Our newest story in focus series – Meet the Makers will shift the focus on our team members who play key roles on the different elements of our conflict and hunger work. The first in the series is Rebecca Bakos Blumenthal who is a legal adviser with GRC.
Q1: Tell us a little about yourself.
I’m half Italian and half Hungarian and grew up a bit here and there, between Budapest and Italy, with a brief stint in Amsterdam when I was 3. If you ask me, I’m probably going with Italian, otherwise I tend to get into a long-winded narration of my whole life story, which is probably not the desired outcome of my interlocutor.
Q2: What did you want to be when you grew up?
While I would like to say that already at an early age I had an innate desire to become a lawyer and champion important social justice causes, I started out less idealistic. My first career choices included maths and gym teacher, chess champion (the latter clearly a humble aspiration), and following in my grandmother’s footsteps, a theatre actress.
Q3: What was your first job?
In my very first job I worked as a waiter in a restaurant during university years. My experience was cut short as my lack of coordination resulted in a perfectly cooked steak being inundated with a big glass of red wine. I smiled and slowly backed away from the client, realising that waitressing was definitely not my calling.
Q4: What are you working on now?
Turning to more serious things, for the last year or so I have been heavily engaged across project activities related to South Sudan and Tigray, where through various means we work on furthering accountability for starvation crimes, by conducting investigations, including in collaboration with OSINT experts like Bellingcat, legal analysis and feeding into activities of domestic, regional and international accountability fora. More recently, I just got back from Cairo, in Egypt, where with GRC Partner, Catriona Murdoch, we held a 2-day training with some of the team from Mwatana for Human Rights, focusing on capacity-building on linkage and perpetrator mapping and discussing next steps, including exploring options for a starvation-related universal jurisdiction claim, following on from the success of GRC and Mwatana’s joint report titled Starvation Makers.
Q5: What do you love most about this work?
Thinking back to our workshop in Cairo, the opportunity to meet with and to collaborate with the Mwatana team has been an incredibly inspiring and humbling experience, so I would definitely put that at the top of my list.
I also feel very strongly about the objectives and aims the Starvation Project advances and works towards. The complete harmony between my personal ideals and aspirations and those the project tries to achieve, makes it all the more engaging and exciting. The way our project navigates the conflict and hunger space recognises the need for a holistic approach working through the need to enhance and strengthen the understanding around starvation from a range of perspectives, including prevention, prohibition and accountability. An approach that very much resonates with me.
Q6: What is the most challenging part?
Frustration. The most challenging aspect of our work for me is the frustration of not living in an ideal world, where things like famine and starvation just don’t happen. When you work on a project with such a grand objective guiding it, the ultimate aim of rendering starvation morally toxic sometimes appears very far away and unattainable. It is in those moments that it’s important to enjoy and celebrate smaller successes and advancements.
Q7: What would be the one thing that surprised you about the work on conflict and hunger?
How little the issue of man-made hunger is known, both in professional circles and among the general public. When I first started working on the Starvation Project a couple of years ago, I realised that while of course people in general are not oblivious to the fact that hunger and famine are very much of a current societal and existential issue affecting millions, how hunger is deliberate, man-made and used by warring parties as a method of warfare is absolutely not widespread knowledge. I myself, prior to joining the team was painfully unaware of most of the issues I deal with today.
Q8: Tell us a surprising or a fun fact about you.
Ending on a lighter note, since I moved to the Netherlands, I feel I have become a bit of a sunflower, turning my head and following the sun’s movements, on the rare occasions it bothers to actually makes an appearance from behind the clouds.
