← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
14 April 2012
00:27:57
Fergal Keane is on Turkey's border with Syria listening to the experiences of those...
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- [00:00]
Kate Adie
Hello.
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Fergal Keane
This download from the BBC is the latest edition of the Radio 4 programme
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Kate Adie
from our own correspondent, it's introduced by Kate Ady.
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Narrator/Presenter
Today we're on the Syrian border, hearing from refugees longing to go home. We hear of the rise and fall of Italy's House of Bossi in Mogadishu. Street life is returning to what was once the most dangerous city in the world. And Olympic dreams. One athlete in Tripoli hoping to be the first Libyan ever to stand on a winner's podium at the Games. Later today, the United Nations Security Council is expected to vote on whether to send monitors to Syria to assess the ceasefire there. In the last 24 hours, activists say that several people have been shot dead during protests. It's a major test of the UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's peace initiative. Fergal Keen has been in Turkey at the Syrian border, meeting some of the thousands of refugees who fled the unrest.
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Fergal Keane
From her place at the fence, the old woman could see the stony hills of her homeland. A walk of a few hundred yards would have taken her to the border post and back into Syria, but in her mind, it might as well have been a thousand miles. On the first day of the Annan ceasefire, we were still hearing stories of shooting on the other side. Just behind her in the camp, a small boy was grabbing fistfuls of sandy soil and then blowing it away. His face gradually covered by the fine dust, he looked listless and bored. A group of younger women were gathered around the entrance to one of the tents. They ignored our call for them to come to the fence, understandably wary of the endless procession of cameras and notebooks recording the misery of their exile. In the last 10 days, nearly 3,000 Syrian refugees have crossed into Turkey. They are well treated here. There have been nothing like the wretched scenes I've witnessed on African borders or back in Macedonia and Albania during the Kosovo war. But for a refugee, the worst part of exile is what is left behind. The old woman at the fence indicated she wanted to speak. She explained that her name was Rukia and that she was aged in her 70s. Eight months earlier, she and her husband and sons and grandchildren had been fleeing the violence near their border village. But the army had opened fire, and in the panic that followed, Rukia and her husband were separated from the rest of the family. I have not heard from them since, she told me. We have no news of them. I cry every day and night when I think of them. If you are not a homeless exile, this border region is a place of great beauty. Here the mountains of the Taurus range, once infested with notorious brigands, roll down to a broad valley where the fabled Orontes river irrigates. The neat farmland across the mountains is the Mediterranean port of Iskandarun, as the dynasty of the Assad family totters across the border in Syria. This is a useful place to reflect on the impermanence of empires. I've spent the last few days working from Antioch, now called Attacha, once a city to rival Alexandria as the great Roman center of the East. Julius Caesar came here in 47 BC. The city and its hinterland also occupy a central place in the history of Christianity. St. Paul struggled along its paths on his donkeys. The Gospels of Matthew took root among its narrow alleys and olive groves. St. Peter reputedly carved a church from a cave in the mountains, and down the centuries, countless armies tramped back and forth. The generals of Alexander the Great were the first to make it a mighty symbol of their power. Then came Romans, Arabs, crusaders, the Seljuk Turks, who defeated the Byzantine Empire. The Mongols, galloping west, the Ottomans, whose empire lasted into the 20th century. After the First World War, this became part of French mandated Syria. But when the Turkish military occupied the territory in 1938, large numbers of its Arab residents fled and the territory was eventually absorbed by Turkey after a referendum. Today we are reminded by the grand monument to modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, in the center of the town, by the patriotic chanting of schoolchildren in the morning and the ubiquitous national flag, that this is now emphatically a Turkish city. The stories of emperors, caliphs, sultans and their generals have been recorded for history. But what of the farmers and slaves, the villagers driven before the advancing warriors, those earliest members of that eternal tribe we call refugees? Of their sufferings, we know very little. It is only in the modern age that recording the narratives of the powerless has become an historical imperative. But I suspect those forgotten refugees would have understood the anguish of a woman like Ruqiya in many years, listening to the stories of the uprooted and exiled. It is the word home that recurs most often. The longer they are away, the larger it looms in their imagination, the greater its promise. But to Rukia, it is simply a place where she can end her days in the company of the sons she bore and the grandchildren who will carry her story to the coming generations.
