The panel, chaired by prominent investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, examined ground-breaking stories focusing on Arab Spring countries. They explored how kleptocrats from the region have used the services of the British capital to retain and launder their money.

Ala’a Shehabi of Bahrain Watch addressed the Frontline Club, explaining the extent corruption has plagued Bahrain. In recent years, extensive sections of the island’s surrounding waters have been dredged and reclaimed as land, with more than 65 km2 of Bahrain’s land having been privatised in the process ‘the sea was literally disappearing’.

Corrupt Bahraini officials and others exploited this land reclamation as a means to generate vast wealth, selling land and the developments built upon it for enormous profits. The wealth created in the process has since flowed into London, and is particularly prevalent in the capital’s housing market.

‘London is being used to… hide and stash dirty money away. It is a guaranteed safe investment… because it has an accelerating housing market and no one will know who you are. The minute we expose who these people are, the incentives to come to London will disappear,’ explained Shehabi.

Bahrain Watch has worked to expose the financial exploitation committed by the nation’s elites, and has had recent success in revealing the money flowing through the King’s own company ‘Premier Group’. 21 high-end London properties belong to the company’s portfolio, including The Four Seasons and The Marriot on Park Lane. Shehabi described the company as being involved in the ‘alchemy of making money from sand’.

Prior to receiving a leak detailing the corporate structure of the group the information pertaining to the company’s ownership structure and property holdings had been successfully obscured. When Bullough asked her about the difficulty of exposing financial malpractice in Bahrain before she obtained this data, Shehabi said ‘It was a web of information which had been completely obscured. Who owns the sea? This was never registered as public land.’

Shehabi points to the Arab uprising of 2011 as being a pivotal moment for the nation’s people in finally registering their discontent at the widespread corruption that had engulfed the island and its political class. However, she decried the failure of media coverage to pick up on this source of anger as a critical driving force for the political revolt, ‘that’s a story that hasn’t been properly told yet’.

Speaking passionately about the struggles she now encounters in trying to access her homeland, Shehabi concluded by referring to the important work she is now doing in London to combat the flow of wealth out of Bahrain and away from the nation’s own citizens.

Ben Cowdock of Transparency International outlined the sheer scale of the illicit money generated during the Arab Spring, much of which has since flowed through the UK. The National Crime Agency estimates that tens if not hundreds of billions of illicit cash flows through the UK each year.

The misappropriation of state budgets within certain Middle East states in recent years has resulted in huge sums of money being accumulated in the hands of a very select few individuals. Cowdock gave the striking example of Syrian state finances, with Bashar Al Assad’s cousin reportedly owning 60% of the national economy in 2011 according to Transparency International. Illicit money owned by such individuals has flowed into London in vast quantities following the Arab Spring.

Explaining why the capital is a hive of activity for the channelling of such funds, Cowdock said: ‘The UK is a safe haven for corrupt money. It’s a safe haven because it’s a global financial hub, so trillions of pounds come through the UK each year. It’s easy to hide that money within legitimate money. It’s a stable legal environment, you’re unlikely to have your assets taken off you by the government… and has a thriving property market so you’re able to buy gold blocks of bullion in the sky.’

Referring to the network of ‘professional enablers’ that exist within the UK, Cowdock detailed the money being made by professional services in London through the trade of illicit money via property. He highlighted legal firms, banks and estate agents as being just a few of the industries who are generating money as a result of this financial traffic, be that implicitly or explicitly.

The UK’s close links with overseas territories such as the British Virgin Islands and other notable tax havens has made it an increasingly attractive destination for illicit money. Cowdock spoke passionately about the need for the UK to bolster transparency, asset recovery systems and defences against such practice in the future if the capital and the nation as a whole is to combat the problem effectively.

Richard Brooks of Private Eye revealed to the audience the map Private Eye have put together detailing property acquired by overseas companies within the UK from 2005-2014. The map helps to track the flow of dirty money in the UK, designating the ownership details of the vast extent of real estate owned across the nation by foreign companies.

Brooks suggested many of these companies have links to offshore banking and investment programmes, which act as a channel and safe haven for illicit funds.

