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From Our Own Correspondent
Heroes of Baghdad
00:28:19
Reporters' despatches: already this year more than seven thousand people have been in...
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Hello.
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This is from our own correspondent, a
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download from BBC Radio.
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And here with the latest addition is Kate Ady.
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Hello today, every trip to the office, shop or school now requires extraordinary courage. How do Iraqis cope amid the growing violence? The Bulgarian president's talking of emergency. As daily demonstrations continue against the government, Americans get ready for the big Thanksgiving Day football games. But serious questions are now being asked about the dangers of their sport. And we're off to a village in China where at 6:15 in the morning, they still sing the praises of Chairman Mao. Iraq is experiencing its worst sectarian violence in more than five years. Over a thousand people were killed last month. 23 died yesterday alone in bombings and shootings. Attacks by extremist Sunni militants, some linked to Al Qaeda, threatened to pitch the country into a new civil war. Indeed, many Iraqis believe that's their intention. Most of the attacks are taking place in Baghdad. Andrew Hoskin has been trying to find out how people there live with the daily violence.
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The first thing to greet me on arrival at Baghdad International was a powerful smell of sewage. Before long, I was whisked into the menacing embrace of the city. Have arrived safely in Baghdad, I texted back to the office, before adding, riley, if that is not a contradiction in terms. As our car sank into the metallic churn of Baghdad traffic, I felt I was now a participant in one of the world's more macabre lotteries. True, the chances of your number being up in this metropolis of 5 million is still statistically remote, but dozens of people die horribly, suddenly every day here believing the same thing. Already this year, almost 8,000 people have been killed in Iraq, nearly twice the number of people who died in the 40 years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Believe me, you're going to see a big city just going about its business, an Iraqi colleague assured me before I arrived. To my mild astonishment, he was right. Old guys in traditional Arab dress slouched around in cafes drinking tea. Women bartered and gossiped in the markets, and children laughed and skipped down the road without a care in the world. There appeared to be no concession to the potential terror. I could only see danger. Parked cars that could be car bombs. Litter bins that could hide an improvised explosive device or ied, or an entirely innocent person transmogrified in my fevered imagination into a possible suicide bomber. To me, this abnormal normality was even more extraordinary when I looked at the numbers. Civilian victims outnumber the military targets of the insurgents by 60 to 1. So ordinary Iraqi people are not collateral damage. They are the intended targets of the violence. The weapon of choice for the insurgents, particularly of Iraq's Al Qaeda affiliate, is the car bomb, usually an ordinary, scruffy sedan packed with a plastic explosive called C4. It's hard to keep up with the atrocities which happen on a daily basis. So let's pick one recent day, which actually was far from untypical. Seven car bombs in and around Baghdad killed 56 people. An IED in a market killed another four, despite additional security measures that were introduced after 70 people were killed in a previous attack in the same place. Elsewhere in the country, another 22 people died, including one Colonel Sarwat Rashid, gunned down in his kitchen in the Kurdistan city of Suleimaniya. He just happened to be the head of security for Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani. If Colonel Rashid can be killed, I thought, then who is safe? We had to be quite careful visiting the scenes of bombings, because often a secondary device is planted to target the bystanders and emergency services. I found the same scene every time. The victims and injured were gone, the wreckage removed and the crime scene scrubbed clean. There'd be hardly a trace of the recent carnage, and life swarmed around and through as if nothing had happened. Nearby, cafes and restaurants would be buzzing and the local market in full swing. Gradually, I found myself adapting to the weird reality. Eating out at a restaurant in a sheer neighborhood, I asked my friend why he considered the place to be safe. Well, since the invasion in 2003, it's never been bombed, he said. It's fine, relax. But this wasn't weary resignation born from years of tyranny, war, sanctions and terror, but something deep and impressive. Everyone dies, and when they do, it is their time. Many people told me this was often accompanied by a quote from the wherever you may be, death will come, even if you are in impressively constructed fortifications. Somehow I felt this was a cover story. Iraq is a country full of widows and orphans and frightened people mourning the loss of loved ones killed in the most savage ways. When many Iraqis leave home, they say goodbye to their families as if for the last time, in case they don't return. Every trip to the office or the shops or the school or the college is an act of courage. I think of every ordinary, decent person in Baghdad, every man, woman and child quietly getting on with their lives in defiance of such horror as a hero.
