If you would like to support the Frontline Fund’s work in supporting fixers donate below:
or simply email ffund@www.beta.frontlineclub.com.
The Frontline Club plus gracious hosts Christiane Amanpour, Wael al-Omar, Paul Conroy, Anthony Loyd and Ramita Navai invite you to the 2019 Annual Frontline Fund, Fundraising Dinner.
The evening will begin with a drinks reception in the Clubroom from 7pm, followed by a sit down dinner.
The Frontline Fund , also affectionately known as the ‘Fixers Fund’ and set up in 2007, aims to raise money for the families of the brave media workers killed or injured in conflict zones, while working with international press. When the foreign media leave, these unsung heroes are left behind vulnerable, unsupported and only too often, pay the ultimate price, for their help and contribution.
Filmed in the Frontline Club, Paddington, London by Edward Lawrence with thanks to the Press Association.
The cost of your ticket will help support the Frontline Fund for another year.
If you would like to support the Frontline Fund’s work in supporting fixers donate below:
or simply email ffund@www.beta.frontlineclub.com.
]]>It will not be long before journalists covering the war crimes in Syria and Yemen, or the potential acts of genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and many other conflicts beside, are asked, perhaps even compelled, to testify about what they witnessed. This event seeks to help provide journalists with an ethical framework and legal understanding of the difficulties that arise.
- How should journalists respond to demands from international criminal tribunals? Why are some journalists are reluctant to testify, while others felt it is their duty?
- What obligations and duties do journalists have if their work is used as evidence?
- Should knowledge that reporting may be used in court influence how journalists work?
- If journalists do agree to testify, to what extent and under what conditions should they cooperate and collaborate with the court and prosecutors?
We will look at the divergent opinions of the journalists who were asked to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Some decided that on balance it was the right thing to too, while others argued that giving evidence compromises the independence of journalists and could endangered the lives of reporters who find themselves in similar situations in the future.
We will hear from both a judge and international criminal barrister, as well as how verification techniques can help journalists and war crimes investigators and prosecutors in their quest for the truth.
Q & A Discussion
Chair
Dorothy Byrne
Dorothy Byrne is the Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel Four Television and Chair of the Ethical Journalism Network. Films Dorothy has commissioned have won numerous International Emmy, BAFTA and RTS awards. She is a Fellow of The Royal Television Society and in 2018 won the Outstanding Contribution Award at the Royal Television Society Journalism awards. She has also been awarded Scottish BAFTA and Women in Film and Television awards for her contribution to television journalism. She is a Visiting Professor at Leicester De Montfort University. In 2018 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Sheffield University. She began her TV career at Granada where she was a producer/director on World In Action.
Speakers
The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Adrian Fulford
The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, is England and Wales’ most Senior Presiding Judge, he was elected to serve as the UK’s judge before International Criminal Court for a term of 9 years, assigned to the trial division. Lord Justice Fulford is the Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPC), with responsibility for reviewing the use of investigatory powers by public authorities, such as intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Sir Adrian is a serving Lord Justice of Appeal and a former Senior Presiding Judge for England & Wales. Until recently, he served as the judge in charge of IT and the Reform Programme, which includes “transferring justice to the cloud”. Previously he served as a High Court Judge (Queen’s Bench Division) and as a judge of the International Criminal Court.”
Wayne Jordash, QC
Wayne Jordash QC is leading international humanitarian and criminal law expert with experience across the globe, regularly advising governments on human rights and international humanitarian law compliance, including the Bangladeshi, Libyan, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese governments. He is a managing partner of Global Rights Compliance, a human rights and humanitarian advisory law company and foundation specializing in the reform of national systems of accountability to ensure complementarity with international standards. He has served as an advocate in international criminal proceedings before the International Criminal Court (‘ICC’), International Court of Justice (‘ICJ’), Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (‘ECCC’), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (‘ICTR’), Special Court for Sierra Leone (‘SCSL’), and is currently appointed as lead counsel at the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (‘IRMCT’).
Wendy Betts, Director of eyeWitness to Atrocities
Wendy Betts has more than twenty years of experience in human rights and transitional justice. She previously served as the Director of the American Bar Association War Crimes Documentation Project. She has written and presented on topics related to human rights documentation, international criminal law, and accountability and co-authored a report entered as evidence in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She is currently a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Ms. Betts has a M.A. in International Relations/International Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law.
