The Frontline Club will screen a short documentary, made by journalist Shafiur Rahman on the current crisis, followed by a panel discussion on the ongoing atrocities that are afflicting the region.
Shafiur Rahman’s documentary on Rohingya women uses harrowing footage from the border with Myanmar as well as devastating testimony from Rohingya refugees. The panel will further help to decipher whether this is an ethno-religious conflict or something more?
Chair
Professor Penny Green
Professor Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London. Professor Green has published extensively on state crime theory (including her monograph with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption), state violence, Turkish criminal justice and politics, ‘natural’ disasters, transnational crime, mass forced evictions/displacement and resistance to state violence. She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, Palestine/Israel, Tunisia and Myanmar. Professor Green is Founder and Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) – a multi-disciplinary international initiative to collate, analyse and disseminate research-based knowledge about criminal state practices and resistance to them. Professor Green’s most recent projects include a comparative study of civil society resistance to state crime in Turkey, Tunisia, Colombia, PNG, Kenya and Myanmar); Myanmar’s genocide against its Muslim ethnic Rohingya; and forced evictions in Palestine/Israel.
Speakers
Shafiur Rahman
Shafiur Rahman is an independent documentary maker. His projects highlight issues around human rights, migration and poverty. Filming in a wide variety of contexts and countries from Bangladesh, Libya, Italy, South Africa, Kenya, the US, his work has taken him most recently to the Myanmar/Bangladesh border. He has been documenting Rohingya refugee stories since 2016
Dr Azeem Ibrahim
Dr Azeem Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. He is also author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has previously been appointed an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale University. Over the years, Dr Ibrahim has met and advised numerous world leaders on policy development. In his most recent roles, he served as National Security and Defence Policy Advisor to the Leader of the (UK) Labour Party, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, and the Shadow Cabinet from 2012 to 2015, and as Strategic Policy Advisor to the Chairman of Pakistan’s PTI party, Imran Khan. Read his recent interview in New York magazine here.
Dr Thomas MacManus
Thomas MacManus is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the International State Crime Initiative in the Department of Law. Thomas is admitted as an Attorney-at-Law (New York) and Solicitor (Ireland). Thomas is an Editor in Chief of State Crime journal, and Joint Editor of Amicus Journal: Assisting Lawyers for Justice on Death Row. He is also a Director of the Colombia Caravana.
Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English/Swedish photojournalist who has been working on issues relating to women, population and war for over a decade. She is a Harvard Nieman Fellow 2016, and recently finished a year of research at the university on war, and how we tell stories about modern conflict. She has written about her experiences as a photojournalist for The New York Times, TIME LightBox, Nieman Reports and National Geographic. As a photographic storyteller, her focus has been on long-form narrative reportage for monthly magazines. Anastasia is currently in Bangladesh covering the Rohingya crisis for Human Rights Watch.
In Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move Reece Jones presents a major new analysis of the refugee crisis, focusing on how borders are constructed and policed, examining state efforts to contain populations and control access to resources and opportunities.
We will be joined by a panel of experts to discuss the relationship between security projects, conflict along borders and the refugee crisis.
Chair:
May Bulman is a London-based journalist currently working for The Independent with a main focus on covering the situation in the Calais ‘jungle’ and the wider refugee crisis in Europe. She finished her Masters in journalism at City University in June and has since written on a freelance basis for several publications including The Times, The Mirror and The Independent. She is currently reporting on the imminent demolition of the camp in Calais and the fate of its residents. May believes accurate and effective reporting on the refugee crisis is a crucial job for journalists in Europe and around the world at the moment.
Speakers:
Reece Jones is a Professor of Geography at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, and the author of Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel.
Professor Heaven Crawley leads research on migration and human security at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. She specialises in aspects of international migration, including policy, public attitudes and the experience of refugees and asylum-seekers.
Elinor Raikes is the Regional Representative for International Rescue Committee’s response to the European refugee crisis. Elinor rejoined the IRC into this role after working as an independent consultant for DFID and others in 2014-15. She was previously with the IRC for six years and during that time worked for many years in DR Congo as well as in Chad, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Prior to the IRC, Elinor worked for Save the Children. IRC’s programming in Europe began in 2015 with a large-scale emergency response in Greece and in Serbia. Today, the IRC has a developed emergency response and is working to expand support to local actors to improve preparedness; and, is expanding its provision of technical assistance working with a large network of partners in order to respond to the unique protection needs of the context; is also developing technical assistance on policy and services to ensure the effective and positive integration of refugees and asylum-seekers.
