In an emotional and inspiring interview at the Frontline Club on 19 February, little more than two weeks after his release from an Egyptian prison, Australian journalist Peter Greste spoke of his experience of being incarcerated for more than 400 days for nothing more than doing his job as a journalist.

Greeted by a standing ovation, Greste took to the stage, beaming to the crowded room and waving to friends and colleagues. It was Greste’s first visit to London since he was released on 2 February under a presidential decree that allowed for the deportation of foreigners accused of crimes on Egyptian soil.

Facing up to what was originally a seven-year sentence had changed him as a person, said Greste, but he felt empowered to have discovered that the limits to what he could endure were beyond what he had ever expected.

Out of the blue

Speaking to journalist Sue Turton, Greste recalled the otherwise ordinary evening in December 2013 when in the midst of his preparations to go out for dinner “about eight guys” burst into his room. They put him in handcuffs and took him to a police cell. He would not be free again for almost 14 months.

Greste, who was working for Al Jazeera English at the time, had experienced brushes with the authorities when working on controversial stories at other points in his career. But this time his arrest came completely out of the blue.

“We knew that we hadn’t done anything wrong; we hadn’t pushed any boundaries,” he said. “We’d always felt when we were working that as long as you play with a straight bat you’ll be relatively safe.”

Although Greste and his two Al Jazeera colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, forced themselves to consider the possibility that they would be convicted, they “never really believed it,” he said.

But on 23 June 2014, Greste was sentenced to a seven-year term on accusations of terrorism and inventing the news, based on courtroom evidence that included footage of a family holiday and stories wholly unrelated to Egypt. Fahmy was also given a seven-year sentence; Mohamed was given ten years.

Creating structure

Conditions in the Tora Mazraa prison on the outskirts of Cairo, where Greste and his fellow inmates were confined to cramped cells for 23 hours a day, were humane but basic.

In order to cope, Greste developed a daily regime that included meditation, exercise and rigid study.

“I had to make a conscious decision to stay fit: physically fit, psychologically fit, and spiritually fit,” he said.
Each day, Greste spent an hour running up and down the 30 metre corridor outside his cell, covering distances of up to 12 kilometres a day.

He began studying for a master’s degree in international relations, courtesy of Griffith University in Australia. The university delivered 13 kilograms of academic papers to the prison, where Greste studied in his cell with pencil and paper.

“I figured there was no way I’d be able to get through this without doing something with my mind,” he said. “Even when your physical integrity is at risk, what really matters is your own mind and how you cope with it.”

Setting a horizon

Even with these distractions, the mental side was the greatest challenge, said Greste.

“The biggest danger is that your own mind can run away and play all sorts of tricks on you,” he said. “There were some really black days when you sink into despair, but you have to ride it out. If you carry a grudge with you it’s only going to turn in on yourself.”

The challenge was made all the more great by the uncertainty of the situation.

“The hardest part…was the open-ended nature of it,” said Greste. “Towards the end we knew we would probably have to mentally prepare for six more years.

“The only way through is to set your horizon to something you think you can cope with. Sometimes to the end of the week, or the next visit. Sometimes to the end of the day. Sometimes I’d say I’ll get through one more hour and I’ll think about the next hour after that then. It’s not easy, but it’s a matter of biting off the amount that you think you can chew.”

Emotional release

When Greste’s release came, it was sudden. “The embassy’s coming for you in an hour,” he was told. “Get your stuff you’re going home.”

At the time Fahmy was in hospital receiving treatment for an injured shoulder and Hepatitis C, but leaving behind Mohamed was an emotional moment for Greste.

“When you spend 400 days in a box with someone you get to know each other pretty well,” he said. “It’s as close as you can come to having a brother. Walking away and leaving them behind is not easy, and I still feel anguished about it.”

Greste attributed his release to the international pressure that was brought to bear on his behalf, both in the diplomatic community and in the media.

“I was rather spoiled,” he joked. “I had two governments on my case – Australia and Latvia. And I didn’t even know that I was Latvian!”

Ongoing campaign

Not everyone was so lucky. Many are still facing charges, said Greste, including a Dutch journalist and three young students who were attached to his case. Six Al Jazeera journalists, including Turton, were convicted in absentia.

Fahmy and Mohamed were released on bail on 13 February, after spending 411 days in prison, when an Egyptian court overturned an earlier verdict that had found them guilty of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

A retrial was scheduled for 23 February 2015, but has now been adjourned until 8 March.

