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

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

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

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

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

Running time: 100 minutes

The Directors:

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

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

The Frontline Club will screen a short documentary, made by journalist Shafiur Rahman on the current crisis, followed by a panel discussion on the ongoing atrocities that are afflicting the region.

Shafiur Rahman’s documentary on Rohingya women uses harrowing footage from the border with Myanmar as well as devastating testimony from Rohingya refugees. The panel will further help to decipher whether this is an ethno-religious conflict or something more?

Chair

Professor Penny Green

Professor Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London. Professor Green has published extensively on state crime theory (including her monograph with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption), state violence, Turkish criminal justice and politics, ‘natural’ disasters, transnational crime, mass forced evictions/displacement and resistance to state violence. She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, Palestine/Israel, Tunisia and Myanmar. Professor Green is Founder and Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) – a multi-disciplinary international initiative to collate, analyse and disseminate research-based knowledge about criminal state practices and resistance to them. Professor Green’s most recent projects include a comparative study of civil society resistance to state crime in Turkey, Tunisia, Colombia, PNG, Kenya and Myanmar); Myanmar’s genocide against its Muslim ethnic Rohingya; and forced evictions in Palestine/Israel.

Speakers

Shafiur Rahman 

Shafiur Rahman is an independent documentary maker. His projects highlight issues around human rights, migration and poverty.  Filming in a wide variety of contexts and countries from Bangladesh, Libya, Italy,  South Africa,  Kenya, the US, his work has taken him most recently to the Myanmar/Bangladesh border. He has been documenting  Rohingya refugee stories since 2016

Dr Azeem Ibrahim

Dr Azeem Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He is also author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has previously been appointed an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale University. Over the years, Dr Ibrahim has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development. In his most recent roles, he served as National Security and Defence Policy Advisor to the Leader of the (UK) Labour Party, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, and the Shadow Cabinet from 2012 to 2015, and as Strategic Policy Advisor to the Chairman of Pakistan’s PTI party, Imran Khan. Read his recent interview in New York magazine here.

Dr Thomas MacManus

Thomas MacManus is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the International State Crime Initiative in the Department of Law. Thomas is admitted as an Attorney-at-Law (New York) and Solicitor (Ireland). Thomas is an Editor in Chief of State Crime journal, and Joint Editor of Amicus Journal: Assisting Lawyers for Justice on Death Row. He is also a Director of the Colombia Caravana.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind 

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist who has been working on issues relating to women, population and war for over a decade. She is a Harvard Nieman Fellow 2016, and recently finished a year of research at the university on war, and how we tell stories about modern conflict. She has written about her experiences as a photojournalist for The New York Times, TIME LightBox, Nieman Reports and National Geographic. As a photographic storyteller, her focus has been on long-form narrative reportage for monthly magazines. Anastasia is currently in Bangladesh covering the Rohingya crisis for Human Rights Watch.

On 3 August 2014, Daesh militants attacked and took over Sinjar in northern Iraq, a Kurdish-controlled town that was predominantly inhabited by Yazidis.

It was a normal, unbearably hot August day and young Yazidi girl Rukan (11) and her friends had decided to play in the shade, building toys and playing hide and seek, when suddenly they heard cars and approaching gun fire. The genocide against the Yazidis was unfolding – the 74th of its kind.

The so-called Islamic State would brutally slaughter men and women, kidnap the girls and leave the rest of the families with nothing. As thousands of civilians fled to the Sinjar Mountains to find safety, they found themselves stranded without food and water.

Two years on, the plight of the Yazidis has disappeared from international attention. In making Descendants of an Angel – the first feature length documentary focusing on the genocide – the team at Dokumanity films travelled to Shingal, Iraq. They met with Yazidi commanders that were still there and refugees, young and old, that had to leave everything behind. Capturing first-hand accounts of the genocide and the struggles Yazidi refugees are continuing to face, Descendants of an Angel is an invaluable and sensitive record of the 2014 genocide that is carried by the voices of its survivors.