Ed Vulliamy
Ed Vulliamy worked for more than 30 years as a staff international reporter with the Guardian and Observer newspapers of London – he still works for both, now as a free-lance author and journalist. He won all major awards in British journalism for his coverage of the Balkan wars between 1991-5, and discovered the gulag of concentration camps operated by the Bosnian Serbs in the Northwest Krajina region of Bosnia. As a result, he became the first reporter to testify at a war crimes tribunal since those at Nuremberg, testifying in nine trials at the ICTY, including those of Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić.
About the Organisations involved
The Ethical Journalism Network is an alliance of reporters, editors and publishers aiming to strengthen journalism around the world, working to build trust in news media through training, education and research.
To find out how to support the Ethical Journalism Network visit: http:// ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/ support
Global Rights Compliance is a niche organisation offering a unique approach to atrocity crimes and other violations of international law. Our “root and branch”philosophy combines innovative full-spectrum accountability strategies, expertise in evidence gathering in conflict setting, and building the capacity of States to implement international humanitarian and human rights standards. Global Rights Compliance is run by Wayne Jordash QC.
Website: https://www.globalrightscompliance.com/
eyeWitness to Atrocities provides a mobile camera app that allows users to capture photos and video that are embedded with metadata to verify where and when the footage was taken. By sending footage to eyeWitness’s secure server, the app user creates a trusted chain of custody. eyeWitness also advocates for the material, working with other organisations to ensure that the footage is used to promote accountability for the crimes captured on camera.
Website: http://www.eyewitnessproject.org/
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On Tuesday 6th December, politicians and journalists met at the Frontline Club to talk with Nujeen Mustafa about her book The Girl From Aleppo and to discuss the West’s response to the Syrian Crisis.
The brutal end of the city’s siege has seen the remains of Aleppo broadcast around the globe. When asked how she felt about these images she replied “relief… but it still hurts.”
Nujeen, who has cerebral palsy, traveled as a refugee across Europe in a wheelchair. She was turned away from borders and the stigma of being a refugee fell heavily on her. However, in her characteristically understated way, she refers to her portrayal as a danger to host countries as “annoying”.
The misrepresentation of refugees was at the forefront of the evening’s discussion. Christina Lamb, Sunday Times Foreign Correspondent and co-author of Nujeen’s book, mentioned that a major difficulty in reporting the refugee crisis was stopping stories getting lost in the vast numbers: “thats why I wanted to tell Nujeen’s story…she wanted people to know that refugees are just like us.”
In the Syrian conflict, control of the message is all important.
Lamb said that the Syrian state had “created their own narrative”. Assad, whom Lamb interviewed last month, was confident of winning the conflict, stating that between him and Al-Nusra, Syrians would be prepared to settle for him.
Andrew Mitchell MP believed that the conflict would end in one of two ways. Given that no military victory was possible, the war was “bound to … end in negotiation”. He added that there was a silver lining in Trump’s election in that, together with Putin, they might be able to reach an agreement in their efforts to unite against ISIS.
This was small comfort to much of the panel. Journalist and analyst Mina Al-Oraibi found it hard to believe that a populace pitted against such violence would accept a brokered peace so willingly: “Our greatest hope for a resolution is that Trump can make a deal with Putin? … How do you tell Syrian’s that?”
Indeed, it is Assad’s forces that is the greatest threat to civilians. The Syrian Network For Human Rights placed 93% of civilian deaths in the hands of Assad’s forces. Lamb backed this up: “I never met a single Syrian refugee who said they were leaving because of ISIS.”
The panel agreed that the crisis highlighted problems within organisations like the UN. Echoing words that he later used in parliament, Mitchell said “the international rules based system is in great jeopardy at the moment”. This comes at an important time, when the world needs more multilateral cooperation whilst nationalism is on the rise. These final statements matched Nujeen’s own: Many people “only think about the differences, not what we have in common. Which is everything I suppose.”
]]>The panel discussion ‘What Does Trump’s Presidency Mean for the Rest of the World?’ on 25 November clearly highlighted this as it careened wildly, swerving from the global implications and election autopsies, to passionate debates over racism and fascism.
