humanitarian crisis – Frontline Club

Is The Democratic Republic of Congo Close to Breaking Point?

Laura Gane — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 12:47:41 +0000

Armed conflict and long-term political insecurity have created one of the world’s most entrenched humanitarian crises in modern history in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Last year alone 1.7 million people were forced to leave their homes (5,500 people a day) and the UN documented more than 12,000 reports of human rights violations. Adding to the problem was a delay in Presidential and legislative elections in the Congo as Joseph Kabila refuses to step down despite the Catholic Church in December 2016 reaching a deal to deny him a third term. This compounded with the death of long-standing opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi has created a political deadlock whereby violence in the Kasai region has intensified.

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

Screening: Conflict and Cholera; Yemen’s Catastrophe

Laura Gane — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 11:16:12 +0000

The Frontline Club will be screening a new BBC documentary on Yemen followed by a panel discussion on the ensuing crisis. Earlier this year, journalist Nawal Al-Maghafi and her team were one of the few foreign nationals who managed to enter the country, due to Saudi Arabia’s blockade on international media covering the conflict. The youngest and most vulnerable are paying a terrible price for over two years of war in Yemen. Food, medical shortages and now a deadly cholera outbreak take their toll. This is the worlds largest humanitarian crisis say the UN, with seven million people facing famine and hundreds of thousands infected with cholera. A Saudi led coalition, supported by the US and the UK, has been accused of indiscriminate bombing and blocking the delivery of food and aid in its war with Houthi rebels, who have some support from Iran. Nawal Al-Maghafi reports from Yemen on this unfolding catastrophe.

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.

War, Disaster and Humanitarian Psychiatry

Laura Gane — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 15:48:33 +0000

What happens if the psychiatric hospital in which you have lived for ten years is bombed and all the staff run away? What is it like to be a twelve-year-old and see all your family killed in front of you? Is it true that almost everyone caught up in a disaster is likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?

Dr Lynne Jones has been a psychiatrist working in conflict zones for over 20 years. From treating soldiers in the Bosnian war, to attending to families affected by the Haitian earthquake, or those who lost relatives in the Sri Lankan tsunami, Dr Jones is coming to the Frontline Club to discuss and share her experiences of working in some of the world’s biggest disaster zones. She will be discussing issues such as if there is a right approach to deal with mental health in humanitarian disasters, and is there a different way we approach mental health in crises in third world countries compared to developed ones? Dr Jones’ field diaries have been published in the London Review of Books and her audio diaries broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Joining this discussion is Dr Conor Kenny from Doctors Without Borders. Dr Kenny has been providing healthcare for some of the most vulnerable people in Europe. His first assignment began in Idomeni, a transit camp for refugees on the Greek border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. After residents of the Idomeni camp were evicted, Conor moved to Lesbos to work providing healthcare in specialised camps designated for the most vulnerable refugees on the island. The refugees here face a number of medical and psychosocial problems as a result of their extensive journeys that Dr Kenny has been treating.

Moderator – Rob Williams CEO War Child

Rob Williams is Chief Executive of War Child, the UK charity dedicated to supporting children affected by conflict. War Child delivers psychosocial support, child protection, education and livelihoods programmes in a range of countries affected by war including Central African Republic, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, and The Democratic Republic of Congo, helping children who have been abused, abducted, displaced or separated from their families. Previously in relief and development Rob has worked for Save the Children, the British Red Cross and Concern Worldwide in Africa and Asia leading country programmes and also managing emergency response. In the UK he has been, at various times, Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Chief Executive of Bliss – the premature baby charity, and Chief Executive of the Fatherhood Institute He is married with two children and lives in Cambridge.

Click on the link to see Dr Lynne Jones’ new book, Outside the Asylum: A Memoir of War, Disaster and Humanitarian Psychiatry

South Sudan: The Cost of a Relentless War

Julianne Rooney — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 14:42:12 +0000

As war continues to rage through many parts of South Sudan we will be joined by a cross section of experts engaged in the current crisis. A South Sudan political analyst, a representative of the Foreign office, a journalists who has recently covered the war and a member of the humanitarian community who is providing lifesaving support. This panel discussion will focus on the human cost of the war, as well as what the future holds for the world’s newest country.

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

Arms Trade and Counter-Terrorism: Developments in Yemen’s Civil Conflict

Julianne Rooney — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 13:56:21 +0000

Since Yemen’s civil war began in 2014, the country has been embroiled in fighting between forces loyal to the president, backed by a Saudi-led coalition, and Shia Houthi rebels.

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.