largely due to difficulties relating to oil, South Sudan’s main source of income, which was increasingly becoming inaccessible due to sanctions put in place by Sudan. Schewe ended the Q&A session by explaining that oil had since started to again be distributed, and that South Sudan had also begun talks with Kenya and China.

Click here for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.

In a week in which Egypt sent F16 jets into Libya in response to the broadcast of an Islamic State video showing the execution of at least a dozen Egyptians, the Frontline Club held a timely event examining the reasons behind Libya’s slide into civil war.

The event was held on 18 February, a day after Libyans marked the fourth anniversary of the revolution that brought an end to the regime of Muammar Gaddafi after almost 42 years in power.

Mary Fitzgerald

But there is little for Libyans to celebrate.

“The speed of Libya’s unravelling has been quite extraordinary,” said Mary Fitzgerald, a journalist who has reported from Libya since February 2011, and contributor to a recently published collection of essays entitled The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath.

In a debate chaired by BBC journalist Mohamed Madi, the panelists spoke of the polarisation of today’s Libya, in which two separate governments and hundreds of militias compete for influence.

Mohamed Madi

“The poison of polarisation has seeped into Libyan society,” said Fitzgerald. “Regions, communities, even families are fighting each other.”

Elham Saudi, co-founder and director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL) and associate fellow at Chatham House’s International Law Programme and Middle East and North Africa Programme, said that justice and governance had been replaced by a single concept:

“If you’re with us you’re with us, if you’re against us you’re dead.”

These deep divisions have created a need for reconciliation, but this will be a long process, said Peter Cole, former International Crisis Group Libya analyst and editor of The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath.

“Reconciliation and amnesty takes a generation,” he said. “It’s not the work of a few politicians in six months.”

Rule by law

The concept of rule of law has been lost in favour of rule by law – or lawmaking for political ends – said Saudi. Only 10% of those in prison have been charged, she said.

Abdul Rahman al-Ageli

For Abdul Rahman al-Ageli, co-founder of the Libyan Youth Forum and former security coordinator in the Libyan prime minister’s office, Libya’s governance problems stem from the fragmentation of the three factors that make a state: international recognition; monopoly on the use of force; and direct control over the territory.

Only one of the governments claiming to represent Libya has any of these three factors: the Tobruk-based administration can claim only the first, and that in Tripoli can claim none.

This is not going to change until there is a “mass reform of the state,” said Al-Ageli.

“All sides of the political spectrum believe that the exclusion of those they consider to be their opponents would be the solution to the country’s problems.”

Power vacuum

Guma el-Gamaty, a Libyan politician and National Transitional Council (NTC) envoy to the UK during the 2011 revolution, said that the root of Libya’s troubles was the power vacuum left by Gaddafi.

“Physics tells us that vacuums have to be filled, and what was it filled with? It was filled with militias,” he said.

Guma el-Gamaty

Bringing these militias into the government’s pay was the “biggest mistake the NTC made,” added El-Gamaty, as it took the number of militia members “from 25,000 to 250,000.”

There was no shortage of institutions after the 2011 revolution, argued Al-Ageli, but these institutions were “toxic and destructive.”

“The state incentivises counter-productivity, it rewards corruption, and it punishes efforts to reform,” he said.

The rush to seek remuneration for militia membership was only explained by Libya’s social history, said Al-Ageli.

“People feel that they have a right to receive a salary from the state,” he said. “There was an audit of armed groups, and 250,000 people turned up and said they were revolutionaries. They just wanted a salary from the state.”

Libya’s current political divisions are fuelled by fear, said Al-Ageli.

For each side, there’s a “fear of being marginalised by their opponent if their opponent wins, so they’re stuck in a zero-sum game,” he said.

“There is no rational reason for a conflict in Libya at the moment – it’s all emotional reasons.”

Elham Saudi

In the absence of the rule of law, concepts of justice have become warped, said Saudi.

Crime is “related to who did what to whom, not the action,” she said.

In hundreds of interviews carried out to establish what people in Libya understood by the word ‘torture’, 67% of those asked defined torture “by who had committed it,” said Saudi.

As Libya enters a fourth year of conflict, Libyans must remember what they fought for in February 2011, said El-Gamaty:

“Sometimes they say you have to trade freedom for security, but this is very, very dangerous. I have another name for that, and it’s dictatorship.”

Copies of the book the Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath can be purchased from Hurst publishers.

Watch and listen back:

Four years ago, Libya dominated the headlines as the country struggled to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. Now, despite the fact that this country of vital importance in the region is sliding into civil war, it has all but disappeared from the news.

As well as the violence, the people of Libya are also facing chronic power shortages and escalating prices of basic everyday goods. The local media that flourished after the revolution has been killed off and human rights organisations have left the country. Now with foreign powers backing different factions the conflict looks set to take on new dimensions.

In a new book, The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath, leading journalists, academics and specialists trace the journey from the outbreak of protests in Benghazi in February 2011 to the subsequent conflict. Some of its contributors and other experts will be joining us to offer an insight into what led to the current crisis and how Libya might be able to rebuild itself.

Chaired by BBC journalist Mohamed Madi.

The panel:

Guma el-Gamaty is a Libyan politician and was National Transitional Council (NTC) envoy to the UK during the 2011 revolution.

Abdul Rahman al-Ageli is co-Founder of the Libyan Youth Forum. He also worked as a security coordinator in the Libyan prime minister’s office.

Mary Fitzgerald is a journalist who has reported from Libya since February 2011 and lived there throughout 2014.

Elham Saudi is co-founder and director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL) and associate fellow at Chatham House’s International Law Programme and Middle East and North Africa Programme.

Peter Cole is a former International Crisis Group Libya analyst who has also worked for the UN mission in Libya.