When people think of diaspora populations, their first thought tends to be of refugee populations, the migrant crisis, and communities fleeing conflict as a result of what’s reported in the media. However, this is only part of the story. Often these scattered populations across the globe continue to have an enormous impact on their homelands.

The European Research Council has sponsored 5 years of extensive research and close to 500 first-hand interviews among Kosovo, Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Kurdish, Iraqi and Palestinian diasporas, and a large-scale survey. These displaced, real, diverse people, living in European countries from the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and France give us a unique insight into the homelands from which they originate.

This resourceful, entrepreneurial section of the population are important actors in the conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction processes of their homelands, be that Iraq, Palestine, Bosnia or Armenia.
Conflict-generated diasporas can have a huge influence on war and peace, and it is often something that is under reported in the media.

Dr. Maria Koinova, Principal Investigator for the ERC Project implemented at Warwick University, and her team will present their paper “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”, and be joined by journalists to discuss the wider importance of their work and how it can influence public policy today.

For more information on the project, visit their website here.

Chair

Chris Morris – BBC Correspondent

Morris regularly contributes to BBC News, Today and From Our Own Correspondent, and is the author of the 2005 Granta publication The New Turkey. He was BBC Turkey Correspondent from 1997-2001 based first in Ankara and later opening the BBC’s new bureau in Istanbul covering the 1999 İzmit earthquake and the arrest and trial of the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan. From 2001-2005 Morris was the BBC Europe Correspondent based in Brussels covering the European Union, the proposed European constitution, and other European stories.

Speakers

Dr Maria Koinova – Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty”

Before joining Warwick University in 2012, Dr. Maria Koinova held research fellowships and visiting scholar positions at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., the European University Institute, and Uppsala University, among other academic institutions. Koinova is the author of Ethnonationalist Conflict in Postcommunist States. Since 2006 Koinova has worked on topics related to diasporas, conflicts, post-conflict reconstruction and democratization, and has conducted multi-sited fieldwork among the Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Croatian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Serbian, and Ukrainian diasporas in the US and/or in Europe.

Tony Barber – Financial Times Europe News Editor

Tony is a columnist and specialist writer on European political, economic and business news and currently the Europe editor for the Financial Times. From 1990 – 1997 he was the East Europe Editor and Europe Editor at the Independent. Before that, he worked as a Reuters Foreign Correspondent from a range of cities from New York, Vienna, Moscow, Warsaw to Belgrade.

Dr Ben Margulies –  post-doctoral Research Fellow, University of Warwick 

Ben’s research background is primarily in comparative and European politics. He is also interested in the way that nations and party systems respond to migration and globalisation. His Ph.D. “Liberal Parties and Party Systems” used data taken from European party manifestos to track when parties moved left or right, and showed how these movements affected vote shares that liberal parties received. Ben joined this project to help develop a large-scale survey among conflict-generated diasporas in Europe.

Dr Dženta Karabegović – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Dženeta’s Ph.D. research project analyses diaspora influence on a weak state in post-conflict environments. Her work has looked into Bosnian diaspora mobilisation in Europe around issues of transitional justice, genocide remembrance, and political participation. This research was undertaken in the form of interviews, participant observation and process tracing with multi-sited fieldwork. Dženeta holds an MA. from the University of Chicago and was a visiting scholar from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

Dr Oula Kadhum – Ph.D. University of Warwick

Oula Kadhum’s research investigates in a comparative perspective diaspora mobilisation for state-building following the 2003 intervention in Iraq. Her work explores how the diaspora in the UK and Sweden mobilised towards this end and why there were differences in their approaches to building the state. Oula completed her Masters degree at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, a postgraduate certificate in Education at Kings College London, and a Bachelors degree from Queen Mary University of London.

Featured image: protestors demonstrating against Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to Strasbourg. France Oct 4th, 2015

On Monday 16 June, the Frontline club hosted director Karen Stokkendal Poulsen and veteran European diplomat Robert Cooper for the screening of Poulsen’s new film, The Agreement.

