One of the investigators tasked with tracking down and arresting those responsible for that massacre was Vladimir Dzuro, a former homicide detective from Prague. Ahead of the English publication of his book, The Investigator, Dzuro will be at Frontline to talk about how he and his team tracked down and arrested one of the key perpetrators, Slavko Dokmanovic, the mayor of Vukovar and the first in a long list of war criminals to be tried and convicted by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Dzuro will be joined by Joanna Korner, Senior Prosecutor for the ICTY between 1999-2004 and 2009-2012, who was responsible for prosecuting high-level leaders charged with grave breaches of international humanitarian law, as well as Kevin Curtis, a former colleague and ex-English police officer who participated in the arrest of Slavko Dokmanovic. Journalist and author Tim Judah will be moderating the discussion.

This event is organised in collaboration with the Czech Centre London. For more information on the book, please visit this website.

Reviews for The Investigator: 

“The Investigator is a raw and unique first hand account of an extraordinary pursuit of justice in the face of absolute horror.” – Julian Borger, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and World Affairs Editor for the Guardian

“Personal accounts of investigations of war crimes, such as this one… breathe life into the abstract project of accountability and show the challenges of operating a criminal justice system in an international environment.” – Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1996-99)

Speakers:

Toby Cadman is a barrister specialising in war crimes, international terrorism, extradition and human rights. He has been senior legal counsel to the chief prosecutor of the Bosnian war crimes chamber, and defence counsel at the Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal. He is a co-founder of The Guernica Group and Joint Head of Chambers at Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers.

Kevin Curtis is a former Detective Sergeant with the UK police and from July 2008, was the Chief of Investigations for UNICEF, retiring in February 2018. Between 1995 and 2004, he headed an team that investigated war crimes and grave breaches of international humanitarian law at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and in 1999 he led the investigations into atrocities committed by Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, then the Republic of Serbia. He was involved in some notable arrests of war criminals, who following arrest, subsequently stood trial in the International Court in The Hague. In 2004, he was engaged by the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) into the Oil for Food Programme in Iraq, (the Paul Volcker Committee) as a team leader. In late 2005 he became Investigations Adviser to the audit and investigation section of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), until joining UNICEF.

Vladimír Dzuro worked as a criminal detective between 1983 and 1995, initially investigating violent crime with the Criminal Investigation Department in Prague and later at the National Central Bureau of Interpol in Prague. In 1994, Vladimír actively participated in the work of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the former Yugoslavia. In April 1995, he began a ten-year stint as an investigator with the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Vladimír currently works as Chief of Headquarters Office at the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services in New York.

Joanna Korner worked as Senior Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia between 1999-2004 and 2009-2012, prosecuting high-level leaders charged with grave breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL). She has lectured on IHL to Iraqi Judges and Cambodian Defence Lawyers. In June 2004, she was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) for services to The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Judge Korner has been a Grade “A” Advocacy Trainer since 1996. She was the Head of International Faculty of Advocacy Training Council of England & Wales from 2005 to 2012. She has organised and taught on numerous advocacy training courses in the UK and internationally.

Moderator

Tim Judah is a journalist and author and covers the Balkans and other regions as a correspondent for The Economist. He has worked for many major publications and broadcasters, notably writing wartime reportage from Afghanistan to Ukraine for the New York Review of Books. He is the author of three books on the Balkans—The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Kosovo: War & Revenge and Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know—and published a book on the conflict in Ukraine – In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine in 2016. From 1990 to 1991, Judah lived in Bucharest and covered the aftermath of communism in Romania and Bulgaria for The Times and The Economist. After that, he moved to Belgrade for both publications in order to cover the war in Yugoslavia. He moved back to London in 1995 but continues to travel to the region frequently. He is the president of the Board of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and a member of the board of the Kosovar Stability Initiative (IKS).

(Image: Vladimir Dzuro reads the charges and the ICTY version of the Miranda rights to Slavko Dokmanovic. (Col. David S. Jones [Ret.])

