The Frontline Club

Rudolf Elmer, the man who blew the whistle on the conduct of Julius Baer Bank in the Cayman Islands for which he is set to stand trial in Zurich on 19th January for breaching Swiss bank secrecy laws, will be addressing the press at the Frontline Club on Monday from 11.15am.

Accompanied by his lawyer Jack Blum, he will reveal more details of alleged abuses in the world of offshore financial centres. As he did back in 2007 he will pass the said documents and information to Wikileaks.

In 1961 Wilbert Rideau was a nineteen year old African-American living in Louisiana, the deep south of segregated America. An eighth-grade dropout despaired by the dead-end and small-town future his life held for him he set out to rob a local bank. The robbery went very wrong and lead to Rideau killing a young white female bank teller, he was arrested and gave a full confession as an angry white mob gathered outside chanting ‘kill that nigger’. He was sentenced to death row.

The forty four years he spent behind bars form an extraordinary story through decades of racial unrest and monumental change, of how Rideau overcame insurmountable odds to redeem himself and to later be described as ‘the most rehabilitated prisoner in the country’.

He went on to edit the prison news magazine The Angolite the first prison publication to be nominated for a National Magazine Award. It was nominated seven times under his editorship. He also co-directed the documentary The Farm, which was nominated for an Oscar. He worked with prisoners and officers to improve the lives of his fellow inmates, lecturing and co-writing a prison text book on how to manage prisoners and meeting with disadvantaged groups to speak about prison life. Yet in spite of his tremendous efforts Rideau remained behind bars, whereas many with longer prison sentences and worse prison records were released sooner.

With the help of his wife Linda Labranche, Rideau’s murder conviction was reversed a third time in 2000 and he was found guilty of a lesser charge of manslaughter in January 2005. Award winning journalist Wilbert Rideau will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with Afua Hirsch, the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent to recount his extraordinary story and the work he now does educating people about the realities of the world behind bars.

Throughout 2010 whistleblower website WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange were making headlines with the release of classified documents. Both the leaks and the controversy surrounding Assange have been covered extensively by the media.

For the first On the Media discussion of the year we are going to be putting the spotlight on the media and asking what the WikiLeaks operation and the media coverage of it tells us about the press.

How have journalists responded to this new kid on the block? The future will no doubt see the emergence of similar organisations, but what impact will this have on the culture of journalism? How will the media adapt and how will this currently uncomfortable relationship develop?

Chaired by Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English.

David Aaronovitch, writer, broadcaster, commentator and regular columnist for The Times;

Mark Stephens, media lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent and Julian Assange’s solicitor;

Ian Katz, deputy editor of the Guardian;

Gavin MacFayden, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

In association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House will be hosting our First Wednesday discussion of the year. With an expert panel we will be examining how the operation works.

Where is it geographically strongest? What form does the organisation take and what tactics does it employ? How has it evolved and how will it evolve in the future?

To address these questions, joining us will be:

Dr Maha Azzam, Associate Fellow, Chatham House.

Investigative journalist and Al-Qaeda expert Camille Tawil. Tawil has covered Islamic militant groups for Al-Hayat Arabic daily in London since the early 1990s and is the author of The Armed Islamic Movement in Algeria – from the FIS to the GIA and Brothers in Arms – the Story of al-Qaeda and the Arab jihadists.

Deepak Tripathi, historian, journalist, researcher and author of Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism and Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Noman Benotman, a senior analyst at Quilliam. He was previously a leader of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and an associate of senior al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan. In September 2010, he published an open letter to his former colleague Osama bin Laden calling on him to abandon violence.

Humanitarianism has become a multi billion dollar business, but who is holding it to account? When a catastrophic disaster hits; the 2004 Tsunami, the floods in Pakistan, the public reach into their pockets and give. But when all the television cameras have packed up and gone home who is left to monitor how that money is spent?

Join us at the Frontline Club with an expert panel to discuss where the money goes. Is there a need for a greater level of transparency and accountability? What systems are in place for this and are they working? To what extent are there levels of corruption in the system and how can this be addressed? Is aid targeted to the greatest effectiveness?

Chaired by Paddy Coulter, Oxford Global Media partner and communications director of Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University’s Department of International Development,

With:

Vicki Peaple, international development professional who has been working in the sector for the past 6 years currently for the STARS Foundation managing a programme of funding and consultancy support to local organisations working in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia and Somaliland.

Judith Randel, co-founder and director of Development Initiatives (DI). She provides strategic direction and expert advice across all DI’s programmes, including aidinfo and Global Humanitarian Assistance, following on from the success of the Reality of Aid reports.

Giles Bolton, closely involved in Africa and its development for more than ten years as a civil servant, diplomat and aid worker. From 1996 until 2004 he worked for the British Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), in countries such as Kenya, Rwanda and Iraq. Author of Aid and Other Dirty Business: An Insider Uncovers How Globalisation and Good Intentions Have Failed the World’s Poor.

Jonathan Glennie, research fellow at the Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure (CAPE) at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Previously, he managed Christian Aid’s aid programme in Colombia and worked on several international campaigns, including Make Poverty History and the Jubilee Debt Campaign. He is the author of The Trouble with Aid: Why less could mean more for Africa.

Mercenaries, gunships and a foiled coup, it reads like a Hollywood script but is in fact the real life story that frontline journalist, documentary filmmaker and long standing Frontline Club member James Brabazon became embroiled in. He will be joining us to recount the inside story of the most infamous coup attempt in recent history; from his journey into the Liberian war to the imprisonment of his friend, body guard and mercenary Nick du Toit in Black Beach Prison, Africa’s most notorious jail.

As in his book My Friend the Mercenary Brabazon will be recalling how his unlikely friendship with Nick du Toit came into being on the bloody battlefields of the Liberian civil war and how this led to him becoming involved in the 2004 attempted overthrow of the government of Equatorial Guinea.

James Brabazon will be in conversation with Andrew Mueller, rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist and author.

"A rare blend of great storytelling and pure wisdom, Little Bunch of Madmen: Elements of Global Reporting is the best thing yet written about the state of modern journalism by one of its few true living masters, and every reporter working today should go out and buy it and read it."

— Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer, The New Yorker

Since 1965 Mort Rosenblum has covered war and peace on seven continents: civil strife, velvet revolution, climate chaos, and everything in between. As Associated Press special correspondent, he’s been shot at, locked up, lied to and shaken down. He ran AP bureaus in the Congo, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Argentina, and France. As editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, Rosenblum dispatched correspondents and decided what made news. Now, in vivid detail, he explains what he learned the hard way in this gem of a guide to global reporting.

“This is the manual I wish I’d had back in the 1960s when I was dropped into the Congolese mayhem, clueless, sleepless, and scared witless,” Rosenblum writes. “It’s also the primer I wish people back home could have had at hand to understand what they were reading and watching.”

Rosenblum will be joining us to look back on the last forty years that form the lessons and stories of Little Bunch of Madmen. He will be joined on stage by celebrated foreign correspondent Jon Swain, the discussion will be chaired by author and broadcaster Tom Fenton. If you are a young aspiring journalist this is an event and a book not to be missed.

This event is part of our monthly On the Media series, produced in association with the BBC College of Journalism.

Leah Chishugi describes herself as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and it is what she calls the ‘survivor’s guilt’ that compelled her to return to her native Congo where she set up the charity Everything is a Benefit to help those affected by the region’s conflict.

She will be joining us at the Frontline Club in conversation with special correspondent and presenter for BBC News, Razia Iqbal, to tell her story and the stories of the women and children in the eastern part of Congo that she now dedicates herself to helping.

Chishugi grew up in eastern Congo but moved to Kigali the Rwandan capital at the age of sixteen to work as a model, she married and had a son. But just three years later she found herself caught up in the massacre that claimed over 800,000 lives. She escaped only after being left for dead under a pile of corpses.

Two years since the White House changed hands, how has the American empire altered? Very little, argues Tariq Ali, apart from the mood music. Ali will be at the Frontline Club in conversation with Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, to discuss his new book The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad in which he slices through Obama-mania, demystifying the narrative arc of redemption.

Contrary to what the world hoped Obama symbolised; redemption of a racist history, the overcoming of adversity, and the hope of a better, fairer future. Ali argues the wind that drove Obama into the White House was really the immaculate symbiosis of big money and big politics.

In this dissection of Obama’s overseas escalation and domestic retreat, renowned author, filmmaker and international commentator Tariq Ali asks how the American empire has changed since Obama took control, with military activity in the Middle East more prevalent than during the Bush Era. The hopes aroused during Obama’s election campaign have rapidly receded: Obama’s failures are paving the way for a Republican surge, while his own supporters become increasingly despondent.

The Alternative Iraq Enquiry was borne from David Lawley-Wakelin, the freelance documentary filmmaker who was so incensed by the Iraq war that he made the bold statement from the audience of Question Time suggesting whether Tony Blair was a liar prepared to kill in the name of oil. On this premise, Lawley-Wakelin travels to Iraq to ask its citizens and military personnel whether they agreed with him.

Questioning the motives of the war and the responsibilities for its atrocities on both sides of the Atlantic, The Alternative Iraq Enquiry reaches the fundamental question: who is responsible for the atrocities of war?