In October the Frontline Club held a tenth anniversary exhibition at the Prix Bayeux Awards and on 13 November they welcomed Prix Bayeux to London for an event to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. The event brought together past winners who each presented their distinguished pieces of reporting and looked back on 20 years of reporting conflict.

The evening was opened by Jon Swain, award winning journalist and guest president of the Prix Bayeux jury, who explained how the awards are very much about the work produced rather than, as is often the case, who knows who. The discussion was chaired by Frontline Club founder and 2011 Bayeux-Calvados award winner, Vaughan Smith.

L-R Vaughan Smith, Adrien Jaulmes, Neil Connery, Christina Lamb and Jeremy Bowen

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor and winner of the award in 2009 for reporting on the aftermath of the 2009 Gaza War for BBC1’s Panorama. He accompanied a doctor from Gaza who lost several daughters and a niece in an Israeli shelling, the terrible irony being that he had spent a lot of his career working for peace with Israel:

“I went around the room and he told me where they were laying. I thought that if I’d put it in a more factual manner, it would have more impact. It worked out in that sense but as ever, one of the ambivalences [of war reporting] is that we report on the back of someone else’s tragedy.”

Great panel with @PrixBayeux winners @frontlineclub tonight, note the temporary exhibition with winning photos. pic.twitter.com/T9Wx25Efqc

— wotienke (@wotienke) November 13, 2013

Christina Lamb, author and journalist with The Sunday Times and winner of the award in 2009, read from Mission Impossible, an account of her time as an embedded journalist with the British military in Afghanistan. Mentioning the Green Book that requires reporters to have their copy pre-approved by military press officers, Lamb reflected:

“There’s a fine line between that and censorship. We [journalists] failed because we should have gotten up against it, all of us.”

Prix Bayeux exhibited photographs from previous winners of the award during the evening. [picture credit: Caroline Schmitt]

“The vast majority of people involved in news-gathering who are injured or killed are locals to that country. They’re not only journalists, but drivers, translators. . . . We as an industry have a huge moral responsibility for those people and I wonder whether we really deliver that as much as we need to.”

Adrien Jaulmes, reporter with Le Figaro and winner of the Bayeux-Calvados award in 2007, he said of reporting in Syria:

“Your moral duty is to share the dangers while you’re there. Journalists suddenly become the targets in big cities because they have money, and that changed the game for us within weeks.”

Watch and listen back here:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/twenty-years-of-war-reporting

Reporter Ben Anderson joined a panel at the Frontline Club on Monday 25 February to discuss his new 30-minute documentary for BBC’s Panorama on the allied troops’ legacy in Afghanistan and the condition of the Afghan police.

Will Pike, a former British Army Major in Afghanistan, and Dawood Azami, former BBC World Service Bureau Chief in Kabul, joined Anderson to answer questions form the audience. Nick Fielding, former Sunday Times and Independent journalist and author of the blog Circling the Lion’s Den moderated the discussion.

Anderson travelled to the southern province of Sangin to film the documentary Mission Accomplished? The Secrets of Helmand – it is an area that is now mainly controlled by the Afghan police. He follows US marines as they prepare to hand back control to a police force that is severely underprepared, ill equipped and rife with corruption.

“The documentary was depressing to make,” said Anderson. “I think the goals the western nations set weren’t achievable. After so much loss of life – British, American, Afghan – to hand back power to those guys . . .” 

“One of the police we filmed was shot a few weeks after I left and they found a bag of heroin in his pocket,” he added, referring to the scenes in the documentary where some police members seemed drugged up.

But Pike defended the allies’ retreat, explaining:

“The automatic response of governments is to give the DOD or MOD a problem to sort out. But Afghanistan is not a military problem, it’s a socio-economic problem. So why do we ask the military to leave and expect it to be a success?”

One reoccurring discussion point was whether or not the situation in Sangin was representative of Afghanistan as a whole. Anderson said: “I’ve travelled all over and it seems these problems are common.”

