← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
08 Oct 2011
00:28:20
Why two crumpled pieces of paper are among the most precious reminders Lyse Doucet has...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC.
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This is from our own correspondent.
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You can hear the version of the programme broadcast on the World Service by following the link to the iplayer on the top of our website. To keep up with our latest reports and get a sneak preview of the stories, you can sign up to our Twitter feed as well. But now, with the addition Broadcast on
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Radio 4, here's Kate Ady.
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Good morning. Afraid even to say they're afraid Today, encounters on the streets of Syria. Also why none of the women we meet on assignment in Afghanistan wants the Western forces to leave. There's a further challenge for the world's newest and poorest country. Introducing English as the official language. And another first for technology as it breathes new life into the long dead ghosts of Montparnasse. The White House last night called on Syria's President Bashar Al Assad to step down, saying he was taking his country down a dangerous path. At least 17 people are reported to have been killed yesterday as thousands of protesters again took to the streets in a number of cities. Lise Doucet has been meeting people there while closely monitored by government minders.
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It took a long time to get a visa for Syria and I will remember this trip for a long time and hold on to some keepsakes, most of all to crumpled bits of paper. One scribbled in haste says, thank you, but no one can meet you. The army is in the street. People are afraid of them. I never met this man. He pressed this piece of paper into my colleague's hand when he saw us, rare foreign journalists in his country outside his mosque on Friday. But he also saw the soldiers, their guns at the ready, and the plain clothed spies. He was brave, but just brave enough to let us know he was scared. My second bit of paper was discreetly passed to me by someone who works for the government. A message written fast and furtively by someone who wanted me to know what he was thinking but couldn't say it out loud. Lost, he wrote, between my morals and what they say say in inverted commas. He too was brave and worried. After months of waiting to get to Syria, to be able to talk to people on all sides of an increasingly violent dividend, I found a place where many were still afraid to speak, even at times afraid to even say they were afraid. For most of this year, I've spent time in places where Arabs boldly declared, we have lost our fear. Men and women marched on boulevards in Tunisia to stare riot police in the face. Egyptians ran into clouds of tear Gas, grabbing the canisters from the street to throw them back at the troops. But this is a country where the army is firing on the people, although you don't see that in the heart of Damascus. On our first day in the maze of cobbled streets in the Old City, a shopkeeper stopped us to tell us we were lying. 23 million people love President Assad. He shouted angrily. When I pointed out that some Syrians were protesting, he gave a precise reply. Well, maybe 10,000 don't like him. A week later, I ran into him again. He was smiling this time. Did you tell us what you really think? I asked. Yes, he insisted convincingly. Then he suddenly remembered his Syrian sense of hospitality and scooped a ladle of salted pistachios from a burlap sack, offering them to me. This is also Syria. That hasn't changed. But Syria is a different country now, even if the government makes it difficult for us to see it. We didn't get permission to visit towns like Homs and Hama, where protests have been greatest. And when we were allowed to go to Deraa, where this wave of unrest began in March, we found a central square cleared of people for our visit. This is a government which didn't want us to see much. What do they fear? In more than one place, we were warned that terrorists could attack us. This is a regime with some who do believe they are fighting armed gangs, with others who believe this will all soon be over. All it needs is a bit more violence to force people off the streets. But it won't be over, not anytime soon. On a visit to Douma, in the suburbs of Damascus, we were, as often happens, surrounded by a crowd, including men in shell suits, talking into telephones, watching and listening. We expected to hear the same whispered denunciations of the president, the same loud expressions of support. But when one student told me, the situation is good, another interrupted without hesitation. No, it's not good. It's bad. The government is shooting the people, he declared. And then an old man with a tired face made his way through the crowd to announce, my son was detained. His mother is crying, looking for him. He didn't hide his face or his anger. I asked him why he decided to tell us his story. I am afraid now, he said, but what will happen will happen. Then he walked away. Not long after troops flooded the area. The last person we interviewed in Syria was a Christian priest. We wanted to hear more about reports that Syria's many minorities, including Christians, were worried about the future. I asked him what people in his congregation were telling him it's not just us. He said, 23 million Syrians are afraid. And then our visas ran out. We stayed until the last possible moment, arriving at the border at two minutes to midnight. So the last Syrians I spoke to were the men from intelligence. They were smiling and friendly, as most Syrians are. They just wanted to confirm all our equipment, everything we brought in was going out. Instinctively, I checked my pockets, ensuring those two pieces of paper were still there staying with me.