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Andrew Hoskin in Baghdad this week seen two landmark anniversaries in the United States. On Tuesday, it was 150 years since President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. And yesterday the country marked the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's death. These two men may have occupied the White House a century apart, but both sought to use the power of federal government to impose change on conservative states and made fierce enemies as a result. Alan Little has been considering what these defining moments tell us about the country President Obama presides over today.
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Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. It is said that it took Lincoln 2 1/2 minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address and that it set the tone for a century. 51,000 men were killed or injured in the three days of fighting at Gettysburg. For Lincoln, the war was a test, a test of whether America's great experiment with democracy could survive. It was still in the 1860s, a revolutionary idea. The idea that the people could govern themselves on that damp autumnal Pennsylvania field. He rededicated the American republic to the ideals on which it was founded. For a century after the war, though the post slavery south enforced strict racial segregation. Black America was locked out of the Gettysburg promise. This is the century that separates Lincoln from John Kennedy and which binds their fates together in American history. Two iconic figures who came to be associated in the American mind with the tragedy of unfulfilled promise. For the south, the war was not about slavery. It was about states rights, the right of the individual states to live their own way of life free from intrusion by the distant federal government in Washington. It is the fusion of two things that unite Lincoln and Kennedy. The age old American argument about the proper nature and scale of federal government and the explosive politics of race. The Civil War fault line reaches forward into the Kennedy era. In the 1960s, American liberals had come to view southern racial politics as an abomination. It was apartheid in the new world, an enduring legacy of slavery in the land of the free. John Kennedy began to press for change. The white south revolted. The south had always solidly voted Democratic. Now it threatened to defect to the Republicans, the party, ironically of Abraham Lincoln. Kennedy was facing re election a year later and had to win the state of Texas. That's why he went to Dallas. It said that as they drove into town from the airport, he told his wife Jackie that they were now heading into nut country. Minutes later he was dead. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, used the momentum created by his martyrdom to force through Congress a series of almost revolutionary acts that ended legal segregation and extended voting rights to millions of southern blacks. For the first time in a sense it was the fulfillment of Lincoln's Gettysburg promise. Is that fault line still active? I went to a Republican Party hustings in Dallas. Every speaker condemned the pernicious expansion of federal power under President Obama as a betrayal of the founding principles of the American republic. The meeting began to discuss the merits and demerits of a government ban on texting while driving. Was it consistent with the founding principles? Wasn't it a clear and very un American assault on the liberty of the individual? Sure, one man said. I'll support a ban on texting while driving just as long as we also ban brushing your teeth while driving, shaving while driving, reaching into the back seat to slap your kids while driving. There followed a bizarre interlude in which speakers sought guidance from the 18th century Framers of the republic. What I found myself wondering, would James Madison and Thomas Jefferson have made of the matter of banning texting while driving? After the meeting, one man, a Tea Party activist, told me that President Obama's attempts at wealth redistribution were only semantically different. As he put it to me, holding a revolver to your head and telling you to give me your wallet. It is a graphic image. It means something very specific to a certain kind of listener. Obama cast in the image of street robber a mugger. It is not overtly racist, but it has, for those who want to hear it, a clear racial undercurrent. The Republicans despised Bill Clinton, but they never challenged his Americanness. Many black Americans believe there is something extra in their hatred of Obama. You are struck again and again by the anger that is coursing through much of the Republican Party. It is understandable. Until 2008, they had been in power for the best part of 40 years, from Richard Nixon in 1968 till George W. Bush in 2008. Forty years in which only two Democrats had made it to the White House and both were Southern white men. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had the mud of the conservative south reassuringly on their boots. It seemed for decades that conservative America was ascendant and that liberal America had retreated into a self destructive, angry counterculture. Now it's the Republicans, so long the party of government, who are in danger of sliding into that counterculture status.