Azami added that although Sangin is a particularly weak area, it is the same picture in many towns.

“The problem is the police are there for basic law and enforcement, they’re not supposed to be engaged in fighting the Taliban – it’s not their job,” he said.

Anderson added the police hadn’t prosecuted one case in two years. Azami continued later on:

“It takes a lot of time, they are new institutions, established in a hurry without vetting them properly. It will take a lot of time for that culture to be established.”

Anderson said a major concern is how the Afghan police will cope once the allies have left all together:

“The main problem is equipment. I think it’s scandalous we’re leaving them with rusty AK-47s, unarmoured jeeps and little else. If we can’t put down the Taliban with all the equipment we have, what on earth chance do they have?”

Pike added:

“The success will depend on whether Afghan local officials stand up, be counted and start to apply some rules providing basic law an order.”

Azami said the three-point plan of the Afghan government was to talk to the Taliban, improve governance, and improve the quality of armed security forces.

“The best hope they have is to reach some political settlement with the Taliban,” he added.

Panorama: Mission Accomplished? The Secrets of Helmand, was shown on BBC1 and can be watched again on BBC iPlayer.

You can watch the full debate here:

Soon, Afghan security forces will be in control of all of Afghanistan, as ISAF forces accelerate their withdrawal. Sangin, where a third of all British casualties occurred, is already almost entirely controlled by the Afghan Army and police.

Ben Anderson first travelled to Sangin in 2007, and has returned many times since then. This lastest film for BBC Panorama raises questions about the British legacy in Sangin, and in Afghanistan as a whole.

Anderson shows that American combat troops have already withdrawn, training has been reduced, not accelerated and the Afghan Security Forces are not ready to take over. Casualty rates are as high as ever, they are just all Afghan now, the Taliban are as strong as ever, locals say their lives have not improved and the police still look like part of the problem.

Directed by Ben Anderson
Duration: 30′
Year: 2013

In the wake of the Kony 2012 campaign that went viral attracting more than 100 million viewers, for BBC Panorama, BAFTA-winning reporter Sorious Samura travelled to the frontline of the battle to bring Joseph Kony to justice. The result is an incisive and often shocking documentary that asks why, after more than two decades, has the brutal leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) not been found?

Leading a small group of fighters calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army, composed of many abducted children turned child soldiers, he is responsible for the death of more than 100,000 people, and the displacement of millions more. Sorious Samura traces more than 25 years of violence, interviewing Kony’s victims, his former LRA fighters and those who hunt him.

In a Q&A following the screening, reporter Sorious Samura, producer Andrew Bell and Ron McCullagh of Insight News TV shared their experiences, and the moments which could not be included in the final cut. When Bell was asked what he thought about the the failure to catch Kony, he said that “tracking him in the jungle is useless […] the only way to get his people out of that jungle is through hearts and minds”.

Samura weighed in, suggesting that he escaped punishment for so long because “for a lot of Ugandans, this man is seen as a hero. We shouldn’t try to hide this fact”. McCullagh added that  “for lots of them, Kony was not a mad man”. Referring to Kony’s claim he is guided by spirits, Bell also warned that “many totally believe he is plugged in to the spirit world”.

However, keeping the panel on its toes, a young graduate from the audience warned against over-simplifying the role of traditional beliefs in Kony’s survival, a point with which Samura concurred, asking “where does the West come from to judge other people? […] You never hear Africans calling the holy trinity crazy”.

The audience then returned to the issue of corruption, asking whether the West was too soft on African governments. One audience member asked whether the West needed “to change the way it does business with Africa?”. Samura answered “The West needs to say enough is enough: We will not give you any more money until you sort yourselves out”.

Bell reflected part of the problem was that African governments were abandoning their own people. He cast a chill on the room, recalling how on location.“I was brought to a group of children or teenagers sleeping rough under some containers. Their parents had been killed, they had nothing to do. My guide told me ‘the next Kony is sleeping under that container’ […] These kids are going to come back to haunt them”.