“In citizen journalism…trust is generated not by the brand name or the glory of the institution, it’s generated through transparency.“ – Jay Rosen, film subject

Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the revolutionary rise of the “citizen investigative journalist” collective known as Bellingcat, dedicated to redefining breaking news by exploring the promise of open source investigation.

This highly skilled and controversial collective exposes the truth behind global news stories – from identifying the exact location of an Islamic State murder through analysis of a video distributed on YouTube, to tracking the story behind the mysterious poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK, Bellingcat hunts down answers using social media, reconstruction techniques and audio analysis.

From his East Midlands home, de facto leader Eliot Higgins and his team of volunteer truth-seekers put newspapers, networks and governments to the test, shedding light on the fight for journalistic integrity in the era of fake news and alternative facts.

For further information about the Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2019, click here.

This groundbreaking documentary from Memento films and ARTE provides rare testimonies from Daesh defectors and those who have helped them escape. Gaining unprecedented access, directors Thomas Dandois and Francois-Xavier Tregan capture what daily life is like inside Daesh and expose the conditions surrounding the dangerous process of exfiltration.

In southeast Turkey, a few dozen kilometres from war-torn Syria, at great risk to themselves, a clandestine network is exfiltrating fighters who have decided to leave Daesh. For the first time, these deserters have agreed to give a detailed account of the roles they played and what life is like under the yoke of Islamic State.

Most of them have lived in Raqqa, the political and military capital of the terrorist group. Personal accounts of this sort are extremely rare because, in general, Daesh deserters go into hiding and keep quiet. If they give themselves up to their country’s authorities, they are immediately imprisoned and can no longer have any contact with their lawyers or families.

The exfiltration network, made up of long-term fighters of the Free Syrian Army, has agreed to reveal a few of its working methods. By helping the deserters to flee and by collecting their testimonies, they want to denounce Islamic State’s lies, its false promises, its cult of violence and its widespread corruption. The members of the network are convinced that, in doing so, they will be able to discourage future Jihad candidates and block precious recruitment channels.

Directed by: Thomas Dandois and Francois-Xavier Tregan
Produced by: Memento, ARTE GEIE
Year: 2016
Runtime: 58′

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, drones, or as the military prefers to call them “unmanned aerial vehicles,” have winged from an obscure surveillance tool to a central weapon in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

To explain why, investigative journalist and Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize-winner Chris Woods spoke about his new book Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone War at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 15 April with Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight.

Woods, whose work has followed the development of drone warfare since 2011, described speaking with spies, soldiers, victims, and advocates to understand how these remote weapons have affected not only civilians and conventional battlefields, but the legality of secret assassination.

Today, with one in three RAF strikes against the Islamic State carried out by reaper drones, he looked ahead to how the technology will impact warfare in years to come.

A Brief History of Drones

Drones had been in the works for decades before 9/11. But had the attack not happened, the CIA’s Predator drone would probably have been sent back to the drawing board, said Woods, adding that it turned out to be quite good at two things: surveillance and assassination.

“When I spoke with a lot of elderly generals, they told me that there used to be this huge rift between the war fighting bit of the Air Force and the intelligence gathering Air Force,” he said. “They didn’t want to arm surveillance aircraft.”

But that changed when the CIA began using weaponised drones to strike in Pakistan in 2004. “By 2008 they pretty much destroyed Al Qaeda,” Woods said. But “the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan began being used as cover for a much more conventional drone program across the border [in Afghanistan], much more like the bombing of Laos and Cambodia in Vietnam, but under the name of ‘targeted killing’,” he continued.

The CIA “did things in Pakistan that would not be tolerated on a conventional battlefield,” he said, adding that even under Obama “the CIA was deliberately bombing rescuers and mass funerals attended by hundreds of people.”

Is ‘targeted killing’ with drones legal?

Drones were a heavy presence in the 2014 war in Gaza. However, when it comes to ‘targeted killing’ programs the Israelis, unlike the Americans, have worked out a legal framework that went all the way to their Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court judgment in 2006 was quite interesting and said that assassinations weren’t lawful nor unlawful, each had to be judged on its individual merit,” said Woods.