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And that's Alan Little. Demonstrators in Bulgaria have been piling pressure onto the government. They say it's corrupt and must resign. The country's president stepped into the row this week, talking of an emergency and pleading for an end to what he described as political confrontation. The demonstrators are now gathering every night in front of the Parliament building in Sofia and As Emma Jane Kirby's been hearing, they say their crusade to clean up Bulgarian politics will only end when the government steps down.
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The sky over Sofia droops heavily over the city, an anemic washed out grey that has neither the energy to produce a rain shower nor to burn blue. The gold cupola of the cathedral has retreated into the dullness, its usual brilliance burrowed beneath the heavy duvet of cloud. And as they trudge along the streets or slump in the tramcars on their way to the office, the people of Sofia seem to ache exhaustion. Every face I pass looks done in and dog tired. And so they are. For five months now there have been spirited protests in this capital. Not the same anti austerity and poverty demonstrations that brought down the last government, but protests against corruption, against government ties with murky businesses, against power grabbing oligarchs. Every night people spill out of their workplaces straight onto the streets, waving brooms in front of the parliament, demanding a clean sweep of the entire political class. Letter and Demeter's eyes are hooded with tiredness, but Leta bounds up the university stairs, buoyed up on a nervous energy fuelled by strong coffee as she leads me proudly to Hall 272, the headquarters of the Early Risers Student movement. Along with 500 or so fellow undergraduates, they've occupied Sophia's university as part of what they're calling the Moral Revolution. Posters scribbled in felt tips with evident fervor adorn the walls. It's fear that makes the wolf look big, declares one, and on the blackboard the single word Ostavka Resign has been hurriedly scrawled. The room smells close and sweaty. On the floor, sleeping bags and old food Fester Demeter, wearing camouflaged combat trousers and with his hair tied back in a ponytail, tells me he's a seasoned protester. Since the general protests began back in June, he's only missed five days of demonstrations. Corruption is everywhere in Bulgaria, he says, at every level. We've never got rid of that communist mentality that you have to pay to get what you want. We don't accept this, and now we want the Bulgarian people and the political class to wake up. Yeah, we do, interjects Letter excitedly, swinging her legs as she perches on a desk in the lecture hall. She looks at me warily in case I've taken her enthusiasm for childishness, and then continues slowly, with an astonishing proficiency in English. I mean, we have to change this situation. There are so many young people who want to leave Bulgaria. But one of our main slogans is that we want to stay here and build Bulgaria into a country that we can be proud of one day. From outside the lecture hall, a raucous cheer and piercing whistle rallies the first of the day's marches. More than three quarters of Bulgarian people support the general protests. With their drums and loudspeakers, they're delivering the same, albeit more audible, message that Brussels has been giving the political elite for the past seven years. But with Bulgarian wages the lowest in the eu, richer club members offer a huge temptation, particularly to the highly skilled. A recent survey of one of Sofia's largest medical schools shows that over 80% of young doctors plan to emigrate. On the vascular surgery ward at Sofia's Tokuda Hospital, 34 year old surgeon Dmita Balezdrov stifles a yawn as he looks at the clock and notes he's not yet halfway through a gruelling 24 hour shift. From the 1st of January. Next year, he'll be able to work in any EU country, and he's already applying to hospitals in Britain. It's not just because he'll earn almost 10 times his current salary, he explains, but because he's sick of corruption. To make money as a doctor in Bulgaria, he says, fixing my gaze, you have to perform operations that people don't really need. I stare at him, slack jawed. Unnecessary operations just to get cash. You operate just for money? I ask. Yes. He nods wearily, passing his hand over his prematurely grey hair. This is how doctors survive here. There's a lot of corruption in the health service, and I'm so tired of it. Round shouldered, his voice cracked by fatigue, Dr. Balesdrov gives me a wan smile. Moving to the UK is, I suppose, a kind of surrender, he says quietly. But I don't want to fight this corruption any more. He leafs through his operation list and sees he's in for a calm few hours. I ask if he can take a nap somewhere, and deep within him some atavistic energy stirs. If it's really quiet, he says, wiping his glasses, I might try to join the protests for an hour.