Richard Savage is the Global Emergency Response Security Manager for Save the Children International. He has provided security analysis and oversight for SCI’s refugee relief efforts in Greece and for the newly established STC maritime rescue operation in the Mediterranean. Richard also has several years’ experience providing security management for INGO relief operations inside Syria and for the regional refugee response. He holds a Master’s degree in Security, Conflict and International Development. In addition to Richard’s extensive experience in the humanitarian sector, he comes with 20 years of security experience including service in the British Army, as well as the private security sector.
]]>Harriet Agerholm sat down with The Guardian‘s migration correspondent and author Patrick Kingsley to discuss his latest book, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis.
Filmed and edited by Adam Barr.
]]>Heated discussion on the issue of Europe’s crisis in handling the arrival of refugees took place at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 4 May.
From the disproportionate focus placed on the Mediterranean crossing, to the misconception that migration is negative by default and the idea that lobbying Turkey to allow Syrians to work is the answer, the panel dispelled the myths surrounding the crisis.
Patrick Kingsley, author of The New Odyssey and the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent, began by speaking about his extensive reporting of the crisis. The central stories in his book range from that of a smuggler, to a civil servant, to a pregnant refugee woman. Kingsley writes of how he travelled across the Macedonian border with the pregnant woman, who believes the child she is carrying has died.
Heaven Crawley, a leading researcher of migration, said that Kingsley depicted the movement of people more completely than many correspondents before him. Media coverage often focuses only on the crossing to Greece, and yet, “the European focus on the journey across the Mediterranean is such a small part of it,” said Crawley.
Kingsley’s reporting navigates the different routes to Europe and explores the various driving factors of migration. This is important in a Europe where, Crawley said, “policy is about 15 years behind the dynamics of the movement.”
Hassan Akkad, a teacher and freelance photographer who fled the Assad regime in 2012, illustrated European ignorance on a personal level. When people hear the word refugee they expect to see a Syrian in rags, he said. “I’ve had people questioning me about why I had a cell phone.” And yet, many who have fled the war are middle class with much to contribute; Akkad is fluent in English and has studied Shakespeare.
Akkad went on to detail how he came to be in the UK. His crime, for which he suffered broken bones and solitary confinement, was protesting peacefully against Assad: “Protesting in Syria is like a suicide mission. You say goodbye to your family because you never know where you are going to end up,” he said.
L-R: Patrick Kingsley, Heaven Crawley, Lindsey Hilsum, Hassan Akkad, John Dalhuisen. Photo by Tolly Robinson
On the journey, the Syrians that Akkad travelled with were from all walks of life – and their first encounter with Europe was not a happy one. Greek marine forces launched an attack on their boat: “I felt like Syria was on a dinghy. And we were not welcome,” said Akkad. He told the audience that for now he has put his career as a teacher and photographer on hold in order to tell the story of the Syrian people, jokingly dubbing himself “the professional refugee.”
The chair, Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum, turned the discussion towards possible solutions. In order to explain how circumstances had become so grave, John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International said that many European governments were enacting hostile asylum policies and closing their borders to prevent the far right from sweeping to power.
Dalhuisen said that this had intensified the crisis, which is almost unprecedented. “We’re looking at quite a distinct phenomenon,” he asserted.
Kingsley disagreed regarding the relative scale of the problem. “It’s actually quite small numbers,” he said. He argued that Europe, as the world’s wealthiest continent, has more than the capacity and resources to deal with the numbers arriving on its shores.
According to Kingsley, the surge in migration is a result of the poor management of legitimate passage to the UK. People were able to wait a few years in interim countries such as Turkey before being granted visas to Europe, but they could not wait the half-decade that they were forced to. “Resettlement provides a reason for people to stay put,” he said. After so long, with no legal means to achieve more prosperous and safe lives for themselves and their families, “inevitably, people decided to vote with their feet,” Kingsley added.
Crawley agreed: “The problem is at our end, we haven’t adjusted,” she said. She dismissed the arbitrary way in which European governments treat all the countries from which people are migrating as if they are the same. “What we need in policy terms is nuance,” she said. And the whole conversation around the issue needs to shift: “The idea of the end point being to stop people is nonsense,” she said.
