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From Our Own Correspondent
The Last Election?
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Context and colour. In today's edition: Turkey at the crossroads ahead of Sunday's the...
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This is a download from the BBC.
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It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program
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for the BBC World Service, but this
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is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, the old neighbourhood in Istanbul set to become a battleground in Sunday's Turkish election. The authorities move against religious extremism in a Spanish city where Muslims and Christians have lived side by side for centuries. Do you warm the pot? Do you use boiling water? We take the train to Darjeeling to get the answers from a tea expert. And we learn how the key to peace in troubled Northeast Asia may lie in the bedroom. There's a general election in Turkey on Sunday, and the AK Party of President Erdogan is looking rather anxiously at some new kids on the block. The hdp, the People's Democratic Party. The roots of and most support for the HDP are Kurdish. But in recent times, it has broadened out, becoming a powerful voice of the Turkish left. It has charismatic leaders, male and female, and many women candidates. It is promoting gender equality, is fielding Turkey's first openly gay candidate, and is championing green issues. But for many voters, the key issue is the president himself and his plans for a new Turkey. Given a sufficient mandate, Mr. Erdogan will redraft the constitution. His critics say this could be the country's final election before a dictatorship. Maria Margarones has been to one part of Istanbul likely to have a major influence on Sunday's vote.
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Tannerre sits in front of his tall, peeling house, perched on a low stool. A spindly rose tree in a pot arcs a thorny stem between us, set out to catch the warmth of the afternoon sun. He might have been sitting here for decades, looking down the narrow street into the heart of Tarlabashe, the old Istanbul neighbourhood where he was born and raised. When he was young, he says, nobody ever went out without a tie and melon hat. Now Tarlabashi is home to impoverished Kurds and Roma and Syrian refugees living hand to mouth in half derelict rooms five minutes walk from well Hill, Taksim Square. Barefoot children play among rubbish and broken glass. Women try to keep their bit of tarmac clean with a dustpan and brush. Sometimes a small, grimy flock of sheep comes trotting by for sale or slaughter. The poorest people here live by recycling scrap metal and paper. Several rungs above them are the mussel workers who scrape and lean and stuff shellfish for the tourist trade. Higher still are the drug dealers. Lately, Tarlabashi has been left to itself by the Forces of law and order, some say deliberately. Still, the neighbourhood's old bone structure shines through. On Sundays, market stalls are piled high with rocket and broad beans, tomatoes and lettuces. The dignified terraced houses marry Ottoman detail with neoclassical style. They were built by Greeks and armenians in the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire still thought itself immortal. Tanner, too, seems a survivor from those times. He has dwarfism, and his life can't have been easy. But his long, thoughtful face lights up when we swap a few phrases in Greek, his forgotten mother tongue. The neighborhood was Greek when he was born, he says. He was apprenticed as a boy to a Greek cobbler who taught him how to make the leather vamps for shoes. But almost all the Greeks had gone by the 1970s. With the Cyprus war, he says he wept for days when they went away. Tarlebashi stood half empty till it was filled by refugees from yet another conflict, the civil war in the east between the Turkish army and the Kurdish pkk. Now, before Turkey's critical election on Sunday, Tarlabashi itself is a battlefield between the ruling AK Party and the upstart hdp. The HDP is a Kurdish party that's also attracting secular liberals, feminists and gay activists. All those who feel left out by President Erdogan's vision of an authoritarian Islamic Turkey. A rapidly developing hub for the Middle East. It needs 10% of the vote to get into Parliament and block Erdoan's plans to change the constitution, giving the presidency and himself a lot more power. The AK Party builds and builds a second, and soon a third bridge over the Bosphorus roads for thousands of cars, great tracts of high rises in Istanbul suburbs, and now a big luxury development here in Tarlaba. Until recently, the company responsible was headed by none other than the president's son in law. Tannerre doesn't sit outside his door just to watch the world go by. Next to his house is a high metal fence. Behind it, thundering machines claw and dig at the ground to lay foundations for new flats and offices selling for more than £5,000 a square metre. Tannerre's house is due to be swallowed up as well, but he has a lawsuit going, he says, against the project. It's a long shot, but Tannerre is planted far more deeply than his rose tree, his taproot reaching all the way into the distant past. Meanwhile, down the hill, the HDP is dreaming of a different future. Mixed with the lines of laundry festooned across the streets. Its multicoloured bunting billows like the flounces of some celestial petticoat. Loud music blares from its white tiled election bureau. In the evenings, Kurdish men gather there to drink tea and talk politics. Women go out leafleting decked out like fairy princesses in Kurdish national dress. Full length, wide sleeved gowns, all chased with sparkling thread. Headscarves edged with elaborate borders of crocheted lace. They are proud, they say, because their party is going to parliament. Days before the election, the polls are on a knife edge. Even with the support of Turkey's intellectuals and urban radicals, this little Kurdish party seems a fragile force to set against the AK Party's bulldozers. And as fragile and as determined as Tanere.