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Narrator/Presenter
Fergal Keen In Italy, the founder of the Northern League Party, Umberto Bossi, and his family are at the centre of a political corruption scandal involving the alleged funnelling of public money into private accounts. Mr. Bossi has been forced to resign as party leader and his anti immigrant party, which ruled Italy in coalition for many years with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is in disarray. From Rome, David Willie reflects on the rise and fall of the House of Bossi.
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Kate Adie
I first met Umberto Bossi in the autumn of 96, when I followed him for the best part of a week on an extraordinary political odyssey along the meandering course of the River Po, Italy's longest river. My journey began high up in the Italian Alps near a waterfall, the river's source. Here. Mr. Bossi and his supporters solemnly filled small glass containers, symbolising the force of this mighty river, which eventually broadens out into a massive stream flowing through the flat plains of Lombardy down to the Adriatic Sea. My journey continued through Turin, crossing the entire width of Italy to end in Venice, near the mouth of the PO. There, Mr. Bossi made one of his charismatic, raucous and fiery speeches, declaring in essence that northern Italians were no longer going to kowtow to Rome's greedy politicians and to pay their taxes to enable lazy southern Italians to live on public welfare. One of his famous phrases was Roma la drona thieving Romans. It was all pretty provocative stuff and had strongly racist undertones. The League mocks the accents and the origins of southerners, whom they derisively call terroni. I suppose ignorant peasant would be the nearest English translation. The Northern League has also openly opposed the arrival of millions of new migrants from developing countries in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe to Italy during recent decades, and this notwithstanding the fact that the Italian economy would have ground to a halt long ago were it not for these lower paid workers who now fill many northern factories. The new arrivals have also been doing the stoop, agricultural labour and the menial and repetitive jobs that Italians of the 21st century, accustomed to a prosperity that their forefathers never knew, often seem unwilling to take on. Sixteen years later, it turns out that Umberto Bossi has apparently been dipping into the public trough even more deeply than the Roman politicians he was so critical of when he founded his separatist party, setting up the phantom North Italian state he dubbed Padania, meaning the country of the river PO. In 2004, Mr. Bossi suffered a stroke which left him with with impaired speech, but failed to quench his political ambitions or his vulgar public manners. He frequently uses swear words in public to smear anyone he doesn't like and often gives the finger in front of TV cameras to make his message even more clear. The first whiff of serious scandal came out when Mr. Boss, party treasurer, came under police scrutiny in connection with an ongoing judicial inquiry in in various parts of Italy into money laundering on behalf of organised crime. The treasurer, Francesco Belsito, had in his Rome office safe a folder marked in English, the Family. In it, police found details of alleged financial transactions which have left Italians gasping. According to court documents, Mr. Boss's wife bought no fewer than 11 houses and apartments with Northern League party funds. Mr. Bossi himself had his own house done up with public money. And his son Renzo, nicknamed by his father the Trout, who in fact does have a somewhat fish like expression, also had access to apparently unlimited cash to indulge in his taste for fast cars. The party even paid for the Trout's speeding tickets, not to mention medical expenses. 23 year old Renzo the Trout has been forced to resign from his 10,000 pound a month sinecure as a regional government official. The public outcry has been deafening. At a time when ordinary Italians are being told to tighten their belts and suffer pension losses and endure draconian welfare cuts, the Posse family is revealed as being every bit as corrupt as the thieving Roman politicians it boasted that it wanted to unseat. Even worse, the Mr. Bossi's disgraced treasurer is now alleged to have diverted billions of euros of Northern League party funds into offshore bank accounts and even invested in diamonds, as Mr. Bossi and his advisors feared earlier this year that the euro was about to collapse and he wanted to protect his future financial security. The sly way in which all Italian political parties, not just the Northern League, have been freely helping themselves to public funds under a reimbursement of electoral expenses law passed by Silvio Berlusconi, has led to some rapid, stable door bolting in Rome's Parliament this week. But the real significance of the fall of the House of Bossi, coming only months after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi, also wounded by personal scandal, is that the politicians who have been governing Italy for the past two decades have been given an ultimatum. Time is running out for them unless they present themselves for office again with clean hands in the local elections due next month and the general election scheduled in a year's time.