Journalist and author Laurie Penny damned the evening as a ‘normalising’ discussion about ‘a fascist’. Echoing this, Shelina Janmohamed (a commentator on Muslim social and religious trends) urged the audience to think about the framing of the stories told. ‘The way we talk about identity,’ she argued, referring to the coverage of the trial of Jo Cox’s murderer, ‘…affects real peoples’ lives’. There is a potential ‘ripple’ effect on women’s rights movements globally, she argued, legitimising misogyny as ‘locker room talk’, disregarding women’s place in society, and signalling that it’s okay to talk about your daughter in ‘repulsive’ ways.
Trump’s rhetoric around climate change has some fearing the death of climate politics. He talks about ‘setting free coal,’ says Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief for the New York Times. But, this won’t go far: ‘No one’s going to invest in coal, it’s not worth their money,’ Erlanger argued. Many countries are ‘invested in a cleaner world’ for their own reasons, so ’just because the president thinks it can happen’ it doesn’t mean it will.
Having previously referred to NATO as ‘obsolete‘, will Trump oversee a shift in the global security landscape? Dan Roberts, The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, argued Europe will be ‘looking after itself’: for Trump, world security isn’t ‘an American problem’. Erlanger demurred, pointing out that the USA’s NATO membership isn’t altruistic, but in American ‘interests’. President of the British International Studies Association, Inderjeet Parmar, agreed, ‘I don’t think America’s retreating’.
Author, broadcaster, and the chair of the event, Michael Goldfarb asked if Trump caught a ‘wave’ that’s sweeping the world. There is a ‘systemic’ element, Parmar mused; the populist surge is the ‘unravelling of an order’ unable to sustain the ‘Western’ dream. But did Trump’s supporters see themselves as part of a larger wave? One audience member disagreed, arguing that many who voted for Trump sought a conservative supreme court, and didn’t consider the ‘world economy’ or ‘globalism’.
To what extent Trump fulfils his campaign promises remains to be seen. ‘The office has a moderating influence’ argued Alex Sundstrom of Republicans Overseas UK, he will ‘tack to the centre to get stuff done’. Janmohamed disagreed, arguing that his appointees are ‘proof that he’s going to make good on those statements.’ Parmar, however, saw compromise ahead. ‘The education of Donald Trump is going to be the title of a really great book,’ he quipped, ‘that education began as soon as his election was through.’
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Rifkind addressed a full house at the Frontline Club on Monday 21st Novemeber at a discussion about the future of conflict. Rifkind was joined by fellow panellists Paul Rogers, a professor in the department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, Julia Ebner, a Policy Analyist at Quilliam, and Julian E. Barnes from the Wall Street Journal, chaired by Jenny Kleeman, a British film-maker and journalist.
Paul Rogers identified a key issue in current conflict: ‘we’ve entered into an era of a revolution of frustrated expectations globally’, where people’s living standards are not rising with their expectations.
Julia Ebner believes a ‘global jihadist insurgency’ and a ‘far-right renaissance in Western countries’ are provoking a ‘phenomenon of reciprocal radicalisation’, where each party’s actions (such as anti-Muslim hate crimes and fundamentalist terror attacks) feed into the other’s grievances. For Ebner the solution lies in tackling those grievances and in tackling the ‘black-and-white narratives that are propagated from both sides’ which result in a worldview of the West and Islam being at war with each other.
Ebner was particularly concerned by the impact of fake news sites, as well as the echo chambers that are all too prevalent on the social media landscape in what she termed our ‘post-factual society’. Rifkind expressed similar concerns about social media, saying it ‘stimulates extremism, people… wind each other up and they get amplified… it’s hugely problematic in terms of stimulating extreme identities’. Barnes pointed to the ‘explosion of encryption technology and the ability very easily for groups or individuals to get very high-powered encryption that’s very difficult for intelligence services in the UK or the US to break.’
Although all of the panellists agreed that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has failed, Barnes said we should expect to see more of a focus on this under Trump, with Russia as a potential ally. Continuing the war on terror may be playing into the hands of Islamic terrorists who want war: Rogers argued that ‘if they present themselves as the true guardians of Islam under attack by crusader Zionist forces, then essentially it helps to be attacked’.
