Unwritten Lives

The Middle East is being set alight by the US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Already hundreds of civilians have been killed. We condemn the bombing and demand the UK government oppose these illegal attacks on a sovereign country. Demonstrations are taking place across the UK. Join the demo in central London on Saturday 7 March at 12:00 noon.

On 28 February, the Trump administration along with Israel launched an unprovoked, illegal war on Iran. Immediately, people across the US hit the streets to express the majority sentiment in the country: rejecting another endless war for regime change! Continue this anti-war outpouring this Monday as part of a coordinated day of action.

Leaving this world in an age of lies and cruelty, my last message is simple: don’t give up on truth. Carlos Hernández de Miguel was a Spanish journalist and writer. He died on 3 February 2026.

It has been 20 years since the UK’s first same-sex civil unions took place on 19 December 2005. Adnan Ali and Eric Stobbaerts were one of the first gay couples in London to form a civil partnership on that historic day. They are both busy men with global lives. Unwritten Lives was glad to catch up with them in London, where the couple spoke with Ishtiyaq Shukri.

For a snapshot of the authoritarian era to which today’s launch of Unwritten Lives is a response, we don’t have to rewind too far, just to the recent past, to moments that still reside fresh in recent memory.

Eric Stobbaerts was a senior humanitarian on the ground in the former Yugoslavia from late 1993 to early 1995. Three decades after the Srebrenica genocide in which more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladic, he remembers the painful failures on the part of the international community that led to the massacre, and the lessons that should have been learned.

Khayam Turki is not merely a political prisoner. He is a turning point, demonstrating how President Kaïs Saïed’s authoritarian rule has transformed Tunisia from the beacon of the Arab Spring to the laboratory of democratic disillusionment ignored by Europe.

When a DNA test revealed the author’s Roma heritage, he travelled to one of Europe’s largest Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) gatherings—Appleby Horse Fair in Cumbria—to learn more about this unique historic event.