The campaign to free Fahmy, Mohamed and the numerous other journalists who have been unjustly detained in Egypt and elsewhere, is ongoing.

Last year, 120 journalists were victims of targeted killings worldwide, the most dangerous countries including Pakistan, Syria, Ukraine, Honduras and Mexico, said Andy Smith, joint president of the UK’s National Union of Journalists, who joined the Frontline Club discussion for the latter stages.

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide for doing their job has increased from roughly 100 at the turn of the century to about 200 today, said Smith.

Greste underlined the importance of not letting the pressure for media freedom ease up following his release.

“The [journalism] community across the globe pulled together in a way that was absolutely unprecedented,” he said.” “If we lose this unity of purpose we lose something of enormous value. It is incumbent on everyone to use this not just in our case but in the case of every journalist.”

There is a natural reticence among the journalism community to write about other journalists, said Greste, but this is something that must be overcome.

“Journalists covering journalists gets us in some sort of existential angst, but we need to recognise that it’s an essential part of society, we are the fourth estate. We’ve got to appreciate that an attack on journalism, on the freedom of speech, is an attack on wider society. We need to learn to be a little less self-conscious about covering the plight of journalists…because it tends to be a symptom of much deeper problems.”

Empowering

The other significant legacy of Greste’s ordeal was the discovery that his limits went far beyond his imagination.

“It has changed me as a person,” he said. “I’ve been tested and I’ve discovered that my limits are a lot further than I thought they were, and it’s a very empowering thing.

“I think most people are vastly more capable of dealing with difficult situations than you imagine.”

Watch and listen back below:

In a week in which Egypt sent F16 jets into Libya in response to the broadcast of an Islamic State video showing the execution of at least a dozen Egyptians, the Frontline Club held a timely event examining the reasons behind Libya’s slide into civil war.

The event was held on 18 February, a day after Libyans marked the fourth anniversary of the revolution that brought an end to the regime of Muammar Gaddafi after almost 42 years in power.

Mary Fitzgerald

But there is little for Libyans to celebrate.

“The speed of Libya’s unravelling has been quite extraordinary,” said Mary Fitzgerald, a journalist who has reported from Libya since February 2011, and contributor to a recently published collection of essays entitled The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath.

In a debate chaired by BBC journalist Mohamed Madi, the panelists spoke of the polarisation of today’s Libya, in which two separate governments and hundreds of militias compete for influence.

Mohamed Madi

“The poison of polarisation has seeped into Libyan society,” said Fitzgerald. “Regions, communities, even families are fighting each other.”

Elham Saudi, co-founder and director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL) and associate fellow at Chatham House’s International Law Programme and Middle East and North Africa Programme, said that justice and governance had been replaced by a single concept:

“If you’re with us you’re with us, if you’re against us you’re dead.”

These deep divisions have created a need for reconciliation, but this will be a long process, said Peter Cole, former International Crisis Group Libya analyst and editor of The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath.

“Reconciliation and amnesty takes a generation,” he said. “It’s not the work of a few politicians in six months.”

Rule by law

The concept of rule of law has been lost in favour of rule by law – or lawmaking for political ends – said Saudi. Only 10% of those in prison have been charged, she said.

Abdul Rahman al-Ageli

For Abdul Rahman al-Ageli, co-founder of the Libyan Youth Forum and former security coordinator in the Libyan prime minister’s office, Libya’s governance problems stem from the fragmentation of the three factors that make a state: international recognition; monopoly on the use of force; and direct control over the territory.

Only one of the governments claiming to represent Libya has any of these three factors: the Tobruk-based administration can claim only the first, and that in Tripoli can claim none.

This is not going to change until there is a “mass reform of the state,” said Al-Ageli.

“All sides of the political spectrum believe that the exclusion of those they consider to be their opponents would be the solution to the country’s problems.”

Power vacuum

Guma el-Gamaty, a Libyan politician and National Transitional Council (NTC) envoy to the UK during the 2011 revolution, said that the root of Libya’s troubles was the power vacuum left by Gaddafi.

“Physics tells us that vacuums have to be filled, and what was it filled with? It was filled with militias,” he said.

Guma el-Gamaty

Bringing these militias into the government’s pay was the “biggest mistake the NTC made,” added El-Gamaty, as it took the number of militia members “from 25,000 to 250,000.”

There was no shortage of institutions after the 2011 revolution, argued Al-Ageli, but these institutions were “toxic and destructive.”