When asked by Oliver Bullough as to why we put up with such practices, Brooks replied jovially that the UK is keen not to put off entrepreneurs,’we are open for business remember.’

Brooks delighted the crowd when he revealed the case of an underground parking space in Kensington being owned by a company in St Lucia, detailing the truly absurd flow of capital and ownership structure in this instance. His point was well made, he documented to the audience extremely effectively the nature of the high-end property market in London and its murky finances using this and other examples.

Responding to a question pertaining to the importance of greater regulation in this area, Brooks made the moral case for a tighter legal framework, saying: ‘laws serve a purpose of saying we don’t think this is great, meaning such behaviour becomes less socially acceptable.’ Cowdock supported this view, arguing there is a need to ‘create larger disincentives for companies and individuals involved and raise awareness of the moral and financial cost of enabling and facilitating dodgy money transactions.’

When asked about comparisons within Europe regarding the issue of illicit money flows, Brooks revealed that ‘the EU has been a pretty positive force in the last few years regarding financial transparency. It’s certainly dragged along other countries like the UK.’ He expressed concern over the potential impact of Brexit in this area.

The panel united in calling for greater transparency of data from central government, better protections and incentives for whistle-blowers and enlarged anti-corruption budgets.

Cowdock finished: ‘dirty money follows the path of least resistance. Greater regulation raises the obstacles to its passage.’

*This was the second talk in the Frontline Club’s series of Kleptoscope events investigating corruption and dirty money in London: interrogating its origins, its launderers and how it gets spent. The first Kleptoscope event featured three ground-breaking stories focusing on the former Soviet Union, and explored how Russian kleptocrats have used the services of the British capital to retain and launder their money; how London’s property market has become a piggy bank for the world’s corrupt elite; and how ex-Soviet businessmen have covertly funded MPs and parliamentary groups, gaining preferential treatment as a result.

Mahboba, age 7, stands against a bullet-ridden wall waiting to be seen at a health clinic suffering from has a disfiguring skin disease called Leishmaniasis which is a parasitical bacterial infection transmitted from tiny sand fleas.

Interviewed by her friend and fellow reporter, the Sunday Times‘ roving foreign affairs correspondent Christina Lamb, Bronstein provided the audience an insight into daily life in Afghanistan. Spanning the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the country her photos showed was harrowing; a baby suffering from severe malnutrition, women widowed by war, heroin addicts huddled around a mass of burning clothes.

’A lot of these stories are hard, none of them are easy, none of them,’ Bronstein shared, ‘but they’re stories I feel it’s very important to tell.’

But underneath the worsening terror of war, life in Afghanistan goes on. People get married, they celebrate Afghan new year, children play football; conflict has become part of daily life. ‘Kids are gonna be kids (…),’ Bronstein said, ‘they’re not going to stop practising cricket on a Friday afternoon’. Her photographs and words share this side of the country too. Her work is deeply human, capturing incredibly expressive faces, from the tortured loss of a mother watching her child die, to the toothless joy of an old man atop a hill overlooking Kabul.

Bronstein’s work in Afghanistan captures a country living at both extremes. When she first arrived in the country in 2001, the walls ‘were all bullet ridden’. But ‘the mountains are gorgeous, the landscape is exquisite,’ she remarked, ‘and so are the people’.

Her work focuses strongly on the experiences of women living in a still deeply conservative Afghanistan. As a female photographer she has been able to get much closer to their stories than her male counterparts, in many cases behind the burqa. All of the women’s stories she has documented, Bronstein said, has been about ‘getting access, getting inside of the home’. But, she noted that her work was still limited by the question of ‘what will the man allow me to do?’

Afghan women in burqas walk in front of the Darulaman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan on February 3, 2002 on a breezy winter day. The palace lies in ruins, it once was the materpiece of Kabul built by King Amanullah.

But despite the more joyful moments captured in her work, both Bronstein and Lamb seemed despondent about Afghanistan’s future. With the Taliban resurgent, ISIS gaining a foothold, and a crumbling political process, they saw little to have hope in. Sharing the stories of colleagues and friends she had lost in recent years, Bronstein painted a picture of a country gripped by insecurity. And, as Christina Lamb pointed out, ‘The second biggest group of refugees after Syrians are Afghans – they’re not leaving the country because things are good in Afghanistan.’