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And that was Lise Doucet. The international community often seems to despair of Afghanistan. It's still plagued by poverty, corruption and violence. The outside world has thrown almost everything it's got at these problems. Military intervention, vast aid budgets, and one diplomatic tactic after another. But Afghanistan's warlords, its drug trade and its social problems are still there, still resisting all efforts to improve life for its poorer citizens and particularly for its women. Nick Danziger has visited Afghanistan on many occasions over the past few years, sometimes with the charity Oxfam. He wonders whether more might have been achieved if we'd listened to the right people.
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I'm often asked which is my favorite country. It's not an easy question to answer, but I always mention Afghanistan. I think of the stunning mountains in the remote Wahan corridor and the rarely visited little Pamir, where from the last pass you can see the borders with Tajikistan, China and Pakistan, the deserts and valleys in Ghor province in the center of Afghanistan, and the beautiful architectural treasures of Herat, where historic caravanserais, canals and surprisingly, several synagogues have been restored. It's not, however, the landscapes that endear me to Afghanistan, but its people. It sounds trite, but I've had Afghans place themselves in mortal danger in the hope that my life would be spared. Equally, I've known others who would as happily have stabbed me in the back given the chance. But for me, they remain as a people, the most beautiful I've come across. Generous to a fault, hospitable and honest. I also believe they've been poorly understood and terribly misrepresented. It's now 10 years since the latest Western backed occupation of Afghanistan began for ordinary Afghans, most of whom can't read a calendar and have never known their date of birth. It's just one of many dozen anniversaries. Independence from the British Empire, the overthrow of the monarchy, the mujahideen, victory over the Soviet backed regime, the assassination of presidents, guerrilla commanders and warlords. But for ordinary people like Shehnaz, life is marked by personal tragedies. It was during the Communist Takeover that men knocked on her door in the poor neighborhood where she lives. They asked for her husband, an electrician, and since that Evening, more than 30 years ago, she's had no news of what happened to him. She raised four children on her own, working at Maristan, an asylum for men, women and children with severe mental health problems. She still works there today. Shahnaz has remained poor, her life little changed, as it has been for millions of Afghan women. As bombs and rockets continue to rain down on the country, it's women who continue to suffer the brunt of the conflict. On my first journey to Afghanistan in 1984, I spent weeks walking through the Afghan countryside and I didn't meet a single woman. Well, now come to think of it, I did meet one woman, an elderly grandmother, and she was mocked. As a result of this chance encounter, this view of a misogynist Afghanistan changed for me in 1989, when I began to visit cities still under Soviet backed control. Women I met were often educated. They didn't wear headscarves, let alone burqas. Many wore floral dresses, swashbuckling belts, bright shoes and makeup. Most didn't want to live under the communist regime, but they knew it was still preferable to a mujahideen victory. It was they, not the Soviet or Western experts, who knew their country and could predict what would happen. Today, outsiders are still making the same mistakes as most Afghan men. They simply don't listen to women. Talking to Shahnaz at Maraston, the mental asylum, I began to see the future most Afghans want. After three decades of service to women who can't look after themselves, Shahnaz has yet to see a visit to her charges from a psychologist or a psychiatrist. There is no therapy available for the violent patients, only chains and cages. And what does she ask for? She wants help that mainly only foreigners can provide. Not money, but training from professional mental health workers. I see a further vision of the future in a classroom made of shipping containers open to the elements. In a rural school In Pawan province, 36 girls aged 14 to 19 are learning to read and write. Only three of their mothers can do so. These girls aspire to become doctors, engineers, one a journalist, another an mp. I asked nausea. Isn't it dangerous to be a female mp? Yes, she answers. And the next thing I know, three girls put up their hands because they want to tell me they want to be president to help their country. Not one of the 36 wants to be a housewife. That's too much hard work, which we already do. They Tell me, among the dozens of women I met, not a single one wants the Western forces to leave. The world has misunderstood Afghanistan and Afghans. The Taliban is not just a movement. It consists of husbands and fathers and brothers and sons who do not wish to see their sisters and daughters and wives educated, or to receive medical attention or to work outside the home. But there are also Afghan husbands and brothers who are sympathetic and want their women to fulfill their potential. There are young women, schoolgirls, boxers, archaeologists, who are doing just this. And more than anyone else, as the west rushes to exit the Afghan quagmire, they deserve continued support.
