“A story of blockbuster proportions! The Big Lie is an urgent and captivating story, told by a voice the world needs to hear.”  ★★★★ –  EDINBURGH49

“Shaniaz’s storytelling capabilities are intelligent, apt and truly cutting; a welcome break from the more trivial pieces of this year’s Fringe.” ★★★★ – THE LIST

“Shaniaz Hama Ali’s semi-autobiographical play contains all the elements needed for a great story…and like the rest of the fascinating hour that we spend in her company, we applaud her for it.” ★★★★ – BROADWAY BABY

Front Line Club are proud to present The Big Lie, a Edinburgh Fringe success production that is going off Broadway in New York later this year – via a pit stop at Frontline.

In this semi-autobiographical play, Shaniaz is an ambitious associate at Sweden’s leading corporate law firm and is assigned to work with their top client – a global arms manufacturer – to sell arms to Syria. The protagonist, an Iraqi-Kurd and a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurdish people, has to consider whether or not to take on the case. Her conscience tussles with her ambition to become one of the firm’s partners, enabling her to join the ruling class.

The Big Lie makes us question our own morality. In her shoes, would we take on this case?

This humorous, gripping play is written by Hama Ali and directed by Oscar Toeman. Shaniaz worked as an associate at a global corporate law firm in Sweden, where she gained first-hand insight into a world that is normally hidden. Shaniaz fictionalised her experiences at the firm in a film screenplay that caught the interest of a Swedish production company. When Shaniaz moved to London, she made it into a one-woman show to bring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018.

The show won critical praise in Edinburgh with 4 stars reviews from Broadway Baby, the List and Edinburgh49. It was featured in the Scotsman, listed as one of four must-sees by the Daily Record and was nominated for Amnesty Freedom of Speech Award. 

Shaniaz says of The Big Lie, “As a Muslim refugee I wanted to make a play about the racism I experienced growing up in an all-white, working-class neighbourhood in Sweden and why people vote for the far right, for Brexit and Trump. But mostly, I want to tell the truth about the clients of the corporate law firm that I worked in – the wealthy 1% and their role in all of this.”

During the Q&A we’ll be asking tough questions about the meeting points of politics and theatre in our society – and the relationship between art and activism.

Shaniaz Hama Ali is a Kurdish-Iraqi actress who came as a refugee to Sweden at a very young age. She joined the Swedish Labour Party and became the fiscal spokesperson for the Labour youth. But Shaniaz had a passion for acting that never subsided, she resigned from her job as a legal consultant and moved to London to focus on her acting career. She has since then starred in the short film PRACTICE; performed in the critically acclaimed French TV-series The Bureau (Canal+); and most recently in Red Snake, directed by Caroline Fourest, award winning French journalist, in her feature debut.

Oscar Toeman read English at St, Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, and trained as assistant to Roger Michell, Polly Findlay, Blanche McIntyre, Tim Carroll and Lucy Bailey at institutions including Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC and the National Theatre. He was Resident Assistant Director at the Finborough Theatre in 2011, long listed for the JMK Award in 2014 and 2015, a National Theatre Staff Director in 2015, Interim Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio in 2016.

Siana Bangura is a writer, producer and community organiser originally from South East London, now working between London and the West Midlands. Her work primarily focuses on the intersection between race, class and gender, exploring issues such as deaths in custody in the UK, police brutality, and gentrification. Siana is the founder and former editor of Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL and most recently she was Campaigns & Communications Officer for an environmental charity in Birmingham, focusing on mobilising young people to take action in their local communities. Siana’s past contributions as a producer in theatre include ‘Fierce’ (Camden People’s Theatre), ‘Othello’ (English Touring Theatre), and she is currently an artist in residence at The Birmingham Rep. Siana is an alumnus of China Plate Theatre’s The Optimists, Belgrade Theatre’s Critical Mass, and is currently commissioned to write three plays of her own.

The area of East Ghouta is said to be one of the last strongholds of resistance by Syrian opposition forces and as such the target of renewed violence by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and his foreign allies.

The panel invited for the talk included Dr Abdulkarim Ekzayez, a Syrian medical doctor and an epidemiologist; Leila Al-Shami, a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aims to connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe along with Dr Idrees Ahmad, a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling. The evening was hosted by BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.

Bowen began by asking Dr Ekzayez how he manages to work and provide medical care in hostile situations such as East Ghouta to which replied:

We see the same patients that we discharged a few days ago, with even more serious injuries, but they (hospitals) don’t have space to treat patients, they don’t have the medical supplies…they don’t have food, water or any essentials. Even the word catastrophe can not describe what’s happening in East Ghouta.

What can done about the conflict in Syria? UK could expand its Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, support the 5.5m Syrian Refugees into work + schools & help rebuild Raqqa – @BowenBBC at @frontlineclub with @LeilaShami pic.twitter.com/64thtTW1ap

— James Denselow (@jamesdenselow) March 13, 2018

He went on to explained that the Assad regime causes delays and confiscates certain medical supplies provided by UN humanitarian convoys and  they hardly reach the population or meet their basic needs.

He further added: “My interpretation is that they (Assad Regime) use this tactic to weaken the community, because this scenario happened many times before…in Baba Amr in Homs, in Eastern Aleppo and other places. First, they besiege the area, then they target all the civilians, so people don’t have access to healthcare or any essentials.”

The lack of a concerted effort on part of the international community was raised by Al-Shami. She pointed out that the UN has not managed to get aid in these besieged areas such as Eastern Ghouta and starvation is being used as a weapon of war. She commented:

This should not be a negotiating principle, this is a basic humanitarian standard.  The aid has to reach these communities in need. We need more efforts, we need air drops of aid. The international community has to start asking questions when a regime purposefully stops aid and starves people, what they can do?

"Civil society, suppressed under Assad but multiple in opposition controlled areas = hope for future of #Syria" #EastGhouta @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/NYsZSDvL2C

— Suzy Madigan (@Suzy_Madigan) March 13, 2018

Further along in the discussion Bowen turned to Dr Idress to see what he thinks the international community can do besides watching the conflict unfold and discussed UN’s classification of words such as ‘besiege’ and ‘hard to reach areas’.

In terms of expectations from the UN agencies Dr Idress explained:

The problem is that the UN has no international backing. The UN alone cannot enforce resolutions. Its efforts have been repeatedly thwarted even for humanitarian efforts and we have had 11 vetoes from Russia which blocks any kind of accountability. In the absence of this it doesn’t have any mechanism with which to confront the regime. So, it’s incumbent on the states which are supposed to be guarantors of world order, but what we have seen is a collapse of that.

One of the questions raised from the audience in this open discussion was on the support for the Syrian government. On this Dr Ekzayez commented that the Syrian regime is not similar to any other authoritarian regime. It relies roughly on 2500 people within its core structure and each person from this inner core was holding positions of power within institutions such as the army, The Ba’ath Party and society agencies. They similarly had links within communities who had shared interests with the regime.

After the formal ending of the conversation for the evening the panel and audience continued to discuss their individual points on the unfolding of events in East Ghouta in the members room on the lower floors of the Frontline Club.

With the independence referendum of Iraqi Kurdistan set for 26th September 2017, The Frontline Club will be hosting a film screening of No Friends But the Mountains along with a Q&A with the makers of the film to discuss the possible outcomes.

No Friends But the Mountains is an insightful personal tale from Kae Bahar, a Kurdish asylum seeker who explains how many wars and the ever growing refugee exodus from the Middle East are fuelling the call for an independent Kurdistan.

Kae himself endured torture under the regime of Saddam Hussein and was forced into exile in 1980. 35 years on, Kae returns to Iraq to win first hand insights into the war against ISIS and explore whether independence in the Kurdish region could become a reality. Along his way he meets Ezidi Kurds who escaped the 2014 ISIS massacre in Sinjar and ended up in Iraqi refugee camps or in Germany.  He also interviews those who are still fighting on the frontline – the Peshmerga and the PKK.

In exile, Kae dreamt about Kurdish independence during all his life and with this film he wants to conduct a reality check back in his homeland. Are the 6-7 million people who are living in the Kurdish region of Iraq also keen on independence? Or could there be a more nuanced attitude to dealing with the real-politik of the region? Kae is also asking how best to prevent further conflicts and more refugee dramas.

Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/230207480

Speakers

Kae Bahar (via Skype): Presenter

Kae is UK based, Kurdish writer and documentary filmmaker. Over the past 25 years he has been producing and presenting films with broadcasters such as BBC, Channel 4 and Al Jazeera. In 2015, Kae’s novel Letters from a Kurd  was published to great acclaim.

Claudio von Planta: Director

Claudio von Planta is a Swiss freelance documentary filmmaker who started his career in 1985 with reports about the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Occupation. From 1990 onwards Claudio worked on many TV news features and longer current affairs programmes for all the main UK broadcasters. In 1996 Claudio filmed a Gwynne Roberts report for Channel 4 Dispatches where they tracked down Bin Laden in Afghanistan. The same year he also shot KARZAN’S BROTHERS for BBC Inside Story, his first Kurdish film with Kae Bahar where they documented the smuggling of Kurds from Iraq to the UK. Ever since Kae and Claudio continued to produce films about the fate of the Kurds.

John McCarthy: Narrator

John McCarthy is a writer and broadcaster.  On his first foreign assignment, to Lebanon in 1986, he was abducted by Islamic Fundamentalists and held hostage for over five years. This experience was explored in the book Some Other Rainbow (co-written with Jill Morrell). His other books are Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), A Ghost Upon Your Path: An Irish Journey, You Can’t Hide the Sun: A Journey through Palestine. Alongside his writing John has worked in television for the BBC, ITV, Sky Arts and Al Jazeera, and on radio for the BBC World Service and Radio 4. In 2014 John presented a documentary for Radio 4 ‘Kurdistan: A State of Uncertainty’. He was awarded the CBE in 1992 and is a Patron of the charity Freedom From Torture.

Tom Hardie-Forsyth: Recent Senior Advisor to Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

Tom Hardie-Forsyth is the recently retired Senior Advisor, Capacity Building to the Prime Minister’s Office, Kurdistan Regional Government, Erbil Iraq, a post he has held since 2005. He remains the Senior Advisor to the KRG UK Representative Office, and a team member of the Genocide Memory Project.

Acclaimed journalist and artist Molly Crabapple has drawn and reported on stories from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan and across the United States. With her powerful illustrations she has pushed the boundaries of visual reportage – and established an important place for art in hard news.

On the release of her memoir Drawing Blood, which intersperses testimony of her own artistic and journalistic engagement with full-colour illustrations, we welcome Molly Crabapple to the Frontline Club to reflect on recent projects and to share her personal insight into the use of art as a tool for better understanding and documenting current events. With US presidential primaries now firmly underway, she will discuss her ongoing work on topical home turf issues including policing and the justice system, as well as her experiences covering the effects of conflict across the Middle East.

Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Drawing Blood. Called “an emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. She is the winner of a 2015 Front Page Award for her drawings of Aleppo for Vanity Fair, and was shortlisted for a Frontline Award in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

This event will be chaired by Natasha Lennard, a British-born, New York-based writer of news and political analysis, focusing on justice, power, biopolitics and dissent. She writes regularly for the Intercept, Fusion and Al Jazeera America, and has written for VICE News, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation and Politico, among others. She is editor-at-large at The New Inquiry journal.

Illustration: Molly Crabapple for VICE: ‘What Life is Like Inside the Besieged, War-Torn Syrian City of Aleppo’

CBS News’ Elizabeth Palmer led an expert discussion at the Frontline Club on 11 September regarding the latest crush of violence in Iraq.

The panel painted a portrait of a country desperately in need of peace, independence, rule of law, reconciliation with its traumatic past, and unity amidst hardening divisions along ethnic, class, and religious lines.  Yet none of these needs are being met.

Professor Charles Tripp lamented Iraqis’ inability to trust their government, with a:

"Parliament that sat for 20 minutes in the whole of the year 2010 after being elected … a judiciary which seems to be completely in the pocket of the executive power, and of course a police that you have to be very wary of calling."

Tripp expressed sadness at a "hatred of the state" that he perceived fueling many Sunni and Shi’a attacks.

"The blowing up of people who are looking for employment … of a large number of people standing outside army recruiting or police recruiting. These are people who are just like [their killers] in some senses, these are, you know, sad people who are looking, desperate for employment."

Kamran Karadaghi, distinguished Kurdish Iraqi journalist, downplayed recent attacks as anything out of the ordinary.  

"This was something that was meant to happen," he said.  "There is always from time to time a wave of violence in Iraq …  Iraqi people are very violent.  Killing, getting rid of others, is something which sometimes is like a normal thing."

Different factions who make up the government, The Independents‘ Patrick Cockburn added:

"Sunnis, Shi’a, Kurds … none of these people like each other … [but] they all have quite a lot to lose if the present system collapses.  So despite the very high levels of violence … in a way it has a sort of grisly stability." 

Karadaghi agreed.

"Being an oil economy … everybody in Iraq wants to be a part of it.  So this is why, despite … all the animosities … nobody actually left the government.  They are all still in the government. This kind of arrangement will continue."

On one topic, however, the panel found optimism, Kurdish independence.  

Karadaghi, as well as Tom Hardie-Forsyth, a senior adviser to the Prime Minister’s office, Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Northern Iraq, both touted the transparency and success of recent Kurdish oil contracts, a more stable and prosperous way of life in the region, and a stronger sense of unity and purpose among Kurds.  

"They are the largest disenfranchised nation in the world.  They deserve [independence]," Hardie-Forsyth said.

But are they ready for it?  

Karadaghi smiled:  "Not yet, but like Andy Murray said, getting closer."

I couldn’t leave him there. He was going to die.

Over a hubbly bubbly and sweet chay in Dohuk this week I met Faris Zubair Ali – a highly experienced deminer and Operations Manager for the Iraqi Kurdistan Mine Action Agency. 

My co-producers Karlos Zurutuza and Borja Portuondo had interviewed Faris and his team at work in 2007, but his extraordinary account of a minefield rescue on a mountain at night had us sitting up in our seats and drawing back hard on the shisha.
 

At around 9pm on November 23, 2008, Faris was called by local civil defence authorities in Dohuk seeking his help. Four hours earlier, two teenage shepherds had unknowingly walked into a minefield near the village of Bagera. They were cousins. One lad had stepped on a landmine – it  killed him severing his legs and injured his cousin in the back. The mine was an Italian made Valmara 69. This bounding fragmentation landmine contains 500 grams of explosives and 1400 pieces of shrapnel.
 

By the time Faris and two other deminers reached a trail leading to minefield it was well and truly dark. Emergency services had lit a fire to guide them up the mountain – rugged stoney terrain with a lot of low bushes.

When they reached the minefield Faris and his team took stock of the situation. Time was critical and they only had one metal detector between them. 

By torchlight, the deminers cleared a path to the injured boy – 150 metres long and one metre wide – within an hour. To put that in context, a team of deminers in daylight and under good weather conditions can clear 20-30 metres in about six hours.

We were not following standard procedures. We were not following our own rules. It was an emergency.

Deminers never work at night and avoid working in areas where they have not surveyed or conducted a reconnaissance. Faris said that they decided not to use protective clothing as it would slow them down.

The deminers used sticks to mark the cleared lane and whatever was at hand to mark the mines. At first they were able to mark the location of mines and move around them. But as they edged closer to the injured shepherd, Faris had to disarm and remove mines to make the area safer for the paramedics.

Along the path they cleared, the team found five different types of landmines. They had to remove seven mines linked to trip wires, including a mine underneath the injured boy’s arm. Faris says it was fortunate that the boy had a spinal injury that prevented him from moving too much.

Faris gave me video footage shot on a mobile phone by a rescuer accompanying the deminers. It’s quite rough and sometimes the camera was held the wrong way but this clip shows the conditions and Faris working quickly to disarm and remove a mine.
 

Extraordinary. Brave. The injured boy survived and Faris said he is slowly making a recovery.

These photos taken after the accident show the area where the boys encountered the mines and the path cleared though the minefield.
 