A panel of freelance journalists and photographers joined an audience at the Frontline Club on Thursday 28 January 2016 to discuss the story behind a new exhibition of freelance war photography. Osie Greenway, Anne Alling, Benjamin Hiller and Jeffry Ruigendijk introduced photography and footage from their time in the Middle East – particularly Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – and explained that the exhibition’s purpose was to bring to light to the complexities that surround freelance journalism, which are rarely recognised by those who ultimately view the content produced. 

The @WZFreelance team discussing their project & exhibition @frontlineclub https://t.co/ZkVVWndicu #Support #WZF16 pic.twitter.com/T1T0874Eft

— Metro Imaging (@metroimaging) January 28, 2016

“We think there needs to be more light shone on [freelancing], to understand where the news comes from and how the news is reported. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes when you see a picture,” explained photojournalist Osie Greenway.

The panel commented that the War Zone Freelance Exhibition was also created in order to draw attention to the vital – and sometimes highly dangerous – work of fixers and local journalists. 

“They are often forgotten in the long run,” said photojournalist and writer Benjamin Hiller. “We leave, they stay behind, and often they have to take up the consequences of that.” Without them, he said, the work of western journalists would be near impossible. “We are intertwined; we are dependent on each other,” he said.

Dutch photojournalist Jeffry Ruigendijk agreed, saying that local journalists frequently don’t receive recognition for their contributions – even when the western media picks up their stories or photographs. “You see a byline with a name from an Arab country, but apart from that you never hear these guys. You never hear them speak on the radio; they never appear on talk shows. They’re ghosts with a name and a beautiful photo.”

Ruigendijk also commented that the exhibition aimed to provoke a discussion about the inconsistent payment of freelance journalists. “Usually [editors] want the photo or video last week, but you get your invoice paid in a couple of months. At the moment I’m waiting on two invoices: one which is a year and a month old, and a second which is nearly a year old.”

If the exhibition could provoke a discussion of “what is ethical and not ethical” in this context, Ruigendijk said, then it would “help freelancing in general.”

Anne Alling, a Danish writer and reporter, said the exhibition was a “developing project” with the purpose of exposing the unique work of freelancers. She added that the exhibition reflected some emerging trends in freelance work, such as the use of crowdfunding and social media to maximise support for the project. She hoped the exhibition would “give an insight into what it takes to be a freelancer, and provoke some kind of debate about freelance journalism.”

Such an interesting evening @frontlineclub on warzone freelancing. Be back tomorrow for the follow-up on #warzonefreelancingexhibition

— Sarah Mbengue (@sarah_mbengue) January 28, 2016

Ultimately, Greenway said, freelance journalism is not a new profession: “it’s an ancient craft, we’re not trailblazing.” Instead, he said, “our goal is to bring it back into the light, to make people see what it takes to take a photo.”

The panel will return to the Frontline Club this evening – Friday 29 January – for a discussion on the future of freelance journalism.

Contact warzonefreelance@gmail.com for more information on the exhibition, and visit the Frontline Freelance Register website for more information on freelance conflict reporting and its risks.

In a heated debate on Wednesday 11 November at the Frontline Club, a panel of writers and scientists discussed the extent to which a drying world is a contributing factor in the ongoing migration crisis.

Chairing the debate, the Guardian’s environment editor John Vidal began by saying: “The Middle East and North Africa is highly politicised. There’s endless debates we could have about Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria and so forth, but the question is, is there water at the root of these problems? The answer is probably no, but lets find out.”

James Fergusson, an author and freelance journalist, drew on his experience working in the Middle East and Africa.

He said: “It was in Somalia that I started thinking water really was at the root… The turning point in the war against al-Shabaab, the al-Qaida franchise in Somalia, was about water.

“What was actually going on in Helmand in Southern Afghanistan was a water war… Water is at the root of all of this.”