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Nick Dantziker, now back from Afghanistan. There have been ceremonies in Namibia this week recalling the violent early years of the 20th century, when the Germans ruled this part of the world, known then as Deutsch Sud, West Africa. A revolt by local people was violently suppressed by the colonial masters. Many of the tribesmen were beheaded, their skulls sent off to Germany for examination. This week, 20 of those skulls arrived back in the Namibian capital, Windhoek. Steve Evans was in Berlin at the start of their journey south when the German government expressed regret for what had happened in the past.
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It ought to have been a very moving ceremony. In a lecture theatre in the charity hospital In Berlin, about 50 people from Namibia sat in the front few row rows, the women in voluminous bright robes with magnificent hats, if that's the right word, headgear anyway, jutting out like sails. The men wore military uniforms adorned with gold braid. In front of them, on a table with a crisp white cloth, two skulls in Perspex cases, the remains of the victims of imperial brutality a hundred years ago. This event in Berlin marked the formal handing back of the heads, the two in the perspex cases and 18 more in boxes, among them the skull of a child estimated to be three years old. It was meant to be a ceremony of reconciliation and regret. Instead, it turned into one of recrimination and demands. The skulls, you see, were those of people killed by the German colonial masters in in Southwest Africa after a rebellion in 1904. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the victims in the Herero and Nama tribes were beheaded after death and the skulls then sent to Germany for racial experiments, precursors of the sorts of experiments carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War. Indeed, the slaughter and the racial attitudes of superior and and inferior races behind it and behind the experiments on the skulls in Berlin led it all to be known as the Kaiser's Holocaust. At the ceremony, the head of the hospital recognized the parallels between these events in southwest Africa and those 40 years later in Europe. He expressed great regret, although controversially, there were no apologies. A German government minister who spoke next was heckled. There were cries of genocide and reparations now and why are Africans different from Jews? She ploughed on, sticking to her message of regret as the cries and the barracking got louder. Eventually she was shepherded away through a door at the back. When the tribes in southwest Africa revolted in 1904, one general, Lotha von Trorta, responded brutally. His troops killed many outright in battle, but his tactic, too, was to drive them to places where they couldn't survive. As he said, I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated. The tactic was to deny the tribes access to water and then, as he put it, to destroy them gradually. Some Namibians want financial reparation for what they regard as, and Germany accepts as genocide. The German government says that it has already given about 600 million euros as aid for development. One Namibian woman I talked to called Ida Hoffman, acknowledged that, but said the money hadn't reached her people. She told me she thought that some of her ancestors were among those who ended up in the vaults of the charity hospital in Berlin, where they were subject to the racial experiments. When I mentioned the indignity of the rumpus around the skulls, Ida said to me, they cannot hear, they cannot see. But I believe, she said, that their spirit is still around. That spirit is being celebrated in religious services in Namibia, both Christian services, Lutheran services, actually following the imported German tradition, and ceremonies of fire, as they're known there, which predated the Christian arrival. After that, the skulls will be put in a museum. Nobody knows who exactly they were. There are no names on them, only the catalogue markings made by scientists in neat, meticulous handwriting. Herero E number 28 says 1. There won't be much dignity for them in the museum either, you might think, though I suppose it might just remind the generations to come how their ancestors were treated, like no more than objects for experimentation in the service of a mad theory. Anonymous the victims are, but they may yet speak silently to their children.
