The Frontline Club

Oleg’s Choice gives a unique and personal perspective to the conflict in the Ukraine. Since the summer of 2014, thousands of young Russians poured into the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine. Driven by propaganda on Russian television, they believed they were fulfilling their patriotic duty.

Amongst the first wave of volunteers was Oleg and Max. Oleg was appointed battalion commander, while Max became a soldier. But their illusions were shattered on the night of June 3rd 2015, when a battle went horribly wrong. Oleg ended up leading many of his men to their death.

While Oleg and Max continue to fight, they discuss their motivations and share their own perspective on the conflict. Oleg’s Choice serves as a uniquely personal testimony of one side of the war rarely seen in the western media.

Music is the beating heart of Malian culture. But when Islamic extremists took control of northern Mali in 2012, they enforced one of the harshest interpretations of sharia law in history and, crucially for Mali, they banned all forms of music. Radio stations were destroyed, instruments burned and Mali’s musicians faced torture, even death.

Overnight, Mali’s revered musicians were forced into hiding or exile – where most remain even now. But rather than lay down their instruments, the musicians are fighting back, standing up for their cultural heritage and identity. Through everything, they have used music as their weapon against the ongoing violence that has left Mali ravaged.

Inspired by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level, Katharine Round’s accomplished debut feature illustrates a more personal account of how inequality shapes our societies.

The film weaves together seven characters each striving for a better life: Wall Street psychologist Alden wants to make it to the top 1%; Glaswegian rapper Darren just wants to stay sober; Newcastle carer Rochelle wishes her job wasn’t looked down on so much; Jen in Sacramento, California, doesn’t even talk to the neighbours in her upscale gated community – they’ve made it clear to her she isn’t “their kind”. It becomes clear that a higher income doesn’t ensure happiness and inequality hurts us all – rich and poor.

The film travels across the world and into individual lives to see how broad economic shifts have shaped not only our physical circumstances, but also the way we think and what we believe in. It reveals, piece by piece, the forces that have undermined our economic foundations, and led to a dramatic transfer of wealth to the very top: the top 0.1% in the US own as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the population.

The film features high profile commentators, including former economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Sir Alan Budd, historian Sir Max Hastings, economist Ha-Joon Chang, Noam Chomsky and epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot. The Divide plots parallel character narratives together with an archive spine, juxtaposing news reports from 1979 to the present day, with the outcomes of those economic decisions and the thinking that made them possible. The lines are clearly drawn between the big picture and the very personal, producing a new and more human way of depicting the true toll of rising inequality.

Sectarian divides – and their manipulation by those in power – are increasingly fuelling conflict across the diverse countries of the Middle East, spilling over borders and contributing to ongoing violence in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Yet in the nineteenth century the region was considerably more tolerant than Western Europe at the time; a high degree of religious pluralism and self-determination were permitted across the Ottoman Empire’s wide-reaching territories. After European powers forcibly broke up the empire and attempted to divide it into secular nation-states, the foundations were arguably laid for the conflicts of today.

On the release of his new book Holy Lands: Reviving Pluralism in the Middle East, we will be joined by writer and Jerusalem correspondent for The Economist Nicolas Pelham – and others – to discuss his optimistic and vivid reportage that spans the region, from Israel and Palestine to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We discuss the roots of today’s sectarian tensions and how they have come to characterise the region as a whole – often without a full recognition of historical context, socio-economic factors, or the rich differences of the countries contained within it. We will look to the future and assess hope for a recovery from conflict and a return to religious plurality.

The event was chaired by Iraqi-British journalist and political analyst Mina Al-Oraibi, a senior fellow at the Institute of State Effectiveness and a Yale World Fellow. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Middle East and has written extensively on US and European policies in the Middle East, in addition to conducting several high profile interviews including with US President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi.

The panel:

Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent, and a writer on Arab affairs for the New York Review of Books. He spent five years as a senior analyst for International Crisis Group, covering the growing power of regional national-religious movements in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, and has worked as a consultant for the United Nations in Gaza. He was The Economist’s correspondent in Iraq during the 2003 American invasion and in the Maghreb. He is the author of A New Muslim Order (2008), which maps Shia resurgence in the Arab world, and co-author of A History of the Middle East (2004).