The battle to defeat ISIS in the region lasted years, resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and ruined vast tracts of cities such as Mosul and Raqqa. Involving some of most brutal urban combat since World War II, the fall of Mosul was key to the downfall of the Islamic State: soon after the remains of the so-called “Caliphate” began to crumble.

Ivor’s work focuses on the human struggles of conflict. Taken on the frontline, his pictures legitimately and compellingly record the experience of being “caught in the crossfire,” whether as a soldier or non-combatant. He furthermore captures post-war reality while attempting to reconstruct the final weeks of combat: the devastated cities including abandoned corpses of ISIS fighters, and, months later, families searching for missing loved ones, and civilians returning to reclaim their homes and lives.

Ivor will be joined in conversation with Anthony Loyd, senior foreign correspondent for The Times, to discuss the challenges of working on the frontline and the human stories behind his images. Copies of End of the Caliphate will be available at the event.

Speakers

Ivor Prickett is a freelance photographer for The New York Times. He has been based in the Middle East since 2009, where he documented the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya, working simultaneously on editorial assignments and his own projects. Traveling to more than 10 countries between 2012 and 2015, he also documented the Syrian refugee crisis. With a particular interest in the aftermath of war and its humanitarian consequences, his early projects focused on stories of displaced people throughout the Balkans and Caucasus. Ivor’s work has been recognised through a number of prestigious awards including POYI, Foam Talent, the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and the Ian Parry Scholarship. His pictures have been exhibited widely at institutions such as the Getty Gallery in London, Foam Gallery in Amsterdam and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He is represented by Panos Pictures in London.

Anthony Loyd is senior foreign correspondent for The Times. His career began in 1993 when he started reporting from the war in Bosnia. Since then he has written from innumerable conflict zones, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Chechnya and Kosovo. He is author of My War Gone By I Miss It So and Another Bloody Love Letter. He has witnessed the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the brutal rise of the self-styled Islamic State and the desperate struggle of the Syrian people caught between the two.

Civilians who had remained in west Mosul during the battle to retake the city, lined up for an aid distribution in the Mamun neighbourhood. Iraq – March 2017

Nadhira Rasoul looked on as Iraqi Civil Defence workers dug out the bodies of her sister and niece from her house in the Old City of Mosul, where they were killed by an airstrike in June 2017. Iraq – September 2017

Unquiet Graves: The story of the Glenanne Gang details how members of the RUC and UDR, (a British Army regiment) were centrally involved in the murder of over 120 innocent civilians during the recent conflict in Ireland. It will detail how members worked hand in hand with known sectarian murderers in the targeted assassinations of farmers, shopkeepers, publicans and other civilians in a campaign aimed at terrorising the most vulnerable in society. Now known as the Glenanne Gang, the group of killers rampaged through Counties Tyrone and Armagh and across into the Irish Republic in a campaign that lasted from July 1972 to the end of 1978. 

Seán Murray is an award winning filmmaker from Belfast. His recent film, Fractured City won a Royal Television Society Award at the BFI in London’s South Bank. He is also director of Relapse Pictures; a Belfast based Production Company specialising in a range of work, including Documentary & Film. He has directed a number of testimony-based documentaries dealing with legacy issues pertaining to the recent conflict in the North of Ireland and his recent film Ballymurphy was screened at a number of international festivals. 

Unquiet Graves (Trailer) from Relapse Pictures on Vimeo.

It has been 25 years since Rwanda slid into the abyss. When human beings are at their worst — as they most certainly were in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide — the world needs the institutions of journalism and the media to be at their best. According to Media and Mass Atrocity, in Rwanda, they fell short.

Confronted by Rwanda’s horrors, international news media at times turned away, or muddled the story when they did pay attention by casting it in a formulaic way as anarchic tribal warfare rather than an organised genocide. Hate media outlets in Rwanda played a role in laying the groundwork for genocide, and then encouraged the extermination campaign. 