Production company: Dokumanity Films
Country: Germany
Year: 2016

With his provocative question, “why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?”, Raphael Lemkin changed the course of history. An extraordinary testament to one man’s perseverance, the Sundance award-winning film Watchers of the Sky examines the life and legacy of the Polish-Jewish lawyer and linguist who coined the term genocide. Before Lemkin, the notion of accountability for war crimes was virtually non-existent. After experiencing the barbarity of the Holocaust firsthand, he devoted his life to convincing the international community that there must be legal retribution for mass atrocities targeted at minorities. An impassioned visionary, Lemkin confronted world apathy in a tireless battle for justice, setting the stage for the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Inspired by Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem From Hell, this multi-faceted documentary interweaves Raphael Lemkin’s struggle with the courageous efforts of four individuals keeping his legacy alive: Luis Moreno Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the ICC; Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Ben Ferencz, a former Nuremberg prosecutor still tenaciously lobbying the UN for peace; and Rwandan Emmanuel Uwurukundo, UN Refugee Agency Field Director in Chad. Alternating live interviews with rare archival footage and striking animation, Watchers of the Sky illuminates the compassion and bravery of these humanitarians and powerfully demonstrates the ability of global activism to give a voice to the silent victims of genocide.

Directed by: Edet Belzberg
Produced by: Amelia Green-Dove and Kerry Propper
Country: USA
Year: 2014
Runtime: 120′

Cinema for Peace is a non-profit organisation based in Berlin that aims to raise awareness for the social relevance of films, and to make active use of the influence of film on the perception and resolution of social, political and humanitarian challenges.

‘[Photography] isn’t necessarily about creating images; it’s about experiencing life and experiencing stories. Images are just a side effect.’

On Tuesday 27 October, American-Armenian photographer Diana Markosian joined an audience at the Frontline Club to discuss her work with Fiona Rogers, the founder of Firecracker – a platform for the promotion of European women photographers – and the global business manager at Magnum Photos International. 1915 is Markosian’s latest project, for which she travelled to Armenia to meet the last living survivors of the Armenian genocide that took place at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Fiona Rogers and Diana Markosian at the Frontline Club

1915 was preceded by a series called ‘Inventing my Father’ (2013-14). Markosian was taken to the United States by her mother when she was seven. “For fifteen years I didn’t know anything about my father. A few years ago I decided to travel back to Armenia to find him… And all these years later I found my father, standing just how I left him: in the doorway, neither fully in or out of my life.”

“Through photography, we found a way to connect and to create new memories… My father opened this distant past for me.”

At the same time, reconnecting to her father proved difficult: “So much of it hurt and there is no guidebook in finding a father.”

In the same period, Markosian was asked to make a series of photographs of survivors of the Armenian genocide. One of her aims “was to reconnect Turkey and Armenia, because there’s so much tension between the two countries and as a photographer you want to move the conversation forward.”

Markosian found three individuals who remembered the genocide. “I asked them about their last memories in Turkey. I went to Turkey, photographed that memory and brought it back to them a century later.”

Yepraksia, now aged 110 years old, remembered crossing a river with her family that was coloured “red, full of blood. I went back and photographed that river,” said Markosian.

Another survivor of the Armenian genocide, Movses, remembered the church in his village and asked Markosian to place his image on the stones of the church, which is now a ruin.

She said: “When I was travelling to his village and exploring it I found everything that he had described to me: the oranges that he remembered eating, the sheep and the sea.”

Markosian continued: “Upon seeing this image, Movses’ reaction was indescribable. He began to dance and sing. His whole goal was to hold this board as close as he could as a way of going back in time.”

Markosian gave her photographs to the families, who all placed them in their bedrooms.

“Movses said: ’Now I get to wake up in my village’.”

Movses looking at his village

Mariam was just a baby when the genocide started. “She was taken in by a Kurdish family… Mariam asked me to bring back dirt for her, so she could be buried in Turkish soil.”

While working on the project, Markosian often felt she lacked the authority to do a story about the Armenian genocide. “Being Armenian is not enough,” she said.

But while interviewing the survivors, she understood that “this wasn’t so much about the genocide as much as the memory that they held. Because they were children when they escaped… it started resonating with me and my past, of being removed from my country.” Markosian’s own loss made it possible for her to relate to the three survivors.

“It was really difficult for me to identify myself as being Armenian” said Markosian. “These three individuals opened something inside of me and they allowed me to connect with this culture and this history.”

.@dianamarkosian & I will be discussing her Armenian project @frontlineclub tonight. https://t.co/OS9KGkNBLm pic.twitter.com/NS23C32DXP

— Fiona Rogers (@Fiona_Rogers) October 27, 2015

Rogers asked Markosian how she managed to handle the enormity of the subject.