Sir Robert Cooper and director Karen Stokkendal Poulsen in conversation at the Frontline Club.

Before Serbia could begin negotiations to join the European Union, it had to prove it could achieve a modus vivendi with the disputed territory of Kosovo. This gripping film follows negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, lead by Cooper, as they sought to reach a settlement on peaceful co-existence.

Ahead of tonight's screening of The Agreement Karen Poulsen & diplomat Robert Cooper were interviewed by the BBC http://t.co/g0TJ1EZAP2

— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) June 16, 2014

When asked about the uniqueness of the film and how the idea for the project came about, Poulsen explained how the piece began its journey to reality:

“I was part of organising a conference . . . about democracy and fragile states and I was utterly bored. I didn’t like the conference at all, I thought it was just people talking about the word ‘democracy’ in 10,000 different ways . . . but I was kind of interested in the new European External Action Service. So I was waiting for Robert Cooper to come on stage and I could not have been more sceptical when he was about to speak.

“Then I thought, ‘Well here is actually something real. I am curious. When he’s talking I actually want to know what is behind this.’ And then I thought maybe . . . the film could be a way of meeting him and get behind what he is doing and also I thought it would be interesting to make a film about European Union policies from another perspective which you rarely see, from the inside.”

The question was then put to Cooper about the unusual nature of the request to film such negotiations so intimately and whether he needed much convincing. Cooper replied:

“The idea that someone might make a film about diplomacy seemed a reasonably good idea because there are lots of films about wars but not very much seen about diplomacy, which is an attempt not to have wars and so I thought it was worth a try. My general attitude was ‘Why not?’

“I had to get Borko [Stefanovic] and Edita [Tahiri] to agree but they were quite happy. Then I had a bit more trouble with the administration who didn’t think this was a very regular thing to do but eventually they also said, ‘Well, nobody minds.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry, we have complete editorial control,’ which actually wasn’t true!”

Cooper was then challenged on the intricacies and difficulties of brokering such a sensitive agreement. When asked about the  difficulty of remaining truly impartial, he said:

“As far as I was concerned, in a way it was very easy to remain impartial because my job was to get an agreement and if I didn’t get an agreement, I failed. If one or the other side thought that I was on the side of the other then that was going to be fatal.

“To begin with the Kosovars assumed that we were somehow not on their side because not all the EU member states had recognised Kosovo, and I was happy that at the first round of meetings we had, Edita realised that actually we were neutral.”

The whole film takes place against the backdrop of a short and intense time period with an absolute deadline, ahead of the start of Serbia’s accession negotiations. When asked about whether Cooper felt this deadline had forced negotiations onward, he replied:

“It wasn’t just about a deadline. . . . The Serbs had an objective as well as a deadline. They wanted to join the European Union – this is President Tadic’s policy – and bit by bit they came to understand that this wasn’t going to happen unless they seriously moved on Kosovo.

“In a way I feel that the film . . . well, it’s a bit hard on Borko, because Borko was in a tough position. Actually it’s the Serbs who are making the concessions, that’s why he was always in difficulty, that’s why he kept us waiting for six hours . . . but he was in a difficult position. The structure of the negotiations meant that the Serbs were destined to agree things which they did not want to agree. Now, did they implement them or not? Well, that’s another story.”

Poulsen also commented on the situation particularly in the north of Kosovo and how this agreement was only a small part in what is a wider and ongoing process to improve relations between the two countries:

“The north is mainly run by fear, and there was a lot of resistance against the dialogue in general. There was a resistance against Belgrade . . . and against Brussels, but at the same time it’s very controlled and I was very surprised. . . . Although it might seem out of law it has this controlling system and the important thing for the implementation to be successful is to have somebody there that they can trust, but leaving in this agreement, telling them, persuading them, that this is the way forward.”

Poulsen and Cooper both hope to screen The Agreement elsewhere in London soon. News about film screenings and other information relating to the film can be found on their Facebook page here.

