← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Marching Orders
00:27:53
From a clifftop village in China, a Ukrainian bunker and a former slave port in Tanzania.
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- [00:00]
Presenter
This is the BBC.
- [00:04]
Narrator
Hello. Today, just the thing for the new year. A swift trip around the world and first up a cliff face by ladder to view rural poverty in China, then to the streets of Tehran. But viewed from afar, we float along a Vietnamese river and get a rowing lesson without hands and visit a former slave port in Tanzania. Maybe no longer. Daily in the news, but checkpoints and bunkers and constant violence are part of life in eastern Ukraine. The war between Ukrainian government and Russian backed separatists has become the longest continuously violent conflict in Europe since the Second World War. More than 10,000 people have been killed since it began in 2014, and there seems no end in sight. A ceasefire deal was signed in Minsk almost three years ago, but it is regularly violated and Russian officers recently withdrew from the centre monitoring the fragile truce. Moscow has warned of major bloodshed after the Trump administration agreed to provide Ukraine with anti tank missiles and sniper rifles. Some fear that this could create an incentive for Russia to move quickly this winter before the new weapons arrive. Lucy Asch found morale was low when she went to visit the Ukrainian army.
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Lucy Ash
The soldier pulls back a grimy curtain to reveal an even grimier shower tray and a length of rubber tubing. We rigged this up a few days ago, he says. At least it's somewhere to wash. His unit is camped out in a former hospital, a maze of filthy, freezing corridors. Every window has been smashed a a few jagged shards of glass remain here and there, like teeth in a decrepit mouth. The hospital was built for Second World War veterans, but today's fighting recalls the trench warfare of World War I. Men in muddy dugouts, cradling their guns. The enemy is just a few hundred metres away, across a stretch of no man's land, behind a row of slag heaps. They add a menacing quality to the skyline over the Donbass town of Marinka, especially when dusk falls and the sound of gunfire becomes ever more insistent. Eastern Ukraine has been described as a frozen conflict, but virtually every week people are injured and killed on both sides of the front line. Only stupid people are not afraid, says the commander, holed up in his bunker with the company mascot, a black dog called Amigo. A flickering screen with red dots showing the enemy positions is the only reminder that this is a 21st century war.
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Commander / Interviewee
War.
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Lucy Ash
Although the commander here and his troops arrived in a new rotation only a fortnight ago, most already look drained. There are people in the shadows, the commander tells me, profiting from this war. Who? I ask. Oligarchs? Politicians? Warlords? He shrugs. We don't see them. But there are those who need the fighting to continue, otherwise it would have stopped long ago. It's obvious his 22 year old cynicism seems understandable as he complains about the lack of supplies from night vision goggles to medical kits. Things were much worse before, according to the press officer accompanying us in the area the Ukrainian government calls the anti terrorist operation zone. These days our soldiers have enough food, proper body armour and helmets, he says, and we're grateful to international charities and volunteers who are supporting us in this war. But given that Ukraine is a leader in the global arms market, why can't it supply its own army with basic necessities like medical kits? The press officer looks awkward. We have some kits, but the foreign ones from the Red Cross are higher quality, he says. The soldiers are treated to some freshly baked bread. I've come to visit the battalion with Oleg Tkachenko, a businessman turned Protestant pastor who opened a bakery in Marinka. It's the only new business in the town since the war began. The army cook, a pallid looking youth in a dirty T shirt puts the loaves into a metal cabinet to protect them from the rodents which scurry down the corridors outside, taking care to stay out of sniper range. Soldiers are preparing for winter chopping wood. Donbas is famously rich in coal, but the supply is limited because mines in this area have come to a standstill. Locals have to dig wells for drinking water and there's no gas because it's too dangerous to mend the holes in the pipeline, which lies between the two warring sides. Back in the town, a group of pensioners queue outside the town hall for winter coal. Some almost come to blows when they're told they're not eligible because they don't live in the so called red Zone. Right next to the front line, there are people in damaged homes right here in the centre. Why can't we get help? Shouts one woman, tears in her eyes. The soldiers sometimes walk in pairs around the town carrying shopping bags, rifles slung across their backs. The bakery owner tells me local people welcome them, but I'm not so sure. Many accuse them of looting. Few seem to find their presence reassuring. Olya, one of the women who works at the bakery, accuses the Ukrainian army of provoking their opponents in the Donetsk People's Republic. Until they return fire. They niggle away for a week, two weeks with little skirmishes and then bam. Because when the guys in the DNR shoot back, they don't mess about. And we're the ones who suffer. Our homes are targeted. Olya invites me to her house, right next to the checkpoint which separates Ukraine from no Man's Land. I haven't seen daylight in here for years, she says, pointing to the mattresses which shield her windows against shrapnel. In one attack, a neighbour's baby bled to death. Olia's father had to have a leg amputated and later died of his injuries. We don't care who's in charge here as long as there's peace, she says. We didn't understand this before, but now it's a golden word for us.