“These individuals… guided me back to their past,” Markosian replied. “They are the ones who built this narrative.”

She continued: “This idea of collaborating with your subjects really appeals to me in my work now, because I think it strengthens the work and it makes the work more honest.”

A century after the genocide, the poignancy and topicality of the event was proven by passionate and emotional remarks from members of the audience.

In this multi-award winning companion piece to The Act of Killing, filmed before its release, Joshua Oppenheimer further explores the terrible legacy of the Indonesian genocide fifty years ago, this time through the lens of one family.

Adi was born in 1968, two years after his brother Ramli was slaughtered in front of many eyewitnesses. Now an optometrist, Adi lives with his elderly parents and his children. Not only does he live under the ongoing rule of his brother’s killers, but he must listen to his children regurgitate the propaganda that instigated the killing, and is still being perpetuated in schools.

Adi decides to confront some of the perpetrators of the genocide, who are surprised when his questions are more probing than Oppenheimer‘s. His breaking of the silence leads to some electrifying scenes, in a film where the beauty of the Indonesian landscape belies the bone-chilling horrors carried out there in the name of democracy.

Radically different to Oppenheimer’s previous film, The Look of Silence is equally shocking and keenly observed. Filmed in his characteristic visual style, the film bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

“One of the greatest and most powerful documentaries ever made. A profound comment on the human condition.” – Errol Morris

“Profound, visionary, stunning.” – Werner Herzog

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Producer: Signe Byrge Sørensen
Year: 2014
Runtime: 103′
Distributor: Dogwoof UK
www.thelookofsilence.co.uk

Holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan, 105, slowly approaches a life-size landscape.

He pauses, looks at the image, and begins to sing: “My home… My Armenia.”

It’s the first time Movses is seeing his home in 98 years.

A century ago, on the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, one and a half million of them were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country.

The picture Movses is looking at is taken by Armenian-American photographer Diana Markosian. She travelled to Armenia to meet Movses and other survivors, to ask them about their last memories of their early home. She then retraced their steps in Turkey to retrieve a piece of their lost homeland.

She will be joining us in conversation with Fiona Rogers, global business development manager at Magnum Photos International & founder of Firecracker, to show her work and share the stories of the survivors she met who, 100 years on, still remember their home.

Diana Markosian is an Armenian-American photographer whose work explores the relationship between memory and place. She received her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism at 20. Her work has since taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world, where she has worked on both personal and editorial work. Her images can be found in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Her work is represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

Within the space of three short months in 1994, a million people were murdered in the genocide in Rwanda. Populated by two irreconcilable tribes — the Tutsis and the majority Hutus — the country had long been steeped in a divisive antagonism.

Hutu women as well as men took up arms, violently killing their neighbours and taking commanding roles within armed groups. In Shades of True eight female perpetrators who have been imprisoned for their involvement in the genocide recount their experiences with clarity and self-scrutiny.

Immaculée admits to being an “animal” and undeserving of her traumatised son Jérôme’s forgiveness. He laments, “What is dirty will never regain its purity.” Filmmakers Violaine Baraduc and Alexandre Westphal guide us through some of the darkest atrocities of war by way of the women’s memories — and by the impossible love between a mother and her son.

Directed by Alexandre Westphal and Violaine Baraduc
Country: France
Runtime: 88′

Burden of Peace tells the impressive story of Claudia Paz Y Paz, the first woman to lead the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Guatemala. Ravaged for years by a devastating civil war, in which nearly 200,000 Mayan Indians were systematically massacred, the country today is one of the most crime-ridden in the world. Paz Y Paz starts a frontal attack against corruption, drug gangs and impunity and does what everyone had hitherto held to be impossible: she arrests former dictator Efraín Rios Montt on charges of genocide against the Mayan Indians.

Each year, nearly 6,000 people are murdered in Guatemala, and the individuals responsible almost always avoid prosecution. When Claudia Paz Y Paz took office in 2010, senior political officials openly criticised her soft spoken demeanour and questioned her ability to combat issues of crime and corruption, claiming that the position of Attorney General is not suited to a human rights lawyer.

Directed by Joey Boink
Producer: Framewerk
Duration: 76′
Year: 2015
For any enquiries contact info@framewerk.nl