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Emma Jane Kirby in Sofia Next Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in America. It's a time when families gather to eat turkey and also to watch huge, padded men throw a ball. About this year, though, American football's engaged in some serious soul searching. Its administrators stand accused of turning their backs on the dangers the players face of incurring sometimes life threatening injuries. Just before the start of this season, the National Football League agreed to pay more than $750 million for medical care for former players. Mike Wendling says the game may be in crisis, but it's as popular as ever.
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Reporters visiting America love to write about baseball. It's a sport that lends itself to good prose. The game's stretches of inactivity nudge the mind towards quiet contemplation. The hopelessly uneven struggle between the pitcher and the batter is a useful metaphor for the American psyche. Even the very best hitters fail two thirds of the time, yet they soldier on with boundless optimism. Baseball is the national pastime, but as an old joke goes, it passes the time between American football seasons. American football, just playing football, as it's called on its home turf, is the country's real obsession, its most popular and its most lucrative sport. Tickets can be scarce, particularly in cities that live and die by the fortunes of the local team. And so I was lucky to find one to see my hometown Buffalo Bills on a recent sunny Sunday. The ritual begins. Hours before the game, our group piles into a car en route to the all important tailgate party, so named for that metal flap that folds down from the back of a pickup truck, a handy support for a grill or a beer cooler. Behind the wheel is my dad, who, in a lifetime of following the Buffalo Bills, says he's never seen them lose in person. It's an incredible boast, made even more unlikely given the fact that Buffalo is one of the most notoriously jinxed teams in sport. Losers of four super bowl championships in a row these days, the Bills operate at a lower level of futility. They won't even sniff the championship this year. Today, nobody gives them much of a chance against the visitors from Kansas City, one of the league's premier teams. As we arrive, the smell of thousands of charcoal grills wafts over car parks. Fans toss balls and toss back cold drinks. Once suitably lubricated, we file into the stadium. No pomp and ceremony is spared, even for this low key mid season matchup. There's a marching band, cheerleaders flame throwing cannons, a jumbo TV replay screen and a booming sound system. 80,000 voices scream as the home team takes the field. Early on, the game is close. When Kansas City has the ball, one of the Buffalo defenders is penalized for a blow to the head. Curses and boos cascade around the stadium, but the replay on the jumbo screen is clear. The hit appears accidental, but these days any contact to the head can draw a bright yellow penalty flag. Officials are cautious because head injuries are currently one of the sport's most Vexing issues. Repeated blows have been blamed for brain disease, early onset dementia, and even the suicides of former stars. People describe a concussion as getting your bell rung or like seeing stars. But when I got concussed four or five times while playing youth in high school football, I experienced it as an insect attack from the inside, a fuzzy column of ants marching across my field of vision. There was always a medic on hand and never any pressure to play through it or return to the game quickly. But at the same time, nobody seemed to know much about the long term effects of concussions or worry about the risks of repeated head injuries. If you felt okay the next day, you were ready to return to battle. On the field, the Bills have the lead. They're about to score again. The home crowd is getting excited. But then, a stunning reversal of fortune. A Kansas City defender intercepts a pass, running it back 100 yards for a touchdown. It's the tipping point. The visitors power ahead and win the game. My dad's alleged streak is broken. Football so dominates American sport that it's hard to see how its popularity could ever drop off. But now even some devoted fans are asking whether football is too brutal. Some parents are reluctant to let their children play the game. A generation of kids could opt for the calmer pleasures of baseball or the global obsession that Americans call soccer. The sport has faced oblivion in the past. Early in the 20th century, in American football's infancy, rules were lax, padding was minimal, and the game just as brutal. Players routinely died on the pitch. It took no less than the intervention of President Teddy Roosevelt to institute rule changes to curb the violence. It's hard to see American football losing its top dog status, but it is a game of surprises. A subdued crowd of Buffalo Bills fans files out of the stadium in the fading autumn light. No one saw that 100 yard touchdown coming either.