Professor Tony Allan, an author and academic who advises governments and agencies in the region on water policy reform, contested this idea. “People think that if you run out of water you go to war, but in fact all you do is import some more food.”

He acknowledged that a water shortage is more likely to lead to instability in countries suffering from extreme poverty, but said “it’s food [security] that is the issue.”

Roger Blench, an anthropologist and international development specialist, broadly agreed with Allan: “There is no connection between land degradation, water shortages, rural poverty and revolutionary movements,” he said.

Explorer and filmmaker Mikael Strandberg said that from his experience in Africa, “a lot of people are migrating North to Saudi Arabia not only due to water – that’s a small part – but because they have no other opportunities.”

Fergusson contested the ideas put forward by the three other panellists, saying: “I would certainly contend that water shortage is a prime driver of a lot of conflict which leads on to war. So I would say that Syria, what’s going on now, that began with a conflict about water.”

Blench, however, argued that water conflicts were not the deep-rooted causes for war.

Allan said he agreed with Fergusson about the impact of water at a local level: “I happily agree at a lower level of social organisation and state: farmers kill each other, villages fight each other, conflict is there all the way through. But states don’t go to war over water; it would be really serious if they did.”

Taking Syria as an example, Allan argued that the conflict was a “post-imperial madness, the whole of the Middle East is a post-imperial madness… The instability that is there… is the problem; it isn’t the water.”

Strandberg said that in his experience of speaking to migrants in Yemen, “very rarely do they bring up the issue of water… They have no future – that’s why they leave – so I’ve never heard of the issue of water as being as big as this.”

Blench said that demographic growth was the central problem, and criticised failures to deal with demographic growth through policy. He said: “If we were to have science-based policy then probably priority would be trying to halt land degradation and slow down urban water mismanagement.”

On the matter of policy failure, Blench and Fergusson agreed. Fergusson said he thought policy focus should be: “Much more on soft power solutions like science and technology and… I think that water would be a good place to start.”

On Wednesday 12 June, the Middle East Monitor launched Ibrahim Hewitt’s new book Memo to the Editor at the Frontline Club. The book is a compilation of letters addressed to the editors of major UK newspapers. It is a critique of how they have misreported major issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict from December 2009 to 2011.

“The purpose of writing the letters has a number of different focuses,” Hewitt explained, “We want to try and educate and inform people; provide a different perspective, an alternative view… I did actually tell the letters editor (of the Daily Telegraph) ‘I know you’re not going to publish this but I’m telling you anyway,’ and that’s the point, I think it is important that the media is aware that people read what they put forward.”

Ibrahim Hewitt

Hewitt was joined by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent, and David Hearst, the current foreign leader writer for the Guardian. The event was chaired by Mark McDonald, a human rights barrister and a founding member of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.

The panelists discussed the book but also broadened the discussion to include media bias in reporting on the Palestine-Israel conflict over the last ten years, particularly regarding coverage by the Guardian and the BBC. McDonald began by asking Llewellyn whether he believed the BBC to be biased in its reporting of the Israel-Palestine question. Llewellyn replied:

“Yes. Absolutely no question about it… After 2000 the Israelis geared up and put so much pressure on the BBC that now their reporting is absolutely bent… The way they question people, the way presenters interpret people, the number of times Israelis get on the air… It’s unbelievable how bent the BBC is at the moment.”

Answering the same question but on his own newspaper, Hearst argued the reason for the pressure was because:

“If you talk to the Israeli Press Attache, he says the enemies of Israel are the BBC and the Guardian.”

He continued that reporting on Israel:

“…is like kicking a wasp’s nest. You have to be prepared to get stung… You have to have an almost Rottweiler approach to the facts…”

It is for this reason that Hewitt’s book is so valuable. For Hearst it is an example of “exactly what we’ve all been doing.”

Discussing the nature of bias present in the media, Llewellyn explained about what he calls “corrective context:”

“When the Israelis bomb Gaza the BBC always says ‘in response to a Palestinian rocket.’ But you have to imagine that Palestinian rocket against their rocket. Nobody ever says that. You know it’s bad they shouldn’t do it, they’re idiots… The next thing is the Israelis are using the weapons of war against these people. The Palestinians are not an army and you know, I’m not pro-Palestinian, I’m looking at it from the human rights perspective. These people are being punished.”

