Bosnia - SIHRG meeting 19th October with Ed Vulliamy

BOSNIA - The Reckoning - Two decades on

Ed Vulliamy

International Senior Correspondent for the Observer and Guardian

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

6:00pm to 7:00pm

Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Charles Clore House 17 Russell Square London WC1B 5DR

Ed Vulliamy was born in Notting Hill, London (when it was Notting Hill), and was educated at the universities of Oxford and Firenze, before getting his first job in journalism on a local paper in Devon. He is now a Senior International Correspondent for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, for which he has worked since 1986. Before that, he was a researcher for the Granada Television current affairs series "World In Action." Ed Vulliamy has served as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian and Observer based in Rome (1990-4) and New York (1987-2003), and has written from all over Europe, America and the Middle East, covering both wars in Iraq, the attacks of September 11 2001, and most recently, the narco cartel war in Mexico for his latest book, 'Amexica: War Along the Borderline'. He was runner-up for an Amnesty International award for his work on Mexico.

But it was for coverage of the carnage in the Balkans between 1991 and 1995 that Vulliamy won every major award in British journalism, and a consideration of the two decades since that war forms the basis for his next book: "The War Is Dead, Long Live The War", and of Wednesday's talk. Ed Vulliamy was the reporter who, with ITN, revealed the gulag of concentration camps operated by the Bosnian Serbs for non-Serb Muslim and Croat - civilians, and was 'ethnically cleansed' from the inside, to reveal the mass deportations from north western Bosnia.

The discussion will be about the issue of RECKONING, two decades on. Ed was among the few reporters to testify at the tribunal in The Hague in a number of trials - itself the subject of controversy in his profession, which we will discuss - and is due to testify against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic next month. But the Hague tribunal was established with a more ambitious brief than simply to try and punish war criminals and what concerns him tomorrow is the apparent distance between the undeniable achievements in the court, a judicial reckoning, and the IRRESOLUTION, the lack of reckoning, in the lives of the survivors and bereaved, scattered throughout the world.

Ed - a political radical for four decades and counting - lives in Glastonbury, Somerset; he spends as much time as possible at his shack in the Arizona desert, and tries when he can to write about his other interests, which include classical music and opera, rock music and football.