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And that's Mike Wendling. These have been years of phenomenal economic development in China. An industrial revolution which has transformed the country into the world's largest superpower. What a contrast with the days of dictator Mao Zedong. Back then, the countryside was parceled up into communes. People would pool their agricultural and industrial output to provide accommodation, education, and living expenses for those living there. But the commune movement proved financially disastrous, and in the early 1980s it was finally abandoned as China embraced market forces and began its remarkable rise to global economic prominence. But not all the communes have gone, as Peter Day's been finding out.
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Dawn is often murky in central China. Grey skies, thin smog everywhere but rain or Shine in NANJI XUAN At 6:15 every morning, the air is suddenly full of songs of praise for China's mighty former leader, Mao Zedong. The anthems blare forth up and down the empty streets from loudspeakers on every lamp post. Nanjiswan is a place where time seems to have stood still or even gone backwards. It's one of China's very few remaining Maoist communes, a showcase for a vanished regime. On and on chants the song that many Chinese recognize from their childhood or their parents childhoods. The east turns red. The sun is rising. China has Mao Zedong. He's seeking people's happiness. He's seeking the way forward. Sixty years ago, this would have been everywhere, in every town and village. Now it's just here in Hunan Province, in the middle of China. Visitors are welcome. The village's propaganda chief shows me round. The archive hall tells the story. After Mao Zedong's successors handed state owned land back to the farmers in the 1980s and the people here were persuaded to give the land back to the village, it's run as a commune. Everyone shares in the enterprise. The historic displays show photographs of decrepit cottages. There's a drawing of the way the land used to be tilled. Two men pulling a plough instead of an ox. A hard life. When the village returned to Maoist communal principles in the 1980s, it appears to have flourished, perhaps rather more than it had done in the 1960s, when Mao's rigorous rule was the way the whole country was run and millions perished in strife and famine. Nan Zhi Xuan's rural slums were replaced with apartment blocks. A traditional Chinese arch was erected at the entrance to the village. There's a big square with a big statue of Mao and posters of other communist heroes. Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin. Lots of red banners. New factories on old farmland attracted outside investment. Making noodles, beer, medicine. There's a newspaper and a radio station which wakes the village up every morning with those Chairman Mao songs. The noodle factory was set up 15 years ago with Japanese investment. It was swarming with hygienically clad workers when I was there. The noodles, fresh off the production line, tasted good too, served up to us by an engaging young woman who joined the village community when she married a local boy. She said she enjoyed the quiet life, set slightly apart from the rush and jabber of modern urban China. Just a few streets away, here in Nanjisun, there are almost no cars, just a few of the electric scooters that have blissfully replaced two stroke engine bikes in China and some sedate three wheeler trucks. The place is plain clean, devoid of commercial advertising, austere lots of Maoist banners and slogans. Of course, basic pay is low, the equivalent of £20amonth, but commune members also get rent free apartments with utilities and basic foodstuffs provided, plus education. It's poignant to experience such a nostalgic place in a China which is still undergoing ferocious modernization and frantically growing urbanization. The great Chinese export machine, fueled by cheap labor, which has been the main engine of growth for 30 years, is now being officially replaced by a more balanced economy. The Chinese authorities are now seemingly concentrating on constructing a consuming society, owning homes and cars and smartphones and the other paraphernalia of 21st century living. Detached though the commune at Nanji Xuan may be, from all the swirling consumerist China around it, you only have to step into one of the village's apartments to find an array of creature comforts that are somewhat in advance of the austerity of the Cultural Revolution. The elderly occupant talked to us in her living room, clean, high ceilinged and spacious, dominated by a landscape painting of a lake and a pagoda taking up most of one wall. There was a nice flat screen television beaming out a repeat of one of those endless historical epics from Central China tv. There was a shiny microwave oven and shelves arrayed with the trophies of a lifetime of family presence and community awards. And in proud position above the television on the wall, a big electronic calendar with the digital dates arranged around a portrait of Chairman Mao in his prime. When you pressed a button, his face was suddenly embellished by a rainbow array of colored lights beaming. The calendar was made in the village,
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of course, Peter Day in the community, which hasn't yet cast the Great Helmsman adrift. And that's it. I'll be here again with more from our own correspondence next Saturday morning at half past eleven. I hope you'll join us then. Goodbye.