On writing in the Guardian, Hearst explained that:

“When you have half the Israeli cabinet saying there shouldn’t be a two-state solution it seems unlikely there will be one. The peace process has been described as moribund, dead. I think it’s dead… But I can’t write a leader saying that… Because the Guardian is in favour of a two-state solution.”

Hewitt too argued that the BBC is biased:

“There are some sections of the BBC that are clearly biased… There are journalists not asking the questions they should be… Because they provoke uncomfortable answers.”

Listen and watch the full event here:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/critiquing-the-medias-approach

On Tuesday 29 May, the Frontline Club showcased ‘Writing Revolution: the Voices from Tunis to Damascus’, a book which celebrates some of the best new writing to emerge from the Arab Spring.

The collection of articles and essays focusses on what the revolutions, which have rumbled across North Africa and the Middle East over the past three years, mean to journalists, bloggers and activists in the region.

L-R: Matthew Cassel, Layla Al-Zubaidi, Mohamed Mesrati, Ali Abdulemam, Rachel Shabi. Picture Credit: Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei

“The process of finding the protagonists was not easy,” said Layla Al-Zubaidi, editor of Writing Revolution and director of the Southern Africa office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Cape Town. She added:

“If you ask revolutionaries to write, it is not easy because they have to sit back and reflect on what they are doing, and for that you need time, space and calm moments. If you’re in the heat of the battle it is hard to find that.”

Al-Zubaidi was joined by Matthew Cassel, a journalist for Al Jazeera English who co-edited the book, Mohamed Mesrati, a Libyan writer and journalist who contributed to the book, and Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini blogger who agreed to contribute before he went into hiding after a government crackdown. Abdulemam was representing his friend and fellow political refugee Dr. Ali Aldairy, who contributed to the project but was unable to attend the event. Rachel Shabi, a journalist who has written widely on the Middle East, chaired the event. She commented:

 “Most of the journalism that came out of the Arab uprisings came from people who rocked up after the revolution started.”

Cassel said that although Western journalists working for mainstream media outlets were a vital part of reporting the Arab Spring, alternative voices could provide a fuller picture of the unfolding events:

“We shouldn’t neglect the young voices that are happening in the country. . . . We need to give a platform to these voices.”

From Cairo to Damascus, Tunisia to Bahrain, the essays and articles highlight the drastic differences between the revolutions which have often been painted with the same brush by the mainstream media. They also explore the histories of the people and their countries, dispelling the myth that the Arab revolutions came from nowhere.

“We wanted to show how much struggle and how much sacrifice happened in the years leading up to the uprisings,” Cassel said, adding that “creative resistance” was a large factor in the uprisings.

Mesrati said that he found it difficult to write down what the Libyan revolution meant to him, when he was commissioned to write a piece:

“When my literary agent said I should write a piece of 3,000 words to 5,000 words, I wanted to write 7,000 words.”

He also mentioned that he wanted to write about Libya’s history and Gaddafi’s influence on the country.

Abdulemam, who went into hiding before he could write his piece, said that he would have focussed on the youth in Bahrain and why they had taken to the streets:

“I would have reflected on youth, what makes them so angry and what they are ready to die for. My essay would try to answer why the youth went out into the street and why until this day they have not gone home. . . . They have this hope that they will bring change. They are sure they will bring it. They don’t want anyone to insult them any more. That’s what makes me sure that change is coming soon.”

Throughout the debate, the editors and writers spoke about the other contributors they encountered along the way.

Aldairy, who was unable to attend the debate, “wrote his experiences from outside the opposition circle”, according to Abdulemam.  On the other hand, Al-Zubaidi recalled commissioning a piece from a Syrian writer while avoiding the use of the word ‘activism’, ‘civil society’ and ‘revolution’ on the phone in case it put her in danger:

“She finally said to me: ‘Do you want me to write an article about the revolution? I will say and write what I want. Don’t worry about putting me in danger, I will express myself.’”