“The state incentivises counter-productivity, it rewards corruption, and it punishes efforts to reform,” he said.

The rush to seek remuneration for militia membership was only explained by Libya’s social history, said Al-Ageli.

“People feel that they have a right to receive a salary from the state,” he said. “There was an audit of armed groups, and 250,000 people turned up and said they were revolutionaries. They just wanted a salary from the state.”

Libya’s current political divisions are fuelled by fear, said Al-Ageli.

For each side, there’s a “fear of being marginalised by their opponent if their opponent wins, so they’re stuck in a zero-sum game,” he said.

“There is no rational reason for a conflict in Libya at the moment – it’s all emotional reasons.”

Elham Saudi

In the absence of the rule of law, concepts of justice have become warped, said Saudi.

Crime is “related to who did what to whom, not the action,” she said.

In hundreds of interviews carried out to establish what people in Libya understood by the word ‘torture’, 67% of those asked defined torture “by who had committed it,” said Saudi.

As Libya enters a fourth year of conflict, Libyans must remember what they fought for in February 2011, said El-Gamaty:

“Sometimes they say you have to trade freedom for security, but this is very, very dangerous. I have another name for that, and it’s dictatorship.”

Copies of the book the Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath can be purchased from Hurst publishers.

Watch and listen back:

The threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and the international network of militants it has spawned will be with us for a “generation”, according to experts speaking at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 24 September 2014.

From Al-Qaeda to ISIS: terrorist tactics. Panel discussion at the Frontline Club, 24 September 2014. From L to R: Patrick Cockburn, Peter Neumann, Sam Kiley, Alia Brahimi and Aymenn al-Tamimi. Photograph by Richard Nield

On the day that the UN security council agreed to launch an effort to prevent the flow of foreign jihadis in support of the Islamic State and US-led airstrikes continued in Syria, the Frontline Club panel underlined the seriousness of the ISIS threat and sought to explain its appeal to an estimated 15,000 foreign fighters.

Hosted by Sky News foreign affairs editor Sam Kiley, the debate brought together Peter Neumann, Professor of Security Studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and founder and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR); Alia Brahimi, visiting research fellow at the Oxford University Changing Character of War Programme at Pembroke College, Oxford and author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror; Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a recent graduate from Brasenose College, Oxford University, and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum; and Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent since 1979 and author of The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

The panel was unanimous in its belief that the airstrikes launched by a US-led alliance on Monday 22 September would not bring a speedy halt to the ISIS insurgency, something that UK prime minister David Cameron and a spokesperson for the US defence administration later admitted.

“I don’t believe the air campaign is going to be able to defeat ISIS, or that a more intensive military campaign would either,” said Neumann. “We’re going to be down there for years.”

Military strikes against ISIS ignore the root of the problem, the panel argued. “I’m pessimistic about the efficacy of airstrikes,” said al-Tamimi. “What is needed is a change of mindset on the ground. It’s local mindsets that matter here in Iraq now.”

“The US is trying to cut them off at the head, but we have to cut them off at the legs and deal with the causes,” said Brahimi.

The popularity of ISIS was attributed to a range of factors, including government failings and the organisation’s successes on the battlefield. “Maliki’s heavy handed responses to political issues in Iraq have definitely played a part,” said Brahimi. “Both Maliki and Assad have attempted to deploy military solutions to political problems.”

“One simple thing in ISIS’ favour is victory,” said Cockburn, pointing to the organisation’s military successes in Mosul, Anbar and Tikrit, and the fact that it has inflicted heavy defeats on the Syrian army. “In the context of great numbers of bitter, angry Sunni young men in Syria and Iraq, their lives pretty hopeless. . . . All of a sudden there’s this victorious army that they can join. It’s all very appealing.”

ISIS has taken advantage of a groundswell of anger and disillusionment among unrepresented Sunnis, which make up about 20% of the population in Iraq and 60% in Syria, and tapped into a history of insurgency that dates back to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“ISIS has ridden on the back of an overall revitalised Sunni insurgency in Iraq,” said Brahimi. “You can draw a straight line between [the invasion of Iraq] and the rise of ISIS. So many in Syria . . . cut their teeth in the Iraqi insurgency, trying to take the whole territory in the war against the US.”

For the time being, ISIS is focused on the ‘near enemy’, but it is likely that it will eventually move against Western targets. “[ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi will relish straying onto [Al Qaeda leader] Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ground,” said al-Tamimi. “Conducting attacks against the west has the ability to re-energise the ranks and silence internal critics. Baghdadi and Al-Zawahiri are in a race.”