Faris told me the boys and their family moved to Bagera from Mosul and were unfamiliar with the local terrain. Yes, they had received MRE – minefield risk education training – but as I found out in Georgia last year, sometimes the lessons about the dangers of landmines are sadly learnt the hard way.

The run-down city of Diyarbakir remains the regional hub and political centre of the Kurdish rights movement, where the city’s crumbling infrastructure is testimony to decades of economic neglect.

But Diyarbakir also acts as regional headquarters for the Turkish military with its airport providing the base for missions against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the Iraqi border region.

Further east lies the ancient town of Hasankeyf, considered one of the oldest still-inhabited settlements on earth. But Hasankeyf now faces doom within a decade from the demands of modern energy supply.

And deep in the Taurus Mountains, close to the border with Iraq, lies Hakkari, a city that witnessed some of the heaviest fighting during the Kurdish uprising of the 1980s and 1990s but which now hopes to continue its recent resurgence fuelled by cross-border trade.

However, like all towns in the region, its future is jeopardised by the escalating conflict between diehard PKK members and the Turkish military along the Iraqi border, a short drive to Hakkari’s south.

The upswing  in violence stoked by renewed PKK attacks has turned what was an internal Turkish problem into an international flashpoint, threatening to reverse recent improvements within Turkish Kurdistan.

Adding to political conflict, the issue of energy supplies is propelling Turkey’s southeast onto the international stage. The proposed Nabucco pipeline which aims to bring Caspian gas into Europe would run through the region while the Turkey’s massive hydroelectric Southeast Anatolia project (GAP) is already affecting the lives of millions.

Diyarbakir does not benefit from either of these projects. Nabucco will bypass the city to the north, while the economic impact of GAP will only affect the region close to the Syrian border in the southwest, where irrigation has created vast stretches of fertile land in the Mesopotamian desert.

Many in Diyarbakir suspect the Turkish government is willingly excluding the Kurdish heartlands from economic development and expect Diyarbakir, with its population of over 500,000, to drop further into poverty.

“It is no surprise that recent bomb attacks here focused on official Turkish installations and that the PKK receives many of its recruits from the city’s many street kids,” one Kurdish activist told us.

Further to the east, along the shores of the Tigris, the beautiful town of Hasankeyf does not have to battle urban poverty in the ways that Diyarbakir does. Home to some 5,000 inhabitants, it is peaceful and a dazzling testimony to human civilisation. There are Assyrian, Byzantine, Roman, Seljuk Turk and Ottoman archaeological sites, including castles, bridges, troglodyte caves, tombs, churches and mosques.

But the town that survived invasion by Alexander the Great, the Romans and the Crusaders now faces destruction. By the middle of next decade a dam of the GAP project is to flood the area, submerging up to 70 villages and disrupting nomadic routes for thousands of herdsmen.

According to the Kurdish Human Rights Project, an independent NGO, at least 19 villages in the area have been evacuated at gunpoint and in many cases houses have been burnt to the ground, with only a few families being compensated. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the project “demonstrates that the south-east is no longer neglected,” suggesting the new lake could become a tourist resort for the region while promising to relocate all artefacts.

The proposals have been met with scorn by locals like Idris Kartal: “We are angry. Our families have lived here for generations. Some were even born in the caves. We don’t want a water park – do they think we want to jet-ski on our ancestors’ graves?”

Further east, ringed by the 4,000 metre Cilo-Sat mountains on the Iraqi border, Hakkari looks like a city trying to defy its reputation as a war-torn rebel hideout as it comes to terms with fragile peace. Pock-marked buildings and armoured police cars are reminders of the city’s violent history yet an influx of trade from Iraq and Iran has created some hope of improvement.

In this once conservative region, young, fashionably-dressed couples now openly flirt in the tearooms and gardens. But as the closest major town to the Iraqi border, Hakkari remains at risk of being sucked back into conflict.

The resignation, anger and hope of Diyarbakir, Hasankeyf and Hakkari are all part of the emotions that make up today’s Kurdistan. Embroiled in what has become a geopolitical struggle for energy and power beyond local control, the people here can only hope for a better future.