Al-Zubaidi continued:

“When [some people] say how disappointing the Arab Spring was, and ask was it worth it, it disregards what these people are doing. You don’t want to risk everything if there’s no hope, and I think these people had hope.”

You can watch the video and listen to the podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/writing-revolution-the-voices

Afghanistan produces around 90 percent of the world’s opium, fueling the global heroin trade, funding fundamentalist groups like the Taliban and bringing billions of dollars a year into the country’s economy.

Award-winning Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi travels deep into the Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farmers are being forced to make in order to save their own lives. Opium Brides exposes the dreadful abuse of young Afghan girls by drug traffickers closely allied to the Taliban. Through interviews with local villagers, Quraishi learns that drug smugglers have been paying local farmers to grow opium, which the smugglers then use to produce heroin.

Now that the government has been destroying the farmers’ opium crops through the eradication program, the drug smugglers are returning and giving farmers a choice: Pay back the money, or give one of the family’s young daughters as a “bride”.

Reporter & field Producer: Najibullah Quraishi
Producer: Jamie Doran
Year: 2012
Duration: 52′

Featuring interviews with the main protagonists from all sides, award-winning journalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad travels into the heart of Yemen’s radical heartland. He provides a first-hand report of how members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have taken advantage of turmoil in the country, imposing their rule on areas of south Yemen in a first ever attempt to establish its own state.

In Ja’ar, a town with a population of over 100,000, the Al Qaeda administration has abolished taxes, provided free water and electricity and installed sewage pipes. Their trucks distribute water to villages and Bedouin settlements. People living in the desert on the outskirts of town have said the jihad had connected their village to the electricity grid for the first time in their lives.

Reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Directed by Safa Al Ahmad
Duration: 52′
Year: 2012

This screening is in partnership with PBS America available on Sky channel 166 and Virgin Media 243

Since arriving in Sana’a three weeks ago, I’ve been shocked by the contrast Yemen’s cosmopolitan capital provided to scaremongering international representations. For those outside it, Yemen remains synonymous with terrorism, yet in my experience people here are less concerned with Al-Qaeda bomb scares than with where next months salary will come from.

Yet as Yemeni’s express increasing frustration at the pace of change after a hard-won revolution, the government and the international community seem progressively disconnected from the reality of everyday life. This became obvious last week when UN Secretary-General Bam Ki-moon made an unannounced stopover in Sana’a that brought the city to a standstill.

Bam’s flying visit to the poorest country in the Middle East was timed to celebrate the first anniversary of the signing of the Gulf Initiative, a power transfer agreement brokered by the US and Yemen’s neighbors in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

The Initiative, signed in late November 2011, saw Ali Abdullah Saleh concede to popular demand, handing his presidential mandate to Abd Al-Rab Mansur Hadi and the Government of National Unity.

Marked as a success by the international community, the agreement paved the way for a democratic transition and the restoration of relative stability in Yemen, yet a year on, how much progress has been made in laying the groundwork for the National Dialogue, and what tangible changes have occurred in the lives of Yemeni’s?

Sitting amongst my fellow disgruntled commuters, late for work due to a marked increase in street security, I was hard pressed to find someone who felt that Bam’s visit was something that marked a celebration. Some argued it as nothing more than a United Nations PR stunt that attempted to shift the focus from their recent failures in Syria. More inconvenienced than indulgent, the general consensus was that international organizations and governments have missed the point over the last year about how to achieve sustainable peace and development.

Although the transitional governments efforts have resulted in a marked improvement in the security situation, many feel that economic, social and humanitarian agendas have become marginalized in a government that increasingly caters its policies towards international – specifically American – security agendas.

As Bam Ki-moon noted in his speech “transitions are difficult.” In a country where nearly half of all children are at risk of malnutrition, with the second highest unemployment rate in the Middle East a focus on a global agenda risks missing the needs of the Yemeni people.

Speaking to Yemeni friends about the growing emphasis on the ‘war on terror’ and Al-Qaeda draws reactions akin to when a vegetarian gets told chicken isn’t meat.