The conflict has attracted between 12,000–15,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq in the past three years, the largest overseas participation of independent fighters since Afghanistan in the 1980s, according to Neumann. Foreign combatants make up an estimated 40% of ISIS recruits.

Many were initially motivated by humanitarian reasons, but more recent converts to the ISIS cause are driven by a mixture of ideology, idealism, and adventure. “The idea of a caliphate . . . motivates people to build something that can be there in a thousand years time,” said Neumann. “It’s like an adventure holiday minus the alcohol.”

“The narrative is increasingly utopian and the reality increasingly dystopian,” said Brahimi. “We have to make more of that.”

The broad international appeal of ISIS is storing up huge problems for the future, and this is something that airstrikes will not change. “You have 15,000 people who may go to other conflicts, go back to their own countries, or stay in the region,” said Neumann. “These networks will keep us busy for another generation.”

Watch and listen back here:

A compelling Frontline Club event on Wednesday 25 June showcased film and photographic work from across the globe that revealed both the depth of suffering and the strength of human spirit in some of the world’s most devastating internal conflicts.

Featured at the event was a series of photographs from Tim Freccia in South Sudan, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in Venezuela, Eman Mohammed in Gaza and Daniel Berehulak in Afghanistan, curated by multimedia photojournalist and filmmaker John D McHugh.

The event culminated in a screening of Ground Zero Syria, a dramatic film by Robert King featuring unprecedented footage of the brutal conflict in Syria, and an impassioned interview with King by The Times journalist Anthony Loyd that offered some chilling conclusions about the future of the conflict.

Robert King and Anthony Loyd at the Frontline Club.

All of the showcased work shared a common theme: that of the determination of each journalist to bring to light the plight of people facing oppression or armed struggle in their home countries, and to reveal the characters of those individuals caught up in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

Among Freccia’s work was a set of portraits of soldiers from the White Army, a ruthless militia group fighting alongside former Vice President Riek Machar in his campaign against the government of South Sudan.

In Freccia’s unique portraits, presented against a white background, he aimed to show through the expressions and postures of his subjects the “humanity present in these characters, for good or bad, which is often neglected”.

Zavala’s photographs were captured in Caracas and San Cristobal in February and March this year as the protests against Venezuela’s government escalated.

A picture of a woman slumped over the coffin of a lost loved one revealed the sacrifices made by the protestors, while another featured a combatant in plastic protective glasses making Molotov cocktails to take into the fray.

Mohammed took up photojournalism at the age of 19. In a narration of her photographs, she explained how she had to overcome cultural barriers to a woman pursuing such a career.

“I thought I had what it took to be a career photographer,” she said. “I was wrong. To gain acceptance in a male dominated field was next to impossible.”

Covering the war in Gaza in 2008-09 and under fire from aerial bomb attacks, the ground “shaking like a swing beneath us”, Mohammed was abandoned by the two male journalists with whom she was travelling. “Terrified, humiliated and feeling sorry for myself”, she learned a valuable lesson.

Mohammed‘s career has been characterised by a constant tension between capturing her own agony and that of others:

“You can freeze, but your camera cannot. If you don’t document history, it never happened.”

Her work included touching portraits of Mohamed Hodr, who along with 22 members of his family lived for several years beneath the rubble of what was once his home.

The only surviving remnant of what was to be a retirement retreat was a jacuzzi, which he hauled up to the roof of his shattered home so that each morning he could give his children a bubble bath.

Berehulak’s work focused on the terrible impact that the rapidly rising use of heroin in Afghanistan is having on the local population. One in 10 urban households in the country has at least one drug user, and in rural areas heroin use is as high as 30 per cent.

A set of photographs of one hospital ward that was admitting 200 children a month for severe malnutrition featured pictures of young children so wrinkled with starvation that they looked more like the elderly than the newly born. At a year-and-a-half, Mohammed weighed just 10 pounds.

“Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here,” said Berehulak in his narration. “Women are kept away from everyone except those in their immediate family.

“Farmers can’t grow crops because of mines, and doctors can’t get to children until the situation is already severe. Women can’t nourish their own children [because of the heroin use].”

At the country’s premier children’s hospital in Kabul, a five-year-old boy weighing just 20 pounds was being treated on a bench because the infusion line wouldn’t reach to a bed. The drug problem, said the director of demand reduction at the ministry of health, is a tsunami for his country.