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Narrator/Presenter
David Willey in Rome. For nearly two decades, the Somali capital Mogadishu was a battleground with warlords vying for supremacy. Thousands of civilians were killed, and by 2007, when African Union peacekeeping troops entered the city to try to bring a degree of stability, it was estimated that over half its inhabitants had fled the fighting. Today, the threat of violence comes from the Islamist insurgent group Al Shabaab, who've carried out several suicide bombings. But despite the constant danger from such attacks, Justin Morozzi, who's visited the city recently, found street life returning.
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Justin Morozzi
How quickly a city can change. A year ago, people would probably have thought you'd need your head tested if you took anything but a Caspia, a giant armored personnel carrier, for a ride across Mogadishu, long famed as the most dangerous city in the world. These days you can hop into a car not entirely without a second thought, admittedly, perhaps with a slight gulp and a prayer, and head over to Villa Somalia, a little enclave on a bluff overlooking the city. This is the seat of the government, which for the first time in two decades controls the entire capital. After a meeting with the prime minister, a softly spoken academic who resembles Mole from Wind in the Willows, the classic English children's story, I bump into Deke Youssef, his dual nationality, Somalian, British, another member of the diaspora who has come back to try to rebuild his country. Dick is 42. He returned to Mogadishu, mog to many recently. Only this morning, he took a drive around the city for the first time in 23 years. It was a very painful journey, he says. I left when Mogadishu was thriving. It was the most peaceful city in Africa today. I saw all the old neighborhoods I knew completely razed to the ground, and it was difficult even to recognize where I used to live. It was very emotional walking around. Eventually we found our old friends and neighbors. It was like finding long lost brothers. Fantastic. I say goodbye to Deke the following morning after a handsome breakfast of spiced goat's liver with peppers and onions, washed down with tea so sweet you can almost feel diabetes coming on and camel's milk. Thick, smoky, and not necessarily for those of a sensitive disposition, a rather more positive thing that's been lost from Mogadi is is the crackling of gunfire, the occasional heavy thwump of mortars and whoosh of RPGs. The tanks of the African Union forces are mercifully quiet. Street life has surged back. Donkeys haul heavily laden carts. Women swelter beneath the sun alongside tall bundles of charcoal. There may still be poverty, squalor and suffering here. If peace came tomorrow, this would be the world's largest reconstruction project. But for the first time in years, the city feels alive. Shopkeepers are busy decorating their whitewashed shop fronts with bright illustrations of the products they sell or the services they offer. Pictures of wide opened mouths and extracted molars identify a dentist. Surgery giant Dollars. The money changes packs of pasta and bottles of tomato sauce for general stores and Cartoons of a PlayStation console for computer shops. Optimistically, there are even travel agencies with images of planes, trains and automobiles. In recent months, the list of international visitors to Mogadishu has been steadily lengthening, from the Turkish premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to the British foreign secretary, William Hague. One morning, Dirk Niebel, the German development minister, drops by in a Hercules transport plane. I hear there are lots of sharks here, he says, gazing out across the glimmering sea from a rooftop in the heavily protected airport base. There are indeed. But the most dangerous ones are behind him, circling around Villa Somalia. Earlier this year, Transparency International rated Somalia the most corrupt country in the world for the fifth year in a row, UN officials mutter darkly about briefcase ministers who are looting foreign aid money. The day after I leave, a young woman suicide bomber blows herself up in the recently reopened National Theatre in Mogadishu. Al Shabaab claims responsibility. Eight are killed. The prime minister narrowly escapes. Back in Nairobi, I look up my old Somali friend Sahal, last seen a year ago when we shared broiled camel, roast goat and camel's milk together. He shakes his head. The Al Shabaab attack hasn't altered anything, he says. The insurgents are under relentless pressure. He smiles. Did you notice Yusuf has left Mogadishu? We laugh. Yusuf, or the more poetic Somali version, Yusuf, emulating a fizzing round of what in English we'd call stray bullets, is an example of the Somali love of wordplay and black humour. I ask him if he's optimistic about the next four months, when Somalia stands to have a new constitution, a new parliament and an elected president. You know, Somali history is full of so many missed opportunities, he says. But this summer I really think we have a big chance.