An audience member asked about the responsibility of the wealthy neighbouring Gulf states. Akkad responded that despite presenting itself as the “mother of Islam”, Saudi Arabia had offered fleeing Syrians no support. Kingsley added: “We shouldn’t judge our response by the yardstick of the Gulf states… it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing more as well.”
One journalist in the audience asked how it is possible to maintain public interest on such an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Following the surge in media attention in 2015, attention has drifted away. In the beginning, he said, Kingsley’s aim was to humanise the crisis. Now that so many journalists have told the personal and tragic tales of individual refugees, a degree of compassion fatigue has taken over. Kingsley said he had to keep taking different approaches. “In terms of keeping people engaged,” he admitted, “it’s a real struggle.”
Photos by Tolly Robinson
Words by Harriet Agerholm
]]>Joined by the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent Patrick Kingsley, whose new book The New Odyssey documents these journeys, we will explore what failures lead to the current crisis and what needs to be done to avert it.
With a new EU-Turkey deal in place, we will ask why it has taken so long for Europe to act and whether this new deal will work.
Chaired by Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News international editor, and author of Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution.
The panel:
Patrick Kingsley is the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent. He is the former Egypt correspondent and has reported from more than 25 countries, including Denmark, where he wrote a travel book called How to be Danish. A percentage of his royalties from his new book The New Odyssey will be donated to refugee causes.
Professor Heaven Crawley leads research on migration and human security at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University. She specialises in aspects of international migration, including policy, public attitudes and the experience of refugees and asylum-seekers.
Hassan Akkad, was a high school teacher and a freelance photographer in Damascus, Syria. He protested against the Assad regime and was imprisoned twice. He left Syria in 2012 and moved to a few countries in the Middle East. Last summer he took a boat from Turkey to Greece, traveled through 10 countries in Europe until reaching the UK, where he was granted political asylum. It took him 87 days to get here.
John Dalhuisen is Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia. He joined Amnesty International in 2007 as a researcher on discrimination in Europe and was Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Programme between 2009 and 2011 with specific responsibility for Eastern Europe, Russia, South Caucasus and Central Asia. Between 2001 and 2006, he was Special Adviser to the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2007.
]]>Over the course of a year, Emmy Award-winning director Mani Yassir Benchelah made this intimate portrait of Syrian refugee children forced to flee from the violence of civil war to neighbouring Lebanon. Funded by friends of Save the Children, the film tells the stories of the children’s lives in their own words and captures the moving truth of how they deal with loss, hardship and dashed hopes.
While her younger brother fetches water, Aya talks about how a soldier pressured her to provide information about her father. Little Nouredine lived through the siege of Homs and, stuttering, explains how he believes that President Assad’s soldiers are following him everywhere. Thirteen-year-old Layim harbors feelings of vengeance, although he actually likes nothing better than to help people, for example by handing out rations.
Nearly all the children look forward to returning home one day, but Fatima, who is disabled, is thriving in Switzerland where she feels fully acknowledged for the first time. Mustafa desperately wants to study, but he has to work to support his family. Through the prism of their testimony, we gain perspective on the fate of millions of Syrian refugees, half of whom are children.
Speakers:
Julia Kirby-Smith is a filmmaker and journalist with a special interest in social impact and digital engagement. She has worked on Channel 4 News, Dispatches and various current affairs series, as well as being Managing Editor of digital journalism agency Newzulu and running the Asia office of indie Make Productions. She now runs her own comms and video production company, Make Waves.
Jess Crombie heads a team of filmmakers, photographers, picture editors, designers and writers who shoot, craft and create all kinds of powerful, effective and award winning communications materials for Save the Children. Previous to Save the Children Jess was at WaterAid, travelling the globe producing all of their overseas shoots; Magnum Photos, heading up their Creative unit; and almost ten years in advertising as a shoot producer for Wyatt-Clarke & Jones and Publicis advertising agency amongst others. Jess has an academic background in representation theory and lectures at LCC on this and other areas.
Directed by: Mani Benchelah
Produced by: Charly Feldman for MAKE Productions
Runtime: 56′
Country: United Kingdom/Lebanon/Switzerland
Across vast tracks of the world people are running short of a basic commodity: water. There are often many complex reasons that drive migration, but there is an undeniable relationship between water shortages and the large population movements we are seeing today.
For our fourth in a series of events in collaboration with the Scientific Exploration Society, we will be exploring how the effects of climate change are being seen across the Middle East and North Africa, the supply and control of water in the region, and the technologies that are being developed to combat the problem.