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Holding fast to history, Maria Margarones the Spanish authorities, like those throughout Europe, have been trying to deter young Muslim citizens from becoming jihadists in Syria or Iraq. Some of their attention has been focused on Ceuta, one of Spain's two territories on North Africa's Mediterranean coast. The enclave, a 90 minute ferry ride from mainland Spain, is surrounded on three sides by Morocco and is an unusual blend of European and African cultures. But as Guy Hedgko's been finding out in recent times, it's become known as much for religious extremism as for its long standing multiculturalism.
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When you first arrive in El Principe, it's hard to believe you're still in Spain. Perched on a hill, it's the most impoverished neighbourhood in Ceuta. The town has belonged to Spain for over 300 years. But El Principe's steep, winding streets and multicoloured makeshift buildings remind me more of Morocco, which is visible just a few hundred metres away beyond a border fence. I have repeatedly been warned not to come up here alone, because El Principe can be a dangerous place. Unemployment here is at around 80% and violent crime is rife. One of the biggest sources of income for locals is smuggling goods, particularly drugs, back and forth across the Moroccan border. So I'm lucky to have Kamal Mohammed, the young president of the local Neighbors association, to show me around. We feel Spanish and European here, he says, but Europe has forgotten about us. He points out that many houses here don't have running water or electricity, and the school dropout rate is much higher than the rest of Spain and even the rest of Ceuta. Kamal, like almost the entire population of El Principe, is of Moroccan Muslim origin. He has good reason to feel Spanish, though. His grandfather fought and died in the Spanish Civil War and his mother was born in Ceuta. He too was born and raised here. But like many of his Neighbors. HE SPEAKS Spanish with a strong Arabic accent. For youngsters around here, the most common language is a local mixture of Arabic and Spanish. Decades ago, this neighborhood saw people of European and Moroccan origin living side by side. But gradually those of European origin moved away to more upmarket areas. Now, says Kamal, there is only one Christian family living in El Principe, a neighbourhood of 12,000 people. There is also only one church. Graffitied on one of its walls are the words Islamic State, a reminder that that beyond the crime and lack of jobs and infrastructure in El Principe, there is another concern jihadism. In recent months, police have made several mass arrests in Ceuta of suspected members of jihadist cells. Many of those detained have been residents of El principe. In March, 11 men went on trial, accused of recruiting for Islamic State. Several of them were from this area. Authorities were alerted to the scale of the problem nearly three years ago, when a taxi driver from El Principe called Rashid Hossein carried out a suicide bombing on a military barracks in Syria, killing 130 people. Spain has seen many fewer people travel to Syria or Iraq to join extremist groups than countries such as France or the uk. But the authorities believe Ceuta and Spain's other North African enclave, Melilla, are highly susceptible to radicalization. That's partly because of the two cities proximity to Morocco, but also because many youngsters in their large Muslim communities feel socially marginalized and confused about their cultural identity. Kamal Mohammed says it's a good thing that there have been so many arrests, because it shows the authorities are clamping down on jihadist activity, but much more needs to be done, he believes. The politicians are very quick to give themselves medals, he says, but nobody wants to take on the job of working and helping this neighbourhood and making sure its youngsters don't fall into those kinds of temptations. A short taxi ride takes me back to the very different world of central Ceuta. The Muslim and Christian cultures that have lived here side by side for centuries are both visible. Some women wearing Muslim headscarves window shop outside a mango clothes store. Nearby, a Burger King poster advertises hamburgers made from 100% halal meat. Sometimes the peal of church bells is followed by the call to prayer from one of the city's 30 or so mosques. In central Ceuta, people are proud of their city and its multiculturalism. Although Muslims and Christians predominate, each faith, making up nearly half the population, there are also small Jewish and Hindu communities. Some locals tell me they have been upset by recent media coverage focusing on crime and jihadism in the city. Ceuta, they point out, is just another part of Spain. Yet one lurid fictional TV series set in El Principe is full of corrupt cops, drug deals and terrorism plots. The Spanish mainland, which is visible on a clear day across the Mediterranean, can be reached within 50 minutes by ferry. From Ceuta's city center, with its shops, restaurants and bustling businesses, Spain and Europe feel a stone's throw away. But up on the hill in El Principe, they seem much, much further off.