The global media landscape has been utterly transformed since 1994. The first information and images of atrocities are now often transmitted via social media, by citizen journalists or eyewitnesses – enabled by the ubiquity of mobile phones. The increasing difficulty of journalists accessing conflict areas is forcing the media to innovate new ways of verifying, covering and understanding events. 

And in many quarters, the traditional news media business model continues to founder. Against that backdrop, it is more important than ever to examine the nexus between the media and the forces of mass atrocity.

Social media tools can be used to inform and engage, but also – in an echo of hate radio in Rwanda – can be used to demonize opponents and mobilize extremism. We are left with many troubling questions, still unresolved despite the passage of time since Rwanda. 

The panel will be preceded by some opening marks by the book’s editor, Allan Thompson.

Chair

Dickens Olewe is a Kenyan journalist working for the BBC, and a 2015 John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University. During his fellowship he organised the first ever drone journalism conference, held in Silicon Valley with support from Center for Investigative Reporting and News Lab at Google. His interest is in using new technology for storytelling and integrating the public in the news reporting process. He contributes to BBC’s Future of News Report. He was part of the team of journalists chosen by Deutsche Welle Academy to develop a manifesto on how to use digital technology to promote freedom of expression in the global south. He also runs The Dickens Olewe podcast where he interviews guests on media, politics and technology in Africa. The latest podcast is a four-part series looking at the East African Community as it celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year.

Speakers

Idil Osman has worked for over 12 years as a national and international journalist for the BBC, the Guardian and the Voice of America, spending the majority of her career covering stories from the Horn of Africa. Through her work, she has developed a vast network of media contacts including those based in the region and the diaspora. She has authored publications that focus on media, migration, development, conflicts in the Horn of Africa and diaspora communities in Europe. She completed her PhD in Journalism and is an expert on diasporic media and development communications.

Simon Cottle, professor of media and communications at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, will reflect on what’s changed in the world of humanitarian crises and communications since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. He argues that today’s more complex and rapidly changing communications environment can open up new possibilities for progressive intervention prior to, during and following such murderous collective events. 

Alan Davis, Asia and Eurasia Director of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, will explain how hate media online in Myanmar – primarily on Facebook – grew out of a history of hate media prior to the explosion in internet access of recent years. Davis, who designed and led a media monitoring and reporting project on hate speech in Myanmar for IWPR, argues that the international community could and should have been better prepared and intervened sooner to reduce the impact of this hate media. He also attributes some of the hate media to the lack of media professionalism in a society accustomed to decades of oppressive censorship. 

  Watch the video stream of Media And Mass Atrocity: Lessons from Rwanda

*Tickets include a light lunch

NGOs and journalists often have to operate in challenging contexts and with difficult subject matter.  Producing quality material whilst maintaining levels of professionalism and sensitivity can be hard. There is increasing pressure on NGO’s and story gatherers to bring back “thumb stopping content” but at what cost? This course will examine mistakes NGO’s have made, look at ethics around story gathering and current trends in digital content that can help you maximise your audience.

What you will cover:

• Producing stories in conflict zones and challenging environments
• Maintaining ethical standards while producing stories with impact
• How to avoid “Poverty Porn” – Common pitfalls NGO’s make when creating content (the Rusty Radiator Awards)
• Organising productions in challenging contexts and balancing field staff versus production staff
• How to create powerful content yet balance against ethical standards
• Working in groups on specific scenarios and discuss best practice
• Examining the differing trends in digital content and how this is influencing the types of content gathered

Note – this is not a hostile environment course.

About the trainer – Nadene Ghouri
Arete is the expert humanitarian storytelling agency for non-profits and NGOs, working with award-winning journalists and content specialists to help tell stories that make a difference. Nadene Ghouri is an award-winning investigative journalist and a key member of the Arete team, with two decades of global experience producing news, current affairs, documentary investigations and features. She has been a staff reporter/producer for the BBC and Al Jazeera English. She is a two-time finalist for Broadcast Journalist of the Year, Popular Features and Best Television Documentary at the One World Media Awards and a former winner of the Amnesty Media Awards (Best Radio Investigation). Ghouri is also a winner of the Human Trafficking Foundation Media Awards (Best National Newspaper Investigation) and the Ethnic Minority Media Awards (Best Broadcast Journalist and Best Documentary). Ghouri is a highly experienced international media trainer and consultant, with a particular focus on storytelling training and strategic communications.