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Narrator/Presenter
Justin Marozi Reporters Without Borders, an organization which monitors censorship, places the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan Amongst the bottom 25 of 179 in its press Freedom Index. This nation, which was until 1991 part of the former Soviet Union, is notoriously hostile to foreign journalists. Natalia Antilava has with difficulty been gathering evidence of what appears to be a secret program to sterilise women in the country, often without their consent or even knowledge.
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Natalia Antilava
The man's hand shook as he scribbled on a yellow piece of paper. Watch one wedding band, one mobile phone. One, he wrote. I leaned towards him from my seat on the plane. Do you really need to put it all down? I asked. Oh, yes, write down everything, he said, pointing at my own yellow form. Don't mess with them. Last time I flew into Tashkent, they took my wedding ring away because I hadn't declared it. The many rules of one of the world's most repressive regimes come into force even before you land in Uzbekistan. The government wants to know everything. The Uzbek government has been so successful at instilling fear in its citizens that it's often impossible to say how justified their paranoia is. I never got to find out. After my nervous travel companion slipped through passport control in front of me, I was stopped. My passport was taken, and soon I found myself in the airport's bleak transit hall. Foreign journalists find it almost impossible to get into Uzbekistan, but as a Georgian citizen, I don't need a visa. Over the years, it was a loophole. I used to travel to the country, reporting on the deteriorating human rights situation, the arrest in the middle of the night, the mysterious death of those who voice dissent, torture in prisons and an all encompassing climate of fear. This time, I had come to investigate claims that the Uzbek government is exercising yet another form of control over its people. A secret program to sterilize tens of thousands of women, often against their will and without their knowledge. But apparently Uzbek officials had had enough. They wanted me out of the country. And 24 hours later, I was escorted by police to my business class seat on a shabby Uzbek Airways plane to neighbouring Kazakhstan. I spent the following two weeks talking to people on the Kazakh Uzbek border, having rightly assumed that if the sterilization program was as widespread as some had suggested, then there would be victims among the thousands of people who flee impoverished Uzbekistan in search for jobs abroad. Finding women turned out to be the easy part. Getting them to talk was much harder. I have never been to North Korea or Saddam's Iraq, but I've worked in some of the world's most notorious dictatorships in Burma, in Syria, in Turkmenistan. In none of these places have I ever encountered the extent of fear that clouds over Uzbekistan. In a dark shack on the border, a couple described their life. We have no gas, they told me. Electricity comes for an hour a day. But the worst thing, they said, is that there is no justice. My neighbor was taken in the middle of the night after he complained to the mayor that he couldn't keep his children warm. The husband said, like many farmers, they told me they're leaving because they can't make a living. The government issues quotas and decides on what crops they must grow. It doesn't work. They're quotas on sterilization, too. Doctors I spoke to said they were under immense pressure to perform a certain number of operations. Some were ordered to sterilize one woman a week, others as many as eight. The government says what it calls surgical contraception is not widespread and is only carried out on a voluntary basis, and many educated Uzbeks defend the practice. These villagers don't use contraceptives, so the government has to take extreme measures, one resident of Tashkent told me. I also took to women who had been sterilized without their consent as part of what many believe is the government's effort to control population growth. The most striking thing about their heartbreaking stories was their reluctance to complain. One woman I spoke to gave birth to her second son by C section nine months ago. She said doctors didn't even inform her that they'd removed her uterus during the operation. But she told me, I don't know why I deserved it, but I guess the president wants the best for us. As one dissident outside Uzbekistan put it, the more they humiliate us, the easier it becomes to brainwash us, to suppress us. Not only do they control what we bring into the country, what we grow or how many children we have, they also control what we think. And that, he said, is truly scary.