The panellists emphasised the importance of preventative work against conflict; but how do we get politicians to realise earlier that conflict is not the answer and to act early when politicians’ interests naturally lie in short-term success? Rifkind pointed out that ‘foreign policy is often about crisis management, it’s often about reacting rather than anticipating’, citing the Gaza conflict as a key example of this. Ebner, meanwhile, argued that the solution does not lie in politics at all, but within civil society, where we should ‘tell better stories than extremists are telling’.
IS is funded partly by Western Gulf states, and Barnes wonders if we might expect Trump to cut business from such countries ‘we very much could see more pressure [on allies which are known to fund terrorist groups] on this transactional approach’. However, IS campaigns are relatively cheap to run, and is able to maintain taxation within the territory, so a decline is as likely to come from a lack of appeal. None of this solves the underlying problems of the Arab world that made it so popular (the ‘revolution of frustrated expectations, as Rogers put it), such as unemployment. The underlying problem of marginalisation is here to stay, according to Rogers, who also named climate change as a major cause of future conflict and migration. Ebner added that uniting against climate change ‘could be part of the solution – it could also provide civil society with a common cause, an abstract enemy…rather than human beings fighting against human beings’.
Will World War III be mankind versus climate change? One can only hope.
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The panel discussion ‘Breaking Point: The EU Referendum and its Aftermath’ on 15 November showed that whilst it’s hard to know how exactly what it means, there are clues about the shape it will take.
For example, despite the pivotal role migration played in the referendum rhetoric, migrants are likely to stay, argued Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London. ‘We have no earthly clue who the European citizens in this country are, unless they’ve registered to vote or are getting a benefit,’ Menon said. ‘People are going to be allowed to stay,’ he remarked bluntly, ‘because we can’t do anything about it.’ The notion of ‘taking back control’ of our borders is ‘nonsense’ because the British civil service ‘can’t deal’ with the ‘kind of promises that some people in the Leave campaign have made, and they won’t try to’.
We also know that Brexit lends itself to European food based analogies. A ’kind of Swiss cheese Brexit’, in which different sectors get different deals, is most likely, Macwhirter claimed. However, Menon rebuts, any ‘deals’ at this point are moot; there is no evidence, he argued, that the EU will allow the UK to ‘salami slice the market’.
But food may not be as important as the analogies would have us believe. It’s simply not true that ‘Bordeaux winemakers’, Bojan Pancevski (The Sunday Times’ European Union Correspondent) warned, or producers of any other foodstuff or product for that matter, will successfully persuade EU governments to be lenient when negotiating with the UK for fear of losing market share. At least in Germany, the trade union bodies representing such individuals, Pancevski remarked, are on a record, saying they ‘completely agree with the government policy’. That government policy, currently, will not be one of doing favours for Britain. To avoid fuelling the rise of their own Eurosceptics, Menon argued, these governments ‘need Brexit to look dreadful’. The German Chancellery’s approach to Brexit and its message to businesses, he suggests, is similar to it’s approach to sanctioning Russia following its invasion of Crimea: ‘the political imperative is more important than economic loss, suck it up.’
Possibly most strikingly, we also know that Europe and the UK are in what Pancevski described as ‘parallel universe[s]’. For example, Britain is the only country in the EU with a political issue about freedom of labour, Menon argued. European countries, Pancevski said, don’t understand the phenomenon as ‘migration’, but rather as ‘internal movement’ within the European Union.
Furthermore, since the referendum, politicians and commentators have claimed that Europe needs the UK so much that it will change the rules, compromising freedom of movement to keep Britain in the single market. ‘We are very happy in this country to assume that everyone loves us’ Menon deadpanned. But the parallel universe strikes again, and obscures what is really at stake; the EU’s ‘primary objective’ Pancevski argued, ‘is to preserve their own union and above all to preserve the single market’. The EU’s fundamental four freedoms of goods, services, movement, and capital are, Menon claimed, ‘sacrosant’.
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In town for a team meeting, Charles Sennott and Gary Knight, founders of GroundTruth, shared their commitment to training up-and-coming talent in global correspondents in an age when digital media seems to cast doubt on the reliability of political news.