Every year thousands of organs are bought and sold on a black market that flourishes in dozens of countries, where the rule of law is a hostage to the dollar sign. Director Ric Esther Bienstock investigates the lucrative and shadowy world of black market organ trafficking.

With unprecedented access to all the players, Tales from the Organ Trade explores the legal, moral and ethical issues involved in this complex life and death business. From the Street-level brokers to the rogue surgeons; the impoverished men and women who are willing to sacrifice a slice of their own bodies for a quick payday; and the desperate patients who face the agonising choice of obeying the law or saving their lives. Speaking openly they reveal a harsh reality, where the villains often save lives and the medical establishment, helpless too, watches people die.

Directed by Ric Esther Bienstock
Duration: 82′
Year: 2013

I’ve spoken to him previously for the Frontline Club about his Frontline bloggers project. 

In this interview with David Bailey, Maj. Smyth talks in some detail about how he used social media to tell the story of British military deployments from Kosovo to Afghanistan. 

These are a few of the things that caught my eye (after I’d spent a few moments puzzling over the indoor brick wall):

1. In Kosovo, Maj. Smyth began making 2 minute YouTube videos and sending the URLs to journalists in Sarajevo to try to capture their interest. Putting these videos online meant they could also be viewed by military wives, girlfriends and families in the UK.

2. He says that in order to get coverage in national newspapers or on the BBC, he needed an "incredible story". But a blog allowed him to provide "behind the scenes" footage and to publish smaller stories for interested audiences on a regular basis.   

3. He targeted influential defence correspondents and outlets such as CNN’s i-Report spreading his news "footprint over a wider area".  

4. He describes how his blogging team inadvertently trumped the established news procedures of Buckingham Palace and the MoD Press Office.

The team had published a blog post revealing a visit by Princess Anne to Camp Bastion an hour too early. He claims the subsequent coverage of the post on the BBC and in The Times and The Telegraph "surprised a few people".

When the Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power it brought to an end a 13-year rule that had seen the country torn apart by bloody conflict, with thousands of people killed. 

The man who had been feted by world leaders at the height of his powers as Serbian President in 1995 was forced out of office amid street protests and a general strike after losing the September 2000 election and later faced trial in the Hague for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. 

Ten years after the October 5th revolution we will be bringing together journalists, fillmmakers and experts who were there to discuss these remarkable events and their impact. What was the legacy of the former President who died in his cell in 2006?

Chaired by Bill Neely, International Editor for ITV News.

With:

Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director, Amnesty International and co-author of Small Acts of Resistance How courage, tenacity and ingenuity can change the world;

Norma Percy, co-executive producer (with Brian Lapping) of the BBC series, The Fall of Milosevic;

Allan Little, BBC News special correspondent and programme presenter;

Maggie O’Kane, editorial director of GuardianFilms and former foreign correspondent with the newspaper, she has covered most of the world’s major conflicts over the last decade.

You can now watch the event here.
Latest debate from the Frontline Club events room in Paddington, London on Independence in Kosovo is now online. The discussion includes contributions from journalist and former spokesman for the Kosova government Daut Dauti, Balkan specialist author/journalist Tim Judah, journalist Misha Glenny who specialises in south-eastern Europe, Dr Nebojsa Vladisavljevic who is tutorial fellow at LSE, specialist in democratisation, nationalist mobilisation, communism/post-communism with a particular focus on former Yugoslavia. BBC Foreign Affairs correspondent Alan Little chairs the discussion. Little is the co-author of the much-acclaimed Death of Yugoslavia.

In another superb multimedia presentation, writer Nicholas Wood and photographer Andrew Testa of the New York Times talk about the war in Kosovo that began nearly nine years ago and how the legacy continues today on the verge of the country’s independence.

The spirit of the place, however, could not be more different. There is now an air of expectation so heightened that further delay is almost unthinkable. The genie of independence is out, and it can’t be put back into the bottle of Serbian sovereignty. It is now the settled view of the western allies – the US, the EU, most of NATO – that hesitation would be more destabilising than a rapid move toward independence.

There is a view, attributed rightly or wrongly to Paddy Ashdown, which western diplomats in Kosovo reiterate, and it’s this: that some nations, by dint of what they themselves have done, forfeit the moral right to govern. They lose their claim to sovereignty because of what they’ve done. This applied to the British in Ireland in the 1920s. It applies to Kosovo now. It puts moral muscle behind the western consensus that Kosovo can’t do anything about economic development until its “final status” is resolved.

The timetable is agreed. There will be a declaration of intent by the Kosovo parliament early in 2008. The preferred date was the third week in January, just after the Orthodox New Year. Serbia’s presidential election campaign probably means that will now be delayed. So early to mid-February seems more likely.

“This won’t be a Unilateral Declaration of Independence” the incoming Prime Minister Hashim Thaci told me, with his now impressive command of English. “It will be a Co-ordinated Declaration of Independence”. Indeed: it is a measure of the extent to which the internationals are running the show that the timetable has been drawn up in Brussels and Washington and not Pristina.

After the February declaration, there will be a four month transition period, as laid down by the UN-sponsored plan drawn up by the former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. The UN operation will wind down and the EU will send in a team to start running the police and the judiciary. NATO will keep its 16,000 strong presence and reinforce if needs be.

In May or June, if all has gone to plan, there will be a wave of recognitions. The US will recognise. Most NATO allies will follow suit. Twenty six of the 27 EU member states will recognise (only Cyprus will refuse, for reasons that have nothing to do with Kosovo).

Russia will veto Kosovo’s application to become a member state of the UN, but it’s hard to find anyone in (Albanian) Kosovo who cares about that.

In Northern Mitrovica there is much talk among local Serbs of the Hong Kong model. Serbia (belatedly and grudgingly according to western diplomats) offered the Kosovars a deal: sweeping autonomy, the freedom to run everything except foreign affairs, under formal Serbian sovereignty – two systems, one country. Like Hong Kong.

They cannot understand why this generous offer was instantly turned down. The only explanation, they conclude, is that the Albanians were under no pressure to compromise because they had secretly been promised independence by the Americans from the beginning.

In fact, the Kosovars have compromised – quite a lot. The independence they will be getting is not of the kind that prevails in the old democracies of Western Europe. For a start they’re not allowed to have their own army: a defence force of two and a half thousand lightly armed men is all they will be entitled to under the Ahtisaari Plan. They’ve also agreed to radical decentralisation that will give the Serbian populated areas strong local autonomy. And the internationals will retain widespread powers to intervene in the political life of the country. All this the Kosovars have accepted: the independence they will get is known as “supervised independence”. It will remain “supervised” until Kosovo is a mature, western-style democracy that has met all the criteria for EU membership, political as well as economic. That will take years. For the foreseeable future Kosovo will remain a most intriguing experiment: it is, in effect, going to become a little colony of the EU.

What can go wrong? There will be popular fury in Serbia. The Serbian government will be under huge pressure to act in the defence of this latest assault. It is, after all, only 15 years since Serbian public opinion walked hand-in-hand with an aspiration to redraw the borders of Serbia to incorporate two-thirds of Bosnia and one third of Croatia. I remember the unfurling of maps by bearded men in World War Two Chetnik uniforms. All the lands west of the Drina as far as Zadar on the gleaming Adriatic were to be known as “Western Serbia”.

The western gamble is this: that there will be no war because the political environment is radically different to what it was in the 1990s. For a start there is no Milosevic. There are paramilitaries on both sides who are capable of provocative atrocities, but they are no longer state-sponsored. The Albanians know they must be on their best behaviour not just for the four month transition period but for years to come. And Serbia? Serbia too wants to get on with the business of becoming a normal European country. What Serbian government will want to set that whole process back by yet another generation in order to fight an ultimately unwinnable war for a province almost wholly populated by hostile Albanians?