Ground Zero Syria

Screened in the second half of the event, King’s film gave a unique insight into the fighters of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their efforts to survive the brutal attacks of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“For six to seven months we didn’t even think about picking up weapons,” said one.

“We started out with olive branches, but [in the end] the only option was to take up arms and put him [Assad] out of office.”

At a field hospital in Al-Qusayr, southwest of Homs near the border with Lebanon, a young boy looked forlornly up at the camera with a single streak of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Across the ward, another child’s guts were bursting through his sundered stomach.

“If I die when I help people it is good for me,” said a doctor at the hospital. “I’m a doctor, I must help people.”

At the Dar al-Shifa field hospital in Aleppo, Dr Osman, a physician at the hospital, explained how he had nightmares about amputating children’s limbs, but each day resisted the urge to return to normal life because there was no one else to help these people.

According to Osman, about 80 per cent of the patients at Dar al-Shifa are civilians. At the time of the interview, the hospital had already been bombed five times, with another 15 bombings nearby.

“The Syrian regime considers medical staff as a perfect target, as a military target,” he said.  “When you kill one doctor it is better than killing a thousand fighters.”

In November 2012, King was there when the hospital was hit yet again, but still hope was not vanquished.

“Dar al-Shifa is not a building, it’s not a machine; it’s people, it’s doctors, nurses,” said Osman, speaking amidst the rubble.

“We will continue. We will build this hospital again and we will work again.”

In one striking scene, Dr Abaman, a former veterinarian working as an assistant physician at the hospital, appealed directly to the camera, emotion cracking his voice:

“We have enough shown TV. Do something. Do something. We are suffering here alone.”

The film also featured the tragic burning of Aleppo’s market, a world heritage site and one of the world’s best-preserved souks.

King asked Ahmed Alhaji, who had witnessed the fire, to explain what he had seen.

“I saw a lot of things that make me cry,” he said. “I saw Assad destroy our history. My heart is broken, I was crying blood.”

Towards the end of the film, King asked an FSA fighter what he thought of the West’s Syria policy. The West’s inaction before – and even after – evidence came to light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he said, was a sign to Assad that:

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. You want to kill 100,000 people that’s okay; you want to drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs that’s fine. Chemical weapons? Just keep 20–30 per cent of them.”

Most of the characters featured in the film, said King, are now dead.

Beyond the obvious perils of filming during an almost constant artillery bombardment, King faced his own challenges in shooting the film, not least the very lack of engagement from the West and its media that was alluded to by the film’s characters.

“I had to reassess why I was risking my life to cover slaughter,” said King in the Q&A with Loyd.

“I’d been there for four months and had photographed 5,000 dead bodies and nobody cared. No one would buy my photographs, so I started shooting video.”

The politics within Syria were also a source of frustration for King. He saw a shipment of powdered milk he had helped facilitate first held up in customs and then less than welcomed by those who had been benefiting from the black market in the product.

Those people who had helped him gain access to the country started to try to influence his material and, when he refused, banned him from going back.

“In the first year I figured that their politics were holding up the medical needs of the community,” said King. “Then they wanted to control the message.”

Asked by members of the audience whether his work could be used to try the perpetrators of the violence, King expressed his frustration with the absence of a more effective international legal system:

“If there was an international court of law that could hold people accountable for their war crimes . . . but why give my stuff to some organisation that fantasises that it can prosecute people?”

Loyd and King agreed that the future for the country is bleak and the potential fallout dire.

“The war launched against Al Qaeda was one thing,” said Loyd, wearing a cast around his leg after sustaining gunshot injuries in the latest of many reporting trips to Syria.

“Now something far worse [Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS)] has taken up a huge block of the Middle East running almost to the Mediterranean, and the West is aghast as to how to deal with the situation.

“Syria has raised a huge question mark and nobody knows what to do.”

King is convinced that chemical weapons have been smuggled out of Syria and have already reached Western European capitals. Asked whether he was planning to go back to Syria, he said:

“I don’t have to go to Syria. It’s done. It’s here. It’s over. I’m going to sit and wait.”

The coming year could be a window of opportunity for the international community to tackle the violence and lawlessness that has claimed more than 5 million lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the past 15 years.

The panel: Kassim Kayira, Noëlla Coursaris Musunka, Jean-Roger Kaseki, Patrick Smith, Ben Shepherd.
Photograph: Richard Nield

This is the hope of Ben Shepherd, one of the speakers at Congo Dreams: Hopes and prospects for the future, a Frontline Club event held at Conway Hall in London in association with the Royal African Society on 13 February.