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Narrator/Presenter
Natalia Antilava when the Olympic Games get underway in London this summer, around 80 countries will be trying to win a medal for the very first time. Among them is Libya, whose athletes have never yet managed to secure a place on an Olympic podium. In Tripoli, John Donison has been meeting one young athlete hoping to break Libya's duck.
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John Donison
He may be the fastest man in Libya, but Mohammad Khawaja has something of a saunter about him as he comes towards me at Tripoli's dilapidated Al Mudmar Stadium. At just 10 stone and well under 6 foot, Mohammed is surprisingly slight for a 400 metre man, a pocket model of his heroes, the Jamaican Usain Bolt and the American Michael Johnson. To say that he carries not an ounce of fat barely does him justice. Nothing went to waste when Mohammed was created, but the 24 year old is quick, flashing past me effortlessly as he begins to limber up. He's the current African champion, and his personal best of just under 45 seconds would have placed him fifth in the Beijing Games four years ago. Libya has never won an Olympic medal of any description. Mohammed is looking to change that in London, but the past tumultuous year in Libya has not been easy. 2011 was a write off in terms of competition. Revolution was not conducive to racing. Mohammed says he was barely able to lace up his spikes and train for most of last year. But he blames the 42 year long rule of the man he calls the tyrant Gaddafi, for the poor state of Libyan sport. He says professional athletes were neglected, with money and sponsorship hard to come by. In the former Libyan leader's famous Green Book, the rambling philosophical text that covered everything from government to gynaecology, elite athletes were given short shrift. Sport, it declared, must be for the masses and not for the individual to monopolize. But of course, as league leaders in double standards, the Gaddafis played by their own rules. Until recently, Libya had only one famous, or should I say infamous sporting son, Al Sadi Gaddafi, the colonel's third bairn, who's now believed to be holed up in neighbouring Niger, having fled the fighting last year. In a country where nepotism itself was played out at a professional level, having daddy as dictator did wonders for Al Saadi's stumbling ambitions as a footballer. An attacking midfielder of modest mettle but mighty means, Al Sadi was made captain of the national team before going on to become head of Libya's football federation and a board member at the Italian club Juventus. But he was a powerful player in only one sense. In a four year career in Italy's top league, he managed to get on the pitch for less than half an hour. Al Sadi was banned for drug use in 2003, hardly surprising given that among his training advisors he listed Diego Maradona, no stranger to a pre match powdering of nose, and Ben Johnson, the disgraced steroid munching Canadian sprinter. At one match back in Libya, Al Saadi's security guards reportedly opened fire on the crowd when supporters began to boo his team. Hardly fair play. And Al Saadi was not the only one who benefited from sporting jobs for the boys. Another of Muammar Gaddafi's sons was head of Libya's Olympic committee. Back at the stadium, Muhammad Khawaja lies back on the sun kissed tartan track and stretches out his seemingly elastic hamstrings. He tells me he came across his namesake, Muhammad Gaddafi, many times. Among the last occasions was at the start of the uprising last year when Gaddafi Jr asked him to parade on state television adorned with a green flag to show his support for the regime. Mohammed says he made his excuses and ran in the other direction. He readily admits he was scared to get involved in the conflict and didn't fight with the rebels, but he sees himself now as a face of the new Libya. He knows that success of any kind in London would be a boost for this country, which is still trying to find its feet. Libya's new political leaders, who are struggling but just about managing to constrain the dozens of trigger happy militia who now police the country, urge patience. Mohammed might benefit from such advice. Rio 2016 could be a more realistic target. But before he trots off into the Tripoli night, he tells me just to raise Libya's new red, black and green flag at London's opening ceremony would be a victory in itself.
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Narrator/Presenter
John Donison and the Olympic dreams of one young Libyan, bringing this edition to an end. There'll be more from our own correspondence next Saturday at half past eleven, so please join us then. Goodbye.