Calvin Sims, seasoned US foreign correspondent and chair for the evening, identified a ‘tectonic shift’ in global politics as a ‘pandemic of populism’ now affects elections in the UK, Europe, and US.
The ensuing debate asked how successful mainstream and off-beat media channels are in producing meaningful political analysis for a generation typically craving entertainment.
The panel (left to right): socio-political journalist and author Laurie Penny, eminent American broadcast journalist Michael Goldfarb (The New York Times, NPR), GroundTruth Co-founder and Managing Editor Kevin Grant, and – joining us stateside via Skype – freelance Bloomberg journalist Matt Negrin.
Election as spectacle
Sims’ began by asking how appropriate it is to engage with humour in covering this election.
A visibly excited Matt Negrin enthused that he is likely the only person left in New York not yet weary of wall-to-wall media coverage of the election, ‘It’s so much fun. The race is close enough that it’s still interesting to cover.’
Grant went someway in agreeing, expressing the collective surprise many in the media have felt witnessing Donald Trump’s continued extremist statements even after being selected as the GOP’s candidate. ‘Trump is not normal, he has never been normal his entire life,’ he said, ‘The only way to cover this race is to be a little bit stupid,’ arguing a level of incredulity is helpful for real analysis.
Penny echoed the feelings of some in the audience saying she was ‘disturbed’ by the ‘excitement angle’ expressed. ‘It’s a real mistake to see this as fun in any way. Politics is a bad drug,’ she said, distasteful of a media frenzy that lacks sober questioning.
Goldfarb countered, it is essential the media depict Trump ‘as the threat to democracy that he is.’ The broadcaster went on to draw comparisons with the recent Brexit result and the imminent American decision, saying ‘resentment has nowhere to go’ for young angry men displaced from traditional ways of life, leading to extreme choices at the polling station.
Language can be unthinkingly recycled by media outlets without real discussion of its meaning – particularly in relation to voter demographics. ‘Critique of media is abysmal in America,’ said Goldfarb.
Several short videos produced by GroundTruth show that humour can capture an audience and convey real political information – as seen in a ‘Fact-Checking’ sketch with memorable dialogue.
Social media and youth in a digital age
‘The digital space was supposed to make things more democratic’ – and yet often a paucity of voices seems to dominate the debate, even online. ‘What should the media consumer do?’ asked Calvin.
Acknowledging that ‘journalism is in the grip of a massive financial crisis,’ Penny argued the media has not found a way of monetising meaningful critique for a mass audience.
Grant held that the media still has a way to go, and often ‘doesn’t get to the heart of policy matters,’ partially because ‘there’s no clicks in unemployment stories’. Media Matters found that roughly 0% of US TV coverage of the election had to do with policy.
Social media is growing in importance as an ‘alternative’ to ‘the shouting match on TV’ for many millennials seeking political discussion, according to Grant.
New opportunities are emerging on digital platforms, and there is hope yet for intelligent nuance in the ‘crass, uncivil discourse’ (in the words of Sennott) which election coverage so often appears to be.
]]>The audience sat in stunned silence. Roman Borisovich continued, “there is an army of UK bankers, accountants, lawyers, trustees, and other professionals assisting Russian corruption.”
Facilitating such dubious financial transactions should be ‘socially unacceptable behaviour,’ he argued, ‘just like child pornography.’
September 14th marked the Frontline Club’s inaugural Kleptoscope; the first in a new series of events investigating corruption and dirty money in London.
“Klepto as in kleptocracy,” award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough explained, “scope as in looking at it under a microscope”. Their aim, he elaborated, was not just looking at those ‘stealing money from their budgets’, but also the ways in which that dirty money is laundered and then spent. Kleptoscope’s debut event certainly delivered on this promise.
Anti-corruption campaigner and ex-banker Roman Borisovich shared a former insider’s perspective. The UK, he argued, is the “single largest enabler of money laundering and corruption in the world.”
That dirty money, Chido Dunn of Global Witness claimed, is stashed in a ‘secret bank’. This bank, she said, is one without branches and employees, but which takes dirty money and cleans it: the London property market.