Patrick Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, currently, for The Independent. He was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, and is the author of several books on Iraq’s recent history, including The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq and most recently The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising.

Safa Al Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian journalist and filmmaker, and joint winner of the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Journalism. She has been reporting on Yemen since 2010, and was one of only a handful of journalists reporting from inside the country for a Western news organisation as the crisis escalated. She has directed numerous documentaries for the BBC and PBS, including Al Qaeda in Yemen: A New Front (2012), Saudi’s Secret Uprising 2014), and more recently, Yemen Under Siege (2016).

Firas Abi Ali is a Senior Principal Analyst for IHS Country Risk, with a focus on forecasting political and violent risks in the MENA region. His expertise includes Islamic finance in Syria, Lebanon, Libya and Egypt, with a concentration on political stability and the rise of Islamist militant groups, as well as the likely evolution of conflicts and ensuing risks across the region. He makes regular appearances in the media, including interviews with Reuters, Bloomberg, the BBC, Newsweek and CNN.

First came President Obama and then the Rolling Stones, the message is clear, Cuba is open for business – but what does this mean for the country and the people? A year since the US and Cuba restored diplomatic relations we will discuss what has changed.

Speaking as the first sitting US president to visit Cuba since the 1959 revolution, Obama switched to Spanish to say “El futuro de Cuba tiene que estar en las manos del pueblo cubano” — “the future of Cuba must be in the hands of the Cuban people.” His words mark a significant shift, we will be discussing whether they can be realised.

Chaired by Juliana Ruhfus, journalist, filmmaker, and senior reporter at Al Jazeera English, People and Power.

The panel:

Michael Voss is the CCTV correspondent based in Cuba. He moved there in 2007 for the BBC and has reported on the political and economic changes along with a broad range of social and cultural issues. He has been covering Latin America since the mid 1990’s when he was the BBC’s South America Correspondent.

Emilio San Pedro is one of the editors of BBC Monitoring and regional manager for Latin America. He was the Americas Editor for the BBC World Service and travelled frequently to Latin America and Cuba. He was in Cuba last year for a BBC World Service series of reports on the changes in the country. He was born and raised in Miami and is the son of Cuban exiles.

Helen Yaffe, a fellow in the Economic History department at the London School of Economics (LSE). Since 1995 she has spent time living and researching in Cuba, her publications have focused on Cuban political economy and regional economic integration.

Will Grant (via Skype) is the BBC’s Cuba Correspondent based in Havana. He has been studying and working in Latin America for 20 years, and covering the region for the BBC since 2001.

In 2014, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) – a network of investigative centres and independent media stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia – in partnership with the Independent, exposed a network of money laundering starting in Russia and involving Latvia, Moldova and the City of London. As a result of this award-winning story, the National Crime Agency launched an inquiry into the involvement of 19 British shell companies in a $20 million money laundering operation. The impact of the investigation has continued to the present day – in March this year the Latvian bank at the very centre of the network, Trasta Komercbanka, had its licence revoked by the European Central Bank.

In April 2016, the OCCRP also had a hand in one of the largest leaks in journalistic history – the Panama Papers – which revealed the secretive offshore companies used by politicians, oligarchs, criminals and sportspeople to hide their wealth, evade taxes and commit fraud. The documents, obtained from offshore services provider Mossack Fonseca, again demonstrated that corruption and financial crime are widespread and systematic, and infiltrate governments, corporations and civil services – with the UK as no exception. Their prevalence is bolstered by an ability to operate with ease across many frontiers, and transparency remains their natural enemy.

On the eve of a Downing Street summit aiming to challenge cross-border organised crime and corruption, we will be joined by OCCRP co-founder and editor Drew Sullivan and others to discuss how best to report on – and combat – transnational organised crime and corruption, with a particular focus on the London link and recent Panama Papers leaks. We will be asking what the role of transparency and government data is in combating corruption, and what role journalism can play in preventing its occurrence and bringing those accountable to justice.

This event was moderated by award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough – author of two books about Russian history and politics: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great; and expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.

The panel:

Daniel Balint-Kurti is a journalist and campaign leader of the Special Investigations team at Global Witness. He focuses on anti-corruption issues in Africa and has been at Global Witness since 2010, before which he worked on The Times foreign desk and as an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.

Meirion Jones is an investigative journalist and producer, and former head of investigations at BBC Newsnight.

Drew Sullivan is co-founder and editor of OCCRP.

Holly Watt has been on the investigations team at the Guardian for just over a year, spending the last eight months working on the Panama Papers. She previously worked at The Sunday Times and The Telegraph.

In 2014, Western countries made Ukrainians a promise. They pledged to find the money stolen by Ukraine’s deposed president, as well as by his friends and relatives, and to return it. Ukraine was in desperate need of funds, as it sought to repel a Russian invasion, to maintain basic services, to pay its foreign debt, and to end – once and for all – its crippling epidemic of corruption. Two years on, it’s time to ask how that is going.

Bloody Money tells two stories. One is of a Ukrainian oligarch’s bank account – and the $23 million it contained. In unprecedented detail, it reveals where the money came from, how it was laundered, and what happened when a British judge ruled on its provenance. The other story is that of a Ukrainian mother, and her battle to find medicines for her haemophiliac daughter, in a country where healthcare is just one more opportunity for corrupt officials to make money.

Bloody Money reveals how kleptocrats use shell companies to obscure the origins of their stolen money, and how Western enablers – lawyers, accountants, and more – assist them in doing so. It also shows how Ukrainian officials continue to run corrupt schemes, despite 2014’s revolution, and how that is sabotaging the country’s reform efforts.

Directed by award-winning director Havana Marking and presented by award-winning investigative reporter Oliver Bullough, Bloody Money is produced in collaboration with Sundance and Vice News, as part of the prize awarded to Global Witness when it won the 2014 TED Prize.

Europe is experiencing a wave of migration not seen since the end of World War II. Forced out of their homes by terror and war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, pulled to Europe by the prospect of a better life, huge numbers are risking everything in perilous journeys across land and sea.

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.

How does the idea of Eurasianism influence modern Russia? We will be joined by a panel, including Charles Clover author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, to explore this theory of Russian national identity based on ethnicity and geography.

From the annexation of Crimea, to Russia’s intervention in Syria and the rise of anti-Western paranoia and imperialist rhetoric, we will examine the history of Eurasianism, how it factors into the thinking of the Kremlin and its impact on Russian society.

Chaired by foreign correspondent for BBC Newsnight, Gabriel Gatehouse.

The panel:

Charles Clover, is an American journalist, currently the Financial Times‘s China correspondent and former Moscow bureau chief. He is author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism.

Rodric Braithwaite is a former British diplomat and author. From 1988 to 1992 he served as British ambassador in Moscow. He is the author of Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War and Afgantsy.

Andrei Sidelnikov, human rights activist and leader of Speak Up! – an international campaign group.

Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster. She is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington, and a special correspondent in China and many parts of Europe. She is a member of the Valdai Group, invited since 2004 to meet Russian leaders each autumn.

A panel of explorers, scientists, journalists and experts explore the dark links between illegal wildlife trafficking and terrorism in the latest in the series of events in partnership with the Scientific Exploration Society (SES).

Chaired by Andrew Mitchell, SES chairman, forest canopy explorer and founder of the Global Canopy Programme.

The panel:

Dr Susan Canney of the Oxford Tracking Group has worked in conservation science in Africa, Asia and Europe, including living for several years in Niger and Tanzania, and being continuously engaged with the WILD Foundation’s Mali Elephant Project since 2003.

Richard Madden is a travel writer, ghostwriter, and online filmmaker who recently spent two years in the African bush reporting for The Daily Telegraph. He is particularly interested in the role responsible tourism can play in wildlife conservation.

Ian Redmond OBE, Explorer and Conservationist is renowned for his work with Mountain Gorillas and Elephants including undercover investigations and anti-poacher patrols, guided film crews and/or special interest tours into close encounters with wildlife.

Julian Newman is the campaigns director for the London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), he joined the organisation in 1997. EIA was established in 1984 to investigate, expose, and campaign against environmental crimes. During his time at EIA he has carried out field investigations into a range of environmental crimes, including illegal logging, smuggling of ozone-depleting chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as illicit trade in ivory and tiger parts.