But it is a gamble. It is a gamble that Serbia will act rationally. Here the analogy with Ireland is invoked again, rather hopefully: Ireland, after all, joined the European Community at a time when its constitution still refused to recognise the legitimacy of the 1922 partition; technically it refused to accept the legality of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland while getting on with the pragmatic business of forging a modern, mutually beneficial relationship with the old enemy. Can’t Kosovo and Serbia, ultimately, do something similar?

I recently went to Serbia soon after a fairly prolonged trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and it is stating the obvious to say there is a vast difference between the mayhem in those two countries and the situation in southern Europe.

Despite some fairly bellicose statements from opposing parties the chances of a widespread conflict of the type which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia seem remote and the region is vastly different from what it was during the fighting in the 1990s.

It remains the case, nevertheless, that the tensions and resentments which fuelled the war at the time have not disappeared and are once again coming to the fore with paramilitaries starting to arm themselves in Serbia and Kosovo and police in Macedonia clashing with an Albanian group which was found to have enough weaponry to equip a battalion, including anti-aircraft missiles.

The Serb sense of victimhood is much in evidence in Belgrade among officials and the public alike. This view holds that Serbia has acquiesced to the demands of the international community, handing over Milosevic and others wanted for war crimes to the international court in the Hague, accepting ‘unfair’ terms over the break-up of Yugoslavia, and carrying out internal reforms.

But, goes the refrain, “every time Serbia fulfils a demand from the West, another one appears”.
The handing over of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic remain pre-conditions for Serbia being allowed into the EU. The Serbs however will have you believe that there is now another condition for joining the club: that they must be prepared to lose Kosovo.

But Kosovo is also a political card for the politicians in Belgrade. According to the moderates, allowing Hashim Thaci, the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader who is likely to be the next head of the Kosovar government, to declare independence will drive Serbian voters into the arms of the nationalists.

So, the message to western Europe and the US is either stop the unilateral declaration of independence or pay the consequences.

Furthermore, the renewed interest shown in the Balkans by the Russians, part of President Putin’s recent combative stance towards the West, has given the Serbs a boost of confidence.

Boris Tadic, the ultra-smooth ‘pro-Western’ president who looks more like a US congressman than an old-style Balkan leader, told me and a group of other journalists from Western publications: “Our information is that Ratko Mladic was in Serbia in the middle of 2002. After that he disappeared and we don’t know where he is. If we knew where he and other fugitives were we would arrest them.”

This was all said straight-faced despite Mladic being sighted in Serbia just over 18 months ago and just a few hours after Carla del Ponte, the chief UN war crimes prosecutor, had apparently railed at him over supposed protection continuing to be given to Mladic by elements in the Serbian political and military establishments.

The Serbian government had announced a bounty of a million Euros (£700,000) for Mladic and officials had said they were confident of tracking him down.

This led to Ms del Ponte forecasting an arrest “within weeks” and she was now looking a bit foolish. Asked about one possible solution to the Kosovo crisis – dividing the province among the Serbs and Albanians – the president gave the standard Belgrade line: “What you are asking for is not dividing Kosovo, but dividing Serbia, because the fact remains that Kosovo is part of Serbia. We will not accept that is not the case.”

The various factions in the Balkans blame each other for undermining the peace accords at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia. But there is also the common complaint that the international community has done little to buttress political and economic progress.

The fact that the Balkans has benefited from millions in international funding with Bosnia, for instance, receiving more in economic aid than Afghanistan, is ignored.

But there is little doubt that the West, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, has not been particularly focused on the region and failed to see signs of cracks appearing.

There are signs this will now change. Two senior American security officials, much in evidence in Baghdad, have just been to Belgrade and Pristina.

I met David Slinn, the former British representative in Kosovo who went on to become ambassador to North Korea, in Lashkar Gar a few weeks ago. The redoubtable Slinn had been sent along with a much augmented team to show how seriously the UK government was taking its task in Helmand. He is moving on to another job soon – back to Kosovo.