“If you were a corrupt politician and you wanted to buy a luxury property using stolen money,” Dunn asked, “how would you go about it?
Her explanation made it seem simple.
Imagine you’re a corrupt minister with the power to sell oil rights, Dunn urged. Using an anonymous company you’ve registered in the British Virgin Islands (‘Shady Incorporated’), you sell those rights to yourself at a fraction of their market value, and then sell them on for their full worth. With no trace left behind, you pocket the ‘profit’. But, Dunn asked, how do you clean that dirty money?
“Property is an excellent way to launder money,” she said, “you can drop a large amount at one time with very few questions asked and the value of that asset will steadily increase.”
‘Very few’ might even be an exaggeration. A excerpt ‘From Russia With Cash‘ screened at the event showed several London estate agents caught on camera blithely nodding along with Borisovich, who played the role of a corrupt oil minister, much to the entertainment of Kleptoscope’s audience.
But whilst the hapless estate agents’ actions were certainly laughable, the impacts of corruption clearly are not.
“Corruption threatens our economy and makes our country less safe’ explained Dunn. In Russia, Borisovich said with an air of resignation, corruption “has caused irreparable damage to the nation”
But, where does the money go from here? Describing the links between individuals associated with bribery, corruption, and violence in Ukraine and Azerbaijan and back-bench MPs in the UK, Bullough asked whether it is being used to buy influence and access. He couldn’t be certain that these links were crooked, he cautioned, “but it looks bad, it looks concerning.”
“By focussing the scope on these things” he reiterated, “hopefully we can push for greater and greater transparency so when the sunlight is shone on these deals we can say actually it was fine […] we need to know, this is a democracy.”
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The film centres on the Russian city of Ozersk, or City 40, a secretive town surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards that sits next to a plant that produced plutonium in the Cold War and continues to process nuclear waste.
Iranian-born Goetschel, who smuggled herself and a film crew into the town, tells the tale of ordinary people living in one of the most contaminated and deadly places in the world whose inhabitants are led to believe they are the nuclear shield and saviours of the world.
Lifting the veil of secrecy on the town, Goetschel and her team encounter a string of willing participants who risk their lives to warn of the perilous and precarious lives of the town’s inhabitants. Goetschel described the the town as a “twilight zone”, in which its citizens live in a “different dimension, a different concept of time and reality”.
Harding kicked off the Q&A with a discussion of the difficulties Goetschel faced in entering the town which at one time was so secretive it did not appear on Russian maps. Goetschel explained that she and the crew stayed in a sanitarium outside the city and made contact with inhabitants in an effort to convince them to help them enter. “The worst that can happen is that they’ll shoot me dead,” Goetschel said.
The willingness of the documentary’s contributors was also discussed. Goetschel explained that the physical barbed wire that surrounds the town had translated into a psychological fence that could only be broken by telling their story. “You have to understand their mentality,” Goetschel said. “They have lived behind barbed wire fences and that’s their identity. They are not supposed to talk and that’s their identity. They have been told they would be killed. But then there was a click that made them decide to talk. The most important thing was that they knew they were risking their lives. They were thinking we are dying anyway and they trusted me for whatever reason.”
City 40 -film by Samira Goetschel – closed nuclear city in Russia – woman human rights activist there @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/IJTZl6vOD4
— Jill Nicholls (@JillNicholls01) June 14, 2016
Nadezhda Kutepova, a human rights activist and single mother whose story is at the heart of the documentary, has since been forced to flee to France after she was accused of industrial espionage. Asked if she felt guilty that her film may have played a role in forcing Kutepova to quit her home, Groetschel said: “No, she made a choice and she’s on a crusade. She’s a tough woman and she knew what she was doing. The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) had harassed her and her children and she knew the risks.”
https://twitter.com/tgbuckley/status/742831042508251137
The editing process also posed a challenge for Groetschel and she cut the film three times from scratch in an effort to “create a narrative which would be helpful and would have meaning”. Groetschel said that no one in the city had seen the film because internet and TV is so tightly controlled but she hoped to show it to Kutepova in France.
]]>The Frontline Club played host to a heated and at times fractious debate on Brexit and the future of Europe on Thursday 24 March 2016.
The discussion, hosted by BBC Chief Correspondent Gavin Hewitt, considered Brexit – and more generally the European project – in the context of the terrorists attacks that struck Brussels on Tuesday 22 March.
“Europe has had to face up to some of its illusions,” Hewitt said. “With the Eurozone crisis, it has had to face up to the fact that the system it built could not sustain the financial crisis. And with the financial crisis, it had to focus on whether Schengen works.”
Dutch journalist and writer Joris Luyendijk branded Brussels the “tipping point” that will seal the demise of the European project. He argued forcefully for the UK’s exit from Europe, insisting: “the heart of the English was never in it anyway.”
Premium #Brexitainment at the @frontlineclub tonight.
Powerful opening by @JLbankingblog. pic.twitter.com/0BY4JODCug— Wolfgang Blau (@wblau) March 24, 2016
Luyendijk, who authored Swimming with Sharks: My Journey Into the World of the Bankers, added: “Europe is suffering from chronic problems which together form a crisis. The EU either needs to fall apart or something new should be built.”
Annalisa Piras, journalist, director and producer of The Great European Disaster Movie, is a fierce advocate of the European Union, describing its existence as a historic necessity.” The Italian filmmaker said that the crises Europe is confronting require more cooperation.
“Even if the UK leaves the EU, the threat will grow. ISIS are proving they are growing more and more ambitious and lethal by the day. The only way to respond to that threat is with more cooperation,” she said.
Toby Young rubbished Piras’ assertion: “Closer cooperation is always the answer of federalists.” The associate editor of the Spectator said: “There is a crisis of faith and that is why Europe is dying. European intellectuals have far too much faith in the EU and far too little in nationalism. They exaggerate the role the EU has played in peace, when it is more down to NATO, and don’t recognise that the rise of Islamism is because of a decline in nationalism.”
Natalie Nougayrède suggested that the EU’s failure to tackle the twin refugee and terrorism crises has boosted the far right movement across Europe. “Brussels will bring more energy to those who say each and every nation in Europe needs to bring up the drawbridge,” the Guardian leader writer and former Le Monde managing editor said.
“That is an illusion. European leaders need to send an urgent signal to voters that they are taking steps to finding at least part of the solution.” Nougayrède hailed Angela Merkel’s deal with Turkey which, despite criticism of it as a bilateral deal that undermined unity, was a sign that Europe “was trying to stem the flow of migrants.”
Young, on the other hand, said Merkel had made a series of blunders, the most serious of which was to “lay out the welcome mat for refugees without consultation with European neighbours… in order to expiate German war guilt.”
Young said that Britain’s exit from the EU would hopefully propel the institution towards reform or preferably allow it to “deflate in a peaceable way rather than erupt in violence.”
Piras struck back that “before throwing our toys out the pram”, we should ask how we can fix the European Union. Nougayrède agreed, insisting that the EU may prove to be an “easy punching ball”, but it is not true that the institution cannot reform.
Luyendijk offered a European perspective on Brexit, telling the audience that there is little interest in the UK among European leaders. “The refugee crisis is a big issue, not you,” he said.
Full house @frontlineclub @BBCGavinHewitt @nnougayrede @toadmeister @jorisluyendijk to discuss #brexit seen from EU pic.twitter.com/CLp5bDQPFv
— @annalisap (@Annalisap) March 24, 2016
Asked to give their predictions for how Europe would look in 10 years’ time, Luyendijk said: “We will look back and wonder why we wasted so much time on things like Brexit while other bigger issues were left untouched.”
Piras hoped to “live in a Europe that is better than the one we founded.” She said: “Europe has given us great things and tomorrow we can become better and stronger.”
Gavin Hewitt underlined the strong commitment from European leaders to the project. “Despite successive crises, the establishment won’t row back on the project. Never underestimate their commitment to make the European Union project work.”
Young said that the Leave campaign will “probably win” the European referendum. “I hope it will stimulate other independence movements in other countries which are vital for genuine reform.”
Nougayrède suggested that the EU will pull through despite the challenges it faces. “Enough people are aware that we live in a globalised world. We must act as a collective club, not individual nations. We need to think collectively to shape realities that affect us, not just be submitted to them.”
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