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.

On 3 November at the Frontline Club, photojournalist Greg Constantine spoke to UNHCR’s UK representative Gonzalo Vargas Llosa about Nowhere People, Constantine’s body of ten years of photographic work on the world’s estimated 10m stateless people.

A stateless person “under law is considered no citizen of any country,” said Constantine. “Once citizenship is severed, it opens people up to an array of deprivation of rights.”

The number of global stateless may exceed 10m, according to Vargas Llosa, as “very few governments want to give exact statistics on stateless people inside their borders.”

Constantine’s talk at the Frontline Club comes on the first anniversary of the launch of I Belong, a UN campaign to “end the scourge of statelessness by 2024,” said Vargas Llosa.

Constantine showed images from his meetings with stateless peoples, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia; Nubians in Kenya; Filipinos in Saba, Malaysia; the Dali in Nepal; the Dom in Iraq; ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Roma in Italy.

“Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them” after end of Yugoslavia says @grconstantine @frontlineclub

— Charlotte Beale (@CharlotteAGB) November 3, 2015

Constantine also shared quotes from stateless men and women he had met, including from Jafar, a stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh: “Because we don’t have citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe. When a fish is out of water, he suffocates.”

“The legacy of colonialism is very much a part of people becoming stateless in Asia and Africa,” said Constantine. “The creation of the idea of ‘others’ that came from French colonialism is responsible for the Ivory Coast’s stateless people… Denial of citizenship is directly attached to Ivorian conflict and the 2002 civil war was borne from a clash of identity – us and them.”

He added: “Most times, you find stateless people are not refugees. Most have never left the country in which they were born.”

“The Rohingya is by far the most extreme example of statelessness in the world today,” Constantine continued, despite them playing a huge role in the economy of southern Bangladesh.

“40,000 Rohingya are living segregated lives in Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps [in Burma],” said Constantine. They are put up in “tents… that psychologically make them think their situation as IDPs is temporary… The conflict has been manufactured by Burmese central government, by 40 years of oppressive policies that pitted communities against each other.”

“The administrative tactics states use to humiliate their stateless fly under the radar of the world’s media,” said Constantine. Discrimination against ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic has been “manifested into policy.”

Vargas Llosa added that in the Dominican Republic, “statelessness is the result of deliberate, well-planned, well-executed policies” by the government.

While “huge strides” have been made in Iraq, which has “some of the most progressive laws in the Middle East,” Domari gypsies still suffer. Similarly, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, “Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them.” Because of certain laws, generations of Roma in Italy “are not afforded opportunities to become citizens,” Constantine said.

“Gender discriminating nationality laws are all over the Middle East and Africa,” added Constantine. He highlighted this with a comment on the situation in Lebanon – a young subject born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father must inherit her father’s stateless condition. 27 countries globally limit a mother’s ability to pass her nationality onto her family.

A member of the audience pointed out that “the state is often an enemy of the people it is supposed to be administering,” and asked Constantine and Vargas Llosa their opinion of the role of the state in creating statelessness crises.

“What strikes one from Greg’s images is the evil a state can do,” Vargas Llosa agreed. “What happens when the caregiver of human rights ends up being the vehicle which perpetrates the denial of those rights?”

Constantine deplored the “sovereign right of a state to determine who its citizens are and who they aren’t.”

Visit the Nowhere People website to find out more.