In 2001, Jack Straw became the first senior British Foreign Secretary to visit Iran since the 1979 revolution and he has developed a growing interest in the country ever since. In 2003, with his French and German counterparts, he initiated the nuclear negotiations which led to the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015.

But when Straw took a family holiday to Iran in October 2015, he was handed a document blaming him for more than a century and a half of malign British interference in Iranian politics. That experience led him to write his latest book The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why it Distrusts Britain which examines the UK’s extraordinary, tangled and difficult relationship with Iran, and why, he says, so many Iranians are obsessed with Britain’s role in their history.

With tensions rising sharply between Iran and the west following President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal, we welcome Jack Straw to the Frontline Club for a timely discussion with journalist and author Ramita Navai about British-Iranian relations, his view of Iran’s internal politics and the culture, psychology and history of a much-misunderstood nation.

Speaker:

Rt Hon. Jack Straw is one of three senior ministers to remain in Cabinet throughout the 1997-2010 Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was Home Secretary (1997-2001), Foreign Secretary (2001-06), Leader of the Commons (2006-07) and Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary (2007-10). He was co-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Iran (2010-15). His most recent visit to Iran was in January 2018. His memoirs Last Man Standing (Macmillan, 2012) received wide praise. Jack was the Member of Parliament for Blackburn from 1979 to 2015, when he retired from the Commons. He is honorary vice president of Blackburn Rovers AFC.

Before becoming an MP, Jack practised as a barrister and then worked as a special adviser in the 1974 Labour government. He lives in London.

Chair: 

Ramita Navai is an Emmy award-winning British-Iranian journalist, documentary producer and author. She has reported from over forty countries and has a reputation for investigations and work in hostile environments. She was the Tehran correspondent for The Times from 2003 – 2006 and she makes documentaries for Channel 4 and PBS Frontline.

Ramita’s first book City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran won the Debut Political Book of the Year at the 2015 Political Book Awards, and was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Prize for non-fiction. She is also a contributing author to Shifting Sands: The Unravelling of the Old Order in the Middle East (published in the UK and US).

Reviews: 

“Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals who’ve endured sequential boom bust cycles of resource extraction . . . tough, reluctant victim-heroes . . . and a courtroom drama, as a tenacious husband-wife legal team takes on the industry and the state . . . [a] valuable, discomforting book” —Jo-Ann Wypijewski, The New York Times Book Review

Speaker

Eliza Griswold is the author of The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010 the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York
University, she lives in New York with her husband and son.

Please note: this event is now a day later that originally advertised because of late changes to speaker’s travel. 

“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.

President Erdogan’s campaign has been driven by anti-European rhetoric and led to stand-offs with Germany, The Netherlands and others. Declining relations between Turkey and the EU raise questions about the stability of Turkish economy, which is largely dependent on trade relations with the EU, and how Turkey will cope with the continuing strains of war, terrorist insurgencies, and the refugee crisis.

Our panel will reflect on President Erdogan’s fraught relationship with the EU in the context of the country’s political future after the April referendum.

Speakers (Full panel announced soon)

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist and Turkey correspondent for Newsweek, The Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has lived and worked in Istanbul for the past four years.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love and her most recent, Three Daughters of Eve.

Andrew Gardner has worked on human rights issues in Turkey for over ten years. Currently he is Researcher on Turkey for Amnesty International. Since joining the organization he has researched and written on issues including freedom of expression and assembly, torture, impunity for human rights abuses and refugee rights. He lives in Istanbul.

This event is presented in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

It is the news media’s major preoccupation – how can journalists best serve audiences in a world riddled with misinformation and “alternative facts”, and when the President of the United States makes baseless claims and labels accurate reporting as “fake news”?

But so far the debate has focused mostly on Western news media, where this challenge feels new. How does the discrediting of media take place in the Global South? Have other countries seen a similar rise in the prominence of fake news – or, as with Russian propaganda, has this challenge been around for years? In countries such as Cambodia and Burundi, leaders have been labelling unfavourable journalism as fake news – but is this the ‘Trump Effect’ or its precedent?

We will discuss how journalists new to these challenges learn from reporters elsewhere in the world who contend daily with misinformation and state hostility. This event, held to mark World Press Freedom Day 2017, will bring together journalists from a selection of countries to discuss these issues and explain how they are dealing with the “post-truth” environment.

This discussion will be chaired by John Lloyd. John is the co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, which was established in 2006 with core funding from Thomson Reuters Foundation, where he is a Senior Research Fellow and member of the Advisory Board. Lloyd has written several books, including “What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics” (2004). He is also a contributing editor at FT and the founder of FT Magazine.

Speakers:

Liz Wahl is an American journalist. She was a correspondent and anchor for the U.S. branch of RT TV and made international headlines following her resignation from the channel.

Maher Abderrahmane is former Senior Editor of Tunisian Television News.

Katya Gorchinskaya is a Ukrainian journalist and CEO of Hromadske TV

Abiye Teklemariam is an Ethiopian journalist based in the UK

The film introduces us to two defectors  – 26 year old Eunhee Park and 25-year old Suuyeoung Lee, who is about to make her first appearance on the show. Both escaped with the help of smugglers who charged about 7,000 US dollars to take the women on a terrifying journey across the border into China and eventually to Thailand, from where they could reach South Korea.  The Chinese authorities arrest defectors and send them back, where they can face execution.

These women’s intimate stories paint a picture of a country where communism is being supplemented by a North Korean version of capitalism, with entrepreneurs making money by selling goods from China on the black market.  As many men work for the government, black market enterprises are run by women – which perhaps explains why over 70 per cent of those with the money and contacts needed to escape from the North are women.

Reporter: Seyi Rhodes

Producer/Director: Kate Hardie-Buckley

Series Editors: Monica Garnsey & Hugo Ward

A Quicksilver Media production

Speakers:

Chaired by series producer Hugo Ward

Kate Hardie-Buckley is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker.

Paul French is an author and widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international and bestseller Midnight in Peking.

John Everard is former British Ambassador to North Korea and author of Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea

EU-27 governments and the Brussels institutions have been tough on the bloc’s negotiating position and are now waiting to hear what the UK wants. Meanwhile official reaction on the continent to the high court’s ruling on article 50 has been quiet, with national governments regarding the decision as an internal matter.

We will be joined by EU correspondents and European journalists to discuss European reactions to Brexit negotiations and explore how UK press coverage matches up to sentiments on the continent.

Chaired by Simon Wilson, Editor, BBC Europe Bureau

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

Matthew Holehouse is a journalist covering Brexit for MLex, the news agency specializing in global regulatory risk. He was previously Brussels Correspondent and Political Correspondent at the Daily Telegraph.

Joris Luyendijk is a Dutch journalist and author of Swimming with Sharks: My Journey Into the World of the Bankers. He used to write the Guardian‘s Banking Blog, which looked at the world of finance from an anthropological perspective.

Alex Barker is Brussels Bureau Chief for the Financial Times

Sonia Stolper is UK and Ireland Correspondent for Libération.

After over two decades in power, Mr Jammeh was defeated in December’s election by Adama Barrow but went on to challenge the results. The former president stepped down peacefully after West African troops had been sent to Gambia in support of Mr Barrow, with the threat of military action from regional states looming.

The transfer of power in The Gambia has been celebrated as a democratic coup, with many urging other leaders across the continent– including those in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Zimbabwe – to follow the “Gambian example” rather than clinging on to power after their constitutional term limits expire. Was it an exception, or proof that African leaders are increasingly willing to demand — and enforce — democracy in the region?

Chaired by James Copnall, Africa Editor for the BBC World Service. He was previously the BBC correspondent for Ivory Coast (2004-7), Morocco (2008-9) and Sudan and South Sudan (2009-12). He is the author of A Poisonous Thorn in our Hearts, a book about Sudan and South Sudan after the 2011 separation.

Jerome Starkey was The Times‘ Africa correspondent for five years from 2012 until he was deported from Kenya last year. His last assignment was in Gambia to cover the military showdown when President Yayha Jammeh refused to step down. Before that he lived in Afghanistan, from 2006-2012, initially as a freelancer and later as a stringer for The Times. He was appointed countryside correspondent in February.

Ludovica Iaccino is an international news reporter at IBTimes UK covering foreign affairs and news in regions such as Africa and the Middle East. She has previously reported from Malawi, Rwanda, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon. Ludovica is the author of The Silence of Nyamata, a historical novel on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A photojournalist, she also collaborates with the websites IecoAfrica and Words in the Bucket

Murtala Touray is a Gambian with over two decades of experience working across West Africa with public, NGO and private entities including the regional body, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria. Murtala holds a Master’s degree in African Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford and provides advisory service on political, social and security risks facing business and humanitarian operations in West Africa.

Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy at Birmingham University. He was the joint editor of African Affairs, the #1 journal in Area Studies, for four years and is one of the editors of The African Affairs Reader (OUP, 2017) along with Lindsay Whitfield and Carl Death. Professor Cheeseman’s research interests focus on African politics and democratization, especially elections, political parties and forms of political mobilization. He is the author of a monograph, Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggle for political reform (CUP, 2015) and more than 30 book chapters and journal articles. Nic also writes a regular column for Kenya’s Sunday Nation newspaper, is the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics (OUP), and a writer for, and advisor to, Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel.

From fashion magazines to social networking, the ‘Mipsterz’ to the ‘Haloodies’, halal internet dating to Muslim boy bands, Generation M are making their mark. Shelina Janmohamed, award-winning author and leading voice on Muslim youth, investigates this growing cultural phenomenon at a time when understanding the mindset of young Muslims is critical.  While responses to terrorism and Islamic extremism lead to discourse polarising Islam and the West, these young leaders are countering stereotypical representations and flexing their economic muscles.

We will be joined by a panel of Generation M individuals defying the caricatures of Islam presented in mainstream media; the young entrepreneurs, journalists, inventors and activists who are building new global identities in a changing and interconnected world.

Hosted by author Shelina Janmohamed. Shelina is author of Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World (I.B.Tauris, 2016) and Love in a Headscarf (Aurum Press, 2014). An established commentator on Muslim social and religious trends, she has written for the Guardian, the National and the BBC. She is also vice president of Ogilvy Noor, the world’s first bespoke Islamic Branding practice.

Speakers

Aisha Gani (@aishagani) is a UK Senior Reporter for BuzzFeed News. She has written on issues from fake news, to interviewing the Muslim comedian who sat next to Donald Trump’s son on a plane, and has reported from France on the burkini ban and the refugee crisis in Europe. She was previously a news reporter at the Guardian. She is based in London.

Sheila Na’imah Nortley is an award winning film writer and producer. Starting out with her first short film in 2003, she set up her own production company and in 2009 her neo-noir short film The Hydra scooped Best Film at the BFM awards at the British Film Institute. Her acclaimed portfolio has won her debut screenings at The Ritzy in Brixton, Warner Bros, Google Headquarters and BAFTA as well as the ABFF in Miami where she won awards from Spike Lee for Best Film and Best Director. She recently won the Women of the Future Award for Arts and Culture. She is in preproduction of her feature film The Strangers.

Miqdaad Versi is the media spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain, as well as its Assistant Secretary General. He is a passionate community activist and works on projects including local interfaith engagement, the recent #VisitMyMosque campaign and mosque project The Salaam Centre that aims to be a community hub as well as faith centre. His recent work has included a campaign to hold media outlets accountable for their inaccuracies in reporting news about Muslims.

This special two-part series explores the interwoven history of the European project and the far right in postwar Europe – both East and West. Beginning with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community from the ashes of World War II, we chart the trajectory of European integration, in tandem with the story of the European far right, recounting the series of shifts that have led to today’s critical juncture: a post-Brexit EU and a stark rise in support for far right parties across Europe.

We also trace the way in which far right politics has increasingly crept into the mainstream, setting the political agenda on issues such as the EU and immigration. Combining documentary storytelling with panel discussion, the series comprises both historical interpretation and incisive analysis on the history and future of Europe.

Runtime: 48′
Produced by: Al Jazeera English

Laurence Lee joined Al Jazeera in 2007 as Delhi correspondent and has also worked as Europe correspondent for the channel. A lifelong reporter, he began his career at the BBC before moving to Sky News. Laurence has reported from more than 40 countries around the world, covering the second Palestinian intifada and the Iraq war. He spent several years in Moscow covering Russia and the former Soviet bloc. Laurence’s work has won several RTS awards in the UK and he won the ‘Golden Verb’ prize for international correspondents in Moscow.

Sanjiev Johal first joined Al Jazeera in 2008 and has worked on projects covering current affairs and global geopolitics across various formats. He is part of a team currently working on special projects including an exploration of post-World War Two US political history.