Chaired by the Guardian‘s environment editor, John Vidal.
The panel:
Roger Blench is a international development specialist and anthropologist. He has conducted research and evaluations of international development activities worldwide, notably in Nigeria and other regions of West Africa as a consultant and formerly as a research fellow of the Overseas Development Institute in London. He is now affiliated to the McDonald Institute of the University of Cambridge and is chief research officer for the Kay Williamson Educational Foundation.
Mikael Strandberg is a Swedish explorer and filmmaker. He has travelled solo through many parts of the world, including amongst communities in Yemen, through Africa and parts of Asia, and is currently working on a film project with migrants arriving to Sweden.
James Fergusson is an author and freelance journalist. He has written extensively on Afghanistan, Somalia and laterly used his degree in hydrology to write on water security in Yemen. His most recent book The Worlds Most Dangerous Place was nominated for the Orwell Prize.
Professor Tony Allan is based at King’s College London and SOAS London, he specialises in the analysis of water resources in semi-arid regions and on the role of global systems in ameliorating local and regional water deficits. He provides advice to governments and agencies especially in the Middle East on water policy and water policy reform. His is the author of The Middle East water question: hydropolitics and the global economy and Virtual water.
PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
]]>In 2008 the Indian Government launched an initiative to train 500 million of the rural poor to work in its growing industrial sector. Migrants from the rural areas of India now make up a significant percentage of the country’s labour force.
Seduced by the opportunity to be independent, many hopeful young women, like best friends Bhanu and Bhutu, try their luck working for garment factories. As part of a wider recruitment and training scheme, these factories are monitored by mediating advocates such as British academic Orlanda. Her task is to bring in women from the impoverished countryside to Bangalore and other manufacturing centres, where she believes they can be “empowered” by the national economic boom.
Yet the women’s relative inexperience leaves them susceptible to exploitation, putting Orlanda’s capitalist optimism to the test. Documentary filmmaker Chloe Ruthven, who is also the protagonist’s sister, follows Orlanda as she and the workers are confronted with the brutal reality of sweatshop conditions and deliberate corporate negligence.
Directed by: Chloe Ruthven
Produced by: Mike Lerner
Country: India/United Kingdom
Runtime: 80′
“Where can I go to have a decent life?”
On Friday 11 June, Shorts at the Frontline Club took viewers on a cinematic journey that showcased the different ways used to document the world we live in.
The theme: migration and the phases of migration.
Two at the Border by Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla shone a light onto the lives Ali and Nasser. The two friends attempt to make ends meet by helping refugees to the Turkish-Greek border. Ali is Palestinian, traumatised by the violence he has witnessed. “Problems, problems everywhere,” he repeats with bloodshot eyes.
“Where can I go to have a decent live?” Ali asks the universe.
As if replying to Ali, Europe’s response to the rising number of refugees has been increased militarisation of the Greece–Turkey border. The film is dedicated to Naser, who attempted to smuggle himself into Greece. The boat he was on allegedly capsized in the Aegean Sea, and he has been missing ever since.
What can await those who make it across the border to Greece? Xenos documents the desperation of Abu Eyad, whose departure from the Palestenian refugee camp Ain el-Helweh in Lebanon was the subject of Mahdi Fleifel’s award-winning documentary A World Not Ours (2012). Xenos is narrated through a telephone conversation between the two childhood friends. Slowly the reality of life across the border becomes apparent to Mahdi as a bitter nightmare of depression, heroin addiction, sex with men for money and the impossibility of seeing their families again.
The Source by Marcin Sauter spirited the audience to Nagorno-Karabakh, illustrating what it’s like to stay where everyone else has left. The black and white film projected a stylised impression of trauma and loneliness felt by a woman who stayed where no one else could. In a village destroyed and deserted by war.Separation and acute loneliness continued in the film Adrift by Frederik Jan Depickere. We listened to Simu’s story against the stark, industrial visuals of the Arctic. Simu dreamt of becoming a pop singer. In life, his father was tortured to death for founding the anti-government UPF. His older brother suffered the same fate. Simu’s mother disappeared. His sister died of HIV as they were being smuggled from Uganda. He cannot return. As he shovels the snow, he thinks his dream is dead.