President Erdogan’s campaign has been driven by anti-European rhetoric and led to stand-offs with Germany, The Netherlands and others. Declining relations between Turkey and the EU raise questions about the stability of Turkish economy, which is largely dependent on trade relations with the EU, and how Turkey will cope with the continuing strains of war, terrorist insurgencies, and the refugee crisis.

Our panel will reflect on President Erdogan’s fraught relationship with the EU in the context of the country’s political future after the April referendum.

Speakers (Full panel announced soon)

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love and her most recent, Three Daughters of Eve.

Andrew Gardner has worked on human rights issues in Turkey for over ten years. Currently he is Researcher on Turkey for Amnesty International. Since joining the organization he has researched and written on issues including freedom of expression and assembly, torture, impunity for human rights abuses and refugee rights. He lives in Istanbul.

Matloff introduces us to Albanian teenagers involved in ancient blood feuds; Mexican peasants hunting down violent poppy growers; and Jihadists who have resisted the Russian military for decades. At every stop, she reminds us that we are all affected by the terrorism, drugs and instability that cascade down the mountainside.

A work of political travel writing in the vein of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Robert Kaplan, The War is in the Mountains is an indelible portrait of the conflicts that have unexpectedly shaped our world.

Judith Matloff has been writing about international affairs for 30 years, writing mainly about areas of turmoil. She covered 62 countries, as head of the Africa and Moscow bureaus of The Christian Science Monitor. Previously, Matloff spent a decade at Reuters in various staff positions in Europe and Africa. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Economist, Financial Times and Newsweek.

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.

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.

At the same time, the controversial leader has shaken up the country’s diplomatic ties, calling for a split from the United States and turning toward China as a new ally. This move presents an obstacle to the United States’ efforts in the South China Sea, unsettling its position as the dominant power in the Pacific.

Will president Duterte be held accountable for the mass killings taking place in the Philippines? How did the disturbing violence currently sweeping the country begin, and what does it teach us about impunity, power and the spread of violence?

Chaired by Paul French, an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs.

Speakers (full panel announced soon):

Gilberto G.B. Asuque is Deputy Chief of Mission of the Philippine Embassy

Vladimir Hernandez has been working as a journalist for over 15 years in Latin America, covering big stories like the drug war in Mexico, the years of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Kirchner rule in Argentina.

Eric Gutierrez is Christian Aid’s Senior Governance Adviser, and author of the report “Drugs and Illicit Practices: Assessing its impact on governance and development”. He grew up in Manila, where he published on criminal entrepreneurs in illicit economies, and the conflict in the Muslim areas of southern Philippines. His PhD dissertation is entitled “Criminals Without Borders: Agrarian Change and Interdependency in Opium and Coca Producing Territories”, a comparative study of the political economy of illicit drugs in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Bolivia.

Daniel Berehulak (via Skype) is an independent Australian photojournalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times. He won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for his coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa for the New York Time and was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his coverage of the 2010 Pakistan floods. His photography has also earned three World Press Photo awards and the John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club. Berehulak recently spent one month in the Philippines where he covered Duerte’s drug war, photographing over 40 murder scenes.

Dr Tom Smith is an academic working for the University of Portsmouths team teaching at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell. His PhD focused on the muslim insurgencies in southern Thailand and the Philippines. Since May 2016 Tom has had 5 op-eds for the Guardian published, 2 in the Conversation and the Diplomat Magazine as well as several other international media outlets including the UN Dispatch podcast, all focused on the many complex issues in the Philippines.

Header image by Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times