Directed and reported by: Nawal Al-Maghafi
Filmed by: Mohammed Al-Mikhlafi
Produced by: Darius Bazargan
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.
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.
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Join us at the Frontline club with an expert panel to discuss the role of the international system, and what more can be done to bring relief to this war torn famine stricken country.
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Caught between political instability, conflict and violence, whilst famine and drought destroy the people and the land, there is seemingly little that can be done to bring relief to Somalia
Aid envoys have been restricted from reaching over 2.2 million refugees in the Al-Shabab controlled region of South-Central Somalia, and refugees have to brave fighting in conflict zones in Mogadishu in order to collect food provisions.
As land access is blocked, the UN is considering airlifts to distribute food and water to the refugees.
Aid agencies have been criticised for not acting sooner and making provisions for prevention, as the famine and drought in the Horn of Africa were deemed “predictable.” Does the international aid system need to step up its efforts and produce a more coordinated response? And what lessons can we learn for the future about prevention rather than cure?
Join us at the Frontline club with an expert panel to discuss the role of the international aid system, and what more can be done to bring relief to this war -torn and famine-stricken country.
Chaired by Mike Wooldridge, BBC World Affairs Correspondent.
With:
Abdi Garad, chairman of Central Committee of Somali National Party (Hanoolaato) a grass root based non clan, non regional and diverse political movement. He is actively involved in humanitarian work, through local Somali NGO, Markabley Development Trust and worked with the UNISOM mission in Somalia from 1993-95. He is currently in southern Somalia, working at a feeding famine victim centres.
Jehangir Malik is the UK Director of Islamic Relief, an international aid and development NGO. It has a significant presence in East Africa and has been one of the few agencies to get into South Central Somalia.
Duncan McLean, operations manager at Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) based in the United States. He manages MSF programs in Nigeria, Uganda, Haiti, Ethiopia and Somalia. His work at MSF has included Head of Mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Nepal, and Chad, and Field Coordinator in Sudan, Thailand, and Myanmar. In addition to his humanitarian field work he has lectured at a number of universities, including Charles University and the Anglo-American University in Prague, and worked as a journalist.
Ridwaan Haji, programme producer and Newscaster at Universal TV, the biggest Somali Satellite TV station. He raised a campaign on his programme Have Your Say to free the Chandlers, a British couple kidnapped by Somali pirates last year. During Ramadan the channel raised nearly a million dollars to support those effected by famine in Somalia.
Jamal Osman, award-winning journalist and filmmaker specialising in Africa. He runs Jamal Media, a production company that makes current affairs programes for British broadcasters. He has won several awards including the Amnesty International’s Gaby Rado Memorial Award 2010 and the news story of the year prize at the Foreign Press Association Awards 2009.
Image Credit: Andy Hall – Oxfam
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