The final film of the evening broke slightly from the theme of migration and touched more upon identity. What happens when one plays for a national team and the political context of what you represent changes? The Opposition by Ezra Edelman and Jeffrey Plunkett chronicles the events around the qualification play-off games for the 1974 World Cup between Chile and the USSR. Chilean football players were faced with a choice between staying part of the US-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s charade, or using one’s privileged position to represent the oppressed.
Whether directly linked to migration or not, all the films explored the human struggle to live. To live a decent life in dignity.
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“The Journey towards you Lord, is life. To set off is to die a little.” (The Migrants’ Prayer)
On Monday 7 July 2014, the Frontline Club screened Who is Dayani Cristal? The film follows actor Gael García Bernal as he retraced the footsteps of a Honduran man found dead in the Arizonan desert – one of the thousands of lives snuffed out by the lure of the American Dream.
Director and cinematographer Marc Silver joined us for the Q&A.
Director Marc Silver
Silver began with how he discovered the story:
“We actually launched a website here, about five or six years ago, asking people to send in stories of resistance against walls and barriers, and just general economic division. And one of the stories that came in was this story of skulls, in the desert.”
Gael García Bernal was on board from the outset.
“He literally sat here and launched that website,” said Silver. “So he was on board before we knew what the film was, and we were just mulling over the subject of resistance. During that research period . . . we did four short films for Amnesty, called The Invisibles, which was just set in the Mexico part of the journey. Through that we were able to recce the river crossing, the trains, the shelter system and it started to inform Gael as to what kind of journey he would go on. Even though it’s a story about one person he takes on this everyman, following in the footsteps of a loose interpretation of the migrants’ journey.”
An audience member asked how the film was made.
“Basically, it sounds crazy,” explained Silver, “but we would just rock up at each of the locations, from Guatemala through Mexico to the border and literally just try to introduce what we were trying to do. I think we created this very reciprocal relationship with the people that we were filming. . . . As you said these voices are never ever heard – and I think there was some sense of empowerment that they were able to literally teach us, or guide us through that journey.
“I didn’t just feel that because of who we met and how those conversations went down on the road,” continued Silver, “but having spent time, for example, in that village in Honduras. No one talked about these issues at home. And I was really puzzled why. Literally every teenage boy has been to America already. And they get deported and they make their journey all over again. They literally said they just don’t want their mums to know how dangerous their journey is. Because they would fear that their mums wouldn’t let them go again.”
Great documentary and Q&A tonight @frontlineclub #WhoisDayaniCristal is beautifully made and really worth a watch #migration
— Flora Carmichael (@FloraCarmichael) July 7, 2014
On my way home from #WhoisDayaniCristal screening @frontlineclub. Once again, #GaelGarciaBernal shines a light on a secret american shame.
— Jonathan Campbell (@SoundbiteCultur) July 7, 2014
Another audience member said he was struck by compassion and anger of the [North] Americans. He asked how representative they were. Silver replied:
“We made a decision from the beginning that we only wanted people in the film who had physically been in touch with that body; which allowed us not to give voice to the other side of the debate. That was like a nice creative device. But partly also it was politically, I can’t see the point of giving voice to that other side, because it exists out there. And if people are interested they can just get on google. I think the humanisation of the subject of migration you can’t really get on google to find out. So that was a political decision on our part.”
“It depends when you ask me,” responded Silver to a question on the social impact films can make.
“Sometimes I think it’s really depressing and it doesn’t. And sometimes I think it’s really inspiring and I can see that it does. . . . This sounds really sick, but people have come up to me after US screenings and said, ‘Oh I might talk to my gardener a bit differently,’ which, isn’t as big a change as I was hoping for, but is actually really significant.
“Joking aside there are around 12 million undocumented people in the US, and if you can slightly change their perspective, and make them realise their story didn’t just begin on the other side of that wall; and actually there’s a massive trajectory that’s not so different to your own trajectory – of universal feelings of, ‘I need to support my family,’ or whatever the reason is that you’re leaving home – if you can shift perception and education then maybe you can shift politics.”
Silver concluded with the universal message of the film:
“It’s not just a Mexico–US issue. The story resonates with deaths in the Mediterranean and deaths in seas off north Australia, to build a bigger conceptual coalition around militarised borders; and the story of one skull in the desert leads to this bigger conceptual understanding.”
For upcoming screenings – and to take action – see the official website and social media:
whoisdayanicristal.com
Twitter: @DayaniCrystal
Facebook: facebook.com/whoisdayanicristal