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Steve Evans, the president of South Sudan Salvakia, is due to hold talks today in the northern capital, Khartoum, during his first visit there since the south became independent three months ago. Relations between the two countries have been strained over numerous issues, including border security and how to share oil revenues. South Sudan faces a whole series of challenges as it tries to build up a new nation from scratch. Fighting's still going On. In some parts, huge numbers of refugees are on the move. A new currency has been brought in and there's a new language to introduce, too. English. But in a country with few schools, teachers and widespread illiteracy, how do you make that work? Rosie Goldsmith has been to the capital, Juba, to try to find out.
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I knew there might be problems as soon as I arrived at Juba International Airport. When I was asked to fill in my own visa form, the immigration officer could not write English. The colourful banners and billboards celebrating South Sudan's independence back in July still adorn the streets. They're all in English, as are the names of the new hotels, shops and restaurants. After decades of Arabisation and Islamization by the Khartoum government, the predominantly Christian and African south has opted for English as its official language. At the Ministry of Higher Education, Edward Mokole tells me, English will make us different and modern. From now on, all our laws, textbooks and official documents have to be written in that language. Schools, the police, retail and the media must all operate in English. And he adds, this is a good decision for South Sudan, rather downplaying the fact that there are very few fluent English speakers here in a devastated country of remote villages and dirt roads, with no industry, banks or landlines, with erratic electricity and connectivity, where there's an 85% illiteracy rate and a shattered education system. This is not just a country with very little English, but with very little written language at all. In fact, very little anything. I visit schools without textbooks. The head of English at Juba University has no books in his office, let alone electricity or a computer. I see no bookshops for the new rulers, the Sudan People's Liberation army turned government. Learning English is a new struggle with English. The programme director of South Sudan Radio, Reyhan Abdelneby, explains to me in halting English. We can become one nation. We can iron out our tribal differences and communicate with the rest of the world. Peace, though, is still fragile. The whole of Sudan is riddled with conflicts. About 150 different languages are spoken in the south, and there are thousands of guns out there and a quarter of a million former guerrillas being demobilized and disarmed. There are soldiers everywhere in Juba, but also traders from Uganda and Kenya, about 2 million returnees from the north, refugees too, and thousands of Westerners seeking fortunes or bringing aid. I meet the new British Council director in his office in the grounds of a notorious nightclub. The club had free office space to rent. And in Juba, you take what you can. After 65 years operating in Sudan, the council has appointed Tony Calderbank to oversee the spread of English in the new nation. Wherever Tony goes, I see people approach him, desperate for courses, books, teachers and grants. English has become a tool for development, tony explains. And even if the British in Sudan are sometimes seen as colonial overlords, the English language is respected. Brigadier General AWA Malwal has asked the British Council to teach his soldiers. The general grew up speaking his tribal tongue, Boer and Juba Arabic, which is a colloquial form of Arabic. Today he speaks remarkably good English. I ask him how he learned it by picking up books in the bush when I was fighting, he says, adding, I read some things by that man Shakespeare. What about Dickens or Jane Austen? I ask. He scratches his head. I don't know them. I promise to send the general some Dickens. In my time in Juba, several people ask me for books, a dictionary of law, as well as biographies of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, black leaders who, for them, inspire hope. And already I've put copies of Shakespeare's Cymbeline in the post. Next year, as part of the 2012 Olympics Arts Program, the South Sudanese Kuoto Theatre Company is to perform this tale of love, death and war in Juba Arabic at the Globe Theatre in London. 36 other Shakespeare plays in 36 other languages will also be staged. As we swat flies down by the Nile, I asked Koto's director, Derek Alfred, why he was swimming against the tide. Why not Shakespeare in English? We must still celebrate our own language, he tells me mischievously. But first of all, we have to translate Cymbeline from English into Juba Arabic.
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Rosie Goldsmith, and she'll have more about the challenges, linguistic and otherwise, facing South Sudan in the world Tonight, on Monday evening at 10 o', clock. Paris is well known for its cemeteries. Perhaps the most famous is the Pere Lachaise graveyard in the east of the city. Thousands of tourists go there every day to seek out the tombs of people like Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Our man in Paris, Hugh Schofield, lives next to another of the city's great 19th century cemeteries, Montparnasse, and he's found a new way of getting to know those who reside there.