May be a window of opportunity to tackle issues in DRC – Ben Shepherd. @idreamofcongo #frontlineclub — Richard Nield (@Rnield01) February 13, 2013

An estimated 5.4 million people have died as a result of the conflict in the Congo since 1998, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee. But there is a glimmer of hope that the situation may improve if the right action is taken.

“There may by a chance in 2013 and beyond for things to evolve differently,” said Shepherd, associate fellow of the Africa programme at Chatham House.

Fighting continues to plague much of eastern DRC as rebel factions, sometimes supported by neighbouring countries, fight for control of land that is rich in mineral deposits. The weakness of the Congolese government and its security apparatus has led to the proliferation of an ‘alphabet soup’ of armed groups in the region, said Shepherd.

There’s an alphabet soup of armed organisations in eastern #Congo – Ben Shepherd @idreamofcongo #frontlineclub @congoconnect — Richard Nield (@Rnield01) February 13, 2013

But support for M23, one of the main rebel movements, has dwindled, and the exposure in 2012 of Rwanda’s involvement in supporting the movement will make it more difficult for it to find support from neighbouring countries.

“It’s hard to see where the M23 will go,” said Shepherd. “It’s hard to see the potential for it to relaunch itself. Now that there has been an acknowledgement of the cross-border involvement of Rwanda it will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle, and make it difficult for other countries to do the same.”

“We have to stop this cycle. People are tired of the suffering, they are tired of the rape, they are tired of the lack of development.”

With more than 6 million people dead in DRC we have had enough – Noella Coursaris Musunka, @idreamofcongo #frontlineclub — Richard Nield (@Rnield01) February 13, 2013

In 2010, a senior UN official described the DRC as the “rape capital of the world”, and it is a problem that has not gone away. One of a series of photographs exhibited at Conway Hall featured the broken glasses of a woman who had been attacked for the work she does with rape victims in the country.

The photograph is part of an exhibition organised by Congo Connect, an NGO campaigning against human rights abuses in eastern Congo, entitled I Dream of Congo, which runs from 16-23 February.

Maj Honorine Mungole.
Detail of picture by Dominic Nahr/Magnum – Bukavu, South Kivu, 2009

Lack of leadership
The help of the international community is essential to improving the situation in the DRC and to stopping the culture of impunity in the country, said Jean-Roger Kaseki, a human rights campaigner in the UK and in the Congo:

“The pattern of letting people who are responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide go free is a recipe for more militias to be created in the eastern DRC. Without the international community it will be difficult to stabilise the Congo.”

Jean-Roger Kaseki, human rights campaigner.
Photograph: Richard Nield

“There is a full graveyard of initiatives to watch the border between the DRC and Rwanda,” said Shepherd. “But they have different ideas as to the level of robustness – whether they are expected to fight or not.”

According to Shepherd, there has also been a lack of international leadership:

“The Congo has suffered from not having a country that has been prepared to co-ordinate, to take responsibility to do the work. Most countries are too frightened of how difficult it is and that they might get burned.”

Resource curse
The DRC is also suffering from a resource curse. It is rich in minerals, including coltan, a metallic ore that produces metals used in electronic products such as mobile phones. But these resources are being exploited by international investors with little benefit to the local population.

“The money is there, it’s just going to the wrong hands,” said Kassim Kayira, journalist and commentator at BBC Africa.

Kassim Kayira, BBC Africa.
Photograph: Richard Nield

“It is not clear that there’s any transparency in the deals being done to give access to Congo’s resources,” said Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, who chaired the debate.

“There’s an irony that we’re talking about the Congo’s lack of resources while they’re being used to push up the share price of one of the biggest companies in the world.”

Patrick Smith, Africa Confidential.
Photograph: Richard Nield 

Irony that DRC lacks resources while they’re being used to boost Glencore share price – Patrick Smith. @idreamofcongo #frontlineclub— Richard Nield (@Rnield01) February 13, 2013

The panel called for international intervention to help to strengthen the army and security forces, to clamp down on militias, and to put help put in place a stronger investment framework in the country.

But in the end, the solution to Congo’s problems must come from within, said Musunka:

“We have had all these outside forces for 15 years and they have failed. The solution has to come from Congo. You cannot impose solutions from outside. We need to empower our people.”

Watch the event here: