Ed Vulliamy | |
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 Vulliamy in 2006 | |
| Born | 1 August 1954 |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, correspondent |
| Known for | War reporting in Bosnia and Iraq |
Edward Sebastian Vulliamy (born 1 August 1954) is a British-born, Irish-Welsh journalist and writer.
Ed Vulliamy | |
|---|---|
| Vulliamy in 2006 | |
| Born | 1 August 1954 |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist, correspondent |
| Known for | War reporting in Bosnia and Iraq |
Edward Sebastian Vulliamy (born 1 August 1954) is a British-born, Irish-Welsh journalist and writer.
Vulliamy was born and raised in Notting Hill, London. His mother was the children's author and illustrator Shirley Hughes, [1] his father was the architect John Sebastian Vulliamy, of the Vulliamy family, and his grandfathers were the Liverpool store owner Thomas Hughes and the author C. E. Vulliamy. He was educated at the independent University College School and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he won an Open Scholarship, wrote a thesis on the Northern Ireland "Troubles" and graduated in Politics and Philosophy.
In 1979, he joined Granada Television's current affairs programme World in Action , and in 1985 won a Royal Television Society (RTS) Award for a film about Ireland. In 1986, he joined The Guardian as a reporter, later Rome correspondent covering the Mafia and Southern Europe.
From there, he covered the Balkan wars, revealing a gulag of concentration camps. In August 1992, Vulliamy and British television reporter Penny Marshall managed to gain access to the notorious Omarska and Trnopolje camps, operated by the Bosnian Serbs for mainly Bosnian Muslim and Croat Catholic inmates. [2] Their graphic accounts of the conditions of the prisoners were recorded for the documentary Omarska's survivors: Bosnia 1992 . [3] Discovery of the camps was credited with contributing to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He remained in Bosnia for the bulk of the remainder of the war, covering ethnic cleansing from the inside, and the siege of Sarajevo.
For his coverage of the war in Bosnia, Vulliamy won most major awards in British journalism and became the first journalist since the Nuremberg trials to testify at an international war crimes tribunal, the ICTY. [1] He testified for the prosecution in ten trials at the ICTY, including those of Bosnian Serb leaders Dr. Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić.
In 1991, Vulliamy also covered the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in Iraq, revealing atrocities by Saddam Hussein's troops in the Shiite South.
In 1994–95, and again from 1997 to 2003, Vulliamy was based in Washington and later New York as U.S. Correspondent for The Guardian's sister paper, The Observer . In the United States, he covered the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and in its wake, investigated deep within the far-right militia movement. He covered US politics, society, culture and sports across the union, the transition from the presidency of Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. Later, he reported on the lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and on its slipstream, penetrated the white supremacist backstory behind the killer's world, in jail and among fringe religious compounds. He was living in New York at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and covered the story and its aftermath, in the city and along the corridors of power. [1] While based in New York, he reported from Mexico on narco-traffic, organised crime and the mass-murder of women in Ciudad Juárez; from Haiti on the regime of Raoul Cedras and US intervention 1994 US intervention, from Jamaica on organised crime in Jamaica, from Cuba on the dissident movement and from Nicaragua.
Vulliamy covered the lead-up to the invasion of, and war in, Iraq from 2002 onwards. He clashed with his newspaper, The Observer, over its support for the invasion, often unable to place his stories about false intelligence and non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in the paper (see Official Secrets film below, 2019). He reported from Iraq several times from early 2003 to 2005, on civilian casualties of the invasion, and on the subsequent insurgency.
From 2003 onwards, Vulliamy has worked along the US-Mexican border, reporting on organised crime, narco-traffic, cartel wars, security and migration. [1] This work led to his book Amexica: War Along the Borderline, which in 2013 won the coveted Ryszard Kapuściński Award – named in honor of the writer, creator and master of the genre. [4] He was among the first reporters to reveal the laundering of proceeds of narco-traffic by mainstream high-street banks (Wachovia and HSBC) on a massive scale. Reviewing 'Amexica' in the New York Times, Tamara Jacoby wrote: "Vulliamy, with a mix of irony and pathos, writes like a latter-day Graham Greene — the detached foreign observer who has seen it all yet really cares". [5]
His book The War is Dead, Long Live The War about the survivors of Bosnia's rape and concentration camps was shortlisted for the same Ryszard Kapuscinski prize in 2015. The book followed survivors of the concentration camps over 20 years after the war, examining the legacy of trauma, resilience and survival of genocide.
Vulliamy badly broke his leg in 2013, and wrote a detailed article from the patient's viewpoint about his prolonged treatment with the Ilizarov apparatus, an external frame that stretches the leg. [6] As a result of the accident, he left the staff of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in October 2016, after 31 years, to become a full-time author, journalist and film-researcher – but continues to work regularly as a reporter for The Guardian, The Observer and Guardian Films on narco-traffic, the US-Mexico border and the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC.
Vulliamy also writes about football, music and painting. In 2014, he completed a book for Granta about Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas , Everything Is Happening: Journey Into A Painting, for Vulliamy's friend Michael Jacobs, who died suddenly of cancer before it was finished. In 2013, Vulliamy wrote liner notes for a CD box set of solo records by Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin and in 2017, contributed an essay to the book which accompanied the 50th anniversary edition, remixed by George Martin's son Giles, of The Beatles 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', for Apple Records.
In 2018 he published a memoir through music, When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace, also for Granta, published in the United States as 'Louder Than Bombs' by the University of Chicago Press. [7] The book explores music and conflict, and features the last interview with B.B. King. In September 2022, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra - conducted by Ciarán Crilly with soloists and choir - premiered a Cantata about the Irish Civil War, 'Who'd Ever Think It Would Come To This?', for which Vulliamy wrote the libretto. The performance, with music composed by Anne-Marie O'Farrell, sold out to a standing ovation. [8] Vulliamy sings in an occasional blues/rock band, "Age Against the Machine".
In 2019, Vulliamy was by played the actor Rhys Ifans in Gavin Hood's acclaimed Hollywood film Official Secrets about the case of Katharine Gun, a GCHQ agent who blew the whistle on illegal bugging of UN diplomats during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, with Keira Knightley in the lead role. Vulliamy features in the film furious at censorship by his own paper of a story he filed during October–December 2002 from an inside CIA source, Mel Goodman, affirming that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, while intelligence was being 'cooked' by a special office in the Pentagon – and then locating the NSA secret agent, Frank Koza, who ordered the illegal bugging. Vulliamy has called Ifans' performance "my Alter Idem, more me than I am!". [9]
In 2020, Vulliamy was made an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Accepting the fellowship, he called it "one of the great honours of my life", and urged media and journalism students to "get out there and give them hell".
Vulliamy is currently working in Ukraine, on resistance - military, musical and cultural - to the Russian invasion.
Vulliamy was awarded several major prizes in British journalism for his coverage of the war in Bosnia and work on organised crime. Among his awards for newspaper reporting are: Granada Television's What The Papers Say Foreign Correspondent of the Year', 1992; British Press Awards International Reporter of the Year, 1992 and 1997; Amnesty International Media award 1992; and the James Cameron Award in 1994. [10] [11]
Vulliamy has two daughters. [12] Vulliamy has been a vegetarian since the age of eight after he questioned what happens to sheep. [13]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda accorded him the title "Maestro".
Omarska is a small town near Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina. The town includes an old iron mine and ore processing plant. During the Bosnian War it was the site of the Omarska concentration camp.
The Omarska camp was a concentration camp run by the Army of Republika Srpska in the mining town of Omarska, near Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, set up for Bosniak and Bosnian Croat prisoners during the Prijedor ethnic cleansing. Functioning in the first months of the Bosnian War in 1992, it was one of 677 alleged detention centers and camps set up throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. While nominally an "investigation center" or "assembly point" for members of the Bosniak and Croatian population, Human Rights Watch classified Omarska as a concentration camp.
Manjača was a concentration camp which was located on mount Manjača near the city of Banja Luka in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War and the Croatian War of Independence from 1991 to 1995. The camp was founded by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and authorities of the Republika Srpska (RS) and was used to collect and confine thousands of male prisoners of Bosniak and Croat nationalities.
The Trnopolje camp was an internment camp established by Republika Srpska military and police authorities in the village of Trnopolje near Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the first months of the Bosnian War. Also variously termed a concentration camp, detainment camp, detention camp, prison, and ghetto, Trnopolje held between 4,000 and 7,000 Bosniak and Bosnian Croat inmates at any one time and served as a staging area for mass deportations, mainly of women, children, and elderly men. Between May and November 1992, an estimated 30,000 inmates passed through. Mistreatment was widespread and there were numerous instances of torture, rape, and killing; ninety inmates died.
The Keraterm camp was a concentration camp established by Republika Srpska military and police authorities near the town of Prijedor in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War. The camp was used to collect and confine between 1,000 and 1,500 Bosniak and Bosnian Croat civilians.
Predrag Banović is a Bosnian Serb who was charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for his actions at the Keraterm camp during the Bosnian War. He pleaded guilty to all charges in a bargain and was sentenced to serve eight years in prison, with credit for 716 days as time served.
Zoran Žigić is a Bosnian Serb who was charged with violation of the customs of war and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for his actions in the Prijedor region including crimes at the Omarska, Trnopolje and Keraterm camps during the Bosnian War.
The Čelebići camp was a prison camp run by joint Bosniak and Bosnian Croat forces during the Bosnian War where Serb prisoners were detained and subjected to murder, beatings, torture, sexual assaults and otherwise cruel and inhumane treatment. The facility was used by several units of the Bosnian Ministry of the Interior (MUP), Croatian Defence Council (HVO) and later the Bosnian Territorial Defence Forces (TO). It was located in Čelebići, a village in the central Bosnian municipality of Konjic.
Milan Kovačević, nicknamed Mićo, was the president of the executive committee of the Municipal Assembly of Prijedor from January 1991 to March 1993. He also served as the vice president of the Municipality of Prijedor Crisis Staff after the Crisis Staff took over control of the town of Prijedor in April 1992. He was an anesthesiologist by profession and most recently served as the director of the Prijedor Medical Center, after his resignation as president of the executive committee in March 1993.
The Višegrad massacres were acts of mass murder committed against the Bosniak civilian population of the town and municipality of Višegrad during the ethnic cleansing of eastern Bosnia by Republika Srpska police and military forces during the spring and summer of 1992, at the start of the Bosnian War.
Uzamnica camp was an internment camp established in 1992 by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) forces housing Bosniak civilian prisoners during the Bosnian War.
The Ahmići massacre was the mass murder of approximately 120 Bosniak civilians by members of the Croatian Defence Council in April 1993, during the Croat–Bosniak War. The massacre was the culmination of the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing committed by the political and military leadership of the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia. It was the largest massacre committed during the conflict between Bosnian Croats and the Bosniak-dominated Bosnian government.
During the Bosnian War, there was an ethnic cleansing campaign committed by the Bosnian Serb political and military leadership – Army of the Republika Srpska, mostly against Bosniak and Croat civilians in the Prijedor region of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 and 1993. The composition of non-Serbs was drastically reduced: out of a population of 50,000 Bosniaks and 6,000 Croats, only some 6,000 Bosniaks and 3,000 Croats remained in the municipality by the end of the war. Apart from the Srebrenica massacre, Prijedor is the area with the second highest rate of civilian killings committed during the Bosnian War. According to the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center (IDC), 4,868 people were killed or went missing in the Prijedor municipality during the war. Among them were 3,515 Bosniak civilians, 186 Croat civilians and 78 Serb civilians. As of October 2013, 96 mass graves have been located and around 2,100 victims have been identified, largely by DNA analysis.
The Gabela camp or Gabela prison was a prison camp run by the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and Croatian Defence Council in Gabela. The camp was located several kilometres south of Čapljina. Its prisoners were Bosniaks and Serbs.
Fikret Alić is a Bosniak survivor of the 1992 Keraterm and Trnopolje concentration camps near the city of Prijedor in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina. The journalist Ed Vulliamy, whose reporting of Trnopolje and another concentration camp at Omarska helped draw public attention to the atrocities being perpetrated in the Prijedor camp system, described Alić as being "probably the most familiar figure in the world" in the summer of 1992, when the image of his emaciated frame, seen behind barbed wire at the Trnopolje concentration camp, was seen around the world as emblematic of the violence being inflicted on non-Serb civilians by Bosnian Serbs under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić during the Bosnian War and genocide.
Nusreta Sivac is a Bosnian activist for victims of rape and other war crimes and a former judge. During the Bosnian War she was an inmate at the Bosnian Serb-run Omarska camp in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina where she and other women at the camp were raped, beaten, and tortured. After the camp's closure in August 1992 due to press coverage, she became an activist for victims of rape and is credited with helping in the recognition of wartime rape as a war crime under international law. She is a member of the Women's Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bosnian genocide denial is the act of denying the occurrence of the systematic genocide against the Bosniak Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or asserting it did not occur in the manner or to the extent that has been established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) through proceedings and judgments, and described by comprehensive scholarship.
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