However, motivated by his relative success in ridding Abyan province of Al-Qaeda, Hadi political rhetoric is increasingly aligned with that of Washington. The question must be asked whether it is at the expense of addressing issues that matter to Yemeni’s.

With the country preparing for the National Dialogue, a process that will determine the long-term political vision of the country, Mohammed Adulahoum’s – the president of the Justice and Building party – comment “it’s either dialogue or chaos” could never be truer. The test for Hadi will be whether he can correlate the support of foreign backers with the needs of his population.

From the debab conversation, a token visit from Bam Ki-moon does little to change the daily reality for most Yemeni’s trying to get their lives back on track after a tumultuous year. The pressure for substantive change is growing with every day.

David Arnold is an Editor at the Yemen Times in Sana’a. He graduated from SOAS in 2011 where he studied in Anthropology and History. Prior to arriving in Yemen he worked at the International Council on
Security and Development for 7 months on projects relating to good governance, conflict resolution and grass-root community engagement.

Coming straight from a day of reporting on the latest unrest between Israel and Gaza, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen was at the Frontline Club on 14 November to discuss the historic events that have reshaped the Middle East. He reflected on their political context, history and the evolving landscape as documented in his new book, The Arab uprisings: The people want the fall of the regime.

Joined by Samir Farah of BBC Arabic, Bowen noted that, in retrospect, even people who had intimate knowledge of the region were naïve as the events unfolded. When leaving for Egypt as things began, Bowen thought he would be back in three days and packed as many shirts. As it turned out, he would be gone for over a month and spent much of the past two years documenting the aftermath.

“The thing which actually makes me feel OK about the fact that I didn’t see it coming is that Mubarak did not see it coming, Assad didn’t see it coming, MI6, and CIA didn’t and actually looking back on it, we should have seen it coming. People knew that some change was pending,” he said.

Both Farah and Bowen also dispelled some of the myths arising from the desperate act of suicide on December 17 2010 in Tunisia, when Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself after being prevented from selling vegetables on the street. The tragedy is widely regarded as a catalyst, along with food inflation, drought, shifting demographics and other macro and socioeconomic realities, not just for the removal of the country’s president but also for the spread of unrest.

“Early on in Tunisia, there were reports saying that [Bouazizi] was a university graduate who had to sell vegetables because he couldn’t get a job and university graduates identified with that. Actually he wasn’t, he hadn’t even finished high school …[but] he was supporting his family from a young age and he just became an archetype which people could identify with and that was the thing in the end that made it happen,” he said.

Bowen also cautioned against oversimplification, not only of the diverse cultures and regions in the present day, but also in drawing parallels to other historic events. As it developed, the situation at first seemed reminiscent of Eastern Europe. Describing it as the “Arab Spring” references the Prague Spring and by extension the dominoes falling in the former Soviet Union in 1989. There was an expectation that by the summer of 2011 there would be a whole new Middle East. Not so, Bowen pointed out:

“It is going to be a generation-long process of change as we are seeing in Syria and we would have seen in Libya had there not been foreign intervention,”

Meanwhile, democracy in Egypt is still in its infancy:

“I have [heard] pious Muslims … say that [what the] Muslim Brotherhood [needs to do is not teach them] how to pray … they need to provide jobs, better healthcare, end corruption, make things efficient otherwise [they] might have to vote for somebody else,” he said, adding also that since the revolution, the amount of anti-Western feeling is increasing exponentially.

Audience questions leaned towards predicting what would happen next, particularly about the continuing devastation of the civil war in Syria and as Israel and Gaza began heating up in a dramatically altered Middle East.

“I think Syria is headed for a deepening war … some kind of sectarian fragmentation and going through the sort of horrendous experience that Lebanon went through in its 15-year civil war with the capacity too, to destabilise other parts of the region, you are already seeing it in Beirut … Turkey, in Iraq,” he said, adding that Israel is conducting an operation in Gaza now in a different world than that of Cast Lead.

Also looking to the future, Farah noted that amid the uncertainty one thing is for sure; Big change is coming.

“The Middle East will never be the same,” he said.

Watch the full discussion here: