According to Emma Sky, the Middle East is in a ‘Time Of Monsters’. Where have these monsters come from? Join us for an evening with two regional experts with diverse experiences to dig deeper into the origins, complexities and fallout of these forces at large in the Arab World – and their relationship with Europe and beyond.

‘Hers was a fascinating world of senior military and diplomatic figures, many of them of the highest quality… She knew all the leading Iraqi politicians, many of whom regarded her as a personal friend. She saw much of Iraq and had some hair-raising experiences. And she always kept her sense of opposition to what was being done to the
country. Many people likened her to Gertrude Bell, the British political adviser who helped to create Iraq, and in some ways they were right.’
John Simpson, New Statesman

In her return to the Frontline Club, Sky will be building on over 20 years advising and enacting policy from Iraq and Jerusalem to Afghanistan with her most recent experiences travelling through a region in revolt.

Chair

Lyse Doucet is an award winning Chief International Correspondent and Senior Presenter for BBC World News television and BBC World Service Radio. She is regularly deployed to anchor special news coverage from the field and interview world leaders. Lyse also reports across the BBC including for BBC Newsnight. She played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the “Arab Spring” across the Middle East and North Africa and has covered all the major stories in the region for the past 20 years.

Speaker

Emma Sky is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She worked in the Middle East for twenty years and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services in Iraq. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Emma is the author of the critically acclaimed The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq.

 
  Watch the video stream of In a Time Of Monsters with Emma Sky and Lyse Doucet

Award-winning photographer Nish Nalbandian spent three years documenting life and war in Northern Syria from the frontlines to the everyday lives of people struggling to survive amid the ruins. A selection of photographs from this powerful body of work were published in Nalbandian’s critically acclaimed first monograph A Whole World Blind (Daylight, 2016). In 2014, as the situation in Syria escalated and it was becoming too dangerous to stay there, Nalbandian shifted his focus to another story close by: the lives of the nearly three million Syrian refugees still living in southern Turkey. Nalbandian’s humanistic portraits of Syrians in Turkey are published in his second book: A Handful of Dust (Daylight Books, April 2018).

In the book’s introduction, Nalbandian writes: “My intent in this book was not to produce a ‘poor refugee’ story, showing sad pictures of exotic Middle Eastern people living in poverty. I do have some pictures like that. But I challenged myself to show a wide swath of the Syrian population from all walks of life. I do not claim to show a complete picture, just a broad picture of what life is like for these people in this place at this time. I also tried to leave people’s politics and specifics of the war out of it”.

About the photographer

Nish Nalbandian working in Aleppo, Syria. Photo courtesy of Richard Charles Harvey

Documentary photographer Nish Nalbandian has photographed in more than 35 countries worldwide, in a variety of situations and environments, from wars to sporting events, cities to remote deserts. His work has appeared in such diverse outlets as The Human Rights Watch World Report, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Bag News National Geographic Traveler, and New Scientist. His first monograph, A Whole World Blind:War and Life In Northern Syria (Daylight Books, 2016) received critical acclaim in such outlets as Smithsonian Magazine, The Daily Beast, Vice, American Photo, Square Mile Magazine, Lensculture and The New York Review of Books. Nalbandian’s work has been shown in the New York Photo Festival, Powerhouse Arena, and IPA Best in Show in New York, and in exhibitions around the world.He has received many honours, including: Applied Art’s 2014 ‘Best Portrait Series’ Award (Portraits of the Syrian Opposition); American Photography AP30 (Aleppo Struggles On); First Prize, IPA (International Photography Awards) Editorial/Conflict (Aleppo Struggles On); Silver Medal, ND Awards (Special – Panoramic, Panoramic Photographs in and around Aleppo); Honourable Mention, ND Awards, Special PhotojournalismStory (Aleppo Struggles On); and Lensculture’s Top 50 Emerging Talent Award for 2014. For more information, go to: http://www.nishnalbandian.com/

Matthew Cassel 

Matthew Cassel is an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist based in the Mediterranean region. For more than a decade he has documented stories of people facing conflict and persecution in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and beyond. He works mainly as a one-person video crew, filming, producing and editing short and long-form documentary content for various publications.

Learn more here.

Another News Story takes a fresh view of the European refugee crisis. The film opens in 2015 Greece as refugees arrive on the idyllic island of Lesbos and follows refugees into Hungary and Croatia and across Europe to a hoped-for sanctuary. Since 2015 the current refugee crisis has flooded every news and media outlet across the globe. Another News Story takes a unique approach to capturing this narrative. While still giving a groundfloor perspective of migrants fleeing Syria and Turkey and their struggle to find a country where they are welcome, director Orban Wallace simultaneously turns the camera on the journalists and the role they play in representing the crisis to the world. Wallace’s gripping debut feature raises important questions about what happens behind the camera, and how the life cycle of a news story starts and grows.

Another News Story has had 17 international film festival selections including Karlovy Vary, IDFA, Zurich and Glasgow among others. The UK theatrical release for the film is at the end of April.

Run Time: 84 mins

Trailer: http://www.anothernewsstory.com/

Ethical Journalism Network

The Ethical Journalism Network is an alliance of reporters, editors and publishers aiming to strengthen journalism around the world, working to build trust in news media through training, education and research.

The EJN has developed migration-reporting guidelines, which are available as an infographic and as a video have been used for training around Europe and have been presented to the United Nations in New York and other international forums.

The migration and media studies that the EJN has published or contributed to are:

How do media on both sides of the Mediterranean report on migration – A 17-country study commissioned by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development to produce a study analysing how media cover migration in Europe, Middle East and North Africa.
Fatal Journeys – Improving Data on Missing Migrants – Published by the IOM in 2017.
Refugees Images: Ethics in the Picture – From the EJN’s 2017 Ethics in the News report.
Moving Stories – An international review of how media cover migration published by the EJN in 2015.
To find out how to support the EJN visit: http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/support

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.

Such testimonies come from young girls currently detained in Nauru, a remote island in the Pacific, which serves as one of Australia’s offshore detention centres for asylum seekers.

The testimonies introduce us to the hardships endured by those who survived a dangerous journey at sea, but are dying slowly in a land where the living conditions have been described as cruel and appalling.

A panel of journalists, migration experts and human rights advocates gathered at the Frontline Club on 27 September to discuss the Nauru files leak, published by the Guardian in August. The files showcased evidence of child abuse, sexual assault, self-harm and suicide attempts, as well as poor living conditions inside the camp.

The leak, which involved over 2,000 incident reports and is more than 8,000 pages long, sparked immediate international outrage.

Anna Neistat, Senior Director of Research at Amnesty International, tried to get inside the camp for two years when she succeeded she said:
“I was unprepared for the level of horror that I saw there. And I don’t say these things lightly. I have been covering conflict in the last 15 years, working in places from Syria to Chechnya to Afghanistan.

“I have never seen this in any war zone that I have worked in. Almost every person I spoke to say that they either attempted suicide or self-harm (…) and that includes 9-year-old children.”

Ian Woolverton, deputy editor of Guardian Australia, said some of his journalists could not cope with the horrors they had seen on the island over the course of two years and as a result are now suffering from PTSD.

Neistat said: “They claim they are saving lives because [refugees] are not drowning at sea. But they are dying anyway and in some ways more painfully and more slowly.”

In May, Omid Masoumali, an Iranian living in the Nauru detention centre for 3 years, set himself alight during a UNHCR visit. He stayed unattended for two hours before getting medical care.

“What’s the point of surviving at sea if you die in here?” a refugee girl asked a Guardian journalist.

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

Day in and day out, images of floating life jackets and drowning bodies fill our social media and reports of abuse and institutional negligence make global headlines. However, as the images of human pain and hopelessness have made it to our screens, the panel discussed: Have they really made it into our hearts and minds?

Eiri Ohtani, Project Director of the Detention Forum in the UK, said the overwhelming flow of daily reports may be undermining how much we care.

“I worry that this is becoming too normal,” she said. “When there are so many similar stories out there, how do we then make that story special?”

The panel agreed the Nauru files went largely under reported, especially in Australia. Ohtani said that human rights advocates and particularly journalists have an important role to play by changing the narrative that has formed around refugee-related issues, not only by giving these stories a face, but also by connecting them to a wider political landscape.

Ohtari added that journalists should be very sensitive to the narrative of deserving versus undeserving migrants, which has been forming in the media.

She said: “As an organisation (…) we get quite a lot of requests from journalists (…) that say: ‘Can you find us somebody who has fled from Syria, was in Greece and then has got a wife in Germany and left handed.’ It seems like you have already decided what you are going to say.”

"In prison you count days down. In #detention you count days up and up" @EiriOhtani @frontlineclub #WithoutDetention #ThereAreAlternatives

— Mary Engleheart (@MaryEngleheart) September 28, 2016

Neistat said that since coming back from Nauru only one journalist had asked her the most important question – who are these people?

“I have to say they made an incredible impression on me. They all would be added value to the society and I’m saying it with no hesitation whatsoever,” she said. “None of them would be a burden, they are nurses, teachers, engineers. (…)They could buy their plane ticket and fly either to Australia or some other place, they just cannot.”

It is hard for Western audiences to relate to the horrors they flee from, but Neistat believes that is why it is important to know who they are. “Changing this narrative will affect a lot the public perception, which will in turn define government policies.”

She then concluded: “We need to stop using the term ‘refugee crisis’. It is not a refugee crisis; it is a crisis of refugee protection.”

The Australian government defended their asylum policies by disregarding the documents as false or unverified, and by stating it was an issue for the Nauruan government, despite the Australian government hiring camp employees.

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.

After the files were published, the Australian government defended their asylum processing policies, suggesting that the accounts in the 8,000 page report were comprised of false accusations of abuse and unverified sources. Immigration minister Peter Dutton has been quoted as saying “Nauru is not part of Australia, so this is an issue for the Nauruan government.”

Will the publication of the Nauru files lead to changes in the country’s asylum policies? We will be joined by a panel of journalists, migration experts and human rights defenders to discuss their initial reactions to the Nauru files, the implications of the reports and how a group of journalists broke a story from within a detention centre that has remained historically off-limits to the media.

Chair:

Emily Wilson has been with the Guardian since 2000, working across news and features. She was network editor of the UK edition of the Guardian’s website before moving to Sydney in April 2014. She is now editor of Guardian Australia.

Speakers:

Will Woodward is Guardian Australia’s deputy editor. He has been editor of G1 (the news section of the paper), deputy national editor, chief political correspondent and education editor, and was a Laurence Stern fellow at the Washington Post.

Anna Neistat is Senior Director for Research at Amnesty International. Over the last fifteen years she has worked in most of the world’s conflict zones and has recently returned from a visit to Nauru.

Ian Woolverton is Head of Media for Save the Children Australia. He works with the media to raise the profile of issues including humanitarian crises, the health of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders, youth justice and asylum seekers and refugees. He has deployed to many humanitarian emergencies, including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Eiri Ohtani is Project Director of the Detention Forum in the UK since 2009. She was also European Regional Coordinator of the International Detention Coalition between May 2015 and August 2016. She has over 15 years of experience working with asylum seekers and migrants, including directorship of a specialist legal advice agency.

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.

The civil war in Syria is never far from our front pages and minds, particularly with the continual images and stories of refugees dominating the media and political agenda. It is a story we all think we are familiar with. 

But what is it like to grow up in exile? How do the Syrian children see their situation, and how has it affected them?

Mani Benchelah’s new hour-long documentary This is Exile, realised with the support of Save the Children UK, takes a unique view – the life of a Syrian refugee, told entirely from a child’s perspective.

The Frontline Club held a special screening of the film on Monday 4 April, which was followed by a Q&A with Benchelah, Save the Children’s Jess Crombie, filmmaker Julia Kirby-Smith and Syrian humanitarian aid worker Ahmer.

“I was reporting on the situation in Syria for Channel 4 News and I found that children were approaching me and wanted to express what they are experiencing,” said Benchelah, who started filming for the documentary in 2014. “Their family members had been affected, killed or maimed and their schoolmates had also been killed. So the idea of making a film about Syrian refugees, children specifically, was discussed with Save the Children.”

With children amounting to half of the refugee population in Lebanon, the film follows a few living in Lebanon over the course of two years. They talk about what it is like to be a refugee, and what they think of their own futures and that of their home country.

“It’s not easy to interview children who have been through trauma, or have experienced what is war,” said Benchelah, who was a primary school teacher before he became a documentary filmmaker. “There is a question among the journalist community whether it is ethical to interview children, particularly in situations of trauma… Sometimes I had to decide not to interview the children.”

@frontlineclub one of my fave places in London for this new doc #SaveSyriasChildren pic.twitter.com/ygUUgNxcig

— Becca Dove (@becdove) April 4, 2016

Ahmed, who is Syrian and has worked with children in Syria for UNICEF, described how the film reflected the reality on the ground. “The film tries to show the reality of what people, especially children, are going through. Nearly three million children are out of school.

“Thousands of children have been born stateless because they don’t have papers – they are going to school and they don’t speak the language. But the good thing about children is they adapt.”

As Save the Children’s Director of Creative, Jess Crombie commissioned the film and explained to the audience why they wanted to do something a little more innovative: “This was the first full length doc we’ve ever made; we usually make short films.

“We wanted to make it because at the time when we commissioned it in 2013, public engagement had dropped and we wanted to bring the situation to people’s attention and give them a different perspective. We wanted to… give a truth to the situation, so it wouldn’t be so overtly political. What a child will give you is a perspective that it not mired in their own political views, but about the reality of what they are experiencing.”

Filmmaker Julia Kirby-Smith pointed out that the children also shine a light on the wider context. “It’s interesting that although children can speak a bit more openly than the adults can, at the same time you can see they are a little filter for what their parents and adults are all saying to them.”

Benchelah elaborated on this point, and told the audience about one child he captured on film who seemed to have strong pro-Assad views: “It’s interesting because although the parents know about what the regime is doing, and about the atrocities, they teach the younger kids to be really pro-regime.

“They want to come back to Syria, but they are afraid that if they are saying anything wrong against the regime to their children, they are afraid that when they grow older, they will become in opposition to the regime – they don’t want that.”

Watch the trailer for the film here.

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