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And that's Guy Hedgeco. Now, it might not catch on here, but in places in Namibia, in southwest Africa, some farmers would rather have a guard donkey than a guard dog. They're looking to protect their livestock from big cats, cheetahs and leopards in particular. Those animals may be among the continent's most feared, but they are also among its most threatened. So a conservation initiative supported by two British zoos is now underway to try to reduce the number of animals shot or trapped on farmland. And the donkeys? Well, it seems there's nothing they like better than giving those predators a good kicking. Victoria Gill's been to Namibia to see whether the farmers can be persuaded to go easy on the big cats.
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I did not expect to find myself on an emergency callout to an injured leopard less than an hour after landing. But it proved to be the start of a head spinning five day immersion into the world of Namibian conservation, complete with close encounters with predators, long dusty drives, a brief bit of extreme weather and one very unhappy episode with a guinea fowl. And it all began with that little leopard. Most of the conservationists who work with the foundation live on its nature Reserve, about 40 minutes drive from the capital Windhoek. As my taxi from the airport pulled up, Colette, one of them, rushed over and in the same breath as saying hello, asked rather apologetically, you must be exhausted, but are you ready to go? We've had a call from a farm. There's a leopard caught in a gin trap. So off we rushed bumpily to that farm. Driving the truck was Stuart Munro, a wiry Scottish wildlife biologist with a fierce nicotine addiction, a very dry sense of humour and an encyclopedic knowledge of snakes. The aim was to sedate the trapped leopard, free its foot and check its injuries on site. But this little big cat, it turned out, was just a month old. Its foot had been crushed in the metal jaws of that trap for a few hours, and despite its diminutive size, its pained growl was truly terrifying. The team had to be quicker and even more careful than usual, the young cub's mother was likely to be listening to those growls and watching. So within minutes, the team had the youngster sedated, freed and gently bundled onto a bed of straw in the back of our truck. Then we set off for the city and the vet. Gin traps have brutal, spring loaded metal jaws. They're illegal and not commonly used, but this incident was a snapshot of the ongoing conflict between farmers and predators. One high tech approach the foundation uses is satellite tracking. They've now caught and fitted tracking collars to more than 60 cheetahs, leopards and African wild dogs. It's then one of Stewart's tasks to upload the animals locations daily and share that information with a network of farmers so they can see where the carnivores are and if they pose a threat to their cattle or sheep. Weeks can pass without a predator being caught in one of the regularly inspected humane cage traps. But my timing is holding out. On another of the Foundation's reserves, about 400 miles south, they've caught a cheetah. So Stuart and I set out before dawn. It's about seven hours drive, most of it on red dirt roads, and as you head south, it evolves into a spectacular mountainous landscape. It'd look like Mars if it weren't for the occasional green burst of a camel thorn tree. When we finally arrive at the reserve on the borders of the Namib Desert, the dry heat is a real concern. A sedated cheetah can't pant, so Stuart and the team will have to keep it cool. Three young conservation volunteers prepare a pile of cold, damp towels. They needn't have bothered. Once the cheetah's been darted and we're waiting for him to fall safely asleep, ominous dark clouds start to gather. Then dense sheets of water hammer down. Five people work on the cheetah under the tin roof of a veranda. They have to shout to be heard over the deep din of fat, relentless raindrops on metal. But soon they have the big male cat with his brand new satellite collar in a secure cage on the back of the truck. They drive him back to the spot where he was caught so he'll know where he is when he wakes up. This tracking study is showing that cheetahs very rarely take livestock. When they do, it's opportunistic. So part of this project is to test and recommend to farmers other ways of protecting vulnerable animals, like penning calves in at night and even using guard donkeys that will bite and kick predators to protect their herd. The following day, we're on the road again, doing about 80 miles per hour on a section of smooth tarmac. After another 5am start, then bang. The windscreen caves in. In a spider web of cracks, a guinea fowl has flown out of the undergrowth and hit us. The poor bird punched the windscreen so hard it knocked the rearview mirror into the back of the cab. Luckily, the crazed glass stays put just long enough for us to limp slowly and carefully back to Windhoek.