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America, by contrast, has “really blocked the examination of their program at every possible turn,” he said. “And, in fact, the Department of Justice puts ridiculous effort in preventing the U.S. federal courts from engaging on the lawfulness of the American program,” he added, suggesting the assassination program “comes out of that same legal black hole” as Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition.

Under Obama, ‘targeted killing’ becomes “just another plank of American foreign policy,” he said. But “there is still a huge question mark about whether this is somewhere where we want to go,” and, “whether this is somewhere we want other nations to go.”

Where are the drones headed?

In the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, US Central Command claim they are not killing civilians. But this feeds into the “fiction of the perfect war” that drones create, said Woods.

In the past, U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden has said “we can’t give guarantees that we’re not going to kill civilians,” said Woods. “I think that’s honest. That’s a grown up way of dealing with it,” he continued. But “in terms of accountability, can we hold the coalition members to account for what’s happening in Iraq and Syria?” he asked.

Proportionally, drones are killing fewer civilians than weapons 20 years ago, “and a hell of a lot less than we were 50 years ago,” Woods argued. But it’s a challenging question to answer whether this has an impact on radicalisation. “That is the problem, and we just don’t know what the implications of that will be ten years, 20 years down the line,” he said. “We’re telling a lot of people we’re doing the right thing at the moment without really knowing what we’re doing. We may yet reap what we’re sowing.”

Red lines have been set and crossed, inquiries have been conducted and talks have been attempted, and yet the conflict in Syria continues to devastate the lives of its population. In what can only be described as one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, more than 200,000 have died and 12.2 million are now in desperate need of aid.

The levels of suffering are unimaginable and yet the international community seems to be standing by. Over four years since the conflict in Syria began, we will be asking if there is any sign of light at the end of the tunnel.

We will be reflecting on the decisions that have been made and how they have contributed to the current state of affairs in Syria. With that understanding, we will look at the situation in the country today and how developments could be made.

Chaired by Owen Bennett-Jones, freelance journalist and host of Newshour on the BBC World Service. As a correspondent with the BBC he has reported from over 60 countries. He is author of Pakistan: Eye of the Storm and his first novel Target Britain.

The panel:

Jonathan Littell is a novelist and journalist. He is the author of Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising, documenting his time in Hom in 2012. His novel The Kindly Ones, originally published in French as Les Bienveillantes, became a bestseller and won the coveted Prix Goncourt and the Académie Française’s Prix de Littérature. Previously he worked for a humanitarian agency, Action Contre La Faim, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Orwa Nyrabia is a Syrian film producer and activist. Born in 1977, raised in Homs, he lived in Damascus until the end of 2013. An actor by training, he worked as a journalist, and since 2005 has dedicated most of his time to documentary, producing the award-winning Silvered Water and Return to Homs. As an activist, he was a board member of the Syrian revolution’s leading constellation, Local Coordination Committees (LCC), served as LCC’s head of humanitarian aid and is associated with the Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian independent human rights organisation.

Laila Alodaat is a Syrian human rights lawyer specialising in international law of armed conflicts. She is also a trainer of international humanitarian law and has worked on several conflict situations including Syria, Libya, Iraq and Pakistan. She currently works on the MENA agenda programme at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and is also the Chair person of Syria Justice and Accountability Centre and a board member of Badael, a Syrian organisation working to promote non-violence.

Nerma Jelacic is a former journalist who has spent the last 15 years working on war crimes and criminal justice issues in conflict and post-conflict countries. From 2008 to 2014 she worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia before joining the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an organisation investigating and documenting atrocities in Syria which has already resulted in the completion of three trial-ready case-files.

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Photo: Ayman Oghanna. ALEPPO, August 3rd 2012. In areas liberated by the Free Syrian Army, protestors took to Aleppo’s streets to demonstrate against the Assad regime, following Friday prayers.