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It's funny how we love a graveyard. You'd think we'd find contemplation of all that decomposition and mortality to be off putting. But we don't. Or at least I don't. Over the last 10 years, I've become an aficionado of the pathways and sculptures and chapels and memorials of my local Montparnasse Cemetery, which lies just a short stroll from where I'm sitting. By now I know all the famous graves. Serge Gainsbourg, the singer and poet. His slab covered with flowers and Metro tickets left by fans in reference to one of his best known songs, the ticket puncher of Le Lilla. Near the northern gate, the shared tomb of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, with always a piece or two of folded paper. Words of devotion from some earnest admirer, often in Japanese for some reason. Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant. The photographer Man Ray, the chess grandmaster Alekhine. Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag, Jean Seberg. It's very regimented in a way that official things so often are in France. The ground's divided into 30 divisions and there are uniformed attendants who blow whistles and hustle everyone out at closing time. Lines of watering cans attest to the fact that graves are still being tended, that this is very much an excuse, the pun. Living cemetery with a thousand new burials every year as old tombs are emptied and reused. So much for the pious hope. Everywhere engraved plot granted in perpetuity. Anyway, it's a lovely restful place, all the more welcome for being at the heart of of a busy metropolis. And now I've discovered a new reason to go. The smartphone, by which I mean the possibility offered by any Internet capable handheld device to serve up the most extraordinary array of instant, fascinating information about people. Dead people, who we would otherwise totally ignore. Thanks to technology, these obscure ghosts are getting a new chance at perpetuity. The other day, I passed a tomb graced with a simple French tricolor. A soldier dead in 1914, name of Marie Joseph Bridou. Never heard of him, no one has. But it turns out, thanks to a quick Internet search, that he was the first French general to die fighting the Germans In World War I, just a few weeks after its outbreak. Not only that, we learn that his son Eugene was later war minister in the pro German Vichy government in World War II. And that his grandson, also called Eugene, was a sturmbandfurer in the French division of the Waffen ss. There, in a single family, is a glimpse of how what began as patriotism was transformed between the wars into demoralization and betrayal. A short walk away, coincidentally, I come across the tomb of the lady they used to call Madame La Marechal. Nothing to mark it out, but this is the wife of the Vichy leader Philippe Petain. He was a notorious philanderer as a younger man, and she also, quite sexually forward, went by the glorious name of Nini Ardon H A R D O N. She was loyal to him to the end. Click on the link to the French National Archives and you can see footage of her, a rather severe lady, tweedy but still busty, visiting her disgraced husband in prison on the Ile Dieu. She died in 1962. Stumbling through a forgotten corner, I find a small, blackened tombstone bearing the family name of France's famous ex Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. And on the very same tombstone, the name of Britain's famous ex Prime Minister, Blair. It turns out I discovered on a genealogy website that the de Villepin family, vaguely aristocratic, is descended in one branch from the Scottish barons Blair of Balfayoch in Perthshire. Any relation? Over here, a stylised sculpture, a cube of stone fashioned to represent two people embracing. Below it, a tombstone, and hidden in ivy, an old, old photograph of a young woman. The writing on the stone is Cyrillic and almost worn away, but a quick search tells the story. This is the grave of one Tanya Rashevskaya, a Russian anarchist who committed suicide for Love in 1908. The sculpture is the Kiss by her friend, the Romanian Constantine Brancusi, himself buried in another division in the cemetery. Apparently the sculpture's very famous and, oh, yes, only now do I spot the security cameras that are protecting it. Here's a man called Charles Crow, long forgotten, but he once invented something called the paleophone. It was exactly the same as the gramophone, but the year was 1877 and Thomas Edison had just taken out the patent. And over here, a newish tomb, someone called Maurice Kriegel Vallrymore. He was one of the French resistance fighters who accepted the surrender of the German army in Paris in August 1944. Come to think of it, I interviewed him on the 60th anniversary and wrote it up for the BBC website. Ah, yes, here it is on my phone. Marvellous seeing your old stuff again.
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And with Hugh Schofield getting better acquainted with the ghosts of Montparnasse, we've reached the end of this programme. I'll be here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with more from our own correspondence. Do join us. Goodbye.