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Victoria Gill in Namibia. The railways in India may be the world's busiest with 25 million passenger journeys a year. But they're in deep trouble. Successive governments and prime ministers have promised to reform the colossal inefficiency of the state owned system. But little progress is ever made. The average speed of an Indian Express is less than 40 miles an hour. Freight chugs along at little more than 20. It's uncompetitive even against expensive and polluting lorries on clogged up roads. This year the network is expected to report a loss of some 5 billion pounds. The slow decline of Indian railways can be seen throughout this vast nation, even in its smallest and most remote outposts, as David Bailey's been finding out.
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When a man who grows tea that sells for over £600 a pound offered me a breakfast cuppa, I expected the golden rules of warming the pot and using boiling water. But even though Raja Banerjee owns the exclusive Makabari tea estate in our jeeling, golden rules are not for him. Good tea is like good wine and needs oxygen to breathe, he insists. Boiling suffocates the flavour. Sir Raja Banerjee lets the water stand in a pot without a lid for several minutes before he eventually spoons in the tea. My cup is filled several times from the lidless teapot as he expands on his personal philosophy of tea and life. An eclectic mix of Hinduism, Rudolf Steiner and the slow food movement of distant Italy. But Banerjee's latest passion is the decaying Darjeeling Himalayan railway, a narrow gauge relic of the Raj that once took Maccabari tea from the Himalayan foothills to the Bengal plains, from where it was shipped to the mainly lidded teapots of the world. Built in 1879, the 48 mile line is now a loss making anachronism that clings to life through the threads of its history and an aversion to the political bother of closure. Looked down on by portraits of the four generations of his family who have nurtured the Maccabari estate, And Banerjee is defiant. Without investment it will die, but with investment it can strengthen tourism and the whole community will benefit. Jabbing the table with his finger, he adds, and I can make that investment. Then the passion deflates. But the government will not let me. Banerjee's view is shared by many who know the region. There are a couple of token tourist steam services, optimistically called the Joy trains, the most popular shuttles back and forth along the five mile litter strewn urban sprawl between Darjeeling and neighbouring Goom. The tatty cramped carriages have smoked plastic windows which have become so scratched as to be almost opaque. You can open them by sliding them back, but this merely adds your layer of scratched plastic to the already diminished view of a fellow passenger behind. The steam locomotives thankfully have more charm than the carriages, but are now over 100 years old and in need of expert and tender care rather than the desperate emergency repairs I witnessed involving the use of crowbars and sledgehammers. An erratic diesel service, ironically with more tourist friendly windows, continues on a further 16 miles to the town of Kursiung. But only one train a day makes the journey down to the plains and the connection to the main line. This section had been closed for several years until March this year. The official reason was because of a landslide, but everyone from the chief engineer to station masters gave me their own additional theories. Even the security guard who frisked me as I left from nearby Bagdogra airport had an explanation. He insisted somewhat too cheerily that it was because of the suicide of a fare dodging passenger, since the fare for the whole 48 miles is less than 48 pence and hardly worth dodging, let alone dying for. This seemed a little improbable. The reality is that it is the railway that is committing suicide from a lack of investment in the engineering workshops. Ancient lathes and machine tools lie idle or broken as the skills to use them are lost with the retiring workers, few of whom are replaced. The most active engineering I witnessed was an earnest young man building a detailed model of one of the locomotives out of a sheet of tiny so why is the Government Railway Board in distant Delhi so reluctant to hand the loss making line to the likes of Raja Banerjee, who would aim to offer tourists a ride along the whole 7,000 foot climb into the mountains with hopefully a reasonable window to look out of? Almost everyone I spoke to believed that the answer is the political cost of privatizing even the tiniest outpost of India's monolithic state owned railway over a million people work for Indian Railways, and their unions fiercely oppose any privatisation. It's a fight no one has a stomach for, preferring instead eventual closure by the attrition of old age and retirement of both people and locomotives. Back between Darjeeling and Gum, tourist taxis wait impatiently as the joy train crosses the road they share, almost willing on the day when the railway will be gone, and with it Raja Banerjee's dream of a world class tourist train with new dining cars and reopened station buffets, presumably with lidless teapots.
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David Bailey in West Bengal, the currently frosty relations between Russia and the west and the rise of China in Asia have brought to some worries about global or regional wars. They've also provided a good reason for academics and specialists from around the world to get together to discuss how they might be avoided. One recent conference with experts from Europe and the United States was held in the South Korean capital, Seoul. It was examining threats on the Korean peninsula and throughout the Asia Pacific region. One of the panelists was Humphrey Hawksley, who found that a key solution being advocated was far removed from the weighty and intricate discussion of rogue states and the international balance of power.
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Thank you all for your insightful and interesting contributions, announced former U.S. congressman Dan Burton and until recently, a Foreign Affairs Committee heavy hitter, fixing his eyes on the banner above him that read Prospects for Peace in Northeast Asia. Now, before the next session, lunch, what is in store next? I flipped through the program. James Woolsey Jr. A former CIA director, wandered over to chat. Scattered about the room were luminaries of international affairs. Uh oh, said one of the panellists, pointing to a section that said Foundation Day Program. It looks like we might be going to a wedding. Eyes bulged with surprise. We're doing what? Exclaimed an analyst from the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington. She had just spoken on the future of Asian economies. A wedding ceremony was indeed being held in a stadium outside the South Korean capital, Seoul, run by the Unification Church, famous for its mass weddings between couples who had been matched and barely knew each other. Inside, a vast, tiered, checkered landscape stretched back and up, brides in white, grooms in black, a peppering of colour from yellow, flowers in buttonholes and bright headphones, wires coiling out from translation sets so everyone, whatever language, could understand the vows. Most of those tying the knot were young. Many were Americans and Europeans who had been paired off, essentially, with strangers. As soon as I saw his picture, I knew we'd be suited, said Anna, a petite brunette who had flown over from the States to marry a serious bespectacled South Korean computer programmer. And where are you honeymooning? I asked him, but he didn't speak English, nor did Anna speak Korean. Oh, we're not yet she explained that even after the wedding there'd be no sleeping together for 40 days. It's in case anything goes wrong. She blushed, then squeezed his hand. But with us it won't. The Unification Church was founded in 1954 by the late and controversial Reverend Moon, who said when he was 16 years old, Jesus asked him to continue work left unfinished because of the crucifixion. He claimed a special gift for matching couples from different races, saying it helped understanding between cultures. And now it spawned a myriad of businesses and international organizations, one of which had set up our conference. It's also had a rocky relationship with the establishment. Moon himself was jailed in America for tax evasion, and many Christians reject his theology outright. It wasn't clear how this wedding ceremony fitted in with our security conference or with a conservative politician like Dan Burton, who was also an ordained pastor. All was to be revealed later. One of our conference helpers, Kaesung Anderson, had been matched some years earlier. How does it work? I asked. Do you date first? Go to the movies? Not really. He creased his brow. Dating is like holding hands, and you're not supposed to do that. When I was 19 and going to college, I knew it would be impossible to keep my virginity, so to stay out of trouble, I signed up the Reverend Moon's widow. Mother Moon, as she's affectionately called, presided over the ceremony, sitting on a throne like chair with an empty one next to it in remembrance of her late husband. Together they're referred to as the true parents, and she's the true mother. And with her came a flurry of activity. Processions, music, couples chosen to receive gifts while Mother Moon repeatedly walked off stage, only to reappear in a succession of glittering robes, colorful trousers, changing her outfits as fast as a catwalk model. Then suddenly a spotlight snapped on and the former U.S. congressman, Dan Burton, was at the podium congratulating the couples. Samir and I are honored to join you in renewing our wedding vows, led by the true parents, he said, with the ideal to protect marriage and the family and to reject socialism and atheism. And then it turned out our jovial conference organizer, Larry Moffat, was himself married in one of these ceremonies in the early 80s, and I had to ask him what any of this had to do with prospects for peace in Northeast Asia. He must have seen my sceptical look. You got to remember Humphrey. Marriage is a crapshoot, he said. We all find it difficult. But one thing's for sure, and if you get this right, you. Everything starts falling into place. World peace begins in the bedroom.
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And with Humphrey Hawksley learning where to find the key to world peace, we've reached the end of another edition. There'll be more from correspondence far and wide on Saturday morning at half past eleven, and I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.