- [06:31]
Narrator
Lucy Ashe and you can hear more on Crossing Continents on Thursday morning. Poverty reduction has always been a central political aspiration for China's ruling Communist Party. It has become a party mantra that the government has lifted 700 million people out of poverty since the economic reforms precipitated by the death of Chairman Mao. Prosperity has transformed the country. High speed trains have replaced dirt roads, skyscrapers have sprouted from scrubland, and gleaming tech cities continue to churn out newly minted billionaires. And yet tens of millions of Chinese people, many in rural areas, still live on less than a dollar a day. President Xi Jinping has them in his sights with his aim of eradicating poverty altogether. But closing the gap, which yawns more widely each year, between the giant mega cities and the poorer people of the countryside will not be easy, as John Sudworth found.
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John Sudworth
Around 4 in the morning, someone seemed to be knocking on the door in the half light and still half asleep. I lifted my head from the pillow only to see a chicken walk in. It must have been the 10th time I'd woken. The ferocious mountain chill had seeped through my sleeping bag. The open fire in the centre of the mud hut had burned so low it offered little warmth despite filling the room with choking smoke. And the rats ran regularly over the soot blackened beams above my head. It was a rough night, but a useful one. It was proof beyond any lingering doubt that there is nothing romantic about China's widespread and deeply ingrained rural poverty. And we'd come to Atulia village in China's southwestern Sichuan province, in search of just that. The village is perched precariously on a high cliff top set deep in the mountains, and it couldn't be more inaccessible if it tried, and reachable only by a series of ladders that wind their dizzying way up the steep cliff walls. End to end, they stretch for well over half a mile. For the uninitiated or heavily laden, they can take up to two hours to climb but it's quicker than it used to be. The ladders are new, built of concrete and thousands of steel scaffold poles. And although putting a foot wrong could still prove fatal. And they're also far less dangerous than the old homemade wooden ladders that now lie abandoned along the side of the route. When much relieved we reached the top, it was as if we had climbed to another century. In the mud brick homes with just one or two rooms, people cook on open fires. Some keep a few pigs. And on the sparse patches of arable land on the hillsides, they grow potatoes and corn. The only chance of a paid job is far away in the big cities. But the choice to move is a tough one. Those who head off to the factories have to leave their children behind. China's strict residency laws make it difficult for the huge numbers of internal migrant workers to bring their families with them. Almost seven decades after it came to power, this kind of stubborn, grinding hardship has become a threat to the Communist Party's claim to legitimacy. And in recognition of that concern, President Xi Jinping has set himself the extraordinary target of eradicating extreme poverty for 43 million Chinese people within the next three years. Atulia village, with its spectacular new ladder and the improved access it brings, has won the President's personal approval and has been widely celebrated by state run media. In the valley below, much bigger projects are underway. Brand new relocation villages are being built to house those whose needs are deemed too acute to stay in their existing homes. Across China, official figures suggest around 3 million people were moved last year alone. In one resettlement village I visited, the people were delighted with their new homes and with their whitewashed walls, new washing machines and neat front yards. But there were also glimpses of the rigid top down approach to poverty reduction that China has sometimes been criticized for, like the posters with the list of prescriptive requirements for the new residents. Keep your poultry in cages, keep the road outside your house clean, and even wash and change your socks once a week. In reality, the government's poverty alleviation policies, however well intentioned, are inherently limited by the residency rules that restrict economic and social mobility and by the lack of democratic oversight. The problem for China's poor is not just one of low income, but one of little choice and no voice. The Sichuan mountains may be beautiful and the climb to the village by ladder spectacular, but a couple of nights shivering amongst the rats in a Tulia village would be enough to convince anyone of just how far behind the rest of the country China's poorest now languish and just how difficult it's going to be to close that gap.
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Narrator
John Sudworth Thousands of Iranians, mostly young people, have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the country's political elite and their economic situation. Foreign news organizations are restricted when operating in Iran, and in response to the protests, the authorities have also blocked access to social media sites and messaging apps on which eyewitness accounts were shared. Hundreds of people have been arrested so far. The protests are not as big as those of the green movement in 2009, but nevertheless, it's got Rana Rahimpur thinking about previous bouts of unrest.
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Commander / Interviewee
The image of Qhar Eshri's eyes haunts me. Qhar gave birth to her beloved son a year before the Islamic revolution in Iran. Gohar, like many other working class mothers with deep religious conviction, welcomed the revolution with open arms, believing that her son's fortunes would dramatically improve under a truly Islamic regime. That he would die in its prisons for criticizing the state would would have been unthinkable to her. The demonstrations and riots in the streets of Iranian towns and cities have plunged thousands of parents all over the country into suffocating fear of losing their children. Evin the notorious political prison is rarely without a group of parents camping outside its imposing but bland exterior. Guhar Son never emerged following his incarceration there back in 2012. In the last few days, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has promised harsh punishments for those taking part in the recent protests. Most of them are people like Go Har and her son, factory workers who haven't been paid for months, employees who can't live off their salaries because of rising food prices, and young, unemployed men and women fed up with corruption at every level. Protests that were intended to be against President Rouhani quickly turned into rage against the Islamic Republic itself, the Velo Yata Fari system of clerical rule, with people chanting Death to the dictator, a reference to the supreme leader. But the Iranian authorities are old hands at dealing with protesters. In my lifetime, there have been three bouts of major unrest. The first happened when I was at high school in Tehran. The student uprising of 1999 was the first significant challenge to the Iranian leadership. It was triggered by the closure of a reformist newspaper. Every morning, my mother would beg my brothers, both university students, not to take part. With no mobile phones, mothers back then were inconsolable until their children arrived home alive every evening. A violent crackdown ended that round of protest. But the demands for change have grown with each round of demonstrations since I left my homeland to join the BBC months before the second disturbances that followed the disputed presidential election of June 2009. Wearing green T shirts, headscarves or wristbands, millions of protesters then marched in total silence. It became known as the Green Movement. As the protests refused to die over weeks and months, the regime's response became more violent. Along with thousands of others, Abdul Hussein Ruhul Amini's son was arrested. Unlike Guhar, Mr. Ruhul Amini was well connected. He was an advisor to the Minister of Health, so had access to the regime's inner circles. But even with those connections, his two week search for his son failed. He only discovered later that the young man had died in custody. According to the authorities, more than 90% of those arrested in the most recent protests are under the age of 25. Like most young people, they are glued to their mobile phones. The government's decision to block Instagram and other messaging apps has made them even more angry. They still want jobs, security and freedom. In one video, a young protester being dragged away by anti riot police shouts, leave me alone. I haven't done anything. I'm just hungry. Although President Rouhani acknowledged their economic grievances, the Supreme Leader merely blamed Iran's enemies rather than taking any responsibility for the country's mismanagement. On Wednesday, in response to the anti government protests, the government ordered its own supporters to hit the streets. Many were state employees told by their buses to be there. Carrying posters of the Supreme Leader, they chanted, death to Saudi Arabia, Death to America. Despite the government's pronouncement that the protests are over, they rumble along in a number of small towns and the nightmare for parents continues as protesters caught on camera are rounded up. Mohammad Al Ghazadeh, whose son was arrested last week, wrote on his Facebook page that he won't eat or drink anything until he sees his son again. Guhar Eshri was destined to haunt the regiment in the Black Chawdor that had become a symbol of the revolution. She has been a familiar sight at political gatherings for years, always clutching the photograph of her dead son. She and her photo have been a constant reminder of the fate that may befall any parent in Iran. For as Georges Danton once said, revolutions devour their own children.
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Narrator
Rana Rahimpur. As well as ancient pagodas and what was the first national park to be created in Vietnam. The Ninh Binh province in the north of the country boasts naturally occurring hot springs, now promoted as a tourist attraction where visitors can soak up the views of the surrounding limestone mountains and striking countryside. Its mineral rich water is said to ease stomach complaints, rheumatism and skin diseases, as well as reviving weary limbs after a trip along a nearby river, Sarah Wheeler could have done with its rejuvenating effects, though it wasn't her arms that were aching from the rowing.
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Presenter
A woman in a pale blue man's shirt stepped nimbly into the back of the metal sampan. I followed, stumbling to the hollowed out bench at the front. Ahead, the teal waters of the Nagorn were calm, and what I think was a river. Lapwing described circles in the sky, white underwings gleaming in sunlight reflecting off the water. The woman at the back, who was the skipper, asked what I assumed to be Vietnamese for all set and we were off. Turning my head, I could see her bare toes curled round the ends of the oars. For the women of the village of Tam Coc in northern Vietnam row with their feet. The journey was smooth, the air dripping with tropical moisture. Apparently it's easier on the back to row with your feet, and the women of Tam Coc have been doing it for generations. The rowers face forward, oars tied to rowlocks with skeins of rags. It's also, I learned, easier on the back if you face forward. Every day these entrepreneurial rowers convey day trippers, most of them Vietnamese, for hour long rides through flooded limestone caves and past gothic escarpments where mountain goats graze near vertical cliffs. These excursions bring welcome year round revenue to a poor area. I had taken about 62 miles south from Hanoi to reach Tam Coc, stopping off at Hoa Lu to inspect the temples. It was the capital of the country in the 10th century, situated in a basin rimmed by mountains, the better for spotting potential invaders before they invaded. At that time, a local warlord evicted the occupying Chinese. Not the first of the waves of bellicose foreigners on Vietnamese soil, and not the last either. The moats and canals were embroidered with pink bowl shaped lotus flowers and water lily blooms with petals like shards of porcelain. Crowds thronged the Din and Lur dynasty temples. But on the Nga Dong, lonely fishermen stood thigh deep, wearing the ubiquitous conical hats that keep out rain as well as sun. The fabled emerald paddy fields glittered beyond. Vietnam is the 14th most populous country on the planet, according to the World bank, with approaching 93 million inhabitants. Yet despite urbanisation, economic growth, a proliferation of high tech industries, burgeoning tourism like here in Tam Coc and all the rest, pockets of rural life endure as they always have for millennia. And even through the hallucinatory nightmare of what Vietnamese call the American War. As for the fishermen, I tried to ask Skipper Chow what he might be angling for, but the conversation failed to clear the language barrier by a long way, and anyway, fish names seldom translate accurately. I liked Chow because she smiled a lot. She must have been about my age and about a third my weight. Her leg muscles were like ship's cables, conjuring those old photographs of Vietnamese women in the war, marching for days, carrying packs heavy than themselves. When we arrived back where we had started, I asked Chow if I could have a try with the oars. She laughed as loudly as I'd ever heard a Vietnamese laugh, but was happy for me to have a go. She got off. I backed onto her bench and attempted to get my toes into the prehensile position Other river women gathered round. I used to row at college back in the Jurassic era, but that was with my hands. Doing it with the feet, it emerged is quite a different matter. I turned the sampan two complete circles on its axis and hit another boat. I imagine the ladies of Tam Coc are still laughing about it today. Far off, the lights of Ning Bing faded upwards to weak violet heights. Then, in the gloaming, the foot rowers walked shoeless back to their homes, brick built now but still imbued with the spirit of the old Vietnam, the scent of soupy rice on the air.
- [22:21]
Narrator
Sarah Wheeler Human trafficking, domestic servitude, debt bondage, forced begging, forced marriage, and the sexual exploitation of women and children. Modern slavery takes many forms, and you can find many of them in Tanzania. But then it has a long history as a stepping stone in the slave trade, which wrenched people from the African interior for sale in the Middle east and Asia. In an old slave port, an RSO's drive north of Daruss. Salaam. Jeremy Grange heard how people there still bear the weight of those iron chains.
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Jeremy Grange
The old man grips my hand tightly. Mr. Mavua's eyes may be clouded with cataracts, but they still look straight into mine. Buagamoyo, he says, emphasising the old pronunciation of the town's name. Buagamoyo. He spells it out to me syllable by syllable, and his meaning is clear. This is the place where hearts are crushed. This is where hope dies. Bagamoyo is a town of nuance and contradiction, especially in its name. The literal translation from the old Swahili is lay down your heart, but exactly whose heart is being laid down and why is open to interpretation. Perhaps the phrase was uttered by grateful traders as their slave caravans finally reached the coast after a gruelling months long trek. But another explanation, the one Mr. Mavua holds to, is that it's about the slaves hearts crushed forever by the realisation that Bagamoyo was their point of no return, that this was goodbye to Africa. The iron neck collars and chains which bound the slaves together during their long, murderous march from the African interior are on display in the tiny museum at Bagamoyo's caravan. In the 19th century, this low, square compound was journey's end for the traders who relaxed within the walls while their captives were held outside, awaiting the sea voyage to the slave markets of Zanzibar. The museum also displays a photograph of East Africa's most infamous slaver, Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab El Murjebi, better known as Tippu Tip. He stares out from the photo, his unwavering gaze meeting yours, and it feels like he's coolly appraising you, sizing you up to determine a price. And why was he known as Tippu Tip? Well, that was the sound of his gun as it was cocked.
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Lucy Ash
Tipple Tip.
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Jeremy Grange
The last sound a slave too ill or exhausted to march onwards would ever hear. When I appear in Mr. Mavua's doorway just off a dusty street in the centre of town, he and his family are eating lunch in the dark interior. He's in his mid-80s, but still energetic. He bustles out of the house with a couple of stools and invites me to sit down. He tells me that his father had three wives. Two of them were direct descendants of slaves, and Mr. Mavua's half brothers and sisters therefore had slave ancestors. Now, I'd heard that in Bagamoyo, nobody admits to slave heritage. It marks you out as lower status, a kind of underclass. Young men are apparently reluctant to take on jobs labouring in the fields in case other people assume there's slave blood running in their veins. Mr. Mavour concurs. He tells me that prospective bridegrooms always try to hide their slave heritage. But what happens if it's revealed once they're married, I wonder? Then he says simply, the wife is brought home. And that's when Mr. Mabua drops his bombshell that his own father was a slave trafficker. When I was a child, I came back to my house one day, he recalls. I looked through the window of a locked room and I saw groups of men huddled there, staring back at me. For as late as the 1930s, men like Mr. Mavua's father were still part of a chain which smuggled slaves from the interior to the coast. Captives were usually shipped onward to Zanzibar to work in coconut and clove plantations, and as they left Mr. Mavur's house, they were chained together, just as they had been in Tipple Tip's day. A short ride away by Boda Boda, the local motorbike taxi, I meet Samahani Kajeri, a spry and wiry man in his late 70s. He's a keen local historian. He greets me wearing a grey short sleeved pinstriped suit and a white baseball hat. His enslaved ancestors came from Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in the far west of Tanzania, he tells me. It took them six months to trek the 800 miles to Bagamoyo. He talks earnestly about the shame and the pain of slavery, the way it created a people with no roots and no rights. But unlike Mr. Mavua, Mr. Kajeri plays down the differences between slave descendants and the rest of the community, and his interpretation of Bagamoyor's name is more positive. Yes, it means lay down your heart, he tells me. But if you're never going to see your home village again, the only thing you can do, he concludes, as the swift African dusk settles and the smell of roasting meat begins to waft up the street, is to lay your heart down here. Accept that now. This is your home.
- [27:45]
Narrator
Jeremy Grange and that's all from us today. We'll be back with more from our correspondence next Saturday morning, as usual. Do join us.
- [